The Inns and Outs of the Center

We share the vision of restoring this historic Inn to its former beauty. Our building has wonderful bones and the plans are being drawn up to make it into our Integrative Health Center. My heart races sometimes when I think of all that is involved in starting this project, but I have so many wise advisers and amazing supporters in this venture. 

Each time I walk through the spider webs in the hall, I am better able to visualize our finished space with natural light and polished floors. I imagine our patients walking in and being greeted by one of us. I imagine bringing them to the exam area and making the time to actually listen to them and working together to reach their health goals. I imagine watching outdoor cooking demonstrations. I walk by our movement space we are creating for yoga, Pilates and dance. I love looking out the windows to surrounding mountains through the desert landscape.

And then, there are the meetings with the architect and the reality of moving block walls in a building constructed in 1948. Creating ADA compliant hallways around huge weight bearing pillars. Finding out our beautiful sliding Shoji wall will mean massive demolition of block walls we had just assumed were drywall. 
A commitment to staying as "green" as possible is met by questioning looks by the powers that be.  The perfect layout with our long hallways circling the 4,000 square feet, suddenly being modified to accommodate OUTDOOR hallways. Endless weeks of studying the ideal patient flow and exam rooms are overturned by the constraints of current architecture. 

A younger me would have pitched a fit over the changes, but I have learned to believe that this will all work out for an even better design than we could have imagined. It will become a wonderful place for the transforming the health of our community. It will be the place our patients will be heard and respected. 

Progress Notes

Reaching goals isn't always as easy as I imagine. There are always those unexpected roadblocks that need some creative thinking to work around. This once only a dream idea of providing the quality of healthcare that I know is possible is taking shape. It is even much bigger and more beautiful than I had imagined on my own.

Each day brings a new and sometimes surprising development. Today, the architect that will help us with our build out showed us even more wonderful ideas than we had imagined on our own.  During our walk-through today we sadly discovered that some walls that need moving are load bearing. All of the thick walls that we thought were dry wall or lathe and plaster are actually mason walls with drywall on the outside of them, meaning that knocking some of them down may mean that we have to get permits and inspections which could be VERY bad for us.  Then one of the partners came up with a very creative idea for working around everything. The architect was inspired to think more creatively.

So, we have our practitioners, we have our space, we have a mission and we even have some amazing business plan ideas. Now, the hardest work begins as we each individually and collectively form our legal structure. We are all caregivers, health care providers-healers...none of us are skilled at this next phase, but we are excited to learn and grow in this leg of our quest.

I am grounded enough in reality to understand that in a perfect world even though we are promised to be ready for patients by late fall- October, or early November, life can happen.   There are nearly always interesting events along the way.  But we are getting there and I am so very joyful!