by Halko Weiss
In systems terminology, core organizing beliefs are referred to as order parameters, or the internal variables or attractors that organize behavior. Thelen and Smith write that “when systems self-organize under the influence of an order parameter, they ‘settle into’ one or a few modes of behavior [attractor states] that the system prefers over all the possible modes” (2002, p. 56).
Attractors can have varying degrees of stability and instability, continuity and flexibility depending on the reinforcement of learned response schemas to anticipated events. Siegel (1999) notes that neural nets that fire together tend to wire together. Schwartz’s ecology of inner parts can be understood in terms of a CAS having “two or more attractors with different basins of attraction coexisting, . . . multistable modes which are discrete areas in the state space” (Thelen & Smith, 2002, p. 61). Again, a person can act in varying ways, depending on the context, though Freud’s repetition compulsion (Johanson, 1999) speaks to the relative stability of an inner ecology (Johanson, 2009a).
Emergent attractors, order parameters, or core organizing beliefs are considered constraints in systems theory, in that they eliminate “some possibilities by realizing others” (Graves, 2008, p. 94). The freedom of potentiality of “a couple of dollars worth of chemicals in a puddle of water” is reduced when it emerges through structural levels to become a human instead of a raccoon, but the freedom of possibility is opened to more inclusive states of consciousness and relatedness (Graves, 2008). “The arrangement of constraints defines the structure of dynamic form” (Graves, 2008, p. 50), which in Hakomi is related to character theory (Chapters 8 and 23).
While “reality is inherently relational . . . [and] all meaningful relationships constrain reality” (Graves, 2008, p. 45), Hakomi therapy regularly attends to indicators of constraints or core organizing beliefs that limit realistic possibilities for how one is able to relate in the world. The therapy can enable a client to mindfully integrate missing experiences (not just insights) that transform by adding to the complexity and availability of new relational possibilities. In line with Freud and Piaget, a goal of therapy is for a person, as a CAS, to accommodate a new experience as new, as opposed to assimilating it into old order parameters (Brown et al., 2007; Horner, 1974; Piaget & Inhelder, 1969).
What moves a relatively stable client, as a CAS disposed to habitually constrained ways of experiencing and responding, to seek characterological-level therapy and the possibility of a nonlinear phase shift or phase transition is fluctuation (Thelen & Smith, 2002, p. 62). Such fluctuations “are the source of new forms in behavior and development that account for the nonlinearity of much of the natural world” (p. 63). “Change or transformation is the transition from one stable state or attractor to another” (p. 63). To explain it in CAS terminology, transformational changes are fostered when “inherent fluctuations act like continuous perturbations in the form of noise on the collective behavior of the system. Within ranges of the control parameter, the system maintains its preferred behavioral pattern despite the noise” (p. 63). However, when the internal and/or external perturbations sufficiently shake the system’s ability to operate satisfyingly out of old order parameters, it can come to a critical or bifurcation point where transformation to new attractor states becomes possible.
So the impetus to seek help is often some crisis, or a long line of noisy perturbations, such as a spouse or friends confronting the client, saying certain behaviors are enough to threaten the relationship; bosses saying addictions are getting out of hand; unhappiness growing through an inability to get beyond predictable, unsatisfying interactions; longings for more meaning than what is being met through work or possessions; children being born or leaving the home; one’s once-solid pension being reduced or a decent-paying job being outsourced; a new relationship evoking an internal conflict between longing for nurture versus need for self-reliance; and so forth (Johanson, 2009a).
Conclusion: Hakomi Principles Engaging Nonlinear Processes of Transformation
It is crucial for therapists to maintain the distinction between self-healing holons, that is, nonlinear living systems, and mechanical systems. For instance, we always remain “involved participants” as opposed to “alienated observers” (Berman, 1989, p. 277). We seek to avoid harmful reductionisms (LeShan & Margenau, 1982; Seybold, 2007).
Hakomi principles help engage clients as CASs in appropriate ways. Organicity and nonviolence help create the conditions for psychological transformation, namely organizing into a client’s system something like support, intimacy, or freedom to act that has been, to a significant degree, organized out (Johanson, 2015). This reorganization is a matter of experience and not just insight—though insight accompanies the incorporation of a “missing experience” (Chapter 20). The unity principle and negentropy suggest that there is an impulse to heal or move toward wholeness and increased relational complexity that is always consciously or unconsciously present. However, when the system does not feel safe, when it perceives on some level that it is under attack, it automatically reverts to protective attractor states that put enough noise in the system to mask signals for growth and distract the cooperation of the unconscious.
When fluctuations and perturbations strain the adequacy of normal order parameters or core beliefs, and lead clients to seek therapy, mindfulness functions in many ways to relate to the complex, nonlinear situation. Simply inviting mindfulness of present felt experience places a client’s consciousness in an open, exploratory, experiential mode that accesses a different level of information than ordinary, conversational consciousness (Schanzer, 1990) in an objective, empirical, scientific manner (Marcel, 2003). Mindfulness and organicity together move both therapist and client to maintain a collaborative and radically nondirective experimental openness to the often mysterious, spontaneous signs (felt sense, sensations, tensions, images, gestures, movements, memories, impulses, and so forth) that reveal the cooperation of the unconscious disposing the way toward desired healing. Unhelpful ego investments in particular results are minimized (Johanson & Kurtz, 1991; Ryan & Brown, 2003). Nonviolence respects, supports, and/or takes over resistance or defenses when they arise, taking further noise out of the system and allowing awareness to go to deeper levels.
When the indicators of missing (organized out) experiences appear, these too can be introduced in mindful, experimental ways that pay exquisite attention to how the system organizes around these new possible attractor states. The curious, experimental aspects of mindfulness are especially maintained when organic barriers to new experiences appear. Respecting the organic wisdom of these barriers is what leads to the possibility, at crucial bifurcation points, of receiving new experiences leading to new order parameters or attractor states.
While mindfulness enables the healing of a fragmented ego, it also encourages a new way of being or self-state that rests in what witnesses our experiences, as opposed to being identified with or caught up in them (Eisman, 2006; Marlock & Weiss, 2001), thus bridging Hakomi therapy into transcendent levels of the system (Coffey, 2008; Graves, 2008). “When no longer ego-involved, a more fundamental ‘I’ that is grounded in awareness has room to emerge and guide experience and behavior” (Deikman, 1996, in Brown et al., 2007, p. 227).
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With special thanks to Sid Kemp.
CHAPTER 6
Assisted Self-Study: Unfolding the Organization of Experience
T. Flint Sparks
The goal of this new therapy is to contact and understand the events which create and maintain the flow of experience itself.
RON KURTZ, Body Centered Psychotherapy, 1991
To study the Buddha Way is to study the self.
To study the self is to forget the self.
To forget the self is to be actualized by the myriad things.
EIHEI DOGEN, Treasury of the Eye of the True Dharma, 1223–1227
THE ESSENCE OF the Hakomi method is assisted self-study done in a state of mindfulness. The method specifica
lly assists the client in discovering and opening to unconscious beliefs and organizing principles that are expressed in habitual patterns of thought, feelings, sensations, somatic habits, and behaviors. Once made conscious, early decisions can be changed, long-held emotions can be released, somatic patterns can shift, and new forms of nourishment can be taken in. The method can help us see more clearly how we continually construct both our ongoing experience and our sense of a solid, individual self.
The Hakomi method is not simply a new way to use a special state of consciousness (mindfulness) in order to uncover the psychological structures or realities of the individual— although this is one of its unique features. Germer, Siegel, and Fulton (2005) reviewed these more traditional clinical applications, but at that time did not yet understand the critical and important difference in the Hakomi method. This method helps clients see how they actually construct their realities by the ways in which they organize their experience. By adopting an experimental attitude, the client and therapist collaborate in the unfolding investigation of experience. In the process of this assisted form of mindfulness-based self-study, the client can become more conscious of what is automatic and habitual. Through the nonviolent evocation of experience employed in the Hakomi method, clients have the possibility of cultivating a witness to the organization of experience and, therefore, have a better chance of waking up from the trance of conditioning.
The unique possibility inherent in the Hakomi method is the ability it offers the client to work at two fully embodied levels—psychological and spiritual. The use of mindfulness allows us to gently open to and investigate the complex tapestry of conditioning carried in our bodymind. We begin to see how this moves in and through us, how it all gains a feeling of solidity and reality, and, finally, how it directs the ways in which we navigate the world we have unconsciously constructed, rather than the world we actually live in. Seeing all of this and becoming intimate with the habits of consciousness can be quite liberating. At the same time, we can also begin to witness the ground in which all of this arises. Traditional psychotherapeutic methods tend to emphasize the careful uncovering of the contents of consciousness and its expression in behavior and relationships. The Hakomi method offers the additional possibility of opening to the spaciousness of awareness itself, through the cultivation of mindful attention. The loosening of identification that arises with this awareness offers the opportunity to begin to see through the apparent solidity of the self and gain additional freedom and peace.
Wes Nisker, in reflecting on his more traditional experience of psychotherapy, puts it this way: “While psychotherapy had shown me how to see the origins of my personality, I had been given no clue how to see through it. I had been taught how to gain some freedom for myself, but never how to gain freedom from myself” (1998, p. 2). The ability “to contact and understand the events which create and maintain the flow of experience itself” (Kurtz, 1990a, p. 10) can be seen as a kind of scientific approach to understanding reality. By adopting an experimental attitude and investigating small bits of experience evoked in mindfulness, one can gain enormous insight into the structure of the self and the causes of personal suffering. There is great potential for freedom at this level. In addition, the Hakomi method can be thought of as a form of assisted meditation, in which mindfulness is utilized to witness both the contents of awareness and the actual spaciousness of awareness itself. Thirteenth-century Zen master Eihei Dogen invites us not only “to study the self” but suggests that in this form of study we are able to “forget the self,” or to see through and beyond the apparent solidity of ongoing experience. Kidder Smith, in commenting on the Buddhist approach to psychology taught by the late Chogyam Trungpa, says:
Both psychology and meditation have a particular way of working with mind. Skillfully practiced, psychotherapy releases the elaborate disguises we have put upon our thoughts and feelings, revealing ancient gripes that seize them as their proxies. As these patterns come into sunlight, they become transparent—we can see through them, and treat them thus with a slightly distant courtesy.
Meditation introduces us to deeper and deeper registers of mind. At first, it may be sufficient just to see we have a mind, that we are a mind. But gradually, and in a moment’s flash, we realize that we are not exactly the thoughts and feelings that constantly occupy us, that had seemed to define us. There is space around them; better, we are this space, and thoughts and feelings occur here as our guests. Actually, though, that space is wisdom itself, and our thoughts and feelings its manifest intelligence. We can relax into this vibrant emptiness. That is the whole path, that relaxation, that falling into basic sanity. (2005, p. xv)
That “basic sanity” into which we can relax is actually the foundation on which all of the Hakomi principles rest (see Chapter 5) and is the core organizing principle of the Hakomi therapist’s attitude. It is the path to the relief of suffering.
Organization of Experience
All experience is organized (Stolorow et al., 1987) and yet most of the complex patterns of organization that form our experience are out of our everyday conscious awareness. The Hakomi method offers a way to study, in some detail, the ways in which we create and sustain suffering. Kurtz (2003) summarizes the Hakomi method’s basic approach to the organization of experience in the following sequence:
1. Experience is organized.
2. Experience is organized in habitual ways. The habits that organize experience, like all habits, operate outside of awareness. Some of these habits are beliefs. Some habits involve emotional memories.
3. Some beliefs (called core beliefs) influence the organization of nearly all experiences.
4. To work with core beliefs experientially, we must first make them conscious. The method we use to make core beliefs conscious is the method of evoked experience in mindfulness.
5. Core beliefs can be changed once they have been made conscious. New beliefs can be established and stabilized and old beliefs can loosen their influence.
This sequence is a clear map for the assisted form of mindfulness-based self-study inherent in the Hakomi method. A number of contemporary constructivist therapies lend support to this approach (Hoyt, 1998; Mahoney, 2003), although their techniques are often quite different (for example, narrative). A few of them do work in special states of consciousness, but these are almost all forms of hypnosis, especially Ericksonian approaches. Many of the somatic therapies work from the same fundamental series of assumptions and do include the use of mindfulness. A detailed overview of the organization of experience with specific emphasis on somatic therapies is available in a more extensive essay by Greg Johanson (2015). Nauriyal, Drummond, and Lal (2006) have published an excellent collection of articles by leaders in the fields of Buddhist-informed social sciences, psychotherapy, and studies in human consciousness. This volume, Buddhist Thought and Applied Psychological Research, posits mindfulness at the center of their reviews of consciousness studies and psychotherapy. Unno’s (2006) edited volume Buddhism and Psychotherapy offers a cross-cultural perspective on these issues. The essence of all of these approaches and research is to help the individual apprehend, directly and experientially, the constructed nature of the self.
The Hakomi method, in effect, offers us a way to become creative and curious scientists, using ourselves as the subject. It is completely experiential. It is as if there are implicit rules that govern experience, which the individual may be entirely unaware of, but which can be discovered and brought to light. Bringing these rules into consciousness, investigating the habit patterns that the rules generate, and naming the core beliefs that undergird the entire structure begins to loosen the grip of this inner habit pattern. By investigating what is automatic and habitual in our body and mind, we open a window onto these rules and habits. Once made conscious, we have an increased capacity to change what we wish to change, let go what is unwanted, and take in what is needed.
Mindfulness
If we were curious and willing t
o follow the sequence of investigative patterns set out in the Hakomi method, it would seem to be beneficial to cultivate the ability to stay with present experience and notice what is actually happening in the present moment. This is the function of mindfulness. There are many definitions and characteristics of mindfulness, but they all point to a quality of nonjudgmental observation. Mindfulness is not “thinking about” something. It is not analytical, nor is it a form of concentration. In many ways, it is the open space in which awareness arises, and it has a purely reflective quality. In fact, the Venerable Henepola Gunaratana, an esteemed Sri Lankan vipassana teacher, says, “Mindfulness is mirror-thought. It reflects only what is presently happening and in exactly the way it is happening. There are no biases” (1991, p. 151).
Interestingly, in his recommendations to his trainee analysts, Freud (1912) suggested that they attend to their patients with “an evenly hovering attention,” a state of mind with “a minimum of constraints and preconceptions . . . [which] encourages the optimal emergence of the patient’s characteristic patterns of seeing and relating to him or herself and others as well as the analyst’s capacity for creative listening” (Rubin, 1996, pp. 24–25). This description sounds a lot like the recommendation to utilize mindfulness as a key attitude in listening to the patient who, in turn, might be invited to utilize the same state of mind to begin noting “characteristic patterns” that we would describe as habits or automatic patterns of behavior.
In the Hakomi method, we begin by using mindfulness in rather small doses, usually less than a minute, as we evoke experiences for self-study. However, even in these relatively brief moments of mindful awareness, a radical shift is taking place. The client gains the opportunity to study, maybe for the first time, rather small bits of automatic and habitual experience with curiosity and openness. This is very different from talking about experience, or analyzing experience in an attempt to figure something out. These moments of mindful investigation can be illuminative and transformative in many ways and can set the stage for the development of this increased capacity for studying present experience.