hakomi.com

Recent Thinking That Has Refined the Method

There is now convincing evidence that much of our behavior happens without conscious awareness.  On this subject, I can recommend four books two articles.  The words used to describe that part of the mind which carries out these behaviors is the “adaptive unconscious”.  My study of and application of this idea is the first of four ideas which are the topics of this outline and the most important additions to my thinking over the last few years.
The Adaptive Unconscious.
a.    the actions of the AU are generally unnoticed, habitual, and many are indications of early adaptive learning, such as learning the grammar of ones native tongue.
b.    some characteristics of the operations of the AU, according to Wilson are, it is nonconscious, fast, unintentional, uncontrollable, and effortless.
c.    the operations of the AU can be observed when a person is in a mindful state.
d.    the paper on Cognitive Load by Swiller discusses the limitations of consciousness, as does V. S. Ramachandran in his book, Phantoms in the Brain.
e.    understanding the importance of the AU and its operations is basic to an understanding of the Refined Hakomi Method.
The Healing Process.
a.    Healing, in general, is an inner-directed process. Early in the development of Hakomi, I stated this quite clearly, I wrote “The answer is within.”  Meaning, within the client.  I have also written, “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.”
b.    mental-emotional healing is “coordinated and controlled” by the AU.
c.    often, our experiments, done with the client in mindfulness, initiate a healing process.  This is marked by spontaneous thoughts and memories and/or the sudden experience of an emotion.
d.    we support the healing process in several ways:
i.    when the client becomes sad, we offer a gentle physical contact
ii.    when the client goes inside and shows external signs of processing—like eyes closed, little nods, quick changes in facial expression—we remain silent. This is because…
iii.    an emotion will draw associations to it, like memories and thoughts that help explain the presence of the emotion.  A good thing to read about this is in a book called, Looking for Spinoza by Antonio Damasio (the key pages are 67-69).
iv.    all the attributes of loving presence are important during the healing process
v.    when spontaneous management behaviors arise, we support them if we have permission to do so. (The short term for this is “taking over”.)
vi.    we pay particular attention to the emergence of spontaneous events, like impulses, memories, thoughts and emotions.  These are often clues to the direction the process should take and are signs of the operations of the AU.  When such events occur, we try to utilize them in what we do next, like another experiment. This aspect of the process is called Following.
Gigenrenzer’s “Evolved Capacities”
The method is built on a series of skills based on some specific evolved capacities of the human brain. The concept of evolved capacities is described in detail in the book Gut Feelings.
Here is what Gigenrenzer says about them:
In order to understand human behavior, we need to understand that there is an evolved human brain that allows us to solve problems in our own way—different from that of reptiles or computer chips.
….important decisions—whom to marry, which job to accept, what to do with the rest of your life—are not only a matter of our imagined pros and cons. Something else weighs in the decision process, something literally quite heavy: our evolved brain. It supplies us with capacities that have developed over millennia but are largely ignored by standard texts on decision making.
They include the ability to trust, to imitate, to experience emotions such as love. The human ability to imitate the behavior of others, for instance, is a precondition for the evolution of culture.
Evolved capacities, including language, recognition memory, object tracking, imitation, and emotions such as love, are acquired through natural selection, cultural transmission, or other mechanisms.
Gigenrenzer discusses the evolved capacity for imitation as one of the important ways that culture is transmitted. Being exposed to the method as a culture is how one learns the method.
An evolved capacity is only a potential; it needs the proper environment to develop. Learn¬ing language is a good example. We are born with the capacity to learn language, but to develop that capacity, we need an environment in which language is spoken or signed. If we don’t have that, we don’t learn a language. Another evolved capacity is involved in learning a language is the capacity to imitate. We imitate the language that is spoken or signed around us. Lastly, we will have to practice. Hearing and seeing are not enough; we have to practice using it. It’ use it or lose it, as anyone who’s taken a language as an academic requirement knows.  Once we’ve practiced and developed our capacities, we can then say, we able to speak the language. Our capacities have become capabilities.
Let’s take an example of ‘the proper environment’. Here’s a passage from a David Brooks op-ed article:
Chinese people work hard because they grew up in a culture built around rice farming. Tending a rice paddy required working up to 3,000 hours a year, and it left a cultural legacy that prizes industriousness. Many upper-middle-class American kids are raised in an atmosphere of “concerted cultivation,” which inculcates a fanatical devotion to meritocratic striving.
The refined Hakomi method uses several evolved capacities. Examples:
(1) the capacity to focus attention
(2) the capacity for social engagement  and bonding
(3) the capacity for ‘mind reading’ (mental modeling) or knowing what’s in another person’s mind
(4) the capacity for sympathy, caring and compassion
(5) the capacity for logical inference and inventiveness
(6) the capacity to ‘read’ faces, posture, tone of voice and gestures
(7) the capacity for calm, patience, and maintaining silences
I will describe these in more detail as we go along and I will point out how we practice using them to develop the skills needed to successfully implement the method.
These are the sets of skills are needed to im¬plement the method:
(1) the skills needed to maintain a compassionate, present-cen¬tered state of mind
(2) the relational skills needed to create trust and confidence in clients
(3) the observational skills needed to gather useful information about clients
(4) the thinking skills needed to understand other people’s minds
(5) the experimental skills to test one’s understanding and evoke meaning laden reactions
(6) and the skills needed to support another’s mental-emotional healing.
All of these skills are discussed later in this handbook. Each set of skills is developed using par¬ticular evolved capacities and developed capabilities. For instance, the ability to maintain loving presence requires the developed capacity to love, an essential capability for normal human relationships and one that is often missing in psychopathic personalities. Presence involves the capacity to maintain attention, without internal disruption.
The experiential exercises are designed to develop capacities like these. The demonstrations and videos provide support for learning through the evolved capacity for imitation. In¬struction and guidance through supervised practice also support development. The incor¬poration into our understanding of evolved capacities is the latest re¬finement in the evolu¬tion of the method.