Marma Therapy & Ayurvedic Bodywork | Melbourne
Two hours of unhurried Ayurvedic bodywork and Marma therapy.
Some things can’t be rushed into. They require time, stillness, and a quality of attention that most treatment tables don’t allow. The Deep Listening Session is two full hours — unrushed, unscripted, and entirely responsive to what the body is carrying. It is the deepest offering at Soma, and the one that tends to stay with people longest.
What is the Deep Listening Session?
The session draws on classical Ayurvedic bodywork as its foundation: warm oils chosen and blended specifically for your constitution and current state, applied with the long, nourishing strokes of Abhyanga. But it moves further. Where the body is asking for it, Marma therapy is woven in — precise, quiet work at the points where the physical and the more subtle come together.
There is no fixed sequence. The session listens and follows. Some sessions move slowly and deeply through the physical layers. Others find their way into something harder to name. What consistently happens is this: with enough time and enough genuine stillness, the body begins to do things it doesn’t usually have room to do.
For when something is ready to shift — and there’s finally enough space for it to.
Marma Therapy — Where the Physical Meets the Subtle:
Marma is one of the most refined and subtle aspects of Ayurvedic medicine. The classical texts identify 107 Marma points throughout the body — specific sites where muscle, bone, joint, blood vessel and prana (life force) converge. These are not metaphorical locations. They are mapped, named, and understood to govern specific physiological and energetic functions.
The word Marma comes from the Sanskrit root ‘mri’ — meaning that which is vital, or that which can be harmed. These are the body’s threshold points. In the Ayurvedic tradition, they were understood by physicians and warriors alike: sites of both vulnerability and tremendous healing potential.
When a Marma point holds tension, trauma or stagnation, it can disrupt the flow of prana through the body — contributing to pain, emotional holding, hormonal imbalance, fatigue, or a persistent sense of being stuck. Working these points — with warm oil, specific pressure, and unhurried attention — encourages that flow to restore itself.
The experience of Marma therapy is quiet and precise. It is nothing like deep tissue work. Often the touch is still rather than moving — a held presence at a particular point that invites the tissue, and what is held in it, to release. Clients frequently notice emotional shifts as well as physical ones: a sense of something lifting, or settling, or finally being acknowledged.
At Soma, Marma therapy is not applied as a fixed protocol. It is drawn on intuitively, in the places where the body is asking for that quality of attention. The two-hour container of the Deep Listening Session is what makes this possible — there is simply not enough time in a shorter treatment to reach these layers.
What to Expect in Your Session:
We’ll begin with a conversation — longer and more spacious than the intake at the start of a shorter session. How you’ve been sleeping. Where you’re holding. What has been sitting in the body, unresolved. From this, the oil blend is prepared: warm, organic, chosen for what your system is currently asking for.
The bodywork begins slowly. There is no rush to cover ground. The first part of the session allows the nervous system to genuinely arrive — not just to relax at the surface, but to come down into something deeper. By the time Marma work is introduced, the body is usually already softening in ways that make this layer of the work more accessible.
Two hours is a long time to be held with this quality of care. Most clients find there is a point — usually somewhere in the second hour — where the ordinary thinking mind genuinely quiets. What happens in that space is particular to each person.
You will leave with oil on your skin. Plan for a genuinely quiet afternoon — not errands, not screens if you can help it. The work continues after you leave the table.
A Note from Natalie
The name for this session came from years of noticing what happens when there’s finally enough time. The body listens differently when it’s not bracing for the end.
Marma work found its way into this session gradually, as I became more attuned to the places where standard bodywork wasn’t quite reaching. There are points in the body that hold things words haven’t touched. The work at these places is quiet and slow and sometimes surprisingly potent.
If something has been sitting with you — in the body, in the tissues, in the life — and feels ready to move, this is the session I’d suggest.
Session Details
Duration: 120 minutes
Investment: 240 AUD
Location: Private studio, Highett, Melbourne (address shared upon booking)
For: Women only
Includes: Ayurvedic oil bodywork, Marma point therapy, personalised oil blend
What to bring: Nothing. Everything you need is here.
Afterwards: Allow the rest of the day to be quiet. The work continues after you leave the table.
"There, where muscle, vessel, ligament, bone and joint converge — that meeting place is called Marma. It is the seat of prana. It is that which is vital."
— Sushruta Samhita, Sharirasthana 6:3