Healer Q&A: Opening Your Own Wellness Center With Emily Morrison.

The following interview is a transcript excerpt from The Heallist Podcast episode. Listen to the full audio version below and subscribe to get notified of new episodes.

Emily Morrison, the founder of Valley Spirit Wellness Center in Beacon NY, shares her personal journey from a solo practitioner to an inspiring entrepreneur and a thriving business owner. Her candid reflections on running a business in the holistic health sphere are not just revelations but a treasure trove of encouragement for those who dream of forging their own path in this field.

It's a delicate dance, balancing the mechanics of business with the fluidity of a healing environment, but as Emily and her team demonstrate, it's a dance worth mastering for the harmony it brings to all involved.

Finally, we touch on self-care and creative expression, where Emily shares the art of maintaining personal equilibrium amid the demands of nurturing others.  Join us for an episode that goes beyond inspiration—it's a call to action, a reminder that within every obstacle lies an opportunity to rise.

Evolution of a Vision from Practitioner to Wellness Center Owner

Yuli Ziv: Let's dive in and start from your journey as a practitioner. How did it all begin for you? Was it always your dream to eventually have a wellness center, or did it come up naturally?

Emily Morrison: I started quite young. I'm 42 now, and I went to massage school when I was 23. At that point, I was really just trying to figure out who I was in the world and where I even wanted to live, let alone work. I started out working for other people. I wasn't seriously thinking about my future career beyond just trying to learn and do it.

However, I did find that I got bored pretty quickly with just massage. It's not that there was anything wrong with massage—I love it—but I really wanted to go a medical route with it, and I felt limited with my skill set at that time. I ended up going to school for Chinese medicine a few years later. I bopped around, moved, and tried different places, doing different kinds of massage in different places.

It was interesting because I would see what they were doing, and even then, I was like, "That's awesome, but that's not. This feels good, this doesn't. These people seem super stressed out; those folks seem like they've got their stuff together." I don't think I ever really thought about it until this moment, like how I was perceiving things then. I was just working, living my life, and I was young. But experiencing those various forms of offerings and places of offerings gave me more information than I realized about how I might want to do things.

Over the years, I married and got together with somebody who was another practitioner. We developed a practice together, and there were wonderful things that came out of that. Both of us learned how to do things differently. We really built a business together, which was the first time I transitioned from being a single practitioner to running things more directly.

As our relationship dissolved, so did our business relationship. I found myself in a new scenario, which was scary because I had always had a teammate. By that point, I was still practicing massage, training in martial arts, and married. It's all a blur at this point, to be completely honest.

Learning how to run the business with one other person, where our personal lives, parenting, business, and training were all intertwined, was both beautiful and challenging. When we separated, I found myself in a wholly new scenario. I didn't want to be a single practitioner anymore; I wanted to be in community. I had students who had been learning from both of us for years, and they stayed with me.

Things changed and evolved, and my focus needed to change because my circumstances changed so drastically. I found myself solely responsible for Valley Spirit Wellness Center, which was terrifying. I had to get really creative and motivated to do things differently than my old partner and I had done because what we did then wasn't working, and I needed help. The biggest thing was I couldn't do this by myself. So, I hired a friend.

Thriving in Survival Mode

Emily Morrison: My whole life had just changed, and I was processing a lot with my kids. I didn't want everything to fall apart. There was this part of me that thought, "I need help just to pay the rent so that this can survive. This place has to survive; my practice wasn't the concern." My clinical practice has been successful since I started, and I'm very good at what I do, but it was keeping this place in particular. I don't know if the place itself was talking to me or if someone else was whispering in my ear, "Emily, this is bigger than you. This is not about you. You need to do this." It was very humbling and a little frightening.

So, I try things out. They work or they don't, and I try something else. That can be challenging to work with because I'm very quick to adapt, whereas others might move slower and think things through. I didn't have time for that and that's just not the way I function. I work quickly; my brain functions fast, even after having babies and living through the COVID world.

I kept persevering and I had help. With my friend’s help, I could speak out loud my ideas about how to do it. I was looking into other places and doing research, but to be completely honest, I was winging it. I appreciate you saying I'm an inspiring entrepreneur, but my experience of myself in this has been a hot mess.

Yuli Ziv: No business plan and no projections for years ahead.

Emily Morrison: There was no business plan besides survival, and it was just month by month. I was really just trying to trust the process, and fortunately, I did, and I continue to because it's proving to be the right route. I have to remind myself of that at the end of every month when bills are due and payroll is up. It gets tricky, but I trust that everything will be where it needs to be as we move on to the next month and beyond.

Building a Supportive Team

Yuli Ziv: The energy you've created is just so magical and beautiful, and it's all due to the people you select to bring to the space. Just having help is incredible because that's the number one thing that I hear from practitioners who can reach a certain point—that they can't do it all. How do you find help and how do you find the right people, people who are respectful of the healing arts but also understand the business side, customer service, and all those other business aspects? How do you attract the right people?

Emily Morrison: It really came down to all of us, particularly with Felicia and Sasha, exploring and learning together. Jenny is on a different side of things because her background is very set in what she knows how to do. She has brought so much education to help us understand and learn what it means to run a really functional, healthy, profitable, and sustainable business. Without her help, we would be a little lost. There's this very real structure that she's brought to it.

But with Felicia and Sasha, it was like we brought our hearts into it and just trusted. Neither of them necessarily had the education or specific skill set of what they do. That was something they learned as we went into it, and their skills have evolved and developed. It's been beautiful to watch them go through that. They were both in a situation where they needed work and community. We were all in this place of needing each other, which was really quite beautiful.

Cultivating Purposeful Work Environments

Emily Morrison: It's really important to me as an employer, as someone who loves these people, and as a human who wants the best for other humans, that people are doing work they're most in alignment with, where there's joy and security created from it, as opposed to strife and difficulty and unhappiness. Nobody wants to be dissatisfied with their job, and I surely don't want to be an employer of somebody who's dissatisfied with their job. I'm a compassionate human who wants the best for the people I love and work with.

Yuli Ziv: That's just so beautiful, and you really represent this new way of employers who genuinely and sincerely care about the people who work for them, not just to match their expectations but to ensure there's alignment with their higher purpose and their own path.

Emily Morrison: Yes. I don't need to be the person in front of everybody else; I don't need to be the leader or have all the spotlight on me or my face on everything.

Integrating Work and Creativity

Emily Morrison: I had the realization a little while ago that I'm not in a place of creativity. I used to be an artist before, but I'm not expressing my creative side, I'm just working. Then, I had a session with a really amazing sole contract practitioner and she really helped me understand that there is no separation between me and my business. It is my expression of creativity.

Once I understood that, everything became easier. That got me into a place of alignment. I stopped fighting so much. I stopped feeling like I'm just working all the time and that I'm so tired. But instead, it became me just creating this whole potential experience for people to have. All of the things that I'm doing, whether it's in clinical practice or running the space in various ways became my creative outlet.

Not only was I less frustrated, tired, and irritable about working all the time, but I also felt like I could expand even more. I can just like really try on some other things. It became so much more exciting. This is something I would really encourage people to think about: Do you want your business to be an extension of all you are and what you believe in and stand for? Or do you want to make money and check off boxes and have an assistant and make it something that's more unfeeling?

If we're in a wellness trade, we have to be feeling about it. We have to be about doing it through medicine, through wellness, through sustainability. We have to always be humble and be vulnerable with ourselves and with others because we are representing that potential for everybody else.

Navigating Professional Services

Yuli Ziv: It's such a beautiful point, and I love this whole idea of swapping the work mode with creator mode. But not to bring us down, are there any words of caution?

Emily Morrison: Get yourself a good accountant. I have an amazing accountant. He is so forgiving. He helped me learn so much and he's been so patient and generous. He does some of my bookkeeping as far as categorizing different expenses, but I do wish that I had a bookkeeper that I was working with on a weekly basis, and that's something that I'm going to be adding in at some point. At this point, I manage it, but I don't want to. It's stressful to me and I just don't like doing it.

The employees that I have now are essential. I used to check people out myself and that would eat into other patients' appointments. I hired a lawyer for a short bit. I brought her on because I needed to expand what we can do and my licensure was inhibiting that. It put me in a gray area, and so to rectify that, in talking with the lawyer, it was recommended that I build a corporation.

However, the process of getting incorporated with the state and doing it through her was way more complicated and took way more time and way more money than I'd need it to be. Just be really aware of who you're hiring, especially around the legal aspects of things, and get second opinions if you can. I consider that to be a lesson because I didn't enter into this with a whole business plan.

My next suggestion is having all of your heart and be one and the same with the creative process and have a plan. Have a very clear plan, or wing it, like me, and see what happens, which seems to be something that's functional.

I feel like I hired a lawyer partly because I wanted to be really professional. I wanted to have all the people in place. Like, I have a lawyer and she's doing this lawyer thing for me, and I have an accountant and he's doing the accountant thing for me. Look how much of a business person I am because I'm doing this and that. Now I realize, I actually didn't need some of those things and that just I needed to trust that I could do it or find the right people, and not just trust blindly.

Trial and Error in the Entrepreneurial Journey

Yuli Ziv: We have to forgive ourselves for going through those expensive lessons. At that moment, you needed it. You wish it didn't cost as much as it was, but we're allowed to make those mistakes because then look at the end result of what you've created and that's what's important.

Emily Morrison: Exactly. Mistakes are going to happen and that's how people learn. For me, I function from trial and error. My way of existence is through trial and error. Also, I have lots of challenges that come into my life and that's how I grow. Everybody does, but mine just seemed to be really close together and intense at times. But it encourages me and enables me to have deeper faith in myself and deeper trust in my own abilities.

I’m a person that meet something head on and I will achieve it, I will make it happen, I will make the shift, I will find a way. That fortitude was what saved me. If I had just been like, “This is too much. I can't do it,” and I stopped listening to that voice of saying, “You need to do it. This isn't about you. You can do this.” Then none of this would have happened.

There are so many different moments where I could have given up because it was hard or because I made a mistake. I had to see it as what it was and move forward. There's no other option. We live in a very scary world. We live in a place where challenges are prevalent.

We have the ability and the privilege to help ease some of the tension that's occurring on the quantum field and in the global energetics of our human experience by doing things in a way that is gentle and with compassion, pushing through the difficulty because we can.  Most of us are very lucky to be where we are, so we can use that as a way to help something that maybe is a little unseen to us because of the distance that is created by us in a global society.