According to Ron Kurtz, the progenitor of Hakomi therapy, “To work nonviolently, we must drop notions about making clients change and, along with that, any tendency to take credit for their successes… that doesn’t mean we have to be passive; nonviolence is not inaction. We can work without using force or the ideas and methods of a paradigm of force.”

Mindfulness is the fourth of the core Hakomi principles. In this context, the word “mindfulness” simply means the ability to have an experience and notice it at the same time. As Ron Kurtz, the progenitor of Hakomi therapy said it in his book Body-centered Psychotherapy (1990), “In psychotherapy, nothing is more useful than mindfulness”.

“It is common in Western thinking to separate the mind and body. This separation, proposed by René Descartes, has not stood up well in recent centuries in philosophy, and has been thoroughly disproven by research in neuropsychiatry and psychoneuroimmunology.”

Organicity is the belief that we are organic; that each of our parts is interconnected and that we are ultimately seeking greater wholeness and healing. 

The unity principle means that we, like all living systems, “are made up of parts organized into wholes.” In other words, at the level of an individual, the unity principle holds that each of us is a complex, self-correcting system made up of interconnected parts. Additionally, the unity principle also holds that each of us is interconnected with an infinitely complex, much greater whole than we ourselves could ever be alone— because “we live in a participatory universe.” 

“The answer to what might or might not be considered Hakomi is whether the process embraces the foundational Hakomi principles of unity, organicity, mind-body holism, mindfulness, and non-violence.”

Dr. Hammer’s teachings and axioms have been and remain the cornerstone of my understanding of Chinese medicine. And in my years of studying with other teachers, I’ve never encountered another teaching that doesn’t align with these core tenets.

Other-people-are-annoying tropes are all over the place: when your roommate (...spouse, kid, or whoever) leaves dirty underwear on the bathroom floor? Annoying. Your friends’ or partners’ little idiosyncrasies that were endearing at first? Annoying. The sounds of your lunch mate’s chewing, the kids crying, a restaurant roaring with so many voices that you can hardly hear yourself think? Annoying, an-NOY-ing, ANNOYING!