What Is Hakomi Therapy And Why It Works So Well for Midlife Women
- Michaela Kozlik
- Oct 15, 2024
- 6 min read
Updated: 12 hours ago
Gentle, body-centered approach to the questions that midlife is asking you to finally sit with.
By Michaela Kozlik, LCPC · Therapist specializing in perimenopause anxiety, burnout & trauma | Illinois
Something has shifted. You can feel it even if you can't name it.
Maybe the roles you've played for decades don't fit the way they used to. Maybe the life you built feels like it belongs to someone different. Maybe you're more unsure than you've been in years about where you're headed and who you're becoming.
And maybe underneath all of it there's a question you keep coming back to:
Who am I now? And what do I actually want from here?
If you're in midlife and perimenopause and those questions are getting louder, you're not having a crisis. You are in a transition. And it is one of the most significant ones a woman can move through.
What you need is not a fix. It's a space to actually explore what's coming up.
That's where Hakomi comes in.
What Is Hakomi Therapy?
Hakomi is a body-centered, mindfulness-based approach to psychotherapy. It was developed in the 1970s by Ron Kurtz and draws on principles from Buddhism, Taoism, neuroscience, and somatic psychology.
The name Hakomi comes from a Hopi word meaning roughly how do you stand in relation to these many realms? Which is, honestly, exactly the question midlife asks.
Here's what makes Hakomi different from traditional talk therapy.
In most talk therapy, we focus on what you think and what happened — the narrative, the story, the analysis of the pattern. That work is valuable.
But a lot of what most needs to heal doesn't live in the thinking mind. It's in the body and the nervous system. In the automatic, below-conscious-awareness responses that developed long before language was available to make sense of them.
Hakomi works with all of that.
Rather than talking about your experience, Hakomi invites you to slow down and become mindful of how your experience is actually living in your body right now in this moment, in this session. What sensation arises when you think about a particular challenge? What does your body do when a certain word comes up? What is the tightness in your chest trying to say that words haven't quite captured?
Why Hakomi Works So Well for Midlife and Perimenopause
Midlife is not just an emotional transition. It is a neurological one.
As I explain in You're Not Losing Your Mind. You're in Perimenopause — the hormonal shifts of perimenopause directly affect the brain's emotional regulation and the nervous system's capacity for suppression. The coping strategies that kept difficult material at a manageable distance start to become less reliable. Things surface that haven't surfaced before.
And as I wrote in What Chronic Stress Is Actually Doing to Your Body — the body is carrying so much during this season.
For women navigating the identity questions of midlife: the who am I now, what do I actually want questions, Hakomi is particularly powerful because it helps you access what is true at a felt level. Not just what you think you should want. What you actually want.
What Hakomi Actually Looks Like in a Session
I want to give you a real sense of this because it sounds abstract until you understand what it actually is in practice.
Hakomi sessions are slower than you might expect. There is more silence. More pausing. More moments of just staying with something rather than immediately moving past it or explaining it away.
Your therapist might guide you into a gentle state of mindfulness — not meditation exactly, but a inward attention. A slowing down enough to notice what's actually happening inside you right now, rather than what you think about what's happening.
From there, you might be invited to notice a sensation or your breath that shifts when a certain topic comes up.
These sensations are not random. In Hakomi, they are information. Clues that lead toward the deeper feelings and beliefs that are shaping your experience, often beliefs that were formed long before you had words for them.
What This Looks Like for Real Midlife Challenges
Here are some of the specific ways Hakomi shows up in the work I do with midlife women:
When grief is rising. As I wrote in Grief and Perimenopause — perimenopause is saturated with loss. The body changing. Children growing up. Roles shifting. A future self being renegotiated. In Hakomi, rather than talking around the grief, we stay with it and let it move through.
When the identity question is loud. You might come into a session knowing intellectually that you've outgrown something, but not being able to feel your way toward what comes next. Hakomi can help you access that felt sense of what really matters to you.
When the anxiety won't settle. As I explain in You Understand Your Anxiety. So Why Can't You Make It Stop?, anxiety that is rooted in early relational experience and stored in the nervous system doesn't respond to reasoning. Hakomi works directly with the body-level activation helping the nervous system gradually, experientially learn that it is safe to settle, rather than just being told that it should.
When the rage is present. As I wrote in Your Anger Is Not the Problem. Perimenopause Rage & What It's Really Trying to Say, the anger of perimenopause is not random. It has been building for years underneath a woman who learned that her anger was not welcome. Hakomi creates a space to finally let that anger be present.
When you've been the one who holds it together. The fawning, the automatic prioritizing of everyone else lives in the body as chronic contraction. As learned smallness. Hakomi helps you notice where you hold that contraction and begin, slowly and safely, to release it.
The Principles That Make Hakomi Different
Hakomi is built on a set of principles that I find deeply resonant with the work I do with midlife women.
Mindfulness. We work in a state of gentle present-moment awareness — not analyzing the past from a distance, but noticing what is alive right now.
Nonviolence. The approach is always gentle. We never push past what the nervous system is ready for. We follow the body's lead rather than forcing an agenda.
Mind-body integration. The body and the psyche are not separate. What lives in the body is as important than what lives in the mind.
Organicity. There is an inherent wisdom in each person that knows what needs to heal and how. The therapist's job is not to fix or direct but to create the conditions where that wisdom can emerge.
Unity. Everything is connected. The pattern in your relationship connects to the pattern in your body connects to the belief you formed at seven years old. Hakomi helps you see and work with those connections.
These principles create a therapeutic experience that feels fundamentally different from most therapy women have had before. Less like being analyzed and more like being accompanied.
Hakomi and Therapy Intensives
One of the reasons I love combining Hakomi with therapy intensives is that Hakomi genuinely needs time to do its deepest work.
In a 50-minute session, by the time we've created enough safety, slowed down enough, and followed a body sensation somewhere meaningful, the session is often over. We've touched something without being able to stay with it long enough for it to fully move.
In a half-day or full-day intensive, we have the time to slow all the way down and follow where the body leads. We can open something and stay with it through the activation, through the processing, through the settling, so that you leave feeling integrated rather than just opened up.
As I describe in What Happens in a Full Day Therapy Intensive — Hour by Hour — the arc of a full day creates the conditions for Hakomi to go somewhere that weekly sessions rarely reach.
You Don't Have to Face Perimenopause Alone
Midlife is asking you big questions. Perimenopause is making those questions impossible to keep avoiding. You don't have to answer them alone, through willpower, or by talking yourself into feeling differently.
Hakomi offers a different way that meets you in your body, in your actual experience, and accompanies you toward something more honest, more grounded, and more genuinely yours than what came before.
That work is available to you. Virtually, from wherever you are in Illinois.
Schedule a free consultation here and let's talk about whether Hakomi therapy, therapy intensive, or a combination of both is the right fit for where you are right now.
📞 773-343-5005 🌐 inpsychotherapy.com 📧 Michaela@inpsychotherapy.com
📍 Virtual therapy for women across all of Illinois
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