I’ve always felt an intense connection to the world and to people, a connection that I can’t quite explain. I’ve tried to articulate it in various ways, but have always felt that I was missing the mark in my explanation. After reading Reiki: The True Story by Don Beckett, I’ve found at least one way to articulate this sentiment. In his book Beckett explains that Reiki is a Japanese word meaning “universal life energy,” and one Reiki teacher, Hiroshi Doi, defines Reiki as “a wave of love!” In the interview below Beckett describes how, through a series of incredible serendipities and his passion for Reiki, his book, Reiki: The True Story, was born.
Q: When did you think about becoming a writer? Was there someone who got you interested in writing?
A: I’ve always had a natural tendency for writing. I remember getting in trouble, in junior high school, for being too good a writer. The teachers thought the papers I was turning in were either plagiarized or that someone else was writing them for me! About that time, my mother was also a great encouraging influence on my writing. I had saved up some money (about $60) and wanted to buy a rowboat. My mother reminded me that we lived in the near-desert of northwestern Colorado, surrounded by 8,000 acres of sagebrush, and convinced me to buy a typewriter instead.
Q: What made you decide to write this book?
A: I was asked to do it. Otherwise, I probably would never have thought of doing it.
Q: Is there any particular story to tell concerning the writing of this book?
A: Yes — the whole thing was a great sequence of serendipities: the book itself, my receiving the information that led to it, and the unfolding of my unusual Reiki career along the way.
What opened my eyes to a different view of Reiki than the standard American model was my serendipitous attendance at the first Usui Reiki Ryoho International (URRI) conference, in 1999. I had been looking, for eight years, for a teacher to initiate me into the third level of Reiki — and that year I met the right one, totally unexpectedly. It just happened that we were both volunteers in the Distant Healing Network, and that our philosophies of Reiki were very similar. She accepted me as a student, and I ended up spending time with her in New York, and receiving my “master” initiation at Niagara Falls. Then she told me about the URRI conference that was coming up in a couple months: It would be held in Vancouver, Canada; and it was open only to “Reiki Masters” in the lineage of the teacher who was hosting the conference. It just happened that my third-level teacher was in that lineage; therefore, I was allowed to attend the conference.
What made this URRI conference so special was that it featured a Japanese Reiki teacher, who was a member of the Usui Reiki Society (Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkai) in Tokyo — Mr. Hiroshi Doi. The very existence of the Usui Gakkai had only recently been discovered by the rest of the world, and Mr. Doi was the only Gakkai member to reveal anything about it to the outside world (as far as I know, this is still the case, ten years later).
Almost everything that we received there from Mr. Doi was greatly inspiring to me. His information answered questions that many of us had been asking for some time, and confirmed what many of us had felt — that what the world had learned as Reiki, via Hawayo Takata, contained some inaccuracies and outright fabrications.
I returned home from the URRI conference and began writing my own Reiki manuals, incorporating the information I had learned from Mr. Doi. Then, about a year later, I received something even more invigorating and quite astonishing: an email from a Reiki teacher in England, whom I had never heard of. His name was Taggart King. As I recall, he said he was contacting me because he knew I had attended the URRI conference. His email contained some Reiki information from Japan, which he thought would interest me.
What he sent was so far beyond interesting — I felt like an archaeologist who had just been handed the “missing link”! It was Reiki information from a Buddhist nun (106 years old at the time) in Japan, who had been taught by Mikao Usui himself! Taggart King had received the information from another English Reiki teacher, Chris Marsh. Chris was a student of Japanese martial arts as well as Reiki, and had been traveling to and from Japan for decades. He spoke Japanese fluently, and was himself a Buddhist — and his martial arts teacher had introduced him to this nun. She was a relative of Usui’s wife, and was introduced as Suzuki-san.
What Taggart King sent me in the email were things learned by Chris Marsh, from Suzuki-san. She had begun teaching Chris what she had learned from Usui himself in the early 1900s. Chris had shared the teachings with Taggart King and another English Reiki teacher, Andrew Bowling — who just happened to have been one of the organizers of the URRI conference in Vancouver. Andy and I had met there, and had both felt a special connection to each other. I believe it must have been through Andy that Taggart King got the idea (and my email address) for sending this newly acquired Reiki information to me, of all people!
The following year, 2001, Chris Marsh returned to Japan and was introduced to eleven more of Usui’s surviving students. He and Andrew Bowling continued to learn from these students, and to share the information with Taggart King, who continued sharing it with me.
In the fall of 2002, I moved from Arizona to the Hawai’ian island of Kaua’i. I had never imagined myself living in Hawai’i … until messages about Hawai’i started popping up in my life, and I began to feel drawn there. I decided to confirm or deny the attraction by having a locational astrology reading. The reading said Yes, that Hawai’i was the very best place in the U.S. for me! And that the farther west, the better. So I went to the island of Kaua’i — which, of course, just happened to have been the birthplace of Hawayo Takata….
I was imagining myself having lots of Reiki clients and students there. I made several different brochures, and put hundreds of copies of them all over the island. They brought me one student: a Japanese woman from Tokyo, who was vacationing on Kaua’i for two weeks. What happened, instead of clients and students, was the Reiki book.
One day I got an email from a Reiki student in Moscow (I had met her on the Distant Healing Network, and she had become my student). She wrote that she had shown my Reiki manuals to a publisher, and that he wanted to publish them as a book! I was shocked and delighted! Immediately I started to rewrite them in the form of a book. I was feeling a great sense of responsibility for every word then, and I began to question everything I had written. I saw that much of it was merely what I had taken — without question — from my own teachers, and from books and websites. And I saw that many of these things were not verifiable, and that some really did not make sense!
Suddenly I had been given a great task, and I threw myself into it. Living in the most beautiful place I had ever seen — on a hilltop in the center of the island of Kaua’i — I shut myself in a small room and worked day and night on this book! My living situation was yet another serendipity, having been offered to me by the friend of an email acquaintance. I shut myself in my bedroom there, and came out only long enough to grab a little food twice a day and to take a walk (maybe 40 minutes) in the wonderful, soft, evening twilight.
Day and night I worked on the book. Questioning and meditating. Searching the Web for information. And receiving more Japanese revelations via Taggart King. Also, I started emailing Dave King (no relation to Taggart), a Reiki teacher who, with his partner Melissa Riggall, had made several trips to Japan. Between the two of them, Dave and Melissa had interviewed and/or been taught by many students of Hayashi and Usui. Dave, as well as Taggart, proved to be a great source of Japanese information for this book.
I had never been so strongly focused on anything before in my life. I found it surprisingly easy to keep this focus through the long hours every day. I was receiving tremendous revelations from Dave and Taggart, plus intuitive revelations from my meditating. The puzzle that Reiki had previously been was now starting to fit itself together as a coherent wholeness!
In less than three months the writing was finished. I sent the manuscript to my friend in Moscow. In addition to acting as my agent and doing the translation, she had offered to create the photos necessary to illustrate the book. So I left all of that to her, and went back to wondering if some Reiki clients and students would soon begin appearing in my life. I was still marveling at how the book project had been given to me; and how, to such a great extent, the book had written itself. Everything I needed had arrived in such an effortless flow, and I had been shown how to put it all together.
Only then, after the writing was finished, I was told some things about the energetic nature of Kaua’i — which led me to marvel even more. I met someone who told me that people deliberately came to Kaua’i from all over the world, for the purpose of writing books or doing other types of creative projects! She said that Kaua’i was known for its intense, inwardly-directed energy, which was so helpful in keeping people focused on their creative projects (just as I had discovered by my own experience). Then I learned something else remarkable: that the islands of Hawai’i are said to correspond with the seven major chakras in the human body. Kaua’i has the place of the brow chakra — associated with the “third eye,” with insight and clairvoyance — which also is considered the center of Reiki energy in the body.
There were so many serendipities! But still no clients or students for me. So I started making a website. For a couple years, I had wanted to make one on Reiki, Johrei, and Macrobiotics. I had been slowly learning the technical aspects, and thinking of what to say; and, in the spring of 2003, I launched the first few pages of the site.
With my initial work on the book finished, and the website started, and still no Reiki clients and no place to call home, it seemed clear that I was no longer needed on Kaua’i. Then I began to get messages about Kona, on the island of Hawai’i. I packed my things and hopped a plane, and landed in Kona. Two weeks later, exploring the island with a fellow traveler, I arrived in the town of Hilo … and felt at home for the first time since living at a hot springs in Utah in the early 1990s. (Not until months later did I find out that Hawayo Takata had lived and practiced Reiki in Hilo for years, and that her ashes were kept there for years after her death!)
Once I had a place to live, I made new Reiki brochures and, as before, put hundreds of them all over the island. For months. With nearly the same response as on Kaua’i. So, again, I focused on the website. Through it, I was beginning to hear from Reiki people all around the world. I was eager to make an electronic version of the Reiki book, which people could download from the site — but there were no illustration photos for the book yet. And then my student in Moscow wrote that she would not be able to do the photos after all.
I thought of someone else — a Reiki person and a photographer — whom I figured would be perfect for the job. But, after months of negotiations, that didn’t work out. Then there was a problem with the Russian publisher. My agent/translator retrieved the manuscript and found a second potential publisher. More months passed, with no action there. Then a third publisher — again, claiming to love the book. And, again, no action. Finally, the agent/translator declared that she would find a way to publish the book herself (which she did, in 2007)!
Meanwhile, I had eventually found a photographer, in Hilo. A world-class, world-traveling photographer of natural and exotic places. His name was Michael Ash. We met at the downtown crafts market — where he was selling postcards and greeting cards and larger prints of his remarkable photos, and I was trying to interest people in Reiki.
Michael agreed to do the photos for the Reiki book. He wanted to do them outside, which I thought was an excellent idea. The accomplishment of it became another lesson in patience for me, though. Using a borrowed camera (digital, which was not Michael’s usual format), which was available to us only occasionally, and having to match the camera’s availability with breaks in the Hilo rain — plus the fact that Michael lived about 20 miles from me — it took us months to get the photos.
It was March of 2005, in fact, when the Reiki ebook was finally made and available on my website! Shortly after that, it was read by a medical doctor in Turkey — who had stopped practicing medicine, in favor of Reiki and Eric Pearl’s Reconnection® energy — who single-handedly got it translated and published in Turkish.
In the spring of 2006, I received a similar offer from Iran, for translation and publication in Farsi. After that came offers of translation into French and Spanish and Danish. Reiki people all over the world — especially Reiki teachers — were lighting up at the discovery of this Japanese information! And I kept updating the ebook — publishing the Seventh Edition in December 2006.
The Iranian and Danish translations ended up not being finished … and I kept wondering if there would ever be a print edition in English! During my first year in Hilo, I had looked into finding an English-language publisher for the book. I really thought that almost any publisher of Reiki books would jump at this one, since it contained such dynamite information, which was not available anywhere else. I submitted it to a well-known publisher of Reiki books … who took months to decide on rejecting it.
I looked at the guidelines offered by several other publishers and agents — and was totally disgusted by them! They were all nearly identical, even much of the wording. And, before they would even look at a page of manuscript, they expected the author to design a two-year promotional campaign for the book; to fly around the country at his own expense, implementing this campaign; and even to contribute thousands of dollars to the publisher’s advertising budget! I couldn’t believe what I was reading! These were major, mainstream publishers and agents — but they were describing what used to be called Vanity Publishing!
I couldn’t bear researching this any further, much less even to think of submitting anything to these people. I figured, if the book was eventually published in enough other languages, then maybe an English-language publisher would notice it and come to me. I contented myself with the ebook, and with the growing number of Reiki people — from everywhere but Hawai’i — who were finding me through my website.
In 2007, someone offered to find an English-language publisher for the book. Early in 2008, thanks to her work, we received an offer from North Atlantic. Then it was “deja vu all over again” for me — days and nights of concentrated research (gathering additional information from the outside world) and, most of all, updating my own understanding of what Reiki really is, how it works, and how any kind of healing works, regardless of the technique or method. My understanding of these things had grown so much, since the last updating of the ebook, that I had to rewrite the book almost entirely. I’m very grateful for that, because it’s now so much better than it was before! I’m especially grateful for the influence of Roger Orcutt, Michael Daniel Neary, and Nichijo Fumon — for steering me to crucial information on kototama, Johrei, and healing in general: information that improved the book enormously! And to Zeyneb Belbez, my MD friend (and guardian angel) in Istanbul, who keeps reminding me that life is about balance!
From the very start of the first incarnation of this book, back in 2002, I’ve clearly felt that it is not “my” book; that I was merely chosen to be the vehicle for it. There are too many serendipities to think otherwise: Taggart King picking my name out of the cosmic hat, sending his information to me; my being sent to Kaua’i, the birthplace of Hawayo Takata, for the initial writing of the book — and then to Hilo, where she lived and practiced Reiki for years (I’ve been to the house that she used as a Reiki clinic there), and where her ashes were kept for years after her death. During the writing of both incarnations of the book, I felt strongly that some of the insights were coming directly from the spirit of Mikao Usui … and that even Hawayo Takata was happy to see her version of Reiki history corrected!
CLICK HERE to learn more about Reiki: The True Story.
CLICK HERE to visit Don Beckett’s website.
