I began to create the techniques and ideas that eventually became the Hakomi Method early in the 1970’s. I developed little experiments done with the client in a mindful state, experiments I called probes. These experiments were done to evoke informative reactions and emotional healing processes. Probes were one kind of such experiments. I also began supporting spontaneous management behaviors by “taking over” the behavior. I took over tensions, voices, holding back and other spontaneous reactions. Tracking and contact were developed also. During the 70’s I first outlined the linear process. The principles were developed with the help of students and co-leaders in the early 1980’s. This whole body of ideas and techniques became the original Hakomi Method. I and others taught it that way all through the 80’s. Late in that decade, I discovered loving presence and began teaching it as part of the method.
During all the years since I began, I never viewed Hakomi as something fixed and rigid. I have always and only been doing what inspired me, adding new ideas which came frequently. I have always and only been trying to express what delighted my mind and touched my heart. Happily, I have been blessed with frequent inspirations. I have read a lot and have worked with many people in many different countries. I have enjoyed the company of poets, spiritual teachers and scientists. I have known and had support from many loving, bright and generous people. All of them have added to my life and to the development of the method.
I took inspiration from Lao Tzu and Buddha, Meher Baba, Milton Erickson, Al Pesso, John Pierrakos and Fritz Perls, Ben Webster, Bill Evans, Edward Hopper and Robert Frost. I grew my own method using that inspiration, using the thousands of opportunities that came, the workshops, the trainings, the hundreds of sessions. I did not learn my work from any teacher of psychotherapy, though I did see some great ones work. I did not study psychotherapy formally in college or anywhere else. From all of this, I cobbled together a new way of helping people, a way that is a unique and personal expression of “who I am and where I am coming from.” When I “do” it, it is not simply a method that is being applied; it is a spirit being enacted.
Over the years, that spirit has inspired others. Some of my very first students are now teachers and trainers, who have developed their own ways of “doing” it., I have continued to grow and learn and to evolve the work in my way, as they have in theirs. Since that time we have all taken the original methods in somewhat different directions.
This method is a way to help people become aware of their implicit beliefs and habits. It is a method of assisted self discovery for people who have the courage and capacity to discover how they became who they are. To make Hakomi effective, the practitioner must be more than just someone who knows a method. The practitioner needs to be someone whose very presence can be healing, a person who has all the qualities needed to support emotional healing in another.
Here in more detail is how my work evolved from its original 1980’s form to the refined method:
Original Components & Major Refinements
Original Components:
- Character Theory (replaced by the more general category called Indicators.)
- Reading Bodies, particularly Posture and Structure (again, replaced by indicators.)
- Experiments
- Use of Mindfulness
- Nonviolence
- Tracking and Contact
- Probes
- Taking Over
- Offering Emotional Nourishment
Major Refinements:
- Loving Presence
- Using Assistants
- Searching For and Using Indicators
- The Operational Shift to Holding the Work as Assisted Self-Study
- Befriending the Adaptive Unconscious
- Irritations (Pierre Janet’s idea)
- Following (responding to spontaneous impulses and behaviors)
- Tracking and Honoring the Need for Silence
- Touching and Comforting
The original components make up a good portion of the method. They came together over two and a half decades of learning through practice, teaching and training people. Used together in an integrated way, they make an effective method for helping others with their personal growth and emotional healing. They are taught and practiced today in at least thirteen countries and used by hundreds of practitioners.
Since the early 90’s, when I resigned as director of the Hakomi Institute, I have continued to refine the method and to teach these refinements in workshops and trainings along with several newer trainers who have trained and worked with me. Some of them, like Donna Martin, have been working and teaching with me for fifteen years or more. Some of the refinements were made as far back as the early 90’s and some as recently as the last three months. I would like to describe the major ones and the changes they made to the method.
The Refinements
- Loving Presence. This was my progression: at first, I thought mostly about techniques, the momentary interventions I had learned from Gestalt and Bioenergetics. After thinking about these for a while, I began to see how they formed a unified method, the timing and use of the techniques and the theory that made sense of them. After thinking, teaching and writing about method and techniques, I began to see how they had to fit within the relationship with the client. I began to have ideas about what we called The Healing Relationship. All of this was part of the development of the original method. Then, after reading a book called Human Change Process by Michael J. Mahoney, I began to see that the most important ingredient – after “client factors” such as motivation – was what he called personhood or therapist’s personal factors. I realized during one mind-opening session that my own state of mind or state of being was strongly affecting the outcome of the session. State of mind very quickly became the most important aspect of the healing relationship. I called that state of mind loving presence and began teaching it in trainings and workshops as the first and most important element of the method. The workshop was about how one creates that state of mind in oneself. Presence refers to attending to the flow of experience from moment to moment.
- Using Assistants. I began using assistants in my workshops and trainings back in the 80’s. When I did demonstrations, I would have one or two of the observers come and help me with taking over voices and physical management reactions. Since the mid-nineties, I have used assistants in my private practice. There are many things you can do when you have assistants that you cannot do when you are alone with a client. I would have four clients come at a time, people who knew each other. I would work with one person at a time and have the other three assist me. Then we would rotate and work with the next person.
- Searching for and Using Indicators. Having tracked clients’ present experiences for many years, I began to notice and think about the person’s habitual behaviors and qualities that are a regular part of their way of being, qualities like holding the head on an angle, shrugging the shoulders, talking fast, constantly watching me, the person’s default facial expression, or any behavior that jumps out at me. I learned that these behaviors often reflect early adaptations and are the external expressions of implicit beliefs. One of the first things I do when I start a session with someone is search for what I call indicators and design experiments we could do with them.
- The Operational Shift to Holding the Work as Assisted Self-Study. This is the most important refinement of all. I stopped thinking about working within the medical model of treating psychological problems or “diseases”. I began to think of the method as a way of assisting a person in the pursuit of self knowledge. When this pursuit is successful, relief from suffering usually follows. Knowing the truth about oneself, making implicit beliefs conscious, recognizing the automatic behaviors of the adaptive unconscious, is the most direct path to changing oneself at a deep level. As part of this shift in perspective, I began to require that clients understand the work as self-study, that they be able to enter into mindful states and participate in the experiments that are the vital to the process.
- Adapting to the Adaptive Unconscious. The adaptive unconscious has come into currency in the last couple of decades. Books have been written about it (Strangers to Ourselves by Timothy O. Wilson). In contrast to the Freudian unconscious, the adaptive unconscious is much more of a helpmate than a “cauldron of erotic and violent impulses”. It is there to “conserve consciousness”. I began to recognize and work with this part of the mind as it interprets situations and initiates actions and reactions acting completely outside of conscious decisions and awareness. Knowing this, I can understand and respond to a person’s behavior in a more accurate, appropriate and sensitive way, thus gaining a level of cooperation that greatly helps the work proceed.
- Irritations (Pierre Janet’s model of unresolved and unconscious irritants). Pierre Janet wrote about events that overwhelm a person, events that cannot be integrated and “made sense of”, events that happen when we are vulnerable, and especially when we are young. The emotions and memories of such events can end up, in his words, “encapsulated” in the unconscious. They remain there, causing irritation and suffering and influencing emotions and behavior. It is these irritations that our experiments in mindfulness often bring into consciousness. And that is exactly what we want. Once conscious, with the proper emotional support, we can finally make sense of them and the irritation is finally dissolved.
- Following (Using Spontaneous Impulses and Behaviors). In keeping with a new awareness of the functioning of the adaptive unconscious, I now see the spontaneous impulses and thoughts that come up during the work as signals from the adaptive unconscious which point the way. When something pops into a client’s consciousness, such as an impulse or a memory, I will use this as information about the very next thing to do.
- Tracking and Honoring the Need for Silence. I have learned to watch a client’s face for signs that he or she needs time to “figure things out”, to integrate the memories and feelings that have arisen during the healing process. Integration is happening and needs to be protected from interruption. At those times, I remain silent.
- Touching and Comforting. I started many years ago to offer physical contact in ways that are generally frowned upon in professional psychotherapy circles. Of course, they have good reasons for this. The imbalance of power, the privacy of the two-person interaction, the intimate nature of the relationship, all make it quite easy to violate boundaries. When I use touch and offer comfort, it is always in the presence of witnesses. Usually, I am not the one touching the person or holding them. I have assistants do that and always with permission. We touch people, usually gently on the arm or shoulder, at the first physical sign of sadness or grief, signs like tears forming and the voice changing. When we use touch, we are signaling that we are aware of the person’s feelings and that we are sympathetic. We also keep silent to allow the person to deepen into the experience. We offer and extend comfort when those same emotions are moving freely through the person and painful memories are being integrated, which happens spontaneously if not interfered with. At those times we are either silent or we make occasional comforting sounds.
