690: Your Heart Is Meant to Break

Ah, friends, I know that today is Valentine's Day. Happy Valentine's. And yet I am doing a pretty untraditional episode theme for such a day. First of all, it could be any day. You know, it just happens to be this. I don't know what day you're listening to this on, but I'm going to talk to you about a theme that I think is pretty important. Profound even. I call it, your heart is meant to break. Now don't get all scared on me. It's really good. It's really good. So what I'm going to share with you comes directly from my book, Stuff Nobody taught you 40 lessons from MI School to help you stop feeling miserable and start feeling amazing. I know it's got a long subtitle, but that's really what it's about. So I will be sharing with you directly chapter 23 of this book. If you like what you hear today, please check it out on Amazon. Yes, you can pre order it now and it will make my heart flutter with delight. But that said, let's just dive in. Because today it's not just about, you know, exes that break your heart. It's about everything. Anything that breaks your heart and how freaking powerful your heart is. How you are able, indeed. Meant to have it broken, meant to have it mend in pretty much equal measure. And why that's so, so good. And finally, one caveat. I use a lot of salty, spicy language. That's why I marked this episode explicit. I know, unusual, but woo. You'll see when you get there. It fits. It fits. Okay, so stay with me. Here we go. Flow Dreaming still kinda woo. Woo is just what it sounds like. An escape into the world of woo. Also a ride into you and how to feel happier, wiser and more self aware in every way. It's your ultimate journey into personal growth and inner power. We'll explore ideas like how your energy self influences the kinds of opportunities you encounter. Or how your personal growth can drive your business growth. Or even how that feeling of being stuck is really always coming from something else. We just have to figure out what. That's right. We're a dash of Woo Woo. A sprinkle of self care, a heap of problem solving and pattern busting, and a giant cup of encouragement. We're going to relight. So much passion, purpose, self love and confidence in you that you practically stagger. I'm Summer McStravik, your host and welcome to Flow Dreaming Still Kind of Woo Woo. So just drift off with me for a moment. Imagine that I have a slick, shiny new copy. I'm just cracking it open of stuff nobody taught you. And I flick to chapter 23. Your heart is meant to break. And I think it's important, one of the most important lessons in the whole book, to help you with discovering a very juicy, profound, freeing, fearless way to live. So it begins. Your heart is meant to break. Yeah, I know it's a weird thing to say, but we have this crazy notion that our hearts are like blown glass and we have to carefully shield them and never ever place them in someone else's hands. But what if. What if you're wrong about that? Your heart is a delightful beating part of you that not only pumps fresh oxygen into your bloodstream to feed your cells, but it also removes the cellular debris and contaminants that your busy cells make every moment. In other words, your heart both feeds you and takes out the trash. Pretty incredible, huh? Now imagine another aspect of your heart, the emotional part. Imagine that your heart opens to love, intimacy, and connection by both giving it and creating it with others. But when that joy turns to loss, or the intimacy turns to betrayal, or the connection turns to coldness, your heart is also there to process it and carry that emotional debris away. You need to let your heart do its job, both creating love and cleansing the heartbreak that love sometimes entails. It does a damn good job of it. Having trust that your heart will heal no matter what is the only thing that gives you the courage and trust to go out and fall in love again, or trust someone with a secret again, or pursue your dream career again. Because all these may not work out. But don't worry. Your heart has got this. It's meant to break. And it's equally meant to heal itself from the break. In other words, you don't need to protect it nearly as much as you do. When I was diagnosed with metastic breast cancer, which means it had spread elsewhere in me, I was just 43. My daughter was starting middle school in a few weeks, and my son was entering fourth grade. My babies needed me. I was also the only breadwinner since my husband was with a very iffy startup company that ultimately failed. Failed. I was paying the mortgage, I was paying for daycare and groceries. I was spinning a dozen plates on my hands and feet to keep it all going. And then you've got cancer and it's spread. Talk about feeling your heart break. There's this feeling that happens when all of life and all the decades ahead that you've always expected to have in front of you. Suddenly wobble and crash. I stood in my bathroom in front of the mirror and I realized that I had a million unspoken, assumed beliefs about how my life was going to go. I was going to live to my 90s like my grandparents all did. I was going to see my grandkids be born and maybe have traded up my old house for a nice beach house in my old age. And now all that was suspended, hanging in the air like a bunch of stuff, smoke disappearing before my eyes. My heart broke into thousands of pieces. I could feel it crumbling in my chest and I wailed. I cried. I fell on the bathroom rug and hugged the tub, my tear soaked hair sticking to my cheeks and chin. I cried and cried and cried. My heart broke and then broke again. Big waves of feeling just pulsing through me, heaving and sobbing. I'd felt heartbreak before, but this was bigger. This was me understanding that my assumption that life was a given was totally, cruelly incorrect. This was me enraged that this was actually crazily, undeservingly happening to me. So unfair. This was me wondering who would raise my kids when I died and would they be okay or would hurt and lost forever. Me wondering what empty headed twat my husband would marry after me inheriting all my hard won assets and 401ks as she wooed him with casseroles and blowjobs. Oh yeah, yeah. You could tell I was also pissed. Angry in all caps. Pissed off at God, the universe, my own body, even my poor husband who did not yet have an evil new wife gunning for my place in the family. I felt scared, deeply wronged. My own body had betrayed me. And you think I was done after I picked myself up and staggered out of the bathroom. Nah, not done. I did the same thing again. Three days later. I felt a whale leap from my chest, split me open unexpectedly out of nowhere. Why now? I wondered. But there it was. Grief has resurged. If you felt this, you know it's grief. Grief doesn't ask for permission and when it wiggles out it brings you down totally and fully and it leaves you in a hollow shell of sniffling and blank, insensible numbness afterwards. So why, why, why would I ever encourage you to Feel is rotten and horrible and at its finale it makes you stare into the deepest fears of loss, agony and even your own eventual death. But after my grief had passed a bit, I felt something unexpected. There was a lightness in my heart that I'd never felt before. It was as if I'd popped a cork and grieved for Every bad, stinky, fucked up thing that had ever happened in my life. Everything. And there were a lot. Emotional abuse, sexual abuse, betrayal, rejection, disillusionment, guilt. All those things in my life that my heart had steadily packed away for me had risen to the surface. I could not believe they were still all there, buried in the folds of my brain cells. Only by feeling their absence as I grieved them out, did I realize they had even been there. And the absence was light, so sweet. Felt like. And uncorking. Not long after, I found a book called the Untethered Heart by Michael Singer. He explains long term energy patterns. Emotions that cannot make it through you are pushed out of the forefront of your mind and held until you are prepared to release them. The energy first tries to release by manifesting through the mind. When the energy can't make it through the mind, it then tries to release through the heart. When you resist even that release, the energy gets packed up and forced into deep storage within the heart. An unfinished energy pattern that ends up running your life. It is your resistance to experiencing these patterns that causes the energy to keep cycling around itself. In layman's terms, this is roughly translated as all the shit that hurt you passes through your mind first as you hash and rehash it for practically forever. But because your mind's the king, it's unable to process it. Because while he tries, that's not his job. So it drifts down to your heart, the queen. But you don't give her any cred, so she won't or can't fully process or grieve. So the heartbreak settles into a holding pattern, circling around, taking up energetic and emotional space, getting packed down into sedimentary layers which eventually you forget are even there. My heart is made to not just create emotion, but to process it out as well. Just as the blood that your heart circulates not only flushes your body with fresh oxygen and nutrients, but also picks up broken discarded cell and carries it back to be processed. And like carrying that debris away from your cells, your heart should also be carrying away the debris of your emotionally broken bits and healing them every single day. If only you honored it and let it. Yet often that healing gets stuck. It swirls in circles in our hearts, unable to be full, released because we're ignoring it. We push down the grief, we reject the hurt. We pretend it's gone already. We're strong and even proud at how well we carry it, when in reality we should be feeling it, purging it. If we were young when the hurt happened, we Might not even have known what to do with it. We were too immature and the events were too mature to process. So the heart stored it for us for later when we could circle back around to it. The heart holds all our grief, loss, anger, betrayal and guilt. Holds it patiently. And like planes circling to land as our emotional debris builds up, like more and more planes circling the same small air space, we're weighed down with unseen, unresolved and uncompleted emotion. Then pop, out comes the cork. Sometime the planes land and you're on your knees grieving for not only what just happened, but for every goddamn stinky, crappy piece of shit thing that has ever happened to you. All that old layered up Samskara shit comes out draining in big heaping emotional meltdowns. Rise. Rise. Now blink those tears from your eyes. Because right on the other side of that is a nectar of joy that's almost incomprehensible. It's heaven in a bottle. You don't think so? Well, I know it. Because in the years since then, the oddest, most unexpected thing has continued to happen to me. I've been able to go into a kind of ecstasy on demand ever since. Just pure ecstasy. The kind where tears stream down your face. And this kind of ecstasy is dependent on nothing. It's about nothing. It's just a feeling that exists. One that I found once. Once all the black tar had swirled away. And now that I've felt it, I'm able to identify it and know it. So when I go looking, I find it again and again. And I admit it's extraordinary. But what'll happen to you? Same thing. Who knows? But I do know that you don't need to fear your heartbreaking anymore. I know it will heal. It was built to. To heal. You see, without that ability to heal, it would otherwise never let you take risks. You couldn't risk falling for someone and seeing them not love you back. You couldn't risk sharing your feelings in a deep way and perhaps being painfully rejected. You couldn't risk sharing your feelings in a deep way and perhaps being painfully rejected. You couldn't risk living in that deep, delicious, filled up way we all crave. Because what if you lost it again? But your heart is there whispering to you, go for it. You've got this. I'm built to break and built to heal. You've just gotta let me do both. And right here is the sound of the book slap and closed. The chapter does go on. But that's the most relevant part. That's the part I want you to think about today. It's a distilled very clear, very in your face. I warned you about the language. It's salty. It's a very in your face way of reminding you your heart breaks. It knows how to do it. If it knows how to break, it knows how to heal. If you're not. If you're afraid of letting the one happen, the whole thing has gotten jammed up, stuck. Planes circling in the sky. Nothing lands. And you say, why am I unhappy? Why am I stuck? Why don't I feel a deep connection? Why don't I feel passionate about my life or my future or where I'm going? I want you to go right back in and ask your heart what part you haven't let it heal, what part you haven't grieved. And when that grief opens in you, it doesn't have to be as extraordinary as it did with me. I used my example of my diagnosis because that was the biggest break. That was the one where the whole house of cards came down. Because until then, everything I just, you know, suffered through, tucked away. But when life was saying, you might not be here in three months, I went, oh, holy moly. That was the big one. Maybe you've had that happen. Maybe you've processed it all out. Maybe not. Maybe you have a series of smaller heartbreaks you just keep stuffing in there. What happens if you let yourself just sigh them out, feel them, heal them? I know you're wondering, how do I do this exactly? Summer, please give me. Give me next steps. I can give you some, right? First of all, there's often something that kind of cracks it open, that reveals that it's there. That's the latest crappy thing that happens, right? That's the thing where you peek and go, oh, well, here it is there. I just haven't been looking at it. So usually there's something that instigates that. A breakup, a rejection, a being fired, a new diagnosis, many things. Depression. After that, it's now your choice. How do I grieve? How do I sit in this feeling? Do I want to write it out? I love journaling you guys. In fact, my book is all Every. I've got 40 different prompts and each one is multi prompt. 40 different multi prompts to help you, like, move through all of these pieces. But for now, maybe you just want to journal on it, let yourself see it again, remind yourself that it's okay to go forward to risk. And I think that's really the biggest thing here. I'm asking of you go risk something. Risk sharing. Risk your heart. Risk telling somebody how you feel. Risk going out there and looking to date again. Risk opening up that stale, crumbly marriage and talking about it. Risk saying to somebody in your life, if I don't pursue this dream, this ambition, I never will. And someday I'll look back and I'll cry about it. Risk, heal. Risk and heal in equal measure. Just allow it to happen. And mostly don't be afraid of it. Do not be afraid. Now that said, like I say to all of my students, my students are actually in MI school with me. By the way, if you're curious about MI school, I do run it once a year, usually in the fall. Just come to my website, flowdreaming.com. poke around, reach out to me, email me about it. But as I tell all my kids in me school kids, I mean you, we're all kids in my mind, right? I tell everybody, don't take something that is too huge for you. You don't need an avalanche when a snowball would suffice. Take whatever you're ready to hold. Take whatever you can keep comfortably or just a little bit cold in your hand. Take that. Take what you're ready for. The degree doesn't really matter. It's the fact of you doing it that matters. So this is a strange again discussion to have on a day when we're all talking about love and connection and hope and hearts and partnerships and dating and swiping left. But I wanted to carry it into something bigger. The relationship with you to yourself. That's so number one. That's everything. The relationship of you to yourself, what your heart is meant to do for you. You can trust it, trust it, let it break because it knows how to heal. And if you don't trust it to break, it's just sitting back looking at you like, dang, you don't trust me, do you? And that, my darlings, my friends, is when things get really locked up, really shook up in us. There you go. Stay with me. We'll be back in just a few. Sometimes we need a good old cathartic do over. We've been flatlining, emotionally spent and wrung out like an old washcloth. We want to feel a different way, be a different way. We've plateaued. We're stuck. We need to gain purpose and direction and feel good again. We want to find the self worth, confidence and inner strength that got wiped away from years of frustration, disappointments and emotional depletion. We're ready to uplevel and go bigger. And when we do, we want to know that we'll be wildly successful at it. This is what's kept me busy these last couple of years. I wrote a book all about how to reinvent yourself up level and find your path again. I wrote three books actually, but only one is on its way to you. It's called Stuff nobody taught you and I took all the lessons from MI School and wrote them out. Not only that, but I go through MI School in the book with you, right alongside you. We both reignite and maybe even reinvent ourselves. By the end. There are 40 actionable lessons. I want you to read just one small chapter a night and then do or think about whatever I ask you to do at the end. It's a formula and it works like crazy. If you pre order the book today, I've got some fabulous bonuses for you. You can find it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kindle, wherever you get your books. If you're listening to this and the book is already out though, don't worry. I've got some goodies for you too, including downloadable worksheets that will make reading it so much easier. So here it is. Stuff nobody taught you. I sure hope you love it. And now for a real shift. It's time for Mailbag. You've got mail. Today's Mailbag question comes from Caitlin and I am going to try and shorten it up as I read it. By the way, if you've got a question for me, you can reach out email me summerlowdreaming.com or you can post on I love Flow Dreaming on Facebook, which is my private group, but it's not really that private. Just ask to come in. It's for everybody. Anyway, Caitlin has said what I personally get stuck on is how do you differentiate what your intuitive guidance is versus anxiety and doubts stemming from your fear? I think that's easily confused during rough times. Like are you out of alignment and being guided elsewhere or are you just internally freaking out and falling into self sabotage? So what Caitlin is asking is how do I trust when my guidance is kind of freaky? When my guidance is feeling like oh, don't do that icky, yucky, scary bad, bad. Is that my fear? Am I just playing small? Am I hiding? Am I freaking out? Or is my guidance saying no, seriously don't do that. Seriously don't go there? I've always found that the defining difference between those two is this. When you have guidance that says no, certain kind of guidance is saying it's bad for you you know, don't run across five lanes of traffic. Don't, you know, drink yourself into oblivion. We know these feelings, right, that say, don't no bad, yuck, ick. They're very clear. There is another kind of no, which is I know you wanna. I know you kind of think it would be a good thing. You're reaching for something. You're wanting, you're grasping, you're hoping, but you're scared. The feeling isn't exactly bad. It's more like, what if I fail? What if I can't? What if I'm not ready? And at that point, you're welcome to stop. You're welcome to listen and say, okay, I'm too scared. I can't. Your guidance is saying, maybe you can, but you're reaching right up to that edge. I call it the fear cliff. Right? Your toes are curling over the edge. Everything you want is probably down there. You probably have a parachute on. There's probably a nice, big, deep, salty, floaty turquoise sea for you to dive in. But you don't know that yet. So you're afraid. That kind of fear, it just has a different characteristic in you. Has a different texture, different taste. And the more you look into that, the more you can start to differentiate between the two. We all know what our anxiety is like. If you have anxiety, I've had anxiety. You know what it's like. It's like an old friend. It's very comfortable. It's very familiar. And if you're feeling that, you can pretty much say, this is anxiety. And the anxiety is probably not coming from my highest self, saying, oh, this is terrible. Ugh. You're just gonna fail. You're gonna flop. It's not gonna work. You've got this new health problem. All the things we get anxious about, right? Mm. Mm. Your anxiety is just running its regular old routine. A little player piano tinkling out the same sounds. And we know that feeling. However, you know, if you are thinking about doing something and you're like, this could change things. I don't know if it'll work. I failed before. I'm scared to feel that again. I'm scared I'm not ready. I'm scared to spend the money. It's a different feeling. It's not quite that same routine anxiety. It's more a sense of other questions. Do I trust myself? Have I truly grown? Do I believe in myself? Am I willing to do this again? Can I afford one more shot? Can I? Right. Whole different set of questions. Your guiding light here is to discover the nuance between the two. And you know what? If you can't discover the nuance, that's fine, too. You will keep leading yourself up to that point of anxiety, up to that point of fear. You will keep leading yourself because you need to go past that eventually. You need to walk into new territories and explore these new green pastures. So you will. And that is my long, short answer to your question, Kaitlyn. I hope that does help to you. Lots of love. And by the way, where you been, lady? It's been a while. Okay, so here we go with the finale to our episode today. I just want to tell you all, no matter where you're at, there's always love going around. Lots of love. Love for me, love from others. I don't joke when I say I care about each and every one of you. Why not? Life is short. I would rather pour out love to as many people as I can and then realize later, oh, I don't want to love that person. Then withhold it from everyone and only very selectively give it out again. Though I can say that because my heart is meant to break. Now I've learned boundaries, don't get me wrong, definitely know what my boundaries are. When something's good, it's good. When it's bad, you're out. Done. However, I want you to get in that same kind of fearless, floating, open sensation as well, knowing you can take care of yourself. You will. You have full, 100% trust in it. So my wishes for you today, this week, are that you let your heart break. You let it heal. You let it break again. You let it heal again. Remember, you're not just going from break to break to break. It only breaks when it's had love. If it's not breaking, doesn't it means you haven't had love. Even little breaks, you know, even people were in love with in a big time, long way, Little breaks here and there. There is always. If you don't have breaks, you don't have love. You don't have love, you don't have breaks. Go together. So go get some love. Go fill up on it. Go call someone right now. Go text them. Go email them. Hey, just thinking about you. Remembering us, thinking about us in our future, whatever it may be, you know, don't be creepy. I know you won't be. But if it's real and it's genuine and it's soft and it's not attached, it's just letting a beautiful feeling expand to someone who may be willing to receive it and may not but that's okay. So lots of love, my friends. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. A little bit unusual Again, if you loved it, it's from my book that's coming out in a couple of months in April stuff Nobody taught you 40 lessons from me school to help you stop being miserable and start feeling amazing. Until next time. Love to you all. And that's it for Flow Dreaming. Still kind of Woo woo. Hey, we don't have sponsors for this show yet, but we do have our parent company, my company. It's called Flow dreaming dot com. If you are curious about exploring your full potential, there are over 250 audio meditations and Flow dreams and courses there that can completely reshape your world. So take a quick jump over and check out flowdreaming.com and with that, thank you so much for joining us.