#584: Instant Joy Is A Real Turn On

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. Breathe. I'm Summer McStravik, and welcome to another episode of Flow Dreaming. Well, hi, everyone. It's Summer here. Welcome to Flow Dreaming. Today I have just a single objective for all of us, and that is to drop into the feeling of joy, right? Joy. Happiness, fulfillment, being really present in the moment. Joy. So I started thinking about this because, you know, lately some of the episodes have been about some tough stuff, right? Turning corners and being seen, interacting differently with the world. But it's not always about problem solving. Sometimes the best way to solve a problem is to create a completely different feeling and not look backwards and not see where it came from or why it started or how it's been going on for so long, but to just jump into the next state of feelings. So I was thinking about this. One of the things that I have my students do in MI school and in Personal mastery is when we fill up our emotional toolboxes. And in our emotional toolbox, we learn what all the emotions are and what they do for us. The positive aspects of every single emotion. Even toughies, you know, like anger, hate, unworthiness, they all do something for us. And that is what we examine. How do we find the most positive, beautiful aspect of every single one? And of course, then there are emotions that are just off the charts. And sometimes those are even harder emotions to work with than the tough ones, because, let's face it, everybody knows what unhappiness feels like. Everybody knows what anxiety feels like. But do you know what joy feels like? So I was putting together our topic for today, and I thought, well, joy, you know, makes me think of Christmas songs and all the joyful angels sing and joy, you know, big, you know, silver trumpets. And I realized joy, for me, right off the top has an almost unrealistic vibe to it. How often do I feel truly joyful? I feel content a lot. I feel happy a lot. I feel hopeful a lot. I feel loving a lot. I feel loved a lot. Those are all pretty easy for me to maintain and experience. I can even feel ecstasy, right? This heart rendering opening that I can bring up when I need to, when I want it. I'm sharing this with you because maybe you also have a few feelings that are desirable. You want them, but they're also kind of unreachable. And that's where I want to take us today. Into those unreachable feelings, starting with this concept of joy. So the only way in is through. The only way out is through. My students get so sick of hearing me say that. But it's true. If you want to find your way into joy, you have to go into joy. You can't step around waiting for joy to come to you, waiting for things to align in your life and make joy possible. Set up the perfect and right circumstances for joy. When we live like that, we end up in a really kind of passive mode of being, which is, if the right stuff happens, then I get to feel the way I want to feel. If the wrong stuff happens, then I don't get to feel that way. And the stuff that happens, well, it's kind of stuff that happens to me. It happens for me. It happens outside of me and enters into my life. It's a combination of other people and situations, all kinds of stuff in flow, in the way we think. We flip that around. We create the feeling, we create the joy. And then we ask life, hey, match me. I don't want to have to match you anymore, because what you keep giving me is a little below my expectations, frankly. But I'm gonna feel joy. So let's go back into this thought of what about those emotions that are just, like, too big for us to feel? What does that say to our hearts? It's possible for other people, but not for you. It's possible, but only under very certain and perfect circumstances. This is an opportunity right now to take some limitations off your mind and say, no. These feelings, I can have them. And I am not setting up these perfect little limited circumstances for them. I am not setting up these things that must happen for me to receive these feelings. I'm blowing open those doors. I'm feeling joy right now. What is joy? Close your eyes for a second. Let's just play with that feeling in our heart. When I drop into my heart and I'm doing this right now, I can feel my heart kind of opening, growing something around my chest area. Heart chakra gets a little bigger, a little fuller, more expansive. Usually this feeling, this joy for me, or ecstasy, love, they kind of swirl together. Not easy to pinpoint the differences where they sort of bleed over into one another. Because love for me is joy, Joy is love. Love is ecstasy, Ecstasy is joy. And then the other feelings start encroaching. The thoughts start coming in like, yeah, but what are you feeling? Joyful for? Do you mean are you grateful? Maybe you're grateful. I'm like, yeah, I'm grateful too, but I feel joy. I feel joy that I'm breathing. I feel joy that I'm sitting in a home that I love. I feel joy that I've been lucky and blessed to have two smart and handsome children. And all the things that we look at our lives and love, things we're proud of, things we feel grateful for, they give me joy. Now I'm really going into it right now and examining what is joy like? Is it a little bit of a lift? Is it a huge lift? Does it sometimes become really big and then settle back down into a pleasant simmer of happiness? Maybe. Maybe all this time my expectations of what joy is have needed to be adjusted. Maybe I experience joy a lot more than I ever thought I did. I just never knew what to name it because I had these outsized and bigger expectations of what it should be like and what I should feel. Joyful to me also feels like laughter. Lots of laughter, lots of lightness, levity, ease. That's also joy. Now I'm really starting to get what joy is for me as a being, as a concept, as something I want to feel and experience more and more. Joy is not just Christmas caroling in the snow. Joy for me is a feeling state I can dip in and out of anytime I want. Anytime I go a little above happy, anytime. Things just work out and break open like cracking an egg into a pan to fry it up, right? That open, blossoming, receiving. All is working out, all is well. That was really easy. Oh, that was a happy surprise. What if all of these little bits evoke little snowflakes of joy? What if joy is like that? A light snowfall, not a deluge, not a pouring down, overwhelming, gripping feeling. Oh, and now I'm starting to see. That's what I've thought about joy all this time. That's how it had to be for me. What if joy could be like these little snowflakes, these little peaks of happiness. Ease, release. What if joy is constantly sprinkled through me and through my life in all the little moments when I'm driving in my car and I look over at my daughter who's getting her driver's license next month, and I see how she puts her mouth in this little teeny little upturned smile, and I can just tell she is so happy. And in that moment, I am so happy. What if that is a little snowflake of joy? And now I start to think I experience this a lot. I experience this all through my day. I experience joy a lot more than I thought just by bringing joy down from the rooftops, bringing it down into my house, the house of my real life, my day to day. Now, now I'm starting to own it and claim it. See, now I'm giving myself permission to have it. Now I'm saying not only do I have permission to have it, but I've already been having it. And if I recognize it, maybe I'll end up giving myself even more joy. Starting to feel good? Are you starting to feel better? Are you starting to recognize right now that you have a lot more joy in your life than you ever knew? Yes. That's what we're going for today. So we're gonna go to a quick break and when we get back, we are gonna go into a little process to evoke pure, straight up joy. No matter what's happening for you, what's going on in your life, what you're sweating about, anxious about, worried about, fearful about, lack about, boom, let's blow that out. Let's just put straight up joy in there. Because it's not just about joy. It's also about learning how to replace your emotions with the ones that you want. So stay with me. We'll come right back with more flow dreaming. So I have a really important question for you. Me, school. You've heard me talk about it, mention it, and I'm just wondering when it might be a fit for you, when you might jump to the next level, which is going from maybe listening to the flow dreams and playing with them, or listening to this podcast and saying there is a next point from here. And I've been kind of playing around this same area for quite a while and I'm ready, ready to see what else there is. And maybe you're nervous and scared. You don't know how much it costs. You don't know what happens there. You don't know what will happen for you there. Look, don't be. Just don't be scared. Me. School is the most beautiful thing I think I have made in my life, but it's the most beautiful thing because I take you, really you people, just like you, into the program. And I take all the learning that I have been blessed with, that I have been mentored with, and I have been mentored and blessed with some pretty amazing people in my life. And my job is to carry this information forward, to then pass it on to you. And what we pass on is how to live well, how to Be you, authentically you. How to live into who you are, who you came here to be. How to find that. How to move through your ceilings and blocks and blossom. You know, you're probably looking at this next big chunk of your life and wondering what's going to be there, what's going to be in it? Is it going to be the same as it was before? Well, for it to be different, you need to start choosing yourself. You need to invest in yourself. You need to invest in your growth. You need to consciously say, I'm ready, it's time, I'm ready. Now. That's what we do in MI school. We spend that time and that's what we look at. Personal power, your ability to generate wealth, security, time frame. We look at your emotional self. Are you in love with yourself? Are you in love with life? If you're not, let's make that happen. It's just a question of whether you say yes or whether you say no yet again. So jump on over to my website, flowdreaming.com and you'll find there a link, a button, an image. There'll be something where you can learn more about me. Score and set up a time to talk with me and we will get you going. I'll share and answer all of your questions and hopefully be able to start working with you as you discover what your life is really there for and how it really wants to show up for you. So right now go to flowdreaming.com and just get your time scheduled for us to talk and think about may school and where you're going next. Just get it done. It's past time and now let's get back to our show. And are you ready? Welcome back. I do hope you took my words to heart and you might give me a ring, a call, reach out out about some me school in your life as well. If you're interested in this whole concept that we're talking about, this idea that you can create emotions on demand, that you don't need to wait for life to serve them up to you. You can feel how you want to feel. Grow that emotional power inside yourself. I encourage you to go visit flowdreaming.com that's where I have all of my flow dreams in the shop. And yeah, that's what every single flow dream practices. How to create that emotional state, that fulfilled state in any different area of your life. Whether it's to co create things and make things, enrich your life with them or simply to change how you feel day to day. Inside yourself. Okay, So I promised we're gonna do a little experience in developing joy inside ourself. Reaching right in. It'll be brief, just long enough for you to say, I did it. I did it. Close your eyes with me. Close your eyes and drop into your heart. Right there in your chest. Your heart. Think about all the things it's done for you today. It's cleansed. Your blood supplied oxygen. Your heart has processed emotion. Think about all the stress, the anxiety, the worry. The things that your mind has given to your heart as it was problem solving and thinking through and getting through work or whatever it may be you've done. Your heart has received so much. It's taken in so much today. But has it had the experience of joy? Have you given your heart a candy cane? Have you given your heart a little sugary kiss? Have you given your heart something to feel happy and excited and brilliant over? Have you given it that? Let's give it that. Notice how your heart wants to lift up, as if someone has tied a string to it. And all the way up at the top of the string, there are a thousand white balloons. Shimmery and beautiful. Light, easy. You can feel this beautiful soft upward feeling. A lift, a lift inside you. A lift as you think and feel right now, for a second, something that you love, something that you are grateful for. Something that lights up your heart, that makes you smile, that makes you say, oh, life is good. My life is good. What is that lift? Can you feel it? Can you let yourself bloom? That little snowflake of happiness just popping in there like little bubbles. Popping. Popping at the top of a fizzy drink. That's you. Those little bubbles of joy. That little soft simmer, that uplifting feeling. Does it have a color? Is it gold? Is it silver? Is it purple? Is it rich hues of magenta and hot pink? What is the color of your joy? What is the odor of your joy? The scent of it. Does it smell like magnolia? Does it smell like lilac? Does it smell like frankincense? What is the smell, the scent of your joy? What is the touch of your joy? Is it like velvet? Is it like silk? Is it like soft baby skin? What is the feeling of your joy? The touch of it. What does your joy sound like to you? Does it sound like the chiming of a beautiful old clock that you have loved since you were a child? Does it sound like the universal bells of the universe or of that church in your town? What does it sound like? The sound of joy as it reverberates and moves through you. Can you feel the reverberation like the echo of those bells clanging through that joy that moves through you? What is the joy now you're getting there. You're getting closer. Do you feel the joy in your body? Is the joy giving you shivers down your skin? Is the joy heating you up? Is the joy making your body tense and pay attention in the most beautiful and connected way? How is the joy feeling inside you? This is your joy. It is no one else's. It comes from no one else. No one else can give it to you. You are the only one who can create this feeling. It's all coming from you. And it's coming from you. Any time you want. Moment after moment, slipping in, peeking at you, opening the door, waving at you, getting your attention. A little more joy. Oh, and now you discover you have joy at dinner time. You have joy at breakfast. You have joy answering the phone. You have joy when you're slipping on your favorite cozy socks or night clothes. You have joy in moments and bits all through your day. You are a joyful person. Do you feel that? You're so much more joyful than you ever thought, than you ever knew, than you ever expected. Joy is your natural state. State. Joy is in your nature. You are joy. You are joy. And now everything, the rest of your day, the rest of your week is impacted by this joy. It's touched by this joy. It's beautified and grown up by this joy. Nothing is the same. All the downhill is now leveling off and uphill. All the wrong turns are writing themselves. Affected. Impacted by the joy. By your recognition of the joy. You are the joy. Such beautiful joy. And you hold the feeling. You are this feeling. You are this feeling. Second by second, moment by moment, all through your day, all through your life, you are this feeling. If you felt it, you are it. You are joy. Now go. Let your joy shine. And when you're ready, open your eyes. And that, my friends, is what it feels like to go into a feeling, recognize the feeling, embrace the feeling, allow the feeling, and kind of reassess yourself as someone different than perhaps you thought before. And this is what we do in flow. This is what we do as people who run their lives by mindset. First, action next. This is how I run things. And I hope you will at least try it out. All right, so this is gonna wrap up our episode today. If you liked what you hear, go back and listen to some past episodes of Flow dreaming. They're all right there for you in my archives, hundreds of them. Yes, things are a little different the further back you go, because the show has been evolving over a very long time, and our latest shows that we're putting out are kind of more like this quirky single subjects. Sometimes I talk about flow and flow dreaming, sometimes I don't. But every show leads you into a new way of thinking, so if you enjoyed that, drop me a note summerlowdreaming.com or better yet, go rate the show on itunes and subscribe to it. Please. Please pay it forward. That can be your thank you for a good 20 minutes just spent with me now. Okay, I love you all and I'll see you all next week for more Flow Dream a wrap for today, but if you want to keep things going, then download my free Flow Dreaming apps. That's right, there's two of them. The first app allows you to listen to this podcast anywhere you want on your mobile device, as well as search and favorite episodes. The other app hooks you up with my Manifesting Store, which includes an oracle to help you see what direction you most are in need of right now and advice. You can also sample all kinds of Flow dreams and put together a library of your own. So to find these apps, just search Flow Dreaming in itunes or on your Google App Store.