The old saying “April showers bring May flowers” perfectly captures the symbol of the Snake and this time of the year, which is all about Transformation. If the Dragon month of April sets the stage, during the Snake month of May we get to sit back and watch the dynamic processes set in motion last month continue to play out.

Welcome to the Month of the Dragon!

As the natural world buzzes with activity, we too find ourselves drawn to social connection and outdoor pursuits. This season invites us to reawaken connections, both with nature and each other…

For those of you that haven’t experienced a remote acupuncture treatment firsthand, we hope you enjoy learning a bit more about it today! In order to describe how remote acupuncture works, let’s first talk about how in-person acupuncture works.

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.”