2) What is Wellness Counseling?

Wellness Counseling is based upon William Glasser's theory of Reality Therapy which advocates personal responsibility for one's own feelings, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. Wellness Counseling is based on the tradition of peer counseling in which a person just like you, without vast amounts of education but with an abundance of life experience, counsels others who are struggling with the same issues that you have mastered or are mastering in your own life. The counselor holds a certain level of consciousness while asking a series of questions designed to stimulate the unconscious. This process provokes insights that can cause changes in beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors because it helps the client to find the root issues that are sometimes buried deep in their unconscious.

3) Who benefits from this type of counseling?

"Healthy" individuals who aspire toward further self-fulfillment who do not require psychological services for treatment of diagnosable conditions and those who simply require a boost to keep them moving forward. Seeking the services of a wellness counselor avoids the stigma that has often been associated with seeing a therapist. The focus is on "how to" tap into your highest potential rather than on identifying the "why's" of a lifelong pattern or on healing the wounds of the past, which are useful therapeutic techniques for treating trauma, but unnecessary for evoking wisdom and clarity in a client who does not require therapeutic intervention.

4) Why not just use your health insurance to see a counselor?

While most health insurances will cover psychological services, the intention of such services is to treat conditions that require psychological interventions. Insurance companies require a "diagnosis" for the reimbursement of a patient's visit. More and more people are becoming concerned about privacy issues that relate to having a history of their personal problems on file and are made accessible by court order. But additionally, there is the time factor. Many professionals and mothers simply don't have the time. Clinical psychologists ordinarily provide 45 to 50 minute sessions 12 times a year to a client with health insurance. Most Wellness Counselors provide 90 minute sessions (and often longer); and often produce visible results in just one session.

5) What is Sunny Massad's background?

Sunny says that unlike most people, she retired for the first twenty years of her life, pursuing her every dream. At the age of 20, she bought 40 acres of land in the San Juan Islands and homesteaded an alternative community with 20 others. She traveled to India in 1979 and began meditating at the Rajneesh International Meditation University. Since then she has traveled to over a dozen other countries.

In 1982 she became the spokesperson for the experimental city of Rajneeshpuram. Five years later, at the age of 33, she studied hypnosis at the Institute for the Re-Education of the Unconscious Mind in Seattle. She moved to the island of Oahu in 1989 where she established a successful private practice as a hypnotherapist. She created several popular courses and workshops such as "Being Your Best Without the Stress," which introduced hypnosis and meditation into the lives of professionals, and "How to Stop Sabotaging Yourself," which taught people how to use the unconscious to be of service toward a higher vision. She taught and gave keynote speeches at colleges, universities, businesses, and corporations for ten years, while returning to college to attain a B.A., an M.A., and a Ph.D. in psychology. Her focus in graduate school was the "enlightened mind," a model taken from Eastern philosophies that had not yet been integrated into Western psychologies. She is presently working on two books: UnTherapy: The Way of the Mystic, a primer for breaking the self-help habit and Dispelling the Myths of Enlightenment, which is a compilation of interviews of 8 individuals who report having "sustained transcendent experiences" and offers a candid discussion on the subject.

6) How does hypnosis and meditation relate to wellness?

Sunny has adopted the term "technostress" to describe the psychological impact that technology has placed on the psyche. She believes that hypnosis is a powerful tool that works beautifully to assist a person to rejuvenate their body/mind from the overload of "noise" that the mind is subjected to (inside and out). Westerners want to "calm their mind," but in today's fast-paced society, meditation is difficult for most people because the very process only highlights the noise of the mind, and does not necessarily quiet it down. For this reason, Sunny promotes the concept of hypnomeditation, which works directly with the unconscious to access calmness. Peace of mind is the root of psychological wellness.

7) What kinds of people are attracted to Untherapy?

The kinds of people who are attracted to Sunny's work are people who have already done lots of work on themselves, people who have never done work on themselves and just want to stop procrastinating or to get more motivated, people who have "tried everything" and can't seem to stop unwanted behavior patterns, and people who have an interest in consciousness and a higher quality of life.

8) What kinds of people take The Wellness Counselor Career Training?

People seeking personal transformation take the training as an efficient way to grow. One student said, "I feel I got more out of this 8 week training than I did in 6 years of therapy!" People looking for a career with more meaning are interested in starting a sole proprietorship as a professional wellness counselor so they can make a living helping others find the same personal empowerment they gathered for themselves during the training. Others are interested in learning these wellness counseling skills to enhance the lives of friends, family or co-workers