Back in 2005, when I was writing my first book Reiki Jin Kei Do: The Way of Compassion and Wisdom, there were a lot of questions being asked about the history of the lineage.

There were conflicting opinions everywhere.

Some people were saying there was no evidence that Seiji Takamori even existed. Others were picking apart elements of Ranga Premaratna’s account of his training. It was one of those situations where everyone had a view, but very little could be firmly verified.

And there was one person who could clear it up: Ranga’s previous Reiki teacher, Beth Sanders.

Following his training with Seiji, Beth became Ranga’s first student in the material he had learned. That placed her right at the centre of the story. If anyone could confirm what had happened, whether the teachings were legitimate and whether Seiji even existed, it was her.

There was just one problem. No one could find her. For 15 years or more people within the lineage and across the global Reiki community had been trying to track her down to get her take on Ranga’s account of his training with Seiji. Beth had disappeared.

At that point, it was obvious to me that I couldn’t finish the history chapter of my book without speaking to her. Her input wasn’t helpful, it was essential. Despite the odds, Somehow, I had to find her.

Without much hope of success, I sat down and start to search for her on Google. Within fifteen minutes, I had her name, her phone number, her email address, and I was looking at her house on Google Earth. This was extraordinary! How had this been so easy and yet so many in the Reiki community had searched for so long and found nothing?

I contacted her immediately and two days later she replied. I still remember sitting there at about three o’clock in the morning, realising that after all those years of people searching, I’d managed to track her down.

We exchanged emails for some time, and in that process she confirmed Ranga’s account of his training with Seiji, giving me exactly what I needed to finish my book.

This was direct confirmation from someone who was there, and the reason no one had been able to find her was simple. She had got married and changed her name.

One small detail, and she had effectively disappeared from the entire conversation.

That experience stayed with me. Because it highlights something important about the Buddho system.

There’s the story that gets told. And then there’s what can actually be verified.

Beth also confirmed something else that often gets overlooked. After Ranga trained with Seiji, he went straight back and taught Beth the Buddho meditation. From there, it entered the lineages of the students she later taught.

So you start to see early expressions of Buddho appearing within Reiki lineages, even before the system itself was formally structured in the way we now recognise.

I’ve just published a new article that looks at the history of the Buddho system in some detail:

What Is the History of the Buddho System?

It separates what can be confirmed from what sits within lineage teaching, and gives you a clear, grounded understanding of the history as it currently stands. If you’ve ever been curious about where this system actually comes from, this will give you a much clearer picture.

Alongside this, I’m currently working on a much more in-depth biography of Seiji Takamori.

This is pulling together hundreds of pieces of material I’ve accumulated over the years. Personal accounts, emails from key figures, interviews, forum discussions, biographies of those connected to the lineage, private messages, and a lot of smaller anecdotes that, when put together, start to form a much clearer picture.

It’s far too large for a standard article, so it will be released as a separate document when it’s finished. Watch this space for more details in the future!

Something else that’s been really interesting over the past week.

The empowered meditation audio I released in the last newsletter, the Yoga Nidra with the embedded transmission, is having a strong effect on the people using it.

Several people have come back saying they’re experiencing very noticeable shifts from working with it and that it is much more powerful and effective than the non-empowered version that they’ve used previously.

At the same time, others inside the Abundance Self programme are using different guided meditations that have empowerment tracks embedded underneath them, and the feedback there has been equally strong.

So this is clearly opening something up.

If you’d like me to release another empowered meditation in an upcoming newsletter, let me know. I’m very happy to do that and to keep developing this further.

If you want to stay closer to this work and be part of the ongoing conversations around it, come and join the Abundant Mind Facebook group. Everyone is welcome and you do not have to have an interest in or be a practitioner of Reiki to participate. It is much more focused on ‘beyond Reiki’.

You can sign up for any of these on my website here: Steve Gooch Courses

All the best,

Steve