A man tells me, in the first five minutes of a discovery call, that he has a 388-day streak on a meditation app and has never once noticed what his jaw does when his phone buzzes. He mentions the streak without pride and the jaw without complaint; what puzzles him is that the two facts can share a body. The puzzle has a plain answer: the app and I are using the same word for two different practices.
What do meditation apps mean by mindfulness?
Most apps teach a concentration practice. A voice in your earbuds asks you to sit, close your eyes, and rest attention on the breath, or on sounds, or on a scan down the body, and when attention wanders, as it does within seconds, you notice the wandering and bring it back. The return is the repetition, the way a lift is the repetition at a gym, and over months the returns add up to a steadier attention and, for many people, a calmer baseline, better sleep, and a reflex for pausing before reacting. The practice is solo by design. Nobody is in the room, the voice does not respond to you, and success is measured in minutes logged and days in a row.
What does Hakomi mean by mindfulness?
Hakomi is a mindfulness-based, body-centered method that Ron Kurtz began developing in the United States in the late 1970s, and its five stated principles are mindfulness, nonviolence, organicity, unity, and mind-body holism. In Hakomi, mindfulness is a state rather than a skill to build: a slowed, receptive, inward attention that you enter on purpose so that experience can be studied while it is happening, with another person present who is studying it alongside you.
In a session the two of us slow down. I might notice that when you mention a deadline your shoulders rise a quarter inch and your breath stops at the top, and instead of talking about the deadline, I will ask whether you would be willing to notice that from the inside. Then I may offer what Hakomi calls a little experiment: a sentence spoken to you, such as “you can take your time,” or a suggestion that you let the shoulders drop, or a hand placed where the breath stops, and we watch what happens. Sometimes nothing happens, and sometimes a memory arrives, or a tightening, or tears, or a laugh, or a clear sentence about what the shoulders have been holding. Whatever comes is the material, and the principle of nonviolence, which Hakomi also calls non-forcing, means I do not push toward any particular result.
The stance I take while this happens is often called loving presence, which means my attention is on you with warmth and curiosity and without an agenda, and the state you are in is not meant to be quiet or empty. Thoughts and feelings are welcome, since they are what we are studying.
Same word, different practice
| Meditation app | Mindfulness in Hakomi | |
|---|---|---|
| Who is present | You and a recorded voice | You and a coach, live |
| What attention is for | Building steadiness by returning to one object | Studying what is already happening in you |
| What happens when a feeling comes up | You note it and return to the breath | We turn toward it and may run a small experiment |
| Measure of progress | Minutes logged, streaks, a calmer baseline | Something learned about a specific pattern |
| Length of the state | Ten to twenty minutes, often daily | Minutes at a time inside a session |
| Goal | A skill you carry everywhere | Insight into how you organize experience |
Do you need to meditate first?
No. Some people come to coaching with years of sitting practice and some have never closed their eyes on purpose, and both can enter the state Hakomi works in, because I guide you into it at the start of every session and stay with you while you are there. The one habit I sometimes have to work around is a well-trained reflex of returning to the breath whenever something uncomfortable shows up. On an app that reflex is the practice; in a session it can carry you away from the exact thing we were about to study, so I may ask you to let a feeling stay a little longer than your training would.
Can you keep the app?
Yes, because the two practices do different jobs and do not compete. The app builds the capacity to settle; a session uses that capacity to look at something in particular. People who do both often tell me the app gets easier, since they are no longer confusing the instruction to let a thought go with an instruction to make it go.
A word about what this is not
I am a coach, not a therapist. Hakomi in my hands is a method for studying how you live in your body, and it is not a substitute for therapy for anyone in crisis, anyone with thoughts of harming themselves, or anyone who needs a diagnosis, medication, or insurance-covered care. If you are unsure which you need, the discovery call on the coaching page is where we sort that out, and I will say plainly what I hear.
The man with the streak kept the streak, and what his jaw does when the phone buzzes, a question the app was never built to ask, is the one we are still studying.