Today we’d like to introduce you to Atousa Raissyan.
Hi Atousa, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I was born in Tehran in 1972 and came to the United States in 1984, by way of Germany, during the Iran-Iraq War and the aftermath of the hostage crisis. I was twelve. I didn’t speak English. And the country I arrived in wasn’t exactly rolling out the welcome mat for Iranians.
But that isn’t where the fear started. The fear was already there.
My parents divorced when I was two, and it was contentious. My mother was struggling, and my father was verbally, emotionally, and mentally abusive toward me. I grew up in a house where I didn’t feel safe, loved, or nurtured, and I came out of it believing I wasn’t enough. Then came revolution, war, immigration, being uprooted from everything I knew, and starting over in a new country and a new language. Those experiences didn’t create the fear. They added more layers to something that was already there.
So when it came time to choose a career, I chose the one that looked like a way out. I graduated from George Mason University with a degree in Electrical Engineering at nineteen, the youngest in my class, and later went back for my Master’s. Engineering was the fastest, safest path to independence. A degree I could use quickly, money I could live on, proof that I could survive on my own. Engineering wasn’t a childhood dream. At that point in my life, safety was the dream.
The other part of me never went anywhere. The entire time I was building an engineering career, I was reading spiritual books, exploring Hindu spirituality and energy healing, trying to understand what was moving underneath the things we can see. I received my first energy healing certification in 2003 and became a Master Healer in 2004.
Then my life stopped cooperating. My physical and emotional health had been struggling for years. I found myself in an abusive marriage, then a divorce, raising a very young son, watching old health problems get worse while new ones arrived. Eventually I reached a point where I simply couldn’t keep functioning the way I had.
I remember the afternoon it broke open. I was sitting in front of my computer trying to write a technical document, something I had written a hundred versions of, and I couldn’t form the words. Not couldn’t find the right ones. Couldn’t form them. I sat there looking at the screen while the part of me that had always performed on command simply refused. So I got up, opened a closet, and pulled out colored pencils and charcoal I hadn’t touched in years. I sat on the floor and started drawing. That was also when I went back to Rumi, and this time I heard him differently. Art and healing started unfolding alongside each other, and I stopped being able to tell them apart.
For years I worked with family and friends while continuing my own healing and training. In 2012, when it became clear I wasn’t going back to engineering, I officially launched my healing practice and my art business.
Today my work is helping people move beyond what I call the healing loop. You know the loop if you’ve lived in it. You do the work. You read the books. You go to therapy, you go on the retreat, you understand your patterns better than anyone in the room, and six months later you are standing in the same place having the same argument with the same feeling in your chest. The people who come to me are usually capable, successful, and quietly exhausted by how much effort it has taken to stay that way. Over more than two decades in this field, my work has grown to include trauma healing, nervous system work, and the deeper identities people build in order to survive. I work with clients privately, including through The Invitation, my six-month private healing and mentorship container, and through private and group retreats.
Alongside that, I’ve built a career as a visionary artist. My pieces begin with my own photography, mostly of nature, and transform through digital layering and drawing into something else entirely. The work has received an Award of Excellence from Manhattan Arts International HerStory and 3rd Place in Graphic Art from Art Buzz, and it has been featured in Catapult Art Magazine, Niji Magazine, and Professional Artist Magazine. I’ve shown in solo and group exhibitions throughout the DC, Maryland, and Virginia area, including WPA DC, Hill Center Galleries, Art Soiree, and The Ven Gallery. I’m also a featured artist at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC, where my work is part of the permanent exhibit Hearts and Healing Hands. That one matters most to me. I’ve heard directly from staff, patients, and families about the comfort, the joy, and the small moments of brightness the art has given them on days that were not bright.
Writing and speaking became other expressions of the same work. My book, Change Yourself, Change the World, became an Amazon and international bestseller, won Gold in the 2024 Nautilus Book Awards, and received First Place honors from The BookFest. I’m writing the next one now, expanding my speaking and retreats, and hosting my podcast, Goodbye Bull, Hello Happiness.
In 2026 I was named Entrepreneur of Impact. What made it meaningful was seeing who showed up around it: clients, former clients, friends, family, and people whose lives had been touched by the work. They voted, contributed, shared, and kept showing up. It gave me a glimpse of how far the work had traveled beyond what I could see. The milestones I actually count are lives that change and the ripple that comes after.
And through all of it, for eighteen years, I was both mother and father to my son while building this largely on my own. I raised him, ran the business, made and exhibited the art, wrote the books, and handled every unglamorous thing behind it. There were times I sold my own belongings to keep things moving.
I’ve been told many times to pick a lane. Be the healer. Be the artist. Choose one service, one offer, one path.
I never could, because to me they were never separate.
The engineer, the healer, the artist, the writer, the speaker, the entrepreneur, and the mother aren’t different lives I’ve lived. They’re all one life, and different expressions of me. What began as my own need to survive became a journey of learning how to actually live, and then a calling to help others do the same.
At the heart of everything I do is helping people move beyond the patterns that keep them looping in place and come home to who they really are.
I often say this isn’t a conventional business.
It’s a calling that happens to have a website.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
No. I covered most of the personal side in the last answer, so I’ll talk about the business, because that came with its own hard years.
The biggest struggle wasn’t money, and it wasn’t the workload. It was trust.
From the moment I started, everyone had a template for what a business is supposed to look like. Scale it. Niche it down. Build the funnel. Say the thing people already know how to buy. Set the revenue goal and let the goal decide what you do next. All of that advice came from people who meant well, and almost none of it fit what I was actually building. What I do isn’t a product line. I’m not moving units. I’m sitting with people while something they have carried for thirty years finally comes loose.
So I kept being handed someone else’s definition of success and being told that if I didn’t follow it, I wasn’t serious. And I had to decide, over and over, whether to trust that or trust myself. That decision doesn’t get easier when money is tight, when you have no team, and when there is no one to tell you that you made the right call. You make it, and you live with it, and you make the next one.
I had to learn to trust myself, and to trust life.
The practical side was hard in its own way. I launched in 2012 with no funding, no partner, no team, and no runway. I did every part of it myself. The website, the marketing, social media, the technology, PR, contracts, bookkeeping. There were stretches when money was genuinely tight and I sold my own belongings to keep things going.
And I was doing all of it as a one-woman show while my son was my number one priority. Always. That is not a line I say for effect. It cost the business real things. Opportunities I didn’t take. Hours I didn’t work. Growth I could have had if I had been willing to be somewhere else. I have never once counted those as losses, but I want to be honest that the tradeoff was real, and that I made it on purpose, again and again.
There was also the challenge of doing work that is essentially invisible. Healing doesn’t photograph neatly. You can’t capture in a before-and-after image what happens when someone finally stops repeating a pattern they’ve spent their whole life inside. Meanwhile, the market around me was full of promises that are easy to say out loud. Transform your life in thirty days. One session and everything shifts. I was never willing to say those things, because they aren’t true, and I watched people choose them anyway.
Eventually I stopped trying to convince anyone. I let the work speak, and I let my clients speak. Their words did what none of my marketing could. Someone changes, the people around them notice, and one of them calls me. That kind of growth has always meant more to me than anything I could manufacture through a funnel.
So no, it hasn’t been smooth. It’s been slow, and it’s been lonely in ways that are hard to describe.
But I measure success differently than I was told to. Success, for me, is the people whose journey I got to be part of. It’s the privilege of watching someone shift, and seeing them live with more peace, more ease, and permission to simply be. It’s knowing I gave my son one hundred percent of me. And it’s knowing I did all of it with love and grace.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
The simplest way I can describe what I do is that I help people come home to themselves.
I’m a trauma healer, spiritual mentor, energy healer, author, speaker, and visionary artist, and I’ve been in the healing field for more than two decades. I specialize in helping people move beyond what I call the healing loop. You’ve done the therapy, read the books, understood your trauma, and gotten very good at explaining why you are the way you are. And you’re still living inside the same patterns.
Most of the people who come to me have already done significant work on themselves. They’re intelligent, self-aware, successful, and usually deeply sensitive. They don’t need another person to tell them what’s wrong with them. They don’t need another label. And they definitely don’t need another list of things to fix.
My work goes underneath all of that.
When something happens to you and you’re too young or too overwhelmed to survive it as yourself, you build someone who can. The responsible one. The fixer. The people pleaser. The one who has to be strong. The one who keeps everyone safe. The one who is always working on herself. These identities served a purpose, and they were brilliant at it. The problem comes when we forget they’re something we learned to be and start believing they’re who we are.
What I’m known for is seeing what’s underneath what someone is presenting to me. A person comes in talking about their relationship, their anxiety, their career, their body, a pattern they can’t change, and very often what we’re actually working with isn’t the thing they walked in talking about. I listen to the words, but I’m also paying attention to the body, the energy, what isn’t being said, and what keeps surfacing underneath all of it. I see the parts that are still hiding, including the ones that have never made it into a therapist’s office. That isn’t a criticism of therapy. Many of my clients are in therapy while they work with me, and therapists send me clients. But some things don’t come out in language, and those are usually the things running the show.
I also don’t work from a rigid protocol, and most of what I do isn’t something I was handed. My formal training is as a Master Healer and in shamanism, but that training gave me the foundation. The work I do today is largely my own: techniques I’ve developed and a modality I’ve built over two decades of sitting with people. There is no five-step Atousa method that I run everyone through, because the person in front of me decides where we go. Sometimes that’s talking. Sometimes energy work. Sometimes working directly with the body and the nervous system. Sometimes silence. Sometimes we end up laughing in the middle of something excruciating. The work meets the person instead of asking the person to fit the work.
Here’s the other thing that I think sets me apart. I’m not interested in making anyone dependent on healing. I’m trying to make myself unnecessary.
I don’t want someone sitting across from me ten years from now, still convinced there’s one more broken piece of themselves we have to find. Healing can quietly become another identity. Another way of telling yourself that who you are right now isn’t enough, and that peace is waiting on the other side of the next breakthrough.
What I want is for someone to see that they are enough, and that they always have been. Everything they built on top of themselves was an attempt to become enough. So is the searching. So is the next book, the next modality, the next breakthrough. None of it made them enough, and none of it ever will, because that was never the missing piece. Nothing was missing. They were already whole, and they were already perfect, and no amount of work was ever going to add that to them. What the work does is clear away what got stacked on top, so they can finally see what was there the entire time.
I want people to discover there is nothing fundamentally wrong with them. That doesn’t mean the trauma didn’t happen, or that the pain isn’t real, or that we bypass any of it. We work with all of it. But eventually the work has to stop being about endlessly repairing yourself and start being about living.
That philosophy runs through everything I offer. I work with clients privately, with couples, through private and group retreats, and through *The Invitation*, my six-month private container for people ready to go deeply into this without rushing it. I also do healing work for homes and spaces.
My books, my speaking, my podcast, and my art are extensions of the same work. *Change Yourself, Change the World* gives people a way to begin on their own. My next book goes further into identity, awareness, consciousness, and what remains when the stories we’ve built around ourselves start falling away. When I speak, I’m usually in rooms with women, entrepreneurs, and leaders who look extremely successful from the outside while privately wondering why none of it has made them feel at home inside themselves.
And then there’s the art, which does visually what the healing does experientially. I start with something that already exists, usually a photograph I’ve taken in nature, and through layers of digital drawing and transformation, something that was always there but couldn’t be seen begins to emerge. I’ve never seen the art and the healing as two careers. Both are about revealing what’s underneath the surface.
As for what I’m most proud of, the awards and the book and the exhibitions matter to me, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But they aren’t the answer.
I’m proudest of the shift, and of getting to witness it. Someone tells me they slept through the night. Someone tells me their relationship with their children changed because they changed. A client sends me a Mother’s Day message years after we finished working together. One client had a glass heart custom engraved for me with the definition of “Difference Maker.” People buy my book for someone they love because it helped them and they want that person to have it too. That never becomes ordinary to me.
And I’m proudest of the ripple, the part that happens outside the room. The partners, the friends, the children who will grow up around a different version of their parent and will never know why. Those people never meet me. They don’t need to.
That’s what *Change Yourself, Change the World* has always meant. When one person changes the way they meet themselves, they change the way they meet everyone else.
I’ll add one more, since it’s the truest answer. I’m proudest of my son, and of the fact that I built all of this without ever making him wait for it.
Before we let you go, we’ve got to ask if you have any advice for those who are just starting out?
Trust yourself.
I know how that sounds, so let me be specific about what I mean. You are going to get a lot of advice, and most of it will be good advice. It will come from people who are successful, who care about you, and who are genuinely trying to help. And a great deal of it will still be wrong for you, because it was built out of someone else’s business, someone else’s strengths, and someone else’s definition of what success looks like. Being handed good advice that doesn’t fit is one of the most disorienting things about starting out, because when it doesn’t work, you assume the problem is you.
Your path is yours. It isn’t supposed to look like theirs.
That includes the timeline. I spent years watching people pass me while I was building something slowly, and I had to keep deciding that slow wasn’t the same as wrong. Some things take the time they take, and comparing your beginning to someone else’s middle will make you quit something that was actually working.
Don’t be afraid to try, and don’t be afraid to fail. Failure is survivable. I’ve done plenty of it. What isn’t survivable, or at least what costs far more than people realize, is spending years not attempting the thing because you’re waiting to be certain first. You will never be certain. You start anyway, and you find out.
And here’s the one I most wish someone had told me. The thing that makes you different is usually the exact thing people will tell you to fix. I was told to simplify, to choose one lane, to be easier to explain. The parts of me that didn’t fit into a clean category turned out to be the whole reason my work is what it is. Before you file down the edges to make yourself more marketable, look closely at whether those edges are the point.
Be true to yourself. That isn’t a soft thing to say at the end of an interview. It’s the actual strategy. Everything I’ve built came from the moments I chose myself over the version of me that would have been easier to sell.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.atousaraissyan.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/atousar/?hl=en
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/atousa.raissyan/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/atousaraissyan
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@atousaraissyan
- Other: https://SoulysticArtShop.com
