About

At the center of my path is visual art. I’ve been an artist in New York City for more than 30 years, and I’ve always believed that learning and creativity—whatever form they take—nourish us to the core of our spirit.

I work with imagery, metaphor and the imagination in my art, and those same ways of seeing have deeply influenced how I teach. It was partly the visual and symbolic language of Taoist practice that first drew me in, and it continues to inspire me.

Visit my Artwork Portfolio → https://miranda-maher.com/

Alongside art, I’ve always been drawn to explorations of spirit. In 1972, I happened upon a lecture by Alan Watts that pretty much exploded my mind. I wandered through Yoga and Buddhism during the 70s and 80s, without much consistency or discipline, but I kept coming back to questions of spirit, consciousness and our relationship to the world.

In the mid-90s, I fell in love with a rigorous Japanese martial art, Amagure no Sato Ryu Ninjutsu, and trained in it for 18 years. I retired from the martial art in 2013, but its discipline, clarity and focus remain part of me.

In 1999, I began looking for Taoist practices that could complement my martial training and found Universal Healing Tao Qigong, Neigong and Taiji. I was struck by how directly these practices worked with the body, energy, emotions and spirit. Over time they helped me heal chronic back pain, balance my hormones, strengthen and root my physical body, and shed patterns that had been getting in my way for years.

More than that, they gave me a way of looking at life that embraces nature, spirit and the human heart.

I eventually began teaching what I had learned, and then expanded my work into energetic healing, Medical Qigong, Ancestral Lineage Healing, ritual, animism and other forms of one-to-one support. These weren’t departures from my Taoist practice. They deepened it.

Today, teaching and healing are intertwined. I teach Qigong, Neigong and Taiji in classes, courses and retreats, and I work privately with people who want to learn, deepen their practice, clear what is getting in the way, or explore questions that don’t fit neatly into a group class.

The thread running through all of it is a desire to help us become more fully connected—to our bodies, our inner lives, our ancestors, the natural world and the larger mystery we are part of.