Welcome to the Four Gates Wellness Center

We are a collection of complementary health care professionals who will partner you towards a renewed experience of yourself in wellness. We subscribe to a holistic and preventive approach, offering acupuncture (and hopefully we’ll resume body work, yoga and classes when Covid has ebbed) to enrich and forward your life.

Located in downtown Columbia, directly across from the Mall, Four Gates was founded by Michael Phillips and Heather Dorst, acupuncturists and educators, each with over 35 years of experience in their respective healing arts. They are joined by a skilled group of practitioners, all dedicated to advancing the experience of wellness for individuals and community.

The Four Gates refers to the Eastern image of a temple protected from injurious external influences while also inviting one to a deepening and expansive exploration of life. We invite you to experience the benefits and wisdom of traditional healing practices and philosophy offered here.

Front Page Collage

Example of the beauty to be experienced through Traditional Acupuncture
GREAT BELL by Michael Phillips

In the mid-1980s, I had the privilege of studying with a Jesuit priest who was perhaps the most embodied example of a Taoist I had met up till then. Father Claude Larre had been asked to translate classical Chinese medical texts into Vietnamese by local physicians. His native language was French. And he explained all this to me in English.

I think one of the gifts he offered from the stew pot of different languages, cultures and time periods was permission to utilize one’s intuition and experience in translating from the pictographic texts of Ancient China. The elegant, artistic characters suggest subjective understanding rather than a prescribed meaning found in words. The following characters are not the most ancient, but nevertheless serve to illustrate my meaning. ...

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  • Update: 2025

    May and June are often my favorite months. Comfortable temperature, lower humidity, greenery, blue skies or nourishing rain, birdsong, frog symphonies and lighter clothing, to name just a few gifts. I learned from Chinese philosophy that after the heavens’ manifest gifts to the earth disappear in the autumn, they return resplendent in the spring and early summer offering gifts for us all to savor and finally harvest, share and store in the late summer.

    I write this to encourage us all to keep emerging, just as we see new plants come up and out, no matter their surroundings. These past few years have challenged and limited us, as well as strengthened and expanded us, in ways seen and yet to be seen. We have known fear and isolation, discouragement and courage, hope and disappointment. While we may feel that we’ve moved on, we are likely carrying yet to be fully understood consequences of the pandemic and these

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