Sita Symonette

“My job is to get your body to flow correctly, to heal more efficiently, and to get you to the place where you come back in for tune-ups or deeper work as necessary.”

Let the healing begin. That's the feeling that washes over you the moment you enter airy, light-drenched Black Pearl Wellness in NW Portland. Relaxing with her wife, Lai-lani, in her newly expanded studio, owner and practitioner, Sita Symonette, spoke to us about her adventures with curative needle work.

Sita has an attuned presence that keys into your core and whispers, “Hey, hey, hey, I am here for you. It's safe to let me in on your body secrets, joys, and woes. Let'em rip.” It's easy to see why Betsy & Iya Designer and Founder, Betsy Cross, has been a patient of Sita's for over 5 years. Betsy credits Sita with helping her through fertility issues, resolving numerous aches and pains from old injuries as well as those brought on by the fine motor work of crafting jewelry, and developing a treatment plan to keep Betsy's overall health in an optimal state.

Sita's easy laughter sparks when she reveals that she had never gotten acupuncture before she entered her Master's degree program for Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine at Oregon College of Oriental Medicine. She was contemplating where to go for graduate school after completing a Bachelor of Science degree in Biological Psychology when her mom off-handedly mentioned that she might look into Chinese Medicine.

“You know, I've always kind of been one of those people that goes with my gut,” Sita says, “which has not ever steered me wrong. But I look back and I'm like, Oh, that was a really big decision, to like, not do any research.”

But when you know, you know. And she knew. And from the beginning, an important focus of her practice has been to create a healing environment for Black and Brown Indigenous Latinx LGBTQIA communities, her communities.

“It is not known well enough that this medicine is not just for a particular type of person in America... actually the Black Panthers had a huge part in bringing this medicine into America in the first place in New York, in their free health clinics,” she says. “They were using acupuncture before it was popular at all, but that history is not told, right?” Right.

Sita is the first Black woman and first LGBTQIA person to serve as board chair in Planned Parenthood Columbia Willamette's 54 year history. She stresses the importance and urgency of restoring the deep-rooted history of holistic medicine to its various cultures of origin. It's a medicine that has been homogenized and disconnected from and made inaccessible to far too many people, she says. “It's a huge problem for people to get the quality of care that they need. We'd be able to heal so many more people if implicit biases were at least acknowledged and worked on.”

Removing those barriers so more people are believed, listened to, and can experience the deepened story and magic that takes place in the room – returning holistic medicine to its wholeness and respecting its rich history – these are pillars in Sita's mission.

“So whether that be Celtic and Irish for white people or the African diaspora for us Black people, herbs, and that type of healing medicine has always been part of all cultures, right? And so I think that we are all drawn to it, and our bodies respond to it. They've responded to it for thousands of years.” Sita stresses the importance of “getting away from this mystification or exotic vacation of this very real concrete medicine that it is for all our communities… it's not just for a particular class or particular well-off white community.”

And ten years into it, Sita's philosophy, approach, and patients confirm that trusting her gut and shifting to Chinese medicine was a very wise decision. She is also quick to say she has a “deep affinity for Western medicine. There is a place for both.” She often works with doctors, and she has many doctors as patients.

The middle ground between Chinese and Western medicine is where Sita sees her work having a huge impact. She looks at what she does as “the missing steps" between diagnosis and surgery in Western medicine. Leave it to Sita, the “body detective,” to seek out and discover those steps. She says, “I can see five different people for back pain and I can treat them all differently—our treatments are based on what we call the body's constitution.”

There's not an area of medicine that acupuncture can't support or treat, Sita says, and there is a whole arm of acupuncture just for pediatrics, though many people don't realize that. She specializes in women's health, infertility, and she works with “any type of pain, any type of injury.”

With her diagnostic background and training, the breadth of health issues Sita is able to treat is impressive, and sometimes even surprising. Her work helps, but is not limited to, autoimmune issues, fibromyalgia, headaches/migraines, allergies, digestive issues, kidney function, even everyone's favorite subject, bowel movements. And this is when your practitioner having a laugh that puts you at ease comes in handy.

“I've had a handful or more patients who don't have regular bowel movements, and I love giving people a regular life,” Sita says. Who wants to be constipated all the time? No one. “They'll come in and they say, ‘I've always been like this.’ And I say, ‘We're gonna fix that for you.’” Some patients, she says, come in with plumbing trouble as their main issue, but a lot of times it is revealed via her top to bottom exam, which of course includes the digestive system. They throw out as an aside, “Oh, yeah, you know, I maybe have a bowel movement like every other day or only two or three times a week.”

And for Sita that is an oh wow, ah ha moment. By fixing that part of the system, she is able to get the rest of the body to flow correctly. “So we don't just say, well, you're coming in for shoulder pain so I'm going to ignore the fact that you don't have a bowel movement everyday. No, we're going to fix both things because that is actually going to, in the long term, make sure your shoulder pain doesn't come back.”

Sita has also helped many women who are having difficulty conceiving, including Betsy. Sita recalls another patient who'd been working with a fertility clinic, and having IUIs (Intrauterine Inseminations) for about a year with no luck. She had heard that acupuncture could help and came to Sita with her next IUI planned in a month. Sita typically works with a women's cycle for about three months to get them ready, but with acupuncture, herbs, and a diet change, this woman got pregnant on that next IUI. She then had a miscarriage, which Sita says is very typical for a first pregnancy, but then, a couple months later, Sita says, “She tried again, and she got pregnant again. And now she's almost through her first trimester.”

Though Sita says it's hard to “pin down” and talk about exactly how acupuncture works, there is a lot of Western science around it, studying the neurotransmitter responses when needles are put in different places. “The electromagnetic fields are denser where acupuncture points are,” she says. And scientists have also been looking into the ways acupuncture affects connective tissue. “When you put in an acupuncture needle, the reason it may fix your migraine is because the connective tissue from that area actually goes all the way up through to your neck...there are so many different levels. It's hard to describe, but it's fascinating and amazing.”

And now that she and her wife Lai-lani are the proud owners of the expanded Black Pearl Acupuncture space, Sita's mission of providing an inclusive warm and welcoming center for patients and practitioners by infusing their work with the full respect for the history of this centuries old medicine can grow to reach and heal even more people.