Dr. Maruti Sharma

On 3 September 2004, a Swiss academy went looking for a partner in India.

NLP-Akademie Schweiz taught across six cities — Basel, Bern, St. Gallen, Zürich, Luzern and Konstanz. It was a member association of the International Association for NLP. Its programmes were acknowledged by SVEB, the Swiss state authority for adult training. That is the institution doing the choosing.

It named a co-operating Partner and Sponsor in research and training, to promote and organise NLP trainings on its behalf. Two signatures sat at the foot of the announcement, both IANLP Fellow Member Trainers: Megha Baumeler and Ueli R. Frischknecht. Frischknecht has been Secretary General of the International Association for NLP since 2000. He still holds that office. You can write to him.

The man they named, in their words, was an International Trainer and Success Coach.

He was from Jammu. His name was Maruti Sharma.

Switzerland reached into north India for an NLP partner. Not the other way round.

In a market where "international" usually means an Indian trainer bought a certificate abroad, he was the man a European academy put its own name behind. Most NLP trainers working in India today were not yet certified when that announcement was printed.

And 2004 was not the beginning either. He had met NLP fourteen years before that, in 1990, through Dr. Ajay Kotwal — the Himalayan teacher who would go on to teach him for fourteen years, and who put the field in front of him long before it had a market in this country.

He had not come from nowhere. He took the Student Award at G.G.M. Science College for 2001–02, founded an inter-college student forum, and represented Jammu & Kashmir at a national conference in Delhi in October 2001 convened to reframe India's National Youth Policy. In 2002 he led an Indian team at the Austrian Youth Red Cross's 47th International Study and Friendship Camp at Langenlois. He completed course work in project management with the Swiss Red Cross in 2003, and in creativity in 2004.

By September 2004 he had founded the University of Life in Jammu, published his first book, The Art of Permanent Happiness, and completed his MA in Psychology at the University of Jammu specialising in organisational behaviour. That July, at Nottwil in Switzerland, he had signed a training and training-research partnership with The Knot (vzw) of Belgium on behalf of Commune of Mystics, the Indian organisation founded by his teacher Dr. Ajay Kotwal, where he served as Coordinator, Programmes.

The rooms had started earlier still. In February 2003 a Jammu higher secondary school appointed him consultant for its development, addressing him as Managing Director of Edumax International. That December he took MBA students at the University of Jammu's Department of Management Studies through a three-day workshop; the Daily Excelsior covered it that Monday on its campus page under the headline "'Wake Up' energises Management students at varsity," quoting a student who said she had never before thought about having a vision for her life. Four months later, while he was himself a final-semester student of that same university, its Internal Quality Assurance Cell recorded its intent to engage him as a resource person for the University's own personality-development and career workshops.

The university was hiring its student to train its students.

NLP began as the study of extraordinary subjective experience: find the rare person who can do what others cannot, model the pattern, make it teachable.

India has been running that study for two and a half thousand years.

Dr. Sharma's doctorate from the University of Jammu stands on exactly that bridge. His thesis, A Comparative Study of Enlightenment in Vajrayana Buddhism, reads the oldest maps of human possibility against the newest.

Behind the doctorate sit fourteen years of direct study with Dr. Ajay Kotwal, in Kashmir Shaivism, Tantra, meditation and non-duality. Fourteen years, with one teacher, inside living traditions rather than texts about them. Note the intellectual line that runs through it: Vajrayana Buddhism and Kashmir Shaivism are both non-dual tantric systems, and his doctorate reads one of them against Western psychology. This is not an assortment of interests. It is one investigation, pursued from several directions at once.

That training is now unrepeatable. Dr. Kotwal has for some years been in retreat and no longer teaches or meets anyone. Whatever was transmitted in those fourteen years cannot be enrolled in today at any price.

To that add the title Yoga Siromani, Teacher of Yoga, conferred by the International Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centre at Neyyar Dam in December 2010 — awarded not for course attendance but for services rendered to the propagation of yoga. And training in Tai Chi and Qigong in the lineage of Bruce Kumar Frantzis, among the few Westerners holding lineage transmission in the Taoist internal arts.

In February 2025 the University of Jammu signed a five-year Memorandum of Understanding with the University of Life to establish an Applied Buddhist Studies Centre — the first of its kind — with the same Department of Buddhist Studies that examined the doctorate. The university published it on its own website.

How these traditions read against NLP →

Theory survives in books. Trainers survive in rooms.

Since 2000 his have included senior and branch managers of The Jammu & Kashmir Bank; MBA cohorts at Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University and at the University of Jammu; 31 probationary Deputy Superintendents of Police at the Sher-i-Kashmir Police Academy, Udhampur, where he lectured on behavioural science and was invited back for a course on community policing; Bharti Airtel's employee-family forum in Jammu; NCC cadets at Group Headquarters, Jammu; and in-service teachers of the Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan drawn from more than one region of India.

Also the rooms that never appear on a trainer's website. Rajouri. Sunderbani. Bishnah. Samba. Leh. In 2012 a Jammu paper ran a full-page feature on him under the headline "Transforming lives worldwide," and what it recorded was a man who kept going back out to the districts to work with teachers and learners who would never see the inside of a corporate seminar hall.

The best evidence about a trainer is not the first invitation. It is the second.

In February 2006 he ran a three-day workshop on Power Communication for MBA students at Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University. In August 2024 the same university brought him back to open its Student Induction Programme. Eighteen years between the two invitations.

Gargi College of the University of Delhi has had him in front of its undergraduates on mental hurdles and resilience — fear of public speaking, stress, anxiety, depression, and the mental well-being of women at every age.

Amity University Haryana came to him three times in ten months. In June 2024 he taught on a two-week refresher course for educationists. That December, Amity Business School gave him the closing morning of a five-day faculty development programme, on a bill with speakers from O.P. Jindal Global Business School, GITAM School of Business and the University of Delhi. Then in April 2025 the Head of Amity's Institute of Clinical Psychology invited him onto the Institute's Industry Advisory Board as an expert, on the strength of his clinical psychology experience, to help shape its research, teaching, training and clinical supervision.

Invited to teach. Invited back. Then invited to help govern.

The corporate work has not stopped either, and it is not lecture work. Ashwni Kumar Goela, a hospitality chief executive in Delhi, sat through a strategic leadership meet Dr. Sharma designed and ran with two colleagues, and afterwards said this on camera:

One of the finest strategic meets that we've had. And I'm saying it not because you guys are here — I actually mean it, from the fact that you have gone into the pre-work for each one of us, into the structured workshop that you have run.

Ashwni Kumar Goela · Hospitality CEO, Delhi

Note what he singles out. Not the delivery. The pre-work, done for each individual in the room before the room ever opened. That is the difference between a speaker and a practitioner, and a chief executive noticed it.

Not participant testimonials. Named academics and officers, writing on their own letterheads.

Dr. Madhu Yashpal of Gargi College, University of Delhi, wrote after his talk to their undergraduates to call it exceptionally insightful and inspirational, and to record that it had equipped their students with strategies for fear of public speaking, stress, anxiety and depression. She closed by hoping to welcome him back. Reproduced with her kind permission.

The Principal of Kendriya Vidyalaya Sunjuwan wrote in 2016 that participants from two regions of the country had been highly inspired and motivated by his presentation. Bharti Airtel's HR manager, announcing his 2009 parenting session, called him a renowned faculty. The Assistant Director of the Sher-i-Kashmir Police Academy asked him to share his valuable knowledge and immense experience with 31 probationary officers.

Twenty-two years of letters, and they all say a version of the same thing.