Total Health: Dr. Coco Cabrel of Coco’sFlameFit On How We Can Optimize Our Mental, Physical, Emotional, & Spiritual Wellbeing

Maybe smiling is my coping mechanism from the teasing and bullying that I endured as a kid. When I would come home from the bus stop upset, my grandma would make me some hot cocoa and serve it with a smile — no words, just a loving smile.

Often when we refer to wellness, we assume that we are talking about physical wellbeing. But one can be physically very healthy but still be unwell, emotionally or mentally. What are the steps we can take to cultivate optimal wellness in all areas of our life; to develop Mental, Physical, Emotional, & Spiritual Wellbeing?

As a part of our series about “How We Can Cultivate Our Mental, Physical, Emotional, & Spiritual Wellbeing”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Coco Cabrel, The Flamenco-Dancing MD.

Dr. Coco Cabrel, The Flamenco-Dancing MD, helps women choose themselves so they can find their joy, grace, and confidence through Coco’sFlameFit©, her unique Flamenco-inspired and MD-designed fitness program — where non-dancers feel like dancers and safely get fit, gain confidence, and have fun together. A graduate of Northwestern’s prestigious Honors Program in Medical Education with 30 years of award-winning professorship in anatomy, physiology, and Flamenco dance, Coco harnessed the physical and emotional power of Flamenco to heal from divorce, bulimia, bullying, and an almost-career-ending back injury. Coco has been featured on Spectrum News SoCal, interviewed on several podcasts including Birth Re-imagined, and was voted into the Top 3 Northwestern Intersections Podcasts of 2020 by Northwestern University alumni around the world. For more details, Coco’s website is www.cocosflamefit.com.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive into the main focus of our interview, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory?

Sure thing! My mom was a respected pediatrician to most of the kids in my neighborhood, yet I was teased and bullied for “looking different” because of my mixed-race heritage. It also wasn’t easy being called “The Brain.” Ballet was my escape. I spent hours dressed up in my mom’s flowing red dress, choreographing grand ballet entrances into our living room while Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake” played on our 8-track player. Our living room was also a real rehearsal space for my siblings and me. We performed professionally in Hawaiian, Tahitian, and Philippine folk dance across New Jersey, where I grew up.

My mom was a huge Martha Graham fan, but she was also very practical. Because academics came easily to me, she steered me into medicine, saying, “People won’t always need a dancer, but they’ll always need a doctor.” I still danced in Northwestern’s Annual Dance Marathon twice, and I directed and performed in the medical school’s annual student-run show, “In Vivo.”

I think my mom was nervous that I wouldn’t finish med school because she kept saying, “Just get your degree, and then you can do anything you want.” She was trying to inspire me to choose some illustrious clinical career.

During graduation weekend, I told her of my plans to walk away from my residency and pursue the arts. What a terrifying moment for me. She was utterly crushed. At the fancy graduation dinner, I watched her fight her tears when some of my classmates openly disapproved of my decision. Ultimately, when I was invited into a Flamenco dance company and travelled to Madrid, Sevilla, Jerez, and Amsterdam, my mom was my biggest fan. My Flamenco maestros not only knew her, but also called her “Mama.”

What or who inspired you to pursue your career? We’d love to hear the story.

I was living in a Chicago suburb and had just had my second child. I wanted to return to dance, but I needed to return to beginner level classes because I couldn’t imagine doing an advanced ballet class while nursing. Through incredible serendipity, an article in The Chicago Tribune’s “Tempo” section appeared. It was about Flamenco dance. A quote resonated with my 30-year-old self: “Flamenco is the dance form where you get better as you get older.”

I found a Flamenco dance studio two miles due east from my house and started taking class. That summer we learned a traditional dance called “Sevillanas,” and I thought it was pretty easy. Flash forward to Thanksgiving weekend: I stumbled into a guest choreographer workshop that my teacher was holding for her dance company members. She pointed for me to sit on the stairs and watch. I made myself very small and quiet while I watched the most beautiful creature I had ever seen, commanding and enchanting the entire studio, the great Manolo Rivera. Barely breathing, I thought, “Oh, that’s what Flamenco is.”

The magic about Manolo is that while he teaches a step or technique, he weaves a life lesson into it. Suddenly you find yourself with a lump in your throat and tears down your face. That was me on those stairs. I wanted to be able to do that for others — teach them the beautiful perfection of Flamenco dance while teaching them the beautiful imperfection of life.

I started taking class twice a week, then three times weekly… in February, my teacher invited me into her dance company.

Manolo cast me as a lead and soloist dancer many times. My mom came with me one of those times that Manolo and I were working on a choreography in New York City. “Why did you pick her?” she asked. He said simply, “Because she has it.”

None of us can achieve success without some help along the way. Was there a particular person who you feel gave you the most help or encouragement to be who you are today? Can you share a story about that?

Vida Peral. Vida is an American Flamenco dancer living in Amsterdam. I had taken some empowering workshops with her — she taught in Chicago every summer. At the beginning of one of those summers, I herniated a lower back disc after a performance, and I refused surgery because that would have ended my career. As part of the healing plan that I cobbled together for myself, which included chiropractic and acupuncture, I arranged to spend a year studying with Vida to rebuild myself because she was the strongest female dancer I knew.

I took all of Vida’s classes that year, including her men’s technique classes. I learned all of her choreographies, took private lessons every week, and spent a lot of studio time modeling myself after her. Her style is a perfect blend of power and grace, and I wanted to be just like her. I was also going through a brutal divorce in the States, and I modeled Vida’s strength as a woman as well.

During my final private session with her, Vida asked me to run one of the choreographies one last time — but this time, “Don’t dance like me. Dance like you.”

I was dumbfounded. My feet stuck to the floor. What was I supposed to dance like if I couldn’t dance like Vida?

I suppose in some future film about my life, that final studio run through will be the magical climactic scene. It was certainly the beginning of my new trajectory as a dancer, a woman, and a human being.

Can you share the funniest or most interesting mistake that occurred to you in the course of your career? What lesson or take away did you learn from that?

Oh, I fell off a stage once. Backwards.

It was a show at a casino, and it was on a portable stage, about 3 feet off the floor, with curtains wrapped around the sides and back. I was supposed to do a flirtatious solo — a deceptively complex choreography from Manolo — after which my dance partner (now my husband) was supposed to enter and invite me to dance. Then another female dancer was supposed to enter, win him over, and I was supposed to turn in a huff and take a seat next to our guitarist.

The chairs were lined up along the back of the stage in the traditional Flamenco style. The entire sequence went exactly as staged, and I enjoyed the laughs from the audience as I played up my “I don’t care” attitude on my way to my seat. But when I plopped myself down onto my chair with a flourish, I felt the back legs of the chair bounce over the edge of the platform. I knew instantly what was going to happen and held my breath for the worst.

The chair tipped backward, but the curtains were so taut that they formed a sling for the chair. I fell backwards, seated in the chair, in slow motion! I landed on the floor behind the stage, still in the chair, on my back, and wrapped in the curtain. My feet were sticking up in the air exactly high enough so that the audience could see the bottoms of my shoes. I figured I should milk this for some more laughs, so I started kicking my feet. I could hear the roar of the crowd, and I laughed, too.

My big takeaway? Always find a way to laugh at yourself.

Is there a particular book that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

Actually, I have three. They share a theme of using sheer will to rise above horrible, ugly, painful oppression. Each entered my life at a crucial time: Les Miserable by Victor Hugo while my junior high body image completely warped, The Road by Cormac McCarthy right after my divorce, and The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood right before my resignation from my university department chair position due to burnout. Similarly, Flamenco originated in the caves of southern Spain as a way to rise from religious and cultural oppression — that rebellion against oppression is a central thread throughout my life in so many ways.

Can you share your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Why does that resonate with you so much?

There’s a line from an exquisite Nikita Gill poem, “You Have Become a Forest,” that chokes me up every time: “You have grown roots and found strength in them that no one thought you had.” I revisit this poem when I’m feeling overwhelmed with being a mom, wife, and entrepreneur, especially when I feel like I’ve hit a wall, and I can’t figure out how to break through. It’s this line, though, that centers my body, brain, and soul. It reminds me of my power to defy everyone’s doubts and kick away any stumbling blocks.

What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now? How do you think that might help people?

I’m lining up several TV show appearances and podcast interviews so that more women can find out about the Flamenco-inspired fitness program that I’ve been building. The women in the program have achieved stunning fitness results. More importantly, they’ve become remarkably supportive friends for each other, even though they live across the US and in a few other countries. My ultimate project is to have my own TV show, to grow this movement exponentially so that as many women as possible can learn the deep value of our mission statement, which is simply, yet profoundly, “Choose You.”

OK, thank you for all of that. Let’s now shift to the core focus of our interview. In this interview series we’d like to discuss cultivating wellness habits in four areas of our lives, Mental wellness, Physical wellness, Emotional wellness, & Spiritual wellness. Let’s dive deeper into these together. Based on your research or experience, can you share with our readers three good habits that can lead to optimum mental wellness? Please share a story or example for each.

As a professor and curriculum builder of anatomy, physiology, and Flamenco dance programs for 30 years, I love education not only for practical purposes, like entering a profession, but also for gaining knowledge, for becoming a well-rounded person. It’s that well-rounded quality that enables us to understand other points of view, even when disagreeing with them. That ability is an important part of mental wellness. The three habits for optimal mental wellness that I’ve always encouraged in my students are these: Read at least one news or research article every day; do some of your homework / work each day instead of cramming before the exam or deadline; and if there’s something you don’t understand, please ask!

Do you have a specific type of meditation practice or Yoga practice that you have found helpful? We’d love to hear about it.

Before I started my Flamenco-inspired fitness program, I was providing meditations and lecturing on physician burnout, ironically, at the very workplace where I burned out myself. I use Flamenco as my own moving meditation. I’ve always entered that artistic state of “flow,” or “the zone” as athletes call it, while dancing. Yoga is my main cross-training for Flamenco. My favorite type of yoga is hatha, especially using the breath with poses to work up to a challenging “peak” pose. My favorite way to end a yoga practice is to listen to Nikita Gill’s poem, “You Have Become a Forest.” For me, that seals the practice — mind, body, heart, and spirit.

Thank you for that. Can you share three good habits that can lead to optimum physical wellness? Please share a story or example for each.

I’ve always been that person who takes the stairs at a run because waiting for the elevator makes me a little crazy, and I love it when it feels easy to break into a sprint to cross the street. Now that I’m teaching and motivating a wide range of women — some are marathon runners, some are active yogis, and some have never taken an exercise class in their 80 years of life — I’ve come up with small but significant physical wins that busy women can easily slip into their day. The three habits that my ladies love the most are these: Roll your shoulders in a circle to uplift your posture while doing dishes or watching TV; make fists and circle your wrists around as a break from computer work; and imagine yourself standing proud like a bullfighter or Flamenco dancer or even a hawk — and soon you’ll look in the mirror and actually be standing taller!

Do you have any particular thoughts about healthy eating? We all know that it’s important to eat more vegetables, eat less sugar, etc. But while we know it intellectually, it’s often difficult to put it into practice and make it a part of our daily habits. In your opinion what are the main blockages that prevent us from taking the information that we all know, and integrating it into our lives?

This is a tricky one. My clients and I talked about this after class recently. Several of us had switched from snacks of buttery, salty popcorn to “healthy” popcorn, or from sugary, chocolate-covered nuts to “skinny chocolate-dusted” nuts. We laughed uncomfortably because these new versions of our favorite snacks were called “healthy” and “skinny.” But we were eating the whole bag at once — which made them utterly “unhealthy” and “not skinny.”

Packaging, marketing, and words have such a powerful influence over our perception of which foods are healthy. We can read every scholarly article ever written about almonds and about chocolate. Then we can make a “smart” decision in the grocery store about which chocolate-covered almonds to buy, the thickly covered ones or the lightly dusted ones.

When we eat them, though, do we think about the articles that recommended pouring out a handful of the almonds into a pretty cup and mindfully eat only those? Or is it so much easier to just hold the pretty bag in your lap while watching TV? After all, the bag does say “healthy” or “skinny,” so it seems OK to simply eat from the bag. One woman said she skipped an entire meal because she had mindlessly eaten a whole bag of “healthy” popcorn. One of the main blockages is a combination of marketing and mindlessness. The marketing takes advantage of people when they’re most likely to be in a mindless state.

Can you share three good habits that can lead to optimum emotional wellness? Please share a story or example for each.

I’ve always used dance, and specifically Flamenco dance, as my inner therapist. My favorite dance classes always leave me feeling like I’ve worked through a problem or an emotion. Flamenco movement lends itself to that through its tradition of interpreting music that often begins feeling introspective or even grieving, and then it structurally pulls through to triumphant celebration.

A few months after I started teaching my Flamenco fitness classes, I was telling my clients how proud I was that our classes had quickly turned into a real community. I felt a wash of emotion and, laughing nervously, said I didn’t want to cry. My very wise 82-year-old client said, “You have permission to cry, my dear.”

Based on my lifetime of expressing emotion through dance and movement, my three habits for optimum emotional wellness are these: Give yourself permission to feel and express an emotion when it hits you; hold space for others to express their emotions; and laugh as deeply and as often as possible.

Do you have any particular thoughts about the power of smiling to improve emotional wellness? We’d love to hear it.

It’s funny you ask this question because people have always commented on how my smile makes them feel, almost as far back as I can remember. It’s also funny that one of my earliest performance memories is from a ballet recital. I was standing in the wings, and I almost started gagging when the mom of one of the older girls smeared Vaseline across the girl’s teeth right before she leaped onto the stage. It was supposed to help the girl smile more easily. To this day, that’s a disconnect for me.

Maybe smiling is my coping mechanism from the teasing and bullying that I endured as a kid. When I would come home from the bus stop upset, my grandma would make me some hot cocoa and serve it with a smile — no words, just a loving smile. Then she’d take out her full dentures and plunk them into a glass of water, and we’d laugh. To me, that’s the power of a smile.

Finally, can you share three good habits that can lead to optimum spiritual wellness? Please share a story or example for each.

I feel spirituality as the awareness of who you are, especially in relation to the people you encounter, the animals in your life (not just pets), and the parts of nature and man-made creations that you experience.

My childhood ballet teacher, Olia Balch, was a wonderful combination of strict, keen, and funny. She taught us that when you use a dressing room, a studio, or a stage, you always leave it better than how you found it. That’s one of my core tenets. It’s what I’ve taught my kids, and it’s how I live my life. It’s our responsibility to leave things better than how we found them. Three habits that I recommend for optimum spiritual wellness are these: When you visit the beach or go on a hike, leave it cleaner than you found it; if there’s an animal or plant in your life, leave it better nourished than when you found it; and when you encounter another person, leave them feeling better about themselves than when you found them.

Do you have any particular thoughts about how being “in nature” can help us to cultivate spiritual wellness?

One February, after I had I started teaching and performing separately from the Chicago dance company I was in, I took a workshop in Jerez de la Frontera, Spain. I was walking with the great Maestro of all Maestros, Jose Granero, after taking a brilliant class with him. We were talking about teaching when he very suddenly stopped to smell the orange blossoms, and he practically pulled me off the sidewalk to stand with him under the orange tree and do the same.

He deeply inhaled the orange blossom fragrance, and it was as if there were nothing else in existence except for us and this tree. He told me how much he loved that time of year in Jerez because he loved the smell of the orange blossoms. He was so deeply in that moment.

Granero passed away a few years later. He was based in Argentina, so I sometimes wonder if he had the chance to return to Jerez during at least one more February to smell the orange blossoms. Or had that time with me been his last time? It’s a profound thought.

Since then, I always, always stop to smell flowers and look closely at their details. I painstakingly take multiple photos of them, to the point that my teenage sons have given up rolling their eyes at me. I never know if that will be my last chance to appreciate such a flower, so I allow myself to go deep into that moment and fully bask in what this earth has to share.

Ok, we are nearly done. You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good for the greatest number of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

I would like to inspire as many women as possible to choose themselves.

In most societies, women end up putting their needs and desires low on their to-do list for each day, each week, each year, each decade. Women are indoctrinated to take care of their kids, partners, jobs, parents, and homes before they take care of themselves. It’s impossible to do a halfway decent job at any of those things if you’re running close to empty yourself. It’s heartbreaking to watch so many women live in a state of denial about this. A woman thinks her kids are fine as long as they finish their homework. She thinks her job or career is on track as long as she’s not getting bad annual reviews. She thinks her partner appreciates how well she juggles it all.

In reality, her kids are desperate for her focused attention, her workplace could easily replace her, and her partner doesn’t recognize her anymore.

I’ve watched, and when a woman makes that choice and puts her fitness first, her joy first, her grace first, and her confidence first — everything else blossoms automatically.

We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we both tag them :-)

I would love to have brunch with Noel Fielding. All four of my kids and I are massive fans of the BBC show, “The Great British Bake Off.” Watching those Friday episodes together was a family tradition that got us through a tough chunk of the pandemic.

I love watching Noel joke around with the other hosts and all of the bakers. But my favorite thing to watch is how he comforts a baker who is emotionally crumbling (pun intended). You can see in Noel’s eyes and body language that he genuinely cares and deeply wants to cheer up this person in this moment. That’s very endearing.

I can totally see us cracking up all the waitstaff at a brunchie!

How can our readers further follow your work online?

My website is www.cocosflamefit.com where your readers will find classes, videos, memberships, social media links, and even a free gift!

Thank you for these really excellent insights, and we greatly appreciate the time you spent with this. We wish you continued success.