The Hakomi Method: What to Expect of This Mind-Body Therapy
Wondering what to expect in a Hakomi Method therapy session? This gentle, mind-body therapy uses mindfulness to help you uncover the deeper patterns shaping your life. Here’s what you can expect in a Hakomi session.
Truthfully, It Depends
The Hakomi Method is truly person-centered, meaning that I cannot definitively state what will happen. That’s up to you and your system! By the way, when I talk about your system, I’m referring to the whole of you–your mind and body, including all of the parts that function to keep you safe and help you make sense of the world.
Still, even though Hakomi therapy is entirely person-dependent, I can explain what you might experience.
Hakomi therapy generally begins with talking in everyday consciousness, just as you would when talking with friends, family members, and colleagues. It’s your usual way of being in the world. If you’re in a session with a therapist, you will probably be telling them about what’s been going on and how you’re feeling.
Let’s say you’re talking about feeling upset that your friend left you on a night out. You explain to your therapist that you understand logically that you don’t need to be upset, but something inside is still bugging you. You can’t quite put your finger on it. This is a common entry point into Hakomi therapy!
Enter into Mindfulness
The Hakomi therapist will guide you into mindfulness, inviting you to settle into your body and observe what’s happening internally. As the noise of the mind begins quieting down, you might observe bodily sensations you hadn’t otherwise noticed. Perhaps you observe a tightness in your chest, a pit in your stomach, or a buzzing feeling, as if you could break out into a run. Maybe your fists are clenching or your jaw is tight. These physical sensations are a core part of Hakomi as a somatic therapy, as the body reveals what words alone cannot.
Touching on Core Material
These somatic indicators are entryways into implicit memory, or the memory system that is non-verbal, unconscious, and automatic. These memories influence our behaviour without our conscious awareness. By staying with body sensations, you can uncover the crux of what’s underneath the verbal story. After all, your body has a different, equally important story it’s trying to tell!
What comes next depends on the person. You might explore spontaneous memories, images, impulses, body gestures, or something else that arises when paying attention to bodily sensations. All of these are pathways to the heart of your experience. Your Hakomi therapist will know how to help you access and deepen your experience.
Meeting Our Parts
It is common to meet a different version of yourself, perhaps a seven-year-old, a tween, or a teenager who experienced something emotionally painful. You might not know the age, and that’s okay, too. What matters is staying with your experience as it happens in the moment. The arrival of these parts indicates that there is likely something unhealed, a need that wasn’t met at the time of a formative experience. Thankfully, you can meet that need for yourself right now. How that happens depends on you and your therapist.
To continue with our earlier example, perhaps when you were seven years old, your friends left you on the playground. That experience might have been so excruciating for you as a child that its implicit impact (the nonverbal, unconscious memory) still emerges today in response to being ditched by your friend, even if you have no recollection of that event happening. However, by turning inward toward bodily sensation, it is not uncommon for previously forgotten memories like this to arise. We aren’t fabricating memories, but instead are working with whatever spontaneously erupts into your awareness, and that which feels true for you. If a memory doesn’t arise, we still tend to whatever is here in the moment, and, in this example, that could be feelings of unworthiness, rejection, and so forth.
By tending to the younger version of you who hurt so deeply, the current pain you’re feeling in response to your friend is likely to dissipate. Because, after all, it doesn’t really have much to do with your friend, but instead is rooted in past experience. If we can tend to past experiences with nurturance and compassion, we can eliminate the root of many current problems. In Hakomi, you learn things about yourself that move beyond just an intellectual knowing to becoming an embodied, fully felt experience. This leads to lasting change.
If you’re curious about this work, stay tuned for more posts on the Hakomi Method!
