Hakomi is a proven, integrative therapeutic practice that combines body based, somatic psychotherapy, mindfulness, and principles of non-violence, opening doors to powerful and lasting transformation. It comes to us by way of a genius in the realm of psychological, somatic and emotional healing, Ron Kurtz who began teaching the method in the 1970s.

Alan and Elana are both so happy and inspired to offer this modality. In each session we gently encourage the client to let go into states of mindfulness where present experience and the wisdom of the body organically guide us into the psychological and emotional material that is ready surface. Respectfully held in loving presence we can study the deeply held beliefs and begin to release what no longer serves.

"The curiosity, warmth, presence, and compassion of a mindful therapist, what we call “Loving Presence,” creates a safe, non-judgmental atmosphere for clients to explore themselves in new ways.

They are viewed as being whole, intelligent, creative, and resilient, rather than as problems that need to be fixed. The body is a trusted source of information on this journey, while mindfulness guides us to a deeper understanding and creates a discrete and healing state of mind that allows us to work in unique ways.

We use “experimental” processes in mindfulness to gently unearth our implicit beliefs and the hidden barriers to getting more of what we desire and need from life."

"Hakomi integrates the perennial wisdom of Buddhism and Taoism with modern scientific findings in psychology and neurology on how the brain changes itself through experience rather than reflection."

- Halko Weiss, co-founder of the Hakomi Institute -

Just to give you a sense of how my (Alan's) experience might be useful and helpful for you, I offer you a little of my background. I have been a practitioner of meditation since the age of fourteen. I went to India for a year as a young man, and spent much of that time with Nisargadatta Maharaj, one of the foremost Advaitist (Non Dualist) masters of the 20th century. I then went on to work with "A Course in Miracles" intensively for several years, while I was being initiated from within, to deeper levels of radical self love, forgiveness and awareness through gifts of grace, revealed as a series of samadhi states or "Holy Instants." When I was twenty five I began a twenty year long relationship with an Arapaho elder and medicine man, Henry Tyler, who adopted me along with my growing family. I have five children and three grandchildren (and one more on the way!) I am infinitely grateful for Henry's indigenous wisdom teachings and lineage, which initiated us, gradually and powerfully, into the crucial understanding of interdependence and the immense potency of ceremony. The most impactful thing for me in this training was Henry's devotion and love of the sacredness of all Life, which held us all and gave us a taste of what it means to have our hearts broken open in reverence. Around the time of Henry's death, I was auspiciously connected with an awakened spiritual master and mentor, Lama Tharchin Rinpoche a supremely skillful Lama in the Dzogchen Varjrayana lineage. Rinpoche accepted me as a student and for the past twenty eight years I have been soaked in the devastatingly humbling and infinitely resourcing nectar of his wisdom, skill and lineage.

I offer a safe, non-sectarian space of loving presence, to collaboratively explore the gifts and the challenges of this most important relationship... our love (and sometimes hate) affair with the Great Mystery, the Supreme Being, The Self, our Buddha Nature, ordinary mind, or whatever you wish to call That. We do this through inquiring together into your deepest yearning and the practice of radical listening. Together we can explore the possibilities of solace, guidance, forgiveness, healing, connection, compassion, reverence and awakening to inherent wholeness. We can design ways to support your implementation of skillful methods for this process to create and sustain a daily ceremonial and/or meditation practice. I am deeply familiar with many of the most potent methods available. You are an infinitely precious facet of the Universe. Together we can encourage ourselves and each other to uncover and remember what's actually true about who we are.

Everything sacred begins with a circle of motion. — Glenn Haybittle

Ceremonial Song Circles - are alchemical community building events employing elements of ceremony and easy to learn and sing chants and songs that combine to invoke a deeper time and space where participants can feel at once more connected to their depths and connected to others on the journey. Individual trials can be transmuted in the group dynamic through song into sacred offerings. Our deeply embedded imprint to sacred circles links us up with ancestral knowings when right relationship to self, other, community, spirit and earth was a way of life. We raise our voices together in joy, in sorrow, in yearning, in not-knowing and are unified and uplifted in this communal act of melody and harmony.

Invite Alan and Elana to present the opening invocation for your conference, retreat or event. We will create the sacred and conscious container that holds the intention and fruition of and for the event. Using ceremony, intention and music, we will invoke the spirit and heart that will inspire and carry participants into and through to the end of the event.

In our western culture, we have lost most of our rites of passage and soul transition ceremonies, yet the need is still very much alive in us. These ceremonies are not predesigned. We will collaborate with you based on your particular resonance for any symbols or processes that hold meaning for you and your loved ones in. We create ceremonies to include secular and spiritual models of honoring the event according to your affinity.

We human beings have inherently built in thresholds of development. From birth though early childhood, to being a "big kid" who begins to recognize her/his agency and responsibility, to when a girl becomes capable of starting new life in her womb and a boy becomes capable of the power to seed that life, and the vast repercussions thereof, to entering actual adulthood when one starts the journey of relating with one's life mission and begins to grapple with one's powerlessness in the face of archetypal and collective forces, to the immensely transformative initiation of becoming a parent and so on.

Ceremony and "rites" have the exceptional capacity to accommodate the vast potential and potency these thresholds have to initiate us. Carl Jung lamented how much we have lost our connection with what he called the "Transcendent Function." This is food for the soul. With ceremony we can reconnect with this crucial aspect of our spiritual anatomy. With ceremony we can choose to walk through and commemorate these doorways into a new stage of our lives consciously, with awareness, dignity and integrity, and with the support and love of our family and community.

Some of these life threshold events which can be celebrated and honored with ceremony are marriage, coming of age, parenthood/birth of a child, loss of a loved one (grief ritual) birthdays, midlife, becoming an elder etc. We also design and conduct ceremonies for cosmological events such as solstices and equinoxes. We love to help couples design their wedding ceremonies and as we are also musicians, when we conduct a wedding, we can include an offering of live music (guitar and voice.) If you give us enough notice we can even learn a song of your choice!

I love this thing called "men's work!" Whenever I speak to women about this work and they begin to really get what we're talking about, they bow with intense gratitude and say "thank you!" I think that's because men and women know how much confusion and suffering is perpetuated by men not having been initiated into the world of sacred masculinity. In men's work we are bringing clarity and wisdom to what masculinity actually is. First and foremost we support each other in looking at where our unconscious entitlement and denial, aka shadow, has wreaked havoc in our lives and in the lives of our loved ones and others. Crucial understanding begins to emerge as we study the Jungian archetypes of sacred masculinity and recognize how these function on a day to day level. As toxic shame is released, it is replaced by healthy self esteem. As a “power over” paradigm is replaced with experiences of the joy of equality collaboration and reciprocity, the meaning of “manhood” is transformed. Ultimately men become safer to themselves, to each other, to their loved ones and to everyone.

The ease and joy of resting in our own true nature is closer than our own eyes and our own breath. As we learn to relax the incessant impulse to DO, we can spontaneously and effortlessly find a brand new experience of what it is to be alive. There are countless methods for finding this pristine, open, heart centered dimension of our being. With the care and clarity of a skilled guide we can save ourselves years of struggle. We will collaborate with you and your particular idiosyncratic constitution and your needs and goals to support you in finding a fun and joyful daily practice. Learning to find rest and refuge in our own being is an infinitely rewarding endeavor!

Dream interpretation is one of my favorite things to do as I love to immerse myself in the endlessly creative and peculiar images and symbols the unconscious comes up with to try to get through to us. I read a lot of fantasy and sci-fi growing up, and some dreams are not all that different!

And yet, is it with great reverence and sobriety (as well as humor) that I approach a dream. A dream is a communication from a knowing part of your unconscious self that wants you to see or to understand something that you are currently turned away from, otherwise you would be conscious of it and not dreaming about it!

The dream presents you with a series of vignettes, populated with people and images, some familiar, many not. People say and do things in dreams that they would never do or say. Scenarios unfold with a peculiar logic all their own that is impossible to make sense of in ordinary waking terms. With a guide, you can learn to decode the language of symbols, archetypes, and complexes that populate dreams.

I am available to facilitate your dream group, where I will implement an effective protocol for dream analysis in a group.

I am also available to consult with you, one on one, on specific dream interpretations. Ongoing dream interpretation work can be combined with counseling such that our perception of the inner world which the dream images reveal can continue to deepen. Our capacity to make sense of our lives is imbued with this deeper fullness and understanding. We don’t experience being divided against ourselves, a common occurrence when the distance between conscious awareness of the persona and the unconscious gets to great. This closing the gap leads to greater feelings of wholeness and well-being and a general lessening of internal conflict and anxiety.