Meet Siara,
Your Body’s Mechanic
The woman who is devoted to helping her clients achieve pain-free longevity through massage was into cars and motorcycles as a teenager. She was on track to specialize in Harley Davidson motorcycles at Motorcycle Mechanics Institute when a series of auto accidents derailed her plans and set her on a new trajectory.
Siara's Story
Three car accidents in 15-months
The first happened in July at the start of Siara’s senior year in high school, the second in September, and the third the following August. Siara was rear-ended twice, tearing tissue and muscle and causing neurological damage from the base of her skull to the tip of her tailbone and across the pelvis and hips. Both rotator cuffs were torn. She couldn’t stand without collapsing. She sustained a head injury in the third accident, adding traumatic brain injury (TBI) to her list of issues. She was advised to undergo spinal fusion in three places and surgery on both rotator cuffs, and sent home with a handful of prescriptions for pain.
Assembling a team of alternative practitioners
Siara’s sister encouraged the otherwise healthy and athletic 18-year-old to seek alternatives to surgery. With the help of a supportive physician, they put together a team of alternative therapeutic practitioners. The team included an Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) specialist to treat the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), a Rolfing specialist, chiropractor, massage therapist, physical therapist, Pilates instructor, speech therapist, vision therapist, and cognitive therapist. For two years, rehab defined her life. Gone were the scholarships to encourage a female in the male world of car/motorcycle mechanics. Her dream of becoming a Harley Davidson specialist never materialized. The young woman who wanted cars and motorcycles to be her world was too terrified to even ride in one.
Siara was young and strong. Her body responded to the interventions and slowly began to heal. Siara will tell you that the Rolfer and the physical therapist were the game-changers; in her view, the majority of her healing stemmed from their structural integration work. As the months dragged on and her strength started to return, Siara joined a bowling league, figuring bowling would be good for her shoulders.
A massage therapist on the team would occasionally massage her neck and shoulders while they sat on the bench, give her back the occasional crack. Siara had been giving her sisters backrubs since they were kids. Eager to return his kindness, she asked if she could give him a massage. The man was exuberant in his praise, calling it “one of the best massages” he’d ever had. He couldn’t believe she’d had no training. “You need to go to school,” he told her. “That massage was terrific.”
Two days later Siara received a call from the Admissions Director of the massage school her bowling partner had attended. “I’ve been told I need to bug you,” the woman said. “Come see our school, shadow one of our students.” With nothing better to do, Siara agreed to a visit. She fell in love with the energy and vibe of the place and enrolled that afternoon.
A body is like a car
The rolfer who worked with Siara during her recovery helped her look at the body as a structural whole. Through the visceral experience of “feeling” her body change over the course of several months, she appreciated how an injury in one area affects the entire structure, much like manipulating one strand of a spider web affects the entire web. One day everything clicked for Siara: bodies are like cars. If one part isn’t working, the car doesn’t run well, if it runs at all. Fast forward through years of training and experience and Siara continues to look at bodies like cars. She uses massage to change the machinery and help the body move the way it was designed to move. Intuition is a powerful part of her practice; she intuits the injured area (often clients can’t tell the source of the injury) and goes to work. The body does the rest. She firmly believes that the body knows how to heal. “Look at me,” she says with a smile. “I’m living proof.”
The Best for Last
Those car accidents were nearly twenty years ago. The doctor who had suggested surgery also told Siara that carrying a pregnancy full-term would likely put both her and the baby at risk. Not so. Siara has a healthy, energetic, totally delightful five-year-old son and six-month-old daughter. And if things work the way she’d like them to, she’ll be a surrogate someday for a woman not able to get pregnant. Nothing would make her happier.