Introduction
About the Method
Overview of the Method
Origins of the Method
Ron Kurtz, creator of Hakomi Method

Origins of the Method
by Ron Kurtz

Ron Kurtz is the creator of the Hakomi Method and the Founder of the Hakomi Institute. He currently resides in Ashland, Oregon. From here he continues to develop the Hakomi Method and innovates and inspires new programs. He travels and teaches Hakomi both nationally and internationally. Check out his web site at http://www.ronkurtz.com.

This article is a chapter from a forthcoming book tentatively titled Life's Essays in Somatic Psychology, edited by Christine Caldwell, to be published by Shambhala Publications. Other authors include Marjorie Rand, Pat Ogden, The Mindells, The Hendricks, Malcolm Brown, David Boadella, and Richard Strozzi Heckler.

In 1987, eight years after Hakomi began, I had a meeting with Swami Rama. He told me that I had a mission. Nervous and surprised, I was still together enough to ask him, "What mission is that?" He responded, "to create a new method of psychotherapy." When I think about Hakomi, I think about it in those terms. In what way is Hakomi a new method of psychotherapy? However, before I talk about that, I would like to give a little history.

My life as a psychotherapist began long before that meeting. It really started in graduate school, in the early sixties. I was a student of experimental psychology. After graduate school, I went to teach at San Francisco State. My first real excitement about therapy and groups came from an experience of a workshop at San Francisco State College led by Will Schutz. I became very excited about the things he did. One of my friends from graduate school, Stella Resnick, was also teaching nearby, at San Jose State. She had studied clinical psychology and was becoming a well-known Gestalt therapist. She encouraged me and we started co-leading sensitivity groups. I also took workshops. So, the way I got involved with psychotherapy was through groups and workshops. And the main techniques were from Gestalt therapy.

For two years, I both taught and led groups. Then I went to Albany, New York and started a private practice using mostly Gestalt. At the same time I began therapy for myself, first with Ron Robbins and later with John Pierrakos, both bioenergetic therapists. During those experiences, plus some workshops with John, I began to incorporate some Bioenergetics into my work. I had read Perls, I now studied Reich and Lowen. I was also inspired by the work of Albert Pesso. Those are the therapeutic roots of Hakomi.

There are two more tracks that influenced me. The first was eastern philosophy and practice. I had been practicing yoga since 1959. In graduate school I got interested in Taoism and Buddhism. Awareness practices became part of my life. Also, I became macrobiotic in 1972. Eastern thought was also the root of my interest in Feldenkrais' work. I took several workshops with Moshe and practiced the floor exercises.

The last track is my life-long interest in science. I was a math prodigy of sorts. I minored in physics in undergraduate school and worked as a technical writer in electronics for four years. My passion has been systems theory, the branch that studies living systems.

So, these threads: eastern philosophy, psychotherapeutic technique, and systems theory are the foundations of Hakomi. They are diverse and extensive and give much that nourishes and teaches.

The bioenergetic techniques I was using seemed, in my view, too forceful, at times even violent. In keeping with the eastern philosophies I'd studied, I wished to be non-violent. I began to look for other ways to access emotional material. I slowly found ways to incorporate mindfulness and other gentle interventions in my work. The first way I started to use mindfulness was this: I would have an idea about what the client couldn't believe or experience. Let's say the person had very low self worth. I would ask him to become mindful. (Sometimes I would teach him how to become mindful.) When he was in a mindful state, I would offer a statement that was just the opposite of his belief about his worth. For example, if the belief was "I have little worth", I would say something like: "You're a worthy person". (We call these statements probes.) I would set these statements up as little experiments. (My science background.) I'd say, "Let's see what happens when I say....", then I'd offer the statement. I was looking for reactions. A person in mindfulness has no trouble noticing his or her reactions.

I slowly started doing more and more of these little experiments in mindfulness and both the client and I would observe the reactions. Sometimes, if I was clever enough, the reaction would be quite intensely emotional, arrived at completely without force. The statements I offered were always positive. The reaction was the result of the person's not being able to accept this potential nourishment. If I could understand what the core issues were, I could help bring them into the client's consciousness through this use of mindfulness.

So, when I think about what's new about the Hakomi method, I think this is one of the main things:. Hakomi is the evocation of experience in mindfulness. It uses mindfulness in this precise way. This is not just another technique. It is a fundamental difference in method. We evoke experiences while the client is in a particular state of consciousness. The experiences evoked tell us what kind of models the client is holding about herself and her world. More important, the models are often immediately clear to the client. This method often releases emotions that would be very hard to release any other way. This happens because the client knows what's up. There are no tricks or manipulations here. The state of mindfulness is a deliberate choice on the part of the client to be vulnerable and sensitive. Clients drop their defenses when they become mindful. They choose to take what comes. If they feel painful emotions in this process, it is because they believe it is worth it to understand themselves and they are willing to bring this material into consciousness where it can be worked on. That is not violence. That is the courage to face what is. This method worked much more quickly than any I had used before.

I eventually de-emphasized Gestalt and Bioenergetics. I used mindfulness to evoke emotions, meaning, and memory. Along with this I started to process emotional reactions in a different way.

The second technique that makes Hakomi unique is our use of what we call taking over. When an emotional experience is evoked in someone, the habits that manage that experience are also evoked. (These management reactions are usually called defenses.) For example, sadness is often managed by covering the face, tightening the muscles of the diaphragm, chest, throat and eyes, hanging one's head and collapsing the posture. All these are automatic reactions. The person doesn't think about doing them. It's habit and it manages emotional experience. I do not oppose these management habits or in any way try to break them down. I do exactly the opposite. I support all management behavior. If a person tightens, let's say his shoulders or covers his face, I might use my hands to help him keep his shoulders together or cover his face. Of course I first ask permission. That's taking over.

It can also be done verbally. If I offer somebody a statement such as, "You're worthy," and her reaction is she hears a voice in her head say, "No! I'm not", I might take the voice over. I would ask the person to be mindful again and, perhaps with the help of another person, we would repeat a few times: me saying, "You're worthy" and the assistant saying the, "No I'm not." The "No I'm not" is also a management behavior. For the client, in her world that is, there's something wrong with feeling worthy. Perhaps it's too dangerous. It makes her a target for others. That's the model, the belief system. Or just the experience of feeling worthy elicits unworthy and some painful memories around that. So, we take over the voices or thoughts that manage this.

The usual result of taking over is this: the person relaxes their management. Sometimes they relax it a little bit, sometimes a lot. If you manage your sadness by tightening your shoulders and I begin to help you with that, the message is: you're not alone with your sadness. You have an ally. It may be the first time you've gotten that message about your sadness and that may be the most important part.

Also, you don't have to work as hard. You're being supported. You can let go a little. It's not that you have to; nobody is forcing you to let go. You've simply been offered the opportunity. Letting go is up to you. And you can do it at your own pace. You can allow the feelings you are managing to come forth and be expressed. This is another way that non-violence is incorporated into Hakomi.

When you are not opposed or made wrong, when you feel like somebody is on your side, you may be able to go a lot deeper into your experience, deeper into your feelings than you could if you were struggling against it all by yourself. Taking over sends messages like these: I can see that this is difficult for you; I'm willing to help you handle this experience; I'll follow your lead; I won't force anything; I'll support your need to control your own process. Taking over sends these messages through the actions themselves; not through words. As such it speaks directly to the unconscious. Of course the therapist has to be extremely sensitive to the client's reactions, must "get the permission of the unconscious" through following the client's non-verbal expressions - through following the body.

Typically, supporting management behaviors, leads to feelings of safety, relaxation of the management, deeper feelings and expression, deeper insight, and movement of the emotional process to its emotionally logical conclusion. It's paradoxical. A part of the person is trying to manage her experience, to hold it back or minimize it. The therapist offers support for that and the person goes deeper into her experience.

So these two general methods, using evoked experiences in mindfulness, and the non-violent taking over of the management of the experiences evoked, are the basic elements of the uniqueness of the Hakomi method.

From a systems point of view, we can think of mindfulness as lowering the noise. A sensitive system is a system that can detect or pick out a weak signs from a noisy environment. To increase that ability, you either raise the level of the external signal or lower the noise in the environment. Mindfulness is a way of lowering the noise. Eastern philosophy teaches us that when the mind has become silent (when you have lowered the noise of bodily tension, busy thoughts, and concerns of all kinds), then the signal (which is the beauty and reality of spirit) will simply emerge. That signal, like the stars which appear when the sun goes down, is always present, hidden by the noise we make.

In body-centered psychotherapies, where the signals being sought are insights into bodily experiences, unnecessary physical tension, struggle, effort, and even pain can be considered noise. Especially when the struggle is one part of yourself against another, when unresolved issues generate conflicting impulses and compete for attention and control, then the noise is great.

Mindfulness, which involves the relaxation of effort and a quieting of the mind, is a lowering of the noise. Being mindful means deliberately bringing yourself into a sensitive and vulnerable condition. That's how it works in psychotherapy. If you're busy lifting weights and listening to the radio, and I come in and say, "you're worthy", you're just going to say hello. You're not going to react much to my words. But if you're mindful, sensitive and quiet, if your mind is open and simply noticing, the same statement can evoke quite a deep experience. Using mindfulness is a way of lowering the noise.

Non-violence is a necessary part of this because in order for the client to become vulnerable, that is to become mindful, he or she has to feel safe. So, the first task of a Hakomi therapist is to make the other person feel safe. There are all kinds of ways to do that, but the most basic is to have an active, deep respect and compassion for all beings. Then the other truly is safe. All you have to do is convey your respect and compassion to the other person, which, since they are real and natural, will happen sooner or later in any case. If you are going to use mindfulness in therapy, non-violence and safety are absolutely essential. It doesn't work any other way.

When the noise is lowered, whatever signal is being masked will emerge. It appears, as out of a fog. When the client is in mindfulness and experiences are evoked, there is no confusion about the source. The client is clear that whatever emerges, is hers. She knows that the emotional response is her own and that it's based on her own beliefs and history. The therapist is not asking her to believe anything. They're not having a discussion about what might be going on. The two of them are doing little experiments in mindfulness together and they're discovering the results. She becomes vulnerable, she lowers the noise and the signals emerge. Using this method, we avoid interpreting or explaining a person to herself. She discovers who she is and how she's organizing for herself, at her own pace, within a safe setting and with a trusted guide. So, two of the main advantages of this method are that it supports personal responsibility (by showing clearly how experiences are organized by inner models and beliefs) and it avoids confusion (by studying and processing evoked experiences in the here and now, letting the person discover who she is rather than theorizing about that).

Here is one of the connections to Taoism and Feldenkrais work and the Gestalt notion of figure and ground: awareness itself lowers the noise. When you put your awareness on something, you automatically lower the noise. When you start to pay attention to something, that is when you make it the signal (or the figure), other things will automatically fade out - the noise will lower by itself. If you draw attention to movements in slow motion, as Feldenkrais does, you will start to notice things that you did not notice before. Bare attention gives time for signals to develop. The more time you take, the more information you get. In mindfulness, attention is concentrated. The pace is slower. One's usual concerns are set aside. The focus is on present experience, as it is in Taoism, Feldenkrais, Gestalt and other consciousness disciplines.

I built this therapy out of these components because they worked. It was mostly trial and error, not shaped by any grand plan. Like any stubborn fool, I had to find out for myself. I read. I got ideas. But I never accepted them without trying them out. When I tried mindfulness and non-violence, they worked. If I created safety, people could get mindful. When I did little experiments in mindfulness, something important would be evoked. It was easy. It worked. And I liked the fact that it was non-violent, full of compassion. That made me feel good. I wasn't thinking about the long run. I was using what worked and I really didn't see what was coming.

When I built Hakomi on the principles of non-violence and mindfulness, I gave the therapy a strong spiritual foundation. Working out of those principles which require respect, sensitivity, presence and compassion on the part of the therapists, leads very naturally to loving experiences and finally to spiritual experiences. You could say, the method is pointed in that direction. Hakomi has been called applied Buddhism. It had built into it, from the beginning, this spiritual direction. This only became clear slowly, as I developed the method and added techniques.

Here's how it happened. The work evolved both vertically and horizontally. (This is from ideas developed by Ken Wilbur, in his book Sex, Ecology, Spirituality.) Adding new techniques was a horizontal development. Techniques are more or less all on the same level. Adding new techniques is horizontal expansion. But, the introduction of mindfulness was different. It was more than just a new technique. It was a vertical jump. It influenced all the techniques. It gave the method an added depth. Using mindfulness, I could do things that I couldn't do before. Adding mindfulness gave the therapy greater power and shifted the way all techniques were used. In addition, it made non-violence essential and that in turn made the personal development of the therapist essential.

I used to think of psychotherapy as intrapsychic, that the client did all the work internally. The therapist suggested things, but was, basically not really involved as a person. That was the way I thought. I thought of myself as a technician. My image was the samurai, in the movie Seven Samurais, who was a master swordsman, but who did what he did without emotions, passion or personality. His goal was perfect precision. I thought of myself that same way, a precise technician, trying to be a master. It was no doubt inspired by a character flaw of mine, but I liked that image: precise, technical, without feelings or personal involvement. I took a secret pride in that.

Eventually though I saw that, the difficulties that emerged in therapy were the result of my personal limitations, my incomplete personhood. They weren't technical problems at all and it wasn't about mastery. It was about my ego, my puffed up attitude and my inability to understand people, because I didn't understand certain things in myself. It was about my ability to relate. Again the focus changed and the change was a vertical one. It was deeper than just technique. I came to a place where I focused for a few years on what I called healing relationship. For a healing relationship to happen, more than just safety was needed; what was needed was the cooperation of the unconscious. It required a relationship at the level of the unconscious, a deep, person-to-person connection - and that's a two way street. Not only did I learn that I needed the cooperation of the unconscious, I also learned that I had to be worthy of it. I needed to earn it.

The healing relationship involves two basic things. First, the therapist has to demonstrate that she's trustworthy, non-judgmental and compassionate. Second, she has to demonstrate that she is present, attentive and really understands what's going on for the person. If the therapist can consistently demonstrate those things to the person, she will earn the cooperation of the unconscious.

The unconscious is waiting for somebody who can do that. If the client has painful secrets, shame, confusion and emotional pain, the therapist will need extraordinary sensitivity, understanding and caring to become an ally of the unconscious. The unconscious has been managing this pain for a long time. It won't allow just anyone to become part of that process. The healing relationship is about gaining the trust and cooperation of the unconscious through compassion and understanding. If you can to that, therapy really happens. Building such a relationship doesn't have to take three months or three years. It can take as little as fifteen minutes. But creating it requires more than just technical skills.

The creation of a healing relationship in therapy requires that the therapist be a certain kind of person, a person who is naturally compassionate, able to be radically present, able to give full attention to another, able to see deeply into people and to understand what is seen. All of that takes a certain state of mind. We could call that state of mind non-egocentric. The therapist needed to be free of as many ego-centered habits as possible, when working with the client. Realizing that and teaching that was the next big vertical jump for Hakomi. This jump was beyond just the use of mindfulness and non-violence. It was about who the therapist was, the therapist's being. It was about the therapist's consciousness.

This next step in the vertical evolution of Hakomi involved the spiritual development of the therapist. It involved the development of personhood, an expansion of understanding and insight into levels of consciousness beyond the ordinary, rational and objective. To sustain this higher level of consciousness, one needs a base, a source of inspiration. One needs to find, recognize and cultivate a source of spiritual (or non-egocentric) nourishment. With a stable connection to that source, confidence, calm, understanding and compassion come naturally.

Outside of therapy, there are many, many sources of spiritual nourishment. But in the present moment of a therapy process, the source I use is the client. I search for and find the non-egocentric nourishment in some aspect of the client. This is very close to the Buddhist practice of searching for the seed of Buddha in every person. Or as Swami Premananda says, "The purpose of life is to see God in everyone and everything." When he was asked how this was done, he replied, "In the silence." The idea is to drop the "noise of self" and to see the other as spirit. With this as habit, with this as a base, therapy becomes a deeply heartfelt journey shared.

Working this way, compassion emerges spontaneously. With the mind quiet and attentive, understanding comes easily. The two qualities most important to the healing relationship, compassion and understanding, are the natural outcome of searching for non-egocentric nourishment from the therapist-client relationship. The development of that practice is a spiritual discipline and its fruition is personhood and full human beingness. It is this approach that makes psychotherapy a spiritual practice.

Some years ago, I read Michael Mahoney's book, Human Change Processes. In it he cited a few, twenty-year long studies which showed that "the 'person' of the therapist is at least eight times more influential than his or her theoretical orientation and/or use of specific therapeutic techniques." I took that very seriously. I realized I couldn't teach people technical methods. I had to define, recognize and teach "personhood". I had to help students develop their personhood, which seems to me, is mostly spiritual development. Up to a point it is personal growth and the usual emotional work that we all have to do. But beyond that, and especially when you wish to become helpful to other people, spiritual development is the natural and necessary next step. So I started to focus on the state of mind of the therapist. I developed methods to explore and support the spiritual development of the therapist. My trainings and workshops now include a lot of work and practice around that. That brings us up to date on the development of the Hakomi Method. The principles of mindfulness and non-violence were the beginning of the uniqueness of Hakomi and the last vertical jump was the focus on spiritual practice and the state of mind of the therapist.

Now, I want to talk about the place of the body in psychotherapy. Besides its focus on mindfulness, etc., Hakomi is definitely a body psychotherapy.

Several things come to mind when I think of the body in psychotherapy. The first is Reich's notion that the body is an expression of the psychological history of the person. The body reveals psychological information. Reich talked about taking a person's history. You don't need to ask about it; a person's psychological history is alive and present in everything he does and the style in which he does it. It's in how people use their bodies, how they move, where the tension is, what the posture is like, and the structure. So, you can look at the body for psychological information. In Hakomi we teach people how to do that. We learn about the person's history, their core models and beliefs, form all these things: posture, movement patterns, breathing patterns, gestures, body structure, facial expression, pace, tone of voice, and on and on. All of this gives us psychological information. For me, this understanding of the expressions of self through the body is one basic component of body psychotherapy.

Another aspect of body psychotherapy is it is experiential. In Hakomi, we focus on bodily experiences, like sensations, emotions, tensions and movements. This focus on experience, rather than abstract notions, leads to more grounded insights and understanding. We discover the roots of psychological organization and we find meaning by working with here and now experiences. The body is alive with meaning and memory. We focus on experience, not for its own sake, but to learn from them how we came to be who we are, and how we shall move on.

If I do an experiment in mindfulness and evoke an emotional experience, the meaning is grounded in bodily experience. The person may respond with something like, "Yeah my heart feels like it's in my throat. My stomach is tight. I'm a little nauseous and I feel afraid." We're not discussing what might be true or what might have happened thirty years ago. We're discussing what is. And what is is that certain beliefs have strong experiential, that is bodily, outcomes. Your mind is hooked up to your physiology.

So, one of the ways Hakomi is body centered is that is uses experiences as the doorway to insight. If you're in mindfulness and I say' "Dogs are friendly" and you react with fear and disbelief, there's no question about what model you're holding. As soon as you're in touch with those beliefs and those emotions, clear memories are likely to follow. And when memories are present, when beliefs are conscious, doubt becomes possible. Change becomes possible. The key thing is to get the connection between the beliefs and the experiences.

Here is how Hakomi works: the practice of loving presence helps the client feel safe and understood. That makes mindfulness possible. The therapist then finds ways (little experiments) to evoke experiences in mindfulness. The meaning of the bodily experiences evoked are understood as direct expressions of core beliefs (models of self and the world that organize all experience). When these core beliefs are made conscious and understood, change becomes possible. Where core beliefs are limiting, destructive, unbalanced or painful, they can be challenged. New beliefs can be tried and new experiences evoked. I call these missing experiences. Safety, peace, freedom, aliveness are a few.

If there is conflict about the expression of certain emotions, we support the actions that manage that expression (but only if we have permission to do so). This usually results in deeper, more complete and more satisfying release and, as is often the case when emotional expression goes beyond an habitual boundary, spontaneous insight and integration follow immediately. The missing experience emerges and the process evolves into savoring and integrating that.

Of course, it's not all that linear. We often loop back to earlier steps, spending time building the relationship, trying new experiments, evoking new experiences and all that. But the general drift of each session and the therapy process as a whole tends to move in the direction I have described.

As I have already said, we work with people's core beliefs and models, models of who they are and what kind of world they're in. We get to those models through the methods I've already talked about. We call the process of uncovering basic models "going for meaning". We want to help people change models. Again, this is not an intellectual process. It's mental, but it's not abstract. For the person holding the model, it's not theory. It just is. The deepest models are those beyond doubt. They are not in consciousness, but they are in use. They are organizing all experiences, all the time. These are old habits.

It's as if you had been wearing colored glasses all your life. If they are orange colored glasses, you have never really seen the color blue. You don't know what blue is, or even that blue is. All blues look black to you. And if you don't even know you are wearing glasses, if is has become unconscious and automatic, you never question the blacks you see. The deepest models you are using determine your perceptions and other behaviors. Your model is your truth. It determines what you think, what you do and what you feel.

One very significant thing about Hakomi is that it brings these models to consciousness clearly and easily. It gets to the beliefs and meanings that run your life quickly. It gives you the chance to examine and change those meanings. The use of mindfulness allows people to study the direct effects of their models. They learn through their immediate reactions to various significant statements (or any other little experiments the therapists can come up with), exactly how they habitually organize themselves and their worlds.

To help people become conscious of the models they are carrying, I might do something like the following. Say I'm working with twenty people in a workshop setting. Around a big issue like safety, there will be quite a range of models. Some will feel perfectly safe. Some will be nearly terrified. So, I help the whole group to become mindful and when they're ready, I offer a statement about safety. "You're completely safe here", I say. Twenty people will have twenty different reactions. Some people will sigh with relief. Some will have feelings, some thoughts. For some, nothing much will happen. Some people will tense up. Some will think, "bullshit". We'll have many different reactions to the same statement because there are many different ways to organize experience into models.

After we bring people's fundamental, unconscious models into consciousness, we then want to provide an experience that balances out any imbalances in the model. Some models are extreme and rigidly maintained. For example, a person might believe at a core level that no one can be trusted. A devastating experience of betrayal can make this belief seem a good one to have, since it protects against further betrayal. A person with this core belief will be cautious with everyone, won't really trust anyone. The person may withdraw from contact and prefer to be alone - because it feels safer. Well, that model is unbalanced. The truth is some people are trustworthy and some people aren't. Some people will hurt you and some people won't. You just have to be able to discover who's which. To do that, you'll need three things. One, you'll need to know what you believe. Two, you'll need to know that trust is a real possibility. Thirdly, you'll need the experience of trusting. We call it the missing experience. We work to create an opportunity for you to have that missing experience.

You won't know that you don't trust anyone until something happens in consciousness to illuminate that. If you haven't discovered it already, it becomes clear when you work with that issue. You suddenly realize you've never felt safe anywhere. Now it's in consciousness. You're experiencing an underlying fear you've had all your life or since that terrible accident or whatever. Now the therapist helps you work with that fear, go through it, survive it, finish it. With that done, you now have the possibility of feeling safe. The therapist helps to create that.

So, one big part of the method is how you create the missing experience. It's going to be powerful for the person. Someone who has never felt safe in their whole life is going to have a very powerful experience when they finally do feel safe. The idea is to spend enough time with that, stabilizing it, creating access routes to it. Taking time with all this feels quite natural to the client. We wait patiently for each new insight and each new aspect of the experience. We don't lead here. We follow.

As the process unfolds, we support each development. But we never use force against "resistance". Pushing against resistance, just creates more resistance. Force automatically evokes counterforce. So, we back off when we see that the client doesn't want to go that fast or that direction. We try to understand why and help the client to understand. There's no rush and no need to push. But neither are we passive.

Once we get to the missing experience, we want to give the client time to fully absorb it, ground in it, memorize it, savor it, learn about it and try it on again and again to see if they can integrate it. They may have a whole series of spontaneous insights. The therapist may just watch the client have insights. The client may speak about these insight or she may not. Something changes when this missing experience is savored and stabilized. The old model is wrong now or at least incomplete. It has to be revised. The model has enormous implications, on all levels, from physiology to relationships. It takes a long time to integrate. In a typical session, it might take thirty minutes to arrive at the missing experience and another twenty to thirty minutes to savor it. It might take years to fully integrate it. The person has been using this possibly his whole life. A lot of things will have to be changed.

In order to really stabilize the new model, the person has to use it, in all kinds of applicable situations. Changes like this are integrated, one decision at a time. I have an example. I once did a therapy workshop for a group of Rolfers. One woman, in her process, touched terror. It was set off by the statement, "You're perfectly welcome here." Her terror and fear was based on her model that she was not welcome anywhere. In fact, at the deepest level, she felt that her life was in danger. People didn't want her to be alive. These were the messages she took in as child and which created these terrifying core beliefs. She screamed with terror, while several of us held her very tightly (taking over the physical contractions that helped her manage her experience of terror - with her permission, of course).

She reported feeling good screaming; it was a relief to let it out. After a while, the terror subsided and her body relaxed. She could finally take in that she was welcome. The people there were all her friends. One after another, possible for twenty minutes or so, each would very quietly say, "You're perfectly welcome here." She kept taking it in. She relaxed in a very deep way. Finally, she became ecstatic. She had this wonderful, thirty-minute (previously missing) experience of feeling welcome, held, cuddled, loved.

I saw her two weeks later. She told me that, a few days after the session, she was walking down a street on her way to a friend's house and she started to feel uncomfortable. She was thinking, "I didn't call them. They don't know I'm coming over. They're not going to be happy about me just showing up." In the middle of that internal dialogue, she suddenly heard a voice saying, "You're perfectly welcome here." She lit up. In an easy, light-hearted way, she continued on to her friend's house.

Every time she does something like that, every time a choice like that comes into consciousness, every time she chooses an option from the new model rather than the old one, and every time those choices are confirmed, she changes. She grows step by conscious step into this new model. Eventually, the new model becomes habit and sinks back into the unconscious. That's how people change. They have a new model. They use it, and if it works, it becomes habit.

Another very important thing about Hakomi: the beginnings of a basic spiritual practice is built right into it. If you're a client in Hakomi long enough, you get a lot of practice using mindfulness. You get a lot of experience doing self-study, from a compassionate, mindful place. That's a way of changing in a very basic way. As you begin to distance yourself from your automatic behaviors and egocentric models about who you are, as you calm down and relax, you begin to find another part of yourself, a different level of yourself. As you distance yourself from egocentric habits, you become able to make spiritual choices, about things like ownership and competition. You become more are home in yourself and in the world, more friendly, less stressed out, all just from practicing mindfulness and studying yourself. As missing experiences become part of you, there's not so much inner noise from conflicted subselves.

All therapy helps people move on in their lives, helps them towards fuller maturity and capacity. This method is particularly good for moving people towards and along their spiritual path. Hakomi therapy is a very good platform for that. One Hakomi trainer, Halko Weiss, says that when the client begins talking about religion, it's a sign that therapy is over. I'm not surprised that Halko's clients end up talking about religion. Hakomi is pointed in that direction from the beginning.

John Napier said, "When did man emerge from the primates? The question is really irrelevant. He was there from the beginning." That is, the potential for man was there in the primates all along. Man was just another small step. One could ask, when does Hakomi become spiritual practice? The answer is, it was there all along. It's there in the use of mindfulness and the principle of non-violence. It's there in the focus on experience and self-study. It's there for the client and it's there for the therapist. Therapy as spiritual practice, it was there in Hakomi from the beginning.

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