Expert Q&A: Supporting women's health through Ayurveda with Maya Tiwari
The following interview is a transcript excerpt from The Heallist Podcast episode. Listen to the full audio version or watch the video and subscribe to get notified of new episodes.
In this episode of the Heallist Podcast, we explore women’s health through the lens of Ayurveda with Maya Tiwari. Maya founded Wise Earth School of Ayurveda, the first Ayurveda school in North America in 1981 and has spent more than three decades teaching, practicing, and building community around this traditional system of care. The conversation looks at how Ayurvedic frameworks support women’s health in everyday life, and how practices rooted in tradition can be adapted within modern wellness contexts.
Drawing from her decades of teaching and service work—including founding the Mother Om Mission—Maya shares perspectives from working with students and communities over time. We explore how Ayurvedic principles can show up in daily routines, who these approaches may support, and how women may reconnect with natural rhythms and self-care practices. The episode also reflects on the evolution of the holistic health field, offering insight into what has shifted over the years and what both practitioners and clients may benefit from understanding as they navigate integrative care today.
This episode is offered for educational and reflective purposes only. It does not provide medical advice or recommend specific treatments. Its goal is to add context to complex health decisions and highlight the value of informed, personalized care across medical and integrative paradigms.
Ayurveda and Lunar Cycles, Hormones and Ojus
Maya Tiwari: Ayurveda means the study of life, the living life, the life force that we protect at all times. Whether it's our metabolic life force or the life force we are inhaling from outside of us, it tells us that the entire life force is within us. It's not just a microcosm, macrocosm equation of the universe, and then we are part of it. We are the entirety of it. This is what Vedas tell us. This is the ancient wisdom wishes of the Vedic tradition tells us. And all ancient traditions tell us the same thing. This life force is within us, and it's a question of trusting, knowing how it operates and how we're to use it. At the biological level of a woman's body, we have our hormonal activity. We have that incredible power of Shakti, not only to procreate, but to nurture, to heal, to sustain. We are the sustaining and manifesting force of the universe.
In the biological body where we can procreate, it is all Shakti's domain - Shakti, being the primordial feminine force. We can call her the divine feminine force as well. But if we're to look at it basically just at the biological level and the psychological level of our being, it maintains our harmonic balances through the lunar cycles. The shakti force within the woman, which controls her biological estrogens, her harmonic nature, her hormonal nature, gets vulnerable when there are trespasses on the lunar cycle. So right now we look at that.
If we look at my former books, I talk a lot about our balancing with lunar and solar rhythms, but especially for women, lunar rhythms, where we menstruate with the new moon and we ovulate with the full moon. And why do we do that? And why did this cycle go into complete reversal in our time? Well, it went into reversal because medical science needed to throw the cycle asunder to control birth, like birth control. And so basically we've been living, those of us who've subscribed to that science, have been living out of balance, which means our hormonal cycles are thrown off, which means our biological rhythms are thrown off, which means our intuition is completely off. Because our innate cellular structure, the memory within them, the energy within them control how the mind functions as well.
We need to get back to balancing this cycle. If we are in our menstrual years, it only takes a very simple home practice to bring the cycle back to the new moon. What does the new moon do? It has more solar energies and it helps to pull the lining out of the womb and to refresh, to regenerate so that it remains healthy. That is called menstruation. And what does the full moon do? At the end of the cycle, it rejuvenates the woman's ojus. Ojus is the essence of immunity, the essence of procreation, the essence of everything that gives you joy. When you're feeling a lack of energy, it's not just about B12 and all of the supplements we take. It is because the core of our body, the womb center, is needing its own nourishment. When we understand that we're living by the cycle of the moon, it's beautiful because it teaches women what each phase of the lunar cycle, from waning to waxing to full. In the waxing cycle, from waning to full moon, which medicines are at which juncture? The inner medicine, the medicines we naturally have within ourselves. We're constructed from nature. We are nature.
Breath, Marma Points, And Grounding
Maya Tiwari: In order to understand how we function, why we function a certain way, we must know what the diagram is. We must have a basic sense of understanding what that function of feminine divine force is within us as women. It controls our instinct, it controls intuition, it controls our ability to forgive, it controls our ability to look past betrayals, it controls our ability to nurture our children, to nourish the world, it controls our ability to compassion, it controls everything. We are that entity. We are honed within that entity.
When we have examples of disasters, for instance, we race to those elements within ourselves. The compassion naturally comes, the help naturally comes, the aid naturally comes, the forgiveness of a neighbor's nonsense naturally happens if they're in trouble. Well, we are that energy, we are that incredible energy, but we don't need a disaster to bring it out of us. We need to understand where it is functioning and operational at every given moment of our lives, whatever chaos is happening around us. And so when we, for instance, do a lunar-solar breath, the left side of your nostril connects to the lunar, the right side to the solar. These two energies are constantly balancing you, keeping you in this equanimity of everything that's happening. And so basically, just a simple closure on one side of the nostril, breathing in in the open, closing the open, breathing out leisurely from the other side helps you to regain a sense of internal balance. It also balances hormones.
I have a headache, and I just start tapping the meridians or the points, what we call marma points, right where the two little lumps are behind the head, right? And we breathe more through the lunar breath to reduce the solar energies, and the headache dissipates. These are simple practices. We walk barefoot on grass that hasn't been sprayed, and you find the tingling of your entire body. We don't have the luxury anymore to just go out in the morning and sit in with our feet in the stream. But that rushing stream brings back the rhythm, the natural biorhythm of your body. And the rushing stream knows which biorhythm you need as a woman, which biorhythm you need as a man, which biorhythm you need as a child. We are that nature, inside and out. I don't want us anymore to look at the practice that's just separate from us and then we do it and it makes us feel better. I want us to look at the practice as an extension of a need within us that just reaches for that practice because the need finds what it needs.
Finding The Right Help And Access
Maya Tiwari: This is where we have a bit of a quandary while I ran the Mother Om mission for many, many years since 1996. The cities of New York, very difficult communities with manifold layers, and including not having any access to any form of healthcare. When we now have what is called functional medicine, which is better than allopathic medicine because it takes into consideration that you are the healer yourself, and once we instigate and invite certain energies within yourself, healing begins to happen because that is the premise of all of natural medicine, all of holistic medicine, but that has become so expensive. Functional medicine doesn't take any health care relief, and then basically you've got to be uh very well off to afford it. Ayurveda is becoming that way, which is unfortunate because Ayurveda was the medicine that cost pennies. When I first started in Ayurveda, India was already in complete defunct of Ayurveda. It had become a lost art in the 70s and earlier, and when I stepped into Ayurveda, it was on its knees. Only allopathic medicine and homeopathic medicine to some extent were regarded as medicines, as viable modalities for healing. So we have come a very long way, and we have very quickly because of merchandising, because of the brilliant minds of business that always wants to make money from the suffering of our people, that mind has now made this into trillions of dollars worth of industry, where you have these major spas, and whereas it serves the very wealthy, it doesn't serve the middling communities.
So we've got to build this from community. We do have practitioners have trained so many all over the world, and they have small studios, they're open to community coming in, and you can exchange work, you can get together as a group and do the basic stuff, you can take some small education, apply it in your home and begin the whole act of self-healing. And these communities must grow again. I started growing it with all sorts of vim and vigor in the mountains of North Carolina throughout the world as I ran around the world with my Peace Mandala work, my Ayurveda work, the sadhana, meaning just back with your own limbs of energy and the food preparation in your home. And then we bring our own vital medicinal healing energy in the preparation of the food, which can alleviate so much of the junk that's already in it.
We need to know that we are the creators of our energy. We have an endless amount of it within ourselves. And we have to regenerate that in small communities. And we are going to need these small communities. And they will be sprouting again because we have no choice. And we're going to heal in that way. We're going to pay what we can afford. This is a model that we must bring back. And naturally the time is calling for it because there's going to be a big shake up. There is already a big shakeup. It will get worse before it gets better. A lot of souls are leaving the earth. But understand that they're being collected well on their journey away from this format. We have many lives to live. So those of us who are staying back, needing, we need to become awareful. We need to take a deep breath. Reorganize, get rid of the things we don't need, and we need to simplify in ways where if we have mortgages that are too high, there's so many beautiful places we can move to and live more simply. Our children don't need the most incredible design or whatever. And we need to start doing this work from within ourselves and within our homes.
The time calls for it. We don't have a choice. And this is going to give us back something so glorious, something so filled with wealth and health and beauty. It will give us back our ability to think for ourselves, make our own decisions, not be influenced by the mass crazy obsessive news out there, and also in the process take back our sovereignty. Our sovereignty as women is called Shakti. That Shakti-fied Force is what protects everything in nature, everything in life, everything in government. Don't forget, women, we gave birth to the entire humanity. And how big is that? We were never victims. We were taught to become victims. We were taught to be victimized by our cultures and our medical culture and our physiological sciences. And even these poor scientists are having a quandary right now because they are realizing that so much of it flies against the grain of nature. And without the protection and the overriding blessing, the grace of nature, what are we doing? I know it's not the easy solution, but it is the real solution. And we are at a time when we need what is real, what is at the core, what is absolutely something we've been dodging and slip-sliding around for centuries.
Embodiment, Simplicity, And Values
Maya Tiwari: Understand that if we remain disembodied from our mind and our own spirit and our own household and family, we're not going to find solutions because we are disembodied. So we have to embody ourselves within our own sovereignty, our own mind of what's going on. It's time to scale down. Scale down in the financial end means that we are scaling up in the values, the system that support us, our oxygen, our food, our children, our family. We really have to stop contributing to the design and label lifestyle of what captures our very soul, really.
Just know that your absolute awareness, it’s the beautiful comfort of knowing that we are so supported by the very energies we have within ourselves. And we as women are the manifestors. We are the ones that are sustaining and nurturing. It's been taken away by the patriarchs, but not for too much longer. The fact is that we are that. We are the center core of the family, have always been, will always be. We are the center core of society, have always been, will always be. We just have to reposition ourselves to feel comfortable in that platform because it's our natural platform.
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