Our Hypnotherapy School (a Historical Perspective)

Orca Institute was founded on January 3, 1986, due to the growing need for such a school in British Columbia. The school's program was conceived and developed by Sheldon Bilsker, HT, RCC, in response to the desire of many practitioners to achieve a high standard of hypnotherapy practice in British Columbia. Orca Institute aims at promoting such a measure by offering professional hypnotherapy training of the highest quality.

Our teaching approach is strongly influenced by our belief in the natural ability of each individual to heal themselves, given the appropriate support and tools. We also believe that an essential part of the therapist's or healer's role is to respect the integrity and uniqueness of each client.

We intend to grow with our students throughout their training even after Certification. Sheldon coined the term "Counselling Hypnotherapy" in 1998. Since then, it has been adopted by many other hypnotherapy schools. This term came about when looking at the growing landscape of hypnotherapy schools in North America he realized that many of them did not include Counselling Training in their curriculum. In his opinion, Counselling skills should be an essential part of any comprehensive Hypnotherapy Certification Course, which is one of the reasons that we added our Counselling Skills Diploma Program. 

Over the past 35 years, our school has changed and grown in many ways, not unlike our students. Our hypnotherapy certification program has taken many shapes and forms. We started at the Student Union Building at UBC in Vancouver. Since then, it has been taught onsite in places like Kelowna, BC, on a horse farm, Alert Bay, BC next to Orcas, an Island in Swartz Bay accessible only by boat, Nanaimo, BC Kamloops, BC Toronto, ON, Calgary.AB and our home base, Vancouver, BC. Our courses have also been taught in other schools.

We have always strived to be on the cutting edge of training approaches and delivery. We were the first Hypnotherapy school to deliver our programs by videotape (30 VHS Tapes). We then changed to 32 CDs and later 6 DVDs (We were first there as well).

Our course material, except textbooks, is now online, allowing students from anywhere in the world (with an appropriate internet connection) to take our training. We remain dedicated to our students, past, present and future, and hold the philosophy that when they succeed, we succeed!

We are Canada's longest-running hypnotherapy School. We are also BC's only PTIB and EQA designated hypnotherapy school.