“If you can observe your own experience with minimum interference, and if you don’t try to control what you experience, if you simply allow things to happen and you observe them, then you will be able to discover things about yourself that you did not know before… You can discover little pieces of the inner structures of your mind, the very things that make you who you are” (Ron Kurtz – Creator of the Hakomi Method)
The Hakomi Method uses experiments in Mindfulness as a way of assisting in the person’s Self-Discovery… We simply invite the person to take a moment to notice, in silence, the reactions to the experiments that we carry out.
Mindfulness is traditionally derived from oriental spiritual practices, its practices are well known nowadays and commonly used in the west. We mainly use what has been called “choiceless awareness”. It is a way of relaxing while keeping ourselves completely awake… witnessing whatever arises in our consciousness. It is spacious, open and free from eagerness, search or attachment.
We try to quieten and lower the mind’s noise, in order to allow higher consciousness around what is happening inside of us.
In Mindfulness there is no intention of making anything happen. There is no place to go. Nothing to search for. There is no preference for what should happen.
At some point we may direct our attention to something specific; a sensation in the body, a feeling, a thought, an image, an emotion… However we will basically remain open to whatever arises.
The reactions that a person has, in Mindfulness, to a well designed experiment, could reveal those core beliefs and lead us to an emotionally nourishing experience. Thus, creating a new record, a more real and appropriate one.
This experience cannot happen while the person is organising their experience by means of their old habits and beliefs. This nourishment is what we call the “Missing Experience” in Hakomi.
The result of this is that we can create new habits, learn to interrupt the old ones while being conscious. Therefore changing the old automatic reactions for the new conscious responses.
This rise in our capacity to choose new responses in situations where, in the past, we were stuck in automatic reactions, becomes a liberating result.