Utilizing Energy And Defeating Self-Doubt With Alexis Artin

Our upbringing hugely impacts how we act and see ourselves. But as we grow, we need to start utilizing energy and become bigger than our current perspectives. Tony Martignetti talks with Demartini Method Facilitator Alexis Artin to share how she went beyond her challenging childhood full of self-doubt and insecurities. Alexis explains how aligning with her inner energies opened up her emotions, found refuge in the world of performing arts, and become an agent of change for others. She discusses why your ideologies and outlook in life must not be dictated by other people and how empowerment must be about making decisions that impact a larger purpose.

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Utilizing Energy And Defeating Self-Doubt With Alexis Artin

It is my honor to introduce you to my guest, Alexis Artin. She has been the best-kept secret weapon for some of the biggest celebrities in Hollywood. She helped develop the transformational events department of a globally renowned female empowerment company, making them a multimillion-dollar enterprise. She's an ICF-Certified Professional Coach, an Energy Leadership Index Master Practitioner and a licensed hypnotherapist. She also practices NLP and she's a Demartini Method Facilitator as well as a Master Embodiment Teacher and Trainer. She serves on the leadership team of 4PC, a community for extraordinary coaches. Alexis balances all of this while being a wife and a mother of two boys while running a full coaching practice complete with body, mind, heart and soul-based offerings. I'm feeling connected with you. I want to welcome you to the Virtual Campfire, Alexis.

I'm so glad to be here, Tony. Thank you for having me. Thank you for inviting me. I've been secretly hoping for an invitation.

You're here. This is the time for us to connect, hear your story and see what kind of magic you've created throughout your life. What are you doing to make an impact on people's lives besides this beautiful family you already have?

I'm the girl who dated all the wrong guys before she married the right one. I'm hoping to raise two fine men.

On the show, we help you tell your story through what's called flashpoints. These are points in your story that have illuminated your gifts into the world. They might be something massive, huge or they could be tiny things that made you shift your perspective. I'm going to give you the space to share what you're called to share. Along the way, we'll pause and see what's showing up.

I'm going to take D, all of the above because it is the small moments and it is also the larger moments. I would be remiss if I didn't start at the beginning because I do believe that those first formative years do shape the rest of our life experiences and perspectives. The big bang in my life was when I was six years old and my aunt and uncle died in a plane crash. I was left behind with their five-year-old daughter, my little cousin.

That was a crucial moment for me in shaping my reality. It was this defining moment of realizing how precious and fragile worlds are at such a young age to realize that with one sound of a phone ringing. Everything, the world as you know it, can completely turn upside down and inside out. It teaches you not only how resilient we are in navigating the fact that we have zero control over our external circumstances. It's our internal ability to navigate those circumstances. That ever-changing adversity is what makes us such fascinating creatures as human beings.

Those first formative years shape the rest of our life experiences and perspectives.

Another significant moment that happened as a ripple effect of the impact of that crash was I was born a very dramatic woman. I always had a flair for the dramatic. Let's put it that way. My parents used to tease me and call me Sandra Heartburn instead of Bernhard. At six years old, you can imagine that you're not fully comprehending what has just transpired when there was a plane crash. It was my mother's sister and her sister's husband who perished in the crash. While I didn't understand logistically the gravity of the situation, I certainly energetically could feel the hurricane or the torrid emotion that was present.

I knew at that moment, intuitively or beyond, that life was never going to be the same again. Having a dramatic nature or essence as I did and as I do, I absorbed what was going on in my environment. The reaction that my body had was to throw myself dramatically onto the stairs and start sobbing, heaving and wailing because I was mirroring my environment. My father was doing his best at the time to deal with his grief, shock and everything else that he was processing. He came over to me and said, "Stop being so dramatic. Knock it off. You're not helping anything."

As a parent now, I understand where that impulse came from in my father. As the powerless child in that situation, in that dynamic, not knowing what I know, not having the resources that I have to make sense of why he had that reaction towards me. All I did was create an understanding at that moment, a part of me that went, "It's not safe to have emotions. It's not safe to be who I truly am, to have a dramatic essence, to express myself emotionally, to communicate the truth of my experience in any given moment because that's not safe. That's not lovable. That's not wanted. That's not warranted."

There was no room for me at that moment because I was too much. Many of us volley back and forth between, "I'm not enough," or, "I'm too much." At that moment, it was like, "I'm too much," which makes me not enough. That was a defining moment in my life. That was certainly a flashpoint. It was a flashpoint like a lightning bolt struck me and inevitably changed me, but it also gave me the gift of being able to work with people in the future who suffer from the same perception.

When you think about that moment, I can feel the emotions of that moment and everything leading up to that, which is something that any child at that moment doesn't know how to understand all of the things that are transpiring. It's hard. The fact that you brought in the understanding of how your father showed up is also something that shows you've come a long way in your understanding of the dynamics of people's emotions. The question that I was coming back to is, how did you show up after that? Did you mute yourself and hold yourself back for a period of time? When did you reconnect with your emotions if that's the case?

I found safe ways to channel my emotions. On stage, as an example, I started to gear towards that. It’s not that I didn't prior, I always had a flair for the dramatic. I was always interested in performing arts but it became a heavy emphasis in my life, dancing, acting, singing, safe ways of emotionally expressing because it was a character. It wasn't me. Even a creative form of writing was a way for me to express myself. I would write poems or songs. I was looking for any safe outlet for my emotional self to fully express myself.

That's something interesting right there for people to take away when you feel like you can't express yourself in the world.

It’s finding a healthy, sacred, constructive outlet rather than a destructive one.

Thank you for that clearer point because that is so true. Most of the time, there are destructive outlets that people find they fall into.

I was seeing a post that a friend of mine put on social media. She’s a fellow embodiment master teacher. She was talking about one of her teachers who had taught her to have a sacred temper tantrum. She gets out a bunch of pillows. She bought herself a child's toy plastic bat and puts herself in an open, safe room. It's by no means easy for her. It's still challenging for her to throw this sacred temper tantrum because it feels out of the norm of what an adult should, would or could do. Yet it's become this sacred practice for her that she allows herself to move the energy through and out of her body in a way that she’s not taking it out on her son, husband or the people that she works with in her career. It's a way for her to just be with what's truly present for her, honoring it and expressing it in a way that feels relieving and satisfying at the end.

I want to move forward and hear more about your story but I have this question or this idea I want to run by you. Do you feel as though emotions have a vibration that reverberates? Therefore, we have to let the emotions play out for them to be released. Is there something about that?

There is something about that. Emotions are energy. E-motion, energy in motion. There is a vibration. If you think of it almost like a tuning fork, there are the higher-pitched and lower-pitched vibrations. If you think of it as an ascension to the higher vibrations of emotion, you get into eustress, which is an energy or people would call it anabolic levels of energy. There are all different ways of phrasing it. It's those levels of emotional energy where you're in grace, gratitude, inspiration and enthusiasm versus when you drop into those lower levels of energy where you become less synthesized and more polarized. It becomes more split off into judgments of good or bad, black or white, right or wrong versus synthesized emotions where you can see the whole.

While there's good and there's bad equally so, everything in life is made an inherent balance. You can't separate two sides of the magnet. For the day, there's night. For yin, there's yang. When you get into the complementary opposites that synthesize the nature of emotion, then you get up into the eustress and you get in gratitude, true presence and all of those things. That's how I see emotion. That's where the Demartini Method comes in and separates me out. I see the value in a sacred temper tantrum. Don't get me wrong. I think that's way better than some other choices we can make when we're in the heat of anger. That being said, there are tools and methods when you are in the throes of anger because you're highly polarized and you're not seeing what's also available in a moment of anger to bring you back into a state of homeostasis, which is grace, gratitude and unconditional love.

That ever-changing adversity is what makes us such fascinating creatures as human beings.

This feels so right. Energy has been something that a lot of people don't quite get. If you speak in a way that people can connect with, they start to see that it's a real thing there. There's something behind it.

Energy is real. To me, energy itself is undisputed. There is energy, E = mc2. Let's call it the spiritual woo-woo energy of it all. What makes it real for me is the science behind it. The soul is made of light. That's why we seek enlightenment. It’s because the soul is made of light. We are ascending towards those states of enlightenment. Light is made of energy. What do we know about energy? It's neither created nor destroyed. It just changes form. Energy is real. That's an irrefutable truth. It's just a question of, "How are you relating to energy when it comes to your life and being of service to you?" That's all anybody is looking for, "How are my highest values being supported at this moment?"

That's it. When you connect it back to values, that's another thing that's important for people. I want to get back into the story and find out what else has happened on your journey because we had a great conversation around energy. I want to get back into, how did you evolve from the child who started to express through theater and acting? Where did you go from there? Where was the next flashpoint?

There were lots of stops on my journey. The next real highlight for me was a smaller moment and it was the other parent this time. It was my mother this time. We cannot discount that our primary caregivers whether they are our parents or guardians have the most influence on shaping our mind matrix, the filter that we triage all of our experiences through. I was at a doctor's appointment for my annual physical. It was right before the summer and I was about to be shipped off to summer camp for two months, which I was regularly since I was about five years old.

In this annual physical with the doctor that I had since I was a young child, who also happened to be a family friend and was a male doctor. I was at that awkward, blossoming age where it started to get a little strange for me to be disrobing in front of this family friend who had come to our holiday parties, this older gentleman. Nonetheless, I had gotten through unscathed in the appointment and was redressing, tying my shoes and so relieved to be on my way out of the office. My mother halted everything and said, "Wait, one last thing." I stood up and she pulled the hem of my shirt up to reveal my belly. She grabbed a fist full of flesh on my stomach and demanded to know from the doctor, "What is this? Why does she still have this?"

I can look at that moment from all of the knowledge, awareness, training and healing that I have now and realized 100% why my mother did what she did at that moment. What I will say became true for me at that moment as a young child was, "My body is not lovable if there is fat on it. My body is not enough. I am not enough. My body is not safe to be in. My body is a threat. It is going to bring unwanted experiences to me. I now have a job to do, which is to protect myself at all costs, by turning my body into something that will be lovable by other people to receive love and feel safe."

These are people who are your closest people in the world, your family.

This is why I do want to reflect back on why my mother did that, and this is helpful for people to know. My mother did that because my mother loved me so much. My mother knew that I had been bullied. She was afraid that I was going to go to the pool that summer and being a full year to two years younger than the people with who I was bunking that summer. They didn't have baby fat anymore and I did. She was afraid that I would be teased and bullied, and I would come home in an immense amount of pain that would do irreversible psychological damage to me. She was going to be unable to and powerless to do anything about that. She was protecting herself from my pain and the pain that she would feel when I was in pain, not realizing that she became the inflictor of the pain that she was trying to help me avoid.

The intention was well-intended but not well-received.

She was doing her best just like I do my best when I leap up at parenting. None of us is perfect and she was doing her best to love and protect me. However, it didn't have the desired outcome at that moment. We all have regrettable moments of how we show up. It’s because we love somebody and are trying to protect them, our own agendas can get in the way of how we're showing up.

Here you have this situation where you've been gone from being too much to being not enough. Your inner landscape has become a mystery to your outside environment. Now, you're in turmoil at this point.

The flashpoints at this point forward are I had massive amounts of painful plastic surgeries. Before I was even twenty, I already had 3 or 4 excruciating plastic surgeries to create on the outside what I thought would make me lovable on the inside. I went into massive amounts of debt trying to buy myself a life that would be lovable by other people. I did a ton of drugs to anesthetize myself but also to establish bonds with other people because that was a shared experience that I thought, "If I do what they do, they'll love me." There were endless streams of self-mutilation to crack the whip on myself and to be the enforcer that was keeping myself from being a threat to what it is that I wanted in life. It's heavy and beautiful because all of those moments are what led me to an awakening. I'm happy to share that flashpoint because that's a great one.

The one thing that is so powerful about this is that your story, although it is very remarkable, there are people out there who have gone down this journey similar to you. Now it's for them to know that they're not alone, that there have been people who have gone this path. They've made it through and they've been able to see that there is a better path.

Everybody has gone through this path, maybe not particularly taken the detours that I've taken on operating tables and so forth. Everybody has had moments where they have experienced insult or injury to who they are and developed strategies to protect themselves.

When we try to protect someone, our own agendas can get in the way of how we're showing up.

Most of the time, it does happen in youth because we are at that point where we don't have it all figured out. We don't have the strength.

We don't live in a perfect world. Something that I tell my clients so often is, "When you are so young, think of an infant, a defenseless, innocent, sweet little child. They don't have the resources. They don't have the power or the authority to self-source or self-advocate." What choice are they left? They have to squeeze themselves into other people's agendas. They have to hijack the values of the people who are getting their needs met for them. You automatically subordinate your who to someone else's. You adopt their whats, whys and hows because that's how you're not only going to survive in your environment. That's how you're going to thrive in your environment. You grow up and realize, "I'm wearing someone else's suit. It's too tight for me or it's too big on me. I've outgrown this. It's time for me to tailor a life for myself."

I'm ready for you to take us to the light, lift us up and see how this came to a good place.

There are two flashpoints. The first is I had gone through a horrendous break-up with someone and I was in big-time victim mode. I had found myself in a gaggle of friends where I was venting and feeling sorry for myself. I don't want to misspeak and say that the person who called me out at that moment was doing me a disservice but she did me a huge service. She called me out at that moment and said, "You love to play the victim. Where's your gratitude?" It was such a jarring thing at the moment for her to say, "You're acting like a spoiled brat." It was jarring to me and yet it shook me to my core to the point where I started going around and checking in with other people, "Is that true? Do I play the victim? Am I a spoiled brat? Am I this? Am I that?"

It was fascinating that what ended up happening was I had a breakdown/breakthrough where I went, "Something has got to change." It was at that moment that I started reading my first self-development book. The first one that I read was Conversations with God and then it was Ask and It Is Given. It was just I operated and assumed. All of a sudden, I became curious and started to question. That was when everything started to change. I thought that I had evolved, but cut to the second flashpoint, I was working in the entertainment industry and a friend of mine had said, "You've got to come to this movement class with me, this dance class." It was a pole dancing, feminine movements class.

I had been a dancer my whole life and I considered myself curious now so I went. I was still locked into my assumptions. Maybe I had gone from one-dimensional to two-dimensional way. I showed up to this class and took the class. At the end of it, I thought it was lovely. It was at the end of the class when the girl who had brought me to the class, who had been taking a class for maybe a year, the teacher had said, "The woman who brought you to class is going to get up and demonstrate this movement for you." In my mind, I was thinking, "Oh, God," because this friend who had brought me to this class was somebody that I had perceived, in my two-dimensional way, as an amazing human being.

I would laugh with her. I would cry with her. She was my bestie but she was not my sexy friend. She was not the friend I wanted to see get up and pole dance. If anything at the club, I was the sexy friend. This was how I saw the world at that time. Within 30 seconds of the song playing and her starting to move, the world as I knew it went and flipped completely upside down because not only was she now the sexiest thing I had ever laid eyes on, but if I hadn't seen that in the past, if that was a lie, what else was a lie? I ran to the front desk. I knocked people out of the way and gave my credit card and went, "I thought I was sexy. I have no idea what sexy is. You have to teach me what she has." That moment changed my whole life. I ended up quitting the entertainment industry, going all-in on female empowerment and I haven't turned back since.

What I love about this is it's not just about woman empowerment but it's about the fact that a simple expression of movement can move you in such a way. I believe that. It goes to show you that a simple thing like that completely can shift your perspective.

That's the key, especially as a Demartini Method Facilitator. I am a real believer that perspective is everything. The smallest shifts in perspective are what create the entirety of our worlds.

It reminds me back to, "One phone call can change everything."

One sound, one movement, one tiny shift, one small step for man, one giant step for mankind. It is something that has left me so open to the smallest moments being the greatest game-changers. They say it takes twenty years for somebody to change. It takes one moment, one choice, one moment of inspiration or desperation to change everything.

That's quotable right there because it's not just the inspiration as I often talk about like, "You're inspired to move in a direction or to do something," but it's also desperation that can move people in a direction to do something. You're like, "What do I have to lose at this point?"

There has to be a need to see something different. If it doesn't serve you, you're not going to do it.

In order to make a change, the pain of staying the same has to be greater than the change.

The smallest shifts in perspective create the entirety of our worlds.

We don't want to gain that which we want to lose and we don't want to lose that which we want to gain. At any given point in time, if it's serving our highest values, great. If it's challenging our highest values then that's information and we're going to navigate and pivot based around that.

We've covered so much ground. I'm inclined to ask what happened next but I sensed that you just moved into this field and you embraced it fully.

I did. I have not stopped in my ravenous hunger and some people call it the pursuit of truth. I am a seeker. I am a grower. I am dedicated to being the change that I want to see in my world and the world.

I want to take a moment and see if you could reflect on, what are the biggest things that you've learned in your journey that you want to make sure people know? What are 2 to 3 things that are so important as you reflect back on your story but also as you think about the work you do now that you want to share?

An important question, nonetheless. The first thing that jumps out at me is that you are the expert on you. I tell my clients all the time, "I could study you all day, every day. I can do nothing but focus on you from this moment for the rest of my life. I can not eat, not sleep, not do anything but study you, focus on you, learn about you and I will never know you the way you know you. I will never be able to make a decision for you." That is the beginning and the end of your power. Everything that is empowerment, this is the second piece of that. There's a lot thrown around about #Empowerment like, "It's about the feminine. It's about this. It's about that." Empowerment is about choice. Empowerment is about your ability to choose at any given moment. That's all empowerment is. Whatever happens inside of your skin, it's up to you and you alone.

When you say it like that, I feel that emotionally but I also feel it in the sense that it allows other people to truly see that it's not about us versus them or “This is only for me or my group.” It's about each person feeling it for themselves. It's empowering not because, "When I empower myself, I diminish you." It's about all of us empowering each other so we all are empowered. Would you agree with that?

I would agree with that. I would venture to say that a part of the reflection of that is and this could be number three. I'm sure you've heard the phrase, "Spiritual beings having a human experience." It's understanding that we are that and to harken back to the idea of complementary opposites, the yin and the yang and everything exists in equal balance. The soul and the body are complementary opposites. The soul is infinite. It's energy. It's neither created nor destroyed. It just changes form. It's infinite." Whereas the body is finite. It has an expiration date. The soul is connected to all that is. The body is separate. It is isolated in the skin. It’s separate from everything else that exists.

All these distinctions make the soul and the body opposites. However, the soul chose this body to serve it specifically in this life. They're opposites but they're complementary opposites. The body is the number one feedback system for the soul. The soul is the why and the body is the how. Our bodies are uncertain. They're polarizing. They're looking for, "Where is life? Where is death? Where is sustenance? Where is threat? Where is feast? Where is famine?" whatever it may be. Our souls don't operate that way. They don't understand uncertainty. They don't understand fear. They're infinite and connected to everything and they don't want for anything. The spirit in us is connected with everyone else. It does have everybody else's best interest in their own best interest and vice versa.

It's only when we're in our minds, which are part of our bodies, that we will not be in service of that. Only when we're in our bodies, animal nature versus our soul's celestial nature, do we start to get into combat or contrast between those two parts of ourselves. I would advise as number three to listen to the wisdom of the body that is here to serve your soul's why. Your body is here to have the experience that the soul wants it to have. That's why you're in a body. Your mind will lie to you. Your soul and the body cannot lie. Drop into the true service that your body is here to fulfill. Have some reverence for that body's servitude for its brilliance and wisdom as the number one feedback system for your soul. Listen in to that source of wisdom because so many of us live from the neck up and we're out of alignment when we do that.

This is so powerful. I'm feeling so much from knowing this and it makes me want to stand up a little straighter and be in connection with my body.

I have a teacher who used to say, "You have to think of the body as a gifted child." It's as if you were to name your body as if it were a gifted child, an innocent, sweet child who wants to please you. That's all the body is here to do is to please you, to serve you. That is its only job. Many times we take our bodies for granted or worse yet, bully our bodies. Our bodies are so brilliant. Think about all the things your body does for you on a daily basis whether you command it to or not. Talk about working overtime, to do nothing but please you. What do you give your body in return? Do you even listen to it?

That right there, in a nutshell, is what gets you thinking about all the beautiful, amazing things your body does on a daily basis.

Also, how brilliant it is. You couldn't think your way into all the digestion, the connecting this neurological wire to that spinal cord, thinking about the miracle of life and creating a human being for women out there. It's miraculous. The body is constantly sending us signals of things we need to pay attention to. If you ignore the little gurgles in a hungry stomach, they're signals to you that you need to eat something. If you don't, the body will escalate. It will start eating your muscles, you'll pass out and then eventually you'll die. The body is there to serve you. Ignoring it is ignoring the greatest servant, ally or advocate you have in your life.

What's one book or multiple books that you want to mention that has had an impact on you and the way you think?

The body is there to serve you. Ignoring it is ignoring the greatest servant, ally, or advocate you have in your life.

When you ask that question, my whole life flashes before my eyes in books. It's like asking me to choose between my children like, "What's my favorite?" I'm going to wing it and see what book comes forward for me because I'm being flooded with so many titles that have been game-changers for me. The one that's coming forward is a book that I read to my children during bedtime. It's The Little Engine That Could. Has anybody ever said that one before?

No, I love it. Please, tell me more about it. Why did you mention it?

I love so many things about that book, the messaging of resilience, self-belief, self-advocacy and the power of language. There are many gifts to that book. It is ridiculous. On top of it like the cherry on top or the icing on the cake. I don't know if people have ever noticed this before but it's almost a feminist book because all of the trains that say no, all of the trains that are not willing to help, all of the trains that are unhappy, unwilling, unable, not believers or contributors or anything are masculine trains.

It's the feminine trains that are the ones that believe in themselves and say, “Yes, I can. I think I can." It's the two female trains that collaborated with one another because the feminine has such a patterning because of our culture and community. In ancient times, the feminine was collaborative. The goddess culture was collaborative. In modern times in a patriarchy, it's very competitive rather than collaborative. In this book, it's these two women collaborating to get over the mountain to serve the children with what they need. It is such a complex and layered but simple children's book and I don't know. That's what came through for me at this moment.

My mind is so completely blown. I'm going to have to buy the book because I don't think we have a copy anymore. I'm like, "I'm going to have to go read this again."

You have to look at it through a feminine eye because I talk about perspective. We will take things for granted that we don't see. Awareness is our superpower. I say that all the time. Having that feminine eye in reading that book, I was able to see something that most people maybe don't.

I'm thrilled you brought that in. We've touched so much ground and there's so much more we could go through but we don't have all that time in the world.

There are more campfires in our future, Tony.

There you go. Thank you so much for coming on and bringing your brilliance and all your gifts. I want to give people a chance to find out where they can learn more about you. Where can they find you?

My website is my virtual world. You can find anything and everything will link back to that space. I invite you into my virtual home, which is at AlexisArtin.com. It's pretty simple and straightforward.

I can't thank you enough for coming to the show. I also want to thank the readers for coming on the journey with us.

Thank you, everybody. It's much appreciated. Thank you, Tony. What a brilliant time to spend. Thank you for this time and the gift that you're bringing to the world in offering this show.

Thank you so much.

Important Links: 

• Alexis Artin
• Conversations with God
• Ask and It Is Given
• The Little Engine That Could

About Alexis Artin