Meet Dr. Lacey Qureshi. She and her husband Dr. Dani are owners of Arya Place Day Spa in Simpsonville.
Their integrative wellness center and healing spa was inspired by an amazing mission of love to help people heal naturally and is designed to treat the whole “You”. They offer a holistic approach with services such as yoga, chiropractic or acupuncture, customized massage, reiki, and a new approach to nutrition and cutting edge health programs. Dr. Lacey and Dr. Dani met in 2010. Their greatest joy is Jami, their two year old son.
We’d like to thank Dr. Lacey and Dr. Dani for sharing the story of Arya Place and for bringing a Holistic Healing and Wellness Center to the Golden Strip Community.
Q: Lacey, what inspired you or led you to this current career?
A: Well, I was at Penn State doing my undergraduate in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. I was going to go to pharmacy school. My parents were in their mid 50’s at this time and their health started to decline slightly. I remember looking at them and seeing prescription drugs being prescribed and I only saw them getting sicker. I watched their health deteriorate over the course of the next few years throughout the time I was in chiropractic college. Throughout the time I was an undergrad and I wondered, why am I getting into something where two of the people that I love the most it isn’t helping? I could see it was only getting worse and they were getting new prescription drugs prescribed to them just to cover up the symptoms of the other prescription drugs. I was a week from graduating Penn State and I had already enrolled in pharmacy school. I remember having this conversation with my mom on the phone saying, “Mom, you know, I can’t, I can’t do this. I can’t go into something where I know it’s making you sicker and watch your health decline like this and then contribute to this.” Then she says, “Well, what about chiropractic? ” She’d been going to a chiropractor, my whole life, essentially. Her chiropractor started adjusting me when I was 12 years old. I was a child with headaches and constantly had stomach aches and things like that. I thought about how much he had helped me throughout my life. I said to my Mom, “Yes, Yes!!!” That truly that was the best decision of my life that day.Why I said yes, and why it was the best decision was because I thought back to how much he actually helped me. First of all, I would walk into his facility and he was always happy. Whereas when you would walk into other places, you never saw or you never felt the joy that you saw in this man. He truly loved what he was doing. He helped me with a dietary plan. I didn’t know that chiropractors were nutritionists as well, and nutrition has always interested me because I grew up on a farm. We ate all organic whole foods throughout my life. He helped me with a meal plan because we had just moved off the farm around the time I was 12 and my stomach was hurting. I ended up healing and going just for routine chiropractic adjustments. He literally changed my life for the sole factor that I went to the medical doctor at the same time as when I started seeing him around 12 years old when we moved out the farm. I was having really bad lower abdominal cramping and the medical doctor said it was psychosomatic saying, “she has just moved,or it’s just this age. The medical doctor gave me Prilosec and Prozac for depression and heartburn at 12 years old. I started taking them but I knew in my gut and even at that young age that this isn’t helping. This isn’t what’s wrong. When my Chiropractor found out he said, “Absolutely Not!” If he wouldn’t have come into my life right then, my life would have been so radically different. I don’t think I would be where I am today because my brain function having been a small child at 12 years old, would have been put on antidepressants. I would have been put on a slew of drugs that weren’t helpful. When it was really food sensitivities. What was the problem all along was when we moved off the farm, we started eating store bought food and I wasn’t used to the preservatives and things in the food. So we slowly got me used to them over the course of a three month timeframe. Then I could eat like a normal person could eat. However, for the six to eight months prior while this was going on, I would eat something and then feel gut wrenching pain in my lower abdomen. All that went away from 12 years old, onward. He adjusted me whenever I was there with my mom. At that point, as a kid, the medical model had failed me for the first time. I truly don’t know what I would have done had I not known that man, but that’s how I got into it.
Q: How long have you been in this career?
A: Almost 10 years.
Q: What do you enjoy most about what you do?
A: I enjoy watching people’s lives transformed from no hope (which is where a lot of people are at walking in) saying to me, “No one’s ever helped me,” or they are so, so ill. Then watching them get their life back is probably the most rewarding thing and then starting to get their families under care as well saying, “Why don’t more people know about alternative healthcare?”
Q: What did you do prior to opening Arya Place?
A: In 2011 my first job out of school I worked as a chiropractor under another doctor for 10 months. I was seeing anywhere from 12 to 17 new patients a day on new patient days . On regular visit days, I was seeing upwards of 100 to 110 people in one day. They were 10 to 12 hour days, and I had a team of seven girls that would follow around and make this be able to happen. I was with each patient for maybe four minutes, which was why they had ample time in the end. I did that for 10 months and it was too much on my body. And then my husband had started a practice up in Buffalo, New York . At that time, he was just my boyfriend. We’d actually separated because I moved down South and he was still up North; but asked me, “Do you want to come join this practice?” I went up to cover for him and ended up moving there. We’ve had that practice since July of 2011 and it’s still in existence today. Then two years later, we started a second Wellness Center about 15 minutes from the other one. So for the last eight years prior to Arya Place we were running two practices up near Buffalo, New York.
Q: How long have you lived or worked in the Golden Strip area?
A: We actually moved here at the end of 2015. We looked for a property for a year before we settled in Simpsonville. Arya Place started and we saw our first spa client on December 7, 2017. I had just had a baby a few months prior to that; so I stayed home with him. The first year, my husband handled the spa and I started seeing chiropractic patients about a year ago.
Q: If you could travel anywhere in the world right now, where would it be? And why?
A: Thailand, for the natural beauty and the huge, huge hills and water.
Q: What is your favorite movie?
A: I’d have to say the Lion King. I still love the songs today.
Q: What advice would you give a crowd of people?
A: If I were asked to give advice to them (I would never just offer advice without someone asking), I would teach them about vitalism, which vitalism is the body’s ability to heal on its own, which is non existent in the medical model. They think that the pill is going to do the healing, when really, it’s not; so I would teach them about vitalism. Bodies have empowered them to take responsibility for their life and health as is. Then the second thing I would probably teach them is about the Law of Attraction. How you create your own life and life is not happening to you around you. Those are two things I would like the rest of the people to know about.
Q: What is something on your bucket list?
A: Probably travel the world with Life Force Doctors, which are some of the best Chiropractors in the world that build Chiropractic Schools throughout the world and teach people about vitalism and healthy living. If I wasn’t practicing, also being a Yoga Instructor. Those are the two things I would do. Both are very achievable if I wasn’t seeing patients one day.
Q: What is your favorite music/ 3 bands you would like to see (dead or alive)?
A: I would say Fleetwood Mac is my all time favorite band.I grew up listening to them because of my parents. Then John Lennon would have to be all time favorite and Tom Petty. It’s all older stuff. Music was big in my life growing up. As I started to get older, I got more into Deep House Music, which is more, it’s like a mellow techno sound. It’s more of just noises with musical instruments. There aren’t a lot of people here that are familiar with that style of music. I learned about it from when my husband and I were up in Toronto, Ontario, and we would go to shows where they would actually play the music and it was really awesome.
Q: Tell me more about Toronto. Is that a place you just visited every now and then?
A: I lived up there temporarily for a period of three months. My husband is Canadian, so his family’s from there.That’s why we go up there and that’s part of our roots.
Q: Where do you see yourself in 5 or 10 years?
A: I see myself with this practice fully thriving… by fully thriving I mean that I am able to not be here. If I were to enter the facility, I’d be able to see everything flow seamlessly from start to finish with Doctors and Therapists and different Healthcare Providers and me just be the organizer of it so that I can have family time. So family time primarily, and then have this secondary to the family life.
Q: What is something interesting that most people don’t know about you?
A: My middle name is Blue.
Q: What 3 words or phrases come to mind when you think of the word HOME?
A: Family, Warm, and Love.
Q: If you were cast into a major motion picture and had your choice of a best friend or relative to be your co-star, who would you choose?
A: I would choose my sister Ona because she is such a character. She’s always got an issue and we always pick on her. For instance, we’ve had this balcony at our new place and no one’s gotten splinters, including my two year old. Then she steps out on the balcony within a minute of getting here and being at our place and gets a splinter in her foot so deep. She always has issues and she’s so funny, so it would be a comedy.
Q: If you had a full time staff member that was fully paid for, who would you choose? Chef, Housekeeper, Driver, Coach, Physical Fitness Trainer, or Nanny?
A: A chef. Because I love healthy eating, and I love helping meals. However, it’s really hard to have the time to do it. I have to put time aside and make time to do it.
Q: Do you have a charity or organization that you are passionate about?
A: Many. Every October we do Breast Cancer Awareness primarily for the amount of people that are affected and how many young women are affected by it. So that one’s always near and dear to our hearts and our biggest charity. We donate a portion of our proceeds to the local Dragon Boat teams.
Q: What do you like to do in your spare time?
A: I like to do yoga. I like to work out. I would love to read. I don’t have time right now to read. The majority of my spare time is spent with my son right now. His name is Jami, and he’s two. I like to spend my spare time fulfilling his days with fun and joy and excitement; so we do a lot of kid stuff like playgrounds, swimming in the summer, walking, riding bikes.
Q: Do you have any pets or cute pet stories to share?
A: We have a cat named Bobo and she’s 14 years old, and she’s a fireball. She is a big fluffy cat and she gets a lion cut all the time. She does silly stuff all the time but the silliest thing she ever did was when she was a tiny kitten and she literally took a piece of toilet paper and chopped it up into a million pieces all from one end of the house to the other. Then she got a bag of sugar. This is all in the same day, mind you. So something went wrong this day but she got a bag of sugar out of the closet and then drug the bag of sugar all over the house and spilled little tiny trails of sugar the whole way around. I have pictures of the house and it was hysterical.
Q: Who else would you like to see nominated as a Face of the Golden Strip?
A: Laurie Boussom. She is a counselor, a psychologist at A Balanced Life. I know her personally and she’s a great, great person!
