Oxygen bar and wellness center set to open in Riverside Sunday

Matthew Forrest was on a train when he got the call letting him know his terminally ill father had passed. He’d watched him struggle and fade away. The dreaded news, while not unexpected, was devastating nonetheless. Forrest ended the call, closed his eyes against the grief welling up inside him and said a prayer.

“A voice came to me,” he recalls. “When you heal from what you’re going though, don’t be selfish. Get out in the world and help people with how you’re helping yourself. Share what you know.”

Forrest had himself been extremely ill for nine months. He’d been to 14 different doctors and had “every test known to man” without getting any answers. The very week his father died, he’d finally been diagnosed — with four different things. He had a clostidrium infection, a potentially deadly bacterial infection in the bowel and three tick-borne illnesses: Rocky Mountain spotted fever, babesiosis and Lyme carditis.

The Riverhead man was on the LIRR into the city to get his first IV ozone treatment when the call came and the voice urged him to help others. With ozone, oxygen, nutrition and supplements, along with detoxification, Forrest says, he was healed. “No antibiotics,” he says.

Fast forward six months and Feelin O2 Good, Forrest’s oxygen bar and wellness center, is about to open just off the traffic circle on Flanders Road — the culmination of the directive given by the voice he heard on the train.

Feelin O2 Good has everything Forrest believes people need to restore and maintain good health. There’s a whole body vibration machine, an ionic detox foot bath, and an infrared sauna. Then there’s the oxygen bar offering 95 percent oxygen — in several “flavors.” He plans to install an ozone generator at the oxygen bar as well. The center also offers organic raw kambucha on tap, alkaline water, liquid multivitamins and supplements — and grass-fed, organic beef, hand-crafted natural soaps and candles.

“It’s the lifestyle I’ve been into for 14 years kind of coming to fruition here,” Forrest says, sitting on a chair in the completely remodeled former coffee shop in the two-story frame building at 10 Flanders Road.

“I meditated on the name of the company,” he says with a grin. “I’ve yet to find anyone who can say it without smiling.”

Forrest, 35, says he’d been on the wrong path as a youth and was headed for serious trouble.

“I was in bad shape — miserable, depressed, suicidal,” he recalls. “I came across a couple of people who were sober. They were happy, participating, productive members of society and they became my role models,” Forrest says. “They were spiritual. They meditated. They believed in a god of their understanding loving caring guiding power greater than ourselves and they taught me how to pray. That was the beginning of a journey for me.”

Forrest said he “got deeper into meditation — into Taoism, Buddhism, Siddha Yoga and Christianity.”

“My mentors taught me that real happiness is in stillness, in prayer and service to others,” he said.

“The only way to really feel good is to give our bodies what we really need: detoxification, healthy, inspired living through art and poetry and music. All of this is incorporated here,” he says, gesturing around at the cozy, wood-paneled space. It has an earthy, soothing feel.

“Everything you see is reclaimed,” he said. The wood on the walls as well as the wood from which the welcome counter is built — all came from discarded wood pallets. The space has a soothing, earthy feel. Forrest plans to hang art created by friends on the walls. And there will be peaceful music in the air, too.

Forrest has a successful contracting company, First Step Solutions, which now has offices on the second floor above Feelin O2 Good. His office staff and carpenters in the field helped pull everything together for the wellness center.

“All my passions came together here,” he says.

Feelin 02 Good will celebrate its grand opening on Sunday. The new oxygen bar and wellness center will be open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily except Sundays, when it will be open from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.