by Linda C. Ray
photos by Rebecca D’Angelo

Emily Muscarella’s life is basically about energy flow. As a chiropractor, she helps her clients keep energy flowing smoothly through their bodies. As a West African dancer, performing with an Asheville group called Chix with Stix, she concentrates on energy flow through her own body, too. “It’s about movement,” she says. “A healthy spine to me is moving all the time.”

Growing up in New Jersey, Muscarella, 32, knew she wanted to be a chiropractor at 15. She ended up following her older brother through chiropractic school at Sherman College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. She moved to Asheville in 2001, and after practicing for several years in other offices. She opened her own office downtown in August 2007. Hers is not just any chiropractic office. It’s called Cloud 9, because that’s what she wants her clients to be on when they leave. She wanted to provide an atmosphere that was “more calming than clinical,” she says. She spends more time with her clients than most chiropractors, consulting with them about their lifestyles and teaching them about their nervous systems. As an entrepreneurial approach, it was risky, but Muscarella says she’s built a good business, especially among artists and dancers.

Muscarella is quite passionate about her unconventional approach to an already-unconventional field of medicine. But she seems equally passionate about her unusual hobby, which she discovered as an undergrad in Burlington, Vermont, watching a lakefront concert of percussion and West African dancing on Lake Champlain.

West African dancing is a wild, gyrating form of movement set to the beat of accompanying drums. It involves the entire body as dancers respond to the fast beats. Muscarella admits it can be hard on the body. “You can get whiplash if you’re not careful,” she jokes. But she was hooked and started driving from Spartanburg to Asheville for dance lessons.

Muscarella took a break from school in 1999 to visit Guinea, West Africa, and visited again for three months in 2001 with the Common Ground dance troupe. In 2008, she joined six Asheville women to form Chix with Stix, and this summer, the Chix will mix up their dance routines with Brazilian and hip-hop moves at local festivals—a MAHEC conference in May and an herb festival in June.

The quiet chiropractor’s office, painted in soothing earth tones, may seem like a complete contrast to the bold colors and loud music in her dance classes, but Muscarella sees both as necessary for total health. “I believe you have to move your body in a way that brings you joy,” she says. “When we do the things that we are passionate about, we’re a better version of ourselves.”   

To learn more about Emily Muscarella’s chiropractic clinic, go to www.cloud9chiro.com.