Montserrat G. Mukherjee

Programme Director, C-IAYT Yoga Therapist, Mentor & E-RYT 500 Yoga Teacher

Meet Montserrat

Montserrat (Gomez) Mukherjee was born in 1967 in Madrid in a family dedicated to education. Her grandfather owned a secondary school and was headteacher of mathematics, her mother was a primary school teacher, and her brother owns several specialised professional training schools in Spain.

Montserrat herself studied phonetic transcription with the aim to work as a speech therapist, but family circumstances took her to the UK where she worked in the fashion industry, fulfilling the role of head buyer, starting her own international buying consultancy, and appearing in international fashion magazines such as Vogue, Elle and W Magazine as an influential figure in the industry.

During this time, she practiced Hatha yoga at The Life Center in Notting Hill in London, where she fell in love with the practice and integrated yoga in her own life as a support tool for her busy life. It was then that ‘a seed was planted’ and her desire for becoming a teacher was born.

When her daughter was born in 2000, she made the life-changing decision to leave the corporate life and dedicate her time to being a full-time mother with her husband in Amsterdam. Due to post-natal-related health issues, she started to practice Kundalini Yoga at a small studio where she quickly became a co-organiser of a Kundalini Yoga Teacher Training, and in 2006 she obtained her 200-hour Yoga Teaching Certificate with Ravi Singh and Ana Brett, from the Kundalini School of Yoga in New York.

Soon thereafter, she started to teach group classes in a studio in the centre of Amsterdam. Whilst teaching, she became aware of the importance of adapting yoga practices to her individual students. By the end of that year, she had already enrolled at the Yoga Biomedical Trust in London to train as a yoga therapist under the mentorship of Dr Robin Monro, a pioneer in this field and an inspirational teacher with who she developed her specialisation in Yoga Therapy for herniated discs and lower back pain.

During this time, Montserrat was inspired to start working as a yoga therapy trainee straight away. Prior to graduating as a Yoga Therapist in 2010, she had already established a yoga therapy studio, offering private yoga therapy sessions and specialised small group yoga therapy classes which continued to grow and thrive until this day, working in collaboration with local health professionals and clients from around the world.

Personal dedication

Montserrat dedicates her life to Yoga Therapy and the care for others. No one is excluded from her home-made ginger teas with honey and snacks. She loves cooking and her home always smells of something delicious, which she loves to share!

Montserrat has worked as a yoga therapist with clients with a wide range of health issues, such as:

Heart disease
Parkinson
Cancer, with a special focus on women with breast cancer
Herniated discs and lower back pain (trained in the CALBA method by Dr Robin Monro)
Auto-immune disease
Burnout
Musculoskeletal injuries
Insomnia
Emotional mood disorders, such as anxiety and depression
Women’s wellness issues

The effects of her work speak for themselves, as do her clients and students. They praise her friendly and down-to-earth professionalism, as well as her in-depth medical and human knowledge.

When she encountered her first client suffering from breast cancer in 2011, she became inspired to seek out ways to support women suffering from this disease as a yoga therapist and became an ambassador of Yogini Rosa, a Dutch charity-based foundation that offers free yoga therapy retreats to women with breast cancer.

Over the years, she also developed numerous yoga therapy programs for large corporations such as Adidas, Heineken and Rituals, focusing on corporate health and burnout prevention.

Montserrat G. Mukherjee & The Yoga Therapy Institute

In 2017, and with the support of her family, friends and clients, she founded The Yoga Therapy Institute, a yoga therapy school which became the first school in Europe to offer an IAYT-accredited diploma programme.

The first classes began with 5 students from Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and in 6 years it grew into an international school with a team of certified and experienced teachers and hundreds of students from all over the world.

“I am passionate about this work, and I have a lot to be thankful for. I was lucky to learn from a pioneering Yoga Therapy diploma program in London, with a strong medical base which resonated with my values of safety, and this gave me the solid foundation I needed to feel confident to work with clients, even those with the most challenging health conditions. Safety and respect for the human condition and putting human beings first above rigid systems of dogma have been the core and the inspiration for my work.

My own personal mission? To keep on learning and to dedicate my life to training professional and compassionate Yoga Therapists who can make a positive difference to people’s lives, and ultimately, to their communities and the world”.