In a quiet space in downtown Cookeville, The Wild Grove is bringing independent holistic practitioners together under one roof—and building a place around the idea that the different parts of our lives and bodies don’t always exist separately.
There are plenty of places where you can book a massage. There are places to get a facial, sit down with a practitioner, or learn more about natural approaches to wellness.
The Wild Grove was created around a slightly different question: What if those things didn’t have to exist entirely on their own?
Located in Cookeville, Tennessee, The Wild Grove is a holistic healing collective—a shared space where independent practitioners with different areas of focus can work alongside one another while remaining rooted in their own practices.
It isn’t quite a spa. It isn’t a medical office. And it wasn’t created to be either.
Instead, founder Shandi Goodloe envisioned a place that could hold different approaches to wellness under one roof, giving practitioners a space to do their work and giving people in the Upper Cumberland another way to explore what feeling well can look like for them.
A Different Kind of Wellness Space
The idea behind The Wild Grove begins with the fact that people aren’t made up of isolated parts.
Stress can show up in the body. The way we feel can affect the way we sleep. Our routines, environment and seasons of life can change what we need. Sometimes support looks like slowing down for an hour. Sometimes it means learning something new or working with a practitioner who looks at a concern from a different perspective.
That philosophy is reflected in the way The Wild Grove has been built.
Rather than one practitioner trying to provide everything, the collective creates room for people with different training, interests and approaches to practice alongside one another.
Depending on the practitioners and offerings available at a given time, someone might come through the doors for massage or bodywork, holistic skincare, a class or workshop, or another wellness-focused service.
The common thread isn’t that every practitioner does the same thing.
It’s that they don’t have to.
Built as a Collective
The word collective matters here.
The practitioners at The Wild Grove aren’t simply employees working their way down a menu of standardized services. They bring their own backgrounds, training, and ways of working into a shared environment.
That allows the space itself to become something larger than any one practice.
It can also make discovering different kinds of support less intimidating. Someone may initially find The Wild Grove because they’re looking for a massage therapist and later discover a class, practitioner or approach they hadn’t encountered before.
There is an element of community in that model, too—not only for the people walking through the doors, but for the practitioners doing the work.
Small wellness practices can be solitary. A collective gives independent practitioners the ability to maintain their own work while being part of something shared.
Rooted in Cookeville
There has been a noticeable shift toward knowing more about the things we bring into our lives.
People want to know who grew their food. They want to meet the person who made what they’re buying. They’re looking for local farms, herbal shops, handmade products and businesses where there is still a person behind the counter.
Wellness is becoming part of that conversation, too.
And that’s part of what makes a place like The Wild Grove interesting to us at Tennessee Almanac.
It’s local in the truest sense—not because “shop local” makes a nice slogan, but because the people practicing here live and work in the same broader community as the people they serve.
The Wild Grove is still growing and changing as the collective itself grows. New practitioners and offerings can change what happens within the space over time.
That’s part of the point.
It wasn’t built around one rigid definition of what wellness has to look like.
A Place for Slowing Down
There’s also something refreshingly quiet about the idea.
Wellness has become an enormous industry, and it can sometimes feel like one more thing we’re expected to optimize—another routine to perfect, product to buy or standard we’re supposed to reach.
The Wild Grove takes a gentler approach.
Sometimes taking care of yourself looks less like becoming a different person and more like having somewhere to slow down long enough to pay attention to the person you already are.
A massage table.
A quiet room.
A conversation.
Learning something with your hands.
An hour when there isn’t anywhere else you’re supposed to be.
Those things may be simple, but simple doesn’t necessarily mean insignificant.
Growing Something Different in the Upper Cumberland
The Wild Grove is ultimately an experiment in bringing people together: independent practitioners, different disciplines and members of the community who are looking for a more personal approach to wellness.
And perhaps that’s what makes the collective model worth watching.
It doesn’t assume that one practitioner has every answer or that there is one prescribed way to feel well. Instead, it creates space for different kinds of work to happen alongside one another.
For Cookeville and the surrounding Upper Cumberland, that means another locally built place where people can discover practitioners, learn, slow down and explore what supports them in the season they’re in.
And for The Wild Grove, the story is still being written.