OUR VISION
Our vision is to do everything we can to help our guests to Live Life Well. It all started with our humble beginnings as Kramer Chiropractic & Acupuncture Center in 1998. As we grew our practice, our vision came to life in 2011, when construction finished for our Senara Health and Healing Center & Spa. It is the home we’ve built for our guests that brings together all the elements of a healthy lifestyle.
Senara is a special place: a wellness center, a community where our guests can experience just how good they can feel, so they’ll be inspired to live longer, healthier, and more meaningful lives. It is your home for the Senara Experience, which is all about how we can help you feel your best.
Our Inspiration
Senara is a long-held dream come true for Dr. Keith Kramer and his wife, Penny. Every inch of the building and all of Senara’s services reflect the couple’s shared vision for how they can help others Live Life Well. The energetic twosome has worked as a business team since opening the first Kramer Chiropractic office in 2002. Learn more about the founders of Senara.
The Kramers were inspired to create the Senara Experience over a decade ago after an anniversary trip to Canyon Ranch in Arizona. The resort takes an innovative approach to health, wellness and holistic and integrative care. The experience changed their lives. The Kramers felt completely renewed, and wanted everyone to feel that way. Since then, they have made it their passion and mission to create a similar experience for others to enjoy. And that experience is at the wellness center at Senara.
Why the Name Senara?
There’s really no single answer for why we chose the name Senara. For starters, it’s unique and we just flat out like the sound of Senara. But there are other reasons too.
We first heard the name from the Kramers’ daughter, Grace, when she was about 7 years old. She was a swimmer and absolutely LOVED mermaids. Grace mentioned reading a book about mermaids that talked about the legend of Saint Senara, who happened to be a mermaid. Just as soon as she said Senara, a light bulb went off for us in our search for the perfect new name.
Mermaids are a natural, nautical match with our spa. To us, mermaids also symbolize, in many ways, what it means to Live Life Well. They’re active, powerful and fit. Beautiful and majestic, inside and out. They’re also alluring, charming and mystical. All these qualities and more describe mermaids and how we want you to feel when you Experience Senara.
The Legend of Saint Senara
The village of Zennor in England’s Cornwall region celebrates Mermaid Day in Saint Senara’s honor on April 30th every year. According to legend in Zennor, a young man named Matthew Trewella sang the closing hymn in the village church each evening. Saint Senara was so enchanted by his singing voice that she left her nearby cove and came ashore to listen closer. The two met and, as she visited more often, they fell so deeply in love that when she had to return to the sea, Matthew followed her into the water to spend eternity together.
Legend also has it that if you visit near Pendour Cove at sunset, you just may hear the young man singing, and that the fishermen there still listen to Matthew’s songs to decide if it’s safe to go out to sea or not.
If you ever visit that area of England, be sure to stop by St. Senara Church. Outside the church, you’ll find a bench that’s over 500-years-old with Senara’s likeness carved into it.
OUR FOUNDERS
Senara’s founders, Dr. Keith Kramer and his wife, Penny, have worked as a business team since opening Kramer Chiropractic in 2002. While growing the practice, the Kramers learned everything they could about the healing power of holistic and natural medicines and techniques. This led to adding health and healing guest services, from acupuncture and massage therapies to nutritional counseling and physical therapy to our wellness center. That meant further growth, including added staff and the need to build their spacious Senara facility.
With the move to their long-held “dream home for guests,” they also transitioned from operating under the Kramer name to Senara. The entire building and all of Senara’s services reflect the couple’s shared and passionate vision for how they can help others Live Life Well.
Both of them credit much of their business’s success to that shared vision, and the dedication each of them brings to their individual role in making it a reality. Dr. Kramer puts it this way, “My job is to take care of our guests’ health. And to focus on that, I need to know that everything else is taken care of, and that’s what Penny does.”
Dr. Kramer was introduced to the connection between hard work and business success at the age of four, when he started helping with the chores on his family’s farm in Iowa. He and Penny met at Iowa State University, their alma mater, and they married in 1995. After he graduated from Palmer College of Chiropractic, they moved to Peoria, where Dr. Kramer joined a highly-respected chiropractic group.
When he left the group to open his own practice and focus on helping others Live Life Well, Penny left her promising marketing career behind to join him in the family business, to devote her time and boundless energy to spreading the message about how to live a healthy lifestyle.
Their daughter, Grace, has been the center and light in their life since her birth in 2002. The Kramer family spends their spare time together and enjoys working out, reading and traveling. Dr. Kramer and Grace also “rock out” by learning to play guitar together.
INSIDE OUR FACILITY
When you open the doors to Senara, you enter a place in time created uniquely for you, a place for an unrivaled lifestyle experience. We designed our wellness center with a Tuscan feel that’s open, airy and inviting.
Inside, you’ll find an attention to detail in every square foot of Senara’s 12,000-square-foot interior that includes our 7,000-square-foot Senara Spa. From the environmentally-friendly interior materials we’ve selected to the artwork by local artists, you’ll see throughout the building, it’s all designed to make you, our guests, feel completely comfortable and at home. You will always be a welcome member of the Senara community.
Committed to Green
You will be proud to be associated with Senara, not only because of our commitment to your health and wellness, but also our devotion to ensuring the environmental health and wellness of our local community and the world. We also encourage all members of the Senara community to constantly be on the lookout, especially at your home, to see how you can make our world greener, too. It’s good for our wellness center to be green, but it’s great for our homes to be too.
And, yes, we “walk the talk” with you. Click here for a look at some of the green features of Senara, and that’s only for the building. We keep the same strong commitment to living and working green with everything from our environmentally safer cleaning products and ongoing recycling efforts to the organic, natural beauty products we use in our services and that we sell, along with the recycled paper merchandise bags we put them in.
HOW SENARA HEALTH AND HEALING CENTER & SPA IS GREEN
The architects did a fantastic job of incorporating the green and environmentally friendly building practices we wanted in our wellness center. And we wanted them all. Right down to a system for automatically capturing and recycling rain water to keep the grass growing and green.
To give you an idea of how the building’s design embodies the Senara Experience, including our commitment to protecting the environment, here’s the short list of Senara’s green features that help conserve energy and natural resources:
Exterior
- Energy efficient windows positioned to take advantage of natural day lighting
- Local stone and other regional, natural materials (less transport)
- High energy efficiency wall system design, with 80 percent of lower level below grade
- Fountain water recycles endlessly
Interior
- Sustainable interior materials throughout
- Carpet tiles of 50 percent recycled content backing and face yarn
- Natural cork and bamboo flooring
- Spa’s glass accents made from recycled glass
- Low air pollution Volatile Organic Compound (VOC) paints
HVAC System and Plumbing
- Variable Air Volume (VAV) air conditioning system consumes less energy
- Air conditioners use non-ozone-depleting refrigerant (R410A)
- VAV terminal units with hot water reheat
- High efficiency gas fired (condensing type) boilers
- High efficiency lavatories, with dual flush design need less water
- Low flow showers require less water
- High efficiency hot water heaters
Lighting
- Downlights throughout the spa use low energy 2.5 watt LED lamps
- Spa lighting controls have four to six zones so only the zones in use are lit
- Accent cove uses an LED rope light that emits just 1.1 watt per lineal foot
- Proximity sensors automatically turn lights off in unoccupied rooms
- All fluorescent lighting uses high efficiency ballast and low mercury lamps
- Exterior site lighting is zoned to turn off all but two security night lights
PARTNER WITH US TODAY
Senara Health Healing Center & Spa is a family-owned company in every way. We exist for our clients, helping them to feel and look better through our holistic health and wellness services. We meet you wherever you are with compassion and care. We put in place a plan that we believe will have you feeling vibrant and healthy, no matter your age.. Our staff believes in our mission and vision, and we treat our employees and our customers like family. If you are looking for the best health and wellness center in Peoria, call us today!
