Hakomi as Applied Mindfulness

In a way, all successful psychotherapy depends on the ability to detach attention from habits and to describe them from the point of view of a neutral observer.
—Helen Palmer

If you can observe your own experience with a minimum of interference, and if you don’t try to control what you experience, if you simply allow things to happen and you observe them, then you will be able to discover things about yourself that you did not know before. You can discover little pieces of the inner structures of your mind, the very things that make you who you are.  (Ron Kurtz)

The Hakomi Method is internationally known as a way of using mindfulness for self discovery and emotional healing. It is used by psychologists, psychotherapists, bodyworkers, teachers, counselors, social workers, coaches, and other helping professionals. This is a gentle yet powerful body-centered approach that can reveal and transform the underlying beliefs and habits affecting how someone experiences life. It is effective for stress, burnout, relationship issues, and other life challenges.

Hakomi is grounded in the use of experiments in mindfulness for self-study. Consciousness is choice and choice is freedom… freedom from being reactive, from living life on automatic, from being caught in the prison of unnecessary suffering, and freedom to be happy and to have happy relationships.

Matthieu Ricard, Buddhist monk, is quoted in Daniel Goleman’s book, Destructive Emotions:

“We are talking about how to help society. If we aspire to contribute something to our society – to achieve a new vision of things – we need to begin with ourselves. We need to decide to transform ourselves…”

The Hakomi Method is experiential and is taught experientially. The focus is always on exploring ourselves first, and discovering any habits or beliefs that might interfere with being a healing presence for others. As we learn to be more mindful of how we are organizing our own experiences, especially in relationship, we learn to apply this kind of awareness to a collaborative journey of self-discovery and self-healing.

There are four main components of the Hakomi method, including the state of mind of the therapist as the basis for the healing relationship, keeping the focus of attention on present experience, using experiments in mindfulness to reveal unconscious beliefs, and providing a “missing experience” of emotional nourishment as an alternative to habitual experiences that are limiting or painful… we want to reduce unnecessary suffering and reinforce new neurological and emotional possibilities for a happy healthy life.

Mindfulness is used by the therapist or helper to stay aware of herself and the other, of the quality and nature of the relationship, of the environment, of present moment experience, her own and the other’s, of signals from the other’s unconscious about what is needed, and of indicators of how the other is organizing experience. These indicators are brought to the attention of the other and become the basis for experiments in mindfulness to help the person discover something about habits and beliefs, about what kind of emotional nourishment is needed, and what will lead to a new kind of experience and to a new possibility for how to experience life.

Daniel Siegel, in The Mindful Brain, says:

Kindness is to our relationships… what breath is to life. With reflection we can nurture in each other an access to a self deeper than personal identity, that ipseity [essence] of being that we all share. From this mindful place, there may be a path toward healing our global community one mind, one relationship, one moment at a time.

Beneath the veil of self-identity that clouds clear vision rests a spaciousness of mind present in each of us. Mindful awareness makes that clarity more than a possibility, but a directly experienced reality.1

This is the intention and the practice of the Hakomi Method of applied mindfulness.

"According to the Buddha dharma, spirituality means relating with the working basis of one's existence, which is one's state of mind. The method for beginning to relate directly with mind is the practice of mindfulness.”  (Chögyam Trungpa)