by Halko Weiss
Laszlo points to a second connotation when he says our interdependent world should be apprehended “with our heart as well as our brain” (2004, p. 6). Compassion, as Thomas Merton noted, is the profound awareness of the interconnectedness of all things. Clients who stand across from us are not totally other. They are us as well. Thus, Hakomi therapists find it both scientifically and clinically necessary to develop that sense of compassion or loving presence that honors and embodies the communion between living systems (Germer, 2006; Kornfield, 1993). This is foundational for facilitating core transformation, as well as normal, healthy attachment (Cozolino, 2006; Davidson & Harrington, 2002; Shaver, Lavy, Saron, & Mikulincer, 2007; Siegel, 2006; Siegel & Hartzell, 2003).
A third implication, sad for psychotherapists and their pocketbooks, is that we cannot be imperialists. If we are holons composed of subsystems that participate in suprasystems (Skynner, 1976), then all those levels will be important and need proper attention. For example, to be holistic and responsible, if people present themselves as depressed, we might need to attend to metabolic issues through nutrition, biochemistry, movement, deep-tissue work, and so forth, as well as the developmental, psychological issues that psychotherapy traditionally addresses, as well as family, labor, spiritual, community, political, and/or economic issues in some cases (Graves, 2008). Since single practitioners do not have skills in all these areas, it means we need to work in interdisciplinary ways as much as possible. Hakomi therapists affirm full psychosocial assessments as outlined in such books as Metaframeworks (Breunlin, Schwartz, & Mac Kune-Karrer, 1992).
Ken Wilber was an early resource for Kurtz, and an ongoing one for Hakomi. The unity principle is where Wilber’s all-quadrant-all-level model of integral psychology recommended itself. While feminist psychotherapists emphasized holons by saying the self is always and only a self-in-relation (Herlihy & McCollum, 2007; Jordan, Kaplan, Miller, Stiver, & Surrey, 1991), Wilber (1995) expressed it by saying that psychology is always also sociology. Wilber agrees that the meaning of something is intimately related to its context, one of the main points of postmodernism (Graves, 2008; Harvey, 1989).
Wilber (1995), as well as Habermas (1979), clarified that a human holon not only has an individual and a communal aspect, but also an internal-subjective and external-objective aspect. Laszlo concurs: “What we call ‘matter’ is the aspect we apprehend when we look at a person, a plant, or a molecule from the outside; ‘mind’ is the readout we get when we look at the same thing from the inside” (2004, pp. 147–149). Following Wilber in plotting the individual-communal versus the interior-exterior results in a four-part grid, or four quadrants (Figure 5.1).
These quadrants suggest that the intentional, cultural, social, and behavioral aspects of a holon are inseparably intertwined, with no one quadrant able to reduce the others to itself. Internal-individual consciousness (II quadrant) has a degree of autonomy, but is highly influenced by internal-communal dispositions (IC quadrant), namely the values of the multiple cultures in which we are immersed (Helms & Cook, 1999; Johanson, 1992; McGoldrick, Giordano, & Pearce, 1996; Wilber, 2006). These values might or might not have strong support through actual social structures that embody them in the external-communal (EC) world of laws, educational systems, housing arrangements, legal systems, economic policies, and so forth. These three quadrants work in terms of mutual, reciprocal influences with the external-individual (EI) quadrant of one’s objective underlying physiology and observable behavior. Wilber’s inclusion here of an interior dimension as well as a cultural-social dimension goes a long way toward addressing what has been the inadequate or shadow side of systems theory (Berman, 1996).
Figure 5.1. Wilber’s Four Quadrants With Representative Theorists
While unity was the term chosen in the Hakomi context, the principle also relates to the Buddhist philosophical terms nonduality and interbeing (Coffey, 2008). This teaching, which dates back to the Buddha (Macy, 1991) and is also integral to contemporary Buddhist thinking (Hanh, 1987; Wallace, 2007), is that it is erroneous to think that we are separate from one another, and detrimental to think that we are all one and the same. Rather, interconnected diversity is seen as a model for how holons interact (Stolorow, Brandchaft, & Atwood, 1987). This model suggests that people should interact with one another as different, yet not entirely separate, which can be a guide for the therapeutic relationship as well as healthy family and social relationships.
Organicity
Following the implications of the unity principle results in John Muir’s observation that if we pick up a stick, we discover it is connected to everything in the universe, which makes being succinct problematic. To return to Bateson’s propositions, his second one is that what makes a system organic is not simply that it has parts, but that the parts are connected and communicate within the whole (Nowak & Vallacher, 1998). Wilber (1979) notes that a broad-spectrum way of thinking about therapy is that it is a matter of healing splits—splits between one part of the mind and another, between the body and the mind, between the whole self and the environment, and a final transpersonal split that overcomes all division.
Trouble, therefore, for living organic systems may flow from a lack of communication. When the liver is not interacting with the pancreas, pituitary, and heart, there are problems. When the family doesn’t talk within itself, the football team doesn’t huddle, production is out of touch with sales, the designers who are doing the dashboard don’t talk to those engineering the heater, and governments don’t stay in touch, there is potential for great harm. Various therapies tend to address a particular split. Hakomi therapists, working out of this integral systems approach, treat their clients in ways appropriate to each split, and/or seek to refer them to specialists who can (Johanson, 2009b).
When the communication and information exchange is happening, the system is self-organizing, self-directing, and self-correcting, characterized by complex, nonlinear determinism, meaning it has a mind of its own based on its own internal wisdom—Bateson’s third proposition. A living, organic system is not a machine where one input will mechanically translate into a predictable outcome. It has decider subsystems, which take any input and process it in unique ways that organize both its experience of the input and its expression in response to the input (Nowak & Vallacher, 1998).
The second Hakomi principle, organicity, is respectful and trusting of a living system’s inner wisdom and integrity as it participates in and interacts with its environment. Organicity distinguishes the qualities of living systems from those of nonliving systems (Vallacher & Nowak, 1994a, 1994b). The organicity principle acknowledges that, as opposed to a machine that can be fixed from without, a living organism can only be healed from within, through enrolling its own creative intelligence when dealing with issues of worldview and meaning (Juarrero, 1999; Murphy & Brown, 2007).
The implication for psychotherapy is that it looks for and follows natural processes, inner movements, inner rhythms, and spontaneous, nonverbal signs of the collaboration of the unconscious (Kurtz, 1990a) orienting toward increased wholeness; this, as opposed to artificially prescribing structures or agendas from without. In everyday life, parents adapt to the differing needs of their children as teachers take into account the various learning styles of their students. This is organically necessary and natural.
Another way of saying this is that organic systems display emergent properties that cannot be predicted or controlled (Clayton, 2004; Deacon, 2006). The solutions needed often cannot be known before they happen. Therapists need to wait in patience and trust. The best leader follows, according to Lao-tzu.
Embracing the principle of organicity clearly moves us toward giving up white knight models of riding in and saving people, in favor of more organic midwife or gardener models that talk less extravagantly of coaxing nature.
Lao-tzu seconds this implication in many places:
[The sage] only helps all creatures to find their own nature, but does not venture to lead them
by the nose. . . . He simply reminds people of who they have always been. . . . Because he has given up helping, he is people’s greatest help. . . . The highest form of goodness is like water. Water knows how to benefit all things without striving with them. (Johanson & Kurtz, 1991, pp. 33, 134)
Self-healing holons are complex and unpredictable. They cannot be effectively modeled by reductionistic models. It is possible to model the consequences of kicking a football by creating a simplified representation of the foot, the football, and the force applied. However, the consequences of kicking a living being cannot be represented in the same way. If a dog is kicked, for instance, its interpretation of the meaning of the kick comes into play. Is the kick perceived as hostile or playful? Is the person doing the kicking known to the dog, or a stranger? The dog has an internal perspective that must be considered in order to make sense of its actions. Bateson and Bateson (1987) and Wilber (1995) recognize that complex, self-healing holons have an internal perspective that interprets meaning. To support the healing of a therapy client, the therapist must honor and receive information that reflects the person’s internal wisdom (Knight & Grabowecky, 1995).
Mind-Body Holism
It is common in Western thinking to separate the mind and body. This separation, proposed by René Descartes, has not stood up well in recent centuries in philosophy, and has been thoroughly disproved by research in neuropsychiatry and psychoneuroimmunology (Damasio, 1999; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999; Shusterman, 2008). Hakomi embraces a unified view through its principle of mind-body holism, which is actually a subset of organicity, and the principle that development occurs by envelopment of previous levels (Andersen, Emmeche, Finnemann, & Christiansen, 2000), resulting in a compound individual of subatomic, physical, biological, psychological, cultural, and transcendent levels (Emmeche, Koppe, & Stjernfelt, 1997; Graves, 2008; Wilber, 1995).
Common understanding assumes that a mind processes information and a body processes physical energy. However, no aspect of human experience can be described as purely mental or purely physical. Wilber’s four quadrants derive from distinctions between interior and exterior combined with individual and communal, but he is careful to say all four are constitutive of a holon and cannot be separated. A thought is meaning, and also is an electrochemical impulse in the brain. A feeling contains meaning, and is also a combination of neuromuscular tension and hormonal balance. A sensation is the translation of a physical change, such as pressure, heat, or cold, into a neural impulse. That impulse is immediately interpreted, perhaps as comforting or hostile, by the person receiving it. A person is a bodymind system, with mind (information) and body (energy and matter) so intertwined that they can only be thought of as one (LeDoux, 1996; Schwartz & Begley, 2002).
It is therapeutically powerful to work with the mind-body interface. The body is a reflection of mental-emotional life (Kurtz & Prestera, 1976; Marlock & Weiss, 2001, 2006; Marlock & Weiss, with Young & Soth, 2015). It is immediate and present, and has not been overused in therapy, as has verbal exchange (Johanson, 1996). The body’s revelations are more closely connected with the deepest levels of the tripartite brain and the core ways we organize experience. The protein receptors of every cell membrane of the body receive signals about the environment from the brain, informed by the mind, which then activates growth or withdrawal responses (Lipton, 2005). The brain’s mind monitors and integrates somatic markers in every experience of consciousness (Damasio, 1999). Perceptions of the world such as “life is a fight and you have to be ready to win at all times” or “life is a wonder to be enjoyed” mobilize the body in different ways that are congruent with these differing life experiences. The mind-body interface can be used in both directions: studying what mental-emotional material is evoked through body-centered interventions, or noticing how the body organizes in response to some mental-emotional input (Fisher, 2002).
Ogden and colleagues (2006) note that it is necessary to incorporate the body, titrating sensation and doing bottom-up processing when there has been trauma. Traumatic events can trigger the primitive fight, flight, or freeze mechanisms that will lead clients to dissociate if standard, mental-emotional top-down processing reactivates the memories through inappropriate timing and preparation. Many chapters in this volume expand on possibilities for using the body in psychotherapy, which is different from using bodywork as an adjunct to psychotherapy (Aposhyan, 2004).
Mindfulness
Though fine tuning one’s metabolism to support physical energy is important, Bateson would say that what we were getting at by employing the mind-body interface is his fourth proposition, namely that energy is collateral or secondary in living organic systems characterized by mind. What is of primary importance is the way a system processes information. An atom bomb or a raging rhinoceros has a lot of energy, but not much creativity in terms of processing information. With a relatively small amount of energy, the human body-mind-spirit can figure out a way to write Shakespeare and go to the moon (Baeyer, 2004; Johanson, 2009b).
Think of what happens when a young toddler believes he has lost his mother in a department store. That belief sets off a reaction of uncontrollable fear, crying, disorientation, inconsolable isolation, and panic. No one around the child can comfort him. A second later, when the information registers that mother is returning from around the corner of the jewelry counter to pick him up, there is an instant transformation to joy, calm, easy breathing, relaxation of muscles, and a sense of peace and reconnection. A little information goes a long way to control a lot of energetic processes. Siegel (1999) thinks of this as an example of the nonlinear qualities of a system, where a small input can lead to a large response in which the limbic system fosters a cascade of responses that affect heart rate, a sense of panic, and so forth.
That leads to Bateson’s fifth proposition that information is coded, which is a way of saying we organize our experience. Experience does not come to us packaged. We process stimuli from within and without. As Suzanne Langer (1962) suggests, we symbolically transform or encode “the given” of various stimuli to make it available to consciousness. “We do not merely live in the world, we live in the world as we view it, construct it, or interpret it” (Brown, Ryan, & Creswell, 2007, p. 213). Those in the constructivist school of psychology honor and employ this insight (Mahoney, 2003). For Bateson, the way information is organized always goes back to the context of relationships that influence its “form, order, and pattern” (Bateson, 1979, p. 40).
A sixth and final Bateson proposition that we consider here is that information is coded or organized into a hierarchy of levels of organization (Deacon, 2003; Emmeche et al., 1997). In psychotherapy, we are especially interested in high-level encoding—the basic faith or philosophy found in our core organizing beliefs that control both our perception and our behavior, before we have any awareness of perceiving or responding (Kurtz, 1990a; Nowak & Vallacher, 1998). For instance, the core belief “I have to perform to get people’s love and approval” encodes and controls a lot of behavior: the way we perceive school and sports, the way we hold our bodies, the expectations we bring to relationships, and more.
In the experience of Hakomi therapy, mindfulness is the most effective tool with which we can study the organization of our experience (Kurtz, 1990a) and begin to relate to it in healing ways (Baer, 2003; Johanson & Taylor, 1988; Siegel, 2007; Weiss, 2008). Mindfulness is a core principle, method, and practice in Hakomi therapy. As Nowak and Vallacher express it: “What really sets the human mind apart from other systems in nature . . . is its ability to reflect on its own operations and output” (1998, p. 4). “The self-evaluation afforded by self-awareness . . . can provide the impetus for people to modify their own psychological structure and thereby change their internal bases for action” (p. 5).
Present experience is always the focus of mindful therapy because that is what is currently organized by core narrative beliefs, and immediately manifests them in sensations, feelings, thoughts, memories, attitudes, relational wa
ys of being, dreams, posture, breathing, movements, and so forth (Borkovec, 2002; Brown & Ryan, 2003; Johanson, 2015; Olendzki, 2005; Roy, 2007). Morgan reminds us that neurologically, “because emotional memory is always in the now, the old perceptions, feelings, and behaviors become blended with the current situation” (2006, p. 15). The chapter on transference in Stolorow, Brandchaft, and Atwood’s (1987) work on psychoanalytic intersubjective theory is titled “The Organization of Experience,” indicating that transference is revealed in how one has made meaning of one’s world, including significant others—something that is present every moment in every situation.
Cultivating mindfulness of something the mind has created (Nyanaponika, 1972) allows clients to get beyond the limitations of ordinary consciousness based on habitual reactions (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999; Watzlawick, Weakland, & Fish, 1974) to observe implicit memory at work (Schacter, 1992, 1996) in the actual, present-moment organization of experience, thus allowing access to the creative core organizers. Mindfulness functions as “a quality of consciousness . . . [that can relate] to the contents of consciousness” (Brown et al., 2007, p. 213).
Mindfulness includes an array of states of consciousness including witnessing, bare attention, and loving presence (Johanson, 2006). In Hakomi therapy, mindfulness is used in two central ways. First, the therapist enters mindfulness and loving awareness (Chodron, 2003; Germer, 2006; Kurtz, 2008) before each session and remains in it, making the client the focus of his meditation. Second, the therapist invites the client into a state of mindful self-reflection as early in the process as is feasible, and helps the client return to mindfulness as appropriate throughout the session. Outside of the therapy context, mindfulness, or a contemplative way of living, can be encouraged as an ongoing practice or way of being (Hayes, 2005). The bare attention of mindfulness combined with the quality of loving presence is important for attending to both interpersonal and intrapersonal attachment security issues that are present (Brown & Ryan, 2004; Shaver et al., 2007).