Transcript 361: Flowdreaming: The Secret to Letting Go of Stubborn Life Patterns (with Summer McStravick)

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00:00:00 – Jen
You're listening to the Vibrant Happy Women podcast. I'm Dr. Jen Riday, and today we're talking about Flowdreaming. Stay tuned. 

00:00:19 – Intro
Are you ready to expand your soul's capacity for joy? Then this podcast is for you. I'm Dr. Jen Riday, and welcome to Vibrant Happy Women. 

00:00:38 – Jen
Hey, my friends. Welcome back to Vibrant Happy Women. I'm Dr. Jen Riday, and I'm excited to be talking with guest Summer McStravick today, who is the creator of Flowdreaming, which is a process where we energetically kind of daydream and practice being in the energy of what we want, and that in turn, attracts more of that into our lives. Now, there's something intriguing in this episode that kind of blew my mind, which is we kind of have patterns and struggles that we repeat. You've heard of the example of the woman who keeps dating the wrong type of guy over and over and over, and her friends will say, what is she even with him for? He's terrible. Well, that's a pattern. And Summer calls that kind of a life major. And I make the comment, how do we move on from a life major? And she says, we don't move on from the life major as much as it moves on from us. We have to get our energy and kind of our emotional capacity right in order to graduate from those patterns. I'm super intrigued by it, and it feels authentic and true to me. No matter what you believe, we are all made of energy. We are all vibrations. Whether you think it's God at the top or your higher self or source or collective consciousness, this episode is for you, because we don't want to be stuck thinking about everything that can go wrong, which is lack thinking. You'll hear about that in the episode. We want to be focused on having the capacity, the energy, the emotional patterns to graduate from the patterns we're ready to let go of and move on to what we do want. So you're going to like this episode and let me tell you a little bit more about Summer.

00:02:51 – Jen
Summer McStravick is a personal growth coach, author, podcaster and creator of Flowdreaming, which is an energy technique for manifesting, healing, and growing your inner emotional strength. Her books and podcasts have been used worldwide to transform people's inner emotional landscapes as well as their external lives. Her latest book is called Stuff Nobody Taught You: 40 Lessons from Me School To Help You Stop Being Miserable and Start Feeling Amazing. Summer has been teaching this stuff for 18 years. Previously, she worked for Louise L. Hay for a decade and created hayhouseradio.com. Find her at flowdreaming.com or through her podcast, Flowdreaming. Well, let's dive in. You're going to hear from Summer all about these things that she teaches that really resonated for me and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Let's dive in. 

00:03:40 – Jen
Hey everyone. Welcome back to Vibrant Happy Women. I'm excited to talk to Summer McStravick today, and she is the creator of what is known as Flowdreaming. So Summer, go ahead and dive in and introduce yourself and explain, what is Flowdreaming?

00:04:01 – Summer
Well, thank you for having me here, Jen. It's so delightful to meet you and chat for the next little while. I'd love to explain Flowdreaming and what it is and why I do it. And I've become such a devotee over the last 20 years. It's essentially a mind-body practice, mind-body-spirit practice that originally I started using it for manifesting and creating in my life, sort of like programming my future, talking to my future. Eventually, after doing it for a long time, I realized it does a lot more things than just that. I use it for healing. I used it for another way of looking at – it would be called emotional reconditioning – So I really focus on the language of emotions and I use it to change how I feel and in turn how the world responds to me. So it's partly a technique that I'm happy to describe to you, and partly it's a philosophy and kind of a way of living, which is to be in a state of flow or in a state of ease or non-resistance with life in the world and where we're all going.

00:05:06 – Jen
Okay, like what we all want.

00:05:09 – Summer
I could monologue forever.

00:05:12 – Jen
We want that. I want to be in a state of ease and flow. We all want that. So what's the easiest way to go about getting into that state of ease and flow?

00:05:23 – Summer
Well, okay, I'm going to scroll back a few years here and kind of give you a picture of how I started doing this in the first place, because that leads exactly to what it's like to live in a state of ease and flow. There was a time in my life when I was really trying to understand if I had more control, quote air quote, control over my future than just responding to everything that was going on around me. I was a mom with two little kids at the time, toddlers and in grade school, and I was working full time, really long weeks in a really demanding corporate job. And I just felt like most of my time was spent just handling what was being shoved in front of me and coming from kind of a woo woo background, a spiritual background. I knew that there was this “thing called manifesting,” which meant you could have some say over where you wanted to go in life and what kind of personal growth you wanted to experience, and, frankly, just what kind of experiences you wanted to have at all. So I began trying all the different modalities. None of them worked for me. Not meditation, not affirmations, not creative visualization. I just flopped as a big failure at them all. Until one day I kind of stumbled into this particular technique. And I'll just describe it in brief for people. Because if you are imaginative, if you have been accused your whole life of being a daydreamer and get your head out of the clouds and stop being so emotional, this is for you. This is the way that we talk to the universe. We talk to ourselves, we talk to the future. So flow. Dreaming in itself, as a technique, is something you practice. Kind of like you take your body to the gym, you work out your biceps and your biceps will get stronger, your muscles will react and respond. If you do a practice like this every day for your emotional, energetic self, it cannot help but respond, which I loved about it, because I felt like a lot of the other stuff I'd been hearing was just very think like this and stay in alignment like that, and keep your head in the right space. And I was like, are you kidding me? I barely can make it home in time to pull out some frozen food for dinner, let alone keep my head in the right space. But when you take these three parts of the technique and you do them together, and you practice them every day, you actually begin changing because you're pouring in new information into yourself each day that you're really consciously deciding on. So the first thing we do is we acknowledge that we all daydream. And unlike meditation, where we often say, quiet down, be mindful, be still, let the thoughts in, let the thoughts go in Flowdreaming. We're saying it's more like I'm going to unleash my imagination. I'm going to daydream. I'm going to let myself kind of get lost in that space. And it's interesting because daydreaming, as it turns out, and being in flow have a very strong crossover. Something I researched later on: Flow state. Like, we've all heard about it nowadays, but didn't used to be as common. There's a psychologist you probably know this already, Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, supposedly the father of positive psychology. He coined the state, or the phrase that you can be in a state of flow. But he mostly attributed flow to something that you did cognitively. Like, I'll get into flow around this certain athletic performance I'm trying to do, or trying to unravel some difficult thing in my head, and I got lost for hours. Or an artist painting, oh, it's been 8 hours. And he described it as kind of an optimal state of complete lack of resistance, where you lose track of where you are and even who you are, and definitely how much time has passed because you're operating at such a high level. So if you think about flow state and you think about daydreaming, in both cases, you're kind of finding yourself in an altered state of being. The thing is, most of the time, we aren't able to get ourselves consciously into one or the other. It just happens to us. Remember how I was saying earlier, I was looking for a way to not have life happen to me as much wanted to happen more to life. So I said, what if I start daydreaming? Release and discover what that flow state is. But instead of doing an activity or a thing, like perfecting my golf swing or whatever, what if instead, I try communicating the same way that I might try begging the universe for something, or praying? What if I try to reach into some sort of higher consciousness or my greater self, or just the bigger being that I am? Whatever a person's beliefs are said, what if I flow into a communication state? A communication channel with that sounded pretty cool. That's what I ended up doing. Thing is, once you get there, the question is then what do you do there? Like, how do you actually communicate? And there's a lot of gimmicky stuff that's going around last few years about manifesting. Write out your intention 50 times a day for five days in a row, and $100 will appear on your doorstep. That's not the way I live at all for me. When I am deciding I want to create something and I need to communicate what that is, I'm going to enter an emotional state. I'm going to be broadcasting. I'm going to be feeling the thing over and over and deeply. Now, when I'm doing this, when I'm going into the state, I'm losing track of time. I'm visualizing in my way in. I'm kind of reprogramming myself on multiple levels, right? One of them is an actual cellular neural level. Just like when you meditate, right? And they have studies that show the more you meditate, the more those new neural pathways take shape. You become more of that peaceful, aware being. When you flowdream, you're doing the same thing. You're putting new neural pathways in, and these are very highly attached to your emotions because you're not trying to release emotion, you're trying to create emotion. So if I'm practicing an emotion, everybody knows gratitude, right? That's an easy one. You practice gratitude every day. You end up feeling more gratitude throughout your whole life. As you feel more gratitude, more things oddly enough seem to come in for you to be grateful for a snowball effect. Right? Because what we are in the world kind of reflects each other, but you can do it with more than gratitude. You can do it with, I am wealthy and safe. I have all of my needs met. I have absolute freedom and choice, and I'm fully supported. These sound like affirmations, but I'm actually just trying to speak aloud certain emotional states. So I will go into this flow state and feel these emotions over and over, and then I become more of this. My being, my brain, becomes more of it. And if you follow me into the woo woo realm, my energetic being, like my soul, the big me that's capturing information all day long, also becomes part of this.

00:12:37 – Jen
Yeah.

00:12:37 – Summer
So that's the technique in a nutshell.

00:12:40 – Jen
I love it. I didn't realize I do this. I hadn't called it Flowdreaming before, but, yeah, communicating with God or a higher power, feeling the energy of what I'm moving toward. Yeah, that's beautiful. I love this.

00:12:54 – Summer
Yeah. A lot of people have said I've already been doing a similar thing to this. I'm like, great, now you know you're doing it. You can do it on demand. Go for it.

00:13:03 – Jen
And it has a name. Flowdreaming is easier to talk about than, I'm going to take a long bath and have my journal…

00:13:12 – Summer
Yeah. In fact, I always tell people, Flowdreaming is something you can do in the shower, it's like, that's my favorite time. It's a place when I'm already daydreaming instead of this time. I'm not just losing myself in a daydream and forgetting I'm there. Sort of like lucid dreaming at night. When you wake up in your dream at night, you stay aware in this daydream and you begin guiding it and feeling it. And the shower is the perfect place to start with this emotional gravity anyway.

00:13:43 – Jen
Yeah. So you sometimes call those repeating blocks and patterns we have as a life major. So what does that mean exactly? Because I'm assuming with the shower we can change our life major.

00:13:58 – Summer
Yeah. So life major is a concept that came up out of ten years of teaching a program called Me School. I've taken more than 1000 students through these year-long journeys. I'm not teaching Me School any longer because after a decade you kind of get done with things. Time to move on. But I took all of those teachings and I put it in my book, the video. You can see it back there. It's called stuff nobody taught you. And one of the concepts is when we are trying to create things in our life, we often stumble against what we think of as the same damn thing just happened again.

00:14:35 – Jen
Yeah.

00:14:37 – Summer
And it's always a different damn thing for everybody. For somebody, it's like I got together with the wrong type of husband for the third time and another person is, I got a great job and I lost it again and I'm back in debt again. And it's like, why do we all have such different kind of struggles? How come they're not like the same across the board or equal numbers of each? It's kind of a weird thing, right? Like, why so unique and individual? Of course. Our personality, our nature and nurture all of that. But if you apply this sort of spiritual concept to it, I tend to see it like, hey, we are growing beings and we just like a student who's entering college, they're like, I'm kind of into, say, psychology. All right, to be relevant, right? I want to learn about psychology. So they take all the psychology classes. By the time they're in their last year and they're looking at grad school, they're like, I never want to take another psychology class in my life. Oh my God, I'm so over this. Why does the college keep making me take more of these classes? As humans, what if we have something in us that we are deeply desiring to master? Individual, unique to us all? Some of us want to master feelings of scarcity and not having enough and fear. Some of us want to master being loved and knowing what really true, deep, heartfelt love is, as opposed to transactional or other forms. So we end up, strangely on these paths where we keep getting the same class over and over. And that is the point. We are mastering this, and we will continue until, frankly, we're so sick of it that we don't want to do it anymore. But being sick of something means you actually know it. Like you know it now, because that's why you're tired. You no longer have an effort to learn.

00:16:41 – Jen
Okay, I get it now.

00:16:45 – Summer
It's your life major. And the way that Flowdreaming plays into that is sometimes you're trying to really get through something. It really comes into play when you're healing, because usually your life major has some degree of suffering in it. It's kind of built in. That's the thing that keeps pushing you into the next thing or popping you out of what you're in, right? There's a degree of suffering. You're running from something or you're running towards something. So when you're using Flowdreaming for healing and you're applying it to an area of your life that's been really hard and difficult, what you're actually saying is, I recognize that this is the thing that I should be embracing right now and no longer running from embracing the healing, embracing whatever next quote step there is for me. Kids don't scream and kick when they're graduating from third grade to fourth grade. Well, some kids probably do, but we're all doing essentially the same thing with each new experience. So flow is going to be there saying, look, we're moving into the next phase of this. Are you ready? Do you want our help and support? How do you want to feel when you're in this phase? And do you have any suggestions for how we go about it? And that's where the quote manifesting aspect comes in.

00:17:59 – Jen
Okay.

00:17:59 – Summer
It's very complementary to traditional psychology in many ways, complementary to meditation and gratitude practice, many other things.

00:18:09 – Jen
Wow. Well, this kind of leads me to a similar related question, I guess, which is, how do you know when you're done with a life major and it's time to move into something else? You mentioned you were done with me. School, I think you called it. That was done to something else. Sometimes you'll have these desires. Oh, I don't want to do that anymore. Do you listen to those desires, or do you stick with it? How do you know when it actually you do get to let that go and, ooh, I'm going to do this now.

00:18:40 – Summer
Well, the truth is, a life major is more done with you than you know that you're done with it.

00:18:47 – Jen
Okay.

00:18:48 – Summer
In other words, it's often like, okay, if you've ever worked with somebody who – and I work with a lot of students and people just every day, thousands and thousands – there's a certain person who says, I'm really attracted to this partner. They're not really treating me nicely. It's very generalized here, but you know what I'm saying? They treat me like crap, but they're so wonderful and they're so great. They're so smart, and they're so this, and it's your friend who's doing this, and you're God, you know, Jesse, can you just dump this guy? We can all tell he's a total loser. Why are you with…, what do you see in him? And she's like, oh. And you cannot figure out what the attraction is. You'd be gone, like, in a hot second.

00:19:39 – Jen
Yeah.

00:19:40 – Summer
Think of it like this. She continues to have this attraction because there's something in there she's still learning how to work with. She's learning about herself. It's not learning so much about this person. She's learning about herself, who she is, what she's worth, what is deserving. Eventually, this kind of person is no longer attractive to her. She'll break up with them, and then another one will come along. Another. And one day, one walks in her life and she goes, oh, you're not attractive at all. And all of us friends go, yay. Finally you see it, right? But for her, it's this understanding of this is no longer sticky, this is no longer interesting. There was nothing in here to learn because I finally figured it out. I finally got it. And that's how we tend to shift and move through some of the big stuff in our life.

00:20:35 – Jen
So the life major is done with us, but we can impact the time frame by doing our work, I assume, right?

00:20:44 – Summer
Yes. Okay. If you think about most people, they're not even thinking in these concepts whatsoever, and they're just taking their sweet time. And sometimes they get to the very end of their life and they're just still quite negative and unhappy. And everything happened to me, and in personal growth and in my world, my becoming a happy woman is, I try to switch it around as often as I can. How am I happening to the world? And again, that's another idea in the flow philosophy. Most of us wait for the world to give us permission to feel the way we want to feel. Things have to happen. If this happens, I feel good. If I get a good job and I have money, I feel safe. If I have a good family and we're all getting along, then I feel peaceful. But what happens is, I call these power leaks. Because our entire emotional setup is now dependent on what the outside world either does or doesn't give us. And half the time, the outside world doesn't even know what we're wanting, right? It has no idea. Plus, it has no obligation. It's not its job to give us these feelings. Okay? So the term that I actually use for this is. I have terminology all built around all of these concepts, right? When we are reacting to the world, it's different than when we are preacting to the world. And this is kind of what defines the manifesting, quote unquote, aspect of it. When we're responding to all the stuff around us, right? That's the emotions that we're giving out. It's quite different than responding to the world. So I encourage everybody as they learn this practice to start thinking, have I spent 99% of my time today responding? Which means I'm just dealing with the stuff that's kind of flowing into me like a wastewater collection unit, right? Here comes the stuff, and I'm going to respond. If you take just 5% of your time, 1%, even if you just spend some time in the shower or whatever flow, dreaming, you're doing the opposite. You're actually switching. You're turning the table. I am responding. Here is how I feel emotionally. And the bigger picture this all leads to is we end up creating something I call an emotional, energetic blueprint, right? So again, if we go back to this idea of response and presponse, you can also think about action and physical action. And what's the other kind of action? Well, I would call it non physical action. So most of us go through life knowing about physical action. Get your goals done, make dinner, go to work, buy a house if you can. Physical action is pretty well laid out. It's like it's the basis of humanity. Keeps us all alive, but think we have light and dark. We have up and down, we have forward and backwards. We've got physical and we've got nonphysical. It would make no sense to only have physical and not have its counterpoint. If you're only living life in this physical way and your nonphysical life is limited to church once a week, you're not really utilizing this entire very potent aspect of living and science itself is moving into understanding this more. All the research are doing on consciousness, universal consciousness, the web of consciousness, how it all interacts, how our brains are kind of like quantum computers. Well, they are. In fact, they actually occupy quantum space. There's a little dip between neurons when information is exchanged, that literally moves into quantum space, into a net. Kind of like we've created the worldwide net, right? The Internet. And it's kind of just a replica of what we are. So when you're committing to doing this so called nonphysical action, what you're really saying is, I'm going to create a blueprint for life. I'm going to create it nonphysically. I'm going to create it. And how do you create something nonphysically? Right? You're like, well, I hope my soul's got that job done, because that's what it is, right?

00:24:54 – Jen
Yeah.

00:24:56 – Summer
Except in my world, they're very connected. It's not like one's here and one's here. I see myself more like when you play an entire string of notes, you got the low notes to the high notes. The physical stuff is the low. The high. High notes is the nonphysical, or the pure data, if you will, or the quantum self. So they're all happening all at the same time, and they're also all connected. Like the sound is all the way connected. So if I'm saying I'm going to non physically create this, and I'm going to go and I'm going to use my Flowdreaming to do it, what's going to happen is I'm going into my space. I'm sorry. I close my eyes often when I start talking about it, I kind of, like, drift into it myself. And I'm starting to suggest to the world these are the kind of emotional experiences I want to have. Not letting the world define what I get to have. These are what I am having. And think of it like building a house, okay? You got all these construction workers standing around, and they've got boards and nails and cement. And you say, go to work. Go to action. And they just start throwing stuff around. And before you know it, you've got 15 bathrooms and one bedroom, and it's a hot mess. If they had a blueprint, if they had architectural plans, they would know what to do. But most of us live our lives without that set of plans. We only do the action plans.

00:26:22 – Jen
Yeah. On a really practical level, I've found that when I want to have a very productive day, if I just go through the whole plan and picture it all done. It goes way better. So it makes sense that that works in all areas of life.

00:26:39 – Summer
Of course. Yeah. And that reminds me, like athletes, they're trained to visualize where the ball is going to go before you ever take the swing. Which is, in effect, like a very small, microscopic way of putting out that blueprint, putting out that sketch. And my sketches are always filled with pure emotion. That's why I create everything. Every physical thing that we want is actually just something we've sort of chosen as a path to get to a feeling.

00:27:11 – Jen
Yeah.

00:27:12 – Summer
So I always ask, okay, if I'm needing this, what's the feeling I think that thing will give me? Because that's what I really want to be sketching.

00:27:19 – Jen
Yeah.

00:27:20 – Summer
That's what I really want.

00:27:21 – Jen
We want things. We're actually chasing feelings.

00:27:23 – Summer
Yeah.

00:27:24 – Jen
It took me a long time to realize I thought I wanted a family trip to Disney World. But then when I paid attention to how terrible I feel in group activities with my family, like that, amusement parks in particular, I didn't want that anymore. It was so funny. What I really wanted was a beach, nature, all those things.

00:27:45 – Summer
Now you're sounding like an empath. That's a whole other discussion that we can have, right?

00:27:49 – Jen
Oh, yeah.

00:27:50 – Summer
Which is working with energy, receiving energy. By the way, I am terrible at theme parks, county fairs. I become the grumpiest person you've ever met in your life. I just tell everybody, just, shopping mall, shopping, shopping mall. Worst bombardment. And then I get really kind of hazy and lost, like, I don't know. I can't make any decisions out of us.

00:28:16 – Jen
My friend wanted to go thrifting. Like, she loves it, so we did it. We tried on the things, and then just real suddenly, I'm like, okay, I'm done here. So we always laugh about that story. I could only do 30 minutes of thrifting, and then I was done.

00:28:33 – Summer
Now, if it's a really cute little boutique store and there's only three people in it, I'm fine. But, yeah, shopping is the same. Like, how could you not like shopping? I'm like, shopping is fine. It's just shopping with people, that's not fine.

00:28:49 – Jen
In essence, Flowdreaming is all about kind of feeling the way we want to feel and then creating these energetic blueprints. Tell us more about what the trifecta of trust is and why that's important.

00:29:00 – Summer
Okay. Yeah. So as you're cruising along here, starting to think, I need to give a lot more attention to this nonphysical self and maybe start creating this blueprint by doing a practice, a daily practice, to grow this part of my life. So it's really strong and vibrant and rich and starts to create some leadership in my life, right? It starts to be important. But think about it. We've all had to go back to the life major conversation we've all had. A lot of crappy things happen to us. I hate to say it, but I myself have gone through so many traumas and reinventions and losses and deaths. When you're really starting to live your life, this is kind of a different concept, but it's related. When you're really living your life, it's natural that breakage occurs. It always does. And speaking of Disneyland or a theme park, when you are at Disneyland and you look around you, everyone's having a great time, but they're also messing that heck out of that park. Sticky little fingers on all the ride doors and candy wrappers blowing across the lawn. The place is a wreck by the end of the day. And I know this because my husband actually did a book for Disneyland. He's in art and publishing and he got to meet with the gardeners and they all do their work in the dark, after hours or pre dawn, before people come. And that's when the street sweepers come and everything gets cleaned up and shiny and made brand new again for the morning. I think about our lives the same way. If we're really living, we should be creating a constant amount of debris and frankly, wreckage. Right?

00:30:48 – Jen
Nice.

00:30:48 – Summer
You can't have the candy without having the wrapper. And most of us think, no, I do everything I can to avoid the wreckage. I'm like, then if you go down that rabbit hole, then you start avoiding life.

00:31:00 – Jen
Yeah.

00:31:01 – Summer
So I call this. These are points where our trust gets broken in all the different ways. And I break it down into three areas of trust and anyone listening, a couple of these areas are going to go, ding, ding, ding, that's mine. There's trust of self, trust of others, and trust of life or the universe or God. Trust of self gets broken when we make a wrong decision, when we spend money that we regret, when we tell ourselves we're going to do something or get through some cool program we purchased and we never finish it and it starts to stack up. I just can't have that anymore. I can't do that anymore. I'm not good with money. I can't do this. And we realize if we continue with that lack of trust of self, the potential things we can put in our blueprint are going to diminish by just falling off a cliff.

00:31:58 – Jen
Yeah.

00:31:58 – Summer
So we have to go into the rebuilding of that so that we can acknowledge it and heal it and move to the next thing we want to make trust of others seems obvious. Like, sure, my ex betrayed me. Right? Very obvious. It also can be my friends didn't support me when I needed them. It can be. Nobody even liked me when I was in school. I learned that I'm always going to be the odd man out and I stopped even trying. And I've done just fine on my own.

00:32:28 – Jen
Yeah.

00:32:29 – Summer
Trust of others where my boss will never see me. I never seem to get the promotions or recognitions I need. And you can see how this plays out in the way that you are now engaging with life as a result. And there's going to be, again, a certain retraction that comes from that. So when you're trying to say a blueprint, my blueprint is I feel super connected and loved and supported. I was doing a session with someone just before this and it was all about support and team. And I said, look, you grew up in an environment where you had no team and you had no support. You can keep responding to that in your energy and in your actions, or you can create something brand new and different that you've never had before. What would it feel like to have an amazing team of people around you who love you, adore you, who see your value, are so grateful to be with you? Can you feel that? She's like, well, trying to. I'm like, great, keep practicing. We need to feel that more and more because we need to make it true in you and we need to make it part of you need to really make that a big part of you now, because life is going to respond to who you are, and if that's not in you, then you're not going to get it. So that's where healing the trust comes in, right?

00:33:36 – Jen
Yeah, it reminds me of one.

00:33:38 – Summer
Oh, go ahead.

00:33:39 – Jen
Well, that reminds me of a friend who said, “how happy are you willing to let yourself feel?” It reminded me of that quote, which is by the practicing of those feelings in that state, you're training yourself to allow all of that and you have to practice it or you're going to push it away. You're going to repel it. I just wanted to add that thought.

00:33:58 – Summer
Exactly. Yeah. Again, another aside, it can be really weird to do what I call creating a feeling on demand, because that's what we're doing. We're creating feelings on demand, disconnected to anything and we've been trained to think that's wrong, stupid, and you're faking it. Why? Because if all I'm doing is still responding to things that already happened to me in my past, right? And if I'm projecting in my future based on what happened to me in the past, I'm really just reliving my past over and over in different ways. Because that's what I'm believing will occur. Because that's what already did occur.

00:34:35 – Jen
Yeah.

00:34:35 – Summer
I want something different in my future, and I want to have more say. So that's where you have to start practicing this feeling on demand kind of thing. And I love all the different feelings. We can practice God benevolence. We can practice intense, deep rooted security like nothing will ever be taken or torn from us again. We can practice a feeling that no matter what happens to me, I am still loved, I'm still worthy, I am still adored. No matter what I encounter, that can never be removed from me. We can practice any of these feelings we want. I know.

00:35:17 – Jen
What do we do instead? We tend to practice worrying about the future. People who claim you can't practice feelings on demand, that's all that worrying is. You're imagining something that doesn't exist and feeling something for it.

00:35:34 – Summer
Precisely. I call that whole genre “lack thinking.”

00:35:39 – Jen
Oh, yeah.

00:35:39 – Summer
It's where we brace for things. We can tip into catastrophic thinking. We can tip into generalized anxiety disorder. It's all just variations of lack. I am anticipating not getting something. I am anticipating it not going my way. I am preparing for that. And what is life here? Right? A lot of us have made a ton of that in us. Like, if you think of your body right now as holding a certain amount of emotions, lack thinking is like, 50% of most of us. All the other emotions are crammed into the other side. But again, our experiences and what we encounter with other people, and even just the opportunities that woo woo life or God gives to us, is responding to what it's seeing in us. So that's the inner work first, anyway. Okay. The last one, though. Trust with the universe. In brief, this is where we start saying things to ourselves like, never had a good relationship. I never will, I guess. Just not meant to have that in this life, or I've tried this so many times, it's always failed. I guess I'm just never going to have the support that I need or the resources I need. And this is where we actually assign what I call the power leak to the greatest thing of all, the thing you absolutely can't do anything about life or God or the universe as if it's sitting there saying, nina, nina, you can't have that. Not for you. And many of us don't realize we're actually thinking that, that there would be this life giving source that would say, you can have that, but you can't have that. And I'm not going to tell you what it is. You're just going to have to fumble around and figure it out yourself through a lifetime. That'd be such a cruel creator.

00:37:26 -Jen
Yeah. We'Re energetically ready to receive it. That it comes. Yeah, that's pretty cool.

00:37:36 – Summer
So we work on all these levels of trust because this is the stuff that gets in the way of the blueprint that you're creating. And when you have this lack of trust and you're trying to also practice this new way of looking at life and new feelings, if you're simultaneously having both, still, it's a clash, right? It's two forces coming against each other, a positive and a negative. And they don't go anywhere. Nothing at all. So we have to start unraveling that. And a lot of other teachers call it unraveling blocks, unraveling patterns, unraveling resistance. For me, it's like, well, we just kind of embrace and heal, and that's how we move through this. That's really what it is. A block is only there because it's telling you everything you want is on the other side of me. And we're going to hang around till you do that because you asked for it. So here you go.

00:38:27 – Jen
OK, but you don't always have to have blocks that major.

00:38:30 – Summer
Yes, exactly.

00:38:33 – Jen
Well, so this is great. And people can learn. Go deeper on all of this with your podcast called Flowdreaming, right?

00:38:42 – Summer
Totally.

00:38:43 – Jen
And you have a book called Flowdreaming as well?

00:38:46 – Summer
I do.

00:38:47 – Jen
Okay. 

00:38:48 – Summer
And from seeing your podcast, you and I obsess on some of the same themes, growing your inner power, your inner awareness and so forth. So dipping into Flowdreaming is very easy on the one hand, because, like at my website, flowdreaming.com, I should say I have these free. It's sort of like when you do a guided meditation. You can meditate on your own or you can have someone lead you through one. Flowdreaming is the same way. You can do it on your own, or I can guide you through one. So you can just drop in and start trying to do the experience. Like I said, it's not meditation. Don't expect to be lulled. Don't expect to be hypnotized. If you are, you're not doing it correctly. Okay. Hypnosis is going down to your subconscious. Flowdreaming is actually going up and out.

00:39:39 – Jen
Okay.

00:39:40 – Summer
Right. It's an expansive, connective kind of activity or energy.

00:39:46 – Jen
Go to flowdreaming.com and we can do one there.

00:39:51 – Summer
Yeah, you can download them. I have an app also where I've put together all the flow dreams. There's like 300 of them. And you can also get some free ones there and a free tutorial. But those are really great places to start to learn more. And if you're discovering, I mean, I always call it a bubble bath for your mind. If you want to add a practice in, that's a bubble bath for your mind that actually does something as well. Effective, you will love it. And you may want to go deeper. And then I've got more things, and I do live classes and workshops and all kinds of Flowdreaming. And of course, the books are good.

00:40:27 – Jen
Flowdreaming.com and then the Flowdreaming podcast. This is great. I love what you're doing, Summer. Thank you for sharing it with us today.

00:40:35 – Summer
Well, thank you, Jen.

00:40:37 – Jen
Right, my friends, you have an assignment, which is to practice feeling the way you want to feel so that you can graduate from those life majors you're ready to let go of. Now, this is kind of esoteric, I'll be honest. There are stories I've had in my life about my marriage, about my kids. And recently I've had just a big shift where I've up-leveled how I think about them and how I experience them. But what's interesting is, it also seems to have impacted how my spouse and kids show up toward me and how they're showing up in general. So we really can graduate from those life majors and move towards the ones that we want. We can let go of the patterns and move towards what we do want. So practice feeling how you want to feel. Do your Flowdreaming. Grab Summer's book and dive deeper to learn exactly how it's done. Go to her website and check it out. I think this is really an important part of being our most vibrant and happy selves. Well, I love you all. I will see you again next week. Until then, make it a vibrant and happy week. Take care. 

Outro: If you enjoy this podcast, you'd love Vibrant Soul, the place to heal, transform and expand your soul with like minded friends. Join us at jenriday.com/vibrantsoul.