In addition to facilitating full trainings in Hakomi, we are available to offer one or two day workshops to small groups upon request. If you are interested in organizing a workshop for your organization, workplace, or circle of friends, please contact us to arrange this. The following is a sample of workshops we have offered in a one or two day format:
Empathy and Compassionate Relationships
Research has shown that the human brain, like the brains of all mammals, is hard-wired for empathy. As humans, we also have the capacity for compassion. This workshop is designed to help bring to awareness our habits of relating that may inhibit our natural inclination towards giving and receiving empathy and compassion. Through experiential exercises and the use of mindfulness, we will explore our relationship to eye contact, supportive touch, kindness, etc. to discover how we may be limiting our natural capacity to share genuine nurturing with others. We can deepen our experience of empathy and compassion, both giving and receiving capacity, and practice bringing them more fully into our relationships.
Hakomi for The Buddhist Minded
Hakomi is a gentle, yet powerful, mindfulness-based method of assisted self-discovery. It is founded on Buddhist principles such as mindfulness, non-violence, and mind-body holism. Like Buddhism, Hakomi’s, primary intention is to cultivate a compassionate state of mind. With an attitude of compassion and curiosity, we use mindfulness to explore our automatic habits and reactions to the world we live in. Through this exploration, we can discover some of our habitual ways of relating, which may create unnecessary suffering for ourselves and those around us. This new-found self-awareness can lead us towards healing, and more satisfaction in our relationships.
Hakomi offers the opportunity to bring the practice of mindfulness into relationship. During this workshop, we will apply mindfulness in pairs and small groups to assist each other towards self-discovery.
Being and Being With: The Therapeutic Relationship
As caregivers (psychotherapists, counselors, bodyworkers, doctors, social workers etc.), what fundamentally empowers our work is the relationship we have with others. In this introduction to Hakomi, we will use mindfulness and experiential exercises to focus on discovering what shapes our unconscious habits of relating. Bringing this to awareness creates the possibility of being more fully present and compassionate, in turn promoting a deeper awareness of what is happening for another, and creating a powerful context for working together.
Uncovering the Love That Is There: A Workshop For Couples
Intimate partnership with another can be one of life’s great gifts offering a depth of love, acceptance, connection, and support rarely found elsewhere. In the beginning it seems natural, easy to relate this way. Over time, old patterns, unconscious habits of relating, and the simple demands of daily life begin to intrude. Take this time out together. Learn more about yourself and offer that to your partner. Support the same process in them. Come away with more understanding of where you get “caught” with each other. Reconnect with your capacities for loving and being loved.
Hakomi for the prevention of ‘burn-out’
It is not uncommon for those working in the helping professions to experience ‘burn-out’ at some point in their career. There is evidence that good quality relationships among team members have a direct effect on workers’ well being. This workshop is designed to help anyone at risk of burn-out to re-frame their focus with clients and team members, reducing stress and increasing efficacy.
In this workshop, we will use mindfulness to discover and explore our unconscious beliefs and behaviour patterns that cause us unnecessary stress. We will also learn to meet ourselves and others with friendliness and compassion, restoring our ability to take in and offer support.
Personhood Series
The following workshops may be offered individually or as a series.
“The basic task of helping professionals in general, and psychotherapists in particular, is to become full human beings, and to inspire full human beingness in others who feel starved about their lives.” — Chogyam Trungpa, quoted in Awakening the Heart
The Practice of Loving Presence
Learn how to create and sustain a more compassionate state of mind, and to set a context for someone to have an experience of being witnessed this way. We do this through a series of experiential practices based on the Hakomi Method, using little experiments in mindfulness for self-study. Once the experience of compassion is stabilized, we practice interacting as compassionate givers and receivers, in pairs and small groups. Through this process, participants develop self-awareness, understanding and deep listening. For therapists, this practice is an alternative to stress and burnout, creating a context for gently powerful work.
Quieting The Mind
Learn how to sustain a calm, sensitive, present-centered state of mind. The basic idea is to become calm and to stay calm, while being present for others as well as for oneself. We will explore the habitual tendencies and unconscious ideas that can (and usually do) disrupt such a state. And we’ll use the Hakomi Method of little experiments in mindfulness to experience new alternatives to old patterns. This kind of sensitive, calm presence is the necessary state of mind for using loving presence and the Hakomi Method effectively in your personal life or in your professional work with clients.
Nonverbal Awareness
Learn to practice following and understanding the underlying meanings in such nonverbal communication as: facial expressions, bodily gestures, posture, tone of voice, energy, pacing, and other signals. In his bestseller, Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman reports that 90% of our emotional experience is communicated nonverbally. Nonverbal communication expresses who we are, our present experience, our personal story, and history, as well as what we expect and what we really need from each other.
Nourishing Communication
Having good intentions, we may still experience feelings of helplessness in the face of pain and suffering. There are effective ways to respond to others in distress, people who need comfort or reassurance, and to help them realize that some kind of nourishing experience is available. In this workshop we explore habits and attitudes around giving and receiving emotional nourishment… we’ll discover the ways we may be resisting or unaware of comfort when it is being offered to us. And we use various skills of the Hakomi Experiential Method to learn how to communicate clearly with compassion and to offer the kind of nourishment that someone in distress needs.
Islands Hakomi Educational Network 