Empowering healers to prosper with courage and compassion

You are here to make an impact in healing the world

You deserve to be richly compensated for your work

You know it’s time to be bolder, play bigger and share your gifts

I’m here to help you get there

I'm Johanna Alper, founder of Medicine Buddha Coaching and the creator of The 5 Elements of Prosperity for Holistic Business Success.

For the past 40 years, I've had a successful 5 Element Classical Acupuncture and teaching business. I understand the challenges you face in growing your business. Today, I‘m on a mission to help healers and heart-centered entrepreneurs like you attract more clients, create prosperity and make the impact you’ve come here to make.

Yes, you’re here to heal the world, I’m here to help - But how did it all start?

After teaching acupuncture for many years, my heart ached seeing talented graduates failing to successfully launch their healing practices. Most healers have incredible gifts, but lack the entrepreneurial skills to create a successful practice. Unfortunately, these skills are not taught in our healing schools. My passion for helping other healers succeed grew to the point that I needed to do more. I embarked on a journey to master spiritual business coaching and I never looked back.

With my background in 5 Element Classical Acupuncture, knowledge of Chinese Principles of Success and 50 years of compassion meditation training and teaching, I realized my unique brilliance lies in using the magic of Nature's 5 Elements to help my students and clients thrive and succeed. Your business is a living system too! By applying the success principles of the 5 Elements to the areas of business that bring in revenue, you can have a thriving practice.

My healer friend, want to know the best part?

Once you understand this organic business system, marketing and sales will be more easy and fun. With the grace of the 5 Elements of Prosperity and my mentorship, you’ll learn how to succeed with confidence, integrity and joy.

Ready to combine the magic of your work with financial success? 

When we work together, we’ll explore the best path for you and your business. As a heart centered mentor for holistic businesses, a soul-aligned and compassionate approach always comes first. 

In order to have a thriving business you need all of the 5 Elements of Prosperity:

  • Fire - Your heart’s unique radiant brand 

  • Earth - Your soul aligned niche 

  • Metal - Your prosperous money flow 

  • Water - Your work-life balance

  • Wood- Your big vision implemented

In your initial assessment we'll discuss The 5 Elements of Prosperity to assess your current business model. This assessment will help us learn where your business is at and the steps needed to set you on a path to success and prosperity.

From an early age, I wanted two things:

to have a good time — and to reduce suffering.

It turns out these two aspirations are not as different as they sound.

Everything I’ve devoted my life to has been, in some way, an expression of both.

Learning to answer the calls

I began as a dance student — studying at San Francisco State College in the late 1960s, in the Vietnam anti-war era. The question of how we inhabit our lives and bodies was erupting in our culture. Dance gave me my first real education in what it means to be present, to listen to our bodies, and to move with rather than against what is true.

In 1971, I heard the Tibetan Buddhist meditation master Chögyam Trungpa speak. Something in me recognized what he was pointing to - a quality of wakefulness, of being genuinely alive in my experience - and I began to meditate. That practice has now been my treasured companion for more than 55 years. In 1973, Trungpa Rinpoche asked me to become a meditation instructor. In 1982, Pema Chodron asked me to lead month-long residential intensive for 30 people.

In 1980 I began studying Classical Five Element Acupuncture - a 4,000-year-old medicine that sees the whole person- body, mind, and spirit - as one living system. For someone who had always been drawn to the question of how we come fully alive, it was a perfect fit. I have been practicing in Boulder, Colorado for over 45 years, and taught in acupuncture colleges for more than 20.

The same intelligence that moves through a river, a season, and a human body also moves through a business, a team, and a life. We just have to learn to listen.

When healing meets the business of healing

Something I began noticing was that gifted, well-trained acupuncture graduates from the acupuncture college where I taught were struggling to build practices that actually sustained them. The medicine is excellent. The training was great. But they hadn’t been taught how to bring their gifts into the world in a way that was authentic, effective, and financially alive.

I felt this gap deeply. And I was called to do something about it.

I began studying holistic business coaching which was at first very difficult. But when I discovered: that the 5 Elements are in every living system including a conscious business the work began to progress. The same energetics that describe how Ch'i (life force energy) moves through a body also describe how energy moves through a business, a team, and an organization.

This became the foundation for my work as The Healer's Coach — supporting holistic practitioners, therapists, and heart-centered entrepreneurs to build thriving practices on their own authentic terms.

From the treatment room to the boardroom

More recently, I have begun to bring the 5 Elements to a non-profit board - helping them understand their own elemental dynamics, move from friction to flow and collaboration, and lead from their deepest values rather than their most reactive habits.

The results have surprised even me. As the board chair described it after our work together: "that was magic."

I am now available to other conscious organizations, nonprofits, and mission-driven leadership teams who are ready for a different kind of organizational development - one that brings authentic alignment and practical results.

My lifetime distilled

To my surprise a book started to flow through me and for the past decade I have been bringing all of this together in The Tao of Coming Alive: 10 Timeless Medicine Wisdom Treasures for Vitality, Joy, and Wild Ease. It draws on 3 lineages - Taoist 5 Element Acupuncture, Buddhist compassion meditation practice, and the shamanic wisdom of the Q'ero people of the Andes in Peru. It offers an inspiring map for living with more vitality, more joy, and more of the wild ease that is your birthright and will be published in 2026.

And now at 80

I am in what I sometimes call my 100th Year of Gratitude - 55 years of meditation, 45 years of acupuncture, and the ongoing wonder and delight of still being here, still feeling really healthy, and still learning.

I live and work in Boulder, Colorado, with friends and a community I love - meditating, dancing most days, walking in the mountains, seeing patients, coaching practitioners, and consulting with organizations.

And I am more convinced than ever that what we are all really here to do - each in our own elemental way - is to come fully, joyfully, wildly alive.

I would love for that to be your experience too.

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