Wonder, experiment, openness. These promote change. Habit, the trance of ordinary consciousness, the intense pursuit of narrow goals, these destroy our natural potential for healthy reorganization. Narrow attention and rapid action are quite necessary, at times, when it is important that we reach some goal without disruption. Think of a rushing to the hospital with a woman in labor. No time there for quietly studying one's subtle reactions. Just keep your mind on the job and get safely through the traffic. Yes! For that kind of thing, speed and focused attention are just the ticket. For studying the self, it won't work. For studying the self, the time needs eyes that need not watch the road. — Ron Kurtz, founder of Hakomi
Upon re-discovery of my Hakomi training handbook, I feel inspired to continue building off my previous blog post on Hakomi, an integrative body-centered psychotherapy approach to healing. Perhaps this might be repetitive (and also very intellectual), but I'm giving myself the space to process out loud here on Hive. I've been swimming in the depths of my own inner thoughts, working through heavy material and being in direct contact with my vulnerability and tenderness. The concepts and teachings behind Hakomi are profound to me. They've made a significantly meaningful impact on the troubled youth I've worked with over the years. They've helped me expand my own awareness of the full range of my humanity. They've also helped me let go of the rigidity behind my attachments, realizing that I didn't necessarily need to change, as much as get out of my own way. As Carl Jung says, people don't get cured; they simply move on.
Hakomi expands on this through the process of getting in touch with ourselves, heightening our sensitivity in order to see ourselves and life more clearly, and then creating choices for ourselves that are more satisfying and effective. Mind-body holism, as mentioned before, is a foundational element to the healing process. Through complex feedback loops, deeply held beliefs and significant early memories influence all levels of physiology, cellular metabolism, the strength of the immune system, distribution of heat and muscle tone in the body, posture, movement, gesture, and facial expression. I practiced Hakomi methods to help heal my intense asthma and digestive issues, which could be a whole blog post within itself.
There may be a 55% placebo response from many, if not all, healing procedures. Such a consistent degree of placebo response also suggests there is a common underlying mechanism or process that accounts for mind-body communication and healing, regardless of the problem, symptom or disease. — Ernest Rossi, The Psychobiology of Mind-Body Healing
Hakomi also draws on systems theory and emphasizes that we are self-creating, self-regulating, and self-organized beings. Healing is an organic process, directed from within. In any authoritarian model of healing, the person is a problem to be solved. In Hakomi, the person is a vessel for an experience of healing or awakening that wants to happen.
When you embrace the organicity principle, you look for and follow natural processes. You do not impose a structure or an agenda on the process, but you seek the sources of movement and growth and support these. In Hakomi, we support the defenses, the habits that manage important experiences. Recognizing that organic systems have their own paths and purposes and will resist attempts to force them in directions they don't want to go, we have found a way to go with the defenses that supports rather than prevents growth. It is the attitude of acceptance that sets the stage.
In general, the principle of organicity asserts our respect for life and our faith in the healing power of the individual. It creates an atmosphere of freedom, self-determination and responsibility. — Ron Kurtz
In psychophysics, there's a law called the Weber-Fechner Law. It states that the level of signal you can detect is dependent on the background noise. The more background noise, the more signal you need. If the noise is too loud, you can't hear the signal. This tells us something about getting in touch with ourselves. This also reveals a lot about our culture, and all the noise that gets created that discourages us from our sensitivity, our ability to see things clearly, and listen deeply to ourselves and to each other.
Distractions, tensions, unconscious habits, and social conditioning create loud background noise, and block the signal. Yet we don't need to instill force or fix ourselves to shift this. As the noise goes down, the signal emerges. Hakomi works to lower the noise, rather than raise the signal. Understanding and working with the barriers of the sensitivity cycle in my previous post is a model for how we lower the noise to access the information within, and then explore where we are in our own cycle to keep things in flow.
What I value about this system of healing is that it touches on the basic understanding that each of us organizes to meet the world in our own way. We give unique, personal meaning to what we receive from the world. As Kurtz eloquently states, "like wind chimes in the breeze, the sounds evoked tell more about the instrument than the wind."
Perception is an act of creation. At one point, we unfolded from a starting place, a blank canvas of potential. We grew more and more complex from there, building each new level on what we achieved in organization and integration at the level below. As children, we made a map of who we are, who we love, and how we communicate. We made a map of what kind of world we live in, and what's possible in it and what isn't. Our interpretation of childhood experiences became the attitudes, beliefs, opinions, and strategies of the present self. Then as adults, we go around using our map. At first, we are map makers, then map users. Yet our maps can be reexamined and shifted. As Kurtz says, the first step of the healing journey "is more significant for the direction it announces than the distance it covers."
The more our world threatens to change the self, the more energy we use to stabilize it. But it is changeable. All of our strongly held beliefs were once new ideas and doubtable. All our tired old habits were once just things we were trying out, playing with, even those that seem unbreakable now. The self was once fresh and flexible. Within us, there is still that possibility of re-creation. Deep within, the maker of the self remains. It is by increasing sensitivity that we reach the map, the map maker and the possibility of change. By accessing the core, we find not just the created self, but the power that creates. — Ron Kurtz
Turning inwards in this way requires relaxation. When the self is defensive, there is no time for wonder and creation on the battlefield. Force sends the map makers into hiding. Self-discovery and healing require a calm, unhurried attitude. Relaxation is a dropping of effort, which over time means less noise. Less noise, more sensitivity and awareness. Through mindfulness, we monitor our actions, and watch our perceptions and reactions. This is the basis of the sensitivity cycle: we become more aware of the many different ways we can do things. Naturally, out of survival value, we automatically select the more effective, efficient, and pleasurable ways. We get better at what we're doing as a result. Kurtz states that "mastery is the natural result of mindfulness." Effective action and awareness compliment each other. We build new and easier ways to move, a new body-image, more pleasure, more aliveness. And with this comes a new image of the self.
At some point in this process, we reach a level of sensitivity where experience becomes intense and emotional. Until one is clear and balanced, this emergence of emotional material will have to happen. The only way to avoid it is to either stay tense, and therefore insensitive, or to look somewhere else, to shift your awareness to something else. We all use those two broad strategies to mask experience. Those mechanisms are our defenses. We're either focused on something else, tuned to a different station as it were, which pushes the pain or whatever into a shadowy background, or we're doing something very noisy, numbing our bodies and minds. The barriers to sensitivity are noise and distraction. In order to reach beliefs, memories, and feelings at a level of experience difficult to tolerate, the [healer] simply helps the [person] become more sensitive. Of course one can be relaxed without processing anything, but not if you freely allow experiences to emerge and you stay with them.
High sensitivity and an openness to experience lead quite naturally to the emotional and spiritual growing we have left to do. — Ron Kurtz
Hakomi is the process of creating the right container for these emotional releases to occur, which can be significantly intense and chaotic. It will look different for each of us, depending on our unique lived experiences. Through various Hakomi processes, I've been able to come into direct contact with my deepest fears and wounds. To experience what it's like to be in the actual pain of them, to become the pain itself, to see the images and feelings and memories deeply associated with them without pushing them away. What a profound and subtle experience it is to shift into the authentic embodiment of our stuck points. To let go of all the walls and armor (for me, this shows up as either anger/rage or putting a positive spin on the experience) and to allow myself to make whatever sounds, words, and actions come from this untamed place. Yet this place, when experienced most authentically, is usually not a dramatic or performative space. It is a real, gritty, raw, deeply vulnerable experience. In the presence of loving and compassionate support from ourselves and those around us, these experiences can be possible. And they can transform us.