My Approach

 

Mindfulness and Focusing

 

Mindfulness is the very center of my approach and, actually, the very center of my life.  Mindfulness is an ancient contemplative practice of meeting each moment with awareness, acceptance and non-judgment.  It is a way cultivating a faith in the unfolding, organic processes of our aliveness.  My 25 year practice of mindfulness through meditation and through just being more and more awake in my life has led to greater joy in my life, less reactivity, greater freedom, and deeper capacity to love and be loved.  

 

Mindfulness provides the container in which good therapy and profound healing can happen.  Most of my training and curiosities have been around how mindfulness can be used as a healing modality and a way of living a healthy, fulfilling and soulful life.  

 

My most recent training has been an exploration of Eugene Gendlin’s FOCUSING.  Gendlin worked alongside Carol Roger’s in the 1960’s and did research exploring what differentiated effective outcomes in therapy from ineffective ones.  He found that the key factor was whether a client was actually in touch with the “felt sense” of their experience in a moment-to-moment way or whether they were just reporting on their life from a distance. The “felt sense” as he saw it was the murky edge of experience coming into being.  He had this conviction that if a client could be in touch with the moment-to-moment felt sense of a problem or an experience, a place of stuckness and pain, then within that experience, frozen places could melt and flow and new life and new possibilities become apparent.  The paradox of this way of working is that within the experience of the pain and stuckness is the tendrils of new life. Life wants to move forward if we can pay attention in a way that allows us to get out of the way and let life flow.  

 

This work seems such a powerful adaptation of mindfulness and is the underpinnings of a lot of other body-mind modalities that I love and practice, whether that be Hakomi, Internal Family Systems, or any other body-oriented, experience-near practices I work with.  I would say that mindfulness and FOCUSING are the lineages of practice that inform all the other ways I practice.  There is an inherent assumption in these practices that life processes are wise and if I, as the therapist, can approach a person without an agenda and trust the wisdom of life, then life processes know how to heal and move toward wholeness.  My job is to create a container so those processes can do what they know to do.  As the poet, Mary Oliver says in her beautiful poem Wild Geese, I need to “Let the soft animal of the body love what it loves.”  

 

Below is a description of Hakomi, one of the ways I apply mindfulness to therapy.  With any modality I use, I am guided by the idea that the map is not the territory and all these modalities are beautiful and useful maps but I never want the map to be in the way of what is actually happening in the arising moment in front of me.  Therapy is a mysterious, alive, improvisational dance with life and with my client and I want to be available for that dance at all times.  

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Hakomi

 

Hakomi is a mindfulness-based, body-oriented psychotherapy.  Mindfulness is a way of paying attention to our moment to moment experience in a non-judgmental way; it is a way of listening to our experience and being connected to ourselves and to our lives.  The idea here is that much of our suffering is a result of unconscious beliefs and habits.  Hakomi is a way of gently accessing those unconscious habits of mind and behavior, bringing them into conscious awareness, so they can be known and modified.  

 

A Hakomi therapist listens and observes very closely your non-verbal behavior, such as tone of voice, gestures, postures, facial expressions and micro-movements.  The body is the doorway into the unconscious so in this way the therapist can get to know how your unconscious is controlling your behavior and beliefs.  From these observations the therapist can come up with little experiments, often a simple movement or a statement, that are done while the client is in a mindful state.  In this way, very gently, unconscious material, beliefs, memories, and feelings, can be uncovered, accessed and worked with.  

 

Sessions move from everyday conversations to doing these little experiments in mindfulness where a client gets to study themselves, doing internal self-exploration, paying attention to body sensations and emotional mind states.  Hakomi is experiential in the sense that we are not talking about something or intellectually analyzing something, but we are accessing an actual experience, a wound, a limiting belief systems and in accessing it we come to know it consciously.  This allows for the possibility of more freedom and choice.  These internal, unconscious habit patterns can be known and different choices can then be made.  Thus, unhealthy and unhelpful beliefs that have run our lives unconsciously can then be challenged, changed and healed.  

 

In Hakomi, unlike other forms of therapy, there is much more sitting in silence, going inside, listening internally, noticing a response to something, being curious and surprised.  It is not an ordinary conversation, but a way of working to help a client know their experience on a more and more intimate basis.  Hakomi takes place in a compassionate and loving environment because such a container creates the safety for mindfulness and for vulnerable wounds and mind states to emerge.  Thus, Hakomi is a nourishing therapy and creates the possibility for missing experiences, experiences that the client did not get while growing up and experiences that might be needed for healing and wholeness to be found.