19 Nov The Healing Power of Marma Points

🎙️ Summary Description

In this conversation, we explore the Ayurvedic science of marma therapy, and how activating these vital energy points can stimulate the body’s natural healing response. From its emergence on the battlefields of ancient India to the applications in modern healthcare and yoga, this discussion offers a fascinating look at a timeless therapeutic practice with clear guidance on how to integrate it into your own self-care routine.

 

🌟 Chapters

 00:00 Introduction 

02:36 Journey into Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine

08:44 Understanding Marma Points and Their Historical Significance

15:55 Marma Points in Healing and Martial Arts

22:14 The Role of Piercings in Ayurveda

27:03 Yoga and the Activation of Marma Points

31:49 Emotional Healing through Marma Therapy

32:54 Practical Applications of Marma Points for Insomnia

33:52 Grounding Rituals for Insomnia

37:22 Understanding Marma Points and Their Significance

39:43 Integrating Marma Therapy with Acupuncture

47:31 The Versatility of Marma Therapy

49:25 Training and Certification in Marma Therapy

55:00 Self-Care Practices and Ear Massage

 

🎥 Watch on YouTube

Prefer to watch the conversation?

👉 View the full video on YouTube Episode #4 – Anisha Durvey

 

 

👤 About the Guest

Anisha Durve, D.Ac, A.D. (NAMA certified)

Dr. Anisha Durve is a doctor of acupuncture, an ayurvedic doctor, an ayur-yoga therapist and meditation instructor for the past 25 years. She trained for 4 years at the Ayurvedic Institute with her guru Dr. Vasant Lad and co-wrote the book Marma Points of Ayurveda with him. Dr. Anisha is the founder of the Marma Institute for Ayurvedic Acupressure and does virtual and live trainings.

– Website: Marma Institute of Ayurvedic Acupressure www.MarmaTraining.com
– Email: marmainstitute@gmail.com

– Instagram: @marma.acupressure
– LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anishadurve/
– YouTube: @marmainstitute

 

📜 Full Transcript

Lois (00:09)

Namaste. Welcome to Essential Ayurveda Talks. I’d like to start by taking a few breaths to ground ourselves. We’ll clear the mind and open our hearts to receive. Let’s close our eyes, feel our sits bones grounded. Take a deep inhale. And then slowly exhale and feel the exhale go all the way down to your sits bones.

I want to take a moment to honor the ancient tradition of Ayurveda. It’s a science that’s rooted in balance, nature, and inner harmony. I have deep respect for the teachers, the healers, and the knowledge keepers who came before us. And I want to open the space with gratitude.

Today I’m honored to speak with Dr. Anisha Durvey. She’s NAMA certified Ayurvedic doctor, doctor of acupuncture and co-author with Dr. Vasant Lad of the textbook, Marma Points of Ayurveda. She has over 25 years of clinical experience and advanced training in both India and China. Dr. Anisha brings a rare integration of the Eastern healing wisdom of acupuncture, Ayurveda and yoga  into modern Western healthcare. She’s the founder of the Marma Institute and is a certified Ayurveda yoga therapist and meditation instructor. From developing groundbreaking hospital-based Ayurveda programs to leading a community healing efforts internationally, Dr. Anisha is a trailblazer in making Eastern healing wisdom accessible in modern integrative medicine.

Her passion is helping people transform through diet, detox, marma, and deep spiritual practices rooted in ancient science. Welcome, Dr. Anisha.

Anisha (02:13)

Thank you so much. very happy to be here.

Lois (02:17)

Wonderful to have you. Thanks for taking the time. I’m a fan of your book, The Marma Points of Ayurveda. I’m going to hold it up really quick and then I’ll put it in the show notes. It’s my Ayurveda 101 book and a deep dive into Marma. I encourage everyone who gets excited about this show to look into that.

I wanted to start off by asking you a few questions about your background. How did you become interested in Ayurveda and traditional Chinese medicine? What was the timeline of your journey?

Anisha (02:56)

Yeah, so I knew from an early age that I was going to go into medicine and I was interested in healing. wasn’t until I was a senior in college that I met an acupuncturist, I met an Ayurvedic practitioner, I got exposed to some of these different integrative modalities that I really had not had a lot of exposure to before.

And as I spent some time with these healers and their clinics and, saw their patients, saw the types of results they got, I was just blown away with the holistic approach of really getting to know your patient and getting to know their story. And I realized that that was such a big part of healing in medicine. I didn’t want to spend five minutes with a patient, barely know anything about them, and write a prescription for a medication that I don’t believe in.

That didn’t make any sense to me and that was the predominant Western model of healing. So I was really drawn to that and right after college went straight to acupuncture school. I was in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Dr. Lad’s Ayurveda school was in Albuquerque in the neighboring town.

So I got very fortunate to be able to go to both schools at the same time and really deepen my training in both systems. As I was doing that, what was really common to both systems was the Marma points, you the energy points in TCM or traditional Chinese medicine. They’re called the acupuncture points or the acupoints. And then in the Ayurvedic system, we call the energy points the Marma points. And so, as I was studying that in both systems, I was really having an appreciation of the wisdom of both traditions and how there was some overlap with how we approach the energy points and also how there were some differences. And so that’s what really intrigued me to ask my guru, Dr. Ladd, of doing a project where we would go into the marma points in a lot more detail, extract that information, and then

That led to eventually writing the Marma book as a textbook for Ayurvedic students to really be able to go into that in detail.

Lois (05:15)

What an opportunity you had that your path crossed Dr. Ladd at that time. Were you one of the original founding classes of Dr. Ladd’s institute? You must have been near the beginning?

Anisha (05:27)

Not the founding classes. I believe the Ayurvedic Institute was founded in 1984. I went there in 1997 and was there until 2001. I spent four years training with Dr. Lad there was no official program at that time for advanced studies. It was just the first year introduction to Ayurveda for beginners, which most of the students take.

Lois (05:33)

Okay. Wow.

Anisha (05:52)

There was the Guru Kula, which was the advanced studies with Dr. Lad, which most people who opted for that would just do a second year with him. But because I was in acupuncture school and physically, there in New Mexico for four years, I took advantage of studying with him for that time in New Mexico and also at the sister school in Pune, India

Lois (06:16)

Nice. And you also studied in China too, right? When did you go to China?

Anisha (06:22)

This was after graduating from acupuncture school as a three year master’s degree. And so after graduating, I went and spent a summer in Beijing and there were some studies, but it was mostly a clinical training experience where we were working in different hospitals rotating in Beijing. it was a good way to test out our skills after graduating and see how the medicine was practiced in China versus America. I really wanted to feel confident with my skills that way. So was a great learning experience.

Lois (06:59)

I imagine it was. So tell us how is it different in China? I imagine it’s more acceptable because they’re not being told that allopathic is the way to go or are they?

Anisha (07:13)

So what’s interesting is, in both countries, China and India, they do have their traditional form of medicine that’s been around for centuries, but there is also the presence of Western medicine in those countries as well. And what I’ve found is the populations in both countries are very open-minded. No one’s really biased of we can only do this and we can’t go to this other system. There’s definitely a sense of openness.

But I think what I got most out of my experience being in both countries, practicing the traditional medicine that’s native to that country, was seeing that it was very different from the Western experience, where you have to do a lot of explanation and convincing and get people to understand what these modalities are and how they work. And then there’s a lot of Western bias against these integrative or traditional systems. And what I found seeing patients in both China and India is there was no mental bias. There was no having to hold people’s hands and explain to them, these systems. So I found that I got results much faster, I was really appreciative of that and seeing how something in the West, that I might be treating might take me like two months to get results versus being in the native country might take me a week or two to get the same results. That was really fascinating to see how much that mental bias in Western countries can really block the healing. But when you’re working with populations who are totally open, you can go so much deeper.

Lois (08:48)

Yeah, yeah, That’s amazing. ⁓

Lois (09:00)

Let’s get to my other questions.

So Shushutra was a famous Ayurveda surgeon. And he talked about surgical incisions at or near certain Marma points diminishing local vitality because of prana and consciousness being highly concentrated at these points.

Maybe talk about that. And then what does this mean for belly piercing happens when you hit a Marma point with a piercing?

Anisha (09:27)

Yeah, let’s start with the history of the energy points to give some context because not everyone might be familiar with that. We have one text in ancient Ayurvedic literature called the Sushruta Samhita. Within that, Sushruta, who was a famous Ayurvedic physician, recorded 107 energy points which he called Marma Points. And this is a text that dates back like 2,000 years but prior to that, there was no written recording of the Marma Points.

And so how this really evolved is if we look back at all ancient civilizations and cultures, if we look at their healing systems, really the first form of healing was touch. You’re in pain, you touch that part of the body and maybe you relieve the pain or the pressure or the discomfort. And so I think just that original healing art of touch evolved into massage, which exists in all cultures essentially. And the Marma points then become much more specific. It’s not just touching the whole body, but touching the body at very specific locations to relieve pain or to find comfort or whatever it might be. So Sushruta is also in Ayurvedic history called the first surgeon who operated on a king in the battlefield. And so the story goes is that this king was riding out into battle. His enemies sliced his nose off and said that the very first surgery was a nose job for the king.

And so what Sushruta noticed as he was going through this surgery is that there were certain areas of the body where you touched, where you operated on, or you made an incision that had more energy than other areas. And so this was kind of how this principle of understanding, appreciating energy, appreciating prana, is that all these energy points have prana flowing through them.

And when we make an incision at a vital area where there’s a lot of prana, it depletes our energy, it depletes our immune system, it slows down the healing process. And that’s one thing that Sushruta was trying to observe as he’s mapping out these different energy points, to make sure that when you are making an incision, you’re not doing it in an area where you’re going to deplete prana.

One of the surgeries that everyone can understand and appreciate is a woman doing a C-section. There’s a lot of vital energy there near the abdomen, near the umbilicus, in that pelvic area. And traditionally, C-sections were done making a really large deep incision from the umbilicus down into that pelvic floor. And that is a seat of so much prana and energy. And we can understand why it would take a woman so long to heal after a C-section with all of that prana being disturbed and depleted in that area. So modern day C-sections, what I’ve seen now is that the incisions are much lower, not as close to the umbilicus, but lower in the pelvic cavity. It’s still a place where there is a lot of prana.

The surgeons are much more careful now. They don’t have the understanding of Marma points, but they’re much more careful of being minimalistic with the size of the incision, the depth of the incision. So I think that’s kind of an interesting development. But that’s from the Ayurvedic literature really the first origins we can see of the Marma points.

But I believe that that knowledge existed before Sushruta put that into the text just because of the healing power of touch. After that in Ayurvedic history, what’s interesting is the form of Ayurvedic massage evolved within the context of Panchakarma. So we have a very elaborate system of detoxification with Panchakarma that includes massage, but includes many other techniques that are also done very systematically. And so the understanding is that the Marma points were incorporated in Ayurvedic massage to give emphasis to certain areas, but they weren’t necessarily a standalone treatment outside of the context of Ayurvedic massage.

So Dr. Lad, who fairly recently in Ayurvedic history has been a practitioner since the 70s, came to the West in the 80s. And he’s really the Ayurvedic Vaidya, or physician, that said MarmaPoints can also be done as a standalone treatment. You don’t have to just be doing it in the context of massage, or with Ayurvedic oils, or in the process of this whole system of detox. That they are powerful enough that they can also be treated on their own. So I think that’s a really significant development in just the history of the Marma points.

Lois (14:53)

Wow, I never knew that.

Anisha (14:55)

Yeah, it’s interesting to see that evolution.

Lois (14:58)

So he saw them as a way to treat things, but also for preventative so curative and preventative.

Anisha (15:05)

Absolutely. The Marma points can be used to treat things like pain if you have some chest pain. You could stimulate some of the Marmani energy points on the chest to help relieve it. But you can also be working on the Marma points preventively to boost your energy, boost mental clarity, work on the points near the nose and help keep the sinuses open.

So one other thing I should mention from the history is that another application of the Marma points was with the ancient martial artists who did have knowledge of these energy points and they could use this knowledge to injure an opponent by striking them at a Marma point. Or they could also use this knowledge to help them heal from injuries or recover from a fight, there was a lot of knowledge that could be used either way, but they all reflect the power of those points because of the prana that is concentrated there.

Lois (16:10)

I remember hearing about that. Don’t touch these seven points…you could kill someone!

Lois (16:18)

So if someone does pierce their belly button, what happens? Does it, it disrupts the prana for a little bit and then everything just comes back. I remember I wanted to get one. I saw this girl with a diamond belly piercing years ago. I was like, I want to get that. It looks cool. And then my chiropractor said, don’t do that. It’s really bad for you. So I didn’t,

Do you think it’s bad?

Anisha (16:40)

Yeah.

So what’s interesting is that there are certain points where piercing them activates the Marma in a really powerful way. For example, when we look at the ear, the ear is a micro system of the whole body. And the point where we usually pierce the ear on the center of the earlobe is actually connected to vision.

In India, the ear points are usually pierced when a child is young to specifically stimulate vision. This was done for me. I was born in India. I had my naming ceremony that’s typically done 13 days after a child is born. And that’s when they pierced my ears it was very strategically done with that cultural belief of using that Ayurvedic understanding, but tying it into like a cultural custom Dr. Lad also mentions the point at the very top of the ear, the ear apex, can also be pierced and is typically done by gurus or gurus initiating disciples and recommending a a coral or a pearl earring, I’m sorry, at the apex specifically to help regulate Kundalini energy. And the very apex of the ear is connected to the sacrum where that Kundalini spiritual energy is stored so that it can be activated.

The other piercing that’s recommended is the nose piercing that’s done typically for women on the left side by that nasal groove. And in particular, having a diamond earring for women helps to stimulate the ovaries, the uterus, and helps with reproductive energy. In Ayurveda, we call this Arthava dathu, or the female reproductive tissue. And so doing that at the time of puberty can help with a woman’s ovulation and hormonal and reproductive health.

Those are the three Body Piercings – and Ayurveda Perspective that we discuss in the Marma textbook that Dr. Ladd has shared with all of his students. He definitely frowns on the belly piercing, because the umbilicus, we call it nabi, Marma, is the seat of our prana. If we think about when we’re in the womb, it is the umbilical cord that is sending prana from our mother into our fetus to nourish us and help us grow. And so that umbilical energy at that nabhi marma is a really, powerful location. So piercing done at that location is considered really harmful to the flow of prana.

Lois (19:32)

I want to just jump back to the vision for the ear piercing. Does it also metaphorically relate to your third eye vision?

Anisha (19:46)

The ear piercing, not specifically, but we do have a point for the third eye that’s called Ajna Marma that’s located between the eyebrows and just a little bit above that midpoint. And traditionally, when the guru or teacher, spiritual teacher meets the disciple and decides to spiritually initiate the disciple, it’s called Shaktipat.

And essentially in that transmission of energy, the guru just places his finger or her finger on Ajna Marma to transmit that energy. So no piercing is needed, but that’s just done through transmission of energy and through touch at that Marma point.

Lois (20:32)

Okay, very interesting. Let’s see. Your book talks about everything. It’s wild. It also talks about the mechanisms of Marma in yoga. Can you talk about how doing yoga postures stimulates the nadis and improves the flow of prana and intercellular communication?

Anisha (20:59)

Yeah, absolutely. So there’s many different ways to stimulate the, Marma points. Just stimulating it through touch, you know, we would call it as acupressure is one of the easiest ways to understand the Marma points. And everybody has done this. When you have a headache, maybe it’s a temple headache and you just touch your hands there or it’s the forehead and you touch your hands there.

Lois (21:21)

or your belly, you know?

Anisha (21:27)

Yeah. Right. So everyone’s experienced self Marma therapy in the form of just touching an area where there’s pain or discomfort. So acupressure is one of the forms of Marma therapy that’s the easiest to understand and to grasp. We can also stimulate the Marma points through meditation, focusing our awareness at a specific area. So with Ajna, the third eye, a lot of times teacher might instruct you to close your eyes and just focus on that area of Ajna. We can activate the Marma point through our breathing, just focusing the breath in a very specific area. We can also activate through sound. If anyone has used Tibetan bowls and placed them on a particular area of the body, you feel that vibration of the sound bowl, but it’s going into that specific Marma point. There’s also tuning forks that do the same thing of allowing

Lois (22:15)

Yeah, Dr. Lad did that, I remember. That was wild. We did that in class.

Anisha (22:20)

Yeah, and it’s such a powerful way to experience the vibration which you could do anywhere on the body, but when you do it at a targeted marma point, it makes it that much more powerful. You can also activate the marma points with smell and with aromatherapy. There are different Ayurvedic essential oils that can be used to specifically balance the dosas, know, calming oils to help with vata that tends to have energy that’s moving and scattered.

Vata oils are going to create a feeling of stability. Pitta oils are going to be more cooling, more calming, more soothing to counteract that pitta fiery intense energy. And then kapha oils are going to be oils that are warming, that are invigorating, uplifting, energizing to counteract excess kapha.

Those are, that’s just kind of to give a little variety in Marmachakitsa. Chakitsa means therapy, but Marmachakitsa is a big umbrella and we can find all these different ways to stimulate the points.

So, to come to your question about yoga specifically, yoga is another way to stimulate the points. And so some of it could be with direct touch or pressure. So in yoga, we often do this mudra, namaste, where we bring the palms of the hands together. So the palms are touching, all five fingers are touching. And this specifically activates a marma point that’s right at the center of the palm called thala hrida.

Marma, this point is connected to the heart energy. And so as we bring our hands together in this Namaste Mudra, we are symbolizing the union of right and left, male and female, yin and yang, know, all those dualities, how ⁓ that becomes one. And then we’re doing this hand gesture in front of our heart chakra, that heart space. But it’s also that activation of the Thala Hrida Marma.

We’re really activating that heart energy in a very powerful way as those two marma points touch. And so with yoga, we are naturally activating marma points through all of the movements that we do, through all of the asanas or postures that we do. And sometimes it’s with direct touch, and sometimes it’s not with direct touch, it’s just the energy moving. So for example, just standing on the floor, any standing yoga poses, your feet are on the earth and the same way we have Thala-hridha on the hand, we have Padmadhya, which means the center of the foot, on the soles of the feet. So any standing yoga poses that we do, we’re always stimulating that Padmadhya point with that direct touch with the earth. And so it’s a whole science in and of itself to go really deep in your yoga practice to be able to feel that flow of energy that’s moving through the chakras, the energy centers that connect to all the different plexuses that are flowing through the nadis, which we call the subtle channels of energy. We have 72,000 nadis that flow all through the body and they all do connect with the seven chakra system that we have at our center, but also a lot of them distribute energy into the marma points which allows that flow of prana to build up in certain areas.

Lois (26:01)

It’s fascinating to me. So that brought another question. Someone asked me this. Can you explain the connection of the chakras to the Nadi’s . Like, what if I just press the chakras? Is that going to take care of all the nadis

Anisha (26:19)

So, you know, the way the human body has been designed is fascinating. You don’t have to believe in energy to have energy flowing through you. You don’t have to believe that you have a heart and a circulatory system, like the heart is going to keep beating. So, what’s interesting is that the chakra system that we discuss in Yogic anatomy and in Ayurvedic anatomy, is connected to all of the seven nerve plexuses that Western medicine does recognize. They do recognize the cardiac plexus, which we call the heart chakra. They recognize the solar plexus, so it’s interesting to see that correlation in Western anatomy, there is some type of confluence at each of these centers through physical anatomy.

So with the Vedic understanding, we have a confluence of prana that is flowing into all of these centers. so the 72,000 nadis are distributed throughout the entire body, allowing that prana, which is essentially also intelligence. it is circulating the body’s intelligence throughout our entire system. And there’s things that we can do to block that intelligence. There are things that we can do to open up that that intelligence. And so what we see with the Marma points is that touch or activation of specific Marma points can really open up that intelligence in a very profound way. So if someone’s just suffering from chest pain, maybe their chest is tight, maybe their breathing is shallow, they just can’t get a deep breath in, maybe that restriction creates depression, or lethargy or fatigue.

And just being able to come to some specific marma points there on the chest, does allow that prana to open up and flow. That’s what allows us to experience that alleviation of symptoms. That could be physical symptoms, but could also be mental, emotional symptoms that we are experiencing.

Lois (28:26)

Hmm, because sometimes our emotions can block those energetic channels.

Anisha (28:31)

Absolutely. Our emotions, our mind is a very powerful thing and so we can convince ourselves we’re in pain. We can convince ourselves we’re uncomfortable emotions always find a way to express themselves in our body for better or worse. We can also use Marma therapy to awaken a feeling of clarity, a feeling of peace.

It could be positive or negative emotions, but all of those emotions are once again the flow of energy and the flow of prana and how are we experiencing that and where are we experiencing that in our body. So the Marma Point stimulation activates or helps to open up the nadis. The nadis are connected to the chakra system. So it’s all kind of built in to allow communication from one part of the body to another in a very sophisticated way.

Lois (29:30)

I know a lot of people suffer from insomnia. And so maybe like they go to bed and they’re thinking about things. That’s usually what keeps them up because they’re tired. They worked hard all day and they’ve got all kinds of stresses. What would be some Marma points to calm down the mind? So you lie in bed, can’t sleep. Instead of going to your phone or reading a book, what Marma points  would you recommend people press to sort of calm things down?

Anisha (30:00)

Yeah, that’s a great question because one of the beauties of Marma therapy is it can be so practical. You can go to an Ayurvedic practitioner or Marma practitioner to receive a Marma treatment. You could be doing a Panchakarma detox, receiving Ayurvedic massage and getting these points stimulated. But one of the things I’ve really tried to advocate for is self-care, Ayurvedic self-care and how we can use the marma points on ourselves in very simple, easy ways. So insomnia is a great example, because that’s something that affects so many people. When you’re lying there in bed and you can’t fall asleep, that is an opportune time to be able to work on yourself. a really simple practice that you could do for insomnia, Ayurveda talks about Dhinacharya is one of our terms for daily routine.

There’s all sorts of systematic practices we can do from the time we wake up till the time we go to bed that affect our energy, our mood, our hygiene, our mental patterns. And so the nighttime routine is really important to ensure sound sleep. This is true even if you don’t have insomnia, there’s things that we can do to prepare for bedtime, take a hot bath or shower, drink some warm almond milk with a pinch of nutmeg, for example.

Lois (31:23)

Yummm

Anisha (31:24)

And so, one of the simple rituals Ayurveda recommends is to do a foot massage at bedtime, usually using Bringaraj oil. Bringaraj is a lovely herb that’s a nervine sedative. It’s very calming. It’s grounding. It’s good to help ground vāta, which is kind of the main culprit that’s responsible for creating insomnia in our system.

So as we massage that Bhringaraj oil onto the soles of the feet, we can once again focus on that Padmadhya Marma that’s right at the center of the soles of the feet. And with some simple touch, you can take your thumb, press it directly into the center of the soles of the feet with steady pressure. As you’re doing this, you can do some breath work, just taking a few slow deep breaths for a minute or two.

And then to go deeper into that Marma point, can also start to do some circular movements there at that Marma point specifically. You can be doing this on one foot at a time, or you could be working on both feet at the same time. And then finishing grounding and holding that Marma point steady, connecting with your breath again. This simple ritual could take one or two minutes to rub the oil on the soles of the feet.

But you could also really go into it and spend a lot more time massaging the soles of the feet, feeling a sense of gratitude for how much we rely on our feet and don’t think about it, take them for granted during the day. And just really putting that loving attention and energy into Padmadhyaya as you do that foot massage is one of the best ways to shift that energy of insomnia, which is too much excess energy in our head, and ground it and bring it down through the feet.

 Lois (33:10)

Nice. Okay, but what if they’re not doing that? When you wake up in the middle of the night? Can you press like the crown chakra? Would that help? Would that bring energy down or not?

Anisha (33:21)

You still want to work with the feet is one of the best ways with insomnia specifically. Yeah. If you’re feeling very emotional, maybe working with the heart area. So, Hridayam Marma, for example, is at the center of the chest, connects to the heart directly. So, sometimes if we have insomnia, it might be because there’s too many emotions swirling. So, just kind of stimulating Hridayam Marma is a good way to just collect and ground the energy in the heart space.

Lois (33:26)

Okay, yeah got it, not the head. That might bring the energy up. Ha ha!

That makes sense. There was something in your book about Dr. Ladd’s theory about tenderness, pain at the Marma point, indicating a weakness or impurity or imbalance. And when you apply the pressure, it’s kindling agni. Was that something that was an insight that he had, not something that was sort of handed down in the ancient texts?

Anisha (34:24)

I think Sushruta did speak about that from the very beginning, tenderness at the Marma points can help us use these energy points diagnostically. So for example, Vruka Marma connects to the kidneys, and if you press that point at the low back and it’s sensitive, then it could diagnostically mean there’s some sort of disturbance with the kidney.

We have Yakrut Marma for the liver on the right side, Pliha Marma for the spleen on the left side. So we do have a few specific Marma points that correlate directly to organs. And as we press on them and feel sensitivity or pressure or tenderness, it could mean that there’s some type of physical disturbance with the organ, or sometimes it could be an energetic disturbance with whichever emotion is connected to that organ.

I can share a little bit also about just my personal practice of how I kind of work with the Marma points and integrate that into what I do because since I am also a trained acupuncturist, majority of my clients are coming to me for acupuncture. Most people have not heard of Marma. So they don’t really know about it until I introduce them. Typically in my treatment protocol, I will sit with a patient, go through their history, determine my diagnosis. My style of acupuncture is also different because I’m geared towards balancing the doshas, which is not the typical acupuncture traditional Chinese medicine understanding. But that’s kind of my integration of the two.

And so then as I go through the acupuncture protocol, you know, once all the needles are in, then I will sit with the patient and start the Marma therapy treatment. So they’re receiving the Marma work at the same time as having the acupuncture needles in. I usually start with some Ayurvedic essential oils. I have some specific dosha-based oils that I formulated to balance vata, pitta, or kapha, depending on the patient and whatever I feel is needed.

So I start with Ayurvedic Aromatherapy. It’s a great way to connect with their nervous system, start to introduce that feeling of relaxation. And usually the first marma point I start with is that Ajna Marma on the forehead that connects to the third eye. And as I’m stimulating that point, I’m also guiding the patient in connecting with their breath. I want them to breathe very intentionally. So I might ask them to breathe into specific marma points or specific body areas. And so I think the breath work is a very important part of going deeper with the marma points. It’s not just knowing where these physical points are located and touching them. It’s also the inner workings of the patient connecting with their breath that allows stuck prana to really start to to move and open up in a powerful way. I’m also guiding the patient as I start to go through different marma points in a guided meditation experience.

Oftentimes I’ll use affirmations as well. So it could be something very simple like I “open my heart” or “I am open to healing”, or “healing energy flows through me”. So I usually want the patient as they enter into that relaxation state to be using the power of their mind to help us get to the end result that we’re trying to achieve, whether it’s relaxation or being energized or being calm. And so it’s a combination of the touch with acupressure, the breath work, the meditation work. I might also suggest visualization.

To the client where at a specific Marma point I might tell them, “Okay. We’re at the heart. I’m gonna have you visualize a beautiful gold light flowing into the space”. Or just kind of working with whatever area it is that we’re targeting. So a typical Marma treatment when I’m combining it with the acupuncture could be 20 to 30 minutes or so If I’m doing a standalone Marma treatment without the acupuncture, then it’s an hour long.

I’ll also then start to include my tuning forks, bring in the element of sound healing, go to specific Marma locations where I want to have that vibration, penetrate more deeply. And then I’ve also trained in pranic healing, which I think also can be integrated with the Marma work as well, where the practitioner, if you’ve cultivated your own prana flow, your chi flow, we would call it in traditional Chinese medicine, then you can also be directing or guiding that energy within the patient as well to open up certain areas, to help shift emotions. I often find with folks when I work at that Hridayam Marma on the chest, it’s often tender on most people. Most of us do have our hearts guarded. Most of us do have unprocessed emotions, so stimulating that Marma point does tend to open things up. I’ve had people sometimes with just the slightest touch start crying, they feel an emotional release. It can be quite powerful in that sense. So that’s my usual protocol as I’m blending in all of these different things together into kind of that Marma experience that I’m creating for the client.

Lois (40:03)

That sounds amazing. I just want to share I have had acupuncture done to me in the past and it was making my vata really high and this was a woman in acupuncture, she was highly regarded. She came from China. Took me like months to get an appointment with her. I said, you know, I just feel like the energy is all going up to my head. It would be days later and I wasn’t grounded, you know. She didn’t really understand. It’s making the Vata too high. She’s like, okay, I’ll try a few less needles. And, then she was doing the moxibustion, like stay calm. I’m just going to light your toes on fire and leave the room. I’m like, “I’m not calm!” ha ha! So, in that particular case, it was too much for me. And I don’t know if that’s what I needed, but I ended up stopping. I was also doing herbs too. It could have been the herbs, so who knows?

But I like that you’re integrating both and maybe it’s also dealing with Westerners. I feel like we tend to hold things in more maybe than other cultures. That’s just a personal observation. And I do like that you are also expressing some intentional thoughts as you’re giving the treatments. As I believe it was Dr. Ladd, said something like, “the mind is always eavesdropping on your conversations”.

Anisha (41:07)

That’s a great line.

Lois (41:25)

You know, I was like, yeah, that’s right. So just be careful what you what you’re thinking, right? Because it’s going into your cells.

So you decide what you think the person needs, whether it’s going to be more acupuncture or more Marma and you generally will fuse it together.

Anisha (41:32)

Right, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I would say I’ve been in practice for so long, I’ve had a lot of time to experiment. So I have experimented doing these things individually by themselves. And so over the years, I’ve just developed my own style of how I put all of this together. For the most part, I do like to integrate all of the things that I mentioned. But sometimes I’ll do just the Marma, for example, if it’s pediatric clients, or people who are afraid of needles, then I will just be doing the Marma and not bringing acupuncture into it. And I found that with even children in particular, they do love being touched. I really like to teach parents how to work on their kids. So that’s a big part of working with that patient population is I do train the parents in how to work on their kids.

I also specialize in women’s health, so I’ve done a lot of fertility work, working with pregnant women, and in that case, I actually bring the husbands in. Then I want to teach the husbands how to do some relaxing marma treatments on their wives to support them during the pregnancy, because that’s just such a special time. It’s great bonding for the couple. And then even when the mom gives birth, I want to teach her some protocols on what to do on the newborn that are just simple and relaxing as well. So that’s one of the things I love about Marma therapy is it’s so versatile. Everybody can use this. Everyone can learn how to use it and practice it. And I think especially in our day and age of medicine becoming so specialized and so complicated and so expensive, we need to come back to as the patient, what is in my control? What can I do to make myself feel better so I don’t have to rely on a medication or an herb or a pill or a doctor, that there are lots of things that we can do to support our own healing.

So meditation, I’m a big fan of meditation and really prescribe that to all of my patients. Yoga as well is, you know, such a big part of Vedic wisdom of how to heal and treat ourselves.

Not all of my clients in a Western audience are open to yoga necessarily, but we’ve just kind of seen these things become more and more popular here in the West. So I do feel even if a doctor isn’t prescribing it, that patients are becoming much more educated and informed and wanting to take charge. And so Marma therapy, feels kind of the next frontier that not a lot of people know about outside of the Ayurvedic community.

But that’s really kind of my mission and path in kind of my journey of a healer is I’ve done a lot of work in working in various clinics, working one-on-one with folks, but I’m really looking to see how do I bring this Marma Vidya, Marma knowledge out into the world in a bigger way. Writing the Marma book with Dr. Lad started my journey way back when, but now my journey has really taken me to training practitioners, getting them to understand how to use the Marma points, whether they’re an acupuncturist, an Ayurvedic practitioner, a massage therapist, a yoga teacher, a midwife, a chiropractor, a physical therapist. What we all have in common is we touch people. If we can learn how to touch people in an intelligent way, then this knowledge of Marma points can really be spread in a beautiful and powerful way. That’s the direction I feel really called in.

So I created my school, the Marma Institute, with Dr. Lad’s blessings many years ago and have really started to formalize the trainings that I do beyond just weekend workshops to more intensive week-long trainings for practitioners who are really serious about this want to include it in their practice. But I’m also in the process of designing more trainings just for laypeople, like for moms who want to work on their kids or couples who want to learn how to work on each other and trying to figure out how to make Marma knowledge accessible for the everyday person. Yeah.

Lois (46:13)

Right. Yeah, that’s amazing,

And then if you want to do this for a career in the United States, what is it you need to have a massage license because you’re touching people? Is that correct or not?

Anisha (46:26)

So it’s still in the US, different state by state, whatever the regulations are. For some people who are in like a health freedom state, they might not need a massage license. But in general, you need some kind of license to be able to touch people. So kind of the default for most people is having a massage license would make it easy to incorporate Marma into the massage and to have a license to do so.

I’m not a massage therapist, because I’m a doctor of acupuncture, I have that licensing that does allow me to touch people.

Lois (47:01)

Yeah. How long do you think people should study Marma Like if you want to do it as a practitioner, does NAMA have coursework for that to get a certification

Anisha (47:13)

NAMA doesn’t offer any coursework specifically. They offer Continuing Ed credits for practitioners. So that’s something I have designed through my school because I wanted to take students deep. There’s so many different energy points. You want to know their name, their Sanskrit name, the translation, the anatomical location, which doshas it’s connected to, which dhatus or tissues the point is connected to, and then all the various ways to use that point in treatment. So it is a very in-depth study for a student who is serious to go through all of that information.

The MARMA book is a good start because we have recorded all of that information for each point, with my school, the level one training is a 50 hour online course that gives you the intro to Ayurveda, intro to the Marma points and the theory, all the point locations, energetics, starting to understand how to use the Marma points and treatment, the different applications. And then they can come for level two hands-on training understanding the proper flow of energy, the proper sequencing of points to really create relaxation in the patient to target specific symptoms or specific issues. That’s a 30-hour training And then I have a level three training, which is another 30 hours of training for people who know all the protocols now, but they want to go deeper into the energetics of understanding the pranic healing and how to reach their patients on a deeper energetic spiritual.

So in total, I have about 108 hours of training for the serious MARMA student to really go deep.

Lois (49:05)

Nice. And how often are you doing those level two courses?

Anisha (49:09)

I try to offer in Miami these trainings two or three times a year based on the interest and my schedule. I was traveling before the pandemic and teaching Marma Intensives in different places.

Once the pandemic happened, I developed the online school so people could learn all this information before coming to a hands-on training, So I am looking to try to revive some of my trainings that I might travel to teach again as well.

Lois (49:37)

Nice. Well, that sounds amazing. I’m looking through my notes here. The only other thing I didn’t ask about, we kind of alluded to, was about the ear being the shape of the body. There’s this diagram in the appendix of your book does it mean that you can press the different points on your ear to stimulate, the third eye or the eyes, or the spine.

Anisha (49:57)

Yeah, if you look at the shape of the ear, it’s like an upside down fetus. And so the earlobe is the head of the fetus. The spine goes all the way along the rim. The tailbone sacrum area would be at the very top. And then the inner part of the ear is all of the inner organs that we have. So when we’re doing marma chikitsa self-care, if you don’t have time to get the whole body massaged you can just work on stimulating the ear. It’s kind of like a mini massage for the whole body because you’re actually targeting everything by targeting the ear. And it can feel super relaxing just to do a little simple ear massage.

Lois (50:44)

Nice, I will do that. And you promised to walk us through a little self-care routine. And I’m excited for that.

Anisha (50:48)

Absolutely. Yeah, that’s a good way to end to let everyone have the direct experience of Marma themselves. So we’ll start by bringing the palms together, activating that Thala Hrida Marma. As we do this, we actually have the energy from the heart center is flowing down the inner arms and then it’s coming and collecting to this point. Starting with our hands in namaste mudra at the center of the chest. And as you do this, see if you can start to feel some activation at the center of the palm. Just activating that tala hrida marma.

You can close the eyes, take a few slow deep breaths.

And then we’re going to gently rub our palms together. So we’re also activating that Thala hrida Marma now with a little bit of heat and friction. And we’re going to place that hand for women, the left hand first, right on the center of the chest, the right hand on top of it. For men, you can do the right hand first, left hand second. And now we’re activating that Hridayam Marma, the center of the chest, with our Thala Hrida Marma.

So go ahead and close the eyes and start to breathe directly into the chest.

Letting your breath be soft and smooth.

Feeling an opening of your heart energy here.

And if there’s any type of heavy emotions that have been burdening your heart, I welcome you to let them go with each exhale. With each exhale, unburdening your heart, letting those emotions go, and with each inhale, allowing some freedom and lightness to flow into your heart space. We’ll do that for a couple more breaths.

And gently opening your eyes. And now we’ll go more specifically into that Hrida Marma. You can use all four fingers at the center of the chest if you like. As you press with all four fingers, we’re also getting the Hrid Marma points that are above Hridayam. We have Hrid 1, Hrid 2, Hrid 3. And that Hridayam Marma are kind of all in a row here. So we’re pressing into the chest with gentle pressure, working more directly with these different energy points. The Hridayam Marma points are kind of bilateral to that midline and then the Hridayam Marma is right along the midline at the center of the chest. So we’re just pressing here once again, light touch and just kind of feeling with the rise and fall of the breath that you’re going a little bit deeper into those points, working on still unburdening the heart, letting go of any heavy emotions that you would like to let go of.

And then we’re going to come more specifically to Hridaya marma using our thumb. So with the thumb you’re going to just press right at the very center of the chest, light touch. And as you touch this marma point, we’ll gently close the eyes. And on the inhale your touch is light. On the exhale allow yourself to press a little bit deeper into that point. So only do what feels comfortable. You don’t want to ever feel pain or discomfort.

But this is a tender point on most people. Just be aware of that. And as you’re touching this hridaya marma, visualize a beautiful golden healing light flowing into this point, bringing in a lovely radiant energy to help heal the heart, to heal our emotions. As you’re visualizing that golden light, you can also mentally repeat, I heal my heart. And we’ll connect this to the breath. So as you inhale, mentally say, I heal. As you exhale saying, my heart. I heal my heart. And we’ll do this for a few more breaths and just allow yourself to go as deep into this experience as you can. So you’re breathing into the heart center, activating that Hridayam Marma, visualizing that golden light and mentally repeating, I heal my heart.

And then gently letting go of that affirmation, the visualization. Come back to the heart center now with your left hand over the heart, right hand on top. Taking three deep breaths to seal in this beautiful healing energy.

Beautiful and gently letting go when you’re ready.

How was that little Marma self-care for you?

Lois (57:07)

Was lovely. I’ll do that at night.

Anisha (57:11)

Yeah, it’s a really simple, lovely practice. You can make it as short or as long as you like, but it’s a really easy way to start to connect with the energy points on yourself.

Lois (57:23)

I love it. Okay, let’s leave it there because it’s so beautiful. You’re on social media, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, your website is marmatraining.com. I’ll add them to the show notes.

I hope some people sign up for your classes. Let’s get more people doing mama therapy. It can only help the world.

Anisha (57:41)

Yeah, absolutely. It’s been such a pleasure, to be with you. More people need to know about Ayurveda and they need to know there’s so much to the science. There’s so much depth and practical wisdom. I love that you’re having these conversations and spreading Ayurveda.

Lois (57:58)

Thank you I appreciate your time. Namaste.

Anisha (58:00)

Absolutely. Namaste. Thank you.

 

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📚 Resources & Mentions

– 📖 Book/Article: Marma Points of Ayurveda Textbook

 

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