671: How to Turn Your Emotions from Your Enemy to Your Friend

I've been talking to a lot of people lately who, they just keep telling me the same thing over and over. This is the year of mental health. Mental health is, you know, broken. It's at the breaking point. And this year is when everybody is really starting to pay attention and frankly, destigmatize it. I feel like in Flow Dreaming, in this world, we've been in the realm of mental health for, yeah, I don't know, 20 years. I don't call it mental health. I call it co creating, manifesting, creating inner power, creating forgiveness, creating inner freedom. But what a lot of those things boil down to, of course, is mental health. And one of the things that I talk about, we talk about over and over, is the power of your emotional self to create your life, to create where you're going to process where you've been. It's as important as your physical body, the one that walks you around all day long and gets you up and gets you places. Without the mental health, without the emotional body also carrying through you through your day, through your week, through everything that's happened, well, you wouldn't function. I mean, it would be pointless to have a physical body if the. The rest of it was non functional. So that is today. This is today's episode I want to show you, help you understand how to turn your emotions from your enemy to your friend. Because in our world, in this particular strange era, that is what a lot of us have discovered. Our emotions are not our friends. We have to battle them, control them, medicate them, somehow manage to keep them in their place. And we forget they are there to help us navigate life and our futures, connect to our higher selves, our higher powers. I mean, they are the juicy richness of everything. So with that, let's jump into episode 671, how to turn your emotions from your enemy into your friend. He here on Flow Dreaming. 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. Hi, I'm Summer McStravik and welcome to another episode of Flow Dreaming. Let's start with this idea. Since you were a little kid, your mom, dad, grandma, grandpa, whoever raised you, they've been trying to teach you to be a good person. I hope, I assume, and part of that is all the things you've been told right, don't be a crybaby, you know, don't be so mad, don't hit little Tommy. Hold back, manage yourself, accommodate, get with the program, be like everyone else behaves with their emotional selves. Here's the extreme that you're allowed to feel and here is the bottom of what you're allowed to feel. And you better find some place right in the middle if you don't want to get in trouble. Maybe you actually didn't get that message. Maybe yours is more the opposite. Like we yell and we scream and we argue and we fight and we are passive aggressive and make each other feel miserable. So in our family we basically learn to completely manipulate through our emotions, either by overpowering another person, gaslighting, shutting down. Maybe you're actually a mix. You know, you got some good messages, you got some bad messages, and mostly you tried to get these messages or you didn't try, but you were given these messages of just, you know, fit in, don't be so emotional, what's wrong with you? I could spend probably the entire episode going on about all the different emotional rules basically that were enforced in our lives as we developed who we were. And I'm not going to do that because I want to pull us right here to present day. It doesn't really matter. I mean, it matters, but it doesn't matter what particular rules you were brought up with. What really matters is were you told to trust your emotions, admire your emotions, feel grateful for your emotions, allow them to direct you? Or do you instead feel like my emotions are unpredictable, they're unreliable. I do things I don't want to do, mean to do. I hurt people's feelings or my feelings get really, really hurt. My emotions are my aggressors, they're my attackers. They often hurt me more than help me. I have to constrain them, contain them. And certainly if you are suffering from a different kind of mental health, I don't even want to say mental health condition because I feel like, gosh, all of these so called diagnoses, depression, bipolar, et cetera, I feel like the stigma of oh, that's an illness is something that needs to be updated. It's more like there's a variety of kinds of people and you are one of these particular varieties. Sort of like neurodiversity is now bringing in all kinds of people's development. Adhd, add, Autism spectrum. It's all just becoming a spectrum of who we are. So emotionally you are too, you're in this world, this spectrum. But the central question is, do you love and trust your emotions. Do they work for you? Are they your allies and friends? Or more of the time, are you mistrusting them? So where this all comes from is some of you guys know I practice, of course, flow dreaming, which is a technique that allows us to envision our future manifest for ourselves, come up with this feeling based, sketch this blueprint for who we're becoming, how we want to feel as this person, and then all the things that happen to us in our lives, the opportunities we get, the jobs or careers we work, the partnerships, those things just come in and fill these sort of emotional, you know, checkboxes. I want to feel deeply loved and admired. Check. I have a great partner. I want to feel like what I give to the world is useful and valuable and they see it and it's safe and long term and I'm not exhausted and I don't have to hustle. I'm just seen and valued. I'm working at the optimum, right? These are feelings that I'm describing. Any particular job could come in and check that box for you. Of course there's a few or one that you particularly hope will do so. So these are the emotions, in other words, that we use to sketch the direction of our lives with. We don't just feel things day to day, we actually make emotions as our goals in life and we make these goals in all these different areas of our life. Then if you want to get into the woo side and you say I'm going to manifest toward these, what you're saying is I'm going to feel these emotions, I'm going to feel these goals as if I'm already expressing them. I am delighted. I have lots of money and wealth, because the feeling of money and wealth means I'm secure, I'm safe, I have freedom, I have peace in my heart, a release of anxiety about money. Those are the feelings. If you want those feelings, you will by default somehow have some sort of material security to get those feelings from. So we end up putting feelings first and letting the other things in our life kind of align to those feelings. This is completely opposite what other people do, what the whole world does, which is if I have certain things in my life, then I get to feel a certain way. If I don't have those things in my life, I can't feel that way. So those people are completely dependent on outside materialistic opportunities, the outside world, to either give them and allow them to have those feelings or pull it away and say, neener, neener. You can't have these, because we're not going to give you the reason. We reverse that equation completely. This is why when you flow dream, or if you just want to feel better, we have to look at your emotions as strength. You're my friends. You're my allies. I make things with you. I trust you. You guide me. Think about this. Do you trust your emotional self? On par, right? If you feel a desire, a nudge, if you feel a want for something, it's coming that all of these words, desire, want. It's an emotional landscape you're checking in. And it's the very first thing we check in with whenever we decide to do something in our lives. Do I want to get a new job this year? Well, there's a logical part that says, well, I probably should, and it's time and I could make more money and da da, da, da, da. But then there's the emotional self that says, hot dog. Yeah, I want to feel valued. I want to feel like I've got riches and security around me. We check in emotionally before we ever take any next steps. Sometimes we have completely broken trust with our emotional selves. And why? Well, we did that really stupid thing, right? We did that thing we regret. We did that thing that was awful to someone else, either thoughtlessly, on purpose, by accident, but we did it. We say, my emotions sometimes go out of whack and I can't control them. They're controlling me. And we realize then I'm in perhaps an emotionally disabled state because I'm not controlling them. They're now running me. So, no, I don't trust them. They're not reliable. I have to constantly keep an eye on them. If I were a manager in an office, I would be a micromanager. I would not trust anything my employee did without me checking, double checking and approving. This is a really difficult way to live. Difficult way to live. I want you to just for a second, just be gentle with yourself and remind yourself not everybody, 100% of the time makes the best emotional decisions. Sometimes we make real doozers. Some of us way far out on one end of the spectrum. We constantly make emotionally unreliable or terrible decisions, especially if we have things like addiction. If we have things like you're on that spectrum of emotional highs and lows or deep depression where some, honestly, some part of your body is not supporting your emotional self. You've got a physically broken thing in there that needs to be corrected, you know, one of your neurotransmitters, one of your nutrients, something going on in the chemistry of you that needs support so that you can, again, regulate and get into that space where you can be the one now choosing the emotions that you feel as opposed to have them overwhelm you. But let's go back to this idea. Do you trust your emotions? I know it's kind of a big one and we're wandering around here in this discussion, but we do that. You know, a lot of times my goal with you is just to get you thinking. Not to tell you the be all, end all, but I want to get you thinking about this, and I want you to think now, do I trust my emotions? Do I trust that part of me? Do I generally make good decisions? You know, you're driving on the road, you don't hit anybody. You made a lot of good decisions. You can kind of trust that. Sometimes you think, well, no, I don't, because I go to the grocery store and I buy all this crummy food. I know I shouldn't. Then I eat it. That's my emotional self out of control again. I've got to grab that sucker by the throat, force it into, you know, obedience. And so you have this. This different relationship with your emotions, which are, I don't trust you. You do bad things, you're unreliable. What if. What if. That could be really different. What if all the messaging you started to hear around you were completely different? And it sounded more like this. Your emotions lead you through life. They let you know, this feels good, this feels bad. This is coming from your heart space. This is coming from some icky other space. If you pay attention to each emotion, you'll know where it's coming from. Right? That emotion that makes you get, you know, overly angry, out of control angry. You could say, oh, that's my emotions just tormenting and terrorizing me. Or you could say, those are my emotions. But I know they're leading to bad feelings. I don't want those. I want to try to go in that, make peace with those feelings, change those feelings, redirect those feelings, allow those feelings to evolve into other kinds of feelings. Because, by golly, I am, as it turns out, on an absolute journey of making my emotions my best friends. Now, how do I do that? Because that sounds really nice, actually. And just because I've developed one kind of relationship with my emotions doesn't mean I have to stay in that relationship. I can change it. What do I have to do to change it? Okay, this question, this dialogue you're opening is gonna open an entirely new world for you. Think about all the research and the, and geez, the podcasts and everything that's coming out on the idea of becoming happier. Basically, mental health has seized on this single idea. You can choose to become happier. Here is how. And what do you know? There's like, things you can actually do to increase your daily, your monthly, yearly, your set point, your baseline of happiness. But you've got to do those. You've got to make that a goal. Like, yeah, I actually want to become a happier person. What do I need to do? It's the same idea. I want to become someone who loves my emotional self, cherishes my emotional self, trusts my emotional self, allows myself to be guided by that emotional self. And when my emotional self does do something not, you know, naughty, I go in there and say, you shouldn't have done that. I love you still. Let's do better next time. Let's do better next time. Imagine if you had that kind of relationship. Imagine what it would be like the next time you, you felt that space in you where you're angry at yourself, you're ma. You're feeling guilty at yourself. You're feeling like, I procrastinated, I lost the opportunity. I did that mean out of control thing. I, whatever it is, you're feeling like, ah, I'm behind, I'm not good enough. Other people figured out their lives, direction and purpose and I haven't, right? This, this, this negativity that you're giving to who you are. What if next time, when those kind of knee jerk feelings came up? And why did they come up? Because basically your estimation of your emotional self is pretty darn low, right? That's why we can constantly, you know, gripe on it. We're used to it, you know, and it's acceptable. I mean, to the world. Not to me. Hopefully not to you. What if instead, as soon as that came up, we said, oh, I am really being harsh on my emotional self. It made an error and I am not letting it go. What would I do if this were my child? Would I continuously punish them forever? Tell them they're a rotten, saggy little bag of bones and I should, you know, punish them and punish them? No, you'd say, this is how we do it differently. Nah, we'd recognize that that child is in a state of learning and we would correct them and show them, well, here's the right way. Here's how I want you to be. Instead, why do we think that our emotional selves are not also in a constant state of learning, just like that child? And for us, parent Self. To say to our emotional self, I don't like you acting that way toward yourself. I don't like you mistrusting your choice. I don't like you getting so upset with yourself or, you know, not trusting the way that you feel or the decisions that you want to make. Why are you. Why do you say that you're over emotional? Why do you say that you're this way or that way? No, let's learn. Let's learn from this. You have a beautiful set of emotions. They're gorgeous. They're a box of bright colored paint. And you have all the paintbrushes. You can play with these emotions in any combination that you want. And you say, no. Well, I can't feel happy or joyful or free or safe unless other things are happening in my life that let me feel that way. And you say to your emotional self, no, you can feel that way anytime you want. Why are you waiting on outside things to give you permission? Go feel that way now. But that's silly. How can I feel that way about something that's obviously wrong or broken? Well, why not? What's it gonna hurt? That, my friends, is sort of the principle by the way of manifesting law of Attraction, all of that stuff. It starts with this strong, beautiful, supple, gentle, emotionally learning self that we are. And eventually we get to that point where we have revised those feelings. Hey, sometimes you might say to yourself, I feel depression. Yeah. My chemistry goes off and I sink down into that bottom space. Everything feels bleak. I'm unmotivated. I just want to lay in bed all day. I'm, you know, and then I say, oh, baby, I want to take care of you. You're my emotions, and I can feel you bottoming out. But I love you and I care about you. How can we fix this? What do you need from me? Who do we reach out to? What are the safeties that we put on around us? Let's activate those. What if you're the person who says, I don't even like myself, Summer? Why would I. How could I say I want to help myself if I basically do not like who I am? You know, that's. That's one of the most difficult spaces to be in. That's, you know, 20 years of therapy. But I think a lot of us have that to, to some degree. Not about our whole selves, but there are pieces of ourselves. I love this about myself. I hate that about myself. That's how many of us are. Again, if I'm putting that hate onto myself, I'M the only one who can take that hate off of myself. It will never go away until I choose it. I'm the one creating it. I'm the only one who can withdraw it. When do I want to withdraw it? How much would it mean to me if I could withdraw that? So I'd like you to think about your emotional self as this part of you that is learning, adaptive, growing. A part of you that has a wide, you know, birth, a wide parameters in your life. You may not be the same as everyone else. Emotionally, that's not a problem. What is a problem is do you still love and care for your entire emotional being? Are you committed to saying, I can feel you when you're feeling self hate, when you're feeling a lack of self worth, when you don't trust your decisions, when you feel like, I'm this, this way, I'm that way. You know, all the things we say about ourselves. I'm a man and I shouldn't feel this emotional. Like bull, bull loney baloney. You can feel however you want. Your emotions are powerful friends. They're your allies. They get stuff done. So yeah, feel them. If you're trying not to feel them, you're. You're losing half your power. Get back in there. Go feel them. Go take them, accept them, embrace them. Embrace them. The idea is that your emotions are not your enemies. Just like the title of today's show, your emotions are your friends. They are powerhouses in you. They are extreme generators of energy, emotion, future being, everything you become. And as such, if you're embarking and committing to say, I am going to love and appreciate the way I feel. Warts and all, right, good parts, bad parts. I'm gonna support the cranky, bitter self, you know, defeatist, worry, anxiety, stressed out, self loathing. I'm gonna love that part of me. I'm also loving all the good stuff. I'm optimistic, I'm generally joyful. I'm a good person. I feel happy. Often my emotions are powerful and I don't want them to be these little orphaned, neglected, overly controlled beings or pieces, pieces of me. I want to bring them in alignment with me. I talk so much about aligning with and loving others and, you know, creating good relationships and intimacy. It starts inside us, with who we are. Maybe it's going to start with a whole bunch of forgiveness, right? And healing. In me school, I focus a lot on that with my students, even ones who say, I don't really feel like I have a lot to heal. I've done A ton of healing work. And I say healing work happens every single day. Day. If you're living correctly, you are always breaking things and you are always repairing them. Because no one lives in a perfect state where things don't get broken. If so, you're living way too safe. So there's always healing to be done. Come heal. And then we dig in and we learn and we find, oh, there's layers and layers and layers and every layer that gets cleared and healed, the more we feel like, yes, you want to get to that point where you say, I really love myself. I love me. I love me. I love all the great things I've done. I love the crappy things I've done. Not that I'd ever want to redo them or am proud of them, but they're part of me. I can't shun them. I can't shun them. I can't yank power away from the emotional part of me that created them or did them. Because then I end up in a straitjacket internally. A point where I can't trust anything I say or want or desire. You know, if I'm talking to you, you know too, if you've experienced even a little bit of these feelings. So are you gonna do it? You guys gonna commit? You're gonna say, I'm gonna love my emotional self. I'm gonna make my emotions my best friends. And maybe what I've been saying is like, whoa, there's a lot of ideas here. I am not sure what you're talking about. If there's one thing, just take that phrase away. I'm gonna make my emotions my best friends. They give me power, they give me energy. You know, when we talk or intention, you know what that is? That's emotion. We talk about making big desire, big intention, big feelings. That's emotion. It's in you. You can own it and start committing to letting it work for you and with you, loved, appreciated and guided by you. Or you can allow it to be controlled by you, shut down by you, mistrusted by you when you do the work that you do. If you are a flow dreamer, if you do the flow dreaming technique and you're going into flow and you're creating this life, you're feeling it into being, then you are by default changing your emotional self. You are exercising it. It's like you're taking your emotional self to the gym every day and saying, strengthen up. Right? I know you can't lift more than a two pound weight today. That's okay, baby. I know, we've got it, we've got some catching up to do. But soon you'll be, you'll be lifting a 10 pound, then you'll be lifting a 50 pound and then you're going to be very emotionally resilient, emotionally strong and emotionally light and soft and open. Yeah, we're going to get there. And the things in your life that are going to crowd around that want to be with that, become attracted to that, become aligned to that, they're going to become aligned to you as that person. Those things are by default probably going to feel and be pretty darn good because they're matching that in you now instead of what they used to be matching the shutdown you, the mistrustful you, the self angry you. And when I say self angry and things like that, you know that's in extreme to a degree, although we all have little pockets of it about one thing or another that we've done or has happened or that we think about ourselves in the future. So that's okay. That's okay. I hope I've given you a lot to chew on and encouraged you to reclaim your emotional sovereignty. Meaning you are the king and queen of your emotional self and you are in a partnership with it. You guys are the co monarchs of your life. One should not be shutting down, controlling the other. Neither should your emotions be sweeping through and overruling everything. Your mind says there's a harmony, an equilibrium, a mutual respect. That is a power couple, my friends. So practice this. Choose this. You can flow dream your way into it. By the way, if you don't know what flow dreaming is, go to www.flowdreaming.com that's my site. I actually have a kit you can download. It teaches you how to flow dream, how to start, you know, getting into this space of being in love with your emotions, using them with them to create spectacular things for yourself. So go check that out or and you may have other practices that you want to integrate. The key is you want to say yes. Yeah, I like this and I want to do this. And that is my gift for you today. So before we go, one quick little thing. I was browsing through my reviews on itunes and I am just chagrined to see the latest was a year ago. Oh my friends, my darlings, I love your feedback and I rely on your feedback. And if you were to put up a little review on itunes, or you can put it on Google, play Amazon Music wherever you want, wherever you're listening, just pop up a little review and the review doesn't have to, like, say oh, I love it or anything. You can just say something like, hey, Summer, I'm listening, or hey, Summer, I'm listening from Alberta, Canada. Hey, Summer, I'd love for you to do a show topic on such and such, just so I know you're there. Just like ping me. I know you're there. I know you're listening. I know that this is valuable for you and I should keep doing more if you did that. Oh, like, extraordinary love. Just. I'm vibrating with love for you for doing that. So that's my ask of you. And with that, we're wrapping up today's show. So lots of love to everybody and I'll see you next time for another episode of Flow Dreaming. Hey friends, let's just take a second to point out a few really awesome resources for you. Every week. You hear me do this program as I wax on about some particular aspect of energy or life or growth. But I also have an amazing website that's filled with a decade of information all on the same things, including the Flow Dreaming shop, where you can find all sorts of flow dreams, over 150 of them, that will help you fix up and shape up all different areas of your life life. By the way, all the Flow Dreams can be listened to on your phone or mobile device. You just have to have the app for that. So if you don't have that yet, just open up your app store in whatever kind of device you're on and download Flow Dreaming. You'll find a couple of apps. Actually, they're both free, and that will help you get even more deep into the world of Flow. And with that, we're back to the program.