The Dragontree

I can’t believe it’s been eleven years since we opened The Dragontree. Twelve and a half years ago, I was building my Chinese Medicine practice and decided to take a job at a spa to make some extra money. After a year there, my private practice had grown enough that it no longer made sense to keep the spa job. Shortly thereafter, an ambitious young massage therapist I’d met there also left. “Left” is a nice way of saying the owners got sick of her always telling them how they could improve the place and asked her not to come back.

She told me she was going to open her own spa, and asked me if I wanted to have my practice there instead of the medical building I was in at the time. She was only 22 years old, and some of her friends had a hard time believing this lofty dream would amount to anything. I think I believed in her more than most. I had fallen in love with her by then, but besides that, she had an impressive work ethic and a knack for getting what she wanted.

She and a friend found a big warehouse in northwest Portland, and one day we brought over a bunch of sledgehammers, crowbars and a Sawzall, and had a great time smashing the existing interior walls. We needed to hire people to rebuild the walls where we wanted them, but for the most part, we did the rest of the work ourselves. Painting, building, putting in floors, hanging decorations … there’s a lot you can get done when you’re young and crazy and don’t need to sleep.

I was hesitant about moving my practice to a spa because I thought people might not take me seriously there. I had been working in a building with other medical practitioners, and everyone knows that when doctors gather together in groups it indicates that they’re highly skilled. It was a place with white walls and beige carpet and fluorescent lights. You know – the kind of place where serious medicine happens. Who would think of coming to me for the treatment of something serious in a place with colorful silks and fountains? I worried that if I moved to a spa, all my patients would have complaints such as too much money and boredom.

As it turns out, I was quite wrong about spas and spa patrons. My patients were smarter than me. They were able to perceive that the colors, textures, scents, and sounds all added to the therapeutic experience, and the absence of fluorescent lighting didn’t mean we weren’t committed to our work.

I learned, thanks to Briana’s vision (that was the young lady’s name), that there’s so much more that provokes healing than just what a doctor says or does to a patient. We are complex beings with souls. We can be encouraged to recover our balance by spending time in an environment that inspires us, relaxes us, or feeds us. We can have an epiphany by being on the receiving end of another’s kindness. The potential for healing is everywhere, in every interaction, and I saw just how little I had been taking advantage of it.

Indeed, I’ve had the honor of helping patients with the most difficult challenges of their lives, and I feel tremendously lucky to have gotten to do it without beige carpet beneath my feet, and in the company of a kind, talented, and committed team.

I’ve long placed great value on integrity. I hope more than anything that the public sees me and our business as having integrity. But I’m sorry to say I’ve broken my agreements over and over.

As we’ve gotten bigger and more successful, I’ve said repeatedly that I’m not going to continue to do the caulking and spackling and painting. I’m not going to lie on my back under sinks, unclogging our drains and replacing faucets. I’m not going to cut holes through cinderblock walls. I’m not going to dig leaves out of our downspouts or crawl around on beams fifteen feet above a stone floor. I’m not going to scale fences to get onto the roof to melt the snow in our ventilation pipes. I’m not going to feed miles of speaker wire through walls. I’m not going to rush over in the middle of the night to stop leaks. So, as we mark eleven years in business, with you as my witness, I intend to keep my agreement to turn over all the grunt work to other people. Oh, who am I kidding?

From the bottom of my heart,

Thank you, thank you, thank you,

Dr. Peter Borten