Jiwanjyot Kour Puri has worked across schools, government psychosocial services, clinical settings and private practice. Her new practice, Healora, grew from what those very different rooms had in common.
Ask most people what a counsellor does and you will usually get some version of the same answer: you describe what is troubling you, and they help you work through it.
Jiwanjyot Kour Puri starts a little earlier than that.
“My interest in psychology has always come back to one question: What lies beneath what we see?”
It is a question that has followed her through more than seven years of professional work — and across settings that, on paper, have little in common.
A career across very different rooms
Since beginning her professional practice in 2019, Kour Puri’s work has moved through school counselling, government psychosocial services, clinical mental-health settings and private practice.
As a School Counsellor in a CBSE institution, she worked with children and adolescents between the ages of five and eighteen. The work involved individual and group counselling, psychosocial assessment, behavioural observation, intervention planning, and regular engagement with parents and teachers.
Working with a child often meant looking beyond the behaviour itself.
A change in academic performance could have an emotional story behind it. Withdrawal could mean something different from defiance. A behavioural difficulty could require a different question before it required an intervention.
Her work later took her into government psychosocial services as a Psycho-Social Counsellor with the Department of Social Welfare, Government of Jammu & Kashmir.
There, the context was different. Her work included trauma-informed counselling, crisis intervention, psychosocial assessment and rehabilitation support, alongside coordination with medical, legal and social-welfare systems.
In such settings, psychological support could not always exist within the boundaries of a counselling room. Sometimes understanding what a person needed also meant understanding the systems around them.
Her clinical training added another perspective.
She trained at Bhatia Neuropsychiatric Hospital & De-addiction Centre in Amritsar, the Department of Mental Health & Behavioral Sciences at Fortis Healthcare in New Delhi, and the Unique Institute of Behavioral Sciences in Delhi.
Schools, government services, clinical settings and private practice bring different people, different circumstances and different kinds of difficulty.
What remained consistent was the question beneath the presenting concern.
The thing a person arrives with is seldom the whole of what is going on.
What Healora is built around
Healora is a psychology practice offering counselling and psychological support both online and in person.
Its scope is deliberately broad, reflecting the range of people, concerns and professional settings that have shaped Kour Puri’s work over the years.
Her practice includes individual counselling and psychotherapy for concerns such as anxiety, stress, low mood, overthinking, emotional overwhelm and self-esteem. She also works with couples and families navigating communication difficulties, recurring conflict, emotional disconnection, boundaries, trust and family dynamics.
Her work extends to children and adolescents experiencing emotional, behavioural, social and academic difficulties, as well as people navigating major life transitions, adjustment, identity concerns and changes in personal or professional circumstances.
She also works with individuals and families navigating disability and rehabilitation-related adjustment, supported by her postgraduate training in Rehabilitation Psychology through an RCI-aligned programme.
The breadth is intentional.
Psychological difficulties do not always arrive in neat categories. Anxiety can sit inside a relationship problem. Academic difficulties can be connected to self-esteem. A behavioural concern can have an emotional context. A major life transition can alter the way a person sees themselves.
A practice built around only a few labels can miss what sits between them.
Healora instead begins with the person and the experience they are bringing into the room.
How she works
Kour Puri describes her approach as person-centred and individualised.
The framework follows the person rather than the other way around.
Her work draws on established psychological approaches including CBT, REBT, IPT and behavioural interventions, while allowing the therapeutic direction to be shaped by the individual’s concerns, circumstances and goals.
“I do not believe there is one way to understand a person, or one approach that belongs in every room. The person comes first.”
It is a simple principle, but one that becomes more complicated when applied in practice.
Listening without immediately assuming what a person’s behaviour means requires patience. So does understanding a pattern before deciding how it should change.
For Kour Puri, that is where psychological work begins:
listen before assuming; understand before responding.
Beyond individual counselling
Her work has also extended beyond one-to-one counselling.
She has been involved in student mental-health and wellbeing initiatives, psychological awareness programmes, parent and teacher engagement, and rehabilitation-oriented psychosocial support.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, she contributed to community mental-health support in District Kathua through the Indian Academy of Health Psychology’s Mental Health Task Force.
Her professional and academic contributions have also included recognition among the top three research papers at the National Conference on Inclusive Education & Psychological Testing in Schools, COE Chandigarh, in 2022. Her professional affiliations include the Indian School Psychology Association, the Counselors Council of India and NHACP.
Her academic background includes an M.A. in Psychology from the University of Jammu and a Postgraduate Diploma in Guidance & Counselling Psychology from Punjabi University, Patiala. Her professional training has continued through work across educational, clinical, psychosocial and rehabilitation-oriented settings.
The idea in the name
Healora’s guiding line is simple:
Look Beyond What’s Visible.
It is more than a tagline. It describes the way Kour Puri thinks about psychological work.
We are often quick to notice what a person does.
The reaction.
The silence.
The overthinking.
The distance.
The pattern that keeps returning.
But what we see is rarely the whole story.
There may be an experience behind the reaction, a meaning behind the thought, or a need beneath the pattern.
That does not mean every behaviour has a hidden explanation, or that understanding something automatically makes it easier to change.
It means that before deciding what a person needs to do differently, there is value in understanding what is happening in the first place.
Perhaps that is what Kour Puri means when she asks what lies beneath what we see.
Not “What is wrong with this person?”
But:
What is happening here?
And perhaps, sometimes, that is the more useful place to begin.
Jiwanjyot Kour Puri is a psychologist and founder of Healora, with over seven years of professional experience spanning counselling, school psychology, government psychosocial services, and diverse mental-health settings.
HEALORA • Look Beyond What’s Visible.
