When Rebekah Knause talks about taking care of our health, she refers to a metaphor about bamboo roots: “Root down. Take care of yourself. The roots of bamboo go out in a grid and go down deeply, which is why it’s so hard to kill. When they come out of the ground, they can bend but they don’t break. Symbolically, that’s what we want to work on. We can get blown by the wind, but we aren’t broken.”
At the Balanced You Clinic, clients are invited to approach their healthcare from myriad points of view. Under one roof, they can experience yoga, therapeutic massage, acupuncture, nutritional therapy, chiropractic care, and hypnotherapy, all with the goal of embracing a balanced, holistic approach to total body wellness.
Opened a year ago, Rebekah pooled her nearly 20 years of experience in massage and acupuncture with other professionals in the area to create a place where people could come for one or two health-related issues and end up addressing three or four, or more.
“A lot of times people come into acupuncture because they are in pain. They have a chronic issue that won’t go away, and they come here after trying a lot of other things,” she says. “But I’ve found this more in the last year that people are coming in for insomnia, stress-reduced gastrointestinal issues, headaches and migraines. There’s been a lot of plantar fasciitis this year too, which is odd. But in our world, it makes sense that stress tightens up the calves, and people are holding onto stress so tightening that it’s causing their feet to hurt.”
When Rebekah first got into massage therapy, she knew the spa path wasn’t for her. Instead of the client wanting an hour of relaxation, she wanted to work with people who wanted to change their lives. Her passion for therapeutic massage led to a job at Hosenfeld Chiropractic (now Apple Health & Wellness), which led to a greater understanding of kinesiology and how the body’s structure affects health. Soon after she learned about Ashiatsu massage (using feet instead of hands for a deep massage), and, after successfully receiving acupuncture to fix a shoulder injury, she went on to attend and graduate from the Jung Tao School of Chinese Medicine.
“As soon as I left Hosenfeld, I thought I’d have a little mom-and-pop shop running a business and raising my kid,” she says, “but once I started thinking about acupuncture, I decided I wanted a whole clinic that addressed all aspects of health, including nutrition and trauma care. I started to visualize what a whole wellness clinic looked like, and that’s what we have now.”