Bend has no shortage of yoga studios, but when Mark and Gina Montgomery moved to the city from southern Utah in September, they wanted to create something broader.

Six months later, Bend Community Healing opened, with the goal of combining Mark’s background in acupuncture with Gina’s passion for yoga.

“Health, in the yoga tradition and the Chinese tradition, is really just a function of the abundant harmonious flow through the body,” Mark Montgomery said. “And you can achieve that in a lot of different ways.”

With that in mind, Bend Community Healing features classes dedicated to yoga, meditation and qi gong, a Chinese meditation and exercise class that Mark described as “the grandfather of Tai Chi.” But he can also move reclining chairs into the space for group acupuncture sessions.

The couple joined Back Bend Yoga after moving to town, and they quickly fell in love with the Century Avenue studio.

“We loved the ambiance, loved the community here,” Mark Montgomery said. “We just thought there was something special about this place to begin with.”

When Back Bend Yoga announced it would be closing at the end of December, the couple moved into the building and the space became Bend Community Healing in March. The new owners kept the studio and a majority of the instructors but shifted the focus to emphasize healing and restoration.

Montgomery graduated from acupuncture school in 1999 and began performing individual acupuncture. However, after visiting Lisa Rohleder and Skip Van Meter in Portland, who he said began the community acupuncture movement in America, Montgomery returned home and changed his practice.

“The limits (of individual acupuncture) became clear to me,” he said. “Frequency of treatment is key in acupuncture, and most people were not able to come in as often as they needed to get the full effect.”

He added that the community approach to acupuncture, which features reclining chairs organized into circles of four, allows him to work on multiple people at a time, letting him see more patients while also helping to create a community-first ethos for the new business.

“People value a place where strangers can come and just heal together,” he said.

Gina Montgomery added that the yoga focuses less on exercise and more on healing. While the studio still offers some exercise-oriented Vinyasa yoga classes, it emphasizes Yin yoga, which focuses on breathing.

“If you think of it as a spectrum, with something really intense on one end, we’re pretty close to the other end,” she said.

While Bend Community Healing offers a variety of services, the Montgomerys agree the overarching focus on community-driven restoration of the body and mind provides a common thread.

“What the research pretty definitively showed is that community is a huge component of healing,” he said, “And we think that’s a component that’s largely gotten lost in current medical treatment.”

— Reporter: 541-617-7818, shamway@bendbulletin.com

Q: Where do you see the business in five years?

A: Mark Montgomery: One thing I’d like to see in five years is that we’ve broadened our ability to reach out to more groups of people.

Q: What’s been the response from other yoga studios in Bend?

A: Gina Montgomery: Other studios have sent students to us who want something quieter, and we’ve sent over students looking for something more rigorous. It’s really sweet to see that we’re starting to support each other without really knowing each other.