#513 The Beauty of Creating Space

Flow Dreaming. It's a show where we talk about the power of your mind to change your world around you, to literally affect the fabric of your reality. We talk about this feeling of hope and joy and relief, and that is what being aware of your flow does. It gives you a feeling of power again in your lives. And that is what being aware of your flow does. It gives you a feeling of power again in your lives. Breathe. It is the feeling that you bring forward. It is your emotional connection that really sets the tone for what is going to be happening to you and for you. And you know that feeling when you touch it, it just spreads through you. I'm Summer McStravik, and welcome to another episode of Flow Dreaming. Hi, it's Summer, and a quick request before we jump into the show. If you like this podcast, the number one reason Flow Dream has grown is because of your reviews. People rely on your opinion, and frankly, they often misunderstand Flow Dreaming. The only way to correct that is through you leaving a few words about the program. So pop over to itunes or your podcast app and write a review. It means so much to me when you do. Now, on to the show. Hey, welcome, Flow Dreamers. How are you? Today we have an interesting show about creating space in your life. Creating time, in fact, using consciously creating shifts for ourselves. Shifts out of one way of hamster wheeling into something else. So get ready, let's go. I think I was inspired by today to talk about this because I was talking with one of my diamond students a week ago or so, and, you know, the conversation brought up this idea that we become habituated to certain ways of doing things. We become habituated to certain levels of stress. We become habituated to putting a certain number of hours in. We become habituated to filling our lives essentially to whatever capacity we choose to fill them toward. Now, I did a show a couple of weeks ago called the End of Capacity. I want to just get that off the table right now. Capacity, creating space. Totally different things, right? Capacity is how much you can hold, right? How much can you hold in your life without going into overwhelm? Creating space is a really different proposition. Creating space is this idea that I may have filled myself to capacity, but for whatever reason, it may not be working. That's, you know, obviously why a lot of us are doing our personal growth, because we're recognizing parts of our life that don't work. And we're saying, how do I fix this, right? How can Flow help me fix this? How can being in alignment help me fix this? So we get into this conversation of, well, how do I create space? Creating space in this case is meaning removing some things that are already going on in your life, right? Dropping out some stuff and creating emptiness, right? Just sit with that feeling for a second. Creating emptiness. Isn't that an odd thing? I mean, who in society, in our culture ever tells us create emptiness? The only time you're told to do that is if you're learning meditation, frankly, and you're emptying your mind, you're emptying your thoughts. Let's extend that. What if you create emptiness in your life? What if this is the best possible emptiness? This isn't because you're empty because of lack, or you've been abandoned or you've been hurt and you've retracted. I'm talking a very different sensation. The sensation of emptiness. Beautiful emptiness, right? White rose petals blanketing the ground snow, covering up all the grime of humanity. What happens in that kind of emptiness? Why is it necessary? Why do we need it? Why do we wipe the slate? That's what I want us to delve into today as we talk about flow and flow, dreaming, manifesting creation, the way our minds work, the way we ourselves live our life day to day. That possesses me, that idea. How are we living? How are we relating? It's almost as if I go through life with two parts of myself always active. The one that's the doing and the involving and the acting and the being and the relating. And then the observer who says, that's an interesting. How did you. Why did you pick to do it that way? What did that give to you? What does that mean? Are you freeing yourself with that or constricting yourself? There's this other part of me, the watcher, the observer. When we talk about creating space, we're actually moving from that doer to a bit of the watcher, a bit of the observer. Here's how it works. I'm going to use an example in case you're already lost, which is quite possible. Let's say that you have become habituated to a really busy life, right? I mean, work and then the kids, and then the kids are always sick, or maybe you don't have kids, but you're going to school and then you're dating, and there's all these people coming in and out and men or women coming in and out of your life. Then there's your family pressures. Then you got this work again, and then there's the going out, right? You just have this. You've adopted a very busy kind of energy in Your life always going, go, go, go, go, go. I know this energy super well, right? I'm not, I'm not making this up. This has been me, you know, 75% of my life, essentially. And then one day you go, I need a vacation because I'm burning out. I can't handle this anymore. I need to quit my job. I need to just, you know, ah, so let's say you schedule that vacation and you're on that vacation the first day and, ugh, the hotel room's not right. And, God, I don't know if I should have gone here. Maybe I should have gone, oh, and the person I brought with me is driving me crazy and. Right. You're still in that level of activity in your head, right? You're still filling every morsel of time. And often that's being filled with fretting because you've asked your mind, You've been demanding of your mind. Go, go, go, go, go. Fill it, fill it, fill it, fill it, fill it. Just keep giving me stuff. Keep giving me ideas, Keep giving me pressure. I'm used to this. This feels like something I know. Second day of vacation. Well, I don't know, maybe I could just chill out with a, you know, drink by the pool and a magazine. I don't know. I still feel like I should be checking my emails. Third day of vacation. Now my partner is starting to sound, you know, pretty nice to be with. And the idea of spending three hours doing absolutely nothing. Why not? I deserve it. I should be. I'm going to last day of vacation. We gotta get back. We gotta get back. Oh, my God, we've. I don't want to go back. I don't want to go back, but I've got to get back. I've got to get back in. I can't lose it. Okay, so this is what this is. This is a mindset I'm playing out for you of the person who doesn't create space and who, when they reluctantly force themselves into having space, has to take a good amount of time to get into that space. I'm talking about adjustment, but I'm also kind of trying to get you to look at a little bigger idea. How much space do you have normally built into your life? Right. Most of us, it's almost none. We have filled our space to the seams. We have stretched it to the tipping point. We don't even have time before bed. We fall asleep, tired. Or if we do have time before bed, we're emotionally, intellectually, mentally, creatively exhausted. And all we can do is watch some junky tv because frankly, that's the only thing that doesn't demand anything of us. That means that your amount of space in your life, probably pretty low. Now, why would you need space? What's the point of having it? What does it actually do? It feels empty. It feels like nothing is happening in it. Feels like you're not progressing. You're not, you're not, you know, implementing. You're not doing anything. Or are you? So I'm going to backtrack a second. I took a group of my. My diamond level students. Those are my students who I work with one on one as a part of MI school. I purposely held their retreat this year in Eleuthera, Bahamas. I picked a foreign destination. I made it kind of swanky, and I said, step up to the challenge. Create the space. Make it important. Is this important to you? You say it's important. Why don't you follow through? And I watched as some of them really struggled because if I had picked a, you know, an airport hotel, they could just fly in, be there a couple of days, get it done, fly home. It almost feels like taking care of business. It's justifiable. But when I make it swanky, when I make it foreign, when I make it feel like a luxury vacation, when I make it feel like that's something they're giving to themselves. Yeah, you deserve it. You earn that luxury vacation. Well, all kinds of stuff comes up. Why did I earn it? What did I actually do? I don't know. That feels like. That feels like too much of a reward. I don't think I've earned that yet. Wait a minute. My fellow students and diamonds are going, hey, wait, whoa. You see where I'm going here? I'm asking them, create space in your life. Yeah. You need a few extra days for this. You need a little extra cash for this. And you know what? When you get there, you don't exactly know what's going to happen. You're putting your faith out there. You're putting your trust out there. I'm asking you to create a space of seven days where anything could happen, Nothing could happen. You could change. You might not change, but I want to shift you out of the behaviors, the attitudes, and the thinking that you're normally engaging in in life. So this is kind of a different way of looking at a vacation. Right? A vacation is often. This is my relaxation period and then I jump right back in. Right. I'm giving myself a few days, and most of us, I mean, that's a luxury vacation. That's like a Hawaiian beach vacation. What about those vacations where you're just flying back to Minnesota to visit family? Right. That's kind of a vacation. But it's also activity, activity, activity, activity. There's still no space in there. Why don't we want to be in places where there's space? What do I mean by space? Space, the opportunity to wake up and have nothing planned for the whole day. Space, not knowing what will happen next, not having it planned out. Space, no pressure, no obligation. Space, the ability to be with yourself and to dream. Just to let thoughts drop in your head if you want them to. Not to find them or force them. That's space. Why does that frighten us? Why does it sound tantalizingly good? Of course I want that. Really. When did you last give that to yourself? Now. Okay. Some of us, yeah. You guys are good. You're like, I did that all Sunday. I didn't do a thing. I laid in bed. I read a book. I went outside, laid the sun. I could easily get in that space all day long. But not everyone is like that. Not everyone can just drop into space. Why do we need it? Here are some ideas why. Space is where life percolates. I love that word, percolates. It always reminds me of my grandma's old percolator coffee maker. And she'd set it up in her big, white old farmhouse and throw the grounds in. And we'd sit around the kitchen table and it would perk, perk, perk, perk, perk, perk, perk. And the smell of coffee would just waft through the room, percolating. Stuff happens when you percolate. Stuff happens. You can't see it. It's the seeping out of the grounds, right? You throw the grounds in and the water in. You throw yourself in and the time in. And something else comes from it. That beautiful, delicious coffee. That incentive, that inspiration to act and to be. But we often don't give ourselves that time. We feel guilty when we do. We feel like it's irrelevant or useless when we do. Percolation is critical. It's necessary. It's the time when we daydream. We stare at the sky. We feel our hearts. We don't know what will come up. We have no expectations for what will come up. Because if we did, then we'd start to get ourselves into that grind again. Something I told my students when we were in this trip together. As I said, you know, at least twice a year, I choose to do something That I have no idea why I'm doing it. And they all stopped. They were scribbling, you know, writing all these notes, looked at me, what do you mean? Why wouldn't you know? I said, nope, don't. Nope. I don't go into it thinking it's going to be for my business or it's going to be for, you know, my, you know, to get me better as a writer or any of my particular. Just, you know what? I'm just like, yeah, let's do this. It just feels right. It just. I don't know what I'm going to get from it. It's a gift to myself. I'm creating space. I have no expectation. And I've done a lot of interesting things as a result. Gone on retreats where I've wound through the Canadian woods wearing nothing but a bright hot pink sheet underneath a big pink silk dragon as part of a movie for a friend. I've done a lot of crazy things. And the reason I do them, because they break me out of the ordinary. They give me that place to percolate, to feel, to let something else in. What am I letting in? Well, think about this. Most of our lives, most of the time, we have orchestrated it, we have created it, we have made it, we are pursuing it, we are keeping all of those balls and bats in the air, these grand juggal of our lives. When are we allowing the co in co creation to have a little room, right? When are we allowing that? If it's always me, me, me, I'm directing, I'm directing, I'm, I'm creating, I'm making, I'm manifesting. Me, me, me, me, me. When does source have a moment? When does God have a moment? When I look at it like this. Imagine you're a painter and you've got a big canvas and you have filled every single square inch of it. It is packed. It is so full. Well, what have you left over? Where's the white space? Where's the space that's unpainted that you don't know what will go into? Where's the space that's a gift to you? Where's the space that does things on your behalf, turns you, molds you, nudges you, guides you? Did you leave space for that? No. You just think it's gonna drop into the middle of that daily scribble of canvas? Is that what you're hoping for when you're so closed off and on that treadmill, on that wheel? Just go, go, go, go, go, go to get everything done and get the groceries turned in on time and stay those extra hours at work. You think it's just all slipping in there. Now, obviously, if you flow dream, if you're devoted to manifesting, then, yeah, a lot of it is going to slip in there. It's going to be your daily heartbeat of intuition. I'm talking about something bigger, though. I'm talking about unplanned time, unplanned space, white canvas in your life that you're gifting to Spirit. You're basically gifting that to God. You're saying, this time is yours. This time is yours. You fill it, I'll participate. I'll be part of it. I'll initiate it. But I don't know what's going to happen in it. I'm really going to let you have this, and I'm just going to be in it. I'm going to listen in it. I'm going to hear in it. Notice how uncomfortable this makes some of us feel. We go, well, what if nothing happens? What if it's a waste? What if? What if, what if, what if? Do you not trust this? Do you not trust this process? Do you not trust that maybe there is an unseen part of your life, of yourself, of source, that would want this unpainted canvas for its own devices to slip in something for you, to nudge you, to turn you in a direction. You might spend seven days doing absolutely nothing, but you encounter one feeling, one thought, one new possibility in one minute of those seven days that then triggers something to transform the next 20 years for you. You made a spot for it to come in. A spot that couldn't get into you. When you were going from A to B to C to D. Now you're saying, okay, summer, but what about, you know, every Sunday I do that, or I take every Saturday off. I give myself. I have a practice in the morning where I allow this to come in. That's beautiful. It's beautiful. But I want you to go beyond that. I want you to truly create unscheduled life. Unscheduled life. Does that make you nervous? Like, God, I should be feeling that. Getting ahead, doing more. Does that make you nervous? Like, gosh, my life is already unscheduled enough. I think I'll just fall off a cliff. I already don't know. It's going. I don't need more of that. What's your reaction to that? Why? If it's a negative reaction, if there's fear, if there's, like, doubt, why, maybe could you Say, that sounds beautiful. I'm really curious. I wonder how I would be in a place of no expectation. Now, here's something else that happens. We get in these continuous action cycles, these motion cycles of our life. It's just stuff, stuff, stuff, stuff, stuff, stuff. And even if you have a beautiful, balanced life, right, maybe you do do your practice in the morning and then you do your work, and then you make a time for healthy meals. Maybe you've got it all down pat. Give yourself an extra new space to go into. Go ahead, try it. Push the boundaries a little bit. When you make a shift like this, what happens is you are consciously telling life, I'm shifting from this kind of motion and energy into something that is blank. And either the motion and energy you're shifting from is already perfect and awesome, or it's stressed out and crazy. It doesn't really matter. When you shift into blank, it's like shifting into neutral in your car. You're not driving. You're just kind of being available, being available. Now, when you're available and you go back then to what you were just doing, what do you think happens? You see what you were just doing very differently. Your perspective has shifted and changed. You're no longer in it because you just got outside it. So when you come back in, it feels like, oh, okay. You ever had that experience where you go on a vacation and you come back to your house after it's been closed up for like six or seven days and you smell. You're like, God, does my house always smell like this? What is that odor? And then you kind of think, God, maybe my house always smells like this. I've just gotten so used to it. You ever walk in someone else's house and say, your house smells different? It's kind of like that with life. You come back into your life and you. You realize, hey, this is. This is really different than what I. Was I really doing all of that? Was I really holding all of that? Was I really racing like that? Was I really that stressed? Oh, my God, I think I was. So when I go twice a year, I'm basically creating that opportunity for myself to come back in, look at my life and say, yeah, that was out of balance and I couldn't see it until I got someplace completely empty. Not kind of empty, I mean really empty. So I fill up those empty spaces with something kind of fun and irrational, right? Not for business, not for any particular thing. Maybe it's just something I'm kind of fascinated by, kind of interested in. Like, I Want to go to Finland? Actually, I want to go to Iceland. Why? I don't know. It just struck me. I don't need a great reason. I'm moved to, so I will. It's going to do something for me. I don't know what. It's going to be my blank canvas, or maybe it's signing up for a workshop or a retreat somewhere. Maybe it's a staycation at home. You don't have to spend money on this. Your staycation, what do you have planned? Nothing. What are you gonna do? I don't know. Sleep in, fix the lamp, do some embroidery, play with my dog, Be available for life, for space. Give myself that necessary buffer between the rest of what I do, my daily action and this. So when I return, I can say, oh, I'm seeing a lot of things that I never noticed about where I was before. This is really interesting. And, oh, Flo has slipped in some interesting new ideas and thoughts. There's some stuff in me, some feelings in me that weren't there. Now Flo has painted on my canvas because I for once lifted off the paintbrush myself, took my hand away and said, your turn. That's what I'm encouraging you all to do, right? Are you rushing to book it now? You online, looking up vacations, planning that staycation at home. Give yourself buffer zones, Create opportunities for nothingness. Don't treat it like a treasure or a reward or something. He he guilty that you're going to get away with. Instead, treat it like this is a necessary moment in my life that I need to have so that I can function to my optimum. Then when you get in that blank space, notice how you feel, notice how you behave, notice if you get restless, if you feel panicky, notice if you feel guilty, notice all of that. There's a wealth of information in blank space. It's a challenge. I'm throwing down the glove. Go find it. Go find that wealth of information for you. All right, so we're gonna take a quick break. When we get back, we're gonna do a little flow dreaming. By the way, if you like this conversation, if this is really intriguing you, if it's maybe it's even triggering you, right? Maybe it's making you feel like, oh, I don't like this. I don't wanna hear this. I wish I hadn't listened to this one. That's all great stuff, right? That's you saying, I can't afford space. It's pissing me off just talking about getting space that I can't have or. This sounds like the dumbest idea she's ever talked about. Notice those things. I love reactions like those. Gets under your skin. Why? Hello? Because we've been whispering. Now you're hearing and there's resistance. Why is there resistance? Can you go find it in the space? Anyway, as I was saying, if you really enjoyed this conversation, if you like where we're going with this, I have a suggestion for you for creating space, for creating empty in your life. I'd like you to check out the De Stress and Detox meditation playlist. It's a meditation, so right. These aren't exactly flow dreams because when you go into this space, I really just want you free. I want you free. I want you empty. So you can listen to this as you fall asleep. De Stress detox washes away the stress, washes away the do, do do B B more, more, more. Detox. This is emotional cleansing that I lead you through, that you'll lead yourself through. Releasing emotional debris that's kind of clogged you up over time. In fact, that's another way of looking at this whole idea of creating space. Imagine that you create so much, you're like a sink that gets all stopped up. You need to detox it. You need to release it out, unplug the drain. Create capacity, create space. Create an empty bowl of you. Okay, coming back right after this. Get ready for some flow dreaming. Hi, it's summer, but on break and I know that some of you are still wondering, what is Flow Dreaming and what is MI School? Because I refer to both of these quite a bit in my podcast. MI School is a transformational program. It's a gorgeous and deeply revealing, empowering online school worldwide where I teach you how to remodel your life in any way you choose, using the technique of flow dreaming as well as a bunch of other deeply powerful life changing processes. So me school is either enrolling or it's accepting names onto the wait list. And that means that I'm accepting students who work with me for the year. And you can learn how to do what I do in life. The way I think, the way I build things, make things, heal things. Everything I talk about you will learn directly from me how to do. You're going to create some amazing things. My MI schoolers. Their lives change way beyond the norm. And you don't even have to be a superstar when you go in. Some of you are, and you're ready to go bigger, play in that bigger field. And some of you are just saying, hey, help. What's Next. Where should I go? And both are fine. Both are great if you're ready to go big. But you know that you need to deepen your own spiritual practice and your personal growth, because that's where it all comes from, right? Then this is where you need to be. Your life only grows as big as you do. So here's what to do. Go over to flowdreaming.com and click on MI School. And during these enrollment periods, you can actually set up a free phone call with me or my staff and we'll talk about it. Is it a fit? Is it interesting? During waitlist times, we just put you on a list of people who've expressed interest, so we can notify you as soon as the doors open. All right. I look forward to hearing from you and even more, to getting to know you as one of my personal students in MI School. Now, let's get back to the episode. All right, here we are, back. Ready to do some flow dreaming. Every episode I have to mention, because there's always new listeners. Flow dreaming is not meditation, not creative visualization. It's not even hypnosis. It's its own beautiful, gorgeous animal. Learn how. It's very quick. It's easy to figure it out. I make it super simple by creating a little kit you can download from my website, flow dreaming.com. it will teach you how to effectively get into the flow state, how to emotionally connect and start communicating there. So that's what we're about to do. Now, if you don't know how to do it yet, not a big deal. Just listen along, enjoy it. Do your best. So we're going to close our eyes right now and relax. We don't want to bring any stress, anything like that, into our flow. So you breathe deeply all the way down to the bottom of your abdomen. And as you exhale, shoulders are dropping. And you roll your neck and you loosen your jaw. And you feel all the tension in your brow let go. You're ready to flow, to release, to be in a new space, to be in a new place, to shift from one gear to another, to downshift, knowing there'll always be ample time, life, opportunity to shift up again, to rev things. But for now, you want to coast. Create that empty space. And you can feel this inside yourself, just as if you were, in fact, some kind of car vehicle shifting down. And then you shift down again. And you shift down again. Until now, it feels like you're simply gliding, gliding through time and space on your own momentum. All the activity, the frenzy the packedness, all of it is gone. It's been set aside. Oh, it's still there. The obligations, of course, but they are completely set aside. You've temporarily released them. Like a rocket letting go of its booster and watching it fall back to the earth, you continue to to glide, moving on your own momentum, forward through time, through space, through your future, through yourself and through your life. You're allowing yourself to move into empty space. It's not been filled yet. None of your current obligations are here. They may show up someday, but right now they're not. For the moment, it's wide open. And all the co creational forces of yourself in your life, you can feel them hovering around the edges like a hummingbird's wings vibrating in the distance. Feel those forces of life, your future, co creation, your soul, your source, God, your guides, whatever you call it. You feel that. Are you giving that room in your life? Give it some room now. Feel yourself drawing open a space place for it. What will happen in it? Don't know. Maybe it will just be filled with quiet and healing. Maybe it will be filled with subtle new ideas, changing you, molding you, enveloping you. Maybe it will pull you back enough that you can see that the prior way that you were living was not exactly what you thought, perhaps out of balance in some way. You feel the space like a cool drink of water on a hot day. You feel the space like white canvas stretching in all directions. And you're not the one for once having to fill it and describe what goes in it. You're co creating and you're allowing and you're shifting in, fully shifting yourself, shifting your gears, shifting the level of activity in your life into this emptiness. Feels beautiful. There's no fear. It's beautiful to be here. It belongs to you. It's a state of mind, a state of being that belongs to you as much as anything else in this world. Why not take it? Why can't you take it? Can you take it? Answer yourself. Can you? If so, receive it, take it in, enjoy it, love it, say yes to it, embrace it. And in that embrace you find yourself now realizing it's time to return, exiting your daydream, your flow dream, having noticed and felt something pretty deeply, having made a choice or a decision to create space. And with that, you open your eyes. Returning from flow. Hmm. After we do a flow dream, I always feel like I don't want to say anything else. I just want to say, bye everybody. Leave you in that state. If you enjoyed that experience, do more. Go back Ask yourself plan. Don't make this just be something you listen to. When are you going to create some space? A day? A weekend? A week? A month? What's it going to look like? Do you know? You now need it. Why you might need it? What its use is, what its purpose is? I hope so. All right, my love to you all and I will be back again next time with another whole new episode and new topic of Flow Dreaming. All right, that wraps up our episode today. But before you go, two things. One, you can get the Flow Dreaming app in the Google, Amazon or itunes app stores. It allows you to search and sort to mark your favorite episodes. It's completely free to download and it gives you access to the latest several dozen of these episodes, as well as to the Premium episode library, where there are more than 400 episodes that date back 10 years. The app's free, so go download it now at Flow Dreaming in the App Store on your mobile device. And last, if you love my show, I'm going to give a shout out to my mom's podcast. It's called the Dear Venus show and she's an amazing intuitive and a medium and super, super funny. Search the words Dear Venus in your podcast directory or online and that way you can find her.