About Brae Onnah Sisk
Somatic practitioner, bodyworker, educator, artist, and founder of Embody Alchemy
BraeI’m Brae Onnah Sisk (they/she), a queer, gender non-conforming somatic practitioner, licensed Tui Na massage therapist, registered somatic movement educator & therapist, artist, and founder of Embody Alchemy in Chico, California.
My work exists for people who sense that insight alone is not enough.
Many clients arrive after years of thinking, processing, analyzing, or trying to understand why certain patterns keep repeating. They may have language for their trauma, grief, stress responses, identity shifts, or life transitions, but still feel those patterns living in the body: in the breath, the belly, the posture, the nervous system, the way they move toward or away from the world.
My work begins there.
Not with fixing. Not with forcing a breakthrough. Not with asking the body to perform healing on command. My practice is built around listening to the body as an intelligent, living system—one shaped by personal history, relationship, culture, environment, identity, and collective experience.
Why This Work Matters
I came to this work through the body, through study, through lived experience, and through the recognition that transformation doesn’t happen only in the mind.
The body carries memory. It adapts. It protects. It finds ways to survive. Sometimes those adaptations become painful, limiting, or confusing over time. Somatic work creates another way to meet those patterns—with attention, precision, and enough space for something new to emerge.
This is the deeper “why” behind Embody Alchemy: to help people move from intellectual understanding into lived, body-level change.
For me, embodiment isn’t a trend or an abstract wellness concept. It’s a practice of returning to what is real: sensation, breath, movement, impulse, relationship, choice, expression, and the capacity to feel more fully present inside one’s own body.
The Artist Belongs in the Healing Work
My background in theater arts is not a side note. It’s part of how I came to understand transformation.
Through physical theater, mask work, clowning, BodyTales, Authentic Movement, and movement-based creative practice, I learned that the body often reveals truth before the mind can organize it into language. A gesture, character, rhythm, image, or moment of play can surface something that analysis alone may not reach.
This creative thread matters because healing is not only about becoming regulated or functional. It’s also about vitality, expression, humor, imagination, and the parts of the self that have been hidden, managed, silenced, or over-controlled.
For me, play is not superficial. Mask and clowning are not entertainment. Creative embodiment is a serious doorway into presence, honesty, and aliveness.
Bringing this part of my background more fully into Embody Alchemy is part of the current reframe of my work: honoring the artist, the bodyworker, the educator, and the practitioner as parts of one integrated path.
A Practice Shaped by Identity, Belonging, and Justice
My work is shaped by my lived experience as a queer, gender non-conforming person and through connection with LGBTQIA+ community care, embodied practice, and identity-centered healing spaces.
This matters because the body doesn’t exist outside culture.
People carry the the impact of family systems, gender expectations, social conditioning, marginalization, belonging, exclusion, and survival strategies. My work does not reduce a person’s experience to an individual problem. It recognizes that the body is shaped by both personal and collective realities.
For LGBTQIA+ clients, gender-expansive clients, queer community members, and people who have not always felt fully seen in conventional healing spaces, Embody Alchemy offers body-centered support rooted in respect, consent, agency, and complexity.
Allyship here is not treated as a slogan. It shows up in language, listening, pacing, choice, and the refusal to flatten people into categories or assumptions.
Training & Professional Background
My professional background brings together multiple streams of study, practice, and apprenticeship.
I’m a California certified Tui Na massage therapist with training in Chinese medical bodywork, including Wind and Water–style Tui Na, Taoist internal practices, Chi Nei Tsang, and Five-Element Classical Chinese Medicine.
I’m also a registered somatic movement educator/therapist with training in Dynamic Embodiment®, developmental movement, Body-Mind Centering® principles, and somatic education through Bartenieff Fundamentals.
My work is further shaped by Andean earth-based healing traditions and a long background in movement-based physical theater, somatic performance, mask work, clowning, BodyTales, Authentic Movement, and ritual theater.
These lineages inform how I listen, work, teach, and create.
My work has never fit neatly into one category, and that is part of its integrity.
My practice is structured enough to create safety and clarity, but responsive enough to meet the actual person in the room. It can be quiet, practical, physical, expressive, reflective, or creative depending on what the client is seeking and what the body is ready to meet.
This matters for people who have spent years being capable, composed, analytical, self-contained, or responsible for holding everything together. My work doesn’t ask you to stay only in explanation. It makes room for the intelligent, protective, grieving, playful, unfinished, and expressive parts of the self to be met through the body.
How I Hold the Work
My role is not to decide who you should become.
My role is to create a clear, responsive container where your body can reveal what it is carrying, what it is ready to meet, and what may be possible now.
Across every pathway, I center consent, pacing, nervous system awareness, and your own relationship with your body. Clients are not asked to perform vulnerability, disclose more than they want to share, or move faster than their body can integrate.
This is especially important for people who have felt pushed, pathologized, misunderstood, over-directed, or disconnected from their own internal authority.
Who This Work Is For
I work with people navigating grief, trauma patterns, burnout, identity shifts, creative blocks, physical pain, emotional thresholds, and major life transitions.
Many clients are thoughtful, sensitive, creative, justice-aware, or deeply introspective people who have already done significant inner work. They’re not looking for someone to explain their life to them. They’re looking for a way to include the body in the process of change.
This work may be a fit if you’re ready to explore why insight hasn’t fully translated into relief, how your nervous system organizes around protection or collapse, where your body holds old patterns, or what it feels like to return to yourself with more honesty and choice.
A Grounded Invitation
Embody Alchemy is not about becoming a perfected version of yourself.
It’s about developing a more truthful relationship with your body, your history, your instincts, your creativity, and your capacity to change.
My work invites people to listen differently—not only to the story of what happened, but to the living body that carried it, adapted around it, and may now be ready for something new.
