Lomi Somatic Work integrates particular Western psychological and bodywork perspectives with Eastern spiritual disciplines. The essential tools of this integration are presence, perception, contact and technique. The disciplines used to stimulate embodied awareness are meditation, conscious movement, principles from aikido, bodywork, Reichian work, and Gestalt.

The Lomi approach to body-oriented therapy stresses the importance of cultivating a personal meditation practice as well as a body discipline. Clear attention combined with conscious intention facilitates the essential qualities of awareness and compassion that drive the Lomi somatic therapy practice. The ability to remain centered provides the essential ingredient for real contact, intimacy and healing.

The intention of Lomi Work is to assist clients in their re-education and healing, not to make them dependent on our skills. Richard Strozzi Heckler writes: "Lomi Work proposes a unified experience where the principles of therapy, education and awareness become one. The inter-play and connections between physicality, emotionality, feeling/ intuition, and energetic states are used in this process. To facilitate this, emphasis on student participation is focal. Lomi Work is not something that is done to you, but rather with you. Emphasis is on awareness rather than cure or goal. There is no "right" way of being, only a vitality to contact, a process or flow to become aware of and to trust."