Dear Friends,

It's a pleasure to introduce one of our worldwide community members, Reza Gunawan, who is a holistic health practitioner and TAT trainer based in Jakarta, Indonesia. He is currently helping both volunteers and survivors of the recent earthquake in Indonesia and has written an email that I'd like to share with you.

I have had the wonderful opportunity to introduce TAT to many different groups recently. Indonesia had a recent earthquake that took the lives of thousands, and even more than that lost their homes and families. I feel so blessed that Tapas was supporting me in using TAT to help with the traumas and fears that follow a natural disaster, and we even created a document as a self-help guide for the survivors in need of healing.

I have had a chance to give 1-day trainings on using TAT for Disaster Relief based on this document. So far I have facilitated 5 different volunteer/helper groups. Each group had its own background. Some groups were mainly laypeople volunteers and students. One group was a bunch of hypnotherapists. Another one was a group of psychologists, and I also taught TAT where the whole group was very spiritual in nature (a lot of people who meditate, are energy healers, and a few who are clairvoyants). This was done straight one day after the other, so you can imagine what it was like to teach full-day trainings of the same material for 5 days in a row to these different groups.

It was interesting to note that while everyone shared the common compassion and desire to help the disaster survivors, it was also true that each group needed to "unlearn" different things before they could learn TAT effectively. For me, this is both amusing and eye opening, so I'm going to share these observations with you.

For instance, when I was facilitating a TAT workshop for the laypeople and students who are volunteering to help, it was much easier once they understood and experienced TAT themselves. Because of this disaster situation, I start the class by doing TAT as a group so that they can experience how such simple TAT processes can be so profound. I didn't notice much undoing for this group; they were mostly an empty cup ready to learn.

When teaching on another day with the spiritually active group, the common "empty-the-cup" theme was to remind the participants not to hold intentionally any healing space, or direct healing energy, or whatever they could intentionally do to "add more" during TAT. TAT is effective and complete just as it is.

The hypnotherapists' group showed tendencies of wanting to guide their TAT clients through visualizations, and give hypnotic suggestions whenever possible.

Another interesting thing I noticed when teaching the same class to a group of psychologists was their tendency to probe and ask more questions after a TAT client put their hands down, perhaps because they do professional counseling most of the time.

I do not intend the above observations to come across like stereotypes, but only to share what I noticed: I needed to remind the members of each group not to do the same thing, which was part of their educational background. It was truly beautiful also to notice how, once they understood whatever needed to be emptied from their cups, profound healing was available immediately in the class' practicums. I have come to the conclusion that learning TAT makes us less of a therapist or "fixer", and more of a human being.

Many of us who are learning therapies are sometimes caught up in the belief that "more is better than less", and so we tend to want more techniques and more complex approaches. I now think of TAT as the simple way of being that brings miracles.

Reza