#587: Five Profound Acts of Self-Love You Can Do Right Now

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. Hi everybody. How are you feeling this lovely mid month? I hope you are ready to entertain some new ideas to expand your mind. Think about your consciousness, think about your ability to give to yourself, love yourself, create for yourself and and think about any of the interesting and you know, ideas that we may just kind of tumble over and roll through on this episode of Flow Dreaming. I'd like to point any of you, by the way who are new back to one of my earlier shows if you're curious. Hey, I thought you were supposed to do some kind of meditation in every one of these. Yes, I have for many hundreds of episodes. Recently I've been kind of taking a new tack, heading in a new direction where we just talk about kind of interesting topic for a while. So if you're here to learn about what Flow Dreaming is or how to flow dream, I encourage you to go to episode number four one six. That's four sixteen. It's just called how to flow Dream. And I do I walk you through the steps. It's the opening beginner's guide to what this is all about. And that means I don't have to keep reteaching the same information. You can also go to my website flowdreaming.com and I have a free kit there that you can download that will also teach you how to do this and get you started going in this practice which is based on guided daydreaming, strong emotion and this concept of flow and ease as a universal principle that you can fall into anytime you wish. So that said, let's get ourselves going today. Number 587 five profound acts of self love you can do right now. So this title sounds just like a magazine cover, doesn't it? Sounds like something you'd find in a woman's magazine. Five profound acts of self love you can do right now. But I wanted to just, you know, after especially last week's show which was very like woo, wow, she really went out there. I wanted to bring it down to again a real actionable level of what we can do in our life to create change right now inside of you. Expand you grow you get you really just feeling more content. And I know a lot of us had a stressful year. I sure had a stressful year. One of my most stressful years in a long time. And I was so good about not being stressed out for so long. In fact, I just put out a newsletter and a blog post about that recently. By the way, if you're not on my mailing list, you probably might want to get on it because I send you out information on the newest shows and, you know, other observations and fun stuff. But you know, it was a tough year because I discovered myself sliding into lack thinking, sliding back into ways of thinking I hadn't in a while. And it was because I up leveled myself again, right? I went for something bigger. I stretched. I went into that zone where I don't have all the answers. I don't know if this will work. I am just moving into it because my heart is telling me to. That's our grow zone. That's where life gets rich and exciting. But it also, if you're kind of going bigger and you're really, you know, challenging yourself can be where your old ways of being need a little more attention again. Because you've already cleared them out of all the easy areas, right? So when you try something harder, those old ways might pop up again because you haven't yet encountered them there as well. Anyway, that was one of the first of probably many digressions in today's episode. I go off in tangents all the time. Sometimes I meander so badly in a show I wonder you guys are even following me at the end. But you do, and I love you for that. In fact, I want to give some love right now to one of our podcast subscribers. Those of you who do subscribe to the show on itunes. Thank you. Thank you. This is one of the very best ways you can give back for any and all of the knowledge that you learn or hear. It really just takes a few seconds. But you go onto itunes and if you haven't subscribed, subscribe and then leave a review. So I call out one of my reviewers each episode now as an expression of gratitude back to you for doing it. And this time I wanted to give a big thank you to someone who calls herself or himself Mo Engineer. I don't know who the man woman Mo Engineer. And this person writes going for life challenges and need some inspirational direction to a better way of life. Flow Dreaming has allowed me to rejuvenate myself and has supported my well being At a time when life's challenges and being stuck in a major Ruth may have gotten me depressed. Since I'm Christian, I enjoy looking at flow dreaming as active prayer with guidance to reconnect to God, the universe and spirit and its flow. For my life and well being. Thank you, Sommer. I'm feeling love again. I was going to say live again. I'm feeling love again in my life. Well, thank you, Mo. That was a beautiful review you left me and I am very, very grateful. And yeah, as a reference to man, slow dreaming is for anybody, everybody, any religion. You can be Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, practice, any native American religion, Buddhist, even though that's not technically a religion, just anybody. Because it's about your emotional space. It's about your ability to connect, to approach life from a very different understanding and perspective, which is you create inside, inside you first. The world shapes itself up around you instead of the way most of us live where we are just reacting, reacting, reacting every second to whatever gets thrown at us in the minutes that roll through our days. In flow thinking, you are the most powerful thing in your life. You, you always have the upper hand. And if anything in your life took that understanding or knowledge away from you, we're gonna get you reconnected and right back into it. And sometimes we do it through tough love. Right? Some of my episodes are like, we're just gonna get in there and, you know, pull some stuff out. And other episodes are. And now we just need to do some float and flow and ease and reconnect because it's all beautiful, it's all good. Sometimes in your garden, you're pulling weeds and doing the hard stuff and sometimes you are picking the fruit and putting those seeds in the little gentle earth. It takes all of it. So five profound acts of self love. Welcome to today's topic. I want to give you a little direction for it. There is a playlist, emotional ecstasy playlist. You can find that at the flow dreaming shop. And if I remember, I'll mention it again at the end. I was inspired to do today's topic because especially, you know, as we wind up the year and we started, you know, start getting into the new year. Of course, you might be listening to the show whenever, but you know, people start buzzing and talking a lot about, you know, taking down time and taking vacation time, spending time with wrapping things up, you know, retrospective on your year. Where are you going? I need more self love. I need more boundaries. I'm going to do things differently. And I thought it was a really good time because the end of the year can be stressful. A lot of things Compound at this time, people get under tremendous money pressure because, you know, here, at least in the US there is a really huge expectation to spend, spend, spend. And then there is family pressure because again, we have a lot of our holidays, you know, coming in December. And family pressures are get together with them, see them, spend more money on those plane tickets, you know, put up with them, get through it, grin and bear it, get along. Oh boy, loneliness. If you don't have the family, you become more acutely aware of it. Whereas the rest of the months you really just kind of get by. A lot of things come together so it becomes, oh, and not to mention all the, you know, the flus and colds and things that start ripping around. So there's a lot that you hold in this last month of the year, which is why focusing in on your own self love and self care is the antidote. I mean, it is the only antidote to the extra pressure, the extra stress that you feel. So stop right now if you are noticing like I haven't felt really good. I haven't felt myself. I felt a little lower. My body, you know, has felt a little lower. My, my mental state. Give yourself a break right now. It's because you, you're, you're more burdened than you know. That's a good rule of thumb. You are more burdened than you know. I feel like a preacher. You are more burdened. It sounds like something a preacher would say. You are more burdened. However, even with those burdens, there's always an antidote, right? Sometimes life is a little tougher, but there's always an antidote. And that is what you can do right now to support yourself. So let's start with some of these acts of self love. So I really took some time writing, rewriting, revising, scratching some on, putting some off, reordering them because I realized there's a lot of things that everybody throws at you. Take a bubble bath, you know, go to the gym, eat better, get yourself, you know, some new clothes. I mean, just self love, blah, blah, blah. Do your gratitude list. Yes, yes, yes, yes. We've heard so many of these. But are there some acts that we can do that are so fundamental, so core that they become kind of the basis that you can put all these other littler acts on top of? That's what I'm going for. If there are only five, if you only have room to do five things this month, which would be the most transformational, the most life changing, the most soothing, the most healing, the most supportive, you could possibly do right. It's tough. It'd be like asking me, pick the five vitamins you could not do without. And I'd say, oh, I would spend some time. Would that be Coq 10? Would it be vitamin C? Would it be my, you know, other antioxidants? Oh, man. And then we'd probably all decide that it's a different set of five for all of us. So keep that in mind as I get going on this list. So first I started thinking about maybe we should pick something to love up each aspect of ourselves. Like something that's deeply loving for our body, something that's deeply loving for our mind, something that's deeply loving for our heart, something that's deeply loving for our soul, Something that's deeply loving for our connections with others. Something. And then. And then. Can you see what happened here? I started going through all the aspects of our life. Way more than five. I thought, okay, no, no, no. Gotta pull that back. That one's not gonna work for me. I said it's okay. Maybe I don't have to put them in each particular area. Maybe I just have to focus again on the core. And here, drum roll, please. Is what I came up with for you. For me. Number one. Number one. This is the starting gate. All the other stuff you want to do, if you haven't done this one, the other stuff's going to be harder. So that's why this one got bumped up to the top. Number one. Forgive yourself. Forgive yourself for all of your dumb choices, your dumb actions, things that you wish you hadn't done, hadn't said, hadn't chosen, things that hurt other people, things that diminished your expectations for yourself. Everything from I was so stupid that I didn't go to college to, gosh, last week I forgot to tip someone, and I wonder if they're still upset about it. You know what? Forgive yourself for that. The big things, the little things, these are things from your past. Yeah, they might still have ramifications for your future, but you don't need to live in them anymore. As long as you're going backwards and regretting them and still feeling pain for them, you are still living them. You are living things that you did and chose five years ago, ten years ago. When are you gonna give yourself a break and stop living those things? I mean, wasn't living it once in the moment kind of enough? But if you're carrying it, you're still living it at a certain time. You have to snip the thread. You can't go any Further, think of it like there's a rubber band, a giant universe rubber band. And your body is in one side of it and the other side of the rubber band is around that thing that you reg, that you're ashamed of, that you wish you hadn't chosen the path not taken. And the further you try to go into your future, the more that rubber band gets stretched until eventually what happens? Can't stretch anymore. You can't go any further forward until you let go. And letting go means either you let go on your end and you snap all the way back and go back to it, or you let go of the thing that's way back behind you so that you're fresh and you can stay where you are, heading into your future life and self. There was a great episode. I did all about this concept. It was number 563, backwards looking girl. Backwards looking girl. It's a hard one to say. Number 563, go check it out. It should be there in my archives. And by the way, if I ever mention a show that you can't find either on inflow radio or in itunes, I have an app. You can download it from the app Store in Google Play or on your iPhone or iPad. And it contains all of my archives all the way back, all five, almost 600 of them. So you can grab that too. There is a little charge for that. It's not very much though. A few bucks. Okay, so forgive yourself for all your dumb choices and actions. As long as you're holding on to that, you are preventing yourself each month, each day a little bit from moving fully into who you can become. Now, that is the most self loving thing you can do. Okay? It doesn't mean that you're saying that you were actually a good person or that what you did was right. You can still acknowledge it was wrong, but you can finally put it down. So put it down. If you want to be a really good person in the future, you got to put it down. You can't be burdened by that. So here is your action that I want you to take. Now that you know what to do, here is a how to do it. I'd like you to write a letter to yourself as if it were coming from a YouTube 20 years from now. 20 years from now, what would the you who's 20 years older be saying about the thing you're trying to let go of and forgive yourself around? Do you think the 20 years in the future you will have let go of it? And will they be happy that you Were able to let go of it. And what happens since? Spend some time. Write it down. It's gonna help. All right, number two. Give your heart the lead. Ooh, tough one for some of us. Tough one for many of us. Give your heart the lead. What do I mean by that? It means let your heart be right for once. So a lot of us have gotten trapped in either one or two of these pitfalls. Either we let our heart be right or we let our heart lead so much that it led us into all kinds of emotional messes and bad relationships and bad choices that we said to our heart, no way. You spent too much money, you slept with too many people. You know, you got abused and rolled over and run over too much. I'm never letting you have any say so again. And you shut your heart down or you were the other person. I don't really trust you heart. I mean, I've never really let you lead. I always make decisions in my mind and I try and think it through because my heart. I don't know where you're going to lead me, but it never really makes sense. I don't understand you or get you. And when I have let you lead, you're never really sure where we're going. And that makes me nervous. I mean, maybe that's how you relate one of the two ways. Perhaps you relate to your heart. So this head and heart conversation is much bigger and deeper. In fact, I spend an entire segment of me school going into the conversation these two parts of us have. And who wins control, who wins the game. I find, though, that most people do not lead with their heart because they've either damaged their belief in their heart or they never gave much belief to their heart in the first place. So the heart is the silent, you know, sad whisperer in the back of you. And your mind keeps telling the heart, I'm doing this all for you, babe. I'm doing it for you. But the heart is like, yeah, but you're not letting me actually out. You're not giving me any freedom. Yeah, babe, but I'm doing it for you. That's your head speaking. So here's what you do. Let your heart be right. Pick one thing, choose one thing. Allow it to make one choice. Not based on logic, not based on, well, you did that already. I'm not going to let you do it again. Let your heart make a choice. Don't let your head censor it. Let your heart go for it again. This can be small. It can be. I'm going to you know, buy flowers for my house every single week this month because it makes me feel good. And it might seem illogical, but maybe something really good will come of it. Maybe it will inspire me and lift my depression. And who knew? Or it could be something even bigger. My heart says it's time for me to leave. I need to let go of this job, this person, this city, this house. My heart just says so, and I'm gonna stop fighting what it's saying. All right, you guys enjoying this so far? I've got three more bad boys for you, so I want you to stay with me. We're gonna go take a quick break. When we come back, the three other things you must do. The most profound things you can do right now to regenerate, to grow, to deepen your self love. And doing this removes stress, releases toxicity, clears your mind, and it's just gonna set you up for whatever comes next. So stay with me. Imagine if there were a store where you could walk down the aisle and pop some self love into your basket. Or how about tons of clients? Or maybe you're more in the mood for some relationship repair. Or how about more money monthly? These are all flow dreams and you can literally put them in your basket. You can use them, feel them, take them inside you and become them. Become these things inside so that the universe starts offering them to you on the outside in your life. You tell the universe who you are by feeling it first. You can find all of these flow dreams. I have more than 100 of them. They're@flowdreaming.com in my shop. Browse through, pick the things that you want to become and put them in your cart. Now you can find the flow Dreaming shop both on a regular computer as well as on your mobile device. On your mobile device, you can either use your browser to go to flowdreaming.com or you can download my free app where you can browse through, listen to samples of all of the flow dreams that I've just been talking about. So go check them out, choose a few playlists, get started, Pick up my free kit that teaches you how to flow dream while you're at it. And that way you can really get started changing your life. Now let's get back to the program. All right, you guys, welcome back. By the way, quick little note. I am looking for some private students right now who want to work with me in the year ahead. By looking, what I mean is some of you have been thinking about it, you've been thinking about me school, but you're also more curious and wondering what we might be able to do together to transform your life next year. The answer is a ton. Just reach out to me. Summerlowdreaming.com I am not always looking for private students because I'm often way too full. But now and again, openings arise and that is your moment to slip in and say, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me. I've been waiting. All right, number three, let's get on with this list. Give your life some emotional direction. Now, how is that self loving? What does that mean? Well, so many of us live our lives with zero emotional direction. We make plans. Hey, what are your plans for the weekend? Oh, my plans are I've got to do the laundry and then I'm going to take the dog, you know, out for a run on the beach. And then, you know, I've got to help my kids with some homework and you know what I mean? Those are the plans. That's really the extent of what we tell our life. And then there's other stuff. You know, as we're laying in bed at night and staring at the ceiling, we're saying things like, gosh, you know, I wish I made more money and oh God, I wish I could, you know, fix this relationship with my sister. And okay. And so you have this set of wishes. They're not really plans though, because you don't actually have an executable plan to do those things. Things your plans are, I'm going to take the dog to the beach and you know, I'm going to get my laundry done and. Right. This is just like taking care of the basics. This is just functional living. But really profound self love says go beyond functional living. What emotional direction are you going to give your life? What is that? Well, in flow dreaming, we talk a ton about emotional end points. What are you doing all this stuff for? What does taking your dog to the beach do for you? Well, it's all for my dog. My dog needs to exercise and meet other dogs and socialize. Okay, but it's also doing something for you. Why are you doing that for your dog? What's it doing for you? Well, it's making me feel like I'm a good person. I'm being a good dog owner. What else is it doing for you? It's making me feel good and happy about myself. Ah, now we're getting there. So the emotional endpoint that you're going for, the whole deepest reason for taking your dog to the beach is I like feeling good about myself and I want to do things that make me feel good about myself. Now we know what your emotional endpoint is, right? I'm going to do the laundry. I'm gonna wash some clothes. Why? Because I need to. Or I'll smell bad when I put them on and I'll look bad. Why? Well, I don't want to look bad or smell bad. I want to look good. Why? Because when I look good, I feel more positive and better about myself. I want people to see me as someone who, you know, has a certain way of coming across. Why? Because if they see me that way, it makes me feel good about myself. Now we're getting there. Again. You're doing the laundry because you don't want people to think poorly of you. Because if they do, then you'll think poorly of yourself. Your emotional endpoint is I want to feel good about myself. So I'm gonna take care of things in my environment that help me feel good about myself. My emotional endpoint is again, to feel good about myself. Pretty much everything you're doing right now has an emotional endpoint. Your job is to discover what it is. What are you going for most of the time? Now the next level is give your life this emotional direction. If you know what these things are generally going for, these feelings you generally are reaching for, why not still start telling your life instead? We're gonna take the dog out and do the laundry. Why not instead say, hey, life, I'm gonna give you some emotional direction. Here's how I wanna feel. I want to feel really good about myself. I want to feel content that I'm a good person. I want to feel proud of myself. I want to be in a state of joy. Ah. Now your life has an overall agenda. It has a directive. You guys ever been at work and they bring you into those classes where suddenly you've got to create your mission statement and everybody's got to come up with the values and core values of the work and company. And everybody just rolls their eyes, but they do. Everybody comes up with it. Why do they do that? Like, what's the point besides just torturing everybody in a room for three hours because they're trying to have everybody see what the greater good is, the greater goal. What's the point of all this that we're doing? What is the point of selling staples or paper? Dunder Mifflin, what is the point? Well, you're doing the same thing. What is your mission statement? That's a self loving thing. That's the most self loving thing you can do because you're setting out the big goal. Now. How do you put that into practice? All right, here's your action step. I want you to flow dream. Yeah, just do a flow dream. Any flow dream. I don't care if you do the positive. Flow flow dream. That's the free one that comes with my kit on flowdreaming.com, go grab that one. You can get a specialty, one that's centered in. Right, exactly. Into something that you're trying or wanting to do. Like maybe more money monthly or maybe I have tons of good close friends. Maybe any of those. But do it because I want you to feel what it's like to start striking toward the emotional goal instead of the actual physical thing. Profoundly self loving when you start to switch and head in that direction instead. Two more. Number four. Heal your stress. Heal your stress. Why did I pick heal your stress? That's an oddball. That's one that I toyed with on this list. I just kept feeling like this is really, really important. But it does seem very self loving. But heal your stress, Geez. I mean, we could spend weeks on just that and we could. Maybe we will in future episodes. But healing your stress. What do you need to do to end your stress? As long as you're not ending your stress, you are being profoundly unloving to yourself. Stress is just there to say, make a correction. That's what stress is saying, make an adjustment. And you fight it and say, but I can't make an adjustment. And stress says, make the damn adjustment. And you say, but I can't. I'm going to continue to be unloving to me because I've got X, Y, Z that I have to get done. For what? For whom? Obviously not you. Because if it were you, your number one goal would be to heal your stress. This is where jumping into me school might be the solution. Because you're like, I want to heal my stress some more. I totally want to heal my stress. But I can't because of all these other commitments and values and so forth. And our dialogue is there's always a way to heal your stress. There is always a way to live without suffering, live without stress, Live with joy, live with freedom, live with money, live with health. If you haven't figured it out, all it means is you haven't figured it out. Probably because you haven't really ever devoted yourself to doing so. Because I trust you. And if you devote yourself to doing so, you will figure it out. You are strong enough, you've been through enough trials and Fires. You can do that. You can certainly learn to live without stress if it becomes a priority. When does it become a priority? When it becomes one of your five profound acts of self love. So ask yourself, what do you need to do to end your stress? Here's the action step. Fix one thing causing your stress right now. Start on it. If you can fully fix it, go for it. If it's just the opening bell to fixing it, do it. Maybe it's finances. Dig in, let's get them fixed. Let's get those payment plans going. Let's get that debt paid off. Let's whatever. Maybe you don't have a job that's causing you stress. Let's get a job. Let's find out what's in the way of that. Let's move it. Maybe you're over committed. You don't have any time to yourself. You're running yourself ragged. How can you fix that? What needs to be reallocated, adjusted, postponed, initiated, given to someone else, Offloaded, delegated? Jump on it. Profoundly self loving. And here comes the last one. Number five. Give yourself back time. Give yourself back some time. And as a cancer survivor, I'm going to bring that one up again for you. Yes, as a cancer survivor, a young cancer survivor, time became my most precious commodity. Time and family. Time and family. Because time, I realized, was the one thing that I wasn't knowingly co creating. How much time I would have left. Time of life, how much you've got of it seems to be that grand universal secret. It's not shared with you until time's up. So if in the days that you've been gifted, the days that you're allotted, if you can give yourself as much time in those days, time to yourself, time to breathe and look up at the butterflies and tilt your head to view the stars and find the constellations on your phone and burn a candle by the bathtub. And right time. Time for you. Time for joyful things, peaceful things, nourishing things, nurturing things. You can't give yourself any of the things on this list if you don't give yourself the time for them first, right? So maybe time should have been number one instead of forgive yourself. What do you need to do to reclaim some time for yourself? Because you are more important than anything else you're doing, Guaranteed. All those things that you're doing are replaceable and they will be replaced in the next week, month, decade. They'll be replaced with something else. But time for yourself, time with your kid, time with your, with your aging Parent time with your own heart, relaxing, enjoying reading time. So the action step here, cut out one thing or rearrange it so you have one solid unbooked day a week. And if that just flipped you out, you're like, there's no way. There's no way I can get a whole day with nothing booked. Nothing. No way. Then just shoot for a morning time. I have Sunday from 11 to 4 o' clock all to myself, right? I go to church in the morning or, you know, I take, you know, my kids to their play dates in the morning or soccer or whatever. But then, boom, the rest is mine time. So there you go, you got it. The five things. There is a bonus for you overachievers out there, and that does have to do with your body, right? I really wanted to focus on loving yourself, your heart self, your soul self. But I recognize your body is your best friend. So if you're not also loving up your body, you're not totally loving yourself. So the bonus is give something to your body like it's your best friend or child. Give to your body like it's your best friend or child. Do you tell your best friend or child, no, you can't eat for another four hours? No, we're not going to do any exercise today. You're going to have to sit in that computer chair for the next four hours. No, I'm, I'm not going to feed you any healthy food. We're going to just do junk food right now. I mean, maybe every once in a while, but not all the time, right? You wouldn't, you wouldn't do that all the time. Give to your body. Make your body your best friend. Make your body your child, your baby. Raise it. Raise it well, take care of it. Look at it. Get it checkups, get it exercise, get it good food, get it sunshine, get it air, Give it strength. That's your bonus. Give some of that love to your body. There you go, my friends, another hour, another episode of looking into our lives and kind of doing some life hacks, right? Some life hacks from a flow perspective, an energy perspective, a heart perspective. How can we live better? Hopefully. I know you probably can't do all five things you want to, but you might not. So forgive yourself if you can't. I'm just saying it straight up, be gentle on yourself. But if you can do one or two of these things, or if you can take these five things and make them your goal for next year. Oh, now. Now we're talking. This is what I would love for you to do to start leading your life in this direction. So again, if you want help, if you want to get into Flow around this, I'm not going to do a flow dream today, but I'm going to refer you to an excellent playlist. Now, Flow dreams are not meditations. They're a form of emotional communication through a form of enhanced daydreaming. Very easy to do, very simple to pick up. So I refer you to the playlist Emotional Ecstasy, and you can find that at the Flow Dreaming shop. So there you guys go. I love you all. I'm really wishing you wonderful, beautiful holidays. I'm looking forward to a lot of your bright, shiny new faces in me school. Coming up on the first. So that's it for us today. And 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.