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.
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. ...
