About Sanela
The Path That Led Here
Some people choose their profession. Others are chosen by it. For Sanela Čović, the path into transpersonal therapy, education, and consciousness work was not a straight line, it was a homecoming.
Born in the Balkans and shaped by the experience of living across cultures, Sanela learned early what it means to navigate between worlds, between languages, between identities, between the familiar and the unknown. These experiences planted something deep: a sensitivity to belonging, to displacement, to the invisible forces that shape who we become and how we move through life.
That sensitivity would eventually become the foundation of everything she builds.
A Career Built Across Worlds
Before entering the field of therapy and education, Sanela built a distinguished career at the intersection of language, culture, and international institutions. She worked for years as a professional interpreter and translator, serving the European Union and the United Nations, environments that demanded precision, cultural intelligence, and the ability to hold complexity across languages and worldviews.
From there, she moved into program management at Spain's and the world's leading business schools, where she developed expertise in designing and delivering high-level educational experiences for international audiences. This work sharpened her understanding of how people learn, what makes training programs truly effective, and how to build structures that support transformation, skills that would prove essential when she later founded her own academy.
These experiences were the proving ground for everything that followed, the discipline of the interpreter, the strategic thinking of the program director, and the cross-cultural fluency of someone who has spent a lifetime working at the borders between different ways of seeing the world.
From Seeking to Serving
Sanela's journey into therapeutic work began, as it often does, with her own questions. Questions about identity, about patterns that seemed to repeat across generations, about the places where psychology meets something deeper, something the rational mind alone cannot reach.
She trained first in life, executive and team coaching, NLP, clinical hypnotherapy, studying Ericksonian approaches and discovering the extraordinary capacity of the subconscious mind to heal, reorganise, and reveal. From there, her path led naturally into regression therapy, past life work, and eventually into the profound territory of Life Between Lives, the spiritual regression methodology developed by Dr. Michael Newton.
But Sanela was never interested in collecting techniques. She was interested in understanding people. That search for deeper understanding led her to Alfred Adler's Individual Psychology, a framework that places belonging, social interest, and the courage to live purposefully at the centre of human development. She is currently completing a Master's degree in Adlerian Counselling, with thesis research exploring how practicing counsellors understand and operationalise belonging in their therapeutic work.
This integration, of clinical rigour and spiritual depth, of psychological insight and transpersonal awareness, is what makes Sanela's work distinctive. It is not one approach or the other. It is the conversation between them.
The Academy: A Living Expression
Nai Do Transpersonal Academy grew from Sanela's conviction that the world needs practitioners who are not only technically skilled, but inwardly developed, people whose capacity to hold space for others is rooted in their own deep work.
What began as The Inner Arts Academy, a training space for transpersonal hypnotherapy and regression therapy, has matured into something broader: a living field where therapy, education, publishing, and service are understood as interconnected expressions of a single commitment.
The transition to the name Nai Do, meaning the inner path in Japanese, was not a rebranding exercise. It was a recognition that the work had outgrown its original container and needed language that matched its depth and scope.
Today, Nai Do offers professional training programs accredited by the International Association of Counselors and Therapists (IACT) and aligned with the Michael Newton Institute as a Career Partner. Sanela's relationship with the MNI extends beyond partnership, through years of dedicated work, clinical excellence, and contribution to the field, she is curently serving as Director of MNI Publishing and Advisory Council Member for Europe, contributing to the evolution of Dr. Newton's legacy at an institutional level.
Nai Do publishes through Tatia Press. It serves a growing international community of students, practitioners, and clients. And at its centre, it holds the same question Sanela has carried since the beginning: What does it truly take to heal?
Credentials and Affiliations
Sanela brings together a breadth of professional training and lived experience:
Clinical and Therapeutic Training
Certified Clinical Hypnotherapist (Ericksonian approach) and Instructor
Certified Regression Therapist and Instructor
Certified Parts Therapy Practitioner and Instructor
Certified Life Between Lives® Facilitator (Michael Newton Institute)
Quantum Consciousness Facilitator (Institute for Quantum Consciousness)
Certified MBTI® Step I & II Facilitator
NLP Master Practitioner
Certified Life, Executive and Teams Coach
MA in Philology (German and Croatian Language and Literature)
Academic Studies
Master's degree in Adlerian Counselling (in progress) — thesis research on belonging as a healing force in therapeutic practice
Ongoing professional development across transpersonal psychology, Psychosynthesis, and consciousness studies
Professional Affiliations and Roles
Founder and Lead Instructor, Nai Do Transpersonal Academy
Director of Publishing, Michael Newton Institute (MNI)
Advisory Council Member for Europe, Michael Newton Institute
Michael Newton Institute Career Partner
Member and Master Trainer, International Association of Counselors and Therapists (IACT)
Founder, Tatia Press (conscious publishing imprint)
Founder, Oneness Initiative Project (a committment to unified humanity)
A Philosophy of Practice
Sanela's approach is grounded in several convictions that shape everything at Nai Do:
The practitioner's inner life matters. Technical skill is necessary but insufficient. The quality of a therapist's presence, their capacity for deep listening, for sitting with the unknown, for genuine empathy, arises from their own inner work. This is why Nai Do's training programs place personal development alongside professional development, not as an add-on, but as a core requirement.
Belonging is the foundation. Drawing from Adler's insight that the need to belong is the most fundamental force in human development, Sanela understands that healing, whether in therapy, in education, or in community, happens through connection. Not connection as an idea, but as a felt experience. This principle informs every aspect of Nai Do's work, from how students are trained to how clients are received.
Integration, not accumulation. It is possible to collect many certifications and still lack coherence. Sanela's emphasis is always on integration, helping students and clients weave together what they are learning and experiencing into something that is genuinely their own. Depth, not breadth, is the measure.
Ethics are non-negotiable. In a field that touches the most vulnerable dimensions of human experience, ethical practice is not optional, it is the ground on which everything stands. Informed consent, clear boundaries, humility about what we know and what we don't, and a commitment to doing no harm: these are not restrictions on the work. They are what make the work possible.
The work is sacred, and the work is practical. Sanela holds space for both the mystical and the clinical, the spiritual and the grounded. She does not ask anyone to choose between science and soul. She asks: How do we honour both, with integrity?
Beyond the Professional
Sanela is a reader, a contemplative, and someone who finds meaning in the small and the ordinary as much as in the extraordinary. Her multicultural background continues to inform her work, giving her a natural affinity for diversity, for the spaces between cultures and identities, and for the universal human experiences that transcend all of them.
She lives in Spain, works internationally online, and remains deeply committed to the belief that inner work, honest, courageous, and sustained, is the most meaningful contribution any of us can make to the world.
If you feel drawn to work with Sanela as a client, as a student, or simply to explore what Nai Do might offer your journey you are welcome to reach out. The path always begins with a conversation.