Hakomi, the body-centred therapy developed by Ron Kurtz, offers shamanic work a gentle, mindful way of helping people discover the beliefs they carry in their bodies. Its refusal to force anything, its respect for the protective parts of a person, and the warm “loving presence” it asks of the practitioner echo the person-centred, non-forcing way in which Therapeutic Shamanism is practised.
What is Hakomi? #
A body-centred psychotherapy built on mindfulness. Ron Kurtz writes: “Early in the 1970s, I began to create the techniques and ideas that eventually became the Hakomi Method.”1 He came to describe it as “mindfulness-based, assisted self-study”, and said that this made it “closely related to the Buddhist and Taoist principles that were among my original inspirations.”2
Kurtz tells how the name arrived: “Hakomi is a word that came in a dream to one of my earliest students, David Winter.” They later learnt, he says, that it meant “How do you stand in relation to these many realms” in the Hopi language.3 See Who was Ron Kurtz?
What are Hakomi’s principles? #
Kurtz names five: “unity, organicity, mindfulness, mind-body wholeness, and nonviolence”.4 Unity, he says, “reminds us of the interconnectedness of all things, of all life, of all events.” Organicity means that “complex living systems, such as human beings, are self-organising and self-directing”. Mindfulness rests on the belief that “real change comes about through awareness, not efforting”.5
Organicity is close to what Carl Rogers called the actualising tendencyActualising tendency. Carl Rogers’s term for the drive in every living thing to grow into the best version of what it is meant to be. In animist terms, this is the drive of the Lower-World Soul. More about this, and to what Therapeutic Shamanism sees in the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer Soul: the drive in every being to become what it was born to be. See What can shamanism offer person-centred therapy?
What is loving presence? #
The state of mind Hakomi asks of the practitioner. “Loving presence is a state of being,” Kurtz writes. “It is pleasant, good for your health, rewarding in and of itself.”6 The Hakomi Way describes practitioners not “as professional experts who will heal the client, but as skilful spiritual friends who accompany clients on their healing journey.”7
Therapeutic Shamanism shares this way of being with people. The person, not the practitioner, is the expert in their own healing, and the practitioner’s task is to create the conditions in which they can grow. Hakomi describes in detail how that warmth and attention can be cultivated on purpose. See What does it mean to work therapeutically with process, parts and resistance?
How does Hakomi work with a person’s defences? #
By becoming an ally to them. Kurtz called one of Hakomi’s key moves “taking over”. He tells of a woman who arched her back so as not to feel her sadness. Rather than pushing against her, he offered to support the weight of her body. “I am offering to be an ally to this part,” he writes, and he is “not trying to break through” her defences.8 When the part felt supported, what it had been holding back could come through. For Kurtz, non-violence “means not persisting, not forcing anything, not using power or coercion”.9
This is very close to how Therapeutic Shamanism respects the fort-holderFort-holder. A protective part of the self that stayed behind to ‘man the fort’ when we were wounded: the inner critic, perfectionist, pusher, pleaser: the loyal soldier still fighting a war that ended long ago. Usually the part that sent an orphan away, so no deep healing holds without its consent; befriended, never extracted. Read the full answer, the part of us that stayed and coped: “no deep or permanent change happens without the fort-holder’s consent”, and “people have to face particular issues at their own pace, and in their own time.”10 Kurtz’s taking over shows one body-based way of offering that respect. See What are child, orphan, fort-holder and protector parts?
What does Hakomi say about beliefs held in the body? #
That the body shapes itself around what we believe. In The Body Reveals, written before Hakomi took its final form, Kurtz and Hector Prestera say: “It is as if the body sees what the mind believes and the heart feels, and adjusts itself accordingly.”11 Hakomi calls these deep, early beliefs core material. Kurtz says of such beliefs: “They make up the world we assume, without knowing we’re assuming it.”12
Therapeutic Shamanism knows these beliefs as introjectsIntroject. A foreign belief, message or story swallowed whole (often in childhood) and lodged inside as if it were our own; a type of intrusion. More about this: “An introject is a ‘must’ or a ‘must not’; a ‘should’ or a ‘should not’; an ‘ought’ or an ‘ought not’.”13 And it trusts the body to show the truth: animists knew that the body never lies and knows the truth. See What is body armouring and what does Reichian work contribute?
What are Hakomi’s little experiments? #
Gentle ways of letting a belief show itself. Whilst the person is in a mindful state, the practitioner offers something small, often a sentence, and both notice what happens. Kurtz gives the example of someone who talks very fast, as if people never have time for him. The practitioner might invite him to “notice what happens when you hear me say, ‘I have time for you.’” The reaction, a thought, a sadness or a memory, reveals the belief.14 Nothing is interpreted for the person. They discover it for themselves.
Kurtz preferred these experiments to a string of questions, which, he found, leave the person passive. See What can person-centred therapy offer shamanic work?
