New College Park wellness center offers yoga, massage therapy - Diamondback Online

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For those seeking spiritual guidance and a therapeutic experience, College Park’s new White Lotus Wellness Center is the place to go, owner Anne Contee said.

The wellness center, which opened Oct. 1 at 4912 Berwyn Road, offers healing services such as yoga, acupuncture and massage therapy. The wellness center has a specialized practitioner for each service, said Contee, who also teaches University of Maryland kinesiology courses.


“I’m from India, that’s a very rich practice in there. There’s an Eastern and Western fusion” at the spa, Contee said. “We want to build a relationship with the [clients]. We want them to have a yoga or therapeutic experience, whether it’s through acupuncture, massage or reiki.”

When deciding to open her own wellness center, Contee said, she wanted to “bring people together.” All students receive a free membership, she said, which gives them discounts when they show their student IDs.

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“We are seeing a lot more faculty, and we’re seeing a lot of people from the community and we’re seeing people from outside the community,” she said. “They’ve heard about us and they are coming far away from D.C., Annapolis, Bowie, Baltimore. We’re getting a mix of people and would like to see more students.”

Students looking for more traditional yoga classes or those in search of more of a variety can find the right fit, as the center has four yoga instructors from different disciplines, Contee said.

“Anne in particular teaches a very traditional and meditative yoga, which is a little harder to find sometimes,” said Jo Zimmerman, a kinesiology instructor and physical activity coordinator at the university. “We as a culture seem to like the energetic, vigorous kind of style, and her style is much more of the classic meditative style.”

Zimmerman said the center not only helps tie the College Park community together, but is also a “great complementary resource” to what the university provides.

“The university is a piece of the community,” Zimmerman said. “The center is situated near enough to campus for students who want something different than what the university provides, but it’s near enough for others within the community to participate and feel more comfortable than actually going on university property.”

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Students interested in attending classes or services at the wellness center can book appointments and view the schedule on White Lotus’ website.

The center has done “really well” in its first month, Contee said, with “several” new memberships. She added that the most popular classes thus far include the Saturday morning class, which offers an orientation to yoga for beginners, and the Monday evening class, which focuses on sleeping and resting.

Students can reap the benefits of yoga during stressful times, such as during midterm or final exam weeks, Contee said.

“The students could be a part of the healing meditative practice,” she said. “When they need to focus and feel overwhelmed with exams and reading, they can come and get to this place of being centered, and then go ahead and approach all the things they need to do. There’s mindfulness in everything that we do.”

Senior psychology major McLaine Rich, who’s done yoga at the center, said she uses it as an “outlet for stress.”

“This can be really beneficial for stress,” Rich said. “It could really be able to make a difference as an outlet to relieve stress and anxiety because as college students we have so much going on, and there isn’t always time to release stress.”

Staff writer Hallie Miller contributed to this story.


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