Atousa Raissyan: Your Guiding Light to a Better Life

Atousa Raissyan is a certified heart-centered transformational healer, shaman, spiritual teacher, digital artist, poet, and motivational speaker. Originally from Iran, she has been featured in Potomac Lifestyle Magazine, Entrepreneurs Herald, and USA Today. Her book Change Yourself, Change the World: Transform Your Life from Fear-Based Living to Choosing Love and Seeing Magic draws on her own healing journey and her work helping clients discover their true selves.

Host: Richard Lowe | Guest: Atousa Raissyan

Interview Transcript

Richard: Why don’t you introduce yourself?

Atousa: I’m originally from Iran. I just published my book, Change Yourself, Change the World: Transform Your Life from Fear-Based Living to Choosing Love and Seeing Magic. By trade, I’m a shaman, healer, life guide, author, and poet.

Why She Wrote the Book

Richard: What made you decide to write a book?

Atousa: When I went through my own transformational healing journey, I started feeling better and realizing it is simpler to have an easier life and get what you want. I wanted to share that. My clients transform and change and feel better. Each one comes back and says the people around them are changing too. That prompted me to get the message out, and the best way I thought was doing a book.

Richard: Did you self-publish?

Atousa: I used AMA Publishing to help format the book, put it together, and get it on Amazon. I came up with the cover art — it’s my artwork, and it’s augmented reality art that comes to life. The promotional work was all me for the most part.

The book went beyond my expectations. I hit number one on three or four categories when the ebook came out, and it stayed that way for three days, even internationally. I hit top three in hot new releases. When the paperback came out, it also hit number one and stayed for two days.

Richard: I know the feeling. I’ve had two books hit top 10 Kindle bestsellers.

Atousa: I was also in a multi-author book before this one, and I’m in another one coming out soon. The multi-author books are easier than the solo ones.

Emotions, Trauma, and Generational Patterns

Richard: You work to help people be happier?

Atousa: I don’t want to say happier, because everyone’s looking for that magic bullet to be happy. It’s not about being happy. It’s about realizing there’s more to life and it’s okay to have emotions. When emotions come, it’s okay to sit with them, go into them, and see the reasoning behind them. What is it trying to teach you? What is it trying to show you about yourself?

It’s about finding that peace and joy inside that’s not attached to what’s happening on the outside. A lot of my clients start panicking — they’re sad, they have anxiety. But if you sit with those feelings and go deeper, you’ll see the reasoning behind it.

Richard: I found that I would take emotions and put them in my stomach — anger here, anxiety there. It produced some interesting physical effects.

Atousa: Those illnesses we carry have some tie to emotional things we’ve experienced. Some of it is passed down from generations before. The body keeps a memory, even when mentally or emotionally you’ve dealt with things. In the book, I cover all that, as well as how to release it.

When we go into it with forgiveness, seeing it differently and releasing it, you start to feel lighter. Those triggers aren’t there anymore. My clients see it all the time — the areas where they would get triggered, once they’ve dealt with it and released the memory in the body, they’re not getting triggered anymore.

Speaking from Your “I” Perspective

Atousa: There’s an exercise in the book — speak from your “I” perspective. Every time emotions or triggers come up, if you speak from “I feel,” “I wanted this,” “I need this,” you’re not blaming the other person, not pointing fingers. You’re staying in you and speaking what’s happening in you. That allows it to come out and not stay in you.

Richard: It’s not even “you made me feel bad.” It’s “that behavior made me feel bad.” It’s not the person. It’s the behavior.

Atousa: Exactly. And if you take that inside and explore it, you’ll find out why. At some point in your life, you had that same experience, perhaps as a kid. That’s still in you.

Generational Trauma

Atousa: Those people we call narcissists or toxic — if you look at their history, how they were raised, how their parents were raised, these things didn’t just happen. Generation to generation, all those traumas get passed down. When we don’t address the traumas being passed down through our parents’ behaviors, it continues.

My grandmother was 15 when she married my grandfather, who was 30. It was an arranged marriage. She was a kid herself. How could she be a mom? My grandfather — I loved him, he was the gentlest, best man I knew. But even we used to say the man you’re seeing today isn’t the man your grandmother got. He got better with his kids, but even they didn’t get what we got as grandkids. By that time, he’d done a lot of soul searching and clearing out of his own stuff.

Responsibility and Choice

Atousa: The two main things I talk about in the book are taking responsibility for your life — not blaming anyone, not blaming circumstance — and choice. You always have choice. If you see that you have choice, those two together, you start to feel your power and the life you’re creating.

Richard: My viewpoint now that I’m older is you can either let life happen to you, or you can make it happen. You’ll be happier if you make it happen.

Atousa: If you’re just willing to open up and see things a little differently and start to shift, everything else will come together. Nature is so healing because of that energy out there — we connect to it consciously or unconsciously. And when you start to feel that connection inside of you, it opens up and you start to shift and change things.

Richard: Anything you’d like to say before we wrap up?

Atousa: The book is available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback. The cover art is my artwork — it’s augmented reality art that comes to life. If you want to get a hold of me for any of my services or just to chat, all my information is on my website.

Learn more about Atousa Raissyan at atousaraissyan.com and SoulysticArtShop.com.

Find Richard Lowe at TheWritingKing.com.