Hakomi Mindfulness-Centered Somatic Psychotherapy

by Halko Weiss

  For example, we do not need to question if our mental association between “lion” and “predator” is accurate when we are at risk of becoming the lion’s lunch. Luckily, the cue “lion” signals the body to run well before the intention to flee registers consciously. Yet when skin color or gender cue behaviors that conform to stereotypic expectations, our associations may be faulty and harmful. Likewise, when individuals chronically respond to neutral—even nourishing—experiences in a defensive and constricted manner, we know that past events are unconsciously influencing the person’s automatic appraisal and response system. Moreover, once a correlation is formed, the unconscious system tends to see it where it does not exist, thereby becoming more convinced that the correlation is true (Wilson, 2002).

  Clinicians will immediately recognize the relevance of this to clinical practice. Clients often get stuck in limiting and faulty mind-sets that persist despite evidence to the contrary. As Lewis and colleagues explain, “Behind the familiar bright, analytic engine of consciousness is a shadow of silent strength, spinning dazzlingly complicated life into automatic actions, convictions without intellect, and hunches whose reasons follow later or not at all” (2000, p. 112). However, recalcitrant attitudes and beliefs can change, particularly when implicit memories and limiting core beliefs are consciously accessed. For example, the work of Nadel (1994) indicates that when a memory trace is activated, it can be changed before it is recoded (cited in Morgan, 2006; Siegel, 1999). This is good news for therapists who work with core material, for it suggests that once a limiting belief is made conscious, it can be modified. The obvious question is how. Germer believes that mindfulness will eventually be regarded as “the technology of access” (2005, p. 21).

  Hakomi has always used mindfulness as an “accessing tool.” Much of the method involves conducting experiments in mindfulness to make unconscious organizing habits, or implicit processes, conscious (Kurtz, 2002b). Specifically, clients are instructed to turn their awareness inside to study their immediate experience. Attending to body sensations and working directly with present, felt experience increases activity in the right posterior region of the brain. This is where implicit memories or “core organizers” are stored (Myllerup, 2004). Thus, a big part of the Hakomi therapist’s job is to “manage consciousness,” that is, to stabilize mindfulness. In so doing, multiple regions of the client’s brain light up, creating the optimal conditions for accessing and modifying emotional memories and the meanings assigned to these events.

  Complex Adaptive Systems

  Researchers at the Santa Fe Institute coined the term complex adaptive systems (CAS) to describe systems that maintain an internal coherence without an obvious conductor (Holland, 1995). For example, a city like New York retains its essential character, despite the introduction of hundreds of daily transplants. At the same time, the city accommodates this growth by developing an increasingly complex infrastructure.

  Likewise, human beings evolve to higher levels of complexity through the introduction of novel elements and by achieving a balance between stability and change (Kauffman, 1995; Morgan, 2006). Complex adaptive systems also learn through a process called aggregation. We acquire an increasingly large internal database against which novel experiences are matched. Differences are filtered out, so that we selectively attend to what is already familiar (Holland, 1995; Lewis et al., 2000; Siegel, 1999). Thus, our experience is determined by external reality and by our uniquely personal way of converting information through the nervous system into feeling and meaning (Kurtz, 1985).

  According to Olendzki, “Ours is a universe of macroconstruction in which the continually arising data of the senses and of miscellaneous internal processing are channeled into structures and organized into schemas that support an entirely synthetic sphere of meaning—a virtual reality” (2005, p. 244). These schemas (called core beliefs in Hakomi) color our perceptions and explain why people respond differently to the same event. For example, one guest has a marvelous time at a party and finds everyone friendly. Another has a miserable time and feels isolated all evening. Such reactions say more about the partygoers than the party. Each has a radically different way of organizing her experience. The former organizes her experience into a virtual heaven, the latter, into a virtual hell. The core beliefs, or implicit realities, that filter out positive experiences are of great interest to Hakomi therapists. Such beliefs are maintained by unconscious habits of perception that are efficient, but distorted (Olendzki, 2005). And “because human beings remember with neurons, we are disposed to see more of what we have already seen, hear anew what we have heard most often, think just what we have always thought” (Lewis et al., 2000, p. 141).

  Fortunately, adaptive systems are also self-correcting. A small input can produce a major, predictable change in how information is processed (Holland, 1995; Kauffman, 1995). Capitalizing on this amplifier effect, Hakomi therapists help clients “update their files” by pointing out small distinctions between experience and reality. First, we conduct experiments to make implicit organizing habits explicit. These experiments demonstrate how experience is being organized here and now. Our primary goal is to promote a flexible way of experiencing that is also more accurate and fulfilling.

  Trusting Organicity

  To study the organization of experience, we must plumb the deeper psychic strata. This makes therapy both more alive and less predictable than working solely at the cognitive level. Consequently, Hakomi practitioners must cultivate a modicum of comfort with uncertainty, since

  just creating a situation that has the potential to evoke previously repressed memories, thoughts, feelings, and desires is an opportunity of immeasurable consequence, both good and bad. No amount of training and research, of statistics gathering and empathy, can offset the unique uncertainty of the encounter. (Phillips, 2006)

  While this can be discomfiting at times, our humanistic bias is that “the unconscious is naturally oriented towards growth and wellness rather than regression and pathology” (Felder & Weiss, 1991, p. 2). Consequently, “spontaneous expressions of the unconscious, even in their most primitive form, are not disregarded but are sought out and invited into conscious awareness. They are understood as efforts towards health rather than indicators of pathology” (p. 2).

  Many psychotherapists have come to regard pain, fear, and other uncomfortable feelings as normal rather than pathological. In fact, the new “acceptance therapies” recognize what the Buddhists have known all along, namely, that resisting experience tends to exacerbate symptoms, and “suffering is in the reaction not inherent in the raw experience itself” (Fulton & Siegel, 2005, p. 36). This may be why Seligman (1998) urges clinicians to help clients build “buffering strengths,” such as perspective taking, optimism, and hope. He contends that “by working in the medical model and looking solely for the salves to heal the wounds, we have misplaced much of our science and much of our training” (p. 2).

  Healing

  Hakomi practitioners view healing as integration rather than as repair. Accordingly, we don’t “fix problems,” or break things into parts in search of a “root cause.” This medical approach, with its Cartesian underpinnings, violates the mind-body-spirit holism upon which the Hakomi method rests. Instead, we make the inner life transparent so that corrective action can occur organically. “There is a strong underlying faith in the unity and organicity of the person’s system that it is self-directing and self-correcting when all the parts are communicating within the whole” (Johanson, 1988, p. 31).

  Hakomi therapists support spontaneous behavior because self-organization and the emergence of new, more complex levels of order are features of all living systems (Williams, 1997). This means the therapist must suspend the need to know and allow whatever psychic forces are emerging from within the client to reorganize limiting beliefs without the therapist’s interference.

  Because the unconscious is naturally oriented towards growth . . . the therapist’s role in the psychotherapy is t
o be a participant, a catalyst, a midwife in a naturally occurring birthing process of unactuated potential; a process directed by the patient’s subjective, unconscious experience rather than by the therapist’s objective, conscious perspective. (Felder & Weiss, 1991, p. 8)

  In practice, Hakomi therapists engage in a dialectic between doing and being. We actively manage consciousness, by turning the client inward, especially when interpretation and storytelling interrupt mindful self-study. Yet we practice noninterference once the client’s unconscious is “online.” We actively suggest experiments to try, but willingly change course to honor the emergent properties of the unconscious.

  Emergence

  A good traveler has no fixed plans

  and is not intent upon arriving.

  A good artist lets his intuition

  lead him wherever it wants.

  A good scientist has freed himself of concepts

  and keeps his mind open to what is . . . .

  He is ready to use all situations

  and doesn’t waste anything.

  LAO-TZU, Tao Te Ching

  In science, chance events can yield exciting discoveries. For example, penicillin, aspirin, and Velcro were all the result of experimental “mishaps” (Gold, 2004). Likewise, in therapy, we may head in one direction only to find the unconscious takes us in another. When room is made for the unexpected, it garners trust in the mysterious ways that the psyche mends and transforms itself.

  Case Example

  I was about to use a probe—a classic Hakomi experiment in which a positive, potentially nourishing statement is said aloud while the client is mindful. During the setup, the client opened her eyes and said, “I just need to know—will you always say something positive, because I notice I’m already bracing to hear something really bad.” The seasoned practitioner recognizes this question as laden with core material, since “bracing for something bad” most surely has powerful, historical antecedents.

  Instead of continuing with the probe, the bracing now becomes the object of exploration. Once the client experiences “bracing for the worst” as a habitual life stance, it opens the door for the neural rewiring made possible when a new experience (for example, relaxing without incurring negative consequences) is filed alongside a historical one.

  After taking time to explore the felt experience and meaning of the bracing, we created the probe: “It’s not your fault.” Upon hearing the statement, the client reported, “I have a dismal, sinking feeling in my chest related to the arbitrariness of life. . . . Nothing is in my control.” With that, her face reddened and she quickly went into the “rapids”—Kurtz’s metaphoric description of the emotional intensity that makes witnessing one’s own experience impossible. Under such conditions, data collection is suspended and the therapist supports emotional expression, or its management, until mindfulness returns.

  In a younger voice, she continued, “If it’s not my fault, then I can’t make it better.” This realization triggered another rush of tears. Kurtz says, “a good experiment, done well, results in the client’s awareness of a core belief or memory” (2002a, p. 13). In this case, the experiment revealed a belief, “bad things happen because I’m bad,” accompanied by a compensatory strategy to be “really good.” The probe, “It’s not your fault,” is thus automatically resisted because it makes null and void the client’s first line of defense. While initially frightening and unpalatable, it also allows for an uncoupling of black-and-white thinking (“bad things happen so I must be bad”) from the magical thinking that maintains the strategy (“If I’m really good, I can make good things happen”).

  Processing in child consciousness is how Hakomi therapists repair narcissistic injuries of this sort. The therapist helps the woman of today inform the child of the past that, even though bad things happen, she isn’t bad. Likewise, the inner child can stop looking for the badness inside her because it was never there to begin with. When this information is experienced as a visceral reality and encoded in mindfulness, new meanings become associated with early emotional events and a more accurate and self-affirming belief takes root in consciousness.

  Curiosity

  The experimental attitude requires an abiding curiosity in the client’s inner world. Both therapist and client must be equally engaged in the process for healing to happen. This means the therapist must regard even exasperating behaviors as indicative of core processes and, therefore, worthy of study. What sustains the therapist’s curiosity is the understanding that client and therapist are cohorts on the human journey (the unity principle). It is not enough to simply observe and follow the process; the therapist must actively support the experience that wants to happen, or “take charge,” in Hakomi parlance. This allows whichever growth processes were interrupted to move forward again.

  To sustain the client’s curiosity, the therapist must help the client shift out of the “doing” mode of daily life and into the “being” mode of mindful self-study. She must also honor the client’s pace by acknowledging signs of resistance and accepting the client’s need to defend as willingly as his need to progress. Finally, the therapist must help the client maintain a level of arousal that’s optimal for inner exploration. For example, too little arousal leads to disengagement, whereas too much incites the threat response, resulting in constricted awareness, vigilance of one’s surroundings, and loss of curiosity (Johanson, 1988; Ogden & Minton, 2000; Siegel, 1999; Van der Hart, Nijenhuis & Steele, 2000).

  Validity and Reliability

  Experiments conducted in mindfulness are not subject to the rigorous controls academic researchers labor over. For example, we don’t concern ourselves with whether or not an experiment will measure what we hope to measure because the unconscious, like a gyroscope, pulls the observer toward whatever is in need of healing.

  Likewise, we have no qualms about the subjective nature of the self-report. We invite clients to author their own experience. We accept discrepancies, partial disclosures, and novel outcomes affably because the psychic landscape is both dynamic and emergent. And while we expect the client’s organizing habits to be pervasive and repeating, our reliability standards are equally permissive. We hope these habits will transform over the course of therapy, making the data time limited. To test this assumption, we might offer the same probe at the end of the session that was originally used to access core material. In such instances, we are checking to see if the client can take in nourishment that was initially refused, now that fresh experiences have been integrated.

  Conclusion

  Hakomi is an experiential psychotherapy designed to access and transform limiting beliefs. During a Hakomi session, the therapist makes guesses about the unconscious habits that organize the client’s experience in limiting and painful ways. Often experiments are conducted in mindfulness to evoke experience, since “gathering information directly from present experience is the most . . . reliable way of discovering how meanings are assigned to events” (Kurtz, 1985, p. 7).

  The experimental attitude is thus curiosity in action. It is sustained by staying open to outcome and trusting the client’s intrinsic ability to heal and grow. In this atmosphere of mutual exploration, unconscious habits are made conscious and corrective experiences that promote transformation are introduced and assimilated.

  CHAPTER 12

  Following and Leading

  Carol Ladas Gaskin and David Cole

  Nonviolence promotes a respect for the subtle almost imperceptible movements of mind, body, and spirit and gives rise to a yielding or softness which follows and nourishes these movements rather than correcting or conquering them.

  GREG JOHANSON AND RON KURTZ, Grace Unfolding, 1991

  Following

  IN HAKOMI, AN understanding of the principles of organicity and nonviolence allows us to follow the natural pathway of a client’s own movement toward self-healing. We believe and trust that there are deep inner signals, sent from a normally unconscious wisdom that wants to move the system to
ward increased complexity and wholeness. These signals function in the service of the system being self-organizing, self-directing, and self-correcting (see Chapter 5). Thus, Hakomi therapists trust that, at the deepest levels, clients are the world’s experts on their own experience.

  However, at the surface level where people are talking in ordinary consciousness, habitually organized by unexamined core organizers in implicit memory, we do not trust that they are the world’s expert on what healing is possible (Eisman, 2006). We begin our work by creating those conditions that will allow the person access to her deep structures and the quality of consciousness that will enable her to listen deeply to the wisdom of her own experience, and follow where it might lead her (Weiss, 2008). Empowering the client to follow her own organic unfolding, and gaining the cooperation of her unconscious, is prerequisite to the therapist following the process on the deepest levels.

  Since safety, nonviolence, and acceptance are necessary for the client to be able to switch into an exploratory, mindful state of consciousness, we begin by internally contacting our own appreciation for the client, regardless of how the session might go. We notice some way that the client delights and inspires us. In that state of loving presence, and what Kurtz called non-egocentric nourishment, we can rest and be nourished as we pay attention to following the client’s inner state with gentle, empathetic awareness. We can calmly and compassionately follow his nonverbal signals that assist us in intuiting core material. We are following by staying with both the client’s and our own present-moment experience. By doing so, we model what we want to encourage in the client.