Reiki: A global phenomenon
'In the second half of the twentieth century, Reiki went from an obscure therapy practiced by a few thousand Japanese and Japanese Americans to a global phenomenon.
By the early twenty-first century, people in nearly every corner of the world had undergone the initiations that authorise them to channel a cosmic energy - known as Reiki - to heal body, mind, and spirit.
They lay hands on themselves and others, use secret symbols and mantras to send Reiki to distant recipients, and strive to follow five precepts to cultivate their spiritual growth.
Reiki's international rise and development is due to the work of Hawayo Takata (1900-1980), a Hawai'i-born Japanese American woman who brought Reiki out of Japan and adapted it for thousands of students in Hawai'i and North America, shaping interconnections across the North Pacific region as well as cultural transformations over the transwar period spanning World War II.'
Alternate Currents: Reiki's Circulation in the Twentieth-Century North Pacific
Alternate Currents: Reiki's Circulation in the Twentieth-Century North Pacific analyzes how, from her training in Japan in the mid-1930s to her death in Iowa in 1980, Takata built a vast trans-Pacific network that connected Japanese American laborers on plantations in Hawai'i to social elites in Tokyo, Hollywood, and New York; middle-class housewives in American suburbs; and off-the-grid tree planters in the mountains of British Columbia.
Highly readable and informative
Using recently uncovered archival materials and original oral histories, Justin B. Stein examines how these relationships between healer and patient, master and disciple, became deeply infused with values of their time and place and how they interplayed with Reiki's circulation, performance, and meanings along with broader cultural shifts in the twentieth-century North Pacific.
Highly readable and informative, each chapter is structured around a period in the life of Takata, the charismatic, rags-to-riches architect of the network in which Reiki spread for decades.
Alternate Currents explores Reiki as an exemplary transnational spiritual therapy, demonstrating how lived practices transcend artificial distinctions between religion and medicine, and circulate in global systems while maintaining strong connections with the practices' homeland.
From Yolanda ... "highly recommended"
Until now, there have been very few books written on Takata Sensei's Reiki life and evolution.
This book is a wonderful and factual contribution to a deeper understanding of how a small Japanese-American woman has affected the lives of millions globally with the gentle and powerful energy of Reiki.
