What is Hakomi?

Hakomi is a unique form of psychotherapy that combines mindfulness, somatic awareness, and compassionate exploration resulting in profound healing and self-discovery. Hakomi offers a safe nurturing space to explore your inner world, tune into the wisdom of your body, and embrace transformative self-awareness. 

Hakomi History

In the mid-1970s, Hakomi founder, Ron Kurtz, began exploring psychology and experimenting and creating a way of working with people that began to draw acclaim for its innovative and imaginative approach. Originally trained as a scientist, and a self-avowed “math geek,” Ron drew from an enormous range of influences, including Buddhism and Taoism, physics, Neurolinguistic Programming, Ericksonian Hypnosis, general systems theory, neuroscience, and a number of body-centered therapies, including Gestalt, Reichian work, the Feldenkrais Method, Bioenergetics and Focusing.

Over 40 years ago, Ron Kurtz and several of his advanced students and colleagues created the Hakomi Institute, a nonprofit educational organization that is still headquartered in Boulder, Colorado today. In his later years, Ron Kurtz also created the Hakomi Educational Network.

Hakomi Principles

At the heart of the Hakomi Method is a set of time-honored principles that underlie all aspects of our work. These principles guide Hakomi practitioners with a sense of wholeness, respect and humility in their approach to their clients and their therapeutic process. 

The Hakomi principles aren’t simply theoretical: they translate into concrete therapeutic skills and thoughtfully-designed interventions. They also serve as a source of inspiration and inner guidance for Hakomi practitioners worldwide.

Mindfulness: A recognition that the ability to enter into a mindful state is essential to self-study, self-awareness and psychological and spiritual healing and growth 

Nonviolence: A commitment to treating ourselves and others with humility, gentleness and respect. This includes not forcing our own change agenda on others, humbly collaborating with clients to discover their inner truth (instead of inundating them with our interpretations and expertise), and supporting our clients’ defenses instead of trying to overwhelm or dismantle them

Organicity: A non-pathologizing view of the human psyche recognizing every part of our inner self as natural, intelligent and essential to the whole. In honoring organicity we allow others to be themselves and trust the process of their authentic unfolding

Mind-Body-Spirit Holism: The recognition that the whole human being–and the whole of human awareness–includes awareness of mind, body, emotions and spiritual essence as well as their relationships and environment.

Unity: As people we are living, organic systems composed of interrelated parts.  participating in larger systems.

Hakomi Therapeutic Approach

Hakomi Mindful Somatic Psychology offers an elegant, comprehensive and uniquely effective approach to psychological change and growth combining an inspiring set of guiding principles with a comprehensive experiential, mindfulness-based, and body-centered methodology.

For over 40 years, Hakomi has pioneered the psychodynamic use of mindfulness in the therapeutic process. Due in part to Hakomi’s influence, many healing approaches now use mindfulness to calm and self-regulate their clients. However, Hakomi is one of the only healing methods that uses mindfulness to access unconscious psychological material that’s not easily accessible by conversation alone. People are often surprised at how quickly they can access deeply unconscious material using the mindfulness-based methods that infuse every phase of our work.

Hakomi practitioners use the body as a doorway to the psyche. A great deal of human communication is nonverbal, and yet the wealth of information that the body communicates is rarely used as a therapeutic tool. Hakomi practitioners learn to track and explore subtle somatic cues (i.e., facial expressions, breathing, tensions, postures, and unconscious movement patterns) that indicate the presence of unconscious psychological material. The body’s intelligence knows things that neither we nor our clients know about the source of their unwanted attitudes and behavior. Instead of making educated guesses or interpretations about what’s motivating people’s behavior, Hakomi uses the body’s somatic cues as a roadmap that allows us to gently activate, study and transform the actual neural networks producing unwanted behavior and beliefs.

Hakomi is grounded in cutting-edge neuroscience. In recent years, neuroscience has made breakthrough discoveries validating many foundational aspects of Hakomi Mindful Somatic Psychology, including the effectiveness of mindfulness, loving presence, empathic attunement, limbic resonance and memory reconsolidation. Hakomi’s pioneering methods supported memory reconsolidation, neuroplasticity and other aspects of neural transformation decades before these psychological processes were widely known or understood.

Hakomi helps to develop the practitioner’s inner state. Although research has shown that the practitioner’s inner state is one of the most significant factors in therapeutic success, education for helping professionals rarely addresses the practitioner’s inner development in sufficient depth. Hakomi training provides ongoing psychological work that allows you to uncover the unconscious patterns affecting your interactions with clients and others. This allows you to create a deeper sense of safety and connect with both yourself and your clients, and also facilitates the emergence of your own “essence” and your own unique style as a helping professional.

Hakomi works with expanded states of consciousness. Learning to more deeply embody expanded states of consciousness like mindfulness and loving presence will allow you to develop an even deeper sensitivity and attunement to yourself and others. As you work with clients in these expansive states, you’ll be able to track deeper levels of psychological material, communicate about it more effectively, reduce client resistance, and experience a deeper sense of safety and connection with yourself and others. Working in mindfulness and loving presence can also greatly reduce compassion fatigue, and brings more ease and nourishment to your work for both practitioner and client alike.

Hakomi is used by a wide range of helping professionals. Mental health clinicians worldwide have used Hakomi for decades in individual, couples and group psychotherapy. Coaches, spiritual counselors, organization development practitioners, bodyworkers, educators, health care professionals, and other helping professionals have also found Hakomi’s principles and practices a powerful adjunct to their work.

(credit Embodywise website for their description of Hakomi)