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Being an empath and learning to trust yourself is strangely one of the most difficult aspects of the entire art form. You keep asking yourself, ah, can I really feel what other people are thinking? Can I really see what's going on inside them? The biggest hill to climb as an emerging intuitive empath is to realize that your feelings are right. You should trust them. But self doubt, ghosting, gaslighting, lying, simple fear, past mistakes will often get in the way. Here is how I trust what I see and how you can too. 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.

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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 Florida. Dreaming still kind of woo woo.

Oh, trust issues, my dear darling, emerging empaths and those of you who are experienced, we all seem to have this particular thing about us. We see something, we feel something, and we say, oh no, no, no, no, no, that can't be right. No, I'm just guessing. I'm making this up. It's all in my head. It's not in your head. And how do I know that? Well, actually I don't for sure, but I do know that if you're practicing good empathic hygiene, then you're going to be able to much more easily discern the difference between when you are hoping for something, expecting something, and generally making that thing be there that isn't there versus picking up on something that's actually and truly happening. So this is all coming from my course, Born Empath, which is starting very soon and enrolling. So if you're interested in anything we're talking about today, I really encourage you to reach out to me summerlowdreaming.com or go to my website, flowdreaming.com and you can find out information on, you know, what the program's like and what we do and what's the point of it and how will it dramatically transform your life? Well, this segment, what I'm talking about today, is part of the program learning to trust yourself and learning to discern the difference between when your feelings are spot on and you should be trusting yourself and when your feelings are a little bit obscured. What happens to those of us who are intuitively empathic? And I do make a distinction between intuitively empathic and just empathic Intuition means that you're able to read. You're able to access something greater than yourself. You're able to reach into another consciousness, literally, and have a conversation. Empathic is, I feel your emotions from across the room. I can read your body language. I can smell your pheromones. I'm attuned. I'm super attuned. But you bring those two skills together, empathy and intuition. You are a major force to be reckoned with. You are a hurricane. But only again, if you're doing it right. And I know that saying empathic hygiene is kind of weird sounding like, what do I do? Like, take an empathic shower or wash my empathic hands? To some degree. Yeah. One of the first things that I start teaching my students is that we are often picking up feelings that we can't place. We don't know if they're ours. A way that I'm feeling because I'm just feeling down and dumpy today, or am I feeling this because, you know, my daughter off at college is having a really depressed and dismal day, and I'm so connected with her that I wake up and I think, oh, my God, the day is going to be horrible. Then I ask myself, wait, what? I actually have a pretty good day planned. I don't get this. What you're learning to discern as a student of empathic intuition is, first of all, what's my feeling and what belongs to someone else? Imagine you walk into a crowded party, like 25 people all in a little room, clinking their glasses, snacking on their chips, yattering away about whatever, and you're just feeling overloaded. You're feeling just. Oh, you feel some people who are. You feel nervousness, you feel maybe some discomfort, and you think, am I feeling this? I normally don't feel this way. Why am I feeling kind of weird and self conscious right now? Then you realize that you're just passing by a whole cluster of people who are all kind of feeling really socially anxious. And you absorbed it. You felt it. This is where you are learning to, first and foremost discern your own feelings from Other people's feelings. Think of feelings as perfume or different scents of candles in the store and home goods as you walk by, right? There's the licorice and black smoke, and then there's the, you know, paradise island pineapple colada. You're. You're learning to figure out what your scent is and what theirs is. That's the first thing that we work on with trust. Knowing who's who. And yes, there are actual exercises that you will practice that will teach you this and start to make it pretty obvious so you're not constantly guessing. One of the reasons empaths get so burned out all the time, but just as an aside, is that we are constantly trying to guess where the information is coming from. We are. We are providing ourselves an extra layer of angst. Constantly. Where is that? Is that mine? Is that yours? What is this? Whose is this? Is this. What is this even real? Am I making this up? Imagine if that brain chatter, that energy chatter, that emotional chatter could be calmed in you. That's number one. Number two, what we're going to do as we learn to trust ourselves is we're going to recognize that when you are feeling something and you know now it's not you, yet, you're not sure if what you're picking up is quite accurate. Okay, let's give an example here. Your best friend calls, and she's really mad at her husband. He was a class one jerk, and you don't know what to. To. To say to her. And she's telling you all the vile, terrible things that he has just done. Disrespectful, mean. And you're like, yeah, I can't believe Donnie did that. What a. What a dumb butt. You know? And she's like, can you look at him? And can you tell me why'd he do that? So what's happening here is you're going in with a. A cloud of perfume already around you. A scent, if you will. Let's say it's a powerful scent. It's mint or eucalyptus or lavender. Something real strong like, okay, Johnny, you're such a. You're such an a hole. Why did you do that? And Johnny's like, I didn't do anything. I mean, I mean, really. I really feel like I wasn't in the wrong here. I did try my best. And you're like, what? What? No, but this was intentional. She said it was intentional. Who are you going to believe here? You're coming in front loaded with expectations, and I call this the filter, the empathic filter. And I liken it to the same thing that your dryer has. If you have a washer and dryer, your filter gets really clogged up with lint unless you scrub it out all the time. And how many of us actually do that? I mean, when was the last time you had an actual person come out and blow all the lint out of the dryer vent? It's probably been. You're probably past due. You're like the rest of us. And imagine now that you're like that, as an empath, it's not just your actual dryer, it's you. So you're coming in with these suppositions about poor Johnny, and you're expecting to see those upheld and. Or confused when they seem not to be. How do you trust. In this case, you practice regular filter cleaning. You say to your friend, don't tell me anymore. Just leave me blank. I don't want to know. I know you're upset at him. Tell me what it was about briefly. Don't give me any ideas, and let me go ask. Well, and so you're minimizing the noise and the presupposition that's coming in, first of all, secondarily, you're asking yourself, what do I already think about Johnny? What's my history with him? And maybe you have a history with him and you've seen him be a jerk before. So you're coming in guns, guns blazing, right? Guns loaded. This filter has to be cleaned. And if you're too close to the whole situation, you have to step back and say, I really can't read this one. I'm too emotionally invested in it. If I care too much about you, I love you. And I'm not. I'm. I'm getting my own beliefs in the way. Sometimes you hear people talk about this as your belief systems. My own beliefs are getting in the way. All right, go talk to somebody who doesn't know you and doesn't know Johnny. You can just read it blankly without any personal sense of need or connection. And that's really crucial for us as empaths. One of the things that I make my students practice is how to read people they do not know. I mean, just straight strangers. I know sounds a little funky, a little bit scary, but it is so incredibly valuable because they have no presumptions about the people that they're reading. And you can read people that you're in a room with. And, yeah, you're going to start to make some assumptions. You're going to be like, well, you know, she wears a lot of pink and she wears dresses and she's wearing some makeup and she's got her hair curled. She kind of feels like she's a real feminine type of person. I wonder if she's passive. I wonder if she's right. And whatever your story is about that type of person, I'm just making this up. I'm not saying if you wear pink and you curl your hair, because, by the way, I do both. I'm not saying that's who she is. But you have a story made up, right? You see another person in the room and he looks like a dude's dude, like a real bro. And you know, you could just. You just. You immediately are like, oh, God, this guy, he's not going to get right. Because that's your story. When you try to read that person, that's going to get in the way. You can also read people without seeing them. You don't have to be in proximity to somebody to read them. And in fact, I often feel it's. Well, for me, it's as good or better, frankly. I read people face to face when I'm having a fun, good time and out with my friends and showing off a little bit, maybe. But I prefer to read people that I don't know and haven't seen because then I'm a blank slate. I'm clear. Which brings me to the next point. How do you say stuff about people that you feel like? I have no validation for this. I have no authority saying this. I'm making stuff up. Is that mean? Is that nice? What if I'm wrong? What if I'm telling somebody something wrong and they're going to believe me? Am I just going in and actually making things worse? This is where, as an empath, you will train yourself to simply say the thing. Remember, other people are responsible for their own actions. Other people may or may not believe what you're actually telling them. They might take what you're saying with a grain of salt. Even if you're 100% accurate, you might be incredibly inaccurate and they will totally, completely believe you. What I'm getting at is it's not your job to control what the person you're working with is asking you to do for them or with them. Now, if you're not doing this for another person, I just realized I put it in the context of when I'm working with a client, but maybe this is just you, you and the person that you're looking at. You and your kid's Teacher. And you're like, does this teacher really like my kid or not? Because I'm getting the weirdest signals about this. Okay? So first of all, you know, the teacher try to pull back from it, and then you just have to start saying the thing. You just have to start believing what you're feeling. And if what you're feeling is, they said this, and I feel. And I'm doing my work, I'm doing the technique, I'm getting in and I'm feeling them. And if you don't know what that means, I just did an episode about this. So you can kind of, you know, pull. Go back on that. This is like, you guys, I have 22 weeks of training. 24. 24. About six months. So what I'm putting here is a very, very, very distilled version. But let's say you're doing this with your kid's teacher, and you hear the teacher say, I'm so overloaded, I can barely pay attention to the ones who are paying attention to me. Like, what does that mean? Means this teacher is like the kids who are, you know, presenting bigger challenges. I know I'm supposed to give more, but I can barely give enough to the ones who are just sitting patiently in their seats. I'm overwhelmed. I'm overloaded. I'm about to take a leave of absence myself. And maybe you'll actually hear that word or phrase, leave of absence, and you'll say to yourself, huh, is that true? How do I know? Well, you will be training yourself to not have to know. Maybe that's the most important thing. You don't have to know if you are accurate or not. You don't have to know. We think that as empaths, we should get immediate validation for what we see and feel. If we see and feel it, it should either be completely validated or, nope, you're wrong. And I'm going to teach you how to live with the uncertainty, to bask in the uncertainty. What you would do with that teacher is the next time you would talk with them empathically, how's my kid doing? And they're like, things are better this week. I've ironed out some stuff in my own personal life, and I feel like I've got more bandwidth and I really love your kid. And you'll say, interesting conversation has very much changed. What does that mean? So you're coming into a kind of dialogue. You're coming into a. They call it meta level. Right? This. This sort of level outside of the words and the. And the and the emails and the texts. This is a. A layer of information that flows in a different level. Flow itself. Right? The. The connected consciousness level. And you're going to continue having that conversation. And after a while, some things that did not make sense will start to make gorgeous and perfect and utter sense. But you have to trust that that is going to happen. Sort of like when you meet somebody for the first time and you get an impression and. And sometimes, you know, they're not happening, they're not at their best, and you think, oh, I don't know about them. I don't think I'm going to like them. And then you start working with them for a while, but eventually you realize they're really sweet people. I've had this. I've had this situation. I have a friend who has pretty strong social anxiety, and for about four years she was a friend in a friend group. And for at least four years, I'd say to my husband all the time, you know, I really don't think she likes me. And it's just. She just. We just. I don't know, I don't think she likes me. And he'd say, oh, come on. She does. I know she does. I don't think she does. Over time, what I started to understand is that I was. I began paying more attention to what she wasn't saying and to talk with her on this different level. And one day it just clicked and I realized, she likes me. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. She likes me. She just has a really hard time displaying it with people like me. People who sometimes have bigger personalities that overwhelm her. But she likes me. I'm not offending her with it. Every time I open my mouth, oh, thank God. Because I kept the dialogue open, I kept my feelings open. I didn't just pin it on the very first meeting we had or Even the first 45 meetings that we had. I'm a slow learner, guys. Sorry. So this trust is what I'm getting at, is something that you will be building, and you need supports for that. You need a skill set. You need a framework for that. You need to know how to kind of track what you're seeing and feeling so that you feel more and more often like I'm really honing in on the real stuff. Now. When I have students, I actually make them work together, right? They have to work together in pairs and triads, twos or threes. And I say, you have to read each other. You've got to read Your friend's friend. They'll give you feedback. I don't want you getting feedback from the actual other people you're reading unless it's your friend. Right. We work on all the different areas because I don't want you relying on feedback. It's the weirdest thing. But in the beginning, feedback is a killer because you are performing for the feedback. And if you're not getting feedback, then you're just performing for yourself. Then you're kind of free. It's like taking a test and never getting a grade back on it. An A or an F. But the taking of the test itself reveals to you, ooh, I feel strong and confident in this material. Or, oh, my God. Holy heck, I have no idea what this is. That's what we're aiming for. That is how an empath grows strength in their skill set. So I ask you not to reach for validation. Lastly, one more little hint and tip that you know you would learn. Sorry, I keep talking about born empaths. I'm very excited about it. This is the first major program that I have brought out in three or four years. Now. I have been gestating on this. I've been, like I say, brooding like a mother hen on these little eggs. And they are here, and I'm like, oh, my God, they're finally ready. So one more thing that I'll be sharing, and I'm going to give you a little head insight into it too, so you can incorporate it into your practice. If you're already a practicing intuitive or you're curious about it, to go back to when I said say the thing a little while ago, I'm going to follow through on that thought. Saying the thing means training yourself to say the things that don't make any sense to you at all. At all. And a couple of examples are coming to mind with me right away. One of the most recent was I was looking in a mother's child, a son, and I said, oh, my God, he wants purple curtains. And this wasn't an especially communicative, communicative son, quiet, withdrawn, said, purple curtains. Why did you love purple? This is the weird. I mean, most, Most. Most boys don't. That's not their favorite. That's not the favorite color, you know. And she said, he loves purple, his favorite color. I just thought that's. That's bonkers. That's really strange. Okay, and why does he want more purple? It soothed him and makes him feel safe, makes him feel secure inside. I was like, yeah, well, that's. That's important to him. Another example of something that happened fairly, fairly recently, and I was talking with somebody is, I said, there is, you know, I'm feeling there's a man, and this man has salt and pepper hair. And this man is kind of serious, kind of rigid, kind of unreadable. And he's around you and he can be of incredible benefit to you. Who's this man? So I'm going out on a limb here because she might say, I have no idea who you're talking about. This is the weirdest thing. I have no abs, Absolutely no clue. Because what's happening is people are scouring through their, their current relevant group of people, and they're pulling the people that are the most important to them first. They are not thinking about, you know, Uncle Harry, who, as it turns out, has a lot of experience in this one particular area that my client needs to learn about. But Uncle Harry shows up at Easter or Passover or whatever, and she's talking and she realizes, uncle Harry, can you help me with my 401k rollover? And Uncle Harry's like, well, you know, I was an investment. I was a wealth investment manager for the last 25 years. Why didn't you ask me sooner? And you say, I didn't even cross my mind? Okay, so you're going to take a. You're going to take a leap. And sometimes you're gonna, you're gonna hit or bat and hit, bat and miss. Right? That's. That was called. You're gonna bat and miss and a person's gonna say, I've got no clue. And you're gonna say to them, okay, just file it away. Maybe it'll come up in the future. Maybe this is something that happened in the past. Sometimes as an empath, it's hard to read the time scale of things. That's another skill set that you can develop because information is just information and it's floating around out there. And some of it is right here, right now, and some of it is on the leading, or I call it the bleeding edge of time. Some happened years ago, but it's something still pivotal, something still in motion. In effect that that diversion or the consequence of that is still operational and very, very relevant. So you're going to give someone time to kind of give you that feedback. It is often not immediate. Sometimes, of course, you're going to trust yourself and you're going to say something that you instantly regret saying. Everybody who is practicing this goes through this because you're trying to just say the thing and then you realize, oh, my God. I said, oh, no. I remember once I was standing in line at a grocery store, and a woman behind me tells me something that she just had a feeling about with me. And I don't remember what it was. It's been like. It was like five or seven years ago. And I thought, that's very interesting. She's obviously picking up on something, feeling something. But what she said just scared the bejesus out of me. Oh, my God. Why did you say, I'm just here, you know, checking out some dinner fixings? And I did. I'm not ready for that. So the whole car ride home, I'm like, what the heck does that mean? Is somebody going to get sick? Is some. Is my mom okay? Are we going to have. What's going on? So this person probably felt a compulsion to say the thing, and maybe she doesn't even consider herself an empath. We've all had people like this in our lives. They just give us unsolicited advice sometimes. And I wish she hadn't. I wasn't prepared to hear that thing. So my response to her was, uhhuh, thanks. Bye. And she probably wondered, oh, what, Maybe I was wrong. Or, oh, that poor soul is so closed down, she won't hear the truth. I don't know what you thought. I. I didn't go back and look, I didn't continue the conversation. So sometimes saying the thing will kind of backfire. And that's why another rule that all my students learn, again, is you only say the thing when you have permission to say the thing. Get permission. Don't just go around, you know, telling people stuff that they may not be in a place to hear. So there you go. Those are some. Those are some ideas about how to trust yourself. But, you know, the final takeaway. Final. Final takeaway. I know I keep saying there's just one more, but the final one is practice makes perfect. The more you practice, and I mean genuinely sitting down and practicing. When I was a child and my mom was teaching me, we had a frequent game. And, you know, this is when I'm like, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. She'd say, what color am I thinking of? And I would tell her the color. She'd say, what color now am I thinking of? And I would tell her the color. What color? Now, she never told me how right or how wrong I was. Occasionally she'd say, bingo, perfect. You did a great job. She just wanted me to practice, and I did. I mean, as a kid, I thought, oh, this is fun, I'm going to guess the color. But it was exactly what I needed. The practice without the feedback. The feedback, especially in the beginning will shut you down. Feedback in the beginning might be wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Because maybe you actually are wrong, wrong, wrong. Because you're just starting. You don't want hear that that's going to cascade snowball. It's going to make you fear. And so when you actually get the weird, you know, purple curtains thing, you're going to be like, oh heck no, I'm not going to say that. That's really out there. That's really wild. You know, eventually people who, who carry this forward into careers, you know, people who work for missing persons, police, etc, you know, they're tasked with very specific requests. I remember I was trying to find a necklace that one of my family members parents had lost after her mom passed. And she wondered, did someone take it? Do I. She's been angry ever since. She thinks that somebody, one of her other family members came in and took this expensive and very sentimental necklace. And I said to her, I don't think anybody took that necklace. I am seeing it shoved down between a pair of some steps stairs. It's in a dark place, it's lost now. I don't know. They never found the necklace. The house that the mother was in was sold and it could, for all I know that necklace could still be there. But I was able to at least introduce the idea that no, it wasn't your other sibling or cousin or whomever that took it from you. It wasn't. And I gave her that. Neither one of us is going to get validation, but I'm actually giving her insight into something that can help her repair her relationship with her other siblings and greater family, including the ones that she was suspect of. And when I looked at them, they were like, I have no idea what you're talking about. So I was like, yeah, I'm feeling kind of confident on this now. Now I'm really done. Anyway, so more, more tips from the working life of an intuitive. A medium, an empathy. You guys know me as the flow dreaming queen. The person who has been teaching that manifesting for the last 20 years. The other side of this is empathic intuition. I always say that manifesting and intuition are two sides of the same coin, right? It's yin and yang energy. It's the AC and DC current. It's up and down, forward and back, in and out. Information you push out into the world, information you pull in from the world. And Most of us just have a joy about doing one more than the other. Some of us do both. And so I'm kind of entering a period of my life where I want to teach many of you the other side of manifesting, which is the knowing, the seeing, the sensing, the feeling, the describing. There is tremendous knowledge and power that gets unpacked when you have that. I guess we're not done yet. You guys remember remote viewing? It was kind of like a big popular thing like 10 or 15 years ago, supposedly the Pentagon and so forth. You know, some major universities had been in charge of this program where people would close their eyes, they'd be given a set of data coordinates, and they were told to go there and describe what they see. That is being an empath. That is being intuitive. My. My coordinates are not land mass coordinates. My coordinates are the energy signatures of people. And there's a whole other thing about how I find those and discover those. But it's the same principle. And the Pentagon would only have done that if they found immense value in perhaps knowing what some world leader across, you know, the globe is actually thinking about doing. Can you imagine the value of that? I was talking with my husband last night. We were. Who are we watching? Oh, Conan. Conan o' Brien. Conan Goes Abroad or. Or one of those. And there was. Oh, no, sorry, sorry. It was hacks. It was the new season of Hacks. And they have. They have an intuitive on staff. And we were kind of joking about how Ronald Reagan was. We talked about all the time, like, he didn't make a decision without his astrologer, without his intuitive. And everyone just said, oh, that's Nancy. That's her thing. Reagan doesn't believe that. And I'm like, pretty sure they're doing all the things on the auspicious days, right? So I'm getting at. Being able to do this is like one of the most incredibly potent skill sets you can pick up in your life. World leaders lean into it as well. I promise you. I'm really done now and I'll see you all next time. Thank you for staying with me. And thank you guys again for putting up a review of this show. I've noticed my reviews are all getting dust balls and mold, meaning they're really, really old. And something I'm trying to do with the episodes, the season this year is kind of boost it back up into the charts again. Your reviews do that. So. Thank you. You know, if I gave you something, just a little five star or some words, 30 seconds of your time is such a gift back to me. All right, Love you all and I'll see you next time for another episode of Flow Dreaming. Still kind of woo woo.

A quick note. For newcomers, Flow Dreaming is both an energy practice and a way of seeing the world. It teaches you how to manifest, heal, and use your emotions to create a sublime life. You'll find over 300 recorded flow dreams which are similar to but not the same as meditations, and a free short training@flowdreaming.com this show dives into Flow Dreaming and other concepts to help you live a more powerful and fulfilling life. Now, let's get to the show.