About Hakomi Therapy
Hakomi is a gentle, supportive system of body-centered psychotherapy built around a holistic set ofcore principles for helping people access and process unconscious defenses that are limit our sense of well-being. Guided by the principles of Mindfulness, Nonviolence, Mind-Body Integration, Unity, and Organicity, the method was created in the 1980’s by Ron Kurtz and colleagues at the Hakomi Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
Over the past 40 years the method has consistently demonstrated its extraordinary effectiveness in creating and maintaining a safe, supportive space of trust and curiosity where mindful attention to thoughts, feelings, sensations, and long-forgotten memories can be accessed and explored. Hakomi is based on a several key observations about the mind-body relationship:
- As we develop from infancy to childhood to adulthood, we unconsciously make meanings from our experiences about our selves and our place in the world;
- Over long years of childhood and adolescence those meanings gradually coalesce into our own unique set of unconscious “core beliefs” about who we are, what the world is, and where we fit in it that govern how we think, feel, develop, act, respond, and create;
- Every person is unique in genetic structure, life experiences, values, identity, and sense of purpose;
- Some persistent childhood core beliefs drive fear-based habits of social withdrawal that limit our ability to function spontaneously in particular situations;
- The purpose of Hakomi is to help people become fully human, alive, spontaneous, open-hearted and caring, with an ability to be equally effective acting interdependently or independently.
Practitioners learn to help clients develop and maintain a state of mindful attention to the flow of thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories, and images that arise from moment to moment, and follow them toward some understanding about their meaning. The work is deep and powerful, often evoking and learning from cathartic memories of long-forgotten emotional experiences.
read more about Hakomi…
Summary of the Method w/ founder Ron Kurtz