Akin was just eight years old when his grandfather Kochu Govindan, a highly respected healer of the Nadar caste, took him on as an apprentice. He was to become a Siddha Marmani, a master of the healing art of Siddha Marma, as had been the destiny of the chosen ones of his family since time immemorial. From then on, discipline and subordination dominated everything day by day, because according to the family tradition every Marma treatment is considered to be a service to the Hindu goddess Kali, the dark one, the mistress of renewal in letting go, Shakti and thus the energy of Shiva, whose flow can be very painful but always provides a very personal and liberating healing experience.

It was only after almost eight years of simple tasks of traditional rituals such as oiling and simple supportive hand movements that Akin received the first instructions for independent treatments. It took almost additional five years before Akin was allowed to perform the ritual independently on his own. During another ten years he developed into true Siddha Marmani, the master who has made the art of Siddha Marma his own being and who has become the art he practises himself. Today, he never conducts more than maximum two treatments on the same day, as his ancestors did already, each treatment and each lesson a very personal release for the ones who asked for it.

Siddha Marma is a unique traditional healing art of the ancient India, which does not originate from the widely known Ayurveda, but from the rather unknown South Indian Siddha tradition.

Methodologically, Siddha Marma comprises a variety of complex manual treatment techniques closely related to distinct fighting techniques of the ancient South Indian martial arts. Both, fighting and healing Marma techniques, are based on the stimulation of precisely defined punctiform energy centres just underneath the surface of the human body, the so-called Marma points. In Siddha Marma there are a total of 108 such points, which are treated sequentially or in parallel with various pressure methods or local massage techniques to release energetic blockages and thus bring about physical and emotional liberation.

The Siddha tradition is primarily associated with the South Indian Nadar caste, whose members, as coconut pickers, had a low social status and little access to written sources. In order to protect the corpus of Siddha knowledge from falsification even without it being written down, the relevant knowledge was only passed on to individuals as a secret teaching. However, when the British colonial power began to eviscerate the Indian traditions, the oral chains of transmission were increasingly decoupled. While Ayurveda has been largely preserved during this critical phase of Indian history and by high ranking Brahmin families and books written in Sanskrit, large parts of the Siddha corpus are now considered lost. However, fortunately the Siddha Marma healing techniques could survive because these were carried on by the anyway only few authentically trained Siddha Marmani. This means, Siddha Marma is in existence as long as the knowing ones are.

However, will the traditional way of learning Siddha Marma survive on the long term? Gaining mastership in Siddha Marma requires to follow a hard way of practicing and dedication, comparable to studying piano interpretations but with the addition of a spiritual dimension of highest complexity and without any sheet of notes. Traditionally, this begins before the age of ten. What follows is a path characterized by discipline and renunciation. It is therefore not surprising that traditionally trained Siddha Marmani are today even harder to find as it was in earlier times. The good news, however, is that Akin is that kind of godsend. Due to his comparatively young age, he could even be the one to ensure the survival of Siddha Marma for the benefit of future humanity. This would require him to develop new forms of teaching Siddha Marma. Undoubtedly, beyond receiving his treatments to our own personal benefit this is definitely worth any support we can provide in a universal sense.