Certification is Optional
- Working Professionals are vital to the Tau learning system, with four seats reserved for them in the 2025 Winter Term, including one for an Indigenous community member.
- These seats require payment (no internships) and include the full core curriculum plus priority in specialty classes.
- The 18-course core curriculum involves 150 hours of in-person training and 150 hours of self-directed learning to meet IMDHA certification requirements.
- Working Professionals can opt out of IMDHA certification. This allows them to attend monthly training days without completing the required reports.
Working Professionals are key stakeholders in the Tau learning system, which is reflected in the wide range of options available to them. In the 2025 Winter Term, four seats are reserved for working professionals, with one designated for an Indigenous community member. Here are the specific details for Working Professionals, with a focus on the inclusion of neurodiverse adults and healing touch methodologies.
All seats require payment and include the full core curriculum plus priority seating in specialty classes. The 18-course core curriculum requires 150 hours of in-person training and 150 hours of self-directed learning to meet the certification requirements of the International Medical and Dental Hypnotherapists Association (IMDHA).
All Tau interns are required to be in the certification stream, but Working Professionals can choose not to certify under IMDHA. Practically, this means that Working Professionals can participate in the monthly training days without completing the oral and written reports that are part of the self-directed learning. The remainder of this post is directed at Working Professionals who choose not to certify under IMDHA.
First, you can still obtain your Community Wellness Worker Certification by completing an additional 5 hours of community service per term, on top of the 5 hours required for everyone. There is an additional charge per course per term for this certification if separated from IMDHA certification. Details are in the highlighted links.
Second, it is important to understand the difference between learning Therapeutic Trance and Hypnosis. Everyone in Tau Training programs can expect a monthly renewal of self and spirit. Therapeutic Trance training focuses on working together for mutual betterment in a group trance setting led by the ‘teacher’. When we state that all hypnosis is consensual because all hypnosis is self-hypnosis, as practitioners, we lean into this statement by using all opportunities to work with other learners in safe and supportive environments. This format of lifelong learning is self-nurturing and important for ongoing development and self-identity. Make it your monthly day of self-care.
Third, the paid seats are essential to a ‘decade of decolonization’. No one can escape the influence dependency has on any relationship. In personal relationships, these dependencies are essential to wellness; in the relationship between not-for-profits and their funders, a more critical eye is called for. However funder relationships affect our programs, the balance factor is always the same – revenue diversification.
Selling our courses at retail prices allows us to run a more robust program for everyone by ensuring that our base costs are covered. This enables us to direct external funding to provide deeper training throughout the curriculum and a broader range of specialty topics, courses, and lectures each term. Working Professionals registering in our paid seats make this possible. Thank you for considering doing so!
Most importantly, participating in our courses connects you to a community of practice for those in healthcare occupations and professions that centers on integrative, community-based wellness. Through multiple opportunities to network and collaborate, find a future for yourself that meets your needs both immediately and in the long term.
Who do you want to be when you turn 40, 50, 60, 70? Do you see yourself as a respected healer in your community of care? If so, this highly adaptable system of training and skill acquisition will meet your needs and expectations.
Neurodivergent adults
Neurodivergent adults can gain numerous benefits from the Tau learning system’s training programs. Here are some key advantages:
- Inclusive Learning Environment: The training is designed to be inclusive, accommodating various learning styles and needs. This ensures that neurodiverse individuals can engage fully and comfortably.
- Personalized Learning Paths: With options to participate in monthly training days without the pressure of certification, neurodiverse adults can tailor their learning experience to match their personal preferences and strengths.
- Supportive Community: The focus on integrative, community-based wellness fosters a supportive environment where neurodiverse individuals can connect with peers and mentors who understand and respect their unique perspectives.
- Healing Touch Methodologies: Incorporating healing touch methodologies can be particularly beneficial for neurodiverse adults, offering therapeutic techniques that promote relaxation, reduce stress, and enhance overall well-being.
- Skill Development: The training helps develop valuable skills in therapeutic trance and hypnosis, which can be applied in various professional and personal contexts, enhancing both career prospects and personal growth.
- Flexibility: The program’s flexibility allows neurodiverse adults to balance their training with other commitments, making it easier to manage their time and energy effectively.
- Community Wellness Worker Certification: By completing additional community service hours, neurodiverse adults can achieve certification that recognizes their contributions and skills, boosting their confidence and professional credentials.
Skills development
Practitioners develop their skills in healing touch through a structured and comprehensive training program. Here are the key steps involved:
- Foundational Courses: Practitioners start with foundational courses that introduce the basics of energy healing, including the principles and techniques of healing touch. These courses often cover topics like energy anatomy, the human biofield, and the role of intention in healing.
- Hands-On Practice: Training includes extensive hands-on practice, where practitioners learn to perform techniques such as light touch, scanning, and non-touch methods. This practice helps them develop sensitivity to energy imbalances and proficiency in correcting them.
- Advanced Training: As practitioners progress, they take advanced courses that delve deeper into specific techniques and applications. The program integrates current practices in hypnosis and Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) to provide the best possible outcome for both practitioner and client.
- Certification Programs: Many practitioners pursue certification through recognized programs like Registered Hypnotherapist or Board Certification. These programs offer a series of courses that build on each other, culminating in a certification that validates the practitioner’s skills and knowledge.
- Mentorship and Supervision: Throughout their training, practitioners often work under the guidance of experienced mentors. This mentorship provides valuable feedback and support, helping practitioners refine their techniques and develop confidence.
- Continuing Education: To maintain their certification and stay current with new developments, practitioners engage in continuing education. This can include attending workshops, conferences, and advanced training sessions.
- Self-Care and Personal Development: Practitioners are encouraged to practice self-care and personal development. This includes regular self-healing practices, meditation, and other activities that enhance their own well-being and effectiveness as healers.
By following these steps, practitioners will develop a deep understanding of healing touch and become skilled in using it to support the well-being of others.
Whatever context brings you into contact with people seeking help with their problems, throughout and after there is a need for a better understanding of the counseling toolkit and the three main types of tools, unconditional positive regard, empathy, and the part of the work, congruency.
Being of Tau, or being a Tau Person is about chosing how you want to be in this world, today and a thousand years hence.
What the world gives in return is a deepened ability to “Bring to each the medicine that is uniquely theirs”
Counseling is the core of Therapeutic Arts
We host a arts and crafts program that provides challenge in a range of interests regardless of gender or generation.
Eus-stress, is the experience of positive (tau) challenge that is nurturing for humans of all ages.
So that we can be prepared to offer a more robust program we needed to bring a focus to the activities, as such we chose puppets.
The CWW program includes puppet making and puppetry as our arts component.
We weave them into our wellness work.
Our current area of interest are young children who are nonverbal.
Details about the arts part of the work are found below.
The ShoBoat
The centrepiece of our program is undoubtably our stage – a beautiful 20 foot Viking Longboat/Chinese Junk hybrid. With space for half a dozen performers inside and more that a few puppet surprises built in, our stage boat is sure to be a worthy vessel on our journey of self-discovey together.
Building Puppets
Members of our circle of elders are currently working away of a collection of customizable puppet bodies that can be dressed up and modified as easily as building a LEGO set using assessories mounted on velcro. Betwix’t members can modify and costomize one of these puppet bodies to create a puppet avatar that reflects some aspect or charactristics they would like to portray, or, if they are really ambitious, they can take on building their own puppet from scratch (with help and guidance from us,, if they want it.)
Puppeteering
A core part of the philosophy underpinning Betwix’t is the value of theatre and performance as a means of overcoming challenges and fears. When we perform in front of a live audience, we must be a little vulnerable and emotionally engage with our audience and fellow performers. We have to get the correct timing and delivery of things, and act in a coordinated manner with other people’s bodies in physical space. It requires us to overcome momentary anxieties to become capable of acting freely under pressure. But, of course, sometimes that’s a lot for a person new to performing to take on. Sometimes it helps to have a little puppet dude act as an intermidiary or safety barrier between yourself and the audience.
Similarly, puppet therapy can help people express emotions they might have difficulty with otherwise, and the use of puppets for the exploration of grief and trauma is well established.
The use of puppets in Betwix’t is to open participants up to engaging with their own identities and emotions, as well as with those of others, in a fearless and honest manner that results in a greater depth of communcation and understanding.
All Arts Needed
We have centred things like puppets and performance in our planning for Betwix’t, but we think of the show we are putting on a bit like the Space Race. The rush to be the first to explore space led to all manner of scientific and technological advancements beyond space travel applications. We use the goal of creating a live puppet show as a means of exploring and developing our entire character.
Similarly, it takes all manner of arts to put on a show. We need a variety of types of performers, each with their own skillsets. But we also need poets and writers, who can put what they are feeling into words of depth and beauty. We need craftspeople to build puppets, props, set additions, costumes – any material thing that can enrich our performance. We need visual artists to design images for our posters and playbills, as well as to even storyboard the staging and visual appearance of the scenes of our show.
Just like we believe in a diverse and equal world, any and every artform is welcome in Betwix’t. If a participant has something they love doing, we will put in every effort to integrate it into the final show.
And if you have no arts experience whatsoever? Then you are even more welcome to come!
Year End Show
Our year end show will be comprised of different parts. We’ll have some musical bits sung by our elders, and we’ll have important stories that we feel need to be told, as well as room for a bit of an open mic for whoever has a talent they’d like to share, but the part that our Betwix’t youth will be concerned with is a 12 minute segment centred around our youth’s undrstanding of their own identies and their place within our community. They will decide the characters and the storyline, and the themes of the story will be drawn from the lessons they learn during the time we spend working together.
Our starting point this term is the question of “I am not my body, but without my body I am not.” – a core struggle for many trans and queer youth. We aim to build empowerent to self-define, combined with the ability to act within and upon the external, physical world. We can define our own interpretation of reality while still engaging with an often unpleasant physical reality that exists independently of the language we use to understand it.
Our show this term will hopefully reflect our youths’ ability to assert themselves to the world on their own terms.