The tea was always there.
Seven blends on a shelf in the apothecary. Teas we trusted. Teas we recommended to patients and drank ourselves.
In 2022, we moved the clinic from Greenville, South Carolina to Kalispell, Montana, settling on Main Street in a space full of light and apothecary jars. People walking by would stop and look in through the windows. Some came for the tea. Some came because something about the place drew them inside.
We started listening to those questions. The shelves grew. Seven blends became thirty, then over a hundred and fifty. Each one chosen the way medicine is chosen: with attention to what is needed, what the season calls for, what the person asking has come to find.
Dr. Devynne and Dr. James are a father-daughter team and the co-founders of Jing Shen Healing Arts and Ancient Ways Apothecary. Together they have practiced Classical Chinese Medicine for over a decade each. The clinic has always held to one thing: the whole person, seen slowly, treated with care. The tea grew from the same attention.
Sara is Dr. James' partner, and the tea owes something real to her early presence. Her curiosity and her sense of what a thing should feel like helped shape what those shelves became. She has since completed her doctorate as a Family Nurse Practitioner and a PhD in Rural and Indigenous Health. Her medicine takes a different form than ours. It works through different tools, in different rooms, for different kinds of need. It is still medicine. It is still taking care of people. The form is different. The impulse is the same.
What lives here is an extension of the clinic into daily life. Tea and formulas from the treatment room, and in time, more. Teachings. Practices. Tools for staying in relationship with your own life, not only in the treatment room.
You do not need to be a patient to find your way here.