The Legacy of Ron Kurtz
Ron Kurtz, who died on January 4, 2011, is internationally
recognized
as the creator of Hakomi and author of Body-Centered
Psychotherapy:
the Hakomi Method. Kurtz pioneered, among other
things, the use of
mindfulness as a fundamental ingredient of psychotherapy
and realized
the need for psychotherapy to be experiential to
be truly
transformative. He also understood that nonverbal
expression reveals
more than our verbal stories can ever tell about
the core material
that organizes experience and that the body is
a direct route to the
unconscious,
In the seventies Kurtz, who was trained as a scientist,
began
exploring psychology and experimenting and creating
a way of working
with people that began to draw attention for its
innovative and
imaginative approach. He was inspired by yoga which
taught him several
basic ingredients that were to become an integral
part of how he
worked, including the principle of ahimsa, or non-violence,
the
interconnectedness of mind and body, the unity
principle which is what
the word yoga means, and a way of doing little
experiments in
mindfulness for self discovery. Kurtz' approach
was also informed by
Taoism, which taught him about organicity and going
with the flow,
Bioenergetics which contributed to his understanding
of the bodymind
connection and how experience brings about change,
and Gestalt, which
showed him a way to do psychotherapy with a focus
on present
experience.
In the 80's Kurtz was greatly influenced and inspired
by Moshe
Feldenkrais and how healing can be approached as
learning. The genius
of Feldenkrais was in bringing previously unconscious
and automatic
habits patterns into conscious awareness (awareness
through movement)
and facilitating the discovery of new possibilities
for healthy
alternative ways of being and acting. What Feldenkrais
did with the
body, Ron Kurtz adapted to psychology. One of the
best ways to
understand the thinking behind Hakomi is to learn
at least the basics
of Feldenkrais.
By the 1980's Kurtz was surrounded by several people
who saw the
genius in his way of working and who wanted to
distinguish it as a
method in it's own right. They brainstormed for
a name for the method
and came up with the word "hakomi" (which they
found was a word in the
Hopi language meaning "who are you?") They
created an institute (the
Hakomi Institute) to offer trainings in the new
method. This group of
well-intentioned followers spent years attempting
to bring order out
of the sometimes seemingly chaotic way that Kurtz
did things, and
began to codify the techniques and organize the
method into a form
that could be practised by and taught to others.
They created a
certification process in order to have some control
over who
practised and taught the method and how.
Meanwhile Kurtz himself continued to create and
experiment and refuse
to follow any kind of formula or stay inside the
box... which was,
after all, how the "method" came about in the
first place. The more
the folks at the Hakomi Institute concretized and
passed on the form
of the method, the more Kurtz was finding and using
new forms to
practise the spirit of the method. He was notorious
for certifying
people in whom he recognized the spirit of the
work whether or not
he'd seen them demonstrate the form. (His whole
approach to the
certification process was as irreverent as his
view of traditional
medical model psychotherapy. One Hakomi Institute
trainer told the
story of his own certification. Apparently he was
attempting to
demonstrate a Hakomi session to Ron who fell asleep
during the session
only to wake up at the end of it and say, "well,
I didn't see anything
I didn't like... You're certified!")
By the 90's there were some in the Hakomi institute
who told Kurtz
that what he was doing was not "hakomi". A
rift began to develop
between them the more Kurtz insisted, as he always
had, on doing his
own thing and not fitting into anyone's idea of
how psychotherapy, let
alone Hakomi, should be done.
He continually applied what he learned from clients
and students and
from his voracious appetite for reading books -
mainly about the
newest research in neuroscience - to his ongoing
development of the
work. In the 90's he realized - as research has
since confirmed - that
the most important ingredient in Hakomi, as in
any psychotherapy
process (after the client of course), is the therapist's
relationship
with the client. He believed that a good therapeutic
alliance depended
largely on the personhood and state of mind of
the therapist. With
this realization, the focus in his trainings shifted
from teaching
Hakomi as a method for psychotherapists to use
on clients to using
Hakomi to cultivate those personhood qualities
and skills that would
help anyone to be a healing presence for another.
Kurtz recognized
that there is an ideal state of mind which can
be cultivated with
practice and he began to call this state of mind
of the helper
"loving presence". By the mid 90's this became
the foundation of his
way of teaching Hakomi to professionals and lay
people alike. He also
saw the value of moving more quickly into the missing
experience of
nourishment rather than staying in the old story
and beliefs.
Neuroscience confirms the importance of this shift
of focus in
psychotherapy.
By the start of the new millennium, other new developments
were
showing up as Kurtz began to feel his own mortality
and wanted to
refine his way of working and teaching his way
of working, still
called Hakomi, to a more and more simple and elegantly
efficient
approach. In the last ten years of his life, he
preferred to call this
the "refined Hakomi method" as he moved further
and further away from
any hint of pathologizing (changing the certification
to
"practitioner" rather than "therapist" and
dropping entirely the use
of the old Reichian-based character system in favor
of what he now
called "indicators".)
Kurtz' way of working and teaching became increasingly
human and
playful and deeply compassionate as he moved more
and more toward the
appreciation of how vital is the collaboration
of practitioner and
client (and ideally of a group) to facilitating
a nourishing
experience of transformation and healing... for
all the participants
of the process.
Right to the end of his life, not a day went by
that Ron Kurtz was not
thinking about and writing about perfecting and
simplifying his life's
passion, a way to help reduce suffering through
what he referred to as
"Mindfulness-based assisted self discovery"...
what someone at Naropa
once called "applied Buddhism", what some of
his followers are now
calling "Applied Mindfulness: the Hakomi Way"...
the Legacy of Ron
Kurtz.