Welcome!

Welcome to the personal site of Ron Kurtz, creator of the Hakomi Method. This site is devoted to bringing the latest, most refined version of the method to the web. Many of Ron’s latest developments and writings are posted here. TheRefined Hakomi Method, as it is now call, continues to draw its inspiration and power from the healing wisdom of nature and our human capacities for love and awareness. The method embraces the support of science, spirituality and all forms of healing. With study and practice, This simple, elegant way of caring and helping each other is easy to learn and has the power to heal the hearts it touches. Using it is joyous work.

Introduction

It has been forty years since I began creating the Hakomi Method and twenty of those developing the Refined version. At present, the many versions of Hakomi are being taught by nearly a hundred trainers and teachers in a dozen countries. During the last twenty years my vision of the work has continuously evolved. I have made some major changes. The latest version is a significant improvement on the original. Some significant additions have be made and a good deal now deemed unnecessary, has been dropped. In the hands of a skilled practitioner, the Refined Method is elegant and powerful.

I founded the Hakomi Institute in 1981 and was its director for ten years. In 1991, I resigned the directorship and did less and less with the Institute. I began to train and work with a whole new group of people and together we founded the Hakomi Educational Network, Int’l. These days, I no longer have anything to do with the Hakomi Institute. I am neither on its faculty or its Board of Directors. My professional association is with the faculty and students of the Hakomi Educational Network.

Over the twenty years since I separated from the Institute, I have continuously worked to modify the method and how it is taught. It has changed significantly. I have shifted the very basis of the work from the traditional ideas of working to cure neurosis, treat character problems and such, to conceiving the work as assisted self-study, where the practitioner helps clients reduce unnecessary suffering by evoking awaremess and supporting the client’s own natural, healing processes. All the major changes I have made to the method can be seen in this light.

From the beginning, the work focused on present experience, used mindfulness and simple experiments to evoke reactions. The later two, in combination, are unique to this method and they were their from the beginning. Those elements remain the core of the method. Sixteen years ago, I introduced the idea of loving presence. For me, being in this state of mind is the first and most important task of the therapist. That change placed the ultimate power of the work in something more than method and technique. I realized that the greatest source of the method’s effectiveness is the therapist’s capacity to be loving towards and completely present for the client. That realization made a huge change in the method.
More recently and just as significant, has been the important research concerning automaticity. A great deal has been learned in the last twenty years about the unconscious, its cognitive and adaptive capacities. These led to seeing the method as assisted self-discovery. What is discovered through the refined method are the unconscious influences that create our thinking, our beliefs, our buried painful memories, and the adaptations we made to handle the world we found ourselves in. All the unconscious activity that now creates our everyday experiences. I now see the method as accessing that activity and making it conscious and modifiable. There are very good reasons why we need discover who we really. Doing so is real work and any of us can use a little assistance doing it.
Seen as assisted self-study and self-discovery, the method has its origins not just in the theories of western psychology, which I studied in graduate school, but even more so in the principles and practices of Buddhism and Taoism that inspired me a dozen years before Hakomi. Grounded in these wisdom traditions, the method can be part of any form of psychotherapy. As self-study, it is a natural part of the universal human endeavor to free ourselves of the inevitable suffering that follows from igno¬rance of who we are and how the world hangs together. It is on the same path taken by all who work to understand themselves, the path that leads beyond half-remembered hurts and failed beliefs, and all that lingers unexamined in the body-mind. It is akin to every form of that heroic labor, a cousin to all the sciences of life and many religions, a sister to sing¬ing bowls and chanting monks and sitting meditation.
Anyone who is motivated to understand herself or himself and is capable of a few moments of calm and openness will have no trouble pursuing self-study using this method. And just as exciting, as¬sisting someone in that process is within the reach of any good-hearted, clear and intelligent per¬son who takes the time to learn how.  –Ron Kurtz