Glossary
Hakomi Integrative Somatics
Using hands-on bodywork, body awareness, and movement, Hakomi Integrative Somatics enables people to discover the habitual, automatic attitudes (both physical and psychological), by which they generate patterns of experience. Particularly helpful in working with the effects of trauma and abuse, emotional pain, and limiting belief systems, this gentle therapy teaches clients to follow the inherently intelligent processes of the body and mind.
Clients are educated in the nuances of inner body sensations and learning to track the ever-changing flow of wordless information that is the language of the body. It is precisely this awareness that becomes a powerful healing tool, as it naturally expands the “somatic sense of self” and heals the various forms of dissociation from the body.
Hands-on bodywork is used experimentally to help clients gain awareness of inner experience, specifically inner body sensation and patterns, emotions, images, memories, or thoughts. Unconscious attitudes are brought to consciousness where they can be examined, understood, and changed. By working physically and psychologically, the transformative shift can take root on both levels simultaneously.
Hakomi Therapy
A body-centered psychotherapy, Hakomi Therapy was started in the mid-1970s by American Ron Kurtz. It uses body tensions and sensations to access information about the limiting beliefs, patterns, and habits of the individual.
Hakomi bodywork includes hands-on manipulation to access and change these beliefs. Treatments vary to meet individual needs.
Hanna Somatic Education
This system of sensory-awareness and neuromuscular education makes it possible for a participant to recognize, release, and reverse chronic pain patterns resulting from injury, stress, repetitive motion, or habituated postures. Hands-on methods teach how to relieve tension quickly, lengthen and relax muscles, reduce pain, and regain comfort.
Combining the hands-on methods (clinical sessions with a practitioner) with somatic exercises (done by oneself) expands the range of benefits. Click here to find a Hanna Somatic practitioner.
Hara
The source of health, vitality, and power, the hara is the physical center of the body. Bounded by the lower rib cage and the pelvic bowl, the hara includes all the vital organs of the body, with the exception of the heart and lungs—but even these have a reflexive, energetic presence here.
The hara is the center of “me”-ness. The first three chakras, which deal with basic survival needs and ego/personality development, coalesce and interact here, culminating in a sense of individuality. It is an emotional center.
(Adapted from “Hara,” by Kondañña, Massage & Bodywork, June/July 2001.) See dantien.
Healing Sounds
This practice uses sound to create balance and alignment in the physical body, the energy centers (chakras), and/or the etheric fields. It is a vibration applied by an instrument or the human voice and can be understood as a field of energy medicine. The primary question in this field is: What are the correct resonant frequencies of the body?
Healing Touch
Developed by Janet Mentgen, RN, Healing Touch is an energy-based therapeutic approach to healing. Healing Touch uses touch to influence the energy system, thus affecting physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health, as well as healing.
The goal of Healing Touch is to restore harmony and balance in the energy system to help the person to self-heal. The quality and impact of the healing is influenced by the relationship between the giver and receiver. Click here to find a Healing Touch practitioner.
Healing Touch For Animals
Developed by Carol Komitor and adapted from the Healing Touch program, Healing Touch for Animals (HTA) is an energy-medicine modality combining philosophies, techniques, and applications to promote energy balance and healing of animals. Also called the Komitor Healing Method, HTA works on physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual levels and is used to help treat injuries, illnesses, surgeries, wounds, behavioral problems, and stress-related issues.
Hellerwork
Movement education and deep-tissue bodywork are the major components of Hellerwork, named for founder Joseph Heller. Emphasizing vertical realignment of the body and release of chronic stress and tension, Hellerwork involves 11 sessions of 1.5 hours each. In each session, one hour is devoted to bodywork and 30 minutes to movement therapy. The therapist also uses dialogue to explore emotional factors that may be contributing to tension in the client’s physical make-up.
As a preventative technique, the goal of Hellerwork is to produce permanent, corrective change in alignment and movement. Click here to find a Hellerwork practitioner.
HEMME Approach
Developed by Dave Leflet, HEMME (which stands for History, Evaluation, Modalities, Manipulation, and Exercise) is a soft-tissue therapy designed for practitioners in a clinical setting. It relieves pain by restoring alignment and improving myofascial dysfunction. HEMME is a conglomeration of the most proven techniques found in physical medicine, osteopathy, chiropractic work, and physical therapy, and works successfully in treating chronic low back pain and soft-tissue injury.
Holistic Medicine
Holistic medicine recognizes that the mind, spirit, lifestyle, environment, and other aspects of a person’s existence, significantly affect the functioning of the physical body. Thus, in evaluating and treating illness and prescribing preventative intervention, this approach treats the whole person, addressing more than just the symptoms or disease. Holistic practitioners may utilize a combination of conventional treatments along with alternative therapies.
Holographic Memory Release
This subtle technique, developed by Charles Daily, DC, allows the practitioner to quickly locate specific holographic touch points that are referenced to the individual’s on-going process. As in reflexology, where the entire body is represented on the foot, these touch points correlate to whole-body microsystems. Through very light and specific digital contacts, a piezoelectric effect is created within the crystalline connective tissue memory system for instantaneous memory reframing. This self-assembly process enhances subtle self-observation within the individual. It increases individual somatic awareness and releases self-limiting beliefs and tension patterns that have been stored within the body/mind continuum.
A 15-minute HMR session spontaneously generates coherent waves of cellular resonance in the connective tissue matrix and releases information logjams that can rob the individual of necessary vital capacity.
Holographic Nature Of Healing
The Holographic Nature of Healing is a year-long training program that combines hands-on energy work with verbal process work. The training’s purpose is to add skill to those who are already working energetically and to assist in providing supervised sessions with feedback in a group setting. There are three focus areas: the chakra system, hands-on healing technique, and quantum psychology for process work.
Holotropic Breathwork
Holotropic means "moving toward wholeness." Developed by Dr. Stanislav Grof, a psychiatrist working with people in uncommon states of consciousness, and by Christina Grof, a transpersonal teacher, this is a simple, yet powerful technique for self-exploration and healing based on combined insights from modern consciousness research, depth psychology, and perennial spiritual practices.
The method activates uncommon states of consciousness that mobilize the spontaneous healing potential of the psyche. Sustained effective breathing, evocative music, focused energy work, and mandala drawing are components of this subjective journey. Virtually all ancient and native traditions recognize the psychological and spiritual healing potential of states of consciousness that differ from what we call “ordinary.”
Holotropic Breathwork is a powerful method of self-exploration and healing. This work can be useful for artists wishing to facilitate their creativity, persons seeking a deep level of healing, or those seeking to explore their inner self and/or the transpersonal dimensions. It may lead to a spiritual opening and transformation.
Homeopathy
This alternative healing method was developed by Samuel Hahnemann in the late 1700s, based on a “like cures like” principle: that is, if a substance can cause symptoms in a healthy person, then it can stimulate self-healing of similar symptoms in a sick person. Clients are given minute amounts of natural substances to stimulate the body to cure itself.
Hoshino Therapy
Developed by Tomezo Hoshino, a Japanese-born Argentinian, Hoshino Therapy is a nonintrusive massage and movement system to relieve and prevent musculoskeletal pain and restore vitality. It recognizes 250 vital acupuncture pressure points directly over the muscles, tendons, and ligaments that relate to the biomechanical functioning of the body. Pressure and body warmth are applied by the first joint of the thumb and with full-hand contact to reverse the hardening of the soft tissues. Therapy is combined with daily exercises called Hoshino Action.
Huma Transpersonal Bodywork
A method of bodywork that integrates subtle, articulate touch and verbal communication by combining the focus of physical and psychological health found in Western body-based tradition (Rosen Method is part of the foundation) with the deeper self, or inner guide, found in Eastern traditions.
Human Energy Dynamics
This therapy, though similar to reiki, uses the English language instead of symbols. It involves setting up and normalizing polarities, as well as bringing universal energy into structures of the body. It is the mental manipulation of human energy to affect changes in one’s self and in others.
Huna Kane
This Hawaiian technique espouses that emotions and experiences are trapped in the fibers of each muscle group and organ in the body. Through a rhythmic massage technique where the practitioner “dances” with the forearm softly across their client’s muscles while informing the client of the particular emotion being addressed (i.e., guilt, fear, anger, etc.), Huna Kane allows clients to reexperience that emotion and to clear it from their bodies. From this place of clarity, awareness, balance, peace, and harmony become more accessible.
Huna Kane is practiced on fully-clothed individuals lying on a mat on the floor.
Hydrotherapy
Although ancient Greece and Rome both adopted the beliefs that water had healing properties, it was the Romans who first integrated hydrotherapy into their social life, building temples and baths near natural springs. Father Sebastian Kneipp from Worshofen, Bavaria, was the father of modern-day hydrotherapy in Germany. Various hydrotherapy massage techniques exist and are generally utilized by massage/bodywork practitioners, physical therapists, physicians, and spa technicians. These include underwater massage, herbal baths, thalassotherapy, Kneipp therapy, Vichy treatments, Scotch hoses, and Swiss showers. Click here to find a Hydrotherapy practitioner.
Hypnotherapy
The use of hypnosis, trance states, suggestion, or altered states of consciousness to facilitate therapeutic goals, including learning and practicing new skills for alleviating symptoms or changing behavior.