“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.”—Ron Kurtz, Hakomi Founder.

Hakomi (HMSP) is a mindfulness, somatic and experience-based approach to change. HMSP is used both as a psychotherapeutic process as well as in educational settings to facilitate self-exploration and personal growth.  Originally, developed by Ron Kurtz in the late 1970’s, HMSP has grown in scope and applicability since its inception.

HMSP itself combines venerable operating principles with mindfulness and precise methodology to create an extraordinarily effective path towards transformation. The basis of the work is threefold:

• to create a bonded relationship that allows enough safety for the client to turn inwards and explore present experiences [cognitive, somatic, emotional, energetic, spiritual, etc.]
• to follow those experiences towards the core material that generates them
• to pursue ways to honor core material and to offer a context in which healing and development can occur

Hakomi, an elder in the use of mindfulness and the body, holds an especially strong somatic orientation. Beginning with focused, relaxed self-awareness, the client is supported in studying the ways in which movement, gesture, voice, tensions, impulses and so on both reflect psychological material and provide direct access to core transformation.

Hakomi Principles:

MINDFULNESS is a powerful tool for helping persons study the organization of their experience. It is an exploratory, relaxed and alert, meditative (though non-hypnotic), state of consciousness, which allows us to move beyond our normal, habitual thoughts and actions to the often richly non-verbal intuitions of our deeper states. The process also supports the mobilization of our essential or core selves, which have a presence, centeredness, compassion, and wisdom that transcends the limitations of our historical experience.

NON-VIOLENCE is a principle that promotes safe, non-forceful, cooperative exploration through honoring the signs and signals of our organic processes, especially those that manifest as “resistance.” In contrast to confronting or overpowering such “defenses,” the Hakomi methodology respects and literally supports such occurrences, which then allows them to be befriended for the wisdom they contain, and willingly yielded when appropriate.

The principle of MIND-BODY INTEGRATION affirms that mind and body jointly manifest and reflect the beliefs we hold about ourselves and the world, which in turn organize how we creatively experience and express ourselves in life. Hakomi has many ways of exploring the mind-body connection to help bring to awareness this somatic material, and the core beliefs and experiences that generate it.

The UNITY principle assumes that, as people, we are living, organic systems that are integral wholes, composed of parts, which also participate in larger systems. The interdependency of all levels of the system, including the physical/metabolic, intrapsychic, interpersonal, family, cultural, and spiritual are taken seriously in Hakomi.

ORGANICITY assumes that when all the parts are communicating within the whole, the system is self-directing and self-correcting, and has an inner wisdom of its own. In Hakomi, we support our clients’ organic unfolding toward wholeness, and trust that this is the direction that their system will naturally seek. Rather than imposing their own agenda, the therapist works cooperatively with the client’s system.

(Content from Hakomi Southwest Institute, www.hakomiinstitutesouthwest.com)