Hakomi: The Organization of Experience part 2

“In Hakomi, we help our clients study how they create meaning and feeling out of events, that
is, how they organize their experiences. Whole classes of experiences are organized around key
issues like safety or being loved. To study these, we first focus on a particular present
experience, like” muscle tension, a feeling, thought or an image. This experience reveals a way
that experience is being organized and is a way to access the core material hidden underneath
it (Kurtz, 1990, p. 11).
Two entirely different processes affect what someone experiences, including what is occurring
externally around them, as well as the tendencies and other elements that first convert these
external events into primary sensory information, then into the nervous system, and eventually
into conscious experiences (Kurtz, 1985).
To a large degree, “especially at the lower levels of conversion, these habits” are adaptive and
not a problem but it’s at the level of feeling and meaning that the conversion of events into
experience can sometimes become unnecessarily inhibiting and painful (Kurtz, 1985, p. 3).
The organization of experience developed through one’s emotional-psychological history and is
based upon mundane information and misinformation, beliefs, “and, at the deepest levels,
memories of emotionally intense events, relationships and interactions. These key beliefs and
memories have the emotional power to create the basic habits with which we organize
experience” (p.3).
In Hakomi, central organizing habits and memories are called core material. This core material
strongly influences one’s personality with major impact on thoughts, feelings and behaviors.
The ways core material is organized can be noticed in even ordinary details of behavior if one
observes carefully (Kurtz, 1985).
“The explicit study of the organization of experience is the very essence of Hakomi Therapy”
(Kurtz, 1985, p.3).
In Hakomi, the therapist carefully protects “the emotional experience of the client, providing
safety and support wherever possible” then within that delicate, supportive space, we initiate
and assist the processes by which a client first becomes aware of and then begins to “change
the habits which make some experiences automatically and unnecessarily painful, limiting and
destructive” (p. 3-4).
All “therapies work with experience and its organization. But only a few work with it explicitly
and consciously; call it that; make it primary; and have principles, methods and techniques
specifically designed to do so. Hakomi does” (p.4).
 References

Kurtz, R. S. (1985). The Organization of Experience in Hakomi Therapy. Hakomi Forum, 3,

3-9.
Kurtz, R. S. (1990). Body-Centered Psychotherapy: The Hakomi Method. Mendocino, CA:
Liferhythm Press.