Hakomi
"Hakomi is the absolute cutting edge of modern therapeutic technique."
John Bradshaw, author of Bradshaw on The Family
"Hakomi is an excellent system for learning key emotional intelligence skills"
Daniel Goleman, author of the bestseller Emotional Intelligence
"Hakomi presents some astounding methods for getting to core material. It is well grounded in theory and revolutionary in its results."
Association of Humanistic Psychology Newsletter
"A visionary contribution in bringing mindfulness to our therapeutic community."
Daniel Siegel, M.D., author of The Developing Mind and The Mindful
Hakomi Experiential Psychotherapy is a body-centered, somatic psychotherapy. It recognizes the oneness in body and mind and actively includes awareness of one’s physical experience, such as breathing, posture, and movements, as a doorway into the psyche. The body becomes a resource and ally for increased self-awareness.
The therapeutic relationship is an essential component of Hakomi. The process unfolds with a deep, authentic, and highly attuned connection between therapist and client. This openhearted presence creates a quality of contact that allows mind, body, and spirit to feel safe in exploring vulnerabilities and moving toward wholeness.
Through the principles of: mindfulness, compassion, trust in the innate desire for wholeness, and the connection between all Beings, clients are able to explore core material, transform limiting beliefs, and experience aliveness.
Therapy is first about discovering. It's about who you are and about what your deepest emotional attitudes are. It's not just about who you think you are. It's not opinion. It's not something you can know with the intellect. It's about who you are in the very heart of yourself. That's the flavor of psychotherapy--discovering yourself, discovering your real attitudes toward the most important pieces of your life. It takes courage to look at yourself. It takes a real desire to know and a willingness to accept whatever is there. It helps to be playful too. At some point, you realize that the things you thought you were stuck with, your character traits, are changeable. You can be free of them. It helps if you don't take these parts of yourself too seriously. Courage, a desire to know and be free, and playfulness--these are necessary. The journey is from "Who are you?" to "Who you are!" At the end you have consistency and vision. You know your needs and direction. You can say, "This I will do and this I won't!". You have resolved many conflicts in which one part of you wants something and another part is against it. It's not a final place you reach. The journey itself becomes a way of life. If it ends at all, it ends in enlightenment. The self one is interested in is no longer the individual ego, but the unbounded self of the spirit. Because, finally, that is who you are.
Core Material
Hakomi helps people change "core material." Core material is composed of memories, images, beliefs, neural patterns, and deeply held emotional dispositions. This material shapes the styles, habits, behaviors, perceptions, physical postures and attitudes which define us as individuals. Our responses to the major themes of life--safety, belonging, support, power, freedom, responsibility, appreciation, sexuality, spirituality, etc.--are all organized by our core material.
Some of this core material supports our being who we wish to be, while some of it--learned in response to difficult situations--continues to limit us. Hakomi allows the client to distinguish between the two, and to modify willingly any material that restricts his or her wholeness.
The Method
In pursuing this material, the Method follows a certain general outline. First, we work to build a therapist/client relationship which maximizes safety, respect, and the cooperation of the unconscious. With a good working relationship established, we then help the client focus on and study how his or her core material shapes personal experience.
To permit this study, we establish and use a distinct state of consciousness called Mindfulness. Mindfulness is characterized by relaxed volition, a gentle and sustained inward focus of attention, heightened sensitivity, freedom from judgment and effort, and the ability to notice and name the contents of consciousness.
The heart of the Method is the precise study of the client's present felt experiences, as a way to discover personal organizing material. These experiences are either naturally occurring, or deliberately and gently evoked by having the client participate in carefully designed "experiments". These might be hearing a statement about a key theme, or having the client change his or her physical position. It might be asking him or her to consider a certain possibility, or making a certain gesture. Through the "experiment", the client is invited to allow and carefully notice whatever responses happen inside of them, and ultimately to feel within their being the core factors that shape such responses. Once arrived at in this felt sense, the core material can be studied, evaluated, and transformed.
The basic method, then, is this: 1) to establish a relationship in which it is safe for the client to become aware; 2) to notice or evoke experiences that lead to the discovery of organizing core material; and 3) to seek healing changes in the core material. All else that we do is in support of this primary process.
