Hakomi Mindfulness-Centered Somatic Psychotherapy

by Halko Weiss

  If one can struggle in a way that is satisfying on a bodily level, there is a welcome sense of release of tension, as in doing a satisfying stretch. The resultant reduction of stress feels good in itself on a physical level, so no harm has been done, and it often allows the spaciousness for internal emotional signals to arise that want attention.

  Ben in Relation to Ed

  Ben showed up for a vets’ group feeling stressed and wound up, still dealing with his issues of deployment reentry as they affected his wife and four-year-old son.

  C: I find myself mad at the kid, nervous about what he is doing, and ordering him around like a recruit. I hate it, but I keep doing it over and over again!

  T: So it seems that you are wound pretty tight. How about we use the group to do a little creative struggling, and see where that leads us? [Here the therapist tracks the tension in Ben that interferes with mindfulness practice, and takes charge by suggesting the group exercise. It is nonviolent in the sense that the therapist is helping Ben go where he wants to go at the deepest levels, and it sends a signal of support that he is not totally on his own in his search for healing.]

  C: Yeah, getting physical is good. [Ben has already had a taste of the physical satisfaction that this exercise can bring, and knows it is true that he is tense in a way that would make mindful exploration more difficult.]

  T: Okay, so let’s all stand up. You know the drill. Your buddies here can provide resistance for you in any way that feels right, that feels good. Notice if your body gives you any hunch about how we might start . . . or we can always just do something, and then check to see if it is right, or needs adjusting.

  There is no standard protocol for how one should struggle. It is highly unique to each individual. By asking Ben to access what is pleasurable, even though it might involve great effort, the process touches bodily cellular information that is organizing the system and knows what it needs to deal with (Damasio, 1999).

  Some participants want to struggle against a force in front of them, or behind them. Some want force coming down vertically on their shoulders that they can struggle up against. For some, it is being pulled in two different directions at once. And others want to move forward with resistance on their legs. It is all quite organic and unpredictable. So the group members who have been trained in this technique stand around and wait for Ben, who also knows the exercise from previous sessions, to give precise instructions.

  C: It feels like I want to struggle against something in front of me.

  T: Okay. So here is Ted providing resistance to both your right and left shoulders with his arms. Check that out and see if it is right or not.

  C: It is close, but I think it would be better with his hands more in the middle of the chest. [It is a good sign that Ben is mindfully involved in the process and listening to the wisdom of his body to be able to fine-tune this adjustment, even though nobody knows what it might mean.]

  T: Okay, let Ted do that. [Ted puts his hands more in the middle of Ben’s chest, and then Ben moves them with his own hands to be more directly over his heart.]

  T: So that is closer to what is needed, huh? Experiment with struggling against the hands now and notice if it feels resonant, or if something else is needed. [The therapist ensures the process is open ended and allows for the emerging wisdom of Ben’s system, as opposed to making the exercise into some kind of predictable rote manipulations.]

  C: There is something about the arms that needs something.

  T: Oh. Would it be more like we could help you hold back from hitting, or hold back from reaching out . . . or . . . ? [Here the therapist introduces an open-ended list of possible moves that function to access Ben’s right brain, since he has to check each possibility with his own experience to make a choice or come up with another alternative. Offering some concrete choices is often helpful as opposed to a more open inquiry like, “What do the arms need?”]

  C: It is more reaching out.

  T: Okay. You are a strong guy, so why don’t we get two guys on each arm, and you direct them how it feels best to give you resistance. [Two guys on each arm provides the safety and security for Ben to explore without having to worry about becoming uncontained or hurting someone.]

  C: Yeah, it is like I want to reach out, but am holding myself back, so maybe they can do the holding back as I try to move them forward.

  T: Sure, let’s do that. You adjust their holds so that it feels best, and let yourself move against the resistance when it feels right. [It is all a matter of listening to the wisdom of the body’s large muscles in terms of what would feel pleasurable to them. The tensions they normally carry are cortically controlled and thus ultimately carry a sense of meaning.]

  C: Oh, yes, this is good. Let me do this some more. [Ben struggles in a satisfying way. Four more vets are involved to provide resistance around both legs to help him feel more safe, more contained, and he finally quits struggling with some satisfying deep breaths, and shows some signs of collapse.]

  T: Now it looks like your body wants to go the other way and lean against these guys. Is that okay to do that?

  C: Yeah, that’s good. Wow. Much more relaxed.

  T: So, don’t force anything, but just check to see what might be coming into your awareness.

  C: It is a vision of my son . . . watching him in a park or something . . . and wanting to go and hug him . . . but holding back . . . struggling against reaching out.

  T: [On a hunch.] So as you are hanging out there with that image, would it be okay if Ted put a hand back on your heart where you had it before? [While Hakomi therapists are trained to follow organic impulses within the client, it is okay for them to introduce their own intuitions as well, as long as they are willing to be unattached and deal with what actually arises.]

  C: Yeah, that would be good. [Ted puts his hand back on Ben’s heart, who adjusts it slightly, while two other vets are supporting Ben from both sides. Therapist and group stand with Ben in silent support and allow his unconscious to lead him where he needs to go. Emotion wells up in Ben’s face all of a sudden and he covers his face with both hands. The two vets on each side provide increased support by putting their hands over his.]

  C: He could die! The bastard could die! [The other vets nod their heads in the common knowledge that one they love today could be killed in the next moment or next day, and sometimes they just have to steel themselves against caring too much.]

  T: Oh, so letting your heart go out to the little guy fully could leave you open to catastrophic heart-wrenching grief, huh?

  C: I don’t know if I could bear it. I’d die or go crazy. . . . But I don’t want to live numb and cheat him out of a father. . . .

  The rest of the session dealt with Ben’s, and everyone else’s in the group, profound and natural ambivalence about being vulnerable to love. The path to this core issue in Ben was facilitated by the body wisdom embedded in the creative struggling exercise that lowered his stress and tension enough to allow his issue to arise into consciousness.

  One of the profound advantages of group work here is that Ben now has a built-in support group of brothers and sisters who know, understand, and support him in his life pilgrimage.

  APPENDIX 3

  Hakomi in Context: The Large Picture in History and Research

  Historical Context

  Halko Weiss and Greg Johanson

  HAKOMI THERAPY IS a principled and unique approach to human healing and growth that integrates, among other things, mindfulness, the mind-body interface, and nonviolence. It is a paradoxically powerful approach, applicable to both brief and long-term therapy, which participates in the ingenious Eastern principle of nondoing as it applies to trusting the unfolding of living organic systems toward health and healing. It is taught internationally through the faculty of the Hakomi Institute and the Hakomi Educational Network. Since the inception of the Hakomi Institute in 1980, thousands of students have been trained in workshops and comprehensive training courses by a faculty of
some 50 worldwide certified trainers and teachers.

  The basic Hakomi texts by Kurtz (1990a), Johanson and Kurtz (1991), Fisher (2002), Kurtz and Prestera (1976), and Benz and Weiss (1989) all reflect the clinical wisdom and approach of the Hakomi method—which integrates many sources as well as adding its own unique contributions. However, these volumes do not enter into extensive dialogue with the wider psychotherapeutic tradition. Thus, the current volume is an edited work of international Hakomi faculty members that maps and references the Hakomi approach into the contemporary world of psychology and science. It represents a coherent source of knowledge of how and what is currently taught through the Hakomi Institute.

  Practitioners who participate in Hakomi training report there is a unique feel, style, and substance to it that fosters both personal and professional growth in an accepting and creative crucible of learning. However, it is not easy to articulate this uniqueness as it integrates the art and science, the spontaneous and linear aspects of therapeutic processes, weaving in a number of elements held in common with other schools. Perhaps a brief overview of the history of Hakomi can provide some contextual understanding. Though the field of psychology tends to be ahistorical, it is clear that the Hakomi method is a child of its time, arising from a multiplicity of dispositions in its day, which in turn was an emergent product of all that had gone before it (Barratt, 2010; Heller, 2012; Young, 2010).

  The World of Psychotherapy

  In the 1970s, when eventual Hakomi students and trainers were attracted to Ron Kurtz doing workshops following the publication of his book The Body Reveals (with Prestera, 1976), the field of academic and traditional psychological counseling was a mixed bag of promise and disenchantment.

  For all the early promise of psychology from the beginning of the 20th century on, the field was no longer looked to by many for answers to humanity’s pressing problems of war, violence, economic and cultural disparity, overpopulation, global warming, and such. Mental health specialists were largely on the sidelines during the 1960s in relation to cultural-social issues, outside of advocating for better or more humane treatment of the mentally ill. People intuitively gravitated to novelists more than psychologists to learn what it means to be human (LeShan, 1990).

  Much of psychology seemed immersed in an unsuitable endeavor to mimic the physical sciences through attempting to reduce human interactions to quantifiable mechanical interactions that shed little light on actual clinical predicaments (LeShan & Margenau, 1982). In terms of prediction, for instance, LeShan asks, who could pretend to know what Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony would be like, even with infinite knowledge of its eight forerunners?

  Human beings are non-predictable in principle. Only papier-mache characters can be predicted. We can make 100 percent accurate predictions that Tom Swift, Tarzan, and James Bond will emerge triumphant from their next adventure, not so for Captain Cook, Al Capone, or Albert Einstein. (1990, p. 56)

  To say someone has a one-in-six chance of committing suicide in the next six months is not particularly helpful, since either committing the act or not committing it supports the same prediction (LeShan, 1990). Likewise, statistical analysis of large groups did not shed much light on the individual seeking consultation whose consciousness was not average, quantifiable, or repeatable. And objective situations alone (the stimulus) can rarely predict individual behavior (the response) because the situation is always dependent on one’s subjective appropriation of it—which anthropologists teach is highly affected by our cultural-social context.

  Human nature differs to a very considerable extent from place to place and time to time. A Hopi sheepherder, a knight of the First Crusade, a 1980 Wall Street broker, and laboratory psychologist live in different worlds with different definitions of space, time, and honor, different life goals, different views of love and the meaning of death. . . .

  [Certainly, ] we need different languages for different realms. . . . The “energies” in an electrical battery, a painting by Picasso, an angry crowd, and my hopes for the future are entirely different kinds of meanings and terms. The same word, used in different realms of experience, means something entirely different. (LeShan, 1990, pp. 60, 93)

  Though cutting-edge thought in the hard sciences maintained that complex living systems were nonlinear, research in this period (and still today, in most cases) continued to follow a linear paradigm (Thelen & Smith, 2002). Context was largely ignored. Both rats and humans were studied individually in ways that ignored the actual environment within which they lived, until ethnographic work began to make headway. Studies were done, with limited clinical value, that artificially separated out thinking, feeling, willing, and so on, which, in actual life, are all organized together (Siegel, 2009). Family therapy attempted to correct the lack of context in part, but risked jettisoning individual consciousness and agency in the process (Nichols & Schwartz, 1998).

  Multicultural, racial, and gender issues were largely ignored, as if one therapy could fit all (Augsburger, 1986). Virtually any spiritual or religious longing in clients was considered suspect within mainline psychology (LeShan, 1990). The human knowledge in thousands of years of wisdom traditions was spurned as premodern. In terms of contemporary knowledge being generated, Wulff (1991) notes that methodological impeccability could yield remarkable triviality and limited applicability. The question about how one quantifies being transformed by a walk in nature, a new relationship, a movie, a song, a lost job, the death of a family member, a military tour of duty, winning the lottery, and so forth was never solved.

  The overvaluing of a limited view of objectivity, what Wilber terms “flatland” science (Beutler, 2009; Wilber, 1995), warned, in turn, against the danger of subjective involvements. For instance, when Bowlby reported the result of his attachment research to the United Nations in 1950, specifically that the mother-infant relationship was extremely important and that early separations can hurt growing children, many professionals scorned and ridiculed him (Karen, 1998). There was such an overemphasis on objective materialism that the richness of subjective experience and the hermeneutics of cultural values were underplayed, resulting in an impoverished account of what it means to be human.

  Standard therapies such as Freudian, Jungian, behavioral, and humanistic wasted valuable time quarreling with each other, rather than learning from one another. The use of touch or the body in mainline therapies was inappropriately sexualized and nearly criminalized through a limited psychoanalytic bias (Peloquin, 1990; Zur, 2007) with no research to support such a position.

  However, the post– World War II era emphasis on self-realization and the strengthening of a consumer orientation led to new approaches like transactional analysis through popular books such as Erick Berne’s (1964) Games People Play. The human potential movement of the 1960s led to a great flowering of exotic psychotherapeutic approaches and experimentation. An openness developed among some to following wherever demonstrable healing seemed to be happening, especially in the experiential therapies such as Gestalt, body-centered approaches, energy psychology, Buddhist, Taoist, and Eastern approaches in general.

  Distressingly, however, outcome studies had difficulty showing psychotherapy was better than no treatment at all. Trauma issues, especially, were barely recognized and ineffectually treated (Herman, 1992; Rothschild, 2000; van der Kolk, 2003). The shift toward expressive therapies made famous at Esalen in a reaction against incessant and ineffectual talk therapies did not produce the hoped-for panacea of increased freedom and function.

  On the other hand, there were enough anecdotal stories of healing and growth through therapy that distressed people kept seeking help through various therapists, and therapists kept seeking more and deeper methods for providing that help. Factors nonspecific to any particular therapy (Frank, 1986), such as the therapeutic relationship itself, seemed helpful to a degree (Mahoney, 1991). A general spirit of excitement and experimentation was in the air. An increasing number of therapists tended toward an eclectic pragma
tism and recognized that help is only helpful when the person being helped acknowledges it as such (Gibb, 1978).

  The Larger World of the 1960s

  The situation within psychology, of course, developed within the greater cultural and social trends of the 1960s and after. Though many, or even the majority, of the World War II generation still identified with the older values of family, work, religion, and community, it was a time of cultural turmoil and change that went beyond the radical reactions of a few estranged youths—in a time when many societal leaders of yesteryear were dying.

  Conventional authorities and their wisdom had been shown to be wanting. In politics there was a credibility gap that followed misinformation about the Vietnam War; manifold instances of corruption; intractable wars in the Middle East, Africa, and Ireland; the hydrogen bomb tested in a policy of mutually assured destruction (Macy, 1983); the world population growing at uncontrollable and alarming rates; commandos hijacking airplanes; former colonies of European powers becoming independent; special interest lobbies frustrating legislation for the common good (Daly & Cobb, 1989; Harrington, 1962); exposing the hidden poor; and much more. These entrenched difficulties and the sometimes blatant assumption of American and Western moral, political, and economic superiority in the face of all these issues gave pause to many (Alterman, 2004).

  In addition to the unrest and the progress of the civil rights movement in America, women’s rights and the feminist movement sought to redefine conventional expectations of where women could participate and lead. In psychology, in particular, feminist self-in-relation theories challenged more male-oriented, grand-autonomous-self theories (Gilligan, 1982; Jordan et al., 1991; Keller, 1986).

  In the corporate-economic realm, similar doubts about credibility and efficiency arose (Halberstam, 1986). Corporations came under fire for hiding risk factors and not factoring in issues of sustainability and the effect of what they were doing on the environment. There was a general trend toward an increasing concentration of power in fewer multinational corporations. The question arose of whether the power of science was outstripping our moral ability to use it wisely. A massively litigious society and an economic royalism in America fostered an increasing split between rich and poor. Many worried about crass materialism, utilitarian individualism, and the denigration of indigenous societies (Thurow, 1998; Wallerstein, 1979).