Supporting women's health through Ayurveda — tradition, practice, and real-world application, with Maya Tiwari

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.

Key takeaways:

• Ayurveda offers a traditional framework for supporting women’s health and daily well-being
• Consistent self-care practices may help cultivate balance and awareness
• Traditional approaches often emphasize living in rhythm with natural cycles
• Integrating Ayurvedic principles into daily life can be gradual and personalized
• Long-standing practitioners bring valuable perspective on the evolution of holistic health
• Education and community remain central to sustaining traditional wellness practices

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Transcript

Yuli 0:00

Welcome to the Heallist Podcast, where we unpack the many layers of holistic health. I'm Yuli, founder of Heallist, your portal to holistic healers worldwide. Now let's go deep. Hello, dear friends, and welcome to the Heallist Podcast. If this content resonates, please hit subscribe or follow to support this independent content. And today I'm sitting down with someone who's been doing this work long before it became a trend. Maya Tiwari founded the first Ayurveda school in North America back in 1981. That's over 35 years of teaching, practicing, and building community. Maya's work centers on women's health and wellness through an Ayurvedic lens. She's the author of several books, including I Am Shakti, and she's dedicated much of her life to education and service, including founding the Mother Om Mission, which serves at risk communities. And in this conversation, we are going to explore what supporting women's health through Ayurveda actually looks like in practice. What does it mean to use this traditional frameworks in someone's day-to-day life? And I can't wait to get into it. Thank you, Maya, for being here. It's such a pleasure.

Maya 1:10

It's a pleasure to be here, Yuli. Wonderful to be with you and your audience.

Yuli 1:14

I can't wait to pick your brain and your wisdom. I've been talking to somebody who's been in the space for so long and seeing those trends and evolve and everything that relates to women's health, especially. I feel like we are living through this revolution. I don't know if it's the right word, but definitely some transformation that is finally becoming a topic that is talked a lot about, maybe too much, maybe there's so many experts weighing in. But finally we're recognizing the uniqueness of our biology and the importance of paying attention and to ourselves, right? As women. I think to me, if I just distill it, what it comes down to, we're so used to giving and taking care of others. And finally we live in time that it's okay to take care of ourselves. And I shared with you when this morning I woke up and I had this really deep desire. My body was talking to me and really I was asking for some sort of work, somatic work, body work. So I end up going and getting a massage because I just felt like it would be disservice for me to record this episode, to go on with my day before I took care of myself. So thank you for being flexible. But to me, I'm just realizing now how it's all connected. We're talking about women's health and how important it is to actually live the truth and live what we preach. So thank you.

Maya 2:33

And Yuli, that's wonderful that you did take that time to self-care. It's the most important thing because that's what the word mother means. That's what the word Shakti means. That's, and by the way, it's not the spiritual element of our lives. It's the bio element, the spiritual element of physiological, psychological, and psychic elements of our life is in that word, that Sanskrit word, Shakti. Not a new age nomenclature. It means the primordial feminine energies. And once we understand what the depths of our primordial feminine energies are, we can no longer be severed from it. So one of the difficulties here is we are managing life as women, with careers, with children, with home, with husbands, with extended families, and basically we do not have the time structure to care for the self. It's always an outward movement. And whereas it is natural for the feminine force to be the nurturing, caretaking, loved, forgiving force, we've got to shift more than time. We have got to shift our entire concept of what it is to be a woman.

Yuli 3:47

Absolutely. So let's talk about some of the fundamentals of maybe Ayurveda specifically and women's health in general. And what's your point of view?

Maya 3:56

The 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. We'll get back to that later. 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. For instance, we are right now at the pivotal full moon just about waning, just after humongous bloodstroke eclipse. We have Saturn and Neptune alignment combination with the Mercury retrograde. What it boils down to is we will feel vulnerable because we are affected. 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, Women's Power to Heal, in that book 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

Ayurveda and Lunar Cycles, Hormones and Ojas

Maya 6:05

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 device. 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 away off kiltell. 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. Because 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 all what does the full moon do? At that 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. And when we understand that we're living by the cycle of the moon, in just a little while I have a moon shakti medicine course coming up. It's a beautiful course 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? Meaning the inner medicine, the medicines we naturally have within ourselves. We're constructed from nature. We are nature.

Yuli 8:09

It's beautiful. I totally understand the concept of it, but I also understand the constraints of the modern life and how disconnected many of us are from nature. What are some of the things or some practices that you're seeing that help women to connect to that natural Shakti cycle?

Maya 8:28

Well, we have to look at the greater picture sooner or later. We cannot just do balms and practices. Because there's about one million practices that we can do that are all supportive. There's about another trillion practice we can do that is even more supportive. And how much time do we have to do all of these practices? And how do they connect to what we need? That is where we need to find our connection to a practice, not just any practice. And what I mean by that is we have to get a little bit deeper, goddesses, to the source of who we truly are. I'm not selling a book, I don't need to sell them, they sell themselves. I am Shakti, which is my newest book, talks about the root cause of our despair and imbalances. It talks about the patriarchal takeover of the Shakti force because they want it so badly. They want it to control, they want it to nurture, they want it to manifest, but they don't have it. They have the masculine force, which also has its grandeur. But not getting off on topic, let us just say that we need to go back and understand what this force is about. We are not operating as human individuals without an incredible construct of intelligence already inside of our bodies. And that's why I call it inner medicine, not outer medicine. Practices that align us with the moon, for instance, are inner practices. They become part of the inner strive, they become part of the inner cellular memory that is building strength again, and they make us remember. Right now we have forgotten who we are in terms of the powerful feminine force within us. Each one of us have it in an awakened state. We could not give birth if it wasn't awakened. So it is awakened. It's a question, and we don't have to go and acquire it from the outside or from a teacher or a guru because it's already inside of us. We simply have to learn it. Learn how it functions so we can access it at the times when we need to.

Yuli 10:33

So are you talking more about accessing the energies? Is it on the energetic level, biological, all of the above? Give me the mechanics of it or maybe the the science behind it.

Maya 10:45

Yes, and science is vast. But here's a simple version of it. 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 harmonas, 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 it 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, in one simple practice, do a lunar-solar breath, the left side of your nostril connects to the lunar to the moon, 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, believe it or not. Simple practices. We don't have to do three hours of yoga a day, although if you can, great. The fact is that we need to understand why we are doing the practice. What does it do? It's like a medicine. I have a headache, I'm going to take an aspirin. Okay, here's a better medicine. 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

Breath, Marma Points, And Grounding

Maya 13:16

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.

Yuli 13:54

Incredible. So since you mentioned traditional medicine and we're talking about hormonal balance and female empowerment, I have to ask you your point of view on all the new innovative hormone treatments that are being sold to women these days. And I personally, as somebody who's spending my life on a mission to help holistic practitioners like yourself and to bring some of those ancient traditions back to life, I have a very conflicting view because I also have a lot of friends that are being really helped by some of those new medical innovations and the hormonal treatments. But I also, and it also I think as a marketer, that's another part of me. I also see how all of a sudden it's becoming this big industry that is really, I can't help but think that is profiting from the opportunity to solve this big issue for women in a way that we're not sure yet. It's not researched long enough. And again, not to dismiss one side or another, but I really wanted to ask you for your perspective on what's happening today.

Maya 15:03

Well, my perspective may sound radical, but it truly is not. It's the truth. Why do we need a mega-trillion dollar industry to tell us what we need as women when we have the intuitive force to know what we need? There are certain things they're doing that are helping women, helping their loneliness, helping their ability to have children and such like. But there is a natural way to do all of it if we take the time and we learn it, and we learn how to do it. I'm not going to blame the medical scientific industry for being what they are. It's a divisive field. It's a field that has taken away a lot of the power of women. It's a field that is eroded a lot of women's reproductive power, and that I do not agree with at all. I think we begin to see for ourselves as we grow into that awareness. And here is the topic that we talk about in Ayurveda, in the Vedas at large, in meditation, in yoga, and in every spiritual activity we do. And if we don't like the word spiritual, we can say in every practical activity we do that ties us back to our own nature. Because spirit isn't just something that flies around our brain and head and mind and nature. It can be seen in many, many ways. Spirit is not about religion, spirit is about the basic part of you, your mind, body, spirit. It is a combination of an interconnected force of awareness. My awareness is worth trillions of dollars. My frequency is worth even more trillions, and that is our new currency. And we've got to come to terms with the currency of awareness, because awareness called chitta in in Sanskrit in Ayurveda is how we begin to process our own sense of what is good for us. What is the parameter? What is what is the decision maker within us? Alert is that decision maker. How mindful is that decision maker? I have made incredible mistakes in my own power as a person who understands healing in a great volume. And yet when it came turn to having a reaction to gases and fumes and atmospheric stuff, and it threw the oxygen down in my body in the mountains, and then the heart began to to go faster, what they call atrial fibrillation. And then medical science stepped in and did, you know, all the things that made it worse for me. I too contributed to being a part of that for a short while. And we have to understand that when something is aching within us, when it is, for instance, an illness or a disease, there is a sense of fear. And we do run to what, not what has been proven, because modern science has never proven itself, by the way. It is still lacking of incredible proof. No matter how many blind studies they've done, it remains blind. Fear does throw us into what the norm is, what will bring a closure to our story very quickly. Well, here is the deal. The way that our mana, our mind works in awareness, it's better to not have a closure really, a quick closure, because we are multi-layered. We are multifaceted. We are as complex as the universe itself. And at the same time, once we understand who we are, it becomes so, such a first nature for us to work. I know you want the practical, but we've got to dive a little bit underneath what we know and what we think is truth. We've been given a time where there's so many conflicts, so much chaos, so much disparity around us. And what does that do? It can make us more vulnerable and fearful, or it can awaken us to understand that we have sovereignty within ourselves, especially as women, and men too. I feel badly for men, women, children, and everyone.

Yuli 18:54

What do you recommend for women who are on this path of maybe recognizing they need external help, especially when it comes to something like hormonal imbalance or just being out of balance in general? How can they find the right guide, the right modality, the right practitioner? This is what my brain is busy with every day. How can we help people find the right path?

Maya 19:20

Yes, and and 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. And then 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

Finding The Right Help And Access

Maya 20:05

that way, which is unfortunate because Ayurveda was the medicine that cost pennies. You know, 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 are the communities, Yuli, we 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. Not necessarily all organic, it can be farmed, but we just have to keep controlling how much garbage we have in our food. 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, just like in the Mother Roman, nobody paid anything. But fortunately, I was earning from my books and other works, not from Ayurveda training necessarily. And able to sponsor so much of the work and train volunteers who give so much of their time to helping other needed individuals. This must come back. 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. Listen, ladies, don't get too upset by this, but 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 deep breath. We need to do a few things at home. 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 blah blah blah blah blah. 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.

Yuli 24:55

Yes, um beautiful message, and I love the idea also of regaining our sovereignty, and I think it's something that people are slowly waking up to, also using their intuition, forming their own opinions, not following the dogmas or the gurus, right?

Maya 25:13

And not getting obsessed by all that's going to unfold. It's like a serial show coming out of governments and of this and of that and whatever. And we do have help. We have way more help now than when I first started. The help is so divine. You don't have to do too many more practices to raise your vibration. It's being done. It's part of your cellular memory. It's getting, it's getting elevated in spite of us. We just have to know that when we're laughing for no reason at all, when we're smiling, when everything should look really bleak, that something is happening with the inner calibration of our vibration.

Yuli 25:53

I also wanted to ask your perspective as someone who's been in this industry for so long, where are things going when it comes to the beautiful world of holistic practices and the different traditions and teachings? I feel like we're also reaching some sort of a, I don't know, culmination or saturation, right? There's just so much. There's just so much information, so many different traditions, so many practitioners coming in. Some are kind of jumping on a trend, some have true intentions there to really help. They're on a mission. Where do you see this space uh evolving in the next few years?

Maya 26:29

So let's answer it the way that you feel it, the way you just put it, Yuli, is you're already sizing it up, you're already assessing it, it's already in your tissue memory going, this isn't working, that's not working, this is going to be an overload. We have something called the nervous system. And our nervous system cannot accommodate all that is unfolding right now. We are being overwhelmed, whether it's holistic practice, medical practice, whatever, whether it is the great gurus that are authentic and the ones that are just marketing. It doesn't matter. What matters is this. Let us understand, like a massage does. We can self-massage with sesame oil as well. We can take warm bath with natural rose petals, do what we can to assuage the body's nervous system into always feeling okay no matter what's going on, then that's what we need to do. We are as guilty in holistic medicine as in the pharmaceutical approach. And in that is, we have built so much hype. We have built so much marketing and so much hype. And what we have to always understand, goddesses, is this awareness has no products, consciousness does not depend on commodities. And what I mean by that is what is it that's working for you and what is it that's not working for you? And let us use our nervous system to be the measuring guide of what is too much and what is too little. We can. We can become attuned to how our nervous system works. If you begin to feel stress and hyper, the nervous system is responding badly and it's out of sync. If you can take a deep listening to some crazy things going on and take a deep breath and you're settled within yourself, your nervous system is doing. We have more hype in the new age accumulation of what they call knowledge than we've ever had in the allopathic formation of what they call knowledge. We have so much hype. So we've got to understand not to get caught in the hype because it is for the elitists. Nothing that is shaped into serving elitism is ever going to serve humanity. And we are the humanity. We are the people that contribute to humanity. We must know the difference. It's not about money and who has and who doesn't. Elitism means it's taking it away from food for one must be food for all. Oxygen for one must be oxygen for all. When something, no matter whether it's called holistic or otherwise, takes you away from that middle path, know that it's not for you, it's not going to serve you. We make fashion out of everything. We put labels on everything. And we have got to stop doing that. Community, your neighbors, bring them together. I bet you, in America, in particular, every 50 mile there has to be at least five yoga practitioners, at least three acupuncturists, at least two I revealed, humble practitioners in every 50 mile area, perhaps not in the sparsely populated rural areas, but in every 50 mile surrounding any city in America. So let us get these people together. Let us be the influencer that can bring this together. So our community within 50 miles, 20 miles, 10 miles can heal.

Yuli 29:50

Beautiful. That's exactly what we're doing at Heallist.

Embodiment, Simplicity, And Values

Yuli 29:53

We're building a community of healers and around the world to strengthen it because I think it's so segregated by different modalities, by different philosophies. It's time to, like you said, stop putting labels on things and just come together and healing and helping people.

Maya 30:12

And 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. But 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. You know, we really have to stop contributing to the design and label lifestyle of what captures our very soul, really.

Yuli 30:52

Beautiful. Well, thank you so much for this important message. I think we're running out of time, and I wanted to give you an opportunity to say any last words of wisdom, anything that we didn't mention, but you felt like our listeners really need to hear right now.

Maya 31:07

That's very kind of you, Yuli. But I think we've covered a lot that is going to stay in the thought process and then it's going to sort of sort itself out. And don't worry it really. Because when we hear things, it stays and then it finds its own little sprouting. Whatever is to you, whatever is captured by your mind, begins to sprout in the way that it needs to. So we don't have to grasp with anything. Just know that your absolute awareness, tetwamacy, I am that, that I am. It's just 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.

Yuli 32:13

That resonates so much. Well, thank you for sharing this words of wisdom with us today. It's just so much needed, and especially having your perspective from all those years and doing this very important mission. It's been really an honor to have you with us today.

Maya 32:28

And Yuli, it's been my pleasure too. And I am deeply honored to be on your show. And all the best with blossoming and blooming Heallist. The world needs it.