A mentor can influence the direction of a career. It is rarer for that relationship to evolve into a business partnership.
For Dr Kavita Bhargava, that shift began during her training in clinical hypnotherapy. She already had an academic foundation in psychology, counselling and organisational behaviour, but the experiential nature of the training challenged the way she was accustomed to learning. Neerja R Handa, then her mentor, became an important part of that transition. Dr. Kavita has described Neerja as someone who supported her, challenged familiar patterns of thinking and helped her move from student to trainer.
Years later, the two are co-founders of KNeer School of Mind and Spiritual Sciences, a learning platform bringing together psychological education, counselling skills, mind sciences, reflective practices and spiritual exploration. Their partnership is interesting because their professional paths were different. Dr. Kavita Bhargava came through academic psychology, psychotherapy, organisational work and social initiatives; Neerja moved from an earlier business career into clinical hypnotherapy, training and holistic practices. KNeer is where those trajectories now meet.
From Practice to a More Sustainable Model
Dr. Kavita’s entrepreneurial journey did not begin with KNeer. Early in her career, she was balancing professional roles while also running With Care, an initiative that mentored young people and offered emotional support to terminally ill cancer and HIV patients. The experience taught her something that later shaped her approach to enterprise: a desire to help people is not enough if the structure around the work cannot sustain it.
That insight contributed to KPsych Services, which Dr. Kavita developed as a platform for psychological services, training, internships and organisational work. Instead of building only around her own consultation hours, she created different ways for people to engage with psychology: counselling, career guidance, psychometric assessments, workshops, professional training and institutional programmes. KPsych continues to operate across individual and organisational psychological services, while KNeer represents the newer shared learning platform.
Her own direction was changing at the same time. A difficult resignation in 2010, followed later by the sudden loss of her younger brother, became periods of reassessment rather than a neat entrepreneurial turning point. Further training in clinical hypnotherapy and regression work expanded her practice, but more importantly, moved teaching and mentorship closer to the centre of her professional identity.
Neerja’s journey had taken a different route. She began working in mind sciences and clinical hypnotherapy in 2009 after an earlier career in business, and over time became a trainer, therapist and mentor. She is currently listed among EKAA’s clinical hypnotherapy teachers, and her work has expanded into spiritually oriented programmes including Soul Group Constellations. For Dr. Kavita, Neerja first represented a teacher. For KNeer, she became a co-founder whose experience added a different dimension to the school.
Building a School Around Two Professional Languages
KNeer sits at an unusual intersection. Some learners come looking for counselling skills or professional development; others are interested in mind sciences, personal growth or spiritual exploration. The school offers programmes spanning counselling, competency mapping and mind sciences, with its Professional Diploma in Mind Sciences and Advanced Professional Diploma in Mind and Spiritual Sciences among the programmes Kavita is particularly interested in developing further.
That breadth can be an advantage, but it also creates a responsibility. Psychology, psychotherapy and counselling operate within professional and evidence-based frameworks; spiritual exploration belongs to a different domain. The two can sit beside each other in a learning environment, but they should not be presented as interchangeable forms of evidence.
Dr. Kavita has become increasingly explicit about that distinction. In discussing hypnotherapy and regression, she has cautioned that therapeutic insight is not the same as proof of a historical event, and that experiences emerging during regression should not automatically be treated as factual memories or evidence of past lives. For a business working across psychology and spiritual sciences, credibility depends partly on being clear about what each approach can and cannot claim.
The International Practitioners of Holistic Medicine currently lists KNeer as an accredited training provider and includes programmes in counselling, competency mapping, mind sciences and other personal-development areas. Accreditation does not remove the need for professional boundaries, but it gives learners a more defined programme framework than a collection of disconnected workshops.
From Individual Expertise to a Learning Ecosystem
Dr. Kavita’s strongest entrepreneurial evolution may be the shift from practitioner to builder of learning systems. Her work now spans individual psychological care, professional education, workplace interventions and public-facing psychology content. Podcasts, workshops and online learning have also allowed her to take foundational psychology beyond formal consultation settings.
Neerja brings a different kind of scale to the partnership through years spent training practitioners and facilitating learning in India and overseas. Recent KNeer activity has included her Soul Group Constellations work in Dubai, while both founders remain active in training and educational programmes. The opportunity now is to build a school that can grow beyond either founder’s personal availability.
That makes their partnership more entrepreneurial than symbolic. Dr. Kavita has spoken openly about a tendency to take on too many responsibilities and the need to improve prioritisation and delegation. Building KNeer requires both women to convert personal expertise into curriculum, faculty, supervision, clearer learner pathways and a business capable of functioning beyond individual founder delivery.
The same question appears in their approach to access. Kavita’s work has repeatedly returned to making psychological knowledge easier to reach, from With Care to online consultations, internships and educational content. KNeer has also stepped into wider entrepreneurial spaces, including the Women Listed Business Lounge, where Kavita and Neerja introduced their work across therapy, training, personal development and mind sciences.
Building With Curiosity — and Boundaries
The next chapter is not simply about adding more courses. Dr. Kavita wants to develop KNeer’s diploma programmes into structured learning pathways, with clearer objectives, practical engagement and a better understanding of what a qualification does — and does not — enable a learner to do professionally.
That distinction matters. In mental health and personal-development businesses, growth can create pressure to promise more or turn an experiential method into a universal answer. The stronger path is often the opposite: clearer scope, better supervision, transparent learning outcomes and a willingness to say where professional limits sit.
For Dr. Kavita, entrepreneurship has gradually moved from doing more to building more deliberately. For Neerja, a career that began in a different commercial world has evolved into teaching, mentoring and creating learning experiences around mind and spiritual sciences. Their joint story is not simply about two practitioners starting a school.
It is about what happens when mentorship becomes partnership, when individual expertise becomes curriculum, and when two women with different professional vocabularies try to build a learning space broad enough for curiosity without losing the boundaries that make trust possible.
Discover Dr Kavita Bhargava, Neerja R Handa and KNeer School of Mind and Spiritual Sciences on Women Listed.
