Pierre, who until recently had been on the faculty of the Julliard School at Lincoln Center and the School of American Ballet, knows this because he experienced this same thrill himself, transforming from an awkward teen into a world champion ballroom dancer. Now he passes on this profound joy to children who might otherwise have only hung out in the streets or gone home to sit in front of the TV, who might never have discovered that their feet have wings, that they can win at something, or that winning isn’t all that counts on the dance floor. His program reaches and teaches approximately 21,000 high school children every year. I love Pierre’s story because his enthusiasm to teach is what makes the world go round, and not only under that magical ballroom dancing globe.
I was born in the Middle East, in Palestine. After that, I lived in Jordan, and then Lebanon, then off my family went to Birmingham, England. I was a very shy child, very timid, and to make matters worse, other children were quite mean to me. They picked on me because I spoke with an accent, which they mimicked. But it was in England, when I was fourteen years old, that a school friend and I started taking lessons at the local dance studio. I was no good at dancing whatsoever, but something stirred inside of me and I loved it. So I persevered.
One day, I went to my very first professional dance competition, and I was awestruck by how wonderfully these professional couples danced. I clearly remember saying to myself that I would become a world champion dancer one day. And eventually, at the ballroom in Blackpool, England, I did. In fact, I won four times, starting in 1977 and including the “Duel of the Giants” at the Royal Albert Hall in London. My mother told me that I couldn’t become what I wanted to be, a full-time dance teacher, because it would be too unreliable. She was nervous because we had been made refugees twice in the Middle East, so I can’t blame her for worrying that this wasn’t a “real” job.To please her, I tried working in an office, in accounting of all things, and I hated it. I became a hairdresser for a short time, but my sights were set on dancing. So, in London, at the ripe old age of twenty, I managed to get myself a full-time position as a dance instructor in a studio. It was difficult at times to make ends meet, very difficult, but I made it my profession, and I haven’t looked back.
When something happens to you as a child, it becomes part of you. Dancing transformed me when I was young and timid. I knew it could do the same thing for other children who needed to shine in some way, to develop confidence in themselves. That was my raison d’etre for starting Dancing Classrooms in 1992. It’s an ambitious program to teach dance to inner-city children, and I was met with blank looks and great skepticism when I first pitched the idea. It seemed bizarre and unworkable to many people in the school system back then, but they let me try it, and guess what? It worked. And it doesn’t just work in the classroom. Believe it or not, the children become better human beings because, through dance, they learn how to relate to each other politely. They learn manners and decorum.
I must say that these lessons, the whole experience of seeing children dance for the first time, of seeing them come alive, sometimes gradually, never ceases to amaze me! I see the looks on the children’s faces. Their eyes almost pop out they are so wide when they realize they are having fun, that they enjoy dancing, that they are enjoying “shakin’ what their momma gave them!” The way I work is to take them on a journey. They have no idea where they are going, but slowly they get drawn in and I see them loosening up and starting to enjoy themselves. And then it’s too late for the ones who were acting up by saying they did not like it at the beginning. They are too caught up in it to go back! Their body language gives them away, and children really do tell it exactly the way it is. Each and every time I am in the presence of the children while they are dancing, I feel so blessed and so glad of having made my decision to volunteer to teach such classes in my first school fourteen years ago, before the school system truly welcomed me. The children themselves keep me motivated. That and my need to rediscover the passion that is inside of me, through them.
DR. ARMIDA FERNANDEZ
Banking for Babies
Can you imagine young children of four or five lying in the gutter, drinking from a trash-strewn puddle and sharing that drink with a family of crows? If not, you have never driven past the Dharavi slum in Mumbai, the biggest slum in Asia. As I did just that, on the way to Dr. Armida Fernandez’s hospital office, I passed thousands of shacks made of cardboard and tin, all leaning against one another. Goats, birds, and children played and scrounged in the tiny filthy strip between these homes and the busy road to the Sion Hospital just beyond. They are banned now, but years ago, I saw a surreal sight above this sad and stinking place, a giant billboard advertising Nestlé’s baby formula, something most of the over 1 million residents of the slum who live on a few cents a day could never afford. It wasn’t until I met Dr. Fernandez, however, that I learned exactly how shocking the advertisement was.
Dr. Fernandez, a mother herself, has been so moved by the plight of the poorest children, especially newborns, whose mortality rate is unacceptably high, that she has dedicated her career to helping them in the most unique way, by starting the first human milk bank for babies in India. I included Dr. Fernandez in the book because I am particularly fond of India, a country I consider my second home, and because my own heart goes out to its poorest citizens, those she serves.
I was born and brought up in India. My family wasn’t keen on my becoming a doctor, but I was determined! After finishing my education at an excellent medical college here, I moved to a rural area where services were few and far between and joined a charity hospital run by nuns. One day, a child was brought in, and his stool had blood in it. I treated the child as best I could, but it was too late to help him at that stage, and he died. That was when I realized that the knowledge I had was not yet enough, and so I decided to specialize in pediatrics.
After that, I came to this crowded city of Mumbai and started working with a hospital in their pediatric department. Suddenly I was seeing so many newborn babies dying, many at less than a month of age. My colleagues and I discovered that most of them died due to infection that started as diarrhea. I presented a paper in which I analyzed the death rate of babies in Sion hospital. I’d found that out of 100 babies kept in the premature unit, 77 died. When I presented the paper, the delegates at the conference laughed at me when they heard these figures. On my return from the conference, I shared this experience with the Health Officer, who told me that this was a challenge and I needed to do something about the high death rate. This was the moment when I made the decision to devote my life to saving lives of newborn babies.
My colleagues and I started investigating the cause of all these deaths by conducting clinical studies. We learned that babies who were given prelacteal feed or animal milk formula by bottle had more chances of getting diarrhea than those who were fed their mother’s milk. When I thought about that, it made sense. After all, human milk has everything a human baby needs for its physical, mental, and emotional growth. Besides, it has the right antibodies in it to protect against infection and diseases. If the mother is well, then she can feed the baby. But at Sion hospital, 40 percent of the mothers arrived with some complication or other; they weren’t well at all. Many of the babies coming to us with these mothers were either sick or premature. So, although breast milk is best for the baby, when a mother is not in a position to feed the baby, how do we ensure that these children get the best milk that will help them grow and prevent them from getting infection?
We made a bold decision but a vital one.We decided to give all the babies in our care human milk exclusively and to stop the use of all other forms of milk.This was in the 1980s. At first, we used one mother to feed another mother’s baby just like a wet nurse. If a mother had excess milk, we would extract the milk and keep it in the fridge and then feed premature babies with it, not very scientific. Nowadays, with the risk of HIV/ AIDS, we cannot recommend wet nurses even in villages that still do not have milk banks. Back th
en, though, we had successes despite our primitive system. I remember one particular baby who came down with tetanus after being abandoned by his parents. He was very sick. One of our volunteers, a resident doctor herself, acted as a wet nurse and nurtured him back to good health. The orphan survived because of that volunteer.
Some years later, in 1987, I happened to go to the U.K., and I saw human milk banks where they extracted mothers’ milk, pasteurized it, stored it, and fed it to needy babies. This method was extremely safe, and that was just what our babies needed. As soon as I got home to India, I started a milk bank at Sion Hospital. It was the first one of its kind in the country. Today, because of our milk bank, many more human milk banks have started. There are ones in Baroda, Goa, and two others in hospitals in Mumbai. That makes me quite pleased, as I know each one is helping children survive and grow strong, giving them an edge on life.
KATHY FRESTON
Becoming the Architect of
Your Own Good Fortune
Kathy Freston is the sort of woman for whom it looks like life has just fallen perfectly into place. She is tall and good looking, beautifully dressed, highly personable, and a publishing success who is happily married to a man she calls “the one.” What’s more is that she radiates genuine happiness! On looking at her life now, it’s hard to imagine that Kathy ever, in a million years, felt that she was a total failure. Yet, that is exactly how she viewed herself for many years.
What is remarkable about Kathy is that she didn’t let experiences of rejection crush her; rather, she used them to deepen a growing compassion that she says connects her to anyone who is going through a hard time. She says that there is a certain intimacy people share upon experiencing a “dark night of the soul,” and for this reason, her self-help books and CDs have struck a nerve and become bestsellers. Kathy is the author of Expect a Miracle: 7 Spiritual Steps to Finding the Right Relationship, The One: Discovering the Secrets of Soul Mate Love and Quantum Wellness. I am so pleased that she is sharing her story and her “secrets” of transformation with you.
I never had a strong sense of self; I didn’t know if I was funny or smart or interesting or quirky. I felt rather like an empty shell always trying to fill in some ever elusive missing piece. I was always trying on different personalities to see what might catch the interest of those I deemed superior. I tried being cool, but just came off as being silly. I tried being super studious, but didn’t have the attention span to keep up. And I tried being athletic, but was sadly too uncomfortable in my body to be coordinated in any sports. So you can imagine how I felt when someone approached me to be a model when I was sixteen years old sitting with a boy at TGI Fridays in Dunwoody, Georgia. I was stunned, and thinking the art director who gave me his card must have left his glasses at home, I nevertheless accepted an invitation to come in for “test” pictures.
At the studio a few days later, stylists poofed out my hair, applied gobs of makeup, and pushed everything into the right place. Then they blasted the lights so that you couldn’t see my pimples or freckles or chipmunk cheeks. Honestly, anyone could look like a million bucks when put together like that. But the pictures came out great, and off I went into a modeling career. As lucky as I felt to be living in New York, Paris, and Milan, I also woke up every day in fear that this would be the day they would discover that they made a mistake and then boot me out of the business. I simply couldn’t see myself as one of those gals who confidently strode the catwalk or pouted into a camera lens with sultry knowingness. So when the agents began to scold me for being too fat to fit the clothes and the photographers chided me to “loosen up” and move more deftly, I felt a dark cloud of insecurity settle in around me.
The more I tried to fit in and be what the industry wanted me to be, the more weight I put on and the stiffer I became in front of the camera. One night I was just about to go to sleep on the eve of a Harper’s Bazaar shoot when my heart started wildly palpitating and my skin began to crawl with intense fear.
I felt like I was tunneling out of my body and speeding toward death. I could barely breathe as my mind raced with images of myself in a world where I didn’t belong. I ran down the hallway of the hotel and pounded on the other model’s door to tell her I was dying (I truly believed I was!) and needed to go to the hospital. Luckily, she was astute enough to realize I was having a panic attack and that it would pass. It did indeed pass, but for the next year or so I lingered in this dark place of feeling that I was on the verge of something terrible. It was during that time that I started reading.
I read everything I could get my hands on that would educate me on leading a deeper and more fulfilling life. I was swept up into the insights of Herman Hesse and Rainer Maria Rilke; I lost myself in wonder through all the diaries of Anaïs Nin; I found guidance in the Tao Te Ching and the writings of the current Dalai Lama; I discovered A Course in Miracles, Paramahansa Yogananda, and Joseph Campbell. Because I desperately wanted to know that there was more to life than being “pretty enough” or “hip enough,” I turned myself over to these and many other tomes that became my teachers. I wish I could say that one religion or spiritual philosophy answered all my questions, but I never seemed to gravitate toward just one belief system. I was just grateful that as I learned about all these different aspects of life, the fear that had engulfed me seemed to lift.
Throughout the years that I continued to model, I went through a succession of relationships that seemed to fall short of my fantasies of what love could or should be. I dated alcoholics, control freaks, bar brawlers, and men who seemed to alternate between depression and volatility. One in particular was the guy who brought me to my knees. Although I was terribly attracted to him, this man was cold and abusive in every way—both emotionally and physically. I thought I loved him at the time, but now I look back and see that it was more of an addiction. Each time I broke up with him over some horrible transgression, I would slip into an obsession about how I should have handled things differently. So we went back and forth over several years, swearing off each other and then crawling back to each other when we needed a new “hit” of drama. We did this seven times. And with each return to the relationship, my self-esteem diminished more and more. By this time, I had nearly stopped eating, smoked over a pack of cigarettes a day, and had gone through my entire bank account since the modeling had dried up. I couldn’t understand how this downward spiral happened until one day it dawned on me that my life was simply reflecting back to me my own self-loathing. I could read all I wanted, but unless I started embodying some of the wisdom I had gleaned from all those brilliant teachers, I would continue to feel ungrounded and “not enough.”
So I turned my attention away from my failures (relationship, career, and health had all gone downhill) and started praying and meditating as per the methods I’d been reading about. I went to twelve-step meetings to address my addictive behavior. When I could afford it, I worked intensely with a therapist. I spent as much time outdoors enjoying nature as I could because everything seemed to become clear when I was away from city “noise.” Then I started doing service:
I volunteered at a place called Hollygrove, which is what used to be called an orphanage for kids who had been abused and neglected, and I took in a rescue dog named Beans. From that work, I learned to step outside of myself and see the bigger picture. I stopped wallowing in my self-centered fear and put my energy into helping to heal those who were suffering much worse than me. As I saw those kids begin to laugh again after the horror that they had been through, I realized that all of us have our crosses to bear and it’s up to us to help each other out. Beans, the mutt who had been through God knows what before he got to me, taught me the greatest lesson of all: that happiness is attained by giving and receiving kindnesses. It was all so simple really; I just had to learn to open my heart and extend my focus beyond myself. And wouldn’t you know it, my confidence started building. I started feeling creative and inspired to try new and different kinds of jobs. My health started comi
ng back, and friends told me I had a twinkle in my eye that had long since disappeared.
SHARON GANNON
Practicing Harmony and
Connectedness
Sharon Gannon founded Jivamukti Yoga School in partnership with David Life. It is one of the most well-regarded yoga schools and yoga methods in the United States. Jivamukti (which means living liberated) revolutionized yoga by reintegrating all of the aspects other modern forms had divided. She teaches all over the world (her students include Uma Thurman, Sting, and Trudie Styler) and has authored two books on yoga.
I always think you can judge a business by the mood of its staff, and there is such calm, kindness, and peace evident inside the Jivamukti studios that it is a reflection of Sharon’s personality, which I have always found astonishingly, genuinely, and consistently loving and giving. Her path has inspired many people to seek their own.
When I was thirty and living in Seattle, I fell down some very steep and slippery stairs, fracturing my vertebrae, resulting in intense pain as well as intermittent paralysis of my right leg. I was a musician and performance artist at the time, without a lot of financial security, so seeing a doctor was out of the question. Plus, I’d recently suffered a personal trauma, which had led me to the brink of suicide. I’d come through it with an, at times, obsessive commitment to making something good out of my life. I’d also developed a high tolerance for pain and a no-tolerance approach to drugs, prescription or otherwise. Rather my approach was to continue with my daily activities regardless of whatever obstacles might appear. In fact, when there was difficulty I plunged into creative pursuits with a greater urgency, arising from a feeling that each day might be my last. It was with this surge of creativity that I moved to New York City to further explore my avant-garde artistic pursuits.
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