#603: Heart-Rending, Tear-Streaming Joy

So maybe you remember episode 594, Love Bombs. I got a lot of response on that one. And the theme mostly of the emails was, oh my God. I started bawling and crying and I really just didn't realize how difficult it is for me to hear how beautiful I am, how strong I am, how present I am, aware how worthy I am. And so I wanted to follow up on that today with Heart rending, tear streaming Joy, episode number 603. We'll take a look at. What does it take to get into that space where you can just be, be this, accept this, receive this, embody this. What's it like if you make it part of your life purpose not to do all those outward worldly things, but to get into your own heart and to be able to go into joy, into ecstasy, into love, whenever you want, to whatever degree that you want to feel it. Now wouldn't that be an interesting goal? 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. Hey everybody. Welcome to our journey today into complete inner joy. So before I even started recording today, I took a few minutes and I got into my heart and I reminded myself that this is part of my practice now. I've started incorporating this more and more often. A little backstory to what this is and how I got started doing this. As you guys know, I've been teaching Flow dreaming for maybe 15 plus years now. Been practicing it for the better half of my life, even before I knew what it was called or what it meant or how I'd bring it to the world. So when I was diagnosed with cancer a couple years ago, I was just 43, I was pretty much doing the best I ever had in the world. Had a beautiful, thriving group of Flow dreamers. And people in me, school with me, was teaching, traveling, talking, writing, recording. And then I got the diagnosis. And it made me think, what? What is? Why? What? What turned my entire world upside down? How is it then when everything is going so well and you've done all the right things and been such a good girl, the universe rewards you with something seemingly so wrong. So this started me on a new journey, a new chapter. It helped me open up and understand different layers of how and why things work. And that really old question that dogs most of us, why is there suffering? I started to see and feel some answers to. So one of the things that occurred along the way, because obviously I could talk for hours about that journey and I have in bits and pieces here on the podcast. But one of the pieces that really came to the forefront for me happened when my heart cleansed, when my heart dumped. I don't know how else to describe it. I had a few moments where everything poured and streamed out of me. I cried and I sobbed. I didn't know why, didn't even know what I was crying about. It was just heaving. It was moving like a. Like a ocean in the thundering storms. And what ended up happening over these multiple times, doing this, is each time I felt lighter and clearer. And I remember a part of me thinking, I don't even know what I'm crying for. Am I crying for my diagnosis? Am I crying for fear? Am I crying that I might lose and miss my children who are still in grade school? For goodness sakes, what am I crying for? Loss of faith and flow in the universe? Am I crying for the pain that my body is going to endure? What am I crying for? Eventually I realized that what was happening was a deep inner purge, a purging of everything that had ever been hurt me. Things that I thought had been long healed, things that I hadn't thought about in forever. I cried over them, I released them, I let them up and out. And it made me become really, really aware of the importance of your heart in your life. Your heart, your heart's not just an organ. It's not just something that's pumping blood and circulating nutrients and taking in the bad stuff and process it right back out again, which is what your heart does. We call it a pump, but really it's a recirculation pump, right? It takes the good and it spreads it around your body and it takes the bat and it filters it out of your body and moves it along. Well, your heart's doing multiple things. It's not just acting physically, as all organs in your body, as all things material have a non physical aspect to them as well. And your heart has the same such non physical aspect. Your heart can generate emotion, it can store emotion, it can trap emotion, it can bury emotion. And it's an almost limitless ocean in there. But one thing you'll discover when you start releasing your heart is that the ocean becomes lighter and freer. The feelings that you're able to feel come more easily More on demand. So when we go into absolute crying, sobbing joy, it's an ability, it's a sensation, it's a beingness that you have to pay some attention to and develop. Because most of us have treated our heart in a very different way. We've treated it more like a bottomless that we can just throw stuff in day after day, week after week, year after year. It goes in and there it stays. Especially the yucky stuff. We let that drift down to the bottom because it's heavier. And the light stuff, well, it floats along the top, but it too disappears. So to segue this into a common question that my students in me school ask that you ask, when you email me questions about, you know, the podcast, this show, they'll say something like, I really don't know how to feel this emotion. I've never actually had this emotion. How do I feel something? How do I preact it? Like you talk about in Flow Dreaming. How do I do that if I've never actually had the experience of what this emotion genuinely is and feels like? And this might be an emotion of falling in love, you'll say, I've never actually fallen in love. I don't know what that strange sensation is like. I've seen it in the movies and I've read it in books, but I haven't felt it. What about joy? Unguarded, unfiltered body, soul shaking, encompassing joy? I've never felt that. I've never had a reason to. So I say, okay, let's not keep waiting for your life to give you reasons to feel something. You're in charge here. Let's just feel it. Let's practice feeling it. Let's imagine feeling it. If it's possible for you to feel, let's have a little faith, a little trust in your body that it can get there for you, it can feel it for you. And you don't have to rely on an outside trigger to make it happen, right? That's one of the core understandings of flow dreaming. So circling back to what happened to my heart, I began to recognize I know what it feels like now. I know the sensation that occurs in my physical body when my heart is open and when I allow it to open. And I know the circumstances that it will do this best in. It's not going to do it in a room full of strangers when some workshop leader is saying, open your heart and bring everyone in. No, my heart is a little more reluctant and shy. My heart likes to open in the morning after I've had My cup of coffee. And I'm sitting in my own office alone with just me. And I close my eyes and I let my heart feel warm and milky. I let my heart feel as if I have taken a lid off of a box. I've unscrewed a cap off of a bottle. And I feel the sensation of a rising ocean coming up and spilling out and sloshing in all directions. And there's no judgment on what comes up and sloshes out. It can be grief, it can be sadness, it can be upset, it can be happiness. It can be love. And I try to make it be love. Frankly, that's sort of what I call and coax out, you know, it's like whistling to a dog. Come on. It cooks out that feeling of love, of joy. And some days I get more of it than other days. Today, for instance, I sat down and I reached a kind of medium level. I felt very pleased and very open and very soft and very warm and very connected. I didn't go to the point of extreme joy, which I also do sometimes. So how do you feel this if you've never felt it before? First of all, you practice. I know, I know, it sounds so basic, but you do. You practice. When you practice something, you strengthen it. When you practice something, you're giving your attention to it, you're giving your energy to it, you're giving your emotion to it. And it begins to unlock levels for you. So the first time you do this, you might feel nothing. And then maybe something will happen. A conversation, an argument, a moment of love. And something will unlock. And you'll say, why and how did this happen? And you'll remember, oh, I've been laying the groundwork for this. I feel it. And then you'll feel it again, and then another layer, and then it will unlock and unlock and unlock. And trust me, this is a much better way than waiting for some big time diagnosis to basically crack you open. Let me get you started here by coaxing you into a feeling. This isn't exactly a flow dream. It's one of my other practices where I teach people to feel things they want to feel and then to use these feelings to sculpt and create different situations and stuff in their life. So I want you to close your eyes and relax into your chest. Feel into your heart. It's okay if you don't feel anything. If you just feel your stomach rumbling. Locate your awareness in your heart. As if your mind is located your heart. Imagine your heart now. It's like soft butter. Softening in the sun, placed on a windowsill, melting, releasing its goodness. Your heart is unfolding. Your heart is opening. Your heart knows how to be locked and safe. It also knows how to be open and safe. Your heart is a beautiful rose in a time lapse photograph where each of the petals is popping open one after another, sped up, opening, blooming, releasing. Your heart says, I have something. I'm feeling. I'm feeling happy. I'm feeling joy. I'm feeling loving, I'm feeling, I'm feeling. I'm just going to feel. I'm open and I'm reaching toward the sun. I'm like a skinny little house plant that's reaching through the window sill, craving that light, letting your heart branch and come out and rise up. Your heart is filled with joy. Your heart is intrinsically happy. Your heart is a beacon. Your heart is a light. You are a light. You are a beacon. You are filled with joy. You are filled with love. You are worthy. And you say this to yourself, I am worthy. I deserve anything and everything. I deserve love. I'm connected. I have intimacy. I have friendships. I have things I love doing. I have things I'm good at and things I'm not so good at. And it doesn't make a difference because I love, love, love it. It's me. My heart. My heart is a little yellow songbird flying around in the blue, blue sky. My heart is open and free and wild. And I can feel it. I feel it. My heart has so much love, it can just spread around like confetti all over everything. My heart. I free you. My heart. Come up. Come play. Come be with me. Come shine with me. Come shimmer with me, heart. Oh, come be with me. Come release and let go. You love me. I love you. What can you give to me? What can I give to you? What do you want from me? What do you need from me? How can I please you? How can I grow you? How can I nurture you? How can I nourish you? What do you want? I am all here to give it to you, heart. Do you feel that joy with me? Can you just touch it? A little bit of sugar on your tongue. Do you just taste it? Do you feel that little bit of sweetness? This something that's not connected to anything else. This is just between you and me. We can feel this together. We do. We deserve it. We don't have to earn it. Nobody else has to give it to us. You and me, we feel it. A little fountain of light rising up, falling over gracefully back into Yourself, into your soul, into your very being, And let that feeling taper off. And when you're ready, open your eyes. So, my dears, that's an example of a heart opening exercise, very brief, that you can begin practicing. This is something that I shared with my more advanced MI school students a few years ago. We all practice this together. We sat on a beach right on the edge of the Pacific Ocean on a beautiful sunny day, with a little wind, and we all opened our hearts. I can't tell you how amazing an experience that was. And more and more, it keeps coming to me that while I love to make things and create things and grow things and do things, one of my bigger goals now is to be able to live in this state of joy and happiness independent of anything, any results of anything else in my life that I'm doing or going through or experiencing. I intend to live in a state of on demand joy. And I just think, gosh, as a goal for a life that's pretty high up there, I wonder why I never really thought of it quite as clearly as I am now. Raising good kids. It's one of my goals. Doing work, I love another one of my goals. But opening my heart to joy, to ecstasy, I bet I can get a lot better at it. And I can just feel, I can taste already what my life would look like if I were walking around every day knowing I can feel ecstasy and joy and total, connected, overwhelming love anytime I want. I just can feel what my life would change into. So I want to share that goal with you. And I thank you for joining me today as we go over this and I've made a few references here to Flow Dreams. Of course, if you're curious, the one that I would recommend the most that kind of goes along with the theme of today is, you guessed it, the Pure Inner Ecstasy playlist. You can find that@flowdreaming.com It's a series of audios where basically I'm walking you through this. But they're much better produced and there's not all the chit chat. You just go right in. They're exercises. Some people call them meditations. They're not. They're emotional exercises. They're energetic little creations that you enter into and experience. So do go ahead and check that out. You can also find it on your, what do you call it, your iOS, your. Your iPhone or iPad app. If you go to the app stor or your Android or Google app, you can find it there too. And those are really nice because then you can carry around your audios and your float rooms and just pop in your headphones and listen to them anytime. So if you like today's show, I love hearing from you, you can go ahead and make a comment about it for me. I do put synopses of my shows on my website flowdreaming.com if you look under where it says blog there is a space for you to, you know, give me some feedback. I love that. And any other ideas or thoughts that you have. You can also email me directly summerlowdreaming.com okay chickadees, until next time, stay in your flow and have a beautiful, gorgeous heart filled Heart Overflowing week. Hey friends, a couple things to tell you about that I think you'll really enjoy. Flow Dreaming is a universe actually. In other words, yes there is a technique, but it's also an entire community of those of us who Flow Dream and I have a lot to give you to get you started. That's 100% free. So if you go to flow dreaming.com the first thing you need to do is download my free kit that teaches you how to Flow Dream. It contains a audio of a Flow dream that's been recorded called Positive Flow just to get you right into flow state in under 15 minutes. It also includes a tutorial and a PDF guidebook. Now if you're on your mobile device right now, you can also get it by just going to the App Store and downloading the Flow Dreaming app and it will come preloaded with this wonderful kit for you to learn the process. The next thing I wanted to mention for you is that MI School is my active, gorgeous, beautiful community of Flow dreamers and we learn together, we share and we grow into our manifestational, our co creational and mostly our own deep, immense inner power. We do this together in a mentorship type school type format. But believe me, no tests, no quizzes. It's the best part place you've ever been to. It calls itself a school, but it's really the place where you will completely transform yourself from inside out. So check that out too. Last of all, I hope I see you guys on Facebook or Instagram. Just look up summer McStravic or flow dreaming and come say hi to me there. Until next time. My love to you all.