What is your current relationship with Mother Earth? And how does nature influence the way you live, move and create?
Nature is my “universe”, my “god” if you like. Raw and undisturbed places in nature feel to me like the purest expression of a larger, ever-present, holding and supporting creator force.
I am inspired by her in all the little ways: texture, colour, shape. I feel a constant playfulness in the flowers and animals, the creatures of the compost, the birds and the stray cats. They bring out my inner child.
She invites me to play.
She invites me into awe and wonder.
She invites me to be curious.
She invites me into devotion: to my body, and to ALL of her.
Dance has been part of your life since you were a little girl. How has your relationship with movement grown and changed with you?
As a little girl, I loved movement in every form, from sport to dance. Honestly, anything athletic, although I was definitely better at dance than at sport. I loved to run. I had lots of energy, which I think came partly from some possible ADHD tendencies, and partly from a challenging home environment.
There was a lot of anger, frustration, fear, worry and confusion that I didn’t know how to deal with. Dance was the place where I could channel those feelings, especially the anger and the fear. I used them to jump higher, work harder, take on my teachers’ criticism, and become different characters for different dances.
I loved the chameleon-like nature of performing solos: playing sad characters, happy characters, angry characters, fierce characters, heartbroken characters. That was the place where I could let my emotions run wild, and use the energy of those feelings as my physical motivation and stamina.
Later, when I was mainly modelling, I was doing a lot of athletic training, aesthetic training for my physical body, and I lost my connection to dance. Even though my life and career seemed so shiny and sparkly from the outside, I was truly miserable.
I was upset with my body, worried about my body, and unable to fully enjoy the fruits of my labour or the joys of my life, because I was constantly worrying about how I looked.
Eventually I found my way back to dancing, and that helped me start to rebuild my relationship with my body.
When I completed my full-time dance training at 25 and 26, I developed a strong appreciation for my body, its abilities and its shape. I started to create movement workshops that support people to connect to their own way of moving.
What really happened was this: I was living alone, and I was using dance to process things happening in my life, from relationships, to my relationship with my body, to work challenges. I would put music on in my house, close my eyes, dance, and let the music take me on a journey.
I realised this was really powerful medicine for me. I did it for about two and a half to three years before I started creating the workshops.
Then, after three years of teaching those workshops (I still teach them now), I realised this is exactly what the little girl in me was doing when she went to dance class: putting on whatever music was playing and channelling her emotions and feelings through her body, through the dance.
So I’m really grateful that movement has taken me full circle. I’ve gone from using dance to deal with emotions I didn’t have the words, capacity or environment to explore, to now inviting people into a space where we can do a little inner work and self-reflection, and also have a lot of fun and playfulness. Of course, that inner child comes into the workshops as well.
Not only have I gone from dancer to model and back to dancer. I’ve also gone from using dance to process my life’s experiences, to losing it completely, to using it in a competitive way, and then coming back to it as a medicinal, more intentional practice of processing and self-inquiry.
It’s very cathartic, really.
How was your journey from girlhood into womanhood? Were there any rites of passage, moments or experiences that felt like an initiation for you?
Honestly, not really. I think a lot of that was because I couldn’t experience those things, with the eyes on me, the cameras on me, and the way I portrayed myself online as this teenage-ish, early-twenties version of me. Hiding behind that mask for so many years didn’t make it possible for me to move naturally through the stages.
When I got together with my fiancé, he brought to my awareness this masked version of me, and my inability to be myself around anyone other than my five close friends.
Peeling away the layers of that mask was absolutely, horrifically painful, challenging and confronting. I had to step into the woman I was. I had to let go of the “Mimi Elashiry” young-girl mask, and the perception I believed everyone was projecting onto me every time I met someone new.
I had to learn to be myself. That was really hard.
But one moment, particularly about womanhood and about women, happened just before my 30th birthday.
I’ve always been really competitive and extremely insecure. So naturally, other beautiful women, or women experiencing any sort of success, came across not so much as a threat but as proof of my lack of worth, or of my complex of not doing enough.
Just before my 30th birthday, I was having a wine dinner with a good friend. She and her partner do something similar to us: he teaches breathwork, she teaches movement and yoga. She was talking about their success, their retreats, their travels.
At any other time in my life, I would have felt attacked by her success. I would have felt like I wasn’t doing enough, wasn’t good enough. I wouldn’t have felt genuinely happy for her.
But for the first time ever, I genuinely felt so happy for her. I didn’t feel like I wasn’t doing enough. I felt this full trust in my own unique path, in what I’m doing and what my partner and I are doing. The similarity between our work is what made me realise there had been a true shift in me.
For years I had known you should support your sisters and lift each other up: “my sister speaks for me”, women supporting women. But I’d never truly been able to support another sister without feeling jealous.
This was the first time I felt so stable, so trusting, so happy and so secure in myself and my own journey that I could genuinely celebrate a sister.
I think that was a big initiation into womanhood, and probably the most notable and powerful shift I have felt.
How has your relationship with your body changed over the years, from dancer to model to creative director?
It’s funny you ask! I’ve been reflecting A LOT on this lately. I think the journey has looked like this:
Model and dancer (ages 3 to 13)
I didn’t even consider my body in an aesthetic way, and I had full self-confidence thanks to my ever-supportive mother and the people around me. I felt so beautiful, and well-behaved too. I always performed confidently, in front of the camera and on stage at dance competitions.
At 13, I was told I hadn’t grown enough to continue modelling, and that I would have to take up acting or quit. That made me aware of a sort of “deficiency”, a fault in my genetics, an imperfection. I held onto it and took it very personally. I chose to quit modelling and only dance, since I knew my height wouldn’t matter there.
However, around 12 I had also been told I would “never be a ballerina” because of my feet and hips. Again, I took it very personally, as all I ever did was ballet. So contemporary it was for me. But the ballet stayed anyway; I’ve always loved it.
I guess at 12 or 13, the “you’re not enough, you’ll never be enough” complex set in.
Dancer (ages 13 to 17)
I ADORED dancing. It was, and still is, my salvation: the happy place inside my body, where I am free to imagine and play and express.
However, being told I wasn’t tall enough, plus some toxic ballet weight rhetoric I was fed at a young age, led me to believe I needed to be very thin. Around 12 or 13, I developed bulimia and body dysmorphia, which continued into my early twenties.
Model, creative director and influencer (ages 17 to 24)
I had an absolute blast. I met so many amazing people, lived abroad in LA and London to model, worked with international agencies, travelled the world chasing fashion weeks, and worked with and created for high-end international brands. The list goes on and on. I wouldn’t change a thing, and I’m grateful for every moment.
But let’s get to the point: my relationship with my body. Terrible.
Until roughly 21, I still had rampant bulimia, hidden from everyone I knew. I under-ate. I over-trained. I was stressed and CONSTANTLY worrying about my physical appearance, from waking up until going to sleep, probably in my dreams too.
What did that do? Stress means water weight, bloating and so on, so it made everything perpetually worse. No matter how little I ate or how much I trained, I always felt I looked like “shit”, especially in my face. Really, I just looked unhappy, stressed, tired and undernourished. Not glowing from the inside, not healthy.
I didn’t dance, and I couldn’t look in the mirrors of a ballet class without being triggered by the distortions of my mind. Slowly, I found my way back to casual dance classes in baggy clothes: hip hop, grooves, contemporary.
Between 21 and 24, I gained control over and healed my bulimia, but the body dysmorphia stayed. I was always trying to be thinner, to look taller, to have a slimmer, less “stressed” or “puffy” face. An impossible battle, from the outside in.
Full-time dancer, dance teacher and part-time model (ages 25 to 29)
Something shifted when I decided it was time to reclaim the dancer in me and put modelling second, even though this was the height of my career financially and in partnerships.
What shifted? Well, dancing and training in dance-specific regimes from 9am to 4pm, five days a week, will change your body, that’s for sure.
Without being woo, I started to see a sort of divine, feminine STRENGTH in my stronger (yes, that means bigger, in ALL directions) thighs, arms and chest. When I looked in the mirror, what was reflected back to me changed from “too big, won’t photograph well next to very skinny models” to:
Ability. Power. Strength. Athleticism.
Suddenly I felt proud, for the first time, of my petite, short, but muscle-laden and lean frame. And it stuck.
Now (ages 30 to 31)
Eventually, I felt the urge to surround myself with people who deeply inspire me in all areas. After 14 years of working as a model, creative director and influencer in the social media space, it was time for a change. It was time to choose me.
I’ve stepped away from the events, influencing and modelling space full-time to build my movement collective, Move, and our jewellery brand with my fiancé, Never Never Jewellery.
At 31, my connection to my body, my natural shape, my femininity and its fluctuations has never been more solid and empowering. I’m sure my body will change and my face will change, and I’ll have to go through a whole new level of acceptance. But that’s life, hey: the ever-evolving journey of accepting the only thing that is constant… change.
What practices or rituals help you feel most at home in your body?
I love to do kriya, a breathwork kriya. I move from the ground up: starting with hip circles, then twisting, then the shoulders, with strong breathing, for just three to five minutes. From there I move my body intuitively, warming up, stretching, moving my shoulders and my whole body around, and then I have a little shake-off.
That is honestly enough to sort my shit out, always.
If I have more time, I love to have a big fat dance, whether fast or slow, at home or out in nature, with music on loud or in my ears. Just free dancing, moving the body.
I also love Hatha or Ashtanga yoga, and Bikram too, as some of you may know it. I love a really strong, disciplined, repetitive yoga practice with long holds. I don’t like fluid, flowing vinyasa-style practices, because I get that movement nourishment from dance. What I love is the mental growth, and the closeness to the dissolving nature of meditation, that I can reach through a very disciplined, static and repetitive practice.
Walking is something I really love for my mental health. To me, walking symbolises a death of the old you and a birth into the new you, and I can process so much mentally while I walk.
I also practise Vedic meditation, 20 minutes every day. I haven’t been a good enough Vedic meditator to do two a day for a little while now, but one a day is so special and potent in bringing me back to a kind of stasis.
Those are definitely my favourites.
What are your favourite HARA pieces and why?
I love the HARA the Label intimates; they’re my favourite. They’re breathable and comfortable, and I love the colours and the fabric. I love the period undies as well. They’re a great shape, they hold their shape, and they look nice under clothing.
I also love the bras. They’re really comfortable when my breasts are feeling tender around my period. I like to sleep in them, and I also wear them under my clothes when I travel to places like Egypt, where you can’t have any nipple showing through.
They aren’t too hot to wear under T-shirts in hot climates, but they still do the job.
