#586: Burning Down Illusions

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, hello, my dears. Welcome to Flow Dreaming. Here we are, episode number 586, Burning Down Illusions. As I said that, I just wanted to break out into Burning down the House. Remember that old song? Who was that? Was that Men Without Hats? Oh, gosh, I'm feeling old. So let's talk about Burning Down Illusions. What does that mean? Now, this topic. Illusions. Whoa. Wowzers. Huge, right? I could spend hours, I could spend an entire academic career on contrasting various understandings of illusions and different philosophies and religions. Illusions from a psychological standpoint, from a philosophical standpoint, from an optical standpoint, like, it's huge. You know, the very. The very center question, like the heart of the nut, of the seed of the all of it is basically, are we an illusion? I mean, that's. That's the central question. But we're not. We're not going to go into that today because I want to keep this short and sweet and I just want to speak into one aspect, one point about illusion. Sometimes I liken this to a crystal. You ever like a. Like a beautiful crystal, one that's been cut and it has, you know, 25, 35, 50 facets on it, and the light shines off one facet and you can see into the whole crystal, but you're only looking through this one little prism into it. And if you looked in any of the other facets, you'd see the whole crystal, but in a very different way. That's what we're doing today. We're looking through one facet into what does it mean to let go of our own personal inner illusion? So we're going to jump into that with you in this episode. Before we do, though, a new little thing I've started. You have been leaving me notes and reviews on it, itunes and in Google Play. And I really, really appreciate you guys. That's why I wanted to share another one with you today. It's a way of sort of paying it forward if you enjoy the program. This is your. This is your nod, your thank you card. Back to me essentially, is a review. So I wanted to share this one by Tim, 27, and he wrote, I've listened to the podcast since August 2015, decided to opt into me school. Yes, Tim, I remember you very well. You stayed at MI school for quite a while, actually. That was wonderful. And it's been one of the most rewarding and enriching courses of my life. What I love about Summer and her Flow Dreaming approach is its practicality mixed with spirituality. It's given me a means to modify my life that works. So if you have something that you'd like to share with me, please, please, and I may read it on air, share it with everybody, kind of get us all inspired about the work that we do. And that's what Flow Dreaming really is. It's the work that we do. It's the mindset that we apply and inject into our life so that we can, in fact, start to live a much better, cleaner, purer, freer life. And maybe I even have. Should have said. And, you know, it's not Burning Down Illusions, it's How to Reach Freedom. Maybe I'll still change the title. You never know. After I record something, I think, well, I make all kinds of changes. Burning Down Illusions to get to freedom. How's that to get to freedom? Because I've been obsessing on freedom lately. In fact, I may have to do a cycle on freedom. Remember, I did the Lack cycle a couple. What was that, a couple, like a hundred episodes episodes ago. I did a bunch on the Lack cycle. Well, what about the Freedom cycle? Well, this is the first step toward it. When we talk about illusion, a lot swims through our mind, right? Am I really here? Those basic questions I already brought up. We recognize that our own senses can be so easily tricked. Our bodies can so easily experience illusion, right? I mean, that's David Copperfield. That's. Every magician ever is relying on their ability to trick your senses. Even pilots, you know, when they're flying, there's all kinds of optical illusions and sensory illusions that their inner ear can't discern, can't pick up. They can't tell if they've been banking or if they're about to roll or they're going to a graveyard roll or just so much. So if your body can be that easily fooled, doesn't it seem like your mind could be fooled, too? Your emotional self could be fooled. Doesn't it seem like what you believe to be true about life in general, this complex system that you say, this is how it works, Isn't it possible that could be fooled, too? How could we say to ourselves, my body could be fooled, but no no, no, no. Not my mind, not my emotions, not my understanding of reality. That can't be fooled. Seems like that would probably be equally or even more foolable. Now, being fooled is not always a bad thing. I love magic shows. I want to go the Magic Castle in la. Anybody? Can anybody get me in? Is anybody out there a magician who can invite me? I love illusions, but I don't like illusions. When they start to limit my freedom, when they start to box me in from wherever I want to go next. And this is where we get that weird feeling like I'm ready for the next step. Oh, my God. If I had a penny for every time I've heard a personal development coach or person say, what's your next step? It's like, I would be a billionaire. But it's true. It's a feeling, it's an urge. It's a. I need to go there. Where? Where were you going? I don't know. It's not here. It's someplace new and different, somehow more satisfying, somehow bigger, somehow more. I don't know. If I knew, I'd go there. How come you can't? Because I think I'm locked in illusion. I think I'm locked in illusion. Well, what does that mean? It means that I know my life to be like this and not like that. And for me to change it from this to that. One, I don't know how. Two, I'm not even sure I could. Three, I'm not even sure what that is. My illusions are keeping me locked into my familiar ground. Because here is the key. You believe yourself to be right about your familiar ground. One of the big core teachings that my students and I in MI school go through is a technique I call being wrong. And I've mentioned it a few times. And if you want to know more about it, come join me in MI school. Right? We go deep. It reminds me a little, though, of Byron Katie's work. You guys remember Byron Katie? I used to work with her back in the day at Hay House and with her on radio and putting some programs and audios and so forth together. And what always struck me about her work, and she literally calls it the work, is that it was so incredibly simple. Basically, it's just a series of questions. Are you sure about that? Are you sure about that? What makes you think that's right? Are you sure about that? Until you reach a final answer, which is no, actually, I'm not sure about that. Then is it really true? You know, and as I recall, that's sort of like the core question for her, then is it really true? And eventually what you come to understand is, no, it's not really true. And the whole purpose of this is to help you release suffering. Because if something isn't really true, why would you suffer over it? It's very elegant and very simple. So when I'm working with people, teaching them flow, dreaming, teaching them different ways to think, right here is a new way to think. I'm going to hand it to you. What are you going to do with it? One of the things I hand them is, is this ability to be wrong. Illusions are straitjackets on our reality. Illusions are straitjackets on our reality. They keep us composed in a particular form. And this form becomes locked in, we become frozen in it. And we start to believe this is it. This is the only way it is, this is how it is. Nothing else can be right or true. But when something happens, when a thunderbolt in life comes down and smacks the ground and shakes up everything, we have a phrase for this. My illusions came crashing down. Everything I thought to be true was not true. And you know, some of the most icky ways, I guess you could say, is when you realize that the marriage was all. It was all false, it was all fake. And your illusions just rip apart when you are believing that life is fair and you worked really hard in high school and you should have got into that great college, but in fact none of them accepted you and you ended up at the community college down the street. By the way, community colleges are awesome. But it just shattered the. Everything that you banked on, believed and hoped for. The, you know, previous 12 years, your illusion of how things worked was shattered, right? I used to have the illusion that if you work really hard, everyone will see your merit and you will be rewarded, right? That is the American way. And then after I worked in corporate for 10 years, I realized that is totally ass backwards. You can work really hard, but not everyone will see your merit. You can do a really great job too and still be marked down because it's not fair. That's an illusion. There are other things at play. But when you get hit with that, when all that you believe and think just gets shaken, like, what do you replace it with? What do you replace it with? Where does it go after that? I mean, you've got to rebuild something because, you know, like earthquakes on quicksand. You know, that's the problem with San Francisco. They built on all that gushy, gushy land so everything just wobbles like jello up There, illusions are the same. We build them on gushy, gushy sand of our existence, and then we think they look solid, but all it takes is a little shake and there they go. And then what do you replace them with? What's behind the illusion? Now, this is where everybody wants to swarm in and say, well, this is the real reality. This is the nature of life. And this is real. And this is the truth. And this is the truth. And this is the truth. But you look around and you real. We're all sitting here right now believing our own versions of truth. And all of us are thinking none of us are in. I'm not an illusion. You're an illusion. We have all of our hands stuck out with our fingers pointing at one another. Millions, billions of people. All right, so here we go, back to square one. What happens when an illusion comes down? This, for me, is one of the only real, solid things that I feel is less disputable than others. Because when an illusion comes down, there is a real, clear emotional reaction. That reaction is. We all know it. Oh, my God. My illusion was shattered. This is not how I thought now what? And we felt that because these are often turning points in our lives, like, big turning points. Like, oh, my God, I am not straight. What? I've built my whole life on that. But I'm. I just realized that I'm. I'm not something else, right? And our lives now move in a whole new direction, and we look back and we say, gosh, I was living an illusion all the time before then. Well, maybe you were, maybe you weren't. Maybe you were actually living in a very solid, clear reality. Because all of our illusions seem real when we're in them. So in a way, you could say we don't go from illusion to illusion. We go from reality to reality, and our realities just keep changing. Now, we're really tripping down the philosophical rabbit hole here. I was researching how do other faiths, religions, spiritualities, philosophies handle this concept of illusion? And without spending, like I said, the next you3 decades relating it to you. I just wanted to pull up one because I really enjoyed this one. I found it on chopra.com and I just. I want to share with you what Deepak has to say about illusion. So Deepak puts out six ideas drawn from Vedic tradition, and I like them. I wanted to share them with you. First of those is the delusion of limitations of space. Right? And this is the idea that I am only here. I am not everywhere. Well, that's one of the Illusions that the personal growth movement, the spirituality movement, tries to break us out of all the time. Whenever it says we are all one. Your consciousness is not resting only inside your physical body, but is, in fact inside of everything, everywhere. And you're like, wow, I'm tripping out, man. That's a big thing. But that's a core concept. I mean, it's. It's. It's hard for our brains to take in because sometimes our brains aren't biologically wired to take in concepts quite that large. But that's the idea that your consciousness is inside of everything. Every atom, every molecule, every quark, everything. It is everywhere at once. But the illusion of life and physicality tells us, no, it's not. It's inside your own little brain and everyone else's is in their brains. And that's why it's so difficult to talk to people, because my brain is not in their brain. So we have to use this thing called language to try to get it across, which unfortunately is kind of, you know, fallible. But then someone comes along like an empath or a psychic, and. And they say, well, actually, I do know what's going on inside your brain. Well, how do you deal? How do you know that? Because I can open my consciousness to your consciousness. Because our consciousnesses are everywhere. And so one of our illusions starts to slip away. The illusion of separation. Separation from one another, separation from the earth, separation at all. Being separate is an illusion. When you start coming at life from that perspective, you end up becoming a much greater guardian of all that is. And you see yourself starting to care about the earth and care about the environment and care about each other more because they're not separated from us now. It's all part of us. If you hurt, I hurt. That's one illusion. How about the next illusion, the delusion of time? That there's a future, that there's a past, that there are even lives maybe stacked on top of each other, where you are forced to forget everything between them. What if there is no time? What if time is a unique measuring device that's not really there? What if everything is actually happening all at the same time? Everything, the past, present, the now, it's all happening concurrently. What happens when you get outside of time? That's kind of what you need to start thinking of. So now time becomes an illusion. Time starts to make sense as something that's a lot more flexible, maybe passable, breathable fluid, even though it feels so fixed. And maybe that illusion is starting to get little holes poked in it the delusion of the limitations of attachment, the illusion that you need to somehow become better and more perfect. And this is a illusion that a lot of us in personal growth are absolutely fueled by. Something is wrong, we need to fix it. We need to get better. And some people run to their doctors and some people run to their gurus. Something is wrong with me, we need to fix it. I need to get better. I am not already intrinsically whole. Well, you got to flip that around again. Of course you're whole. You're completely whole. You've always been whole. If there's a part that's happening inside you that's hurtful, that's painful, it's part of your whole. And yeah, you could say, actually, I just want to clear this pain. That's very different than saying, I am not whole and I am broken and something needs to be fixed. You are always whole. You are always perfect. What is the series of tests that you think you have to pass in your mind to get to a certain place before you're allowed into what? Nirvana, the Pearly Gates, Enlightenment, Ascension, the Pleiadians. What is it like if you have a series of things in your head that you're saying I need to do before I'm allowed to? What you're also saying is there is some cosmic guide up there who's checking off a list and making sure you're getting A pluses in your classes. And basically you have just put the whole human dilemma into the cosmos. And I, I personally would never, would never put the smallness of our, our human thinking onto the cosmos like that. To say that out there is just a replication of what we are here, just bigger in some ways, patterns. Yes. But when it comes to human forms of control and so forth, I don't know. Now again, we're sliding into philosophy. You can disagree with me, by the way. You probably are in your head, you're like, eh, maybe, maybe not. Look, the whole point of today is to think is to stretch your mind and say maybe I'm wrong. Because when your illusions start burning, it is the only time in your life, the only times in your life where you have fresh, open, clear ground when that lightning bolt strikes the ground in the forest and the forest goes up in flames, all the trees pop their seeds and that is how nature is clearing the land for the new growth. When your illusions burn and come down. It's often one of the only times in life when you are willing to and open to actually think or consider something different. And that is a Potent, potent thing that is corner turning. That is new path breaking. That is huge. Because usually we don't. We're comfortable in our thinking. We're comfortable with how things are going. Maybe we don't like it, but we're used to it, so we're gonna stay in it until something pulls the rug out and says, nope, wrong. You're just so wr. And then we drop everything. And when we drop everything, our hands are empty. And we can for once start asking, gosh, what if I misunderstood this the whole time? What if I'm actually not like that? Maybe I'm like this. Maybe I shouldn't be doing that. Maybe I should do this. Maybe this has never been true about me. Maybe this is true about me instead. And this is what we call the stripping away of our own personal illusions about ourselves and our lives. And it's not just bad things that can cause this. Great, beautiful things can also take our illusions down. You guys thinking, I know this is definitely not one of the episodes you should be listening to. Distractedly, you're like, what the heck is she talking about? Wait, I lost it about five minutes ago. In fact, I tell you what. We'll take a quick break and I'll let you just kind of cool down a little bit. And then we'll go back into more illusions. Why we have them and what they might be and how they serve us. And especially what happens when we start to let some of them go. And why. If you're going through this right now, this shattering of your illusions is probably, probably one of the finest, sweetest, most potent moments that you could be encountering in your life. Despite how it feels, despite the emotions that surround it, despite the fear and the doubt and the worry, it's a beautiful moment to be in because it's got more growth, more new awareness packed in this one experience than you would have perhaps Normally gotten in 10. 10 years, 15 years. So stay with me and we'll come back right after this. I have a present for you. It's a free gift. It's a kit that I created that teaches you how to flow dream in under 15 minutes. It's really easy to get. All you have to do is pull out your mobile device or phone and send me a text. Send it to the number 38470. Again, the phone number is just 38470. And then write the word flow F L O W in the message area. That way I can get your free kit sent right over to you, which includes a flow dream called Positive Flow for you to begin with working with, as well as an audio guide and a tutorial. Remember, this only works in the US if you're outside the country, go to my website and fill out your information there. And I hope you have a lot of fun with this. All right now. So coming back, we kind of left with that idea that if you are burning through some illusion right now in your life of how you thought things were supposed to be and they are not, and how wonderful a state that is because you have an opportunity for growth, I don't want you to confuse an opportunity for growth with again, that illusion of the limitations of attachment, which is I need to grow, I need to get better, I need to get bigger. Oh, and this dramatic experience is going to help me do that? No, this dramatic experience is just going to show you more of who you are. You're going to get to know yourself more. There's not a points or a graded, you know, teacher's notebook here. There's no grand Google Drive of the heavens tracking if you got through this experience on time. But what you're experiencing is a greater awareness of you. You're expanding your own inner understanding. That is the subtle shift and that's what tells you this whole idea that you need to get better and be more. Actually, all you're doing is waking up to the awareness of what you already are. And some people are a little more woken up and some people are a little less and they're playing small and mean and cruel. And some people have really woken up to who and what they are. And we pray to them and we love them and they're so expanded and self aware and we admire that and say, lead us, most of us, you know, we're somewhere in between, somewhere in there. So Deepak has a few others here. The delusion or the illusion of creativity, right? And knowledge. Meaning I can do this, but I can't do that, or I know this, but I don't know that. This is the. This is the understanding that there's some sort of separation between what you are and what you're capable of having, being or doing. And again, this is a hallmark of flow dreaming. I always say, what do you want to have, be or do? Why aren't we doing it? What's the illusion here that's telling you you can't. That's an illusion. Would you like to see through it? When will you be ready to see through it? You say, well, I can't because of this, this, this and this. And I say, okay, tell me when you're ready to be wrong about those things, then we can start burning down that illusion. Because on the other side of that illusion is where you say, oh, I can be, have, or do these things. And that is really the biggest focus of the personal growth movement right there in that little idea. One more illusion, though, that I'm particularly obsessed with, the illusion of fear. Just about all negative emotions come from fear. Fear is at the origin of them, the heart of them, right? Fear is an energy that cracks you open, that makes you do vile things, think vile thoughts, feel ways you never want to fear, feel fear, feel, feel. But fear is also an illusion. Fear is a concern that I won't be safe, that somebody I love will be hurt. Fear is, I won't get something I need, I'll be hurt. I won't feel good. Really. That's kind of what fear is, a worry, a concern that you won't feel good. And that single small thing, this concern that you won't feel good is what prevents most of us from doing all the most extraordinary things that we wanted in our lives. We do not want to suffer anything but suffering. So fear always comes along and says, can't do that. It'll make you suffer. Can't do that, you might suffer. Can't say that you might suffer. Can't feel that way, you might suffer. Can't go for that. You might suffer. And suffering, do anything, anything to avoid it. Now, is suffering an illusion? Let's talk about all emotions. Are they illusions or are they active choices? I choose to feel suffering. I choose to feel fear. I choose to feel happiness. I choose to feel delight. Let's instead look at emotions as things that we're choosing to feel all the time. I choose this feeling. I choose that feeling. These feelings aren't choosing you. You think that they are. Because often you're in a reactive mode. You're waiting for things outside you to stimulate the emotion inside of you. Basically, the world is leading you around by the nose. Is suffering an illusion? Now, we would turn to Buddhism and we would talk for another hour, but let's just say, are all emotions illusions? Are they like looking inside the crystal through the facet of this particular emotion, that particular emotion, they color. They put understanding onto the things that happen to us. There's an intellectual understanding and there's an emotional understanding. And we use these understandings to guide our lives. I want less negative feelings and more positive feelings. I want to create more positive feelings in the world through my word and actions and less negative feelings in the world. Right. Our emotions are our guidelines, our fence posts that lead us and direct us. Are they illusions? If so, they're useful illusions because we use them every moment. But are they fundamentally real? I don't know. They're part of our expansion into self awareness. So now let's pull back from this a little bit and talk about what happens when that illusion comes down. When you get into that space, right, when the Maya, the illusion has been torn and you can see through into something that feels different, it feels more like truth. The thing that you couldn't see for so long is now standing there naked in front of you. And your reaction inside your being is either embrace or fear. Fear or embrace. Now, I happen to think that embracing is pretty much the way to go all the time, no matter what you're looking at. Embrace. Embrace it to fix it, embrace it to correct it. Embrace it to love it, embrace it to nourish it. Rejection, on the other hand, is, no, not now. I can't, I won't. This isn't. And when you're rejecting something that's standing there naked in front of you, there's a good chance that that thing is just going to slip right back into the realm of illusion because you didn't receive it. You didn't receive the new understanding. You closed your eyes to it and said, not now, not yet. Let's bring this down to a real, practical level. And by the way, if this is your first time listening to this podcast, this is not atypical. This one is more atypical. Sometimes I like to get out there and really kind of just do a lot of thought exploration. And that's what we're doing today. But bringing it down to the practical, when was the last time you experience a ripping through of the illusion in your life? Because we all have some. We all have heaping teaspoons full of illusion in our life. It's kind of like that sugar that we use to make our life go down. And every now and then we see right through it and you can kind of spot it. Like right now, at least in me, my mind is dancing around like, yeah, I remember when I finally realized that about this person. And I remember when I finally understood that my dad was going to be this way and not that way. And I finally. I remember when it dawned on me that life wasn't just going to give me stuff. I had to make it and create it for myself. And I remember too, when. Right. You know, these fundamental shifts in what you thought is now different and the Reason I say these moments are where the beauty is, is because these are choice points where you're no longer on autopilot. You've been given an opportunity to go and feel and understand in a different and new direction. And whenever you take those opportunities and embrace them and say, yeah, like, just to use that example of like being with a parent again, I can tell you I've had so many friends and family and clients and who said to me, my mom, you know, or my dad, they were very cold, they didn't bring me up well, they, they beat me, they made me feel inferior to my brother. I just never felt love. And I'm so angry. And it ruined my life. And I would have been a different person if they had just done a better job. And then one day, this belief that they've been holding about how their lives were really tortured and diminished by this one day, this illusion gets rent into something happens, mom is dying and they're with them now, or they just grow into a new, more adult understanding. They had their own kids and they suddenly see it all different. And now they're looking at mom not as mom, but mom, as a wounded girl who was herself mistreated, who was herself locked in a marriage that was hateful, whose own life, she didn't get the opportunity. She never became the person in her career that she wanted. She was always told she wasn't good enough and she just passed it down by rote. And instead of feeling angry, you suddenly shift and you realize, I have so much compassion for my mom, it's just extraordinary, exploding in me. I, I, I just love her so much now that I realize this. And a whole big chunk of illusion just falls like an avalanche. And now your relationship with her is completely altered forever for the rest of your life. Like that. That's an example of an illusion just stripping away. If you choose to embrace it, you have that choice. You can turn in a new direction. And every time you embrace an illusion that's falling and you say, take me into a better place, like I want to go where I feel better now. What happens over and over. If you do this in your life, you really do get to a point where so many things in your life are now highly improved, better. I often say that manifesting co creation, flow dreaming. This philosophy, this way of living, this really empowered way of living is not an overnight quick fix. It's more a series of one good feeling leads to more good feelings, lead to more good actions, lead to more good choices, lead to more good opportunities. It's a gradual rise. You're going on an incline. And if you go on this incline in your life and you're thinking long enough, you will reach the top of the mountain. But it will feel like such a slow and gentle walk. You won't realize you've gone up 14,000ft because you just adopt this way of being so embracing the illusions that come down, even if they're illusions about things that you loved and liked, you're like, yeah, but Summer, I thought my. My partner loved me, and then I discovered they were cheating on me. Mm. We're letting go of that illusion. Where was the disconnection in this relationship? Where was the separation? Where was the thing you did not see? Can you open your heart to that? Can you embrace it, get clear on it? Can you find out what happened in that other person's life, the person who disappointed you that led them this space? They probably didn't want to be doing this to you or you to them. There's something rich and beautiful here. Can we find it? Can we get through the illusion? Because on the other side, you're going to discover something way more close to that pure love that you have been desiring and wanting. Maybe not with this person, maybe someone else. So I hope this has opened your eyes today. Hope it's given you cause to think, reconsider, kind of understand. It's really good to let go of ways of thinking, even everything I think now, everything I've shared with you, probably just my set of current illusions, the ones that are working for me. And I'm sure some of these will be shattered and rent into shredded at some point in my future. Because if I'm not constantly growing and revising my understanding that I'm not growing, I've become stuck and locked. See, I've just given myself ultimate permission to be wrong over and over and to keep growing for as long as I want. Growing into my awareness, growing into the objectives that I hold for my soul and my spirit and my life, which is to be happier, to be more at peace, to be content, to be joyful, to do good works. Because every time I feel those things, my body lights up, my heart lights up. They don't feel wrong. They feel so, so, so right. And any illusions that I need to get rid of so I can get those feelings, I'm down for it. All right, so I want to give you a suggestion. If you want to move more into this line of thinking and being and feeling in your life, I did put together a meditation playlist. It's called the Guided and Fearless Meditation Playlist. This can be found@flowdreaming.com and it will move you into the feeling state of allowing illusions to come down, allowing clarity to breathe through you and into you, allow guidance, illumination to shower itself into your life, to create a sense of fearlessness inside of you. And this meditation, these meditations, you can practice them in the daytime or you can lay down and fall asleep to them and just let them sink in into your subconscious however you want to do it. But do check them out. And with that I am going to give my love to all of you. Remind you I'll be back next week, same time, same place, probably for a much lighter, more fun felt topic. Although this one for me is just rich and beautiful. So I kind of. I really enjoyed today. I hope you did too. All right, so I'll see you all next time for more Flow Dreaming. That's 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.