Transforming Trauma: Episode 172

“We don’t fight defenses; we support them. Nonviolence and organic unfolding are radical acts in trauma healing.” – Shai Lavie

On this episode of Transforming Trauma, CTTC Senior Trainer Brad Kammer welcomes his colleague, old friend, and Hakomi Trainer Shai Lavie, LMFT to discuss the intersection of individual and collective healing, relational and somatic practices, and how they are supporting therapists to work with clients’ multi-layered suffering.

Brad invites Shai to trace the arc of his work from early encounters with Hakom, to training to become a Hakomi Therapist and Trainer, to integrating Somatic Experiencing in support of a more regulated and embodied approach to depth work. Together they discuss how mindfulness can support and enhance relational co-regulation, and how important it is to hold the larger relational context that includes communal and collective healing.

Shai shares that honoring protective strategies is not a detour, but the path itself. They both agree that the goal is not to conquer one’s defenses, but to befriend them so that they can support new ways of being in the world.

Shai names a quiet pivot that changed everything for him. He shares a story of Ron Kurtz’s (founder of Hakomi Therapy) formative moment in a bioenergetics workshop, when instead of pushing against an arching back, Kurtz placed supportive hands beneath it. The body softened. The story became a north star for Hakomi’s principles of nonviolence and organic unfolding. Shai states, “there is an intelligence in what looks like resistance.”

Mindfulness, for Shai, is not a solo sport. He frames it as co-regulated awareness, echoing Daniel Siegel’s view that the neural circuits for sensing inner experience and being accompanied by another strongly overlap. In practice that means helping clients feel difficult sensations while noticing they are not alone and in a supportive relationship. From there, the work often drops through what Shai describes as a parabola that becomes an hourglass. At the waist of that hourglass, something opens. Archetypal material, ancestral threads, and a sense of belonging can surface without being forced or named prematurely.

Shai also reflects on the cultural shadow. He challenges the moral superiority that can sneak into helping spaces and the ways growth culture can accidentally marginalize the very parts that keep us safe. His antidote is context and compassion. He shares that he reflects to clients the reasons a protective part exists, and genuine care for why it had to. Then he observes as the system re-organizes. Shai and Brad reflect on the similarities between Hakomi and NARM®, two depth-oriented, relational psychotherapeutic approaches.

Transforming Trauma is grateful to Shai for reminding us that healing is both deeply personal and irreducibly communal. The future he points toward is not more technique, but better relationship: within the self, with one another, and with the wider field we share.

 

GUEST BIO
Shai Lavie, M.A., LMFT, is a mindfulness-based psychotherapist in private practice in San Anselmo, California. He earned his M.A. in Counseling Psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies (1995) and has been a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist since 1999.

 

Lavie is a Certified Hakomi Trainer with the Hakomi Institute of California and Hakomi Mallorca and is also certified in Somatic Experiencing, Peter Levine’s body-based trauma method. He has taught mindfulness and psychotherapy at Sofia University, CIIS, JFK University, and the Marin Mindfulness Institute, and has trained therapists throughout California.

A longtime Vipassana meditation practitioner, he taught in the Teen and Family Program at Spirit Rock Meditation Center and led wilderness rites of passage for youth through Wilderness Reflections and other organizations. His writings include articles in Psychotherapy Networker and The Therapist, as well as a chapter in Hakomi Mindfulness-Centered Somatic Psychotherapy: A Comprehensive Guide to Theory and Practice (W. W. Norton, 2015). Lavie lives in Fairfax, California, with his wife and daughter.