Reviewed by Kathryn Vercillo, MA Psychology | Last Updated: November 2025
What is Hakomi Therapy?
Hakomi is a mindfulness-centered somatic psychotherapy that uses present moment body awareness to access and transform core beliefs formed in early life. Through gentle experiments and compassionate inquiry, clients discover unconscious patterns held in the body and nervous system, creating pathways to healing.
Discover Body-Centered Transformation Through Hakomi
When words alone cannot reach the depths of your experience, Hakomi therapy offers another way forward. This experiential approach recognizes that your body holds memories, beliefs, and patterns that shape how you move through the world. Throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, our Associate Marriage and Family Therapists integrate Hakomi principles into their practice, offering you a path to healing that honors the wisdom of both mind and body.
Developed by Ron Kurtz in the 1970s, Hakomi emerged from a synthesis of Eastern mindfulness practices, Western psychology, systems theory, and body-centered techniques. The word “Hakomi” comes from a Hopi word meaning “how do you stand in relation to these many realms?” This question captures the essence of the work: exploring your relationship to yourself, others, and the world through mindful, somatic awareness.
Our collective includes associate therapists trained in various body-centered modalities who can guide you through this gentle yet powerful process. Some of our therapists offer in-person sessions in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, and other Bay Area locations, while others provide secure telehealth options throughout California.
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On This Page:
- Understanding the Hakomi Method
- How Hakomi Sessions Unfold
- Conditions Hakomi Addresses
- Who Benefits from This Approach
- Core Principles of Hakomi
- Hakomi Techniques and Practices
- Why Choose Our Collective
- Beginning Your Hakomi Journey
- Frequently Asked Questions
Understanding the Hakomi Method
A Therapy That Speaks the Language of Experience
Hakomi differs from traditional talk therapy in fundamental ways. Rather than analyzing problems through conversation alone, this method invites you into direct exploration of your present moment experience. Your therapist acts as a compassionate guide, helping you turn attention inward to notice sensations, emotions, impulses, and the subtle ways your body organizes itself in response to different thoughts or situations.
Recent research published in Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy explored what makes Hakomi therapy uniquely effective, identifying two essential elements: a particular “felt state of being” and “dual awareness” that Hakomi practitioners cultivate through specific training. The study, which interviewed experienced Hakomi therapists, found that this therapeutic presence—described as being “really caring, really curious, and really there”—creates a foundation for deep healing work that distinguishes Hakomi from other therapeutic approaches.
The approach rests on a belief that your psyche naturally seeks wholeness and healing. When given the right conditions, safely held space, and skilled facilitation, your inner wisdom emerges. Old protective patterns that once served you but now limit your life can be gently accessed, understood, and transformed.
The Somatic Foundation
Your body is not simply a vehicle for your mind. It carries its own intelligence and memory. When experiences overwhelm your capacity to process them, especially early in life, they become stored in your nervous system and body structure. You might notice this as chronic tension, habitual gestures, particular breathing patterns, or automatic postural responses.
Hakomi therapists are trained to read these somatic signals. They help you bring mindful awareness to how your body responds in the moment, using these responses as doorways into core material. This body-first approach often accesses material that remains out of reach through cognitive methods alone.
A comprehensive review in Frontiers in Psychology examined body-centered interventions across multiple therapeutic modalities and found substantial evidence supporting the effectiveness of somatic approaches for treating psychological conditions including depression, anxiety, and trauma. The research confirmed that interventions working directly with the body can successfully reduce psychopathology through the bidirectional communication pathways between brain and body, providing scientific backing for Hakomi’s body-first methodology.
Mindfulness as the Vehicle
Every Hakomi session involves cultivating a state of mindful, relaxed attention. This is not the mindfulness of achievement or productivity. It is a receptive, curious state where you can observe your inner experience without immediately reacting to it. In this state of consciousness, you become able to study your own psychological processes as they happen.
Your therapist guides you to notice: What happens in your body when you consider a particular thought? What impulse arises when you imagine a certain scenario? What sensation accompanies this familiar feeling? These observations, made in real time with mindful awareness, reveal the organizing principles of your inner world.
How Hakomi Sessions Unfold
The Architecture of a Session
Hakomi sessions typically follow a natural rhythm, though each session adapts to what you bring that day. Sessions generally move through several phases, creating a container for deep work while maintaining safety and grounding.
Establishing Contact
Each session begins with your therapist meeting you where you are. They attune to your state, noticing your energy, mood, and what might be present for you. This is not small talk but rather a process of creating genuine connection and assessing what might be most useful to explore.
Entering Mindfulness
When you are ready, your therapist invites you into a state of mindful awareness. This might involve closing your eyes or softening your gaze, bringing attention to your breath, and noticing whatever sensations, thoughts, or feelings are present. There is no pressure to achieve a particular state. Whatever arises is welcomed as material for exploration.
Studying Present Experience
Once you have settled into mindful awareness, your therapist may introduce small experiments. These are gentle probes designed to evoke your automatic responses. For example, your therapist might say a particular phrase and ask you to notice what happens inside. They might invite you to imagine a scenario and track your body’s response. They might reflect something they notice about your posture or expression and explore what that reveals.
Accessing Core Material
As you study your responses mindfully, deeper layers often become accessible. A bodily sensation might intensify or shift. An image, memory, or feeling might emerge. Your therapist helps you stay with these experiences, neither pushing them away nor getting overwhelmed by them. This mindful witnessing allows the material to unfold and reveal its meaning.
Processing and Integration
When core material surfaces, your therapist supports you in processing it at a pace that feels manageable. This might involve allowing emotions to move through, understanding the origins of a belief, or recognizing how a survival strategy once protected you. The processing happens experientially, in your body and nervous system, not just cognitively.
Completion and Integration
Each session closes with time to integrate what emerged and return to ordinary consciousness. Your therapist helps you ground, reflect on insights, and consider how new awareness might influence your life. You leave the session having not just learned about yourself but having shifted something in your lived experience.
The Role of Your Therapist
Your Hakomi therapist functions as a skilled facilitator of your own healing process. They create safety through presence, attunement, and respect for your pace. Additionally, they track subtle shifts in your state and help you navigate between different levels of consciousness. They offer experiments when useful and step back when your own process takes over.
The therapeutic relationship itself becomes a laboratory for exploring your relational patterns. How you organize yourself in relation to your therapist, what you expect, how you respond to being seen, all of this provides material for understanding your core beliefs about self and other.
Conditions Hakomi Addresses
Trauma and Post-Traumatic Stress
Hakomi offers a particularly effective approach for trauma because it works directly with the nervous system and body where trauma lives. Traumatic experiences become encoded as procedural memory, body states, and automatic responses that persist long after the event has passed.
In Hakomi, you do not need to recount traumatic events in detail. Instead, you work with the present-moment residue of trauma: the tension patterns, protective responses, and survival strategies your system still carries. By bringing mindful awareness to these patterns, you can gradually renegotiate them. Your nervous system learns that it is safe to release old defensive states.
The pacing in trauma work is crucial. Hakomi therapists are trained in titration, working with small, manageable pieces of experience rather than overwhelming your system. You might spend several sessions simply learning to track sensations and build resources before addressing more activated material. This careful approach prevents retraumatization and builds genuine resilience.
Many clients discover that traumatic experiences created core beliefs about their safety, worth, or place in the world. A young child who experienced neglect might have organized around the belief “I am not important” or “no one will be there for me.” These beliefs become part of your bodily felt sense of self. Hakomi allows you to access these beliefs experientially, witness their origins, and consciously choose new organizing principles.
Anxiety and Chronic Stress
Anxiety lives in your body as much as in your thoughts. Your shoulders carry tension. Your breath becomes shallow. And your nervous system stays on alert. Hakomi addresses anxiety by working directly with these somatic patterns rather than only addressing anxious thoughts.
In sessions, you learn to bring curious, nonjudgmental attention to the felt sense of anxiety. What is the quality of this sensation? Where does it live in your body? What happens if you breathe into it? Through this mindful exploration, anxiety often reveals the fears and beliefs driving it. You might discover that your body learned to stay vigilant as a survival strategy in an unpredictable childhood environment.
Hakomi also teaches you to work with your window of tolerance, the zone where you can process experience without becoming overwhelmed or shutting down. Through body-based techniques, you learn to expand this window, developing greater capacity to be with challenging sensations and emotions without spiraling into panic or collapse.
The approach helps you differentiate between present-moment reality and old patterns. Your body might signal danger, but through mindful inquiry, you discover that this response comes from the past. You learn to reassure your nervous system that the past is over and you are safe now.
Depression and Emotional Numbness
Depression often involves a disconnection from vitality and feeling. You might experience yourself as flat, heavy, or empty. Hakomi offers a way back to your aliveness by reconnecting you with your body and the subtle movements of energy and emotion that are always present, even when you cannot initially feel them.
In mindfulness, you learn to notice tiny shifts: a slight heaviness in your chest, a subtle urge to move or withdraw, a barely perceptible sense of sadness or longing. Your therapist helps you stay curious about these small signals rather than dismissing them as insignificant. Often, as you bring gentle attention to these subtle experiences, they begin to reveal more of themselves.
Depression frequently masks deeper feelings that were not safe to express earlier in life. Perhaps anger was forbidden in your family. Perhaps grief was too overwhelming. Your system learned to dampen all feeling rather than risk the dangerous ones emerging. Hakomi creates a safe container to gradually welcome these exiled parts of your emotional life.
The body-centered nature of Hakomi also addresses the somatic dimension of depression. You might discover that your body has organized itself in patterns of collapse or contraction. Through gentle experiments, you explore what it is like to inhabit your body differently, to lift your gaze, to open your chest, to allow energy to flow more freely through your system.
Relationship Patterns and Attachment Wounds
The way you learned to be in relationship as a child becomes the blueprint for your adult relationships. If your early attachment figures were inconsistent, you might have developed anxious attachment, constantly monitoring for signs of abandonment. If they were dismissive, you might have learned to suppress your needs and maintain distance.
Hakomi helps you discover these patterns through direct exploration. In the therapeutic relationship, you notice how you organize yourself in relation to your therapist. Do you seek reassurance? How often do you downplay your needs? Do you test boundaries? These responses reveal your core beliefs about relationships and what is safe or dangerous in intimacy.
Through mindful exploration, you can access the origins of these patterns. You might have a bodily memory of reaching for comfort and finding no one there. You might carry the felt sense of being too much, taking up too much space, needing too much. As you witness these early experiences with adult awareness and compassion, you create the possibility for new relational patterns to emerge.
Your Hakomi therapist also works with you to practice new ways of being in relationship. This might involve experiments in asking for what you need, receiving care, or expressing difficult feelings. These new experiences, encoded in your body and nervous system, begin to challenge old organizing beliefs.
Self-Worth and Identity Issues
Core beliefs about who you are form early and often outside conscious awareness. You might carry beliefs like “I am defective,” “I do not matter,” or “I am too much.” These beliefs organize your experience, influencing how you interpret events, what you attempt, and how you treat yourself.
Hakomi accesses these beliefs through the body. Your posture, gestures, and automatic responses reveal how you hold yourself in the world. A chronic collapse in your chest might express the belief “it is not safe to be visible.” A habitual tension in your jaw might hold the words you learned not to speak.
In mindfulness, your therapist might offer a statement designed to evoke your core belief. “You matter.” “You are welcome here.” “There is nothing wrong with you.” As you hear these words and track your response, you discover what you truly believe about yourself, often beneath what you consciously think.
The power of Hakomi lies in what happens next. As you witness your automatic response, your belief, with compassionate awareness, something shifts. You see that this is just a belief, formed in particular circumstances, not an absolute truth. You create space for a new possibility to emerge, one grounded not in old survival strategies but in present reality and your inherent worth.
Chronic Pain and Somatic Symptoms
Your body speaks through sensation and symptom. Chronic pain, mysterious ailments, and persistent physical complaints often carry psychological and emotional dimensions. This is not to say the pain is “all in your head,” but rather that mind and body are inseparable, and somatic symptoms frequently express what has not been processed or spoken.
Hakomi invites you to explore your relationship with pain and sensation. Rather than fighting or trying to eliminate discomfort, you bring curious attention to it. What is the quality of this sensation? Does it have a shape, a color, a texture? What happens if you breathe toward it rather than away from it?
Through this mindful exploration, pain often reveals its meaning. A chronic tension in your shoulders might hold the weight of responsibility you learned to carry too young. Digestive issues might express anxiety that has no other outlet. As you give these somatic experiences attention and allow their emotional content to emerge, symptoms often shift.
The approach also helps you work with the secondary layer of suffering that accompanies chronic pain: the fear, frustration, and sense of betrayal by your own body. Through mindful acceptance and self-compassion practices, you develop a different relationship with your physical experience, one of curiosity and kindness rather than battle.
Life Transitions and Existential Concerns
Major life changes, whether chosen or thrust upon you, can destabilize your sense of self and meaning. Career changes, relationship endings, relocations, aging, or confronting mortality all raise deep questions about who you are and what matters.
Hakomi creates space to explore these transitions not just intellectually but experientially. How does uncertainty feel in your body? What happens when you imagine the future? What beliefs about yourself are being challenged by this change? Through mindful inquiry, you access your deeper responses and resources.
The method also helps you recognize when old patterns are hindering your ability to navigate new territory. Perhaps your early experience taught you that change is dangerous. Perhaps you learned to suppress your own desires in service of others. These patterns might have once protected you but now limit your ability to embrace new possibilities.
As you bring awareness to these patterns and their origins, you create freedom to respond differently. You discover capacities within yourself that old beliefs obscured. You find that you can tolerate uncertainty, that you have wisdom to draw on, that you are more resilient than you imagined.
Who Benefits from This Approach
Individuals Seeking Deeper Self-Understanding
If you are drawn to personal growth, curious about your inner world, and interested in exploring beneath the surface of your experience, Hakomi offers a rich path. The method assumes you have innate wisdom and healing capacity. Your therapist facilitates your own discovery rather than positioning themselves as the expert on your life.
This approach attracts people who value experiential learning over purely cognitive understanding. You recognize that knowing why you do something is different from having a felt sense of where it comes from and how to change it. You are willing to slow down, turn attention inward, and work with the subtle dimensions of experience.
Those Who Have Not Found Relief in Talk Therapy Alone
Many people come to Hakomi after years of conventional therapy that provided insight but not transformation. You understand your patterns, your history, your dynamics, yet nothing fundamentally shifts. This is often because the work has remained primarily cognitive, not engaging the body and nervous system where patterns actually live.
Hakomi offers a complement to or alternative to talk therapy. The method recognizes that lasting change happens at the level of experience, not just understanding. By working directly with your body and nervous system, Hakomi accesses and transforms material that cognitive insight alone cannot reach.
People Comfortable with Mindfulness and Inner Focus
Hakomi requires a willingness to turn attention inward and sustain focus on subtle internal experiences. If you already have a meditation practice, do yoga, or engage in other body-centered awareness practices, you will likely find Hakomi familiar and accessible.
That said, you do not need prior experience with mindfulness. Your therapist guides you step by step, helping you develop the capacity to observe your inner world with curiosity and compassion. Many clients discover capacities for present-moment awareness they did not know they possessed.
Those Wanting Trauma Healing Without Retraumatization
If you carry trauma but fear being retraumatized by therapy that asks you to repeatedly recount distressing events, Hakomi offers a gentler path. The method works with the present-moment residue of trauma, the ways it lives in your body and nervous system now, rather than requiring detailed narrative recounting.
The pace is always determined by your window of tolerance. Your therapist helps you approach difficult material gradually, building resources and regulation skills as you go. This careful, body-based approach allows trauma healing without overwhelming your system.
Individuals Interested in Holistic Healing
Hakomi fits naturally within a holistic approach to wellbeing. If you see yourself as an interconnected system, mind, body, emotion, spirit, rather than a collection of separate parts, this therapy aligns with your worldview. The method honors all dimensions of your being and recognizes that healing in one area impacts the whole.
Many Bay Area residents who value integrative health practices, who see acupuncturists or work with somatic practitioners, who engage in contemplative practices, find Hakomi a natural complement to their overall approach to wellness.
People Open to Experiential Exercises
Hakomi sessions involve more than conversation. Your therapist might guide you through specific exercises: imagining scenarios, exploring movements, noticing sensations, or experimenting with new ways of organizing yourself. These experiences, done in mindful awareness, create opportunities for insight and transformation.
If you are open to this experiential dimension, willing to engage actively in the process rather than simply talking about problems, Hakomi can be powerfully effective. The method asks you to be a participant in your own healing, bringing curiosity and willingness to explore.
Core Principles of Hakomi
The Hakomi Institute, founded in 1981 by Ron Kurtz, Phil Del Prince, Dyrian Benz, Jon Eisman, Greg Johanson, Pat Ogden, Devi Records, and Halko Weiss, is the original and most extensive Hakomi training organization worldwide. Furthermore, they are a member of the United States Association of Body Psychotherapists (USABP). And they help us understand the core Hakomi Principles.
Organicity: Trusting Your Natural Healing Process
Hakomi rests on the belief that you are not broken and in need of fixing. You are a living system with innate capacity for growth, healing, and self-correction. When given the right conditions, your psyche naturally moves toward wholeness. Your therapist’s role is not to impose change but to create conditions where your organic healing process can unfold.
This principle shifts the power dynamic in therapy. You are the expert on your own experience. Your therapist brings skill in creating the conditions and facilitating the process, but the wisdom and direction come from within you. This collaborative stance honors your autonomy and agency.
Mindfulness: The Power of Present Awareness
Mindfulness in Hakomi is not about achieving a particular state or becoming better at meditating. It is about bringing gentle, curious attention to your present-moment experience. In this state, you can observe your automatic responses, beliefs, and patterns without being swept away by them.
This observing capacity creates what therapists call decentering. You realize you are not your thoughts, emotions, or sensations. You are the aware presence that can witness these experiences. This recognition itself is healing, creating space between stimulus and response, between old pattern and new possibility.
Nonviolence: Honoring Your Defenses
All parts of you, even the parts that seem problematic, developed for good reasons. Your defenses, your symptoms, your difficult patterns all once served to protect you. Hakomi approaches these aspects with respect rather than trying to eliminate them forcefully.
When you judge or fight against parts of yourself, those parts often strengthen their grip. When you meet them with curiosity and compassion, they can relax and reveal what they are protecting. This principle creates safety for all parts of you to be present in therapy.
Unity: Seeing Wholeness
Hakomi recognizes that all dimensions of your experience are interconnected. Body, mind, emotion, spirit, relationships, and context all influence each other. Change in one area ripples through the whole system. This principle guides therapists to work holistically rather than focusing narrowly on isolated symptoms.
The unity principle also recognizes your connection to larger systems: family, culture, society. Your individual patterns exist within contexts that shaped them. Healing involves understanding not just your personal history but also the familial, cultural, and social forces that influenced your development.
Body-Mind Holism: Integrating All Ways of Knowing
Your body is not separate from your mind. Sensation, movement, and posture are not merely physical phenomena but carry psychological meaning. Conversely, your thoughts and beliefs shape how you inhabit your body. Hakomi works at the intersection of body and mind, recognizing that lasting change must include both dimensions.
This principle means your therapist attends to somatic signals as primary sources of information. The way you hold your breath, the tension in your shoulders, the gestures you make unconsciously, all of these reveal your inner world as much as your words do.
Hakomi Techniques and Practices
Accessing State: Entering Mindful Awareness
Every Hakomi session involves guiding you into a state of relaxed, inward attention. Your therapist might invite you to close your eyes, soften your gaze, or simply bring attention to your breath. They help you settle into a receptive state where you can observe your inner experience.
This is not hypnosis or trance but rather a shift from ordinary, outward-focused consciousness to a more contemplative, inward focus. In this state, you have greater access to subtle sensations, emotions, images, and memories that remain beneath awareness in ordinary consciousness.
Tracking: Following Your Experience
As you enter mindfulness, your therapist tracks your experience. They notice shifts in your breathing, changes in your facial expression, movements in your body. They might reflect what they observe: “I notice your shoulders just tensed,” or “Something seems to be happening for you right now.”
This tracking helps you deepen your own awareness. Often you are not conscious of these subtle shifts until your therapist reflects them. The act of noticing together creates an opportunity to explore what the shift means and what it reveals about your inner world.
Contact Statements: Offering Presence
Throughout sessions, your therapist makes contact statements, simple reflections of what they observe or sense about your experience. “This seems important.” “You are working hard right now.” “Something tender is present.” These statements communicate that your therapist is with you, tracking your process, and offering support.
Contact statements differ from interpretation. Your therapist is not telling you what your experience means but rather acknowledging what they sense. These reflections help you feel seen and accompanied, which itself can be deeply healing if your early experience lacked this kind of attuned presence.
Probes and Experiments: Evoking Responses
At key moments, your therapist offers small experiments designed to evoke your automatic responses. They might say a phrase and ask you to notice what happens: “You are welcome just as you are.” Or they might invite you to imagine a scenario: “Imagine someone is here who really sees you.” They might suggest a movement: “What happens if you lift your chest a bit?”
These experiments are invitations, not demands. You always have permission to decline or modify them. When you do engage with an experiment, you track your response mindfully: What sensation arises? What impulse? What emotion? These responses reveal your core beliefs and patterns.
Taking Over: Supporting Your Experience
When you contact difficult emotions or sensations, your therapist might use a technique called taking over. They offer physical or verbal support that allows you to deepen into the experience without having to maintain your ordinary defenses.
For example, if you are working with feelings of collapse, your therapist might gently support your shoulder or back, literally holding you so you can let go more fully. If you are in touch with sadness, they might say the words you need to hear: “It is okay to feel this. You are not alone.” This support allows you to have experiences that felt too dangerous or overwhelming to have alone.
Transformation: Welcoming New Experience
As you mindfully witness old patterns and access their origins, space opens for new experience. Your therapist might introduce an experiment that offers a missing experience. If you never felt welcomed, they might help you take in genuine welcome now. If you learned to be small, they might support you in experimenting with taking up space.
These new experiences, happening in your body and nervous system in the present moment, begin to shift the organizing principles of your psyche. Your system learns that new ways of being are possible, safe, and nourishing. This experiential learning creates lasting change.
Why Choose Our Therapy Collective for Hakomi Therapy
Depth of Somatic and Mindfulness Training
Our collective attracts Associate Marriage and Family Therapists who are passionate about body-centered and contemplative approaches to healing. While Hakomi certification requires extensive training, many of our associates integrate Hakomi principles and techniques alongside other somatic modalities. You benefit from therapists who understand how to work skillfully with the body-mind connection.
When you browse our directory, you can filter for therapists with training in Hakomi, mindfulness-based approaches, and body-centered practices. This depth of training ensures you receive care from clinicians who understand how to navigate the territory of embodied healing.
Supervised Practice Ensures Safety and Quality
Every Associate MFT in our collective practices under clinical supervision. This oversight is particularly important when working with vulnerable states, trauma material, and deep emotional processes that Hakomi often accesses. Your therapist has regular consultation with experienced supervisors who help ensure your care meets the highest standards.
This supervision model also means your therapist is engaged in ongoing learning and development. They bring questions, challenging cases, and areas where they want to grow to their supervisor. This commitment to continuous improvement benefits you directly.
Diversity of Integrative Approaches
No two therapists in our collective practice exactly the same way. Each brings their unique training, perspective, and style. Some integrate Hakomi with Internal Family Systems work. Others combine it with EMDR or attachment-based approaches. Still others weave in expressive arts, movement, or contemplative practices.
This diversity means you can find a therapist whose particular integration resonates with your needs and preferences. The directory allows you to read about each therapist’s approach and see who might be the right fit for your healing journey.
Accessible Care Model
Our collective exists to make quality therapy accessible. Our therapists offer sessions at rates significantly lower than many private practitioners in the Bay Area, where therapy costs can be prohibitive. This accessibility model means Hakomi therapy, which often requires sustained engagement to be most effective, remains financially feasible.
Many clients appreciate that our commitment to accessible care does not compromise quality. Our therapists bring extensive training, work under supervision, and practice with skill and dedication. You receive excellent care at a rate that allows you to engage in the depth of work Hakomi invites.
Flexible Options: In-Person and Telehealth
Our therapists are located throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. Some offer in-person sessions in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, Marin, and other locations. All provide secure telehealth options throughout California. This flexibility allows you to choose the format that best supports your healing.
Some clients find that in-person sessions enhance the somatic dimension of the work, as your therapist can more easily track your physical responses and occasionally offer supportive touch with consent. Others discover that telehealth creates a sense of safety and comfort that allows them to go deeper. You can discuss with your therapist which format might serve you best.
Beginning Your Hakomi Journey
Honoring Your Readiness
The decision to begin therapy is significant. You are acknowledging that something needs attention, that you are ready for change, that you deserve support. Honor wherever you are in this process. Whether you are certain that Hakomi is right for you or simply curious to explore, your interest itself is meaningful.
Many people spend considerable time preparing to reach out. You might research, read about the approach, imagine what it would be like. This preparation is part of the journey. When you are ready, the act of contacting a therapist becomes a powerful statement of care for yourself.
Building Ongoing Relationship with Your Therapist
The therapeutic relationship in Hakomi is collaborative and attuned. Your therapist tracks your responses, honors your pace, and adjusts their approach based on what you need. They might be more active in some sessions, offering more experiments and guidance. In other sessions, they might step back and follow your process.
Over time, you develop trust in this relationship. You learn that your therapist can handle your emotions, that they will not be overwhelmed by your pain, that they can witness your full humanity. This secure base allows you to explore territory that felt too dangerous to approach alone.
Finding Your Therapist
Our directory includes detailed profiles of each associate. You can read about their training, specialties, theoretical orientation, and personal approach. Many associates note whether they have specific training in Hakomi or related body-centered modalities. Take time to read profiles and notice who resonates with you.
Some of our therapists offer in-person sessions in various Bay Area locations. Visit their profiles to see where they practice. All therapists provide telehealth throughout California, giving you flexibility if location or schedule makes in-person sessions challenging.
You can contact therapists directly through the information provided in their profiles. Many offer a brief consultation call where you can ask questions and get a sense of whether you feel comfortable working together. This initial contact is part of finding the right fit.
Ready to find a therapist who can offer Hakomi therapy?
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Frequently Asked Questions About Hakomi Therapy
Q: How is Hakomi different from regular mindfulness meditation?
A: While Hakomi uses mindfulness as a foundational tool, it differs significantly from meditation practice alone. In meditation, you typically observe your experience without trying to change it, developing equanimity and present-moment awareness. Hakomi uses mindfulness as a vehicle for psychotherapy, intentionally exploring specific aspects of your experience to access and transform core beliefs and patterns.
During Hakomi sessions, your therapist guides you into mindfulness then introduces experiments designed to evoke automatic responses that reveal your unconscious organizing principles. When a response emerges, you study it mindfully to understand its meaning and origins. The process is interactive and directed toward specific therapeutic goals rather than simply observing whatever arises.
Additionally, Hakomi emphasizes the body-mind connection in ways most meditation practices do not. Your therapist tracks your physical responses and uses somatic cues as primary sources of information about your inner world. While meditation cultivates awareness, Hakomi uses awareness as a tool for deep psychological exploration and transformation.
Q: Can Hakomi help if I have trouble talking about my feelings?
A: Hakomi is particularly effective for people who struggle to verbalize their inner experience. The method recognizes that not all knowing is verbal and that much of your psychological life exists beneath words. Through body-centered exploration, you can access and work with material that you cannot easily talk about or even consciously identify.
Your therapist pays attention to what your body communicates through sensation, posture, gesture, and movement. These somatic signals often reveal feelings, beliefs, and patterns that remain inaccessible through conversation alone. You might discover that your body knows things your conscious mind does not, and Hakomi provides a language for this embodied knowledge.
The experiential nature of the work also means you can process and transform material without necessarily finding words for it. Shifts happen at the level of felt experience and nervous system organization. Many clients report that their experience changes in ways they cannot fully articulate but definitely feel. This makes Hakomi accessible even if verbal expression feels difficult or unsafe.
Q: How long does Hakomi therapy typically take?
A: The timeline for Hakomi varies widely based on your goals, the complexity of what you are addressing, and how you respond to the work. Some clients notice meaningful shifts within a few months, while others engage in the process for a year or more to address deeper patterns and longstanding wounds.
Trauma work, particularly complex or developmental trauma, often requires sustained engagement. Your nervous system and core beliefs reorganize gradually, not all at once. The work happens in layers, with each layer of healing revealing the next area that needs attention. Many clients find that working with Hakomi for at least six months to a year allows sufficient depth for lasting transformation.
That said, even brief work with Hakomi can be beneficial. Some clients come for a specific issue and find that a few months of focused work provides relief and new capacity. Others return to Hakomi at different life stages when new challenges or growth edges arise. We encourage you to discuss your goals and timeline with your therapist, who can help you develop realistic expectations based on what you want to address.
Q: Will I need to recount traumatic events in detail?
A: One of the strengths of Hakomi for trauma work is that you do not need to repeatedly recount traumatic events. The method works with the present-moment residue of trauma, how it lives in your body and nervous system now, rather than requiring detailed narrative recounting. This approach reduces the risk of retraumatization while still allowing deep healing.
Your therapist helps you develop skills in tracking sensations, managing your nervous system activation, and working within your window of tolerance before approaching more difficult material. When trauma content emerges, you work with it in small, manageable pieces, often through body-based exploration rather than storytelling. This careful pacing allows your system to metabolize old experiences without becoming overwhelmed.
Some clients do choose to share details of their history, and your therapist certainly welcomes whatever you want to express. The key difference is that detailed narrative is not required for healing in Hakomi. Your body and nervous system can release old patterns and learn new responses through mindful awareness and experiential processing, even when traumatic memories remain implicit rather than explicitly narrated.
Q: Do I need previous experience with mindfulness or meditation?
A: You do not need any prior experience with mindfulness or meditation to benefit from Hakomi. Your therapist guides you step by step, teaching you how to bring gentle attention inward and notice subtle aspects of your experience. Many clients who have never meditated discover they have natural capacity for this kind of awareness.
If you do have a meditation or mindfulness practice, that experience can enhance your work in Hakomi. You might be more comfortable with the inward focus and more skilled at sustaining attention on subtle experience. Your therapist can build on your existing capacity.
Some clients worry they cannot meditate or are bad at mindfulness because their minds wander or they feel restless. Hakomi is not about achieving a perfect meditative state. It is about bringing curious attention to whatever is present, including restlessness, distraction, or difficulty. These responses themselves become material for exploration. Your therapist helps you work with your experience as it is, not as you think it should be.
Q: Can Hakomi work alongside other therapies or treatments?
A: Hakomi integrates well with other therapeutic approaches and can be part of a comprehensive treatment plan. Many clients work with Hakomi therapists while also seeing psychiatrists for medication management, working with other specialists for specific issues, or engaging in complementary practices like acupuncture, yoga, or bodywork.
If you are currently in therapy with another provider and want to add Hakomi, we recommend discussing this with both therapists. In some cases, clients transition from one approach to another. In other situations, working with multiple providers can be complementary, particularly if each addresses different dimensions of your experience.
Our associates are trained to coordinate care when appropriate. If you have other providers on your treatment team, your Hakomi therapist can communicate with them with your consent to ensure your care is integrated and coherent. This collaborative approach often enhances outcomes and prevents conflicting interventions.
Q: What if I feel worse after starting therapy?
A: It is not uncommon to experience increased distress early in therapy, particularly with approaches like Hakomi that access deeper material. As you begin to turn attention inward and work with patterns you have long avoided, difficult feelings can intensify before they resolve. This is often a sign that the work is reaching beneath surface symptoms to address root causes.
That said, therapy should not consistently feel overwhelming or destabilizing. If you notice increased symptoms, more difficulty functioning, or feel that the work is moving too fast, communicate this to your therapist immediately. Skilled Hakomi therapists know how to adjust the pace, build more resources, and work within your capacity. The work should challenge you while also remaining within your window of tolerance.
Your therapist also helps you develop skills for managing distress between sessions. Grounding techniques, self-regulation practices, and ways to soothe your nervous system all become part of the work. If symptoms persist or worsen despite adjustments to the therapeutic approach, your therapist can help you assess whether additional support is needed and coordinate care accordingly.
Citations:
- Kelly, S. W., & Papps, F. A. (2022). ‘Really caring, really curious, and really there’: A qualitative exploration of therapeutic presence from a Hakomi therapy perspective. Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy, 17(2), 150-165. https://doi.org/10.1080/17432979.2021.1939162
- Tarsha, M. S., Park, S., & Tortora, S. (2020). Body-centered interventions for psychopathological conditions: A review. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 2907. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02907