Women’s Power to Heal: Remembering Our Inner Medicine
“Health is more than the absence of disease; it is our individual undoing and continual unfolding as we strive to awaken the heart of consciousness.” Women’s Power to Heal. Mother Maya Tiwari
When I first read these words of Mother Maya, something stirred deeply in me. The wisdom that our health is continually unfolding feels profoundly empowering.
As Mother Maya reminds us in Women’s Power to Heal, health is not the absence of disease, it is a continuum, not a fixed state. There can be disruption, weakness, imbalance; at times life feels muddy. We may feel rigid, fixed, unyielding. Old patterns may be wreaking havoc in our bodies and minds. Yet this does not mean health is absent.
In Ayurveda, both can exist at once: disruption and vitality, dis-ease and healing.
Mother Maya teaches that Inner Medicine healing is earthed in the understanding that each one of us has the ineffable ability to arouse healing powers imbued within ourselves.
This is the paradox: even in the midst of disruption, the healing force is still alive within us. Shakti (our inner feminine energy) continues to pulse through us. She meets us exactly where we are and She dissolves what no longer serves us, renews what is ready to live again, she will help us soften into surrender, and to open our hearts once more.
Sometimes, like winter, the unfolding, the healing, asks for us to surrender into something like earth. To heaviness, steadiness, structure, solidity, to something timeless, ancient. To allow ourselves to be buried in her glorious mud, pressed into her weight, soaked by her waters, nourished by her unseen nutrients.
This past winter, I answered that call. I stepped away from screens and turned toward the “great screen of life.” I nestled into the earth of my winter, and my seasonal pause was named, wintering.
This wintering was not a retreat into idleness. My days remained as structured as ever. I was still working at the Ashram, still holding space for clients one-to-one. The difference was not in what I was doing but in how I was being. I had stepped away from the Vata–Pitta quality of distraction and urgency, from the restless pull of social media, which created space for me to enter into something slower, steadier, and more earthed.
It was the realm of Prithvi — the Earth element.
Heavy (guru): grounding me, steadying me.
Stable (sthira): reliable, consistent, unmoving.
Dense (sandra): giving form and structure.
Slow (manda): deliberate, calming, unhurried.
Tangible (sthula): perceptible, embodied, real.
This was not always easy. Letting go of distraction and multitasking brought resistance to the surface. There was disruption in my system as I came face to face with the restlessness underneath.
And on the cusp of Spring the great August moon rose like the Goddess herself; luminous, commanding, tender, and fierce all at once. She became a mirror, reminding me to honour and trust my own body even more intimately. That powerful full moon pulled me deeper into myself and eventually into bed, into stillness, nourishing my immunity and nervous system in ways I had never experienced before. Her medicine was fierce and tender at once.
Like many of you, I discovered that when I push against Nature’s rhythms, the threads of body, mind, or spirit begin to knot and fray. We may be tending the garden of our body with care by eating well, practicing yoga, moving with the seasons. Yet if our thought life is restless or heavy, the nervous system can still shift into fight, flight, or freeze. The body then speaks through symptoms: inflammation, digestive upset, headaches, exhaustion, even low libido.
But there is another truth too. Sometimes we are doing all the things “right.” The rhythms are in place, the steadiness is holding us and still, Shakti has her way. On that full August moon, the Goddess herself threw me into bed. Not because I had failed or done something wrong, but because everything was working. The steadiness I had cultivated made space for a deeper release: perhaps the loosening of “Little Ms Perfect — Ayurveda Teacher,” perhaps the grief lodged in my lungs asking to be dissolved.
This too was health. It was Shakti’s unfolding, reminding me that health is not about control, not about getting it perfect.
It is about allowing the loom of body, mind, and spirit to keep weaving, even when the thread changes direction.
As Mother Maya says, “it is our individual undoing and continual unfolding as we strive to awaken the heart of consciousness.”
During this wintering phase I deepened my faith in my practices, and opened even more to the love and support of my family and community to help me through this healing. It was so deeply precious and I leaned into the wisdom I have come to know and trust.
Too often we are conditioned to doubt ourselves, to outsource our wisdom, to believe that someone else knows more about our bodies than we do. But our health cannot be outsourced.
I believe so deeply that you have the power to heal and that health is in your hands. Through the wisdom of Sadhana, ritual, food, rhythm, and community, we step into a profound sense of our own agency, we hold within us the wisdom to awaken our healing.
Remember beloved community, you carry the power to heal, as a living truth.
