About IAIM

Founder - Vimala Schneider McClure

Vimala lives in Boulder, Colorado. She has been practising 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

Following her experiences working in an orphanage in northern India, Vimala brought the age-old practice of infant massage to the West. Vimala says, she had a need to "do something for others, to realise one's greatest potential and to contribute to the welfare of humanity".

At first she taught parents the art of infant massage out of her home. In 1978, at the request of childbirth educators, she developed a training programme and began to train instructors to teach the programme she had developed in India, incorporating 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 IAIM.

In that same year (1978) Vimala wrote her groundbreaking first book, "Infant Massage: A Handbook for Loving Parents". The theory, curriculum and focus that Vimala writes about are unique and have been carefully developed and refined through research and practical experience since first introduced in 1976.

Vimala says, "when people ask me, 'When did you start all this?' I'm not sure what to say. I believe that for me, as for all of us, it started in my infancy. Psychologist Abraham Maslow described two kinds of needs we all have: "deficiency" needs and "growth" needs. Deficiency needs spring from a lack of something basic; growth needs are those higher quests - to do something for others, to realise one's greatest potential, to contribute to the welfare of humanity.

My work with babies and parents springs from both of these. I seek to heal the infant me, who, because of cultural misconceptions and circumstances of fate, was deprived of wholeness. Every baby I "touch" is me, and I am again made whole through love. My work also springs from a deeply felt desire to contribute to my culture and to my world."

Vimala talks about the conception, gestation, birth and vision of IAIM in the other pages of this section of the website "About IAIM".