When you step into La Sagrada de Patagonia, behind Patagonia Bikes on Third Ave, there is an immediate calmness which invites you to “take a breath.”
You’re in the massage studio of Licensed Massage Therapist Alyssa Navarette, who has been in business since 2024, and has steadily grown since, as the word spread and her promotional efforts reached new clients.
Her grandmother’s lacy curtains delicately enhance the privacy, and balance the solidity of the old adobe walls. Candles flicker from the darkness of a corner fireplace, reminiscent of a religious shrine in a grotto. The resemblance is no accident. Navarette feels the sacred aspects of her work. On her website, she wrote, “With each session, I invite my prayers of healing practice with divine benedictions and sacred intentions, transcending the mundane to access realms of spiritual resonance. Through this mindful alchemy, tensions dissipate, and a transcendent state of well-being unfurls.”
One of Navarette’s aunts was a healer—a curandera—women healers who carry wisdom in a position somewhere between a doctor and a priest. Although Navarette grew up in Arizona, her family is from three places in Mexico. Instead of identifying with a single racial background or cultural tradition, she calls herself “indigenous to the borderlands.” That unity, she feels, is expressed by the rallying cry of the 20th century immigration rights movement in the US: “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.”
Navarette is focused on the immediacy of life more than on the labels we stick on each other. On her table and under her hands, she sees people as physical beings whose bodies she can help. Their cultural and social identities are abstractions that are not on her table.
But what is the “holistic massage” approach mentioned on her sign outside her studio? In a given session, she can treat your whole being, weaving together Swedish massage, deep tissue manipulation, cranial-sacral massage, yogic breathing, subtle energy balancing and still other modalities.
Types of massage she offers include lymphatic massage, sports massage, and abdominal massage with, for women, a focus on the womb. She calls her blend of techniques “an artful dance of touch and presence, where healing unfolds not only on the surface but at a cellular level.”
Thinking about her clients as unique beings is natural for someone so deeply empathic with others. She feels, for example, the health consequences of the many kinds of trauma experienced by firemen, police and combat veterans, and how it gnaws at their health and peace of mind. She anticipates serving more of them in the future.
A second pillar of Navarette’s work is the use of plant materials as a resource for healing— botanicals for human wellbeing. In her practice and in daily life, Navarette sees plants as allies with humans. With materials mostly wild-harvested locally, she makes oils, salves, and teas. Although she has knowledge of what grows where in the Borderlands and does sell a few botanical products, she is not a “product pusher.” Instead, she keeps her central focus on bodywork.
In addition to sessions in the studio, she will travel to clients who are infirm or immobile, bringing a portable table to their homes.
The website is sagradadepatagonia.com (be sure to put the DE in the middle, or you’ll end up in a commercial venture in “the other Patagonia”). Her phone number is 520-216-1492. Navarette is also on Facebook and Instagram.