Hakomi Inspired Somatic Psychotherapy

A Hakomi session is a gentle, body-centered approach to therapy that helps us slow down and become curious about what is happening inside you: your thoughts, emotions, sensations, impulses, and patterns of relating.

From a place of deep respect, we move beyond talking about what happened and gently become curious about your present-moment experience. I might invite you to notice a sensation, posture, breath, movement, or emotional response and explore what happens when we bring mindful attention to it with curiosity and care.

One of the central pieces of Hakomi is bringing the unconscious into conscious awareness. Many of the beliefs, expectations, and ways we learned to protect ourselves were shaped through our early experiences, sometimes before we had the capacity to fully understand or put words to them. They can also develop through experiences at any point in our lives; an event, relationship, loss, rupture, or period of change that may shape our beliefs about safety, belonging, trust, worth, or what is possible for us. These patterns can continue to influence how we experience ourselves, our relationships, and the world without us realizing it. By slowing down and staying curious about what emerges in the present moment, we begin to recognize these patterns through the felt experience of the body in the present moment.

From there, therapy becomes an opportunity for integration. The new awareness has capacity to move beyond intellectual understanding and into the body, emotions, thoughts, sensations, and meaning we make from our experiences. From a place of “loving presence”, mindful awareness, and authentic curiosity, we slow down enough to notice what happens when an old pattern is met with something different. As these new experiences are felt and repeated within a safe, attuned relationship, they can support the brain and nervous system in forming new neural pathways and strengthen the connection between what we think, feel, sense, and know. Over time, this creates more room for choice, connection, self-trust, and a greater sense of ease in being with ourselves and others.

Hakomi is deeply relational and co- created. The therapeutic relationship itself becomes part of the healing process. Together, we create experiences of curiosity, safety, attunement, acceptance, and choice that may have been missing or difficult to access earlier in life. The therapist isn't analyzing you and doesn’t have an agenda for you ; they are actively participating in creating a new experience with you.

These missing or reparative experiences can allow something new to emerge. Sometimes the healing is not about changing the past, but about allowing your nervous system to experience, perhaps for the first time, what it is like to have your experience welcomed rather than dismissed, to have your boundaries respected, to be supported without losing yourself, or to be seen without having to perform.