https://www.listennotes.com/e/5a85c136b59a4d7188b17562ee5cfa83

When should you retract and when should you expand? Well, I'm going to give you a simple framework for knowing what it means when life seems to be taking things away from you. Remember when old stuff leaves, new stuff comes in. It's just the murky middle of the process that we hate. But today we're going to talk about what you personally can and should be doing if you feel like you're in one big outflow of money or work or whatever it is right now. So stay with me as you discern what to do, cut back or double down. 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 Kinda Woo Woo. First of all, it is so good to be back with you all. I took a nice little break for quite a few months, a little longer than I had anticipated. Next time I intend to give you a heads up when I do that. But I think going forward, I'll continue to take a month or a couple months off each season just to keep this a little more, I don't know, fluid and flowing and doable because we are in our 21st season now. My goodness, I have a lot to juggle. Nonetheless, I'm happy to be here with you guys and especially this topic. Money tight, cut back or double down. Here's what to do. And I picked this one to start the season with because of the kind of crazy uncertainty that a lot of us are feeling right now day after day. I mean, I work with a lot of people one on one. As you may know, I work with people year round. I do private sessions, readings and so forth. And this one theme keeps coming up. What do I do? I still have money, but I might not, right? There's a collective fear that's been really surfacing and I understand. Because we're getting contradictory and kind of bad news pretty much every day right now. There's a lot of uncertainty. And you know what? We people, we hate uncertainty. It's funny because I teach you how to be in a state of flow, which is how to embrace uncertainty. But when it hits your bank account or your job. Nope. No, thank you. That's where we, most of us, draw the line. So I've been talking with a lot of people recently. What do we do? What do we do if something happens and you feel like, I'm not going to have money, I'm not going to have safety, security to pay my bills, to pay my rent, what do I do? So naturally, we all kick into survival mode, right? Energetically, emotionally, it's cut back, cut down, and hide. Like, just. Just wait for this all to pass. Just hide until it all passes. You know, minimize. And sometimes this is actually good. I'm not going to say it's. It's not. I call it pruning. In fact, I have a new oracle card deck, by the way, the flow Oracle card deck. It will be out soon, and I will let you know where and how to get it. But one of the cards is literally called pruning. Pruning means that something has grown to a point where it can't grow any further or it'll be reduced unless you're able to kind of trim things down a bit. I'm an avid rose gardener. I have like 20 some rose plants. I'm a little obsessive with my. My little baby roses. And every year I get out there like a crazy lady and cut them to the bone. I take my shears and I get them to be about a foot, a foot and a half inch off ground, not a stick of a leaf left on them. It's a weird feeling to do this because you take a plant that's kind of at the end of their season, there's still some blooms even, and then you reduce them to sticks. But I know from having done this for so many decades, they want it, they need it. They're not going to produce the kind of growth and blooms they want to create if I don't prune them back. When you look at your own life right now, you've got some things that kind of grew to excess during the good times, right? And maybe that's all the extra money you're spending on your, you know, your. Your puppy care. I'm speaking for myself because I still send my puppy to camp every week, even though he doesn't need to go, but I do it just to make them happy. Maybe it's something else that you've let kind of grow out of hand. Your subscriptions, your, you know, dining out, whatever it is just stuff, right? Pruning says you can retract, you can re evaluate and you can get back down to the basics, the things that you will not let go of. This is a practice I do pretty frequently actually in different areas. Like for instance, you know, I run this business called Flow Dreaming and it requires lots and lots of software and plugins and all kinds of stuff. And sometimes I'll test stuff out, I'll try it and then I won't really use it again, but whoop, there it comes, another subscription payment for it. And I go, wait a second here. Not only is it just a payment, but it's a mental payment. It's another bite of my mind that is supposed to be tracking this, taking care of it and so forth. Now maybe you don't have a lot of subscriptions in your business, maybe you just have a lot of subscriptions on TV and you're gonna follow the track that a lot of people do nowadays, which is to turn it on when the whole season is there and ready and you can binge it and then turn it off. As opposed to keeping HBO and Peacock and Amazon prime and Apple TV and Showtime, right? Gets kind of out of hand and we don't end up utilizing all of them. That is retraction in a kind of physical level. But there's another kind of retraction that many of us kind of again, knee jerk reaction kick into, which is I'm going to hold back and wait. I'm going to pull everything back. I'm going to be in a scared state. Because scared is safe sometimes, right? Scared, hide, protect, safe. Let it, let the danger pass. But when you get into this kind of attraction, a new danger emerges. That danger is when you are sending out a signal, an expectation, a knowing, a fear just radiant from you. Things are going to get worse. It's going to be hard. I need to cut back. What is the universe hearing from you? What are you basically yelling at it every day? Things are going to get worse. I have to cut back. It's not safe. Hide, hide, hide, reduce, cut down, get rid of things. This creates a kind of self perpetuating cycle. You believe it, the universe listens to you, so it believes it and it makes sure that it stays right on target with your expectations. It's getting worse. Cut back. So what became A or what was a practical measure devolves into a kind of self perpetuating prophecy. And when you get into that kind of deep retraction, it gets harder to get out of it because you've dug deeper in. And then when you start to say to yourself, well, I don't have to retract anymore, right? Everything is great. You've created this kind of hardened, you know, wall that you've got to get through. A part of you says, no, it's not. Nope. Why are you saying that? I don't see evidence of it yet. Prove it to me. Prove it to me. And there you stay, retracted and small and safe and often long after the danger has passed. So the opposite of retraction, right, is expansion. Expansion means things are maybe not looking so great, but do I want to reduce my expenses or simply earn more? Is this the time to double down and grow bigger, to reach out? Remember, when other people are losing things, other people are gaining them. It's a shift in the seas, a shift in the sands. I hate to say one person's loss is your gain. I guess that's what it sounds like, huh? But I don't mean it quite like that. What I mean it is whenever something is taken away, a new opportunity comes to fill the space, period. Full stop. When you decide to expand, what you're saying is, huh, I'm feeling pinched. I don't have enough. What am I going to do about it? Am I going to cut back or am I going to grow and escalate and expand? This is when you decide, tell you what, my job got a little funky. I'm going to go get a better job. I'm going to get another job. I'm going to open up a new career for myself and plan for that. What I'm driving at here is it's a mindset shift, right? It's something in your head that says, I either go small and play small or I go big and play big. Now, when you feel like things are being taken away, the go big and play big can feel harder. But ultimately I want you to end up sitting on more money, more cash, more safety, more stability, right? And money just equals opportunity. That's all I'm talking about. That you have what you need so you can do X, Y and Z with it, so you can continue growing. So hitting the pause button is a retraction and it's temporary. If you stay in it, then you will take a lot longer to get back, to get back out of it. I don't Want to say decline because that sounds terrible. If you hit the expansion button, what you're saying is, all right, some things are shifting and moving and going away in my life, but I'm going to expand into that. I'm going to ask what's going to be filling this instead? Where do I need to show up? How can I grow myself and go bigger and be more visible and try newer things, grow my skill set? Like what needs to be done? If you have a thousand dollar in bills a month and you've got 900 bucks in your bank account, you have two choices. Cancel 100 bucks worth of something or get something else that can increase your income by 200 bucks, cover the difference and then some. So that is the balance that I really want you to be thinking about. Where is your mindset? Where is your energy? Where is your focus? What is the universe hearing from you right now? Where is your intention? Protection? Think of this as short term, careful, thoughtful, like me and my roses. I. It works. I have to. I don't like it, but I have to. But the expansion has to be there. The expansion is I'm going to actually grow, not just survive and maintain or try to get back up to where I was. I actually still want to go bigger than where I was. And especially when those lack thoughts, those scarcity thoughts are crowding in your head. Like, but how Summer, you know, I don't know how to do this. And we come up with, oh my God, the, the reasons. I hear them spilling out of my own mouth. It's the economy, it's recession, it's the politics, it's other people, it's this, it's that. Yes, it's all of that. But I also know that until I get myself recommitted to expansion, recommitted to going outward and reaching for more. Like that's. If I don't get there, I'm dead in the water. I don't know for how long. So I want my retraction to be a temporary looking around kind of reckoning. And then I want my expansion to be my focus. Where am I going? How am I getting there? What can I do to support myself? Yeah, maybe I'll invest in myself. Maybe I'll actually spend money when I feel like I don't have enough, but I'm going to do it because I've got a bigger picture in mind. Expansion is where I'm really heading toward. Always and constantly check in with yourself right now. Where is your energy? All right. I hope that gives you some inspiration. And a little reality check in, especially if you've been feeling a lot of nervousness and uncertainty and a sense of lack of safety or, or, you know, scared about your environment, your home, your work, job, the economy, the politics, etc. Don't let it become you. Let it be a factor that you absorb and look at, but don't let it become you as soon as it becomes you. Like I said, dead in the water or doa, dead on arrival. Meaning, oh, it's so much harder to get started when you're in that, that space, in that position. So be fluid, cut back, but cut back with the intention of growth. If you cut back one thing I want you, I need you to grow another. Right, double down on the other thing that you didn't cut back. Now, finally, of course you're going to want to use some Flow Dreaming around this. We want to support everything we do with an energetic basis. And that Flow Dreaming is where you go into that space. If you don't know what Flow Dreaming is, oh, please come visit me at Flow Dreaming. Com. I've got free Flow Dreams for you to download. They are emotional energetic practices, techniques, activations, audios that you listen to that help you shift and recreate your insides. Like literally the way you think and feel and the energy you put out and the way you communicate with life and the universe. So you need to get in there and you need, I hate to say you need, but I want you to get in there and to start feeling and programming to the universe. I have everything I need. The shifts that are going on around me right now are perfect. They're blessings, they're beautiful. I'm so excited to see what I'll discover in them. I'm so excited to see what support I will be receiving in this new, different landscape. I'm so glad to be here. I'm so glad I'm alive right now. I'm so glad I have so many resources at my fingertips and everything is coming clear and yeah, the clarity is just blossoming and growing in me and I'm feeling more and more secure and more and more directed every single, single gosh darn day. Right? That is expansive. Can you feel like there's an emotional lightness and quickness to that energy which is very different than hide under the covers, quit everything and wait it out. So I'm going to leave you with that today. And just a quick reminder, come visit me by the way at Flow Dreaming. Like I already said, flow dreaming.com, get on my email list and if you're interested in working with me or having a session and letting me explore explore some things in your life in your flow. Very personally, I am very, very good at it. I can say that with a pretty, you know, confident voice at this point in my life. And I love helping you. I love helping people discover what the right gosh darn next step is. So please reach out. You can email me or find me through Instagram Summer underscore McStravic or just Flow Dreaming. But Summer McStravic is the better account and I have some interest things coming down the pipe in the next few months as well that I'll be sharing with you. Okay, lots of love to you all and I hope to see some of you anybody who wants to work together and do workshops with me join Rising Light Leaders. Go look for that too. It's the Mastermind that I have with that. Much love to you all and I'll see you next episode. If you're serious about healing and manifesting through Flow Dreaming, I invite you to join me in the Flow Dreaming Mastermind. Every month we hold powerful workshops aligned with the moon and the seasons. They're fun with grounding rituals combined with transformative Flow Dreaming energy. Think of it as a series of exclusive events and you're invited to each one as a Mastermind member. Beyond live events, you also gain immediate access to 36 Flow Dreaming courses, complete with 42 Flow Dreams and and worksheets. Plus, it's incredibly affordable. You'll connect with like minded souls worldwide for joyful Flow Dreaming parties, energy cleansing, and even some witchy rituals. The lighter and brighter you become, the more your life reflects it. Check it out@flowdreaming.com because our next Flow Dreaming event is right around the corner. I hope to see you there.