Watching Mental Health Episode 4 | Alyssa Waters

This is a transcript of Watching Mental Health Episode 4 with Alyssa Waters which you can watch and listen to here:

Katie Waecther: Hi everyone, and welcome to the next episode of Watching Mental Health. I'm really excited for today's episode because we're going to be bringing, I think, a spiritual and a holistic touch to mental health, which is something that people talk about more and more these days. But to have a professional here to actually give her insights, I think is going to be super valuable. So I want to introduce you to Alyssa Waters. And as a dedicated self-healing integration coach, she empowers individuals to embark on transformative journeys towards holistic wellbeing with a background in psychology and a deep understanding for various healing modalities. Alyssa guides clients through emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual integration. Her mission is to help individuals harmonize their inner selves, fostering self-acceptance, resilience, and a profound sense of inner peace. And today we're going to dive into just that, into how mental health is connected to our emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual wellbeing, and how approaching mental health holistically matters in order to really get that profound sense of inner peace that I think we're all looking for. So without further ado, please bring on Alyssa Waters and let's just dive right into it. Thank you so much for being here.

Alyssa Waters: Oh, Katie, thank you so much for having me. I absolutely love talking about these topics. It's a huge passion. I'm so grateful.

Katie: Awesome, thank you. Well, so I gave a little bit of a background, but tell us a little bit more in your own words, who you are and why you're here.

Alyssa: Oh, sure. Well, in essence, I'm a spiritual being, having a human condition experience, take that as that lens. But I'm a multifaceted being. I'm a full spectrum of so many different things. So often we want to claim ourselves one thing, but at the same time, we are on the dualistic end of the spectrum of the same thing. And so I'm everything. But with that said, on my journey, like you said, I'm a self-healing integration coach. I have a passion to guide others to the realization that they're the hero of their own stories. That you and I are the hero of our own stories.

Katie: That's right. I love that. The hero of your own story. And I think we all are in some ways, in many ways, and to step into that is powerful. So tell me a little bit more about why mental health is a passion for you. I know you have a background in psychology. What brought you to that? Why does mental health matter in your world?

Alyssa: Well, I believe it's been an unfolding throughout my lifetime and more of a destiny type of situation should I have chosen the road of recovery and healing and education and vulnerability and authenticity.

So to me, when it comes to this road to mental health, for myself, when I was younger, I struggled a lot with insecurities, perfectionism, people pleasing. I was bullied. But what I had really learned as an adult is that at the bottom of the human condition experience is that we all just don't feel good enough every single one of us. So if we can really explain that at the top of the mountains to everybody, at least we have a baseline to start from, and we can stop judging ourselves and take a more compassionate approach to growth. And it can even be fun to grow. And as I started liberating myself throughout my adult years, I was a drinker from 14 years old to 31. I'm five years alcohol free now. So that had a big part of my journey. And I had learned a year ago that I have a D H D, and I'm on the autism spectrum. So I had been going throughout life, feeling really disconnected and misunderstood, and then going to places to cope that were not healthy, that was destructive, and I didn't have the tools.

I started seeking out the tools and the education, and it really empowered me. And I realized, oh my gosh, we can relieve our own suffering when we give up trying to control everything on the outside, all of a sudden I gain control on the inside. What huge awakening started happening in my life? So it became a passion to be able to share this truth, this universal truth that, hey, we all don't feel good enough, but at least we can work the ladder up from here. Let's talk about it. Let's share tools. Let's communicate. Let's love on one another. Call them in, rather than call them out, call me in. Rather than call me out. I believe we can create a more harmonious experience together.

Katie: Yeah, no, absolutely. And you mentioned that you were diagnosed with a few different, you had a few different kind of diagnoses thrown at you, which is hard to handle, and I think a lot of people can get unsure about how to move forward with that. How did that look for you when you were finally able to step into healing? I know that you mentioned that you were able to stop drinking, but what were some of those healing moments for you? What were some of the resources that you utilize that maybe now you offer some of your clients?

Alyssa: You got it. Do you mean regarding the diagnosis or in general?

Katie: I think just in general. But you can jump into a specific diagnosis if you'd like. However personally you want to get, and I think that we'd appreciate a little of that, just kind of knowing maybe some specifics, but however comfortable you are kind of jumping into it,

Alyssa: It takes such a radical acceptance, Honesty. And I had been running away from intimacy for a long time, not knowing how to access those spaces without realizing that intimacy is just radical honesty and an unconditional acceptance of one another, of our environments, of ourselves, of our relationships, of the occurrences. I was so scared to lose things, lose my identity. I was totally wrapped up into being the party girl and having that role, that label or the hero for other people or the fixer or whatever. My mind at that time felt safety in a role that I was given, whether I gave it to myself, society gave it to me, others gave it to me, and I had to be okay with surrendering that role and understanding that that wasn't my identity in the first place. And it took me being okay with ego. Death is more or less what it really is. But realizing that in essence, we are not any of those roles. We are in awareness, watching and observing everything that's happening. And if I could zoom out and show myself some compassion and realize, oh, no wonder I act in those ways. I didn't have the tool or no wonder I didn't get taught that, but let me not be a victim and let me go seek out the information myself and liberate myself.

So it took a huge dose of humility understanding that I'm just a person just like anybody else, and I give so many others grace, why am I not giving myself this grace? And when I did, I had realized divine love, energy, and it had to come from compassion. Couldn't come from shame or guilt or apathy, depression because it had to come from love. And when I realized that, I realized like, oh my gosh, I'm infinite. I jumped from one paradigm to the next. And how I got there was I radically accept this moment for exactly the way it is, but it's about the now and moving forward. And I had to surrender the old stories, surrender the old perspectives, surrender me telling myself that I'm not enough. I used to think that self-love was self-sacrifice, giving to others in a way that drained me. And I didn't realize, oh, no, no, self-love is putting my needs first. And that could be a need for peace, a need for boundaries, a need for safety and fun and rest and relaxation and creativity. I can keep going.

Katie: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That reminds me of that quote, why would you about that inner talk, if you don't say these things to your best friend, why would you say them to yourself? And we could be so harsh on each other, on ourselves while trying to be compassionate with other people. But I think being compassionate with ourselves as a key thing that we tend to miss.

Alyssa: Bingo, dinging, ding, ding, dinging. You're right on the money there. And I got fortunate that I enjoy research. I'm super nerdy, especially when it's something that I enjoy. And what I had realized about fear, a good acronym for fear is false evidence appearing real, false evidence appearing real because it's not reality. And so when I realized if I fear something and a way for me to know that I'm fearing it is avoidance, I have a huge pattern of avoidant or I had a huge pattern of avoidance, language is important. Let me be careful with that. And I realized avoidance is fear.

Just go and learn about the thing. And when you learn about it, you can understand the dynamics, the foundations, where it comes from, and learn tools to navigate through it. And once you learn about it, you know how to navigate through it and guess what dissipates fear. And so we have to be okay to say, Hey, there's something going on with me here. That doesn't mean that I'm less than, it doesn't mean that I'm not enough or I am the mistake. It's just time to go seek information.

Katie: Yeah, exactly. And so let's bring this back a little bit to somebody who's maybe struggling today. So let's say I am really struggling with depression and anxiety and I've done therapy and for some reason something's not clicking and I see you and I come to you. And what would you say to me or how would you help me kind of start to climb this hill and maybe change my mindset? Mindset to do that?

Alyssa: Books, books, books, books, books, books. Somebody's 20 years worth of life experience you can read in two weeks or less.

Katie: So what are your favorite books? What books? Tell me I love books.

Alyssa: So letting Go Pathway to Surrender by Dr. David Hawkins. I love him. We actually just coincidentally have the same birthday too. He passed away in 2012, but he was a mental health professional and a psychologist and was treating people for quite a long time and had started to learn more of the eastern side of healing and learned about consciousness itself and created a proven scientific system through kinesthesiology is muscle response, the nervous system response in the body and was able to map levels of consciousness through the way that our body is responding to truth at that time or non-truth at that time through kinesthesiology.

So for me, this was changing. I've probably bought this book so many at least 14 times and have mailed them around the country to friends. Really cool because it created a map of consciousness. So for me, I struggled with emotional, I struggle with emotional regulation. I don't got to lie to kick it. I have hard days still, but I had learned the energy underneath the emotion at each layer and stage of consciousness to where I could become a magician of sorts and transcend that energy. So for example, anger. Anger, what's the energy underneath anger. It's actually a perceived loss and it's sadness and it's grief because there's a perception of an unjust or unfairly unbalanced scenario or something was taken from you, you lost something.

So how do we dissipate that? How do we work with that? Well, we first look, well, what am I sad about? What is my perception of what I lost and how can I change the perception of the perception? How can I change my relationship with that? And guess what dissipates the anger. I didn't say it was easy, but I said it was worth it. It's so worth it. And so that's an example of the huge gift that just one book gifted me. And I could finally independently be compassionate to myself and be like, oh, okay, I'm feeling this emotion. This teaches me how to identify that emotion. Okay, this is the energy. And it also taught me how to work through that energy for myself so that way I can come back to a willingness and courage, reasoning and truth, love, peace, bliss, joy, enlightenment, those stages that are all energy giving because everything underneath that is just depleting my energy, like pride, fear, anger, shame, guilt.

Katie: So it seems like it's not just awareness, it's also learning to work through that energy.

Alyssa: It's knowing that we were born master creators and that we have the ability to go out and learn anything. Whatever you put your conscious attention on will grow. Now understanding you can't put your attention everywhere, but when it's important and if you can surrender, you can go and seek this information and you have the ability to learn and you can liberate yourselves. We don't have to be victims. We're not victims. The information is out there and the people who gave out the information, they're no better or no different than us,

Katie: Right?

Alyssa: They're just a few steps ahead.

Katie: Yeah, for sure. Sometimes it seems like that's all it is. In some ways it's somebody who's just a few steps ahead because we're all in this journey together. We're all here. And some people seem to struggle while others succeed, but it just feels like maybe some people get some things and others it's just waiting to click in some ways.

Alyssa: Exactly. And it really comes down to compassion. It's think about, like you said, when you talk to a friend, for example a little bit earlier, it's like we would never talk to our friends like that. The most abusive relationship in our lives is the one with ourselves.

So it's radically accepting that and saying, this is the human condition experience. It's not personal. We need to stop taking it personal and realize that this is the game or this is the puzzle. It's not a problem, it's just a puzzle. And so learning how to hack our own consciousness, learning how to hack our own emotions, learning how to hack our own mind through meditation and learning how to regulate ourselves in those ways is not only life changing, it's lifesaving. It's lifesaving. I was committing passive suicide because I did not understand myself. Others, I didn't have the tools. But once I surrendered and sought the information, I grew and life grew with me.

Katie: Yeah, for sure. I saw you, and I know that our viewers can't see this, but I saw you at a workshop or give a talk a few weeks ago, like a month, two months ago maybe.

Alyssa: Yes.

Katie: And I loved that visual that you had with the water. So walk us through that a little bit, that visual and kind of the intention with that.

Alyssa: You got it. I love it. That's a good example. So I put on a physical demonstration of something that is more intangible in our lives. That is a day-to-day choice, and it's something that needs to be intentional if you're wanting it to grow. I had showed up, it was a talk about the power of stillness and connection, and it was about brainwave states and meditation and how to hack. That was really fun. And at the end, I brought out a vase and I filled it with clear water, and then I had scooped in dirt into the clear water vase. So how I started was with the clear water. This is the purity of your inner beingness without all the conditioning, without all the trauma. This is the inner child. This is the truth.

This is the clarity, this is the love. And over time, what happens, A little trauma comes, let's scoop in a little bit of dirt in there. All of a sudden it's a little mucky. We're going to twirl it around. Now it's all mucky. And we'll give the listeners a nice visual and then something comes along. And now that trauma, you haven't been healing that trauma, you didn't go to the therapist or maybe you're not sharing with a friend, you're not being honest with yourself. Now you start drowning yourself in an addiction. I don't judge you. No judgment here, myself included. I had to stop judging myself for me to heal. That's really what it takes. But then I put another scoop of dirt in there, mix it up, mix it up, and then, okay, well then what I did is that I started pouring in clear water back into the vase, and I said, this is you taking your care of yourself. This is you loving yourself, pouring into yourself. This is you telling a friend you're struggling. This is you going out and reading a book. This is you going out and going to the therapist, yoga, meditation, whatever your solutions are. Doesn't have to look like mine.

But you start pouring in the water. And so the muck in it starts filtering, it starts pushing itself out. And then while you're doing that and pouring the water, and guess what happens? The rug gets pulled out from underneath you. Something totally outside of your control happens. Let's throw some nice little muck in there. So the moral of the story is, is that it takes a continuous pouring into us and to ourselves and exploring different ways to pour into ourselves, to be able to keep that clarity, to keep that pur, to be able to have the clear mind. We're talking about mental health, all that muck so much congestion. So there is no break, there's no finish line. We have to

Katie: Exactly. And it's like often people say, okay, well, am I fixed now? Can I just be fixed and I can go on about my life and well, no, that's just not how it works. It is a journey. Every single day you have to wake up and pour into yourself, even if you don't think that you need to, you do because you're right, life happens and people that we love die move away. And there's just so much that's out of our control that happens around us in our environments. But what we can do is continuously try to pour into ourselves and it's so

Alyssa: Important. Exactly. Exactly. And it takes a heart, body, mind, and spirit approach. So for example, we can't heal an injury of the heart with the mind. You can't logically analytically think your way through something that requires compassion and surrendering and grace, humility, you're not going to get there. So what happens is that we have a thought and we have to remember that our thoughts are just automatic sometimes symptoms that are going on. It's just a tool to help us navigate through life that we are not our thoughts itself, but we can over identify with thought, form and emotion. So a thought form comes, we judge the thought. Depending how we judge the thought, it'll create an emotion at energy giving emotion or an energy depleting emotion. Now emotions are felt through the body. So now the body goes, yeah, the physical body's energy's up I foot or it goes, I want to go and eat my potato chips in bed and watch my bad TV and say goodbye to the world as I'm looping, saying I'm a terrible human being.

Doesn't help anyone. That doesn't help me. It doesn't help you. It doesn't help my one. So now the physical energy, now the physical energy is hit, guess what's hit the spirit. So heart, body, mind and spirit. Four corners. So if you have a wobble on a corner, you can't grow a foundation.

Katie: So you really do need to address all four corners. You really in order to feel healed, well, not healed, but in order to continue on your healing journey and to feel healthy and happy in your life,

Alyssa: It's wholeness. It's about integrating all aspects of ourselves, especially the aspects that we tend to neglect and not shaming or hiding and embracing it. Because the sooner that you look at it, the sooner your relief is going to come. The truth does set you free. And I've realized that no one has broken their needs to be fixed. And whoever's hearing this really needs to hear this is I need to hear it and remember it myself too. No one has broken our knees to be fixed. We need to remember, we need to remember that we are love and that we don't need to earn it. When you look at fear and you peel layers and layers and layers and layers, I'm like, what is this? Like I said, I'm the researcher type, and I'll sit very introvertedly for hours alone, no problem on stuff myself. You look at fear, it's like a fear of loss and love of someone, a fear of rejection, a fear of being pushed out of a community, a fear of not being accepted for who we are.

A fear of learning something in front of somebody else to be judged, a fear of. But when you get down to the bottom of that, we're all just yearning for love. But if we can remember that we are it ourselves, for example, if we want to experience love in our life, then go be loving. When you're loving, you experience love and guess what's going to bound back to you magnetically. It's going to be maybe not from your controlled fixed of where you want it to come from, but it will come from back. And that's where we have to surrender. But we are it ourselves. So how can we find something that we are,

Katie: Yeah, yeah, life isn't perfect, but that love, I think that's so important, just that compassion for yourself. And so you have, I think mentioned a few of these things, but what does self-care holistically for you look like? I know that you've mentioned books and meditation. Let's say you're having a really bad day. What do you do instead of grabbing those potato chips and curling up on the couch?

Alyssa: Great question. It's taking me some time to create daily rituals.

And I had realized it's not a thing that I just do when I don't feel good. It's creating automated habits that I know are scientifically proven to help me as a human being. But then on top of it, whatever my personal authority of what I enjoy and what feels good for me. And that can be flexible over time. So what I realize is really about having healthy daily rituals. Now, am I perfect at my daily rituals every day? Not all the time, but for the most part, when I hit them, I feel productive. I get really good positive and positive self confidence. Even the days that I'm feeling depressed, if I do one of them, I'm like, at least I got that done. You go, girl. And so it creates a positive feedback system. When I wake up in the morning, I like to try to stay away from my phone for at least an hour. I'm a very sensitive person. I'm easily conditioned and I'm highly empathic. The moment you open up your phone or your social media in bed, you're inviting everybody into your bed with you. So now you're thinking about their day. Now you're thinking about their problem. Now you're like, oh gosh, that was a petty comment. Now you're thinking about that and you haven't even said hello to yourself yet.

Haven't said hello to your life force energy, yet you haven't had any dialogue within to say, today is a great day. I'm going to be kind to myself. You don't even have an opportunity. You're just going

Katie: Right into it. So…

Alyssa: The days I do that, or I did that, I would see a huge difference in my mental health and my productivity. So I try to stay away for an hour. During that time, I'd like to come downstairs. I love reading. So it's like flexing the mental muscles. I like to do, for me personally, nonfiction, something that I can learn about personal development. And I let my intuition lead book by book. So even if I have a bunch of books that haven't been read yet and I just got a new one, if my intuition says, read the new one, you need that right now. I listen to my intuition, not my ego stretching. We hold a lot of tension in our bodies and emotions are energy and motion. Emotions are energy and motion. So when we have an emotion and we push it down, we can move above it of a little bit of around it. We have to move through it. So this gives me enough time to try to stretch my body and get any stuck energy out. I start talking to either my higher self or my spirit guide team or whatever. Those are all labels, but

Whoever's versions of that, that's what I'm talking to. I send in my day, I do a page of gratitude journaling a day, so I'm grateful for, and then I like to give out positive personal development tools out on the internet or do something positive or something to serve the community. So I, a passion and I feel a need in my community that equals purpose. That's bigger than now. I feel great the way I was designed to be able to help the collective. We all are.

Katie: That's really great. You know what, I love how you said that is that you started off with you and then you ended with your purpose. You ended beyond you. And so you poured into yourself first, and then you were like, well, this is also important. Right? But I got to pour into myself first and then I can give out to the community.

Alyssa: Good catch.

Katie: Yeah,

Alyssa: Very observant. Yes, you're absolutely right. And that shows healing. The mentality of lack of, I have to get to everything else, everybody else before mine, or if I serve me, no one's going to be there or they're not going to take me. Whatever,

Katie: Right

Alyssa: Goes on in our minds. I took care of myself first, and because I was able to, I can trust the integrity and the ethics of what I'm actually giving out to the community at the same time. And I'm in a joyful mood to do it because my cup overflowing.

Katie: Yeah, exactly. No, I feel the same way. When I'm taking care of myself first, then I find it's easier to post on social media about something good for the environment or good, really important. And I just like how you have such a holistic approach to it, stretching all that's super, super important. So I know we only have one minute left, one or two minutes left, but I want to ask you just this one last question and then we'll get out of here. And this is something I like to ask all my professionals who come on. But when you think of mental health or mental health diagnosis, do you think of that as something that you can overcome or something that you should learn to live with? And I'm interested, you also have a personal perspective in this and that you also have been given diagnoses, mental health diagnoses in your life.

Alyssa: It's something to celebrate.

Katie: Oh,

Alyssa: None of us come out unscathed. None of us come into Earth School or onto Earth and not experience trauma, not experience pain, not experience. Generational cycle patterns, not experience conditional stuff from society. So it's overcome by acceptance and celebration is where I'm at my state of consciousness at this time. Now, that's always going to be flexible. We'll see what it mutes to, but it's really about celebrating that you have superhero talents. Through that experience, there are gifts and adversity, and it's not adversity. Maybe it doesn't have to be looked at at all. This is just how I regulate and it's teaching me how to communicate with others better. It's teaching me how to stand up for myself. It's teaching me how to accept myself and love myself and stop caring what other people think about me. So some of that was the vehicle that allowed me to help me to get to where I'm at right now. Thank you. Thank you. Diagnosis or thank you regulation or thank you. If it's not going to be this, it's going to be something else.

Katie: Sure.

Alyssa: For sure. This is what it is. How can I work through it? How can I work with it? How can I pull superhero talents with the autism, for example, I have extra sensory stuff. It helps me so much in my work. It helps me so much. I see things that other people don't see, and now I can guide others. My ADHD, when I'm hyper-focused, it's awesome.

Katie: Right?

Alyssa: I'm a superhero.

Katie: It's superhero stuff. It is. And I've learned over these last couple years to start looking at my anxiety in that same way. To be grateful for what it's given me and the superhero talents that I've taken. So I think we're out of time. We can keep talking and talking. I want to, but I have to pause it now. I have to stop us and let it go. But I'd love to have you back on a future episode and we can dive in even deeper. I think it'd be so amazing. I really appreciate you being here with me. Thanks again, Alyssa Waters, and join us every first and third Wednesday at 3:00 PM Pacific Time.

Alyssa: Thank you so much for having me, Katie. Thank you. Thank you, thank you. You are wonderful. Thank you for being here, for our community.

Katie: Thank you. Bye-Bye everyone. Bye.