Rebirth in the Desert: How Holistic Healing Found a Home in Borrego Springs

For nearly three decades, Renate Nishio has helped make Borrego a place people come to heal.

Her own story began with a little girl’s hands in Germany.



Two days before a tournament at Torrey Pines, Phil Mickelson was sick with food poisoning, and no one expected him to play. He called Renate Nishio.

She went to work with lymphatic drainage, gentle joint movement and acupressure. He played, she says, and he won.

It is one of many stories from a life spent healing people with her hands, a life that started with a little girl in Germany holding her mother's aching back and led, years later, to a small desert town.

People come to Borrego Springs for many reasons: the wildflowers, the dark skies, the silence. More and more, they come to heal. Today the valley is known for retreats, bodywork, yoga and wellness getaways. Visitors talk about the desert’s restorative energy the way earlier generations talked about its winter sunshine.

That reputation was built on purpose, and one of the people who helped build it is Renate Nishio. In a 2017 letter to the Borrego Sun, she described Borrego as “our sacred and secret sanctuary.” She has spent nearly 30 years helping others discover it.

A Wellness Retreat Like No Other

In late 2010, Linda Haddock, then the executive director of the Borrego Springs Chamber of Commerce, set out to position Borrego as a place to come for wellness and healing. She needed someone with real training to anchor the idea, and she found Nishio.

The Chamber featured Nishio’s services in its Visitors Guide and promoted her to residents and visitors alike. The idea took hold, and “Borrego as a wellness retreat like no other,” as Nishio puts it, became part of how the town introduced itself to the world.

Her training was serious. She completed the 1,000-hour Holistic Health Practitioner curriculum at the School of Healing Arts in San Diego in June 1999, part of five years of study that included Chinese medicine. That October she registered with San Diego County as a Holistic Health Practitioner. She later became Board Certified in Therapeutic Massage and Bodywork through the National Certification Board for Therapeutic Massage and Bodywork. To Nishio, holistic simply means whole. She treats body, mind and spirit, and lets a person’s emotions guide her hands-on work. She calls it a healing art.

That same year she launched Networkers Holistic Health Home Service in San Diego with a dozen top practitioners, many of whom had once been her teachers. The team worked out of the Hotel Parisi, a small boutique hotel in La Jolla. Guests soon arrived from across the United States and Europe for treatments. Her clients there included golfer Phil Mickelson, race car driver Kyle Busch, actress Jennifer Grey and two-time Olympic snowboarding medalist Hannah Teter.

Teaching Borrego to Heal Itself

In Borrego, Nishio’s work reached far beyond the treatment room. She helped design the spa at La Casa del Zorro, started its yoga studio, and led seminars and wellness classes for hotel guests and locals.

Teaching people to help themselves has always been central to her work. In early 2019 she led a five-week “Health and Happiness” workshop at The Club La Casa Yoga Studio. Participants learned hands-on acupressure techniques based on the Chinese Five Element System. The first class covered facial pressure points for rejuvenation and for everyday complaints like headaches and lower back pain. At the old library, she gave a seminar on how the Five Elements connect our emotions to our physical health.

Her signature work is Zen-Touch Shiatsu, an Oriental bodywork technique that uses pressure along the body’s meridians. For years her ads in the Borrego Sun offered pain relief and healing through holistic and therapeutic bodywork. Sunrise magazine, Terri Zumstein’s Borrego publication, featured her shiatsu treatments. In the hottest months, when temperatures can climb to 125 degrees, she has offered Watsu, a gentle form of shiatsu done in warm water that is especially suited to elderly and fragile clients.

Her approach always went beyond the table. She teaches clients to walk with good alignment, to work with gravity instead of against it, to choose exercise that suits their bodies, and to eat according to their blood type. Her fees have stayed the same for years, and many times she has charged nothing at all.

Facing Fear Together

When Covid arrived, Nishio made a hard choice. In July 2020, after the state allowed massage and spa services to reopen, she wrote to her clients in the Borrego Sun that she would keep her doors closed. Working in close contact did not feel safe for them or for her, even with masks. In the meantime, she offered free phone consultations to anyone with health questions.

That December, she wrote a column for the Sun on fear. In Oriental medicine, she explained, fear is the emotion that most directly harms the kidneys and drains the body’s vital essence, called Jing. Her advice was to replace fear with respect, awe and reverence, and to breathe. Inhale for a count of eight, hold for four, then exhale slowly for eight while letting go of negative thoughts.

“Rebirth happens with every breath you take,” she wrote. In 2023 she returned to her practice, bringing her approach to pain relief and wellness back to the community and its visitors.

The Ranch and the Horses

Some of the most meaningful wellness work in Borrego happened on a ranch on Palm Canyon Drive, home to eight Arabian horses.

Dr. Sandra Lee Thorpe was a lifelong educator. She earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at San Diego State University and a doctorate in education from the University of La Verne. She taught English and art, became a school administrator, and founded Windows Arts Academy, one of the first charter schools in San Diego. When most people would have retired, she came to Borrego and followed her passion for Arabian horses. “My passion is improving education,” she once told the Borrego Sun.

Dr. Sandra Lee Thorpe

At her Smoketree Arabian Ranch, she developed the Horse Wisdom program to teach what she called the three C’s: Communication, Compassion and Creativity. In 2008 she founded Juan Bautista de Anza Charter School, the first charter school in the Borrego Springs Unified School District. Horse Wisdom became part of the curriculum, and students took riding and horse lessons at the ranch. The school described it as a way to overcome fear and gain confidence. Students learned about horses and about life, and for parades the children painted the horses and walked them along the route. Her motto was “Who I Am Makes A Difference.”

Thorpe and Nishio were friends for nearly 20 years. They became business partners, and they called themselves spiritual sisters. Nishio kept her treatment room in the ranch guest house, and together they taught Horse Wisdom and Horse Whispering classes. Thorpe showed participants how horses mirror human behavior. Nishio helped people quiet their minds, release physical stress and align their energy so they could truly connect with the animals.

Nishio treated all eight of the horses, and that is how she became a horse healer. She remembers one mare in particular, whom she helped through pain during a pregnancy. The bond between them never broke.

Thorpe died unexpectedly at the ranch on June 15, 2017, and Nishio was with her. In a letter to the Sun, Nishio wrote that her friend had come to Borrego to nurture her love of art, her horses and her compassion for children. “Sandra gave it her all,” she wrote.

As Thorpe was dying, Nishio promised her she would look after the horses. When Thorpe’s family later decided to have them put down, it broke Nishio’s heart not to be able to keep that promise. She stayed with them to the end. She groomed them, braided flowers into their manes, fed them treats and held them.

That October, Nishio and tennis pro Mike Rogers organized a small memorial for Thorpe at the La Casa del Zorro tennis courts, where her students had taken weekly lessons. The children played tennis first, then shared memories. “She taught them how to live without fear,” Nishio said that day, “to have fun, and love everything they did.”

Thorpe’s work outlived her. When the charter school she founded later closed, one of its educators earned a certificate in Equine Guided Education so Horse Wisdom could continue at a new charter school in Salton City.

The property has since changed hands. For Nishio, it remains the place where she and her friend lived holistic healing every day.

After Thorpe’s death, Nishio moved her practice into her own home in Borrego. People came every day with frozen shoulders, tennis and golfer’s elbow, wounds that would not heal and much more. Whatever the complaint, she treated the whole person. Even during Covid, when she saw clients, she treated them outside on her patio.

Where It All Began

Nishio’s story starts in Bad Essen, Germany, on a Sunday night under the brightest flower moon in 25 years. Her mother collapsed in front of the beautiful Saint Nicholas church and went into labor on the spot. “Guess who came out in a hurry,” Nishio says, laughing. The town’s name fits her life’s work. “Bad” means bath or spa in German, and Bad Essen is known for its healing saltwater springs.

Her mother had suffered from rheumatoid arthritis since she was young. When Renate was very small, her mother would place the little girl’s hands on her lower back. One day Renate asked why. “Mommy has pain there,” her mother said, “and the pain goes away when your hands are holding me.”

From then on, young Renate went around with her arms outstretched, asking everyone whether they were in pain. She held her grandmother and grandfather, the dogs, the cats and even the pigs.

Her mother also gave her a name. In Latin, Renate means “reborn,” and Nishio says her mother chose it on purpose. She describes her mother as deeply spiritual and very wise. Whenever Renate came to her with a question, her mother would answer, “My child, ask yourself. You have the answer.”

A Life Lived as Art

Before healing became her profession, Nishio lived a life most people only read about. She lived and worked in Japan, where the celebrated photographer Hideki Fujii took her portrait. That image still appears in her ads today. It was in Japan that she first encountered the idea that shaped her life’s work: the body is designed to regulate and heal itself, and a healthy mind and a healthy heart work together.

She spent years in the international fashion world, working with modeling agencies in Japan and New York. Later she brought that world to Borrego, producing photo shoots in the desert for European magazines and fashion catalogs. One Swiss winter catalog was shot here in the middle of July, with the desert standing in for snow. It earned her a location of the year award and helped introduce Borrego to European audiences.

Creativity runs in the family. Nishio raised her niece, artist Amy Adler, as her own daughter. Adler now teaches art at UC San Diego, and her work has been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

“Life is an art,” Nishio says, “and living it is the canvas.”

The Energy of the Place

Today Nishio is mostly retired. She is not taking on new clients, but she still makes time for people living with ailments that conventional medicine hasn’t been able to help.

Over the years her Borrego clients have included Beverly Kuhrts, who helped build the town; Artists Barb Matson and Liesl Paris; Sunrise magazine publisher Terri Zumstein; and Linda Haddock and her daughter, Jennifer and more.

Barb Matson called Nishio’s work “life lengthening.” Nishio says Barb kept a childlike spirit all her life, and it made her the artist she was.



Writer Trish Schiesser, who lived at the RoadRunner, had used a wheelchair for a long time when her husband asked Nishio to help. A few sessions later, she no longer needed it. Schiesser later wrote about Nishio in one of her books. A client named Marina still comes from Italy several times a year for her sessions.

She tells stories about her longtime clients with obvious affection. One woman in her nineties stayed so fit and energetic that her family joked they had to ask Nishio to let her go. When that client passed, she left Nishio a cactus. Last year it bloomed on Mother’s Day, and Nishio still talks to it.

She welcomes everyone who now offers healing work in the valley. “I am glad to see that I have paved the way,” she says. What draws people here, she believes, is the place itself: the mountains, the desert floor that was once the bottom of an ocean, and a night sky with a clear view to the stars.

She likes to share a saying from her Five Element studies: birth is not a gain, and death is not a loss. Then she adds her own advice. “Take it as it comes, leave it as it is. Enjoy living.”

 This story comes from the Borrego Sun Archives and from Renate Nishio.

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