Presented by Shai Lavie, LMFT
The Hakomi method of experiential psychology offers an elegant, comprehensive, and highly effective approach to human change. Hakomi combines mindfulness, unique and powerful somatic techniques, and focus on present experience to access and transform deeply held, life-limiting core beliefs. Specific skills from the Hakomi method support us as therapists in several ways, such as to strengthen our ability to attune relationally with our clients through enhanced tracking of somatic experience, engage our clients’ internal experience more directly by contacting the affective core of their verbal and nonverbal communications, facilitate the deepening into core-level material in a way that is safe and nourishing for the client, and effectively use mindfulness skills to build our clients’ experience of a coherent self. In this presentation, besides focusing on these specific skills, we will develop familiarity with advanced mindfulness-centered techniques, including probes, take-overs, and experiments in mindfulness, which allow therapists to more deeply engage unconscious organizing material. Through the lecture and case examples, Shai Lavie will intersperse case examples to provide us with a sense of this work “from the inside out.”
Shai Lavie, MA, LMFT, is a Certified Hakomi Therapist, Teacher, and Trainer with a private practice in San Rafael, where he works with adults, adolescents, couples, and groups. His special interests are trauma, anxiety, spiritual crises, and phase of life issues. For over a decade, he has led psychotherapy groups and has offered Wilderness Rites of Passage programs for youth through Wilderness Reflection, the Stepping Stones Project, and the Marin School. He is an adjunct professor at Sofia University (formerly the Institute for Transpersonal Psychology), and he is on the faculty of John F. Kennedy University. He also teaches in the Mindfulness and Compassion Certificate Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and he is on the faculty of the Marin Mindfulness Institute.
Shai Lavie has trained therapists at many sites throughout the Bay Area, including Family Service Agency, Apple Family Works, CIP, New Perspectives/BACR, various chapters of CAMFT, Aldea Treatment Services, Dominican University, Chapman University, and Holos Institute. As a speaker, he has offered parent groups at many local schools, including Parent University (Marin County Office of Education), Mill Valley Middle School, San Rafael High School, Drake High School, Branson School, the Bay School, and Marin Academy. To learn more about Shai Lavie's approach to integrating mindfulness-centered techniques into treatment, check out his articles in the Sept/Oct 2011 issues of Psychotherapy Networker (“In Search of a Lost Self”) and The Therapist (“Mindfulness-Based Family Therapy”).
CAMFT