Wholehearted Wellness Care
Welcome! We’re delighted to have you here!
The Dragon Rises team believes that solid, caring relationships are the cornerstone of healing and that one of the most important aspects of healthcare is a strong therapeutic alliance between patient or client and the practitioner. Our team maintains strong bonds, and our students, patients, and clients can feel it.
Stephen Higgins and Melinda Iglesias-Wheeler, Co-founders
Dragon Rises Center for Wholeness - Our Approach
Our team of practitioners seeks to empower you to connect with your inherent wholeness. We partner with you in realizing greater self-awareness, self-healing, and a deeper connection to your heart, mind, and body. You can think of us as a guide illuminating the path you want to walk toward your greatest healing. We think of this as our greatest charge: being able to listen to what the body is telling us.
With an approach based on Chinese medicine of the Menghe and Shen-Hammer lineage, the practitioners at Dragon Rises Center for Wholeness provide holistic, heart-centered care to help you achieve wellness in body, mind, and spirit.
Our Roots & Our Name
Our shared medical lineage, Menghe (pronounced mung-huh, with a hard “g”) medicine, can be traced back to the early 1600s. The first written record dates back to 1626, when the first of our scholar-physician forebears practiced in a region of China known as Menghe. Menghe doctors were well known throughout ancient China for having strengthened their clinical efficacy by weaving together many healing modalities. Dragon Rises’ own multifaceted approach includes classical Acupuncture, Chinese Herbal Medicine, Bodywork including craniosacral, myofascial release, and Somatic Psychotherapy.
This four-centuries-old lineage, also referred to as the Shen-Hammer lineage, now bears the names of the two most recent lineage holders who brought this knowledge to the West, Drs. John H.F. Shen and Leon I. Hammer. Our clinic’s namesake, the book “Dragon Rises Red Bird Flies: Chinese Medicine and Psychology,” was written by our late teacher Dr. Hammer. We are deeply humbled to have been given his blessing to name our clinic “Dragon Rises,” which describes the innate healing potential that exists within all living systems.
The following quote eloquently describes Dragon Rises’ aspirations:
“Whether and how we rise to our ecological, racial, economic, and social reckonings will mean the difference between whether we flourish and grow or whether we perhaps merely survive as a species. And in these last years, it’s come to seem to me that at the end of all of this aspiring, what we’re called to collectively is nothing less than the possibility of wholeness — to figure out what it means to be whole human beings, with whole institutions, living in whole societies. Wholeness does not mean perfection. Being whole will not mean that we are less strange, but that we turn and structure towards what is life-giving, that we can become conscious of our complexity and our strangeness and work with them — as creatures who also have it in us to become wise.”
~Krista Tippett, On Being