Debbie Spector Weisman (00:00:00) - Hello, hello, hello and welcome to Dream Power Radio. I'm your host, Certified Dream-Life Coach Debbie Spector Weisman. This is the place where we talk about dreams, both daytime and nighttime dreams and how you can use them to make the internal shift to a life you love and rediscover the truth of who you really are. I know, I know, I know, I say that at the beginning of every show. But you know what? It's true. You know how much I love talking about my nighttime dreams, how much I believe in their power and ability to give us much needed insights into our beings. We talk a lot about how to understand what the images and symbols we get mean, and how to take action on them to transform our daytime lives. All of that is so important, to be sure, but there's also a lot we can learn about ourselves from the time we spent in our conscious minds as well. And by that, I mean focusing on our daytime dreams.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:01:05) - When I usually refer to daytime dreams, I mean the hopes and aspirations we have consciously while we're awake. But now we're going to focus on actual daydreams. Specifically, we're going to talk a take a closer look at Flowdreaming. That's a technique founded by my special guest, Summer McStravick. Summer pioneered Flowdreaming more than 20 years ago and has shared its use in workshops, masterminds, her long running podcast 'Flowdreaming: Still Kind of Woo Woo, and her books, including Stuff Nobody Told You. Summer says that Flowdreaming can give you an almost surreal like manifesting and potent inner healing and works in all areas of your life. Sounds amazing right? Well, I don't know about you, but I want to hear more about it. So let's welcome Summer to Dream Power Radio. Welcome, Summer.
Summer McStravick (00:02:00) - Hi Debbie, it's good to be here. Lovely.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:02:03) - Thank you for being here, Summer. Before you started and created Flowdreaming, you actually had a front seat to some of the greats in the Mind-Body-Self-Help world, like Louise Hay and Wayne Dyer. So why did you feel a need to create something different for yourself?
Summer McStravick (00:02:21) - Well, it was kind of an accident, to be honest.
Summer McStravick (00:02:24) - I consider the ten years that I spent with Louise as my boss. I worked at a publisher called hay House, and Wayne Dyer was my weekly radio co-host for many years. I look at it now like the universe just gave me an MBA in spirituality and personal growth. And of course, I had no idea that's what was going on. I just thought I was learning how to build really neat stuff with some amazing people, meaning podcasts and webinars and audiobooks and all the work that I was involved in. That said, I do come from a long line of mystics and intuitive and people who've been in this world, in this realm for ages before me: my mother, my grandmother, my great grandmother, my great great, all the way back. So when I was trying to think of a way practice a way to create things for myself in my life to manifest in, we're talking manifesting back in the 80s, right? This is not like it was today. It was a little different animal back then.
Summer McStravick (00:03:28) - I went and tried everything Louise told me to do. I stood in front of the mirror. I did my mirror work. I told myself I love myself and my inner child was gorgeous and exquisite, and my life was so successful. And of course, I tried Dr. Dyer's power of intentions to focus my mind and what my intention is. I did all of these things, and yet there was something that I always felt it was missing for me in particular. And that's when I discovered that I was already sort of naturally drifting into, well, daydreaming or what I later discovered was flow state. And when I was in that place, I was not just thinking about the things I wanted, and certainly not just visualizing. Sometimes I didn't even have visuals at all, but I was feeling it. I was in a deep, emotionally connected state, sort of somewhere hovering between conscious and greater consciousness, just emoting, embracing, embodying the feeling state. So flowdreaming kind of erupted as a response to my personal need for something that was different than meditation, something that was felt to me more emotionally power packed than the affirmations I'd been practicing.
Summer McStravick (00:04:46) - Admittedly, I may have been doing them wrong and a little less cerebral than what Wayne would talk about holding my thoughts in the right space, and so on. Working full time with two little kids and married. I couldn't hold my thoughts in the right space for more than five minutes at a time. So Flowdreaming came to me as a way of really reaching the greater consciousness. I think that we are describing my needs and feeling them, and sort of coding them in is how I call it now just writing a template or a blueprint every single day. This is who I am. It's how I feel. Go take it, universe, do something with it.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:05:23) - I want to get into Flowdreaming in a second. I want to go back to something that you said when you started talking about this, was that you came from a long line of mystics. Was that something that you dealt with as a child or was it something that was kind of not--.
Summer McStravick (00:05:37) - Oh, no, we're very open. We're very, very open. My mom actually was a master herbalist, and so a great part of my childhood was spent in the back rooms of libraries or as she teaches these huge classes on how to use lobelia or ginseng or damiana or comfrey when it was still legal. She gave up her herbology maybe two decades ago. She's in her center, almost her 80s now. But yeah, my grandmother also practiced healing touch. She was a good physical healer. In particular, she dabbled with acupuncture, acupressure. Oh my goodness, it's such a strange small world as far back as we can figure it out, we've all. The trend of what you're supposed to be and do. And when you grow up in something, it doesn't seem that weird. It's only in in hindsight or when other people tell you that's really weird. I go, yeah, you know, that was quite unusual. But then you're a kid, it's normal.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:06:35) - Yeah. So it makes perfect sense that you would then try to create something for yourself that worked for yourself and works for other people as well.
Summer McStravick (00:06:45) - Yeah, I think also having absorbed so many different modalities, I mean, gosh, anywhere from acupuncture to healing touch to herbology to channeling the automatic writing, like all of this was just fluffing around in my life all the way. My particular fascination just ended up being manifesting this concept, this idea that somehow the emotions and the ability of your conscious mind could sculpt or create, that you could take something non-physical and have a physical result from it absolutely absorbed me. And I think we all end up finding our own little niche specialties, even in the world we are today, all of those mystics and spiritual seekers. We have our favorites.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:07:30) - Exactly. Find out what works for you, and you go with it. So let's go back to Flowdreaming. And the idea that it's actually designed to get you into what you call a flow state. So talk a little bit more about what it means to be in a flow state.
Summer McStravick (00:07:48) - Sure. Well, it intersects perfectly with your show, right? Daydreaming and night dreaming.
Summer McStravick (00:07:53) - Daydreaming is actually one of the cornerstones of this technique. Long story short, it takes three pieces, three pillars that every one of them is regular and not a big deal. But when you bring them together, a discovery that something else erupted. They hadn't been brought together in quite this way before. Daydreaming is where we allow our minds to sort of release. There's a concept in neuropsychology called the pilot and the co-pilot. Right. The pilot mind is a series of neurons that like a broad layer of dendrites that sort of impose this conscious direction on things. The co-pilot are all the little cells that are attached, cells in the wrong neurons that are attached, providing almost like a computational function. And when we're daydreaming, we've all had this experience. We're still somehow managing to do all the things around us, but we're also someplace else completely, as if our minds have, in fact, bilocated, the co-pilot and the pilot are active at the same time. So daydreaming for me was this sense of ongoing someplace else.
Summer McStravick (00:09:04) - And I'm going to use my imagination here. And I would start I'm seeing visuals because I have a very chatty mind. I always say I have a yappy dog mind. That's my mind. So whenever I would try to meditate formally, the entire session goes something like, oh, that's a nice thought, release it. Oh, here's another one. What are you looking at now? Oh release that. This is like a running monologue. So I always felt like I was never quite getting where I wanted to be. And one day I said, what if I just throw my mind a bone? Like I'm throwing up for my own dog, you know, go fetch the toy? And my mind said, oh, I can help. And I'm like, yes, you can. So I said, imagine things for me. I want you to take me on a journey, and I want to feel total and perfect alignment with my life. I want to feel as if myself and universal consciousness have just stepped on the same road together, and my feet are absolutely gliding on this path, and I couldn't get off it if I tried because there's no other place to be.
Summer McStravick (00:10:04) - And my mind said, done, I'll come up with something for you. So away we went on this daydream. Now, the funny thing about daydreaming is you actually can enter what they call flow state, which is another psychologically recognized state. But before this, flow state was only being applied to things like the psychology of hitting the perfect golf game, the musician who gets into perfect flow and they're one with the music, epitome of being in flow state. I said, well, okay, if you can be in flow state with all of these physical sorts of manifestations, the arts or the sciences, the things, the sports things that you do, can't you be in a non-physical flow state as well? Right. The people who again, the mystics and the spiritualists and the monks and the nuns and the people who pray, they're reaching to a different place. Essentially, they're connecting through to something greater. I said, what if we apply flow to that? What if we say, I'm going to go get into quantum consciousness using this vehicle of flow, and I'm going to be there and I'm going to daydream my way in? And the funny thing about daydreaming is just like nighttime dreaming, or when you're waking up from sleep and you kind of feel like you're pushing the bounds of being fully awake, and it's almost like there's a layer you pass through.
Summer McStravick (00:11:26) - And sometimes we doubt we hit the snooze button, and we feel like we're surfacing like a big whale, and then we just kind of sink back. A similar thing happens in daydreaming and flow for a while. You know that you're imagining, and then you pass the layer and then you forget where you are. You forget you're sitting here in a body.
Summer McStravick (00:11:43) - You don't know how much time has passed. You're someplace else. You're in flow state. So now we're daydreaming. We're in flow state and we have an objective. I want to be in a deeply into it and communicative state with consciousness. So when we're there, what do we do? Because I already mentioned, like we can get into perfect alignment or, you know, fancy words for it. Entrainment, coherence. If you want to get into some of the quantum psychology behind it. But I said, I want to make things here, I want to describe things here. I want to share with all the greater me, greater all.
Summer McStravick (00:12:22) - That is the kind of experiences that I want to walk into in life. And the best way I could figure out how to do that. Was it actually by envisioning or seeing it visually, even though my brain was very happy to give me that. And it wasn't by using words and verbally speaking it, stating affirmations. It was by embodying the feelings of its emotion. And that's where the third component comes in. This deep, I call it relentless emotion, overpowering, effusive, just radiant, like a new jasmine blossom or orange blossom, just perfumed everything. It's funny how a scent can do that, right? It can take over an entire room. One little orange blossom spring. That was my emotion. And I said, here is the emotion that I want to feel in my life, and I might want to feel it in some particular areas where I'm currently not feeling it. So I said, at work, I feel deeply rewarded, deeply seen.
Summer McStravick (00:13:23) - I feel as if the talents that need to be nurtured in me are absolutely being nurtured and brought up and expanded.
Summer McStravick (00:13:31) - I have all the tools, all the opportunities. I feel it, and I'm using words to describe it because otherwise I'd just be quietly feeling. But when I'm doing my flow dreaming, I'm just in a deep feeling state. It's like throwing a very potent ball of energetic awareness, light, whatever it is, in an absolutely frictionless state. Because when you're in flow, it's a path of absolute ease, absolute coherence, absolute entrainment. There is no friction. There is no resistance. So whatever you're putting out is what is absolutely being received and I believe magnified. Okay. That's it in a nutshell.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:14:11) - Yes. You have to go in deep to explain it because it is a very deep process to understand. I totally get that. That's fine. We are going to take a short break here. We're talking all about Flowdreaming and getting into the flow state with Summer McStravick, and we'll be right back.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:14:43) - Yes. Welcome back to Dream Power Radio. I'm your host, Debbie Spector Weisman, and we're talking about Flowdreaming with Summer McStravick. Well, Summer, one thing I was curious about is that if you are doing a flowdream, and especially when you do your podcast, you're talking about Flowdreaming and getting into the state. What's the difference between Flowdreaming and a guided meditation?
Summer McStravick (00:15:10) - A question I often distinguish it for people because there was a time way back when I would get really critiqued and lambasted. They'd say, this is the worst meditation I have ever heard. She speaks too fast. She's making me feel all of these things. I am not quieting my mind. And I'd be like, you're not supposed to be doing any of those things. Wait, there's basic misunderstanding. So now I qualify it a guided meditation or often, yes, visualizing, but there's often a serenity to it. Maybe we're trying to open into one particular feeling, or maybe we're trying to reach an absence of feeling, a kind of openness.
Summer McStravick (00:15:51) - Becoming that blank, receptive state. There's all kinds of meditation. So, for instance, if I were to record a flow stream. So flow dreaming is something you can do personally and privately, just like meditation all by yourself to sit down and do it. Or just like with meditation, you can buy a guided meditation. So sometimes I have hundreds of these guided flowdreams and bringing you into an emotional, potent state around something that you have deep intention, deep desire around. That's the biggest distinguishing difference. So my voice is faster, the energy flies higher and the hotter and wider, if you will. I think of it more of an energy activation if I had to call it something. But I do sometimes call it meditation because people understand it, and it's often too big relief to tell them you're doing something very different. And they're like, oh, well, then I don't know what I'm doing. I'm like, oh no, just go with me. And similarly, sometimes people will say, it sounds like hypnosis, like self-hypnosis.
Summer McStravick (00:16:47) - You're just telling your subconscious all this great stuff. And I say, well, if you are simply being receptive to the words, like if you're listening to a flow dream recorded one as you fall asleep and a lot of people do, then you're drinking in words and feelings, but you're allowing them to settle in you more like rain, right? They're drenching in you and they're going into your subconscious. But when you're actively flowdreaming, it's the opposite of rain. You're going up and out, not down and in. So in that sense, it is different. And same thing with creative visualization. There are elements of it. But then we need to enter flow state right there. That's the missing element there, that space that we get into.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:17:31) - How can you use Flowdreaming to create a better emotional balance in your life?
Summer McStravick (00:17:37) - So sometimes when I work with people in the sciences, psychiatrists, psychologists, counselors in particular, they're like, I love the woo aspect of it. I get the whole quantum consciousness, but I just we need to bring this down a little bit and make it more sciency.
Summer McStravick (00:17:54) - And I go, great, okay. We'll just call it emotional reconditioning. How does that sound? The same way is when you meditate, you're developing greater neuroplasticity in your brain, right? You're creating new neural pathways. When you're Flowdreaming, you're doing the same thing. But these pathways happen to fall more into your emotional channels. When you are practicing an emotional state every single day. And the key here is most of us, we wait to be allowed to feel certain things. If something good happens, we can feel happy in response, something bad happens. We are provoked to feel anger or anxiety in response. We become these very reactive creatures. In Flowdreaming, we flip flop that. We don't wait for anything outside of us to give us permission. In fact, that I call that a power leak. When we're waiting for the world to give us permission to feel how we want to feel, we create the feelings first, and we then challenge the world to align to our feelings and create the right things around us.
Summer McStravick (00:18:54) - The world tends to try to get in balance or alignment with us. But getting back to emotional reconditioning, if you're just practicing those same emotional states over and over, you begin to embody them. They come freer and more easily to you. Your mind is more going to shift down that new pathway than the old pathway that you used to practice. So for someone with anxiety, for instance, if you're practicing a feeling of, I am safe, I am cared for. I have all of my needs met, right? Often anxiety isn't just about safety, but we have this lack thinking that our needs will not be met. Somehow our needs for health won't be met, our needs for money won't be met. But no, all of my needs are full. All of my needs are full. Now that is creating a new emotional baseline. Yourself, whether or not you feel that you're actually impacting the future or going out. Quantum or larger consciousness that's impacting your future. You're still changing your emotional baseline on that level.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:19:54) - So really this works in multiple levels just depending on your beliefs?
Summer McStravick (00:19:55) - Great question. Yes.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:20:00) - Something that I think everybody is looking for is more abundance in their life. Can you use Flowdreaming to help manifest that?
Summer McStravick (00:20:13) - Yes, you absolutely can. I think it's one of the number one things that people know. So I will tell you, the keys to the kingdom in five minutes or less. No, I'm joking, but that beautiful rainbow that I see behind you, if you're able to, to see the visual of us talking together, you know, the old saying is there's a pot of gold at the end of it, right? All of the colors of the universe arrive at what? A pot of gold abundance when you are going into flow. Abundance, for me, is one of the easiest feelings to reach out and grab. It's just a moment of--In fact, you can feel it right now. The sense the world around you. Like I said, I have beautiful jasmine flowers that are perfuming my yard.
Summer McStravick (00:20:56) - I have weeds springing up everywhere, an abundance of them right now. There is enough air for me in this room to last days or ages. Even if I never stepped outside. The sunlight is pouring down and allowing every plant out there to create chlorophyll. It is not charging plants money for it; it's just abundantly raining down. So the very first thing that I key into is the actual abundance of this earth around us, full to overflow for every single one of us. Just the natural wealth around us. Just the oxygen and the sunlight. That right there is sort of the key essence of abundance. Now we people turn that into what I need. An abundance of money somewhere. That's an abundance. Sure. Of course, the earth is rich in all resources, but the one resource money. It works. How about that one? I'm like, look, money is just an artifact. It's just something we have made that signifies abundance. If you think about money, it’s kind of not even real in a way.
Summer McStravick (00:22:00) - I know that sounds funny, but the value my son likes to do, I hate to admit he likes to do day trading and stock trading. We talk a lot about this, and the value of money, of a dollar goes up and it goes down, goes up and it goes. It's never even fixed. It's us that are assigning value to money. It's not its real own thing. And you know, the whole gold standard that's gone. Money is whatever we want it to be. Money can be worthless. We look at some countries where inflation, there are country where inflation takes over declining. So if you start to get really flexible with that understanding of what abundance and value is, you can call in what the true feeling of abundance or money is. Again, all of my needs are met. I have the money, or I have what is equal to money. Resources, opportunities can be worth more than money. My time spent at Hay House was an opportunity worth its weight in gold.
Summer McStravick (00:22:58) - Like if I had paid for an MBA at Harvard, I would not have gotten as good of an education. So we're really starting to get in deep and embrace a concept of abundance that goes beyond the dollars that flow in. Now, when the dollars flow in, I say, look, I need something here to pay this mortgage. I want to have that constant stream. So this is where when I'm daydreaming, right when I'm using my imagination, I'll come up with images. One of my favorite ones that I use is flowing waterfalls and these waterfalls. For me, they're green and they're gold, and they're full of spilling checks and gold coins and dollar bills, hundred-dollar bills. And I'm sometimes going then and using it symbolically. If I go in and I say, my waterfall is looking pretty thin as it rained in a while, I'll notice that and I'll think, have I been feeling that way about the abundance in my life? And I'll make it and expand it, and I'll make a wall.
Summer McStravick (00:23:56) - I'll make Niagara Falls around me. So what I'm doing here is I'm shifting the universe, and I am feeling my abundance growing within me. The coaching word today is my capacity, right? But truly, my capacity for abundance has to grow because sometimes it shrinks, and we don't realize that. But we get into lack thinking and worry and we start clutching. And when you squeeze something, it's the worst thing we can do. We squeeze harder when we don't have it. We squeeze all the water out of the sponge and then we're like, it's empty. So again, practice is key. Flowdreaming is a technique and it's a philosophy. It's like yoga. You can do the exercises, or you can understand it to the philosophy goes something like this. We're not waiting for life to give us permission to feel things or experience things. Most of us run around thinking, when things get like this, then I'll feel like that. We put the cart before the horse. Do the opposite. I feel this, I become this.
Summer McStravick (00:24:57) - I challenge your life to get into balance with me, align. And then we allow the things to drop away that don't fit and the new things to sprout up and come in. The key here is patience. Every new plant takes a little time to sprout and come in. And then there's this sort of inner belief if I do this every day, it's like going to the gym. Like, I firmly believe my spiritual self, my non-physical self is as real as my physical. If I take my body to the gym, it's going to get strong. If I practice this non-physical work, this emotional, intuitive flow dreaming work, my inner spiritual being, my non-physical self becomes very strong. So this strong self now becomes more of a director. Here's what I'm receiving. Here's what I'm feeling though. You figure it out, you go match me. And the funny thing is stuff will change outside you. We all know this when we go into big spiritual jumps in our lives and we're like, everything is crashing down.
Summer McStravick (00:25:58) - Why I hate this? Because that crap isn't matching you anymore and it's fine. It should be disintegrating and going back into life in the earth and frankly, recycling. It's all it's doing. All that old stuff is just getting recycled. Now look at the new stuff that you're doing. Are you actually consciously going in there and guiding it, or are you just falling back and waiting and seeing again? And I say, go in and flow to him every day or whatever your practice is, go in and guide.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:26:25) - That is perfect advice. And I tell you, I have so many zillions of questions to ask you, but we only have time for this one final one, which is Summer, how can people find out more about you and your work?
Summer McStravick (00:26:38) - Yeah, well, I like to joke I am everywhere. I've been out this week and everywhere, but it's still kind of a secret though, so I have a number of books. "Flowdreaming" is one. "Stuff Nobody Taught You", which takes off from Flowdreaming, helping people find their patterns or blocks, etc.
Summer McStravick (00:26:58) - I think my website is the best place though. Flowdreaming.com and that's flow with an F like Frank, not an S. Sometimes people are thinking it's like slow dreaming. I'm like no, but that sounds cool too. But so. And then I have an app on your phone or mobile device you can download, and I give a free tutorial and actually give people flow dreams to start working with basic ones. Positive, you know, positivity everywhere in my life, instant alignment. And I say, start working with these in practice. And then of course my podcast, which is Flowdreaming: Still Kind of Woo Woo, where I give a lot of mindset out and a lot of teaching. I've got 20 years of episodes in my 20th season, so kind of crazy rich, you know, I say start with any of those and then reach out to me if you want further guidance. I have classes, courses, and I work individually with people too.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:27:47) - That is wonderful. So thank you so much for being on Dream Power Radio today.
Summer McStravick (00:27:52) - Thank you so much Debbie. Delightful. Great interview.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:27:55) - Oh thank you. We've been speaking about Flowdreaming with Summer McStravick. I hope you've enjoyed today's program. If so, please hit that subscribe button so you don't miss out on any future episodes. Until next time, this is Debbie Spector Weisman saying sweet dreams everybody.