speaker

Heather Mason

MA, RYT-500, C-IAYT

Pharmacy

Neuroscience, Psychotherapy

Heather Mason is the founder of The Minded Institute, a leading yoga therapy training organization known for its focus on mental health and empowering yoga and health professionals to integrate yoga therapy into healthcare. Although a rigorous and academic training course for yoga and health professionals, The Minded Institute grew out of the culmination of Heather’s personal and professional work. After years of deep depression, PTSD, and anxiety Heather opted for a non-traditional mode of healing and moved to South East Asia to begin intensive meditation practice in Buddhist monasteries, where she spent 3 years developing and transforming her mind. During this time, she also trained as a 500-hr yoga teacher with the Yoga Training Centre in Varanasi and soon after shared her yoga teaching with nuns in various Buddhist Monasteries in Southeast Asia. Teaching first in Buddhist monasteries forged a natural fusion with her mindfulness practice and her yoga teaching.

By 2003 she had chosen to ordain as a Buddhist nun, but first wanted more academic knowledge about Buddhist teachings and moved to the UK to undertake an MA in Buddhist Studies at SOAS University London. This decision led her back into the non-monastic world as Heather wanted to share the insights she gained in intensive meditation. Ultimately, she realized that her struggles were imbued with meaning and purpose, if, she could help others, so she enrolled in MA in Buddhist-Based Psychotherapy in hopes of melding yoga with therapeutic support. Whilst studying Heather realized she was more interested in using mind-body therapy practices than in talking therapy and in 2007 took a sabbatical from her MA to undertake a yoga therapy training course in India. During a lightbulb moment at the ashram, the pieces of her life fell into place and the vision for an 8-week yoga therapy and mindfulness course for depression and anxiety emerged in her mind as though she had been crafting it for years. When she returned to the UK her new course was immediately popular and Heather also began working privately with those with depression and anxiety.

At the same time, Heather traveled around the world doing various courses in yoga for depression, she was the first person in the UK to train in trauma-sensitive yoga with the Boston Trauma Center (where she later lectured), and finally neuroscience at the graduate level. Armed with this interface of knowledge Heather had a new mission “to integrate yoga and yoga therapy in healthcare”.

By 2009 Heather had officially formulated The Minded Institute and her professional yoga therapy training. In 2011 she was offered an opportunity to create an elective course for medical students at the Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM), called “Embodied Health” where she taught the physiology of mindfulness and yoga, their clinician applications, and allowed future doctors to experience the benefits for themselves. From 2011-2014 she lived between Boston and the UK running her Institute, teaching at BUSM, and also creating and teaching the mind-body science course at the Maryland University of Integrated Health, which had the first Masters of Science in Yoga Therapy. She also had the esteemed pleasure of offering a lecture on breath practices and medicine for the Harvard Medical School Mind-Body Medicine Course.