Dive Into Reiki With... Paul Mitchell

DIVE INTO REIKI: Today, I have an exceptional guest, Paul Mitchell. I met Paul when we were on a panel for Reiki Home and I was really impressed by the depth of his practice and his kindness. So, we connected, and he kindly agreed to come today to talk about his practice. 
Paul's education was in philosophy and theology, and his early work was in religious education teaching in San Francisco. He met Hawayo Takata and studied level 1 with her in 1978. He became one of the 22 masters initiated by Takata in 1979.
In 1992 he was recognized as Head of the Discipline of Usui Shiki Ryoho. Together with Lineage Bearer Phyllis Furumoto created the Office of the Grandmaster responding to the community call to define the system received from their teacher, Hawayo Takata. Since that time, he has traveled to over 25 countries supporting the Reiki community in their practice and development. Paul, thank you so much for joining me today.
PAUL MITCHELL: Oh, you're very welcome. I'm happy to be with you.

DIR: I wanted to start with your origin story, the first time you encountered Reiki practice. 
PM: Okay. As you mentioned, I was teaching religion in a Catholic boy's school. One of my co-teachers had a flyer for a conference on holistic health. He said, "We should go to this." I was trying to wrap my brain around why as a religion teacher, I should go to this. But it was intriguing. And so I went, he didn't. It was the beginning in the early seventies of the holistic health movement. So, a lot of the luminaries were speakers. There were about a thousand people in attendance. What touched me, actually, was the personal stories of well-known healthcare people, psychologists, psychiatrists, doctors whose personal lives were a mess. And then they had some spiritual awakening, and it totally changed their relationship to their work with other people in healing professions.
So, I was driving home and thinking, "Oh, there's something here for me," but I had no idea what it was. I was in a master's program in education. I never went to see my advisor. I just took courses that looked interesting. And so, I was looking at the catalog for the summer session, and there was a course in holistic health and self-regulation. So, I said, "Well, okay, that's it." So, I went to this course put together by Dr. George Araki, a biologist at San Francisco State University. And he had started a little mini department called interdisciplinary studies in science, and their hidden agenda was bringing the scientific method to bear on healing. So, this course was like just the potpourri of what was going on. We had lots of guest speakers.
We practiced a little yoga, we learned about autogenic training and biofeedback. We did some Tai Chi and meditation. Learned about Ayurvedic medicine and a bit of Native American medicine, just all kinds of things. One day the guest speaker was Hawayo Takata. She walked into the room. She was very short, I think under five feet, and very bright and energetic. Dressed nicely. She began talking, telling her story of how she came to Reiki. She told us a bit of what Reiki was. She was a great storyteller. I was just mesmerized. And then she said at the end, "Well if people are interested, I can come back and teach you Reiki." I found my hand in the air and put down my contact information. 
I was driving home after this class, and I thought, Oh, this is what I've been looking for." And then I was confused because I didn't know I was looking for something! So I went home and told my wife about it, and she wanted to take the class too. So we took the class in Dr. Araki's home. He's Japanese American. We white folks were a minority. It was mostly the Japanese community taking the classes at that time. We just had a lovely time. He opened his house to us every Thursday if we wanted to come and practice together. So we did that, and that was having that kind of instant community. I don't know if you can imagine 1978 and the word Reiki, which nobody knew!

DIR: Even 10 years ago, most people didn't know much about Reiki!
PM: So that little community really held me because it was just strange, right? But I had such absolute trust in my teacher, and, looking back, I would say she was really the first master that I ever met. So, I just put myself in her hands and trusted her teaching and trusted her faith in me. You know, it's like, "How can I do this? And I'm not my teacher." And she communicated to me that I could, and I should. So I did.

DIR: I think that doubt you had is familiar to most people who start training in the Reiki system. In a prior conversation about Mrs. Takata, you mentioned something that struck my mind: she gave you everything you needed to practice without fear. Can elaborate about that, both as a student and as a teacher since you have been one for over 40 years. 
PM: I'll have to tell you when I was driving to the class what was going through my mind was, "I'm sure everybody in the class will be able to do this, but not me. And if there's some special experience to be had, everybody else will have it, but not me." So that was my mental attitude going into the class, which. Certainly, it said a lot about me as a person at that time. And I didn't have any special experience in the class other than being in her presence. So with that, I went home just wanting to put my hands on anybody who would allow me. It didn't matter what the situation was. I felt totally free to do that. And that's when I realized she gave me everything I needed to not be afraid.
She gave me the confidence that I had this connection with Reiki, that it would come through my hands. I had that as a basis. Secondly, that I could do no harm with Reiki. That I didn't have to know anything other than a relatively simple set of hand positions and that sometimes there could be what we would call unpleasant reactions to treatment. And that was okay. I connected it with what I heard as a child growing up. Sometimes things have to get worse before they get better. I don't know if she said those words, but [I made] that connection with my experience.
I mean, I love it when I give a treatment and the person just blisses out and becomes totally relaxed. I love that. And at the same time, I've treated people who got very emotional, wept, got afraid, had experiences, or greater physical pain. And I was able to hold the space for the person.
Let's just take pain as an example. Treating a shoulder because the person has a chronic shoulder problem, and when I treat it, it hurts more. I see that that's happening: their eyes are getting a little big or something. So I say, "Well, how does that feel?" "I'm feeling more pain." "Okay, so that's good because your body is really taking in the Reiki, and it's okay. If it's too intense for you and want me to stop, I'll pull my hands from this position and work around it. But if you can be with it, it's going to be good." 
Often at the end of treating that position, when I take my hands away, it feels better than it ever has for a long time. Those experiences with Hawayo Takata gave me a way to hold, let me be comfortable, and then communicate that to the person I'm treating.

DIR: It brings to mind the Reiki Precept, "Do not worry." But we always worry in sessions. You said that with her presence as a teacher, she already gave you everything you needed. That is such a beautiful statement. But she also made you practice a lot. According to you, she was a little bit of a drill Sergeant. Can you talk about the importance of practice?
 PM: I learned afterward that her way of teaching was very Japanese. You go to the master and just pay attention. She gave no written materials. All of us Americans showed up with our notebooks, and she said, "Put them away. No notes, watch my hands." You had to be present. 
She communicated mostly energetically. It just went in. She was open to questions, but she taught this beginning class to the sense of what the beginning student needs to know? So if somebody came up with some experience was maybe kind of out there, she just said, "Oh, fantasy," and, "Practice, practice, practice." She said that all the time, three times: "Practice, practice, practice." The first evening she taught us how to treat ourselves. She would say, "Reiki is, first of all, for yourself, treat yourself every day and then naturally your family and your friends and anybody else who comes to you." But that was the order. 
[I had tried other] things for a while that were very interesting, but they always dropped away. But after my first year of having my first degree, I looked back and realized that I had treated myself every single day. One of her teachings was, "Reiki will teach you." Well, it was clear to me that the learning environment, the classroom of Reiki teaching, was when I was doing Reiki for myself, for others.
She defined Reiki as universal life energy or God power. Universal life energy was just a concept for me. God power I kind of got because I was having a lot of religious upbringings. That landed. But both grew on me. This is the energy of life, and it's not like I didn't have it. Everything is filled with life energy. It's not like Reiki is a new thing. It's just our awareness of it. That was part of the new thing of learning Reiki: "Oh, I have a conscious relationship with the energy of life." I put my hands on myself and another. In those relationships with self, with others, receiving treatment from others that the intimacy of connection with what Reiki was offering me grew and grew and grew and grew.

DIR: One thing that you said right now is that Reiki is a system to grow our conscious connection with universal energy. I think many people see Reiki as a type of energy and there is a lot of discussions like Reiki is not so powerful. There are more powerful energies. So what will you say to people who have this approach?
DM: It's a complicated question for me because what do I really know? What I really know is my experience and how I interpret my experience. Of course, there are all kinds of energies. Nuclear energy is very powerful. It has benefits and lots of destructive potentials. I know there are all kinds of levels of energy, but my experience from the very beginning, is that Reiki is the energy of life. I learned it as life energy. And at some point, I also speak about it as the energy of life. From whatever the source of that energy is. Who knows? Maybe it is eternal from a Buddhist perspective. Maybe it was created at some point from a Christian Judeo-Christian tradition. But for me, it is the energy of life, and it's also this energy of connection. I can put my hands on anything and feel the energy. So part of that for me is like, yes, this is the core of all of life. This is the stuff of life on the energetic level. 
So, you know, [less] powerful, more powerful… those are interesting questions for a while. But, for me, they're not so interesting. Because for me, Reiki put me on a life path. What kind of path? Let's say a healing path. Well, what is healing? So, you work that question over and over and over again. I live with that question. What is healing? I go back to the Greek root, and it [means] wholeness. Okay. Wholeness. Well, what does it mean in my human being-ness to be whole? Well, there are lots of theories about that. And there are spiritual traditions that focus right on that: what does the meaning and purpose of your life? Why are you here? What are you working towards? 
But my experience of Reiki is that it constantly, in a way, awakens me to the essence of what it means to be human. In a sense, it constantly asks this question to me, "Oh, who do you need to become to manifest that essence more clearly? More authentically? And we have the Reiki principles that give us guidelines for that. The principles have nothing to do with anybody else. They're all about how do I live in my body? How do I live in my mind? How do I live in my spirit? How do I live in a relationship? Reiki is all about relationships for me. Why am I so happy that my teacher said, "First of all, Reiki is for you to treat yourself"? Because it [constantly brings] me to a much more intimate understanding of myself. Yeah. So, you know, what do I need to heal? Well, sometimes it's my body. And sometimes it's my mental, emotional state. And sometimes, it's my spiritual self that needs healing, which is basically wholeness, just to get to the essence. What does life energy want to offer in this time in history my world, through this unique gift of Paul Mitchell? Recognizing that every other human being is also a gift. So Reiki is this path for me to wholeness. 
In the Reiki world, we love this word transformation. Who doesn't want to be healed instantly? Who doesn't want to be transformed instantly into some luminous being?

DIR: That was the reason I took my first class!
PM: Right. But it's a journey. Mrs. Takata used to say, "Reiki will go to the root of the problem." One of her masters who passed away a few years ago, Shinobu Sato, was very Japanese. She was born in America, went back to Japan, grew up into her twenties in Japan, then came back to America. She was in Hiroshima when the bomb dropped. She would say, "Mrs. Takata always said Reiki will go to the root of the problem." And she's right. And sometimes it takes one treatment. Sometimes it takes a lifetime. And she just practiced. For me, it's not that it takes a lifetime to solve a problem. That's not what I understood. It's a lifetime of unfolding. That's the journey. This constant unfolding of who we are here to be. I'm happy with how far I've gotten. I'll be 75 soon. But I also say I have a long way to go.

Reiki Master Paul Mitchell.

DIR: I love that you keep a beginner's mind. When I talk to people who have a profound practice like you, there is always a joy and excitement that we can always go deeper, right? That this is just a journey. I think when we start, we are obsessed with shadow work and fixing. So when you say trust Reiki to go to the root, I feel like we need to let go of the problem and just practice and trust. 
PM: At the same time, I'm really good at analysis! [Laughs.] Reiki will teach you. I don't know if I heard her say this, but it became clear to me that it's like, "Let Reiki teach you." So, part of the process is I pay attention. What am I learning? Okay. Learning isn't enough. I've got to practice what I've learned. 
One of the things I discovered in my early days was that [I had the idea that] I was a good person. Well, one of the things Reiki taught me was I was also a very angry person. But I had that so well hidden that it only came out in my humor, which was mostly sarcastic. So, okay, like just for today, "Do not anger." Oh, oh! I just learned I'm an angry person. Well, I can't deny that. I have to take the journey through understanding myself, but, first of all, I have to be able to know that I'm angry, know how to respond to anger, know the tricky ways I can be to express anger. I can be passive-aggressive really beautifully. That's getting better also! [Laughs], but it took me years to understand what the aggressive part was. I was really good at disappearing. You hurt me. Okay. Bye-bye, not available. I had to own that part of myself. I had to embrace that part of myself to be able to choose, to be different step by step, not be reactive, not being knee-jerk. But actually, to find that space where I can choose to say, "Oh, what's underneath my anger? Oh, I'm scared. Oh, I'm hurt. Oh, what's underneath that?" So that I can actually become the way I would really like to be. 

 DIR: It gives you the gift of acceptance. I was talking to my students recently, telling them that one day I was meditating, and I realized I'm not a good person. but he wasn't like, "Oh, how dreadful!" It was actually a relief. Like, "Oh, I'm not a good person. It's okay. Right. Some days I'm angry. Some days I worry. And some days, I'm not the nicest person that I can be." I'm a lot better than I used to be. But there was no drama to this realization. I was holding the space. I was practicing. It was like, "Oh, I better work on myself a lot more," and that's it.
PM: When I first started doing Reiki, I saw myself as a wounded person. In fact, I saw myself as tragically flawed. "I'm wounded, and there's no hope." I was fine, but, in the heart of hearts, needing to be good and to do what you want so that I would receive your love because there was this empty place in me, you know? And in Reiki, I experienced those moments of just being whole, I touched my innate wholeness and, therefore, lovableness, and that touching really gave me the courage to do the shadow work. That's the dance. And it's a wonderful dance.

DIR: It also gets you out of the head and into the mind-heart, which is a different space. But as you said, practice, practice, practice. And I love when we had the pre-interview, I asked you, "What can we do to make our practice juicier and not get bored? And you basically put me back into my place. Like sometimes it's not going to be juicy. We just need to practice. And you said something beautiful: if you don't stick to your practice when nothing happens, like then maybe you shouldn't be teaching—if you are a teacher. So can you elaborate a bit on those moments when practice feels flat and the need to stick to it?
PM: Well, one of the things that helps me is to realize that I live in a world of mystery. There are so many things I don't understand. Mostly because there were kind of beyond my capacity to understand at any given moment. My wife and I have been together for almost 50 years now. I can still discover new things about her. Some time ago, she expressed an interest in something. And she said I've been interested in this for 20 years. I never knew that.
It's also true of myself. We are an amazing creation, and part of our being is unknown potential. You put some seeds in the ground, and they sprout right away. You put some other seeds in the ground, and you have to wait for 30 years till there's a forest fire or something for that seed to grow. In a way, that's a great analogy for all of us. 
Let's use the boring word. "Oh, why should I treat myself? It's just boring!" I have a good friend of mine who had a child later in life. She was a single mom, and she got to the stage where the kid was always saying, "It's boring, it's boring." And she just says, "You are boring! Look at all the potential you really have. You are bored? It's not my job; fix it." I thought, "Wow, that was a great teaching moment." I can apply that to myself. If I'm bored, what's underneath that? Some expectation that things should be different. Well, I'm not four years old anymore, although I can still act like that sometimes. When I'm treating myself, [from my experience], I know that something is happening. I don't need to feel it. 
You know, the cell phone is part of this [need for] instant gratification. I get to know anything I want right now. Right now! Well, it's a technological advancement, but maybe we're regressing into our instant gratification-hood. But it's deeper than that. We're filled with this incredible potential still, but we have to keep doing our work. We need the silence. We need the hands-on. We need the acceptance that Reiki is working in us for whatever our next steps are. It's okay not to know them. They're not only what we want. If we want to know that part of ourselves, you got to do a practice that allows that to be. If juiciness is what drives you, you probably won't practice.

DIR: That makes a lot of sense. It's going back to the trust you were saying, right? In my first years of practice, I was really like, "Oh, this doesn't work." Now there is trust. Sometimes I know that the answer may come in months or years, but it will happen. Trusting the process is such an essential part of surrendering to the practice. 
I have another question for you, totally changing gears because you gave me so much great material during the pre-interview. I always say Reiki is deceptively simple, but you came up with another way of saying that I love: Reiki is a single practice filled with paradoxes. For example, regarding the hands-on healing protocol: keep placing your hands in precisely the same positions and let Reiki guide you. Can you elaborate on that?
PM: Yeah. I realized why Takata introduced me to paradox. Because she would say, "Watch my hands, do it like this." She had this drill Sergeant kind of presence, as well as being warm and joyful. She was the master, right. And [then added] Reiki guides you. Some people would find that confusing. I wasn't smart enough at the time to be confused. I was in the zone of total trust and the energy that she created in that class. It was a sacred space. What she was imparting, most of it was energetic. Yet, she gave us this very simple practice that could bring us back to that energetic any time.
At that point, I was like, "Okay, this is how my teacher does practice treatments." So, I did that. I met Hawayo Takata when she had Reiki for over 40 years. She taught Reiki, but mostly she practiced Reiki. She treated people all the time—long-term and short-term. She was a master practitioner. So, it's like, "Oh, okay, I'm going to lean into this. Why should I think that I can come up with something better?" So, I followed the practice. In that process of sinking into the discipline, being held by the discipline, and surrendering more to this flow of this relationship, sometimes my hands wanted to go someplace else. And then I would go my little argument within, and then eventually it just became natural. It's like, "Okay, let's see what this brings. Oh, that was interesting." And then my discipline was, "Okay, let's not generalize. "This is a good position for everybody! Well, no!" It's a natural inclination, right? 
I'll tell you a little story about that. I was doing a lot of treatments, and the throat was not a basic position. It was an additional position. But like three people I was treating in a row, my hands wanted to go to their throat. So, I did. The next first-degree class I taught, what do you think I did? I just unconsciously added it as a basic position. Ten years later, I'm doing a workshop with masters in Spain with Phyllis. We're demonstrating the basic positions, and the whole room is horrified. 25 or 30 Reiki masters horrified. "The throat! Why is it the throat?" It took me about 30 seconds to connect the lines. One of my students, who took my first degree and became a Reiki master with Phyllis, went to Spain and taught for years in Spain and passed on what I taught in first degree. So I got a great lesson in humility and said, "I know what the problem is. It was me."
It was a great lesson, but the form is always there, and the form has integrity, but it's not the whole story. We live in this wonderful creative tension. For me, that's the essence of paradox. The opposite of an ordinary fact is a lie. But the opposite of a profound truth is often another profound truth. So, here's the practice, here's the form. Do it. And we're not limited to that. It's bigger than that. It's bigger than us. So, follow your hands, let Reiki guide you, and pay attention. Be in the moment. 

DIR: I love that you repeat, pay attention, be present. It's the core of the Reiki precepts: Just for today, for this moment, this breath. And yes, we need to do those hands position, not just with the hands, but with our whole being. 
I have one last question. We're evolving Reiki practice, and the number of practitioners is multiplying. You have said that your mission is to carry Mrs. Takata's teachings with a lot of respect. Can you talk a bit about that? How can we carry the teachings with respect, and how do we balance them with adapting them to current times?
PM: I'll speak personally and also maybe philosophically. When I learned Reiki and when I became a master, master felt kind of a big word. Right. In fact, when I had my little business cards, I put Reiki teacher. Because I got no concept [of being a] master in comparison to my teacher, right? But Phyllis challenged me. So, in the next card, I put Reiki master in parentheses. I realized that I'm not a master in anything, but when I step into a class, I have been given what I need to pass on this art. So, in that class, I am a master. That was very helpful to me. 
It was also my experience that I would be in a different place, totally supported by the energy of Reiki in that particular role as a teacher. It was clear to me that I was a carrier of a tradition. I wasn't the author, so I didn't have the authority to add things, which of course, I did, mostly out of insecurity. I like to say that the class Hawayo Takata taught was very simple, giving you exactly what you needed to be a practitioner. I added things to make it more clear: metaphysical causes of illness and a little bit of Chinese medicine that I knew about. 
At one point, I woke up and said, look at what you're doing. I took all those things out and went back to the very practice as I learned it. I took away all those things so that the practice would be clear—same motivation. I come back to the same place of teaching the tradition that I am a carrier. In our evolution, we said, "Well, what is a master?" A master is an initiator, a teacher, and a mentor…Oh, and a student. Always a student of Reiki. And then eventually, after 25 years of practice, I said, "Oh, you know what, we're tradition keepers. That's what we're doing."
What's the essence of tradition? The essence of tradition is you take something that is so precious to the life experience that you want to pass on because it's important that it'd be passed on to the next generations. That's the essence of tradition. It's not some dead thing. There's a German composer, Mahler, who says that tradition is not the worship of ashes. It's maintaining the flame. So that's the role that I felt was mine.
Of course, Reiki is going to teach me. And one of the things I learned as a master was to make a distinction between your personal practice [and teaching.] When I'm with one person doing a treatment, whatever Reiki leads me to, I do. As a teacher, I give the practice in its simple, profound essence. A colleague of mine heard from a shaman, "As a shaman, working with the person, I am free to follow that particular moment in time. When I'm training another shaman, it's exactly the same." 
As Americans, we have been accused of having no traditions. Our gift is creativity, but it's like everything needs to be in balance. One of the holistic health luminaries who wrote a book called "Health is a question of balance." Life changes. So, how does our practice evolve in relationship to meeting life as it changes? Evolution is different from change. We change and change. [Laughs] Evolution is what lasts. It's what really still contains the essence that keeps living. But our perspective is too short. I want to be mindful, so I make difficult choices. So, COVID, how do I treat people? Well, I can treat people distantly. Are there situations where I can put my hands on someone? But what care do I need to take? Teaching. People do online teaching. I don't, I wouldn't. 
What I learned from [Hawayo Takata] was anyone can do Reiki. She was happy to teach any person Reiki, but she had no need to teach any specific person Reiki. She needed you to step up to meet her. There was a fee for the first degree. She taught it over four consecutive days. You had to commit that time. You had to commit that money. And you know, people would say, "I really want to do this, but I don't have the money." She said, "Do you smoke? Do you go out to dinner? Well, don't. Save that money. And the next time I come, you'll have the money to take Reiki." She had a kind of innate sense of what being a student should demand.

DIR: For the people who are not aware, you actually paid $10,000 for your Reiki master. And that was in 1979. So this will be equivalent to like 50 thousand versus sometimes paying $30 for the master attunement. So it's a beautiful commitment to your practice.
PM: Yeah. I didn't have that money! I didn't own anything that was that valuable, you know. And she let me pay it over time because she knew that, and she wanted me to have it at that point. But, my commitment was there, and it was fulfilled. If you look at the Tao Te Ching, it's all about the 10,000 things. The 10,000 things are the symbol for everything. So, the $10,000—I have no idea if this came from her or her teacher or whatever—but it's a connection that works for me. 
What you're saying is, when you have first degree, you have everything you need to be a lifetime practitioner. If you're called, you take second degree. But because it's your soul's calling, not because you think, "Oh, I don't have enough." You want to be a Reiki master? Okay. What does Reiki master do? Basically, he commits his life to the practice and teaches. Symbolically $10,000 [means,] "I'll give everything. This is my path." It's different today in terms of the world of Reiki, and that's okay. I wouldn't take away from my students that level of stepping forward. I wouldn't. And I'm not critical of others who have a different experience. Human beings change things. That's what we do. Especially in this country, because that's who we are.

DIR: That's a great way to close the interview: We move levels because we're called to, not because we feel we don't have enough. Thank you so much, Paul.
 PM: Thank you!