Vimala McClure

Vimala McClure lives in Boulder, Colorado, her “ancestral home.” She has been practicing yoga and meditation since 1970 and taught yoga for several years before giving birth to her two children, now adults. Vimala then turned her attention to the world of parenting, and after spending time serving in an orphanage in northern India, Vimala brought the ancient practice of infant massage to the West in her groundbreaking first book, Infant Massage: A Handbook for Loving Parents. For several years she taught parents the art of infant massage out of her home. In 1978, at the request of childbirth educators, she developed a training program and began to train instructors to teach the curriculum she had developed, incorporating traditional Indian, Swedish, and reflexology methods and yoga postures and poses adapted for babies. She named the strokes, designed a special routine for colicky babies, and developed a course for parents that became the core curriculum for her upcoming organization. After several years, she trained a group of instructors to train other instructors, and the International Association of Infant Massage was born, incorporated as a nonprofit organization in 1986. The IAIM now has instructors in more than seventy countries, and her book has been translated into many languages. Vimala was able to travel to India many times during these years, and she had the great fortune of working in Mother Teresa’s Shishu Bhavan (baby hospital) in Calcutta, India. Since then, Vimala has continued to write for many magazines and has authored eight more books. During the 1990s she pursued fiber arts and became an award-winning quilt artist. Vimala continues to write about parenting and participate in the IAIM.