To Listen Within

Anca Marissa Sira’s Integrative Approach…

At heart of my work is listening to not only words or symptoms, but to the quiet intelligence that moves through the body,” explains Anca Marissa Sira, the founder of the Ama Wellness Center in Mount Shasta. As a practitioner of Chinese medicine and acupuncture, her work lives at the intersection of somatics, depth psychology and Eastern methodologies, focusing on ways to re-educate the body’s nervous system to change deeply learned muscle memories that bring pain. “Somatics describes how emotions live in the body, how experience lodges in tissue and later presents as symptoms. Symptoms are just the messengers.” 

Sira’s philosophy is deceptively simple. “I help the body feel safe enough to change its mind,” she says, to release patterns it no longer needs to hold. “I don’t approach the body as something to correct. I approach it as something already inclined toward coherence. Then, I use questions to peel back the layers of the onion, followed by needles, breath, pacing and presence to offer the body the opportunity to reorganize itself. Whether someone comes in for digestion, fertility, sleep or anxiety, I’m really working with thresholds: moments of recognition, when the breath drops, the body softens and the nervous system realizes it no longer has to hold everything together alone and can find its way back to internal balance.”

One of Sira’s most powerful examples involves a woman who broke her foot during a horse fall. “On the surface, it was simply just a broken foot. But even after the cast came off, the pain lingered. So, as I got to work with her, it became clear this woman was also living in an abusive marriage. In Chinese medicine, the foot is often associated with forward movement in life, and her life wasn’t going forward in a way that was healthy for her or for her children. She ultimately made a choice to end the relationship. The next time I saw her, she was pain-free.”

Sira’s path to this work has been anything but linear. Raised in Romania, she was studying herbal medicine by 16 and planned to go to medical school. Instead, she pursued a secondary passion for art and worked in advertising in New York. But something always tugged at her. “I do believe that we leave crumbs for ourselves,” she muses. One of those crumbs was a moment when she was 20, visiting an acupuncturist in Boston who treated her when her period was late. “I woke up the next day, and I had it,” she says. Years later, in California, while trying to figure out what she wanted to do with the rest of her life, she remembered the transformational nature of that treatment. “It was like a light bulb that went off. And I thought, ‘Oh, it’s everything. It’s got herbs, it’s natural. There’s a science to it.’”

From there, Sira ended up at acupuncture school, studied under an 88th generation Daoist master, and opened a practice in Marin, where she says that 98 percent of her patients were women trying to conceive. But since arriving in Mount Shasta a decade ago, Sira’s practice has become more varied. “I call Mt. Shasta the low back pain area because so many people here work really hard with  their body,” she says with a laugh. She also sees her fair share of cancer patients and people with heart problems. “The only thing I can’t directly treat is a structural problem. So, if someone comes in with stenosis or a blown disc, I can only help them manage their pain. But pretty much everything else is treatable.”

As a partnership provider, many of Sira’s clients come through doctor and clinic recommendations, so some people walk through the door wary of needles. But Sira is quick to reassure them that acupuncture is actually gentle. “The needles that I use are the size of a hair,” she explains. “When they are inserted, you barely feel them. In fact, most people fall asleep. Then, when they wake up, they think it’s only been five minutes, and I’ll tell them, ‘Oh no, you’ve been out for a little while.”  Sira’s office reflects that same gentleness. “People often tell me that they feel the energy in my office immediately,” she says. “I want people to feel relaxed and comfortable, so I have it set up as if you’re coming into a home, complete with tea and magazines.”

Even after decades in this work, Sira insists she’s still not bored. “Everybody is a different terrain.” She also finds satisfaction in the ripple effect of her work. “It’s a mad, mad world out there. But people are nicer when they’re not in pain. They’re not so cranky and angry.” And, it’s just a thought, but maybe, in a world that feels increasingly fractured, the gentle shift of one eased body or one softened nervous system is where greater healing can begin. Sira agrees. “If only that would solve it all, right?”•

Ama Wellness Center
www.ama-wellness.com