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Introduction (See also: Helma Mair’s Paper under Articles and Papers)

In my private practice, in the early in the 1970’s, I began to create the techniques and thinking that later  became the Hakomi Method. The unique contribution the method made at the time was this: it contained, as a necessary element, precise interventions (called, experiments) which were done with the client in a mindful state. The purpose the interventions was two-fold: (1) they brought unconscious material that would normally be difficult to access quickly into consciousness and (2) very often the interventions would evoke emotions, memories and reactions that revealed the beliefs and early experiences that control the client’s habitual feelings, attitudes and behaviors.

Another important aspect of the early method was the technique of “taking over”. Taking over is how I dealt with what are called, “defenses”. When an experiment evoked an emotional reaction, the reaction often included spontaneous behaviors that managed the reaction. These usually in¬volved tensions, changes in posture and certain kinds of thoughts. For me, this was spontaneous management behavior. Taking over is a set of interventions that support that kind of behavior. I didn’t see resistance that needed to be overcome; I saw self-control that could use some help. The use of taking over techniques often helped the client stay with whatever had been evoked long enough for something new spontaneous experience to emerge. In this way, the process would move experientially.

This body of ideas and techniques became the original Hakomi Method. I taught it that way in the late 1970’s and all through the 1980’s. Early in the 80’s, I founded the Hakomi Institute and began teaching the people who eventually became trainers themselves. In the late 80’s, I resigned as director of the Hakomi Institute and formed an independent organization called Ron Kurtz Trainings, Inc. I needed to devote my time to teaching and writing. I am now an associate member of the Hakomi Educational Network (Int’l) and am no longer with the Hakomi Institute.

In creating the method I have always felt free to make changes. I am still changing things. Here are some of the major changes of the last sixteen years:

In 1993, I introduced loving presence as the essential state of mind for a practitioner. I made it the first and most important task we have when working with people. That one change made a huge difference in the effectiveness of the method. More recently and equally significant, I came to see the work as assisted self-study, mindfulness-based, assisted self study. I no longer saw the method as treating illness. I saw this updated approach as evoking and supporting a process in which the client is seeking to understand who he or she is. Understanding that, healing becomes a conscious choice.

Further changes included the use of assistants, a couples version, the general tactic of following, the appropriate use of silence, the understanding of integration as a spontaneous process, and the use of Jeff Hawkin’s memory-prediction framework. In addition, I have written several dozen papers and four handbooks. The following is a talk I gave in Wuppertal, Germany in the fall of 2009:

Talk on the Refined Method[1]

Transcribed by Arlene Cassidy[2]

Okay I’d like to talk for a little while. There is an expression in Taoism that says that the master works by letting things take their natural course. So, although we have a written schedule, we may have to let things take their natural course at some point. Right now, I want to talk about the core of the method. But first, an observation: because there are so many musicians here, I want to make a kind of analogy between doing Hakomi and playing music. There are skills that need to be mastered in both disciplines. The reason musicians practice so much is so that they don’t have to think about what notes to play. I heard once that John Coltrane practiced eight hours a day when he was home. Scales, tone and technique become automatic. Once those skills are mastered, once they are completely habitual, once a musician doesn’t have to think of what notes to play, because all that is done at an unconscious level, then he can relate to the music at a different level. He can be totally present with the sound he’s making.[3] He can use it to express his personality and feelings. You don’t have to concentrate on what the notes are you can improvise, you can try new things to see how they sound. It’s the freedom to try things that made jazz an art. As the writer Albert Murray put it, the early jazz musicians all had an experimental disposition.

There’s something similarly true about Hakomi. There are skills that have to become habitual. They’re described in detail in the Training Handbook. We’ll study a few of those skills in this workshop. When you know the techniques and the method at an unconscious level, you can meet the client in a new way. You can be more intimate, direct and connected. When your skills are highly developed, you’re don’t become distracted by your own thinking. You can be very present when you don’t have to think.[4]

Another analogy I’d like to make is this: great musicians make their playing look so easy and so simple, it almost seems magical. Their playing seems effortless. And of course, it is. Anything handled by the adaptive unconscious feels effortless. Good therapy also feels effortless. Having done this work for forty years, A lot of things I do are handled by my adaptive unconscious. If I’m asked, I can usually explain why I did something, but at the time I did it, I wasn’t thinking about it. When I did it, I just did it. I can remember doing a workshop at Esalen, maybe 10-15 years ago. At the very end, when people said how much they liked it, I realized I felt like I hadn’t really done anything. I felt like, “it just happened”.

After forty years of practice, meaning: having an experimental disposition, trying things, learning what worked well and what didn’t, after all that, the work as I do it now is much simpler. Not just because the skills have matured, but because, as Picasso once put it, ‘Art is the elimination of the unnecessary’. Over those many years, my skills improved, meaning: I learned to eliminate the unnecessary. That’s what refined the method.

In that forty-year process of experimenting and learning my craft, I adopted a lot of new things, but not as many as I gave up. As a result, the work has become simpler. Simpler to understand. Simpler to teach. And simpler to do. The overall process is described in the graph we’ve handed out.[5]

The Process in Graphic Form is a flow diagram. The first item is creating a particular state of mind-being in yourself. That state is Loving Presence. It is the basic context for your relationship with the client and is a key element in building a relationship that will support the client’s cooperation, participation and healing. I’ll come back to this.

Somewhere near the middle of the graphic is a point called, Experiment 2. The whole process really revolves around setting up experiments that are done with clients in mindfulness. That’s the core of the process. All the rest leads up to that or follows it. If you didn’t do experiments, you wouldn’t be doing hakomi. Here’s how I’ve expressed this:

The unique contribution of the Hakomi method is this: the method contains, as a necessary element, precise experiments done with the client in a mindful state, the purpose being to evoke emotions, memories and reactions that will reveal or help access the beliefs, experiences and adaptations that are influencing the person’s habitual behaviors.

I started using this unique approach in 1974. The first thing unique about it is the very specific way we use of mindfulness. The client becomes passive and focused on his or her present experience. When the client is ready, the therapist says or does something designed to evoke a reaction which the client. I know of no other therapy that uses mindfulness in this way. Doing so doesn’t require an extended period of self-observation, only a few moments during which a specific, short intervention is reacted to.

That’s the core of the method. So, what are we trying to do when we do such an experiment? We’re trying to evoke experiences that will bring memories and beliefs into the client’s consciousness. We’re working to help make the client conscious of habits that significantly effect how the client’s automatically organizes his or her experiences, the kinds of experiences that are the result of adaptations to painful experiences, the kind that block emotionally nourishing relationships.

To create such experiments, we usually have to make a guess about what beliefs and memories might be sustaining the behavior we’re noticing. It’s not that we’re sure. We only have an idea. Call it a guess! So, we do an experiment, both to test our idea and to evoke a reaction that will begin a healing process for the client. If our idea is right and we do a good experiment, the material that comes into consciousness and the emotional experience that comes with it will be the first step in healing the wounds that have always been too tender to touch.

The general idea is this: the client has ideas about the world, ideas that predict how the world is going to behave.[6] Here’s an example from Jeff Hawkins’ talks on the internet: Imagine some practical joker you know pulls something like this on you. while you’re here at this workshop, the joker goes over to wherever you live and moves your front doorknob about an inch to the left. You have opened this door hundreds of times. You don’t have to think about where the doorknob is. You reach for it out of habit, without thinking about it or observing it with any degree of curiosity. You expect the doorknob to be exactly where it always was. You’re not thinking about it all. Without thinking about it, you’re making a prediction, an unconscious prediction based on your memory of where the doorknob has always been for you. You’re longtime experience with this particular doorknob leads you to thoughtlessly predict it’s going to be in a certain place. So, you walk up to the door and you reach for the doorknob and it’s not where you expected it to be. What happen then? You’re immediately going to become conscious of the fact that it’s not where you expected it to be. Your prediction, unconscious though it was, has failed and now consciousness automatically takes over.

You could’ve been coming up to the door focused on anything but where the doorknob will be. When you’re faced with a new type of situation, you have to consciously concentrate on it. But, something you’ve dealt with a thousand times, as they say, “no brainer”. Okay, you came up to your door, thinking about the meeting you had an hour ago, or your talking on your cell phone or whatever. But, as soon as your prediction fails, as soon as your hand fails to find the doorknob, you’re going to stop whatever else you’re doing and start looking for the doorknob. When predictions fail, people immediately become conscious. That’s the core of this method. That’s the reason we do experiments. We want to bring unconscious material into consciousness and to do that, we make the clients’ predictions fail.

The early part of hakomi sessions are about creating the conditions and getting the necessary information you’ll need to create an experiment. In the usual case, to create an experiment, you’ll need to have a good guess about what kind of prediction the client is likely to make. I’ll give you an example: Let’s say you’re talking to a client who always looks at you sort of sideways, never looks straight at you, maybe has his head tipped a bit and turned slightly (the sort of look a dog gives you if you make a funny sound). Suppose this client looks at you that way a lot of the time. You might guess that he doesn’t trust you. You might also guess that he’s generally doubtful of everyone, that he believes he can’t trust anyone. So having made that guess about him, your goal is to bring that distrust—if it’s really there—into consciousness. If you want him to realize he doesn’t trust you, then all you have to do is ask him to be mindful and when he’s ready, you say, “You can trust me.” If you guessed right, the reaction may be something like surprise or fear or a thought like, “No I can’t.” Or like, “Watch out!” As soon as he notices a reaction like that, he’ll not only realize he doesn’t trust you, he may also realize that he has strong negative feelings which keep him from trusting people in general. That’s exactly what you want. If those strong feelings start to come up, memories will come soon after. When that happens, a healing process in now possible. To summarize, if you have good guesses about what you’re observing, you can use your guesses to create experiments that will bring the client’s beliefs and memories into consciousness and initiate healing.

I’ll give you another example. I did a workshop in Vienna with two hundred or so people. At one point I asked them to talk to a neighbor and predict what would happen if I told them they were good people. I wanted to establish what they imagined (predicted) their reactions would be to a statement like, “You’re a good person.” Then, I asked the entire group to get mindful, and after a few moments, I said to the group: “Please notice what happens, when I tell you, you’re a good person.” Only I said it in German. About eighty percent of them had some a reaction that told him they didn’t believe were good people. Eighty percent of them! Some got tearful. Some had thoughts like, “No I’m not” or “How do you know?” In some way they resisted the idea that they were good people. None of them had predicted correctly prior to the experiment. If they hadn’t been in mindfulness, they probably would have simply accepted the idea or maybe thought I was up to something. But when their predictions failed, consciousness came in with the real belief.

That’s the core of the method. So, if you’re going to do and experiment that causes the client’s predictions to fail, you have to have an idea about what beliefs the client has. That’s the usual case. There’s an exception to this. Namely, you can sometimes do an experiment with an observed indicator and without guessing about its meaning. That’s the core of the method.

Of course, when I do an experiment, I typically don’t ask clients about their beliefs. I don’t generally get information from clients by asking questions. That’s one of the major changes I made to the method. There are two reasons for this. One, you’re not going to get unconscious material that way. The unconscious expresses itself in behavior. And two, asking questions sets up the wrong kind of relationship. When you ask questions a lot, the client will go into a pattern where he or she will answer each question and then simply wait for the next question. So the client never starts moving on his own.

The goal is to evoke and support a healing process and healing is a spontaneous process. It proceeds and is directed from within.[7] If you cut your finger, you only have to clean it and bandage it. Maybe put some salve on it. Then it will heal on its own, because you have provided the right support. You don’t have to keep bothering it. The same is true when a healing process happens in therapy. You get the process moving and you do what you can to support it. Mostly that means leaving things time to happen. I’ll tell you about that later.

First, I’m going to tell you how I get the information I need to do therapy. I get it by observing people. I watch and listen. I study their behaviors. I watch for facial expressions, gestures, posture. I watch for patterns and habits. I listen for the tone of voice. I get my information nonverbally. That kind of information is very reliable. Suppose you ask someone if she enjoyed a movie and she replies, “I liked it.” But when she says that, she shrugs her shoulders. What are you going believe, her words or her shoulders? You better believe the shoulders. She liked it, but not that much. I get my information from observing people.

There are two kinds of non-verbal information I’m habitually focused on. The first is, signs of the person’s present experience. I want to be able to understand what the person is experiencing moment by moment. For example, you can study the color of the face and the color around the nostrils. If the nostrils start to get red, you can be nearly certain that this person is becoming sad. It’s quite possible that you could detect their sadness before they’re actually feeling it. Emotions can show up before the person actually experiences the feeling of the emotion.[8] That happens all the time.

I want to know what a client is experiencing because I want to stay connected to them. I want the clients to know that I know what they are experiencing.  And I want to be able to respond to their present experience. If a client is becoming sad, then there’s something I’m going to do about it. So, one kind of nonverbal information I’m focused on is signs of the client’s present experience.

The other thing I focus on is what I call indicators. The habitual angle of the head is an example. Noticing indicators is a refinement of what I used to do twenty years ago which was to look for character patterns. I don’t think about them anymore. I look for indicators of which there are am unlimited number. They’re usefulness is that you can create experiments with any of them. They’re not a set of diagnostics; they only help the therapist get ideas about what they might mean. That’s very different from categorizing someone.

Indicators are habits at a very fine grain level. For example, a fairly common indicator is a habit of shrugging ones shoulders. If a someone shrugs his shoulders whenever he makes a statement he’s suggesting that he has no knowledge of what’s being talked about or any responsibility for whatever happened. We all know that’s what that indicator means. We can tell the meaning in a second. It means, “I couldn’t help it.” “I don’t know.” “It’s not my responsibility”. This kind of habit suggests that this is a person who habitually avoids taking responsibility. When you see that indicator, that habit, you can reasonably postulate that this person has an underlying belief something like, “It’s important to avoid being blamed.” It follows, if this is your guess about it, that a good experiment might be to say, with the client in a mindful state, “It wasn’t your fault.” Why? Because you might expect that there was a situation in which a lot of emotional pain was created by a strong experience of guilt. It might not be just one powerful experience; it could be many repetitions of such situations. The habit protects against feeling guilt.

If this guess is a good one, then the experiment is likely to cause this client’s unconscious prediction — expecting to be blamed — to fail big time. What is evoked by the experiment and comes into consciousness may be a taste of the painful emotion of guilt. Or, it could be a powerful memory of a particular event that provoked feelings of guilt. Either one could lead into a healing process.

So I use these indicators to get an idea of what a client believes. Then, I can test my ideas by setting up and doing experiments. If my ideas are good, and the experiments work, clients become conscious of their core beliefs. That’s the core of the and the beginning of healing. When you get an emotion in reaction to an experiment, you have the beginning of a healing process. The emotion aroused will tend to bring associated memories into consciousness. These associations will arise spontaneously if you give them time.

When an emotion is evoked, don’t ask a question! That’s the worst thing you can do. Once the person is in touch with a feeling, just be silent! Just wait! Because feelings draw associations. It’s automatic. It’s natural that when we feel something and are given time, we spontaneously try to make sense of the feeling we’re having. That’s why the associations come into consciousness. If you give the client time, almost always, a clarifying memory will arise. The memory will be an embodiment of the kinds of experiences that engendered the belief. The client came to believe whatever they believe on the basis of his or her experiences. And those experiences will come to mind, if the person is allowed to just stay with her feelings. And once those experiences are in consciousness they are amenable to change.

If you realize what you feel, what you believe, and where and when you learned to believe that, you have an opportunity to change your mind. That’s what we are there to create: opportunities for people to change their minds about certain kinds of beliefs. The kind of beliefs want to help clients change are the ones that cause unnecessary suffering. While it’s true that there are some people you can’t trust, if you have a habit of not trusting anybody, then you’re not going to have healthy close relationships. We want to give clients experiences which defy their overgeneralised, unrealistic, unconscious predictions who or what will cause them emotional pain. We want to show the client that in some cases, yes, you can trust some people. It’s not the case that you can’t trust anybody. You just have to learn how to decide who you can trust and who you can’t. With practice, you can do just that. However, first you have to realize it’s possible. That possible experience is what is missing. The client learned to avoid it, probably learned as a procedure, rather than a thought out conclusion. One reason the missing experience is missing because, for one reason or another, it has been avoided. It could be that situations of a particular type are remembered as causing pain and adaptations have been made to avoid them.^[9] Since this is avoidance behavior, it is self-reinforcing. The reward for avoiding an experience that you believe will cause pain, is the relief that comes from avoiding it.[10] Creating what’s missing, the positive, nourishing version of it is what constitutes mental-emotional healing. And there are things we must do to support that process.

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[1] Given in Wuppertal, Germany, in October, 2009.

[2] Thanks, Arlene!

[3] From the Ken Burns series on jazz, disk 5.

[4] Being present has a lot to do with what in brain science is called, “gamma rhythms”.  For more about that, see Colgin, Laura On the same wavelength—literally. In the January 2010 Excerpts or at:

http://www.ntnu.no/news/on-the-same-wavelength

[5] See the Process in Graphic Form, page 47.

[6] For more about this, see the videos of Jeff Hawkins talking about the “memory prediction framework and Rodolfo Llinás and Sisir Roy’s paper The ‘prediction imperative’ as the basis for self-awareness. It can be found in the Excerpts on page 374 or at: http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:5FHHVtZRppcJ:www.neuroquantology.com/repository/index2.php%3Foption%3Dcom_sobi2%26sobi2Task%3Ddd_download%26fid%3D29%26format%3Dhtml+The+‘prediction+imperative,+rodolfo,+pdf&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESiJXPhhwORFUoZB5eQ7eLuC-44dZ7nsxDolUo9vg44k6VV9i-rvGJabEhbhqsUoQTW9SZdTfVQV1VFefkl0JVpLRM8z-F60cx9vyvmZDubFIZB-VcdGOfpgCbGckWv1JpE1lMpX&sig=AHIEtbT7js2pE0pT8k3zJlLcrccUYS1z3A

[7] I wrote somewhere, “The impulse to heal is real and powerful and lies within the client. Our job is to evoke that healing power, to meet its tests and needs and to support it in its expression and development. We are not the healers. We are the context in which healing is inspired.

[8] There’s a passage about this, beginning on page 67 on Antonio Damasio’s book, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. New York: Harcourt.

[9] The memory-prediction function is remembering situations like the present one and it is predicting that the present one will lead to a painful outcome. See Jeff Hawkins talk on TED. http://video.yahoo.com/watch/562477/2805602

[10] Solomon RL, Wynne LC. Traumatic avoidance learning: the principles of anxiety conservation and partial irreversibility. Psychol Rev. 1954 Nov;61(6):353–385.