Hakomi Demonstration Session

Quoted from: https://hakomi.com/history/ron-kurtz-biography :

Some History: I founded the Hakomi Institute in 1981 and was its director for ten years. In 1991, I resigned the directorship and started Ron Kurtz Trainings. I began to train and work with a whole new group of people and together we founded the Hakomi Educational Network, Int’l.

Over the last twenty years, I have shifted the very basis of the work from the traditional ideas of working with character issues and neurosis, to conceiving the work as assisted self-study, where the practitioner helps clients reduce unnecessary suffering by evoking and midwifing the client’s own natural, healing processes through re-consolidating formative experiences using support from others, including comforting touch. All the major changes I have made to the method can be seen in this light.

From the beginning, the work focused on present experience, used mindfulness and simple experiments to evoke reactions. This part of the method was developed in my private practice, back in the 1970’s. It was there from the beginning and it remains the core of the method. Around sixteen years ago, I introduced the idea of loving presence as the most supportive state of mind for the therapist. This state is the first and most important task of the therapist. That one change placed the ultimate power of the work in something more than the method and techniques. I realized that the real source of the method’s effectiveness is the therapist’s capacity to be loving towards and completely present for the client. This too is central to the refined method.

More recently and almost as significant, is the important scientific research concerning human automaticity. A great deal has been learned in the last twenty years about the unconscious in its cognitive and adaptive capacities. For me, this led to my vision of the method as assisted self-discovery. What has been discovered through the refined method is the unconscious influences that create our thinking, our beliefs, our buried painful memories, and the adaptations we made to handle the world we found ourselves in. In short, all the unconscious activity that now creates our everyday experiences. I now see the method as accessing that activity and making it conscious and modifiable. There are very good reasons why we need discover who we really are. Doing so is real work and any of us can use a little assistance doing it.

Seen as assisted self-study and self-discovery, the method has its origins not just in the theories of western psychology, which I studied in graduate school, but even more so in the principles and practices of Buddhism and Taoism that inspired me a dozen years before Hakomi began. Grounded as it is in these wisdom traditions, the method can easily become part of any method of psychotherapy. Self-study is a natural part of the universal human endeavor to free ourselves from suffering, the inevitable suffering that results from ignorance of who we are and how the world hangs together. Self-study is the path taken by all who work to understand themselves. It leads beyond half-remembered hurts and failed beliefs, beyond all that lingers unexamined in the body-mind. That deep desire to know ourselves has given rise to all manner of heroic labors. It is a cousin to the sciences of life and to many religions, a kin to singing bowls, chanting monks and sitting meditation.

Anyone whose passion is to understand and heal, in the company of loving friendships will find this way of working life-changing and a joy to do. — Ron Kurtz, September 30, 2010.