Renee Vidal
Renee Vidal
Founder, Excitari Wellness
Uniting holistic health
When the world locked down, some people’s pandemic project was baking sourdough bread. Some people grew scallions on the counter, devoted themselves to learning TikTok dances or took up hiking. Renee Vidal opened a holistic wellness center.
“My whole goal was to bring holistic modalities into the same environment, so people can learn more about them in a streamlined way.”
Excitari Wellness Center is a holistic wellness center in Medford. Holistic healing focuses on the interconnection of the mind, body and spirit and treats issues from each of those angles. Excitari brings together holistic practitioners from all different modalities – from physicians to Reiki practitioners, massage therapists, sound healers, yoga instructors and metaphysical practitioners.
“My whole goal was to bring holistic modalities into the same environment so people can learn more about them in a streamlined way,” says Vidal, who opened the center in May. “I want to make holistic healing more accessible and more mainstream.”
Vidal started on this path during her own healing journey. When she was a teenager, she suffered a head injury in a car accident and has been experiencing severe migraines ever since.
“Then about 12 years ago, the treatments that I was using stopped working, and I called it ‘The migraine that would never go away,’” says Vidal. “Anyone who has ever had a migraine knows that there are no ‘mild’ versions of it. At that point, I was still going to Western medicine doctors, and it just wasn’t working. So I started searching for new answers, and this led me down a journey of trying to find holistic remedies.”
She bounced from one practitioner to another, and while she really resonated with the work they did, she had to go to every corner of South Jersey to find it.
“The first practitioner I visited was a woman working out of her house – literally, at a little table in the corner of her enclosed front porch,” she says. “Another practiced in his spare bedroom. I was getting good help, but it was so odd. I didn’t understand why there wasn’t one professional place you could go to find different holistic remedies.” The question stuck in her mind. And after years of meeting different accomplished practitioners, she finally decided to create the center herself.
“I had been thinking about creating this practice for so long, and then one day it just hit me: it was time to make that jump,” says Vidal. Excitari’s newly renovated building is specifically designed to create cohesion between physical and healing practitioners. The physical medicine physicians have the same training and licenses you’d find in any Western medicine office, but at Excitari they have the ability to work in conjunction with spiritual practitioners to treat the patient as a whole – not just their symptoms.
Holistic medicine isn’t as “out-there” as people may think, she explains. Practices like sound healing, which is the use of sound vibrations to “unstick” stagnant energy in your body, and Reiki, which is a healing practice that targets the energy fields around the body, may be a little unfamiliar, and unusual, to some. But, she says, other practices like reflexology and massage therapy have long been accepted as mainstream treatments for serious physical ailments.
She believes that even the most analytical, logical people can learn to embrace holistic healthcare. Case in point, Vidal herself is about to enter her 26th year as an accomplished tax and estate attorney.
“I really don’t think it’s necessarily that different than what we’re used to,” she says. “If you have an open mind, you might find solutions to problems you haven’t been able to fix before. Things like osteopathic manipulation treatments have been around for ages, and they’re considered a part of Western Medicine, but it’s also holistic because it follows the natural path of the body.”
That’s what she hopes to do with this practice: bring different treatments all under one roof in a way that invites people to learn and try something new. In addition to physical medicine and rehabilitation services by licensed physicians, the center offers programs like sharmanic health extraction to remove misplaced or intrusive energy in the body or mind, psychic readings, osteopathic manipulation treatment, which can be used for anything from treating ankle sprains to heartburn and irritable bowel syndrome, as well as yoga and meditation classes. For anyone thinking about trying holistic wellness, she has a few pieces of advice.
“Follow your own journey, not just what other people tell you will work or tell you is normal,” says Vidal. “Listen to yourself and what feels right to you. There are so many opportunities to grow and open your mind to new experiences.”
