Mindfulness & Your Health: Healing Beyond “Tune-Ups”
By Emily Horn, CMT-P
“Mindfulness can help you take a more active role in your health and healing. You are not a machine being taken to the shop for a repair or a tune up. It’s best if you can begin participating in your own health care as early as possible. Starting in childhood by learning mindfulness practices in school would put people on the road to a much more healthy relationship to their body and their emotions. That’s much healthier than the default mode where you just hope for the best and treat the body more or less as an automobile that you drive into the hospital for repairs when it breaks down.”
Emily Horn, CMT-P
I was in my early 20s at North Carolina State University when I first encountered mindfulness meditation. At the time, mindfulness wasn’t a common word, nor was it secularized. It felt unusual—even revolutionary—to be drawn to a Buddhist wisdom tradition as a young woman from Wilkesboro, NC, who loved going to the Episcopal Church.
But my questions were big ones: How can I really know myself? How do I become the best version of myself? In other words—I wanted to be healthy, in body and mind.
I could never have guessed that over the next two decades I’d be mentored by some of the leading mindfulness teachers of our time, helping to write and record some of the first guided mindfulness meditations in app form. And yes, if you look up my name and Joe Rogan, you’ll find me at one of the most challenging and formative moments of my life—learning how to integrate intense systematic mind and heart training with a world not necessarily interested in what I’d just jumped into, headfirst.
Building a Space for Healing
Today, life has brought me here—working alongside my sister, Dr. Kirsten West DC MS, with an incredible team including acupuncturist, Kat Harrod, LAc, and Alex Simkins, our operational powerhouse. Together, we’ve created Mindful Wellness Space: a place where health is approached as a team effort, not a solo hero’s journey.
Think of recent superhero movies—there’s rarely just one protector anymore. Healing requires a network of care, a collective of people who want well-being for everyone. That’s the kind of space we’ve imagined and built: a place where you feel truly held when you walk in, supported on multiple levels of reality.
Going Beyond Meditation Alone
At its core, mindfulness teaches us to navigate health from the inside out.
Mindfulness of the Body is where the practice both begins and ends. Through it, we learn to listen deeply—tuning into the signals our bodies are constantly sending. We notice which foods and supplements support our biology, when we might need a structural adjustment for our bones and muscles, and how to better balance our schedules and daily routines. Over time, we come to see that our bodies are not obstacles but the very instruments through which we make a difference in the world—and we begin to treat them with the care they deserve.
Mindfulness of Emotions and Thoughts helps us notice the patterns that either nourish or drain us. When we can witness these patterns with compassion, we create the space for new, healthier responses to emerge.
At Mindful Wellness Space, we go beyond meditation alone. We integrate multiple modalities—acupuncture, muscle testing, chiropractic care, and even blood work when needed—to help you meet what arises with clarity and support. This combination allows us to address not just the mental and emotional layers, but also the physical and biochemical ones.
Most importantly, we don’t do this work in isolation. We sit together—in health and in difficulty—offering a rare sense of collective holding. This shared presence creates a container for healing that is hard to find in modern health care.
An Invitation
It’s not easy to cultivate wellness in our fast-paced, fragmented world. But you don’t have to do it alone.
May all beings be healthy.
And if you need help finding your way back to health—body, heart, or mind—we’re here to walk that path with you.