Way Out #16: From Corporate Publishing to Soul Blueprints with Alisa Messeroff
If you are someone who usually prefers strictly logical, practical career stories—stay with me, and keep an open mind.
In this episode, we are going deep into the spiritual realm. Alisa freely admits that she is "so spiritual and so woo."
Whether you fully embrace the "woo" or consider yourself a healthy skeptic, Alisa's journey offers a universal lesson. It is a profound look at what happens when you stop suppressing the things that make you different, trust your own unique path, and fully embody the belief that "everything is always working out for me."
The Ordinary World is a "Box"
Alisa Messeroff was born with a unique gift: she could connect with spirit starting at just three or four years old. However, she was raised by a deeply overprotective mother who operated from a place of fear and told Alisa she was just making these visions up. Alisa stopped talking about it.
Wanting to fit the mold of normal society, Alisa spent her youth and college years terrified of her gifts. She would see spirits as outlines, receive visions, and experience things she could not explain. She begged the spirits to go away.
In college, she went to doctors, asking if something was wrong with her brain. Nothing was.
Her father was a professor and landscape architect. Her mother worked for NYNEX (later Verizon) for her entire career and “came home every single day crying” because she hated her boss. Alisa would later describe the pain of watching her mother live a life she wasn’t happy with.
Alisa’s mother is now in the late stages of Parkinson’s. “Disease is dis-ease,” Alisa told me. “There’s something going on in the body.” She says watching her mother’s life contract has been one of the most influential forces in her own refusal to live small.
She silenced her true self and followed the standard societal blueprint: she went to college, got married, and took a corporate job in New York City.
As Alisa shared now, “I think corporate puts us into a box and I am so multi-dimensional and multi-passionate, and you can create a life that you love and be everything that you are."
The Call to Adventure & Crossing the Threshold
The breaking point came when the corporate matrix broke its promise. Alisa was working grueling hours at Time Inc. (the publishing giant behind People, Golf, Fortune). She was the middle woman between domestic magazines and international licensees, negotiating photo rates. She worked into the night, pulling 12+ hour days back-to-back. She was making $48,000 a year with overtime and living in New York City.
She had been promised a promotion two years in a row. When the day finally came for her second promised promotion, her director looked her dead in the eyes and said, "I'm so sorry, I couldn't pull it off".
Alisa looked right back at him, said "fuck you," slammed his sliding glass door behind her, and walked out.
The next morning, she walked back into the office, assuming she’d be fired. Instead, her director pulled her into his office and apologized. But by this point, she was already checked out.
That night — or possibly the next, she isn’t sure — she turned to her husband Mike and said, “I’m quitting and traveling the world. Are you coming with me?”
He walked into their bedroom. He stayed in there contemplating for what felt like hours. When he walked out, he turned to her and said, “Let’s do it.”
“Rejection Is Redirection. Every Single Time.”
In her final goal-setting meeting at Time Inc., Alisa’s manager asked where she saw herself in five years. Alisa said, “In the Caribbean, sipping a margarita.”
“Be realistic,” her manager said.
“I am being realistic,” Alisa replied.
Six weeks after the promotion incident, Alisa turned in her notice. As she puts it, "Rejection is redirection every single time."
She and Mike sold their furniture, packed what they couldn’t part with into Mike’s mother’s garage, and flew to St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Alisa had pitched herself into a catamaran marketing role by leveraging her background, landed a spot on an all-female crew, and tacked on shifts as a hiking tour guide and restaurant hostess.
Just as she found her geographic freedom, she was hit with her greatest physical test.
On their last day in the U.S. Virgin Islands, Alisa broke out in her first hives.
Back in the States, they tapered her off prednisone. Seven days later, at a family dinner, a golf-ball-sized welt bloomed on her forehead. Within 24 hours, she was covered head-to-toe. Her tongue swelled. She developed what’s known as “moon face” from sustained high-dose prednisone. Her allergist told her that some people have diabetes and have to live on insulin; she would simply have to live on prednisone. Forever.
She and Mike were out of savings. They had not carried American health insurance. Three months and roughly $25,000 in medical bills had wiped them out.
Another doctor told her, “You could die from this. My heart goes out to you, but we don’t know how to help you.”
Alisa looked at Mike. “If I’m going to die,” she said, “we’re going to keep traveling, and I’m going to die doing what I love.” They went to Australia.
The Angel in the Caravan Park
In a caravan park in Broome, Australia, she met an "angel" named Lily who booked her an appointment with a naturopath. Four days after starting a protocol of Chinese herbs, her hives finally subsided.
Those herbs were not a cure — what Alisa actually had was alpha-gal syndrome, caused by a Lone Star tick bite she would not discover for another decade — but they gave her her life back. When the specific formulation was discontinued years later, she hired a clinical herbalist to rebuild a protocol. This fall, she’s enrolling in her herbalist’s full training course. (Remember that detail. It matters later.)
The Vision She Could Not Un-See
One afternoon, back in the States, Alisa was on an acupuncture table — her acupuncturist doubled as a life coach and knew about her gift — when a vision dropped into her head:
It was a residential neighborhood. A boy, seven or eight, brunette, on a bike. A large truck turning in. The boy going under the truck. The boy dying.
Alisa was seeing it from behind the scene. She was also seeing a date.
She called her sister, who lived in Delaware with her own young son. “Don’t let him ride a bike,” Alisa said. Her sister did not speak to her for a week. On the date in question, she stayed glued to her son’s side. Nothing happened.
Three months later, in Alisa’s residential neighborhood in Breckenridge, Colorado, a little boy who had just moved up from Denver was hit by a truck and died. The incident was quickly swept aside because the family was not yet embedded in the community.
Alisa went into what she describes as the darkest spiral of her life. Her husband, Mike, told her she was crying like she had lost her own child. She told him she felt like she had murdered one.
Her sister, by then a Reiki practitioner herself, asked Alyssa to visit and get her Reiki attunement. Alisa, again desperate, did.
She told the practitioner during the attunement that she had no intention of ever actually practicing.
The practitioner looked at her and said, “Yes, you will.”
Soul Blueprint
When Alisa performed her first Reiki session as a healer, it was on her sister’s friend, a woman she had never met. Mid-session, Alisa felt a shackle form around her own right ankle. She said so out loud.
The woman broke down. Her son had just been charged with murder.
Alisa no longer calls what she does “Reiki.” She calls them “soul blueprint sessions.” Spirit gives her fragments of data: images, sensations, and phrases. The client’s job is to help her connect the dots.
Twice in her life, spirit has gone further than sending visions. Twice, spirit has asked to use her body during a session.
The first time it happened, Alisa was terrified. She later found out the client on her table had been secretly suicidal, and walked out of the session completely healed. So when spirit asked to use her body a second time for a session with a friend, Alisa was confused. Afterward, her friend asked why spirit would do that. Alisa explained the story about her first suicidal client, adding, "But you're not suicidal."
Her friend broke down crying. She confessed that the night before, she had been sitting with a handful of pills, ready to die. Two years later, the woman called Alisa to tell her, “Alisa, you saved my life.”
Alisa is quick to say she is not the source. “I’m the conduit. I’m the middle man.”
Iribella
Before any of this fully made sense to her, Alisa did something called a QHHT — Quantum Healing Hypnosis Technique — session. The practitioner put her under and asked her guides why she had hives and how she could heal.
A being came forward who said her name was Iribella. Alisa had never heard the name. Iribella told her three things:
The hives will not kill you.
It is your journey to figure out how to cure yourself. The journey is the point.
In a future life, you will lead a movement that proves herbs will save humanity.
Alisa left that session furious. “I wanted real answers!” she told me.
Five years later, to treat her Alpha-Gal syndrome, Alisa hired a clinical herbalist. They began rebuilding her health protocol from scratch. Alisa became so enamored by the process that she is now enrolling in an herbalism certification course with her to become a practitioner herself. Years later, the frustrating vision finally made perfect sense. Every answer Iribella gave her had begun arriving.
Bali
This past May, Alisa flew to Bali to photograph a two-week women’s empowerment retreat. What happened there was, in her words, "life-altering."
Without Alisa saying a single word about her gifts, the local shamans and priestesses immediately recognized her abilities. They offered her a profound, validating truth about the illness she had battled for 14 years: she was not stepping into her full power.
"You're not living in your true purpose," they told her. "And this is why you're breaking out in hives."
During a Balinese offering ceremony, the retreat leader told Alisa to put down her camera and participate. As she sat down, spirit asked her a question: "Are you ready?"
Suddenly, the room completely filled with spirits. Among them was her grandmother, whom Alisa had not felt in eight years and assumed had moved on to another body. Her grandmother came forward, hugged her, and told her exactly what she used to say in life: "Calm down, Alisa."
The other women in the circle took photos of Alisa sobbing uncontrollably. The trip was a ground-shaking confirmation of everything she had spent her life running from. Her gifts were not a freakish curse, but a profound power she had to finally, fully step into.
The Life She Actually Designed
Today, Alisa is in her early 40s. She splits her time between Breckenridge, Colorado, and Tamarindo, Costa Rica. She runs 1:1 coaching programs, soul blueprint sessions, 9D breathwork sessions, boudoir and empowerment photography, and mentoring for women starting businesses. She made more in a single month in 2022, roughly $65,000, than she made in any entire year in corporate.
She and Mike intentionally spend time apart each year because Alisa wanted to know what it was like to live alone for the first time in her life. She is teaching herself, at 41, to be on her own.
Her polyamorous marriage, which she describes as “just the freedom to meet new people without guilt, built on honesty and communication,” has brought her more judgment than anything else she has done publicly. She has used that judgment as fuel.
Even her father, who was initially horrified by her choices, eventually saw the light. When he visited her early on while she was working on the catamaran, he looked her in the eye and admitted, “Alisa, I get it.” Years later, when she told him she was becoming a professional photographer, he warned her she’d never make money. She simply told him, "Watch me," and went on to clear six figures in her very first year.
When I asked her the question I ask every guest, if you had to pick, would you choose happiness or success, she did not hesitate. “My happiness is my success.”
Alisa Advice for Wayfinders
At the end of every episode, I ask my guests what advice they would give to people still trying to figure out what to do with their lives. Here is what Alisa said.
Stop Trying to Figure It Out
The question is not what is my purpose?
The real questions are: What is my zone of genius? What do people come to me for without asking? What do I talk about so easily that someone turns and says, “How do you know all this?” Start there.Small Aligned Actions Deliver Radical Transformation.
Your subconscious currently believes that safety lies in your paycheck. So any big, dramatic leap feels like a threat and triggers a full-body veto. Alisa’s approach, which she teaches to every client, is to take one small, aligned action per day. Small enough that your nervous system lets it through. Combined with somatic work like breathwork and body-based resets, can teach your nervous system that safe and new can coexist. This is how rewiring actually happens.The Swipe
Researchers say we have 60,000 to 90,000 thoughts a day, and roughly 90 percent of them are negative.
Alisa’s move: when a thought arrives that is not serving her, she acknowledges it, names it, and visualizes herself physically swiping it out of her field of view, off into the ether. She has built a mindset practice around this single gesture.
Follow Alisa
🌍 Website: alisamesseroff.com
📱 Instagram: @alisamesseroff
This post is part of the 101 Ways Out series: stories of people who found the courage to exit the status quo and build a life of purpose, freedom, and joy.
