{"id":32953,"date":"2011-01-07T09:00:52","date_gmt":"2011-01-07T14:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=32953"},"modified":"2011-01-07T10:29:59","modified_gmt":"2011-01-07T15:29:59","slug":"ron-kurtz-founder-of-hakomi-therapy-dies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/daily-astrology\/ron-kurtz-founder-of-hakomi-therapy-dies\/","title":{"rendered":"Ron Kurtz, Founder of Hakomi Therapy, Dies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ron Kurtz, the founder of Hakomi Therapy, died in Ashland, OR, Tuesday morning. He had what was described as a massive heart attack. He was 76 years old. About a year ago he had suffered another smaller heart attack and cut back his travel and seminar schedule, and concentrated on organizing his writings and recordings.<\/p>\n

\"Ron
Ron Kurtz, founder of Hakomi Therapy.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

He was a native of Brooklyn and educated at the University of Indiana. He began his first Hakomi Therapy practice in Albany, NY in the early 1970s, eventually settling in Oregon.<\/p>\n

Kurtz worked tirelessly to develop his therapy method, training thousands of people over the years. Kurtz’s first book was called Body-Centered Psychotherapy,<\/em> published in 1990. He co-authored The Body Reveals: An Illustrated Guide to the Psychology of the Body<\/em>, which came out in 1976 and more recently, The Body Speaks Its Mind<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Hakomi is one of several offshoots of Gestalt Therapy, which was created by Fritz Perls and others in the 1940s. While Gestalt has a confrontational quality, Hakomi is mellower, designed to penetrate the ego’s defenses rather than encounter them directly. Kurtz described the process as “applied Buddhism,” using mindfulness, nonviolence and the holistic relationship between ‘mind’ and ‘body’ — concepts that are often separated in the theories of more traditional forms of therapy. Though I don’t have his data available now, I’ve done Kurtz’s chart, and his therapy method reflects his deeply Piscean nature.<\/p>\n

The word Hakomi came to Kurtz in a dream one night during an early training session when an anonymous person handed him a small piece of paper on which it was written. At the time, the therapy process had no name, and he did not know what Hakomi meant. It actually shows up in many languages with different meanings; in Hopi it is said to translate to “who are you.”<\/p>\n

Compared to traditional talk therapy, Hakomi sessions are minimalist. Therapists are trained not to get involved in the client’s narrative, instead making contact with the emotional movements on deeper layers of consciousness. Hakomi also discourages the asking of questions, instead using gentle probes — or simple statements such as ‘you are welcome here’ — to which the client then responds intuitively.<\/p>\n

The method teaches therapists to track the client, monitoring their speech and body movements and assessing the ways in which their words and gestures relate to one another — a technique that has roots in Gestalt.<\/p>\n

He is survived by his wife, naturopath Terry Toth, and their grown daughter, Lily Kurtz.<\/p>\n

Toth said Kurtz’s family and work were the passions of his life. “He never stopped learning, expanding his theories and helping people, teaching them to heal,” she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ron Kurtz, the founder of Hakomi Therapy, died in Ashland, OR, Tuesday morning. He had what was described as a massive heart attack. He was 76 years old. About a year ago he had suffered another smaller heart attack and cut back his travel and seminar schedule, and concentrated on organizing his writings and recordings. … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32953"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32953"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32953\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32953"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32953"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32953"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}