Hakomi: Powerful Technology for Your Transformation
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One of the biggest leaps forward I’ve had during my 12-year journey as a wellness practitioner has been the discovery, study, and integration of Hakomi Mindful Somatic Psychology into my work. Today, Mindfulness-Based Coaching centered around Hakomi is a significant portion of my practice and brings a new level of depth and transformative potential to helping my clients unravel the challenges they face.
As I see it, Hakomi is the bones of my practice. It permeates and influences my work and, truthfully, everything I do. I often say to colleagues, “I’m not a Rolfer that does some Hakomi, I’m a Hakomi Practitioner that also practices Rolfing.”
In my experience, Hakomi is even niche-ier and less well-known than Rolfing, so let’s explore Hakomi a bit so you can get a feel for what it’s like and if it’s right for you.
Hakomi is a mindfulness-centered, somatic psychology-grounded method of connecting the dots between our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual realms. In Hakomi, we get to discover the relationships between those realms and learn how we’re foundationally wired to operate. It’s a brilliant methodology for getting to the source of our mind-body challenges, uncovering the things that drive us subconsciously, and creating more awareness and freedom for ourselves so we can do more of what we want.
At its heart is the use of a mindful state of awareness – rather than our normal, conversational consciousness like in traditional talk therapy or coaching – to study and understand how the body and mind are connected. It’s a body-centric, guided practice of studying ourselves, so it aims to unlock how the stories and challenges of our lives reside in, and can be accessed and transformed through, the experiences we have in our bodies.
Many wellness practices talk about honoring or exploring the mind-body connection (including Rolfing), but they often go about it indirectly, or simply make space for those connections to potentially happen. It was through the study of Hakomi that I finally learned how to actively tap into the ways our bodies and minds bridge together, and to facilitate my clients’ discovery of what lies in that terrain. In my experience, Hakomi is the best technology I’ve come across to help people connect to the complex relationships between the body, mind, and emotions, and how each are intricately woven together and hold the key to our healing and transformation.
And on a personal note, it’s been the lynch pin in my development of emotional intelligence (EQ), greater self-awareness, compassion, and empathy for others. And, incredibly, my sense of touch and perceptual sensitivity in my Rolfing work leveled-up significantly during my Hakomi training.
While Hakomi weaves into every part of my work, how deep we go into exploring clients’ inner worlds with it depends on the needs and desires of the client. It’s tremendously powerful, but not every client wants or needs to work at that depth.
For example, most of my Rolfing clients come to me to solve some type of chronic pain challenge they’ve struggled with. With every one of those clients, I weave in some level of mindfulness teaching to help them better track the unconscious habits of posture and movement they use that often sustain pain symptoms. For more about how this “Hakomi-lite” approach in a Rolfing session looks, check out this recent blog.
And for those clients that want to take their transformative work even deeper, Hakomi becomes an unparalleled resource in my practitioner toolbox.
I tend to have three types of clients that I dive into Hakomi with:
Rolfing clients whose pain resolution plateaus or hits some sort of limit that we jointly feel resides in the non-physical parts of their lives, such as their emotions, mindset, other life challenges, or perhaps even the “why?” behind their posture or how they move across the room. To unlock that pattern, we might do just one or perhaps several Hakomi sessions to help uncover and resolve that non-physical sticking point. From there, we often return to our Rolfing work, which can then proceed more smoothly to its successful conclusion.
Mindfulness-Based Coaching clients that are interested in unlocking a non-physical challenge, like a frequent relationship issue, career malaise, or another sticking point on their life’s journey. Very often these people have tried other methodologies like traditional therapies, Rolfing, or other healing modalities, but they haven’t yet had the opportunity to weave the mind, body, emotions, and spirit together as one in their work to find a solution to their challenge.
And then there are those Mindfulness-Based Coaching clients that are seeking from a more aspirational place. This group has committed to, or are even just beginning, a life-long personal growth journey and they’re drawn to Hakomi as a way to develop greater self-awareness, EQ, and compassion (both for themselves and for others). Those are the high-level-human superpowers we all need to perform better in the world, be more complete humans, and create awareness around our personal kryptonite (and how to break free of it) for the inevitable challenges ahead.
Whether I’m with a Rolfing client or Hakomi client, I often describe the source of our physical, mental, or emotional challenges as residing in the “software” of the body (the nervous system), rather than in the tangible “hardware” of the body. That software gets coded with particular habits – you could call them complex algorithms – that mainly run on autopilot below our conscious awareness to help get us through the challenges of our days and of our lives. It’s important to note that those algorithms are inherently good because they’re designed to help us, but very often their usefulness runs its course and they become limiting in some way, particularly when we’re trying to do something different in our lives like resolving chronic pain or redirecting our life path forward into something more fulfilling.
The Hakomi method is a brilliant way for us to use mindfulness to literally tap into those algorithms, understand how they’re constructed, and create skillful ways to recode them into something more up-to-date and higher functioning.
So, how does a session unfold?
In a Hakomi-focused session, our starting point is establishing a mindful state of awareness. Mindfulness is the main tool on our journey, and we use it to tap into those algorithms running the show, so it’s our first stop. For some, it’s a pretty simple first step, especially if they have an existing mindfulness practice of some sort. And for others we need to spend some time at the beginning of our work together simply learning how to maintain a mindful state and how to study the inner landscape from that perspective.
Tapping into that mindful state is often reported as being very relaxing (for some, that in itself is a huge win!). And, the ability to be mindful and relaxed are not the goal of this work. They’re just the first step. Our goal is to use that mindful state to unearth how we’re subconsciously wired, and to learn how to transform and integrate that wiring into a higher-functioning whole.
Once we’re in a steady state of mindfulness, we begin to explore together, with me as the guide, the nuances of what is happening right in the present moment in the client’s system. So we study the sensations or movement impulses in the body; emotional tone; thoughts, images, memories that arise, or other mental activity that bubbles up; and even the subtle shifts in the overall energy of the body. And, importantly, we start the process of connecting the dots between those phenomena, getting to know what happens in the body when a mental image arises, what emotion goes with it, what that feels like, and where in the body (or outside of it) that’s experienced.
This is the process of “building out the map” of how we’re wired so the client can get familiar with the patterns that reside within their System. And within that state of mindfulness, we’re aiming to have the perspective of being an impartial and compassionate witness to what’s unfolding, so that even if we come across experiences the client doesn’t particularly like, they can keep studying how they shift and change as our work continues.
Then comes the interesting stuff.
In Hakomi, we often refer to “little experiments” that we conduct. Once we’ve established mindfulness and built the inner “map” out a bit, we begin to try small ways of shifting the tapestry of experience we’ve discovered. Importantly, these are always meant to be kind. We’re not going for painful, cathartic experience; we’re not even necessarily in search of a win (though those are always a nice outcome)! With these experiments, we’re thinking a bit scientifically, and looking for more information about how the client’s System is organized and programmed, perhaps finding clues along the way as to what might shift things forward in a positive, nourishing, and liberating way.
Some examples of these little experiments might be:
Touch – potentially from me if the client consents to the contact, or having the client contact themselves in some way (especially if we’re working via Zoom). For instance, a gentle hand over the heart.
I might say a simple (and kind) word or phrase.
Slow, purposeful movement, either from me or the client doing it themselves.
Creative visualization of some sort.
We try these experiments out as a way of offering the client’s System more information to consider, and to then see how it responds. Whatever that response is – positive, negative, or completely neutral – is more information for us, guiding us to greater specificity about how they’re wired, and constructing with greater detail the map of how they’re subconsciously built. Through this process we come across limitations, strengths, learning edges, and a greater understanding of the specific needs of each individual client. Even if we land in a place of more resistance or discomfort from an experiment, as I often say to my clients, “now we know a bit more about where we are.” And that in itself is a huge win on this journey toward transformation.
As we get more and more detail about the client’s operating system, what creates resistance and what frees it up into more ease, we also get to learn with tremendous precision what types of specific solutions each client needs to move forward on their growth journey. This creates an extremely customized roadmap for each client to overcome their challenges, develop their growth skillset, and learn to lead their own evolution.
With Hakomi in my quiver, I’ve been honored over the last several years to help my clients do some amazing things, including:
Learn how their chronic physical pain was the result of misalignment with their career or a relationship and find resolution to both challenges simultaneously.
Learn to recognize repetitive, unseen habits and become more skillful in relating to the challenges and stressors on their life’s journey.
Unlock their pain remotely via Zoom, without needing to use hands-on bodywork as a tool.
Integrate their different physical and mental practices into a unified and more-powerful whole.
If Hakomi sounds right for you to help unlock your physical pain, get unstuck from a life challenge, or help you expand further on your personal growth journey (or even if you’re just intrigued and curious to learn more), reach out or schedule an Exploratory Call here. I’d love to chat with you about this amazing work and find out how it might serve you on your journey ahead!