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Mirabai's Story
Tapping Inner Resources for Good Health
Mirabai has brought her message of tapping inner strengths for well being to wide audiences in appearances as a health and fitness expert on CNN, the Today Show, Good Morning America, the CBS Nightly News, and ABC, and has written articles published by many leading fitness magazines.
“My story is one of not feeling so good about myself and learning to use dance, movement and my intuition as paths to getting better. I don’t see myself as a dancer, I see myself as a teacher and I hope a catalyst,” she says. “I want to give people a base to work from. Beginning to learn healthy alignment is as basic as you can get. People often ignore the fact that they can feel some kind of goodness and awareness from walking around.”
“A lot of times, people lock their energies into a given set of muscle groups. They hold tension in different parts of their bodies. That’s more of what I’ve developed – an approach to movement that won’t be threatening to them because it’s so natural. I want to give them an awareness of themselves so they can offer awareness to other people. I can only give people what they’ve already got. I’m not inventing anything new.”
An Awkward Beginning
Mirabai’s is a Cinderella story. Although she began her first dance lessons at age 4, she was a chubby child who also was nearsighted. In ballet class, she was miserable – but in her room alone at home, movement became a wonderful world of her own. “It was a whole different feeling – much more spontaneous,” she recalls.
As an adolescent in summer camp, Mirabai decided to take charge of her body once and for all.
She put herself on a low calorie diet eating a lot of fruits and vegetables and tried any type of exercise she thought she would enjoy. Swimming turned out to be her favorite that summer. She lost 20 pounds and grew a couple of inches. When she was met at the airport at the end of the summer, her mother didn’t recognize her right away. So began Mirabai’s life-long struggle with her weight, and her body image.
In high school in Chicago, she enjoyed classes with a gym teacher who was a modern dancer and let the kids create their own dances. “It was the first time I felt the power of movement,” she says. “It gave me hope -- I didn’t have to be a jock and I could move, be beautiful and express myself.”
It planted the seed of Mirabai’s Moving Free® program.
An Inner Source of Inspiration
Gravitating toward modern dance, Mirabai began to study dance and choreography at the University of Denver. When she was a sophomore, she found a physical education instructor who was teaching modern dance and let Mirabai choreograph anything freely. After studying with this teacher for a year and a half, the teacher invited Mirabai to help organize and chorograph a couple of benefit performances for sick children at a hospital. It was an uplifting experience that became one of the threads linking Mirabai’s dance and movement to health and rejuvenation.
In Denver, for her student teaching requirement, Mirabai organized a creative movement program in a local school that had not previously offered any dance curriculum. Her classes were filled with 50 fourth, fifth and sixth grade children. She also developed a creative writing program so that kids could learn how to express themselves and not feel intimidated. She asked students, in groups of 5 or 6, to improvise movement and creative dramatic scenes. They would write their own compositions.
A Catalyst for Self-Expression
Seeking a city that had a more dynamic dance scene than Denver did at the time, Mirabai got accepted to attend the Boston Conservatory, so she moved east in 1973. The dance faculty featured a prima ballerina with whom Mirabai studied a strict regime every day. But the extremely stylized leg positions injured one of her knees, so she again pursued an outlet for expressing her individual style and creativity.
At age 23, she opened a dance exercise studio. The studio was located in an inexpensive space at the Cambridge Food Cooperative. By chance, it had some discarded mirrors from its previous life as a department store, after Mirabai put in new walls and a floor, it became the New Combinations™: Movement for the Non-Dancer.
Her injured knee forced Mirabai to stay seated while teaching. This gave her a golden opportunity to observe the students anatomies and notice how they shifted their weight while moving into different positions. She also learned how to more effectively explain the movements they were studying.
“It became increasingly important for me to figure out a way to teach movement in dance according to a person’s anatomy and alignment. I started to really look at the people who were studying with me, and watching how they shifted their weight." This is how she started to develop a method of teaching based more from the inside rather than outside stimuli, she explains.
“As I got better, I started to know specifically where to tell them to put their weight and what it should feel like to them. Eventually, they started to experience their bodies from the inside. That’s how my methods proved to be not just physically helpful to those who were aspiring to become dancers, but also an aid to people who don’t normally use their full range of movement. It became a time for them to explore their own movement patterns.
“When people are not used to improvising, they are uncomfortable with it," Mirabai says. "After they do some simple exercises, they become more comfortable with their bodies. I also included some yoga, because one of the biggest problems people had was no awareness of their lower spine and lower back muscles.”
Group dynamics was integral to Mirabai’s classes as well, and she discovered that being a catalyst in her role as teacher for groups was very effective for exploration and learning. “We are taught, in various ways, to conform,” she observes. “I think there are a lot of frustrated people out there and they would not feel so frustrated if they could express themselves. Unlike creative children, adults are conditioned to repress our feelings as we grow older.”
In Boston, Mirabai performed sold out one-woman shows and received rave reviews.
“When people saw my show, a lot of them would ask me if they could take dance classes from me. I think they liked what I did because it wasn’t necessarily so beyond them and they could perceive what I was trying to do. People found it to be something they could assimilate into their own lives. Also, in performing, I was making a statement about myself that incorporates a lot of universal feelings people could relate to. There is a place for self-expression and I decided to help people find their outlet.”
In 1978, Mirabai went to New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts for a Master’s degree. Her independent style clashed with the school’s administration, but she convinced the faculty to allow her to pursue her own muse. Her thesis performance, “Mandala: The Wheel of Life,” not only convinced the school of her 100 percent commitment to her work with movement, but led to her being chosen to receive the Masters degree on behalf of the entire school of arts.
A Turn Toward Special Needs
In 1980, her father had knee replacement surgery.
Her father’s physical therapist concentrated only on his knee, while Mirabai could see the injury had misaligned his whole body and was causing other problems as he tried to compensate for the weak knee. She worked with him on exercises to integrate all of his movements, and speeded up his recuperation drastically. After her father alerted the National Arthritis Foundation about her success, the organization hired Mirabai to help train physical NAF-affiliated therapists working on an exercise program (PACE) for arthritis patients.
With aerobics and fitness becoming a hot new trend in the 1980s, Mirabai turned her energies and talents to developing fitness programs for worksites. "People working in offices always told me they were too tired to exercise when they got home," she recalls. She created lunch-hour fitness classes for employees at large companies in New York. The popularity of the programs grew until she had to train more staff so more classes could be added.
Mirabai earned two certifications from the American College of Sports Medicine, and others from the Aquatic Exercise Association, the American Council on Exercise, and a medical exercise specialist certification from the American Academy of Health & Fitness Professionals. For four years, she chaired the American Council on Exercise Instructor Examination Committee. She also was a member of the American Heart Association Committee on Preventative Cardiology and the Women’s Heart Health Initiative.
A Universal Language
Helping people recuperate and restore their bodies and optimism became the theme for Mirabai’s work. “It isn’t so much teaching exercise as it is helping people find self-empowerment through movement. Movement is just an easy gateway — everyone moves. It’s a universal language.”
That was the case literally when a friend told her about a spa opening in Indonesia that needed a fitness consultant. Mirabai was hired and traveled there in 1990 to set up the spa. She spent 3 years in Indonesia. Television cameras followed her and she became a celebrity, sometimes conducting classes for hundreds of people who didn’t speak English.
Her international work continued as a consultant for European fitness programs, which were following the U.S. lead in popularizing aerobics. Her work took herto France, Germany, Portugal and Singapore. In 1994, she came home to the U.S., and continued to appear as an invited speaker for the the American Heart Association, the National Arthritis Foundation, the NIKE Women’s Symposium, the National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine, IDEA Health and Fitness Association, the American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation & Dance, and the National Wellness Association, as well as other health groups in the northeast.
Also in 1994, she answered an ad for the 92nd Street Y, a renowned cultural center for the city, which was trying to revamp its fitness program. She opened one of the New Jersey’s first children’s gyms, implementing the All Winners™ Cooperative Fitness Play Program for Kids and created the POW™ (Personal Optimal Wellness) a weight-management program in cooperation with a registered dietitian. She participated in conducting a study at Rutgers University of an extended family at high risk for heart disease, and worked through Lenox Hill Hospital with a cardiologist to design a cardiac rehabilitation program for women. She also wrote a manual on lowering risk for congestive heart failure through a training program that began from the patient’s bed to walking to lifting weights. She continued to design movement programs for special needs into the mid-90s, then went to work and teach full-time at the Y and was appointed Director of Fitness and Wellness Programs.
Around this time she met the man who would become her husband. Mirabai, now 45, would settle into that blissful perimenopausal state we all know too well, and she proceeded to pack on 40 pounds.
“I was 40 pounds heavier before I knew it; although it had to have taken a couple-three years. I was exercising as much as ever but my metabolism had slowed down and I was unconsciously eating more.
Coincidentally, I needed a hysterectomy and I remember being in the hospital, one day after surgery, woozy on morphine, and the nurse came in saying, ‘we have to weigh you now’. I said ‘weigh me now’? I was horrified! But it turns out I’d lost 10 pounds. I knew it was time to lose the rest.
Managing your weight and the anxiety that comes with it is a constant struggle and that struggle never ends. I watch what I eat, weigh myself every day and take a tape measure on vacation. I have no idea where I would be if it weren’t for exercise. Even so, having and lost as much as 40 pounds in these last few years going through perimenopause and menopause I’ve learned what it takes from personal experience. I was tired of being a before; I wanted to be an after.
My situation is not special or unique; there are millions of women out there just like me.
I designed a diet and exercise program that women can modify to suit their needs and body types. I implemented it in my New York practice. It’s working there so I’m writing a book and doing a video so women all over can use it. You really can ease into the best shape of your life and stay there!”
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