What is The Hakomi Method?
It is important to understand that unconscious structures of psyche are putting up numerous filterings functions right now in your attention.
What, in any moment, stands out to you as relevant? What do you notice among the literally infinite things you could be paying attention to? What associations do you carry with this or that phrase, object, or tone? This all has a profound effect on how you experience, how you interpret events, what choices you are aware of as possibilities to act on.
Most behavior is habit, automatically influenced by core material. Our feelings, actions and perceptions are continuously influenced by core material around major themes: safety and belonging; support, love and appreciation; freedom and responsibility; openness and honesty; control, power, sexuality, membership, and the social and cultural rules.
Mindfulness is the key element to making this step into core material. It is characterized by relaxed volition, a surrender to and acceptance of the present experience, heightened sensitivity, and capacity to observe and name different qualities of consciousness. By altering how experiences are perceived, individuals undergo profound changes in character and personal paradigms.
Hakomi doesn't just discuss experiences; it delves into how each individual unconsciously organizes their perception. One big way we study the organization of experience is to set up experiments in mindfulness.
We study how you mis-interpret or block off available nourishment, and stifle development because of limiting beliefs that formed out of core wounds.
As a child, you may have formed a belief which helped you navigate a challenging circumstance at the time. The belief is really not accurate, even though it was the best a child could come up with, and now it operates within your unconscious filters of experience in harmful and limiting ways.
A simple but powerful formula of a hakomi experiment looks like this:
Mindfulness + Nourishing stimulus → psychosomatic response + Study & deepen → core memories
The nourishing stimulus could be a phrase, a smile, a touch, etc. but it is something that the therapist expects will be rejected. The rejection exposes the unconscious filtering beliefs that are pushing away genuine nourishment all the time. This is called a nourishment barrier, and this is what we study together.
There are two types of experiments: one where the client is passive (mindful, still) and the therapist does something, a probe (statement), a touch, walks towards the client, closes his or her eyes, etc.
In the second type, we ask the client to be active and do something like: "notice what happens when you slowly make a fist." "See what words come up when you tighten your body in the way you feel it tightening when you think of being at work."
Hakomi looks at people as self-organizing living systems. The popular metaphor of the mind as a computer is not accurate. A better metaphor is the mind as a web of relationships in an ecosystem, with every part contributing in many unseen non-linear ways to the whole, and every part a whole unto itself.
The bird, the tree, the forest, the river, the microbes, the soil, the hills, the sunlight. People are like psychological ecosystems with a landscape of core material, a climate of beliefs and symbolic images, a diverse web of dynamic interrelating skills, desires, needs (animals and plants). All of which lead to an immensely complex, rich, and unique human being.
When the landscape of how you experience comes into balance a whole lot of new life options open up. Resilience, complexity, and evolution naturally result.
More information about one-on-one sessions can be found here.
