EASTHAMPTON — A new wellness center on the border of Easthampton and Northampton is aiming to ease clients’ stress by offering them a variety of alternative medicine practices all in one place.
Owners Natasha Perrone and Barbara Nichols opened Sisu Wellness Center at 247 Northampton St. last spring after spending years experiencing the benefits of Reiki energy healing, hypnosis and other wellness services.
“What helped me heal, that’s what I’m sharing with others,” said Nicole Keegan, a practitioner at Sisu who specializes in Thai Bodywork, yoga and guided meditation. Thai Bodywork focuses on improving and balancing the flow of energy throughout the body by combining dynamic-assisted stretching influenced by yoga with physical pressure.
Perrone explains that everyone at Sisu practices what has helped them get through a hard time in life or heal past trauma. “The results we all got inspired us to help others in the same way,” she said.
Sisu includes eight practitioners who rent the eight rooms Perrone and Nichols decorated in string lights, crystals and other wall hangings that absorb sound.
“Each room we put so much love and energy and thought into,” Perrone said. “I really believe the feeling that people feel when they walk in — that they just feel so relaxed the minute they walk in — is because of everything that we have put into this.”
Some services that Sisu offers, such as massage and an infrared sauna, are familiar spa treatments that help clients slow their mind. Other services prompt clients to practice new ways of thinking, such as hypnosis or “Dreambirth imagery” — through which practitioner Meghan Armstrong helps clients who are pregnant or trying to visualize scenes that she said help them connect with their future baby.
Nichols is the center’s leading expert on hypnosis, and while she noted that many clients are familiar with hypnotism as a source of entertainment, the service she provides is “more about inner control.”
“With hypnosis, you are able to relax to the point where it helps silence the critical mind and brings in the heart,” Nichols said. “It brings in what you’ve always wanted to do, but you’re afraid to because the world has told you you can’t.”
Nichols works with many mothers whose children have moved out, and through a combination of Reiki and hypnosis, she helps them “answer the question of ‘Now what?’”
Some Sisu practitioners, whom Perrone describes as strong women in their early 50s, had to answer a similar question for themselves when they reached a turning point in their career and moved toward alternative medicine.
Perrone was a math and science teacher when she delved into Reiki, and she remains interested in the scientific reasoning behind energy healing.
She came up with the future name of the center after watching a TV program about Finland in which they defined Sisu as an indomitable spirit, persistence, determination, grit, courage, tenacity, resolve, willpower and endurance. Perrone said she immediately fell in love with the concept. “It is a way of life in Finland … your inner Sisu,” she said.
Aura photographer Betty Coyne was a corporate software developer, and when she discovered aura photography, she was fascinated by the software that depicts the color of a person’s aura.
Armstrong is a linguistics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and continues to think of dreams as the language of imagination.
Sisu says that its sessions are an affordable way to participate in alterative medicine. For example, Nichols offers hypnosis and private yoga sessions at $50 an hour, and Perrone charges $60 for a one-hour session, but combining services can bring the price down to $48 a session. Perrone, who says she hasn’t raised her prices in 13-plus years, also does Thai hand and foot reflexology as well as the facial reflexology and clients can use the packages for any services she offers. Facial relexology follows the same premise as hand and foot reflexology where pressure is applied to specific points on the face, neck and scalp.
When Armstrong hears people are skeptical of alternative medicine, she leans on her background in academia to pull a number of research papers that demonstrate the benefits of wellness treatments. For those uninterested in hearing the reasoning behind complementary medicine, Perrone and Nichols still encourage people to visit the center and unwind.
“Come in and find out if it works for you,” Nichols said. “You won’t know unless you try it.”