Personal Transformation with Summer McStravick

george grombacher 0:01
Some extract is the founder of flow dreaming. She is an author, a speaker and a coach who has helped 1000s Probably countless 1000s of people over the past 20 years step in and live the lives that they truly want to live. Welcome to the show summer.

Summer McStravik 0:17
Thank you, Doris. Pleasure to be here with you.

george grombacher 0:20
I’m excited to have you on tell us a little bit your personal lives more about your work and why you do what you do.

Summer McStravik 0:26
Do well, which where do I start? My work is my personal life. I’m one of those types. No, I actually love my work so much. I feel blessed that I got to create a life around doing something I love. Not to say hasn’t had challenges getting here, especially inside myself reaching this point. As for personal personal, I’m still married to my high school boyfriend. I’ve got two kids entering college or in college. So I’m about to be empty nesting. And I have a giant German Shepherd husky, who is very happy to guard our house. That’s basics right there. floodproofing is the work that I do with people. It’s a it’s a brand quote, quote, but it’s also a practice. I mean, fundamentally, it’s a practice for personal growth, interchange. And you could say manifesting. So I’ve just devoted the last 20 years to it. And then teaching and teaching and teaching and teaching.

george grombacher 1:27
In a nutshell. Yeah, no, I appreciate that. It’s difficult to to distill one’s work down to a 32nd sound bite, what? What brought you to the work.

Summer McStravik 1:39
So I began this process, like I said, about more than 20 years ago, in the year 2000. I was, you know, I’ve always been in the personal growth and spirituality, era of my upbringing. Eventually, my work led me to work for Hay House Publishing, work there for a decade, put together Hay House, radio, and basically their whole audio department. It was during this time that a practice of mine that I discovered in the year 2000, because at that time, I was desperately trying to manifest or create co create all different words for it. I had sort of fallen into this practice, by accidents, and some discovered or whatever you want to say. But by the time I reached Hay House, the word was starting to get around, that this was something unique and different. That seemed to work for a lot of people, whereas meditation, affirmations, a lot of other practices weren’t yielding the results they wanted. So at that point, I wrote a couple of books for them and started my podcast there. And that’s where everything just took off. From that point. I spent, like I said, a decade there. And then I transitioned and began sharing flow, dreaming of the world full time. So as a practice, like I said, it’s it’s something similar to meditation. It’s not meditation, though. It is today, I think people would call it an energy activation, depends on how we will you want to get with it. I work with a lot of psychologists and clinicians, and they say, it’s called Emotional reconditioning. I’m like, Okay, we’ll go with that one, just depending on whether you want to do what I’ve connect spirituality to it or not. But the gist of it in a nutshell, is that we take these three different modalities that we already do. One of them is daydreaming. One of them is deep emotion, emotion on demand, as I sometimes say. And then the third one is flow state. And people usually think of flow state as something that they would use for peak performance, Dr. Mihai, to me high positive psychology. Psychologists coined the term, when he was talking about people who were envisioning their perfect, they’re perfect time on their run or reaching some milestone in their work and being in the zone, if you will. And what I discovered is that if I could do this process on demand, I could get myself there. And it wasn’t very hard to do. So I take these three things, and I put them all together and stir them up. And I daydream my way into basically flow state. And that’s where for me the real magic occurs, because that’s when I begin to exude and become an experience the person that I feel I truly want to be or or have in my life, haven’t How do I want to have the person that I am? I know that was a convoluted, but I’m thinking about the things that I want to have. And so for me things, things that we create in our lives, we have goals, of course, and they’re good because they give us a physical thing to move toward or move after. All of our goals, though, eventually just give us basically emotional states that we’re looking for. No matter what that goal is money, a house a partner by everything is leading to a way we want to feel because of that thing. So I kind of short circuit the process and I say fine, you can, you can think about the thing that you want to create for yourself your next goal you want to hit. But let’s instead focus on the feelings that the goal gives you call these emotional endpoints. And anybody listening right now can write down anything they’re working on right now getting their raise, getting the project finished and out the door, resolving this big conflict with their sister, every single one of these has an emotional feeling attached to it. That’s the real honest driver of it. Maybe it’s safety, maybe it’s freedom. Maybe it’s like for well, for instance, it’s often safety and freedom. Those are the feelings we’re trying to get. So we tend to choose things in our life, from what’s laid out in front of us that we think will get us to those, those feelings. But again, going back into flow dreaming, we go straight to the feelings, and then we sort of let the universe we let life kind of come up and suggest to us, maybe the route you’re on is the easiest way to get those things in your right you pick the right next steps. But maybe you didn’t. If you didn’t, wouldn’t you like to know that easier, faster, kinder, gentler, more, you know, conducive way. And that’s where, you know, I think that the universe kind of kicks in and says, we’re going to shift your goals for you. But we’re still going to get you to those same emotional endpoints. So the kind of manifesting, I practice, the spirituality, I practice, I call it playing the long game. This is nothing that gets you overnight riches, necessarily. Sometimes I’ve seen it. But generally speaking, I work on myself with this spiritual practice every single day, and I have for the last 25 years, and like going to a gym, right, you work on your arms every day, they get stronger. Most of us don’t work on our spiritual or our emotional selves every single day. But I do. And the long term effect of that is I have shifted and changed my emotional system, from the emotional conduits that rolled through my brain sort of like with meditation, right? It changes your neural network and creates better neuroplasticity. This process does the same thing. But think of it as shifting and changing your emotional channels. And beyond that, if you go into sort of the spiritual aspect, it’s also communicating deeply who and what you are, because you’re building it inside yourself every time you practice it. Now, I’ll give you a chance to speak because I can really get on a roll.

george grombacher 7:24
Sorry, George. No, not at all. I I’m grateful that you did. And I love I love all of it. It makes sense to me that you go straight to the feeling versus and shortcutting it or hacking it or short circuiting it, whatever term that you used. Do you think that most people I think, is it hard for most people to figure out what they really want? And how they want to feel? Or? Oh,

Summer McStravik 7:50
yeah. Okay. Good question. I was thinking about that. Just the other day, I was taking a drive. And I was asking myself, How do I really want to feel in my life? And I was specifically thinking, I was scrolling ahead in my mind, like 10 years from now, when I you know, enter retirement, I know that can’t possibly be heading to retirement. I know why. Yeah, that’s exactly what yeah, what I wanted you to say. But I was really feeling like, what what kinds of activities, what things could I do? That would really help me feel the way I intend to feel? And I kept coming up with blank. Like, I don’t actually know, once I stopped, maybe, you know, growing and teaching flow dreaming what then? And it was a really good reminder to me that a lot of times, we don’t know exactly where we’re going or what we want only that it’s gotta be not where we are. And then we get really angry and upset at ourselves. Like, how come I don’t even know what I should do next? I don’t know what the next step is. So the beauty of this process, though, is you don’t often have to know if you’re deciding do I get a new job? Do I move? Do I? What will what will it take? How much money in the bank? What’s the number that’s going to make me feel a certain way? We don’t often know, or we guess and we’re wrong. So we end up and I call it a kind of flatlining, emotional flatlining, which is, I’m just kind of waiting. I’m just stuck. And I’m waiting. So in that case, what I do when I go into flow is I say, Look, just because you don’t know what the next thing is that you want or need. You always know how you want to feel. You always know that. Like, there is never a question. And it’s sometimes you ask for a feeling that you don’t think you’re gonna get, right. You think, Well, I want to retire in 10 years and I want to have I want to feel freedom. I want to have so much wealth and so much bounty around me that I never worry again that I can just exhale and be in that space. Okay. The feeling though, is exhaling and being in that space. You think money is going to be the thing that will get you there, and you’re not really sure what to do. To get that money, so just focus on that feeling of exhaling and freedom, and not having to ever worry about a thing again, let that then be the Northstar let that be the guiding road. So that again, so in other so flow dreaming is kind of a huge philosophy, as well as a practice, it’s like yoga. And that sense, you know, you can go to the gym do all your poses. Or you can understand yoga from a deeper level, and dharma and all the different pieces that make it make sense. Flow dreaming is a practice is the thing you can do for 15 minutes each day. As a philosophy, it’s got all these layers to unpack. One of which is, I always feel that we are always capable of getting into a state of pure Divine Alignment. We live in a world whose basic split is is dualism, yin and yang, up and down, forward and backward, light and dark. Yet, we seem to be constantly moving in one direction, there is a natural direction that’s uninterrupted. The best example is time, time doesn’t really get screwed up very often, the Earth is always moving around the sun, it’s not encountering resistance. If you’re a bird, and you’re flying in the sky, you can fly with the current, you’ll go forward faster, in a in a beautiful aligned getting to your goal. If you turn around and fly against the current against the wind, you’re going to stutter and stop in place. So the universe we’re existing in right now seems to have a direction that we could all just sort of get into should we wish to. If a bird can do it, if the Earth can do it, time itself is doing it, we too are doing it. And if a you know a bigger, more existential level is most of us do believe that as souls or beings, we are moving into ever more complex self awareness, we call it growth, right development, getting something bigger in becoming something bigger inside of ourselves as beings. That’s the same, that’s the same thing. Right? None of us are saying I want to get worse, I want to know less. I want to go backwards in my evolution both biologically spiritually. So in flow, we’re recognizing I want to be in this perfect state of alignment. So imagine, you know, you could pull an ace out of the deck or two, most of us want the ACE, you know, that’s the best card we can get. We don’t want the two that’s frustration and going backwards against Trent. So in flow dreaming, one of the things we look at in our life is how do I get imperfect in Divine Alignment? And once I’m in that place, how do I communicate the kind of feelings I’m striving for? Once I know those feelings, and I’m striving for them? How can I allow life itself to shift around me to start to reflect or embark on giving me opportunities for those feelings. So this is a kind of classic idea and manifesting, right? What you are inside is what the world outside of you is reflecting. So my whole job is to create the world inside me. And it’s not just something in my head, it’s an energy practice every day. So for instance, if we’re done with this, and I go in flow grim for a while, maybe what I’m going to say is something like, I want to feel absolute joy, and perfect freedom, and, and love, and that I have enough, all those feelings, and I want it to be in the area of my working career. What I literally do with my day, sorry, I close my eyes off and when I kind of naturally dropped through the state. So I’m going to go and I’m going to feel this, I feel absolutely in love with what I do. I feel so joyful and lucky doing this, I feel like the income and the resources to support me so I can do more of this. It’s a no brainer, it’s just right here, it surrounds me it is me. If I do that, think of it like this, every thought we have everything that we do literally becomes part of who we are, it becomes embedded in us it’s a little piece of information that is now a part of us, every experience of memory you have is part of you, when you’re doing a practice like this, it is also now becoming literally part of you. And if you’re doing it often enough, it becomes a bigger and bigger and bigger part of you and other parts of you, you know kind of takes over you know, the big beautiful bush and then garden is growing over all the other stuff. So that is my goal that this part of me grows so big and so lush and so vibrant. That the other parts of me the ones that I’m typically doing during the day, which are oh my god, I have to answer this email and dreading this. Oh, it’s gonna be so Oh, I gotta pay my bills and I don’t have enough, right lack thoughts and so forth that we habitually kind of spew out Those may still be there. But the other part of me is growing and consciously being attended to. It is smothering or overcoming that other part of me. Now the world is reflecting who I am, right? I’m a pinball in the pinball machine. And I’m bouncing all over, it’s reflecting me. And younger lovers are putting me here on there. But I’m generating where I’m going toward those lovers. Meaning, I mean, that was a difficult metaphor, but pardon me. The kinds of things that are now in, you know, encountering me have to shift and match and meet me. So one of those laws of the universe, right, like, like attracts like, alignment means you and the other thing are just right there. So if a part of what I’m asking for to go back to that path of ultimate ease, is, I’m in a place where all the effort I expend all the hard work, I expand yields the maximum amount of results, I’m in a place of no friction, I don’t want to encounter restriction. I want to cruise into this next place. And I want the experience of that. And I’m feeling it. And here are the areas and feeling it in. So this practice kind of opens up a lot of doors as you can, as you can kind of get a guess. I mean, I’m, we’re scratching the surface right now. Yeah,

george grombacher 16:17
no, it makes a lot of sense to me. And it’s, it’s a lot of new information, which, which is awesome. But it definitely makes sense. I love, I love everything you’ve been talking about. I love the idea of complex self awareness. Because I’m a different person than I was yesterday, and my wants and preferences and desires have changed. And if I’m not checking in on myself, well, then I’m probably not going to end up where I’m at, or where I wind up because of what I was working on, might not give me the feelings that I really want today, even though they were the feelings I wanted yesterday. So it certainly makes sense that it would be a daily practice and, and society has told me that I should, you know, start a huge company or grow a huge company. But I don’t know that that’s something that I want. More if I use mission, I’m always curious as to why some musicians aren’t constantly making new music, but maybe that’s not what they want. So it’s so much, but I think you’ve done a great job breaking it down.

Summer McStravik 17:18
Yeah, yeah. When you when you say, you know, society has all these expectations. For us, it’s very true. You know, I’ve been caught in that myself, you know, growing flow dreaming into a multimillion dollar company. And I have had everything from tons of staff to nothing but a VA to I’ve been through all that I’ve heard all the different language about how to how to do something, how to get there. Ultimately, I found my place where I feel happiest and most content, the size of my company, the employees in the company. And that’s where, for me, I’m trying to align my actions with really my emotional goals. Instead of trying to do all the actions that I’m told, to get to an emotional goal, I’m coming from my emotional spot first. In other words, and sort of flipping that around. And, you know, that reminds me of another really important point. Most of us are relying on life, to give us reasons to feel things. If you have a great big company, then you’re going to feel secure, you’re going to feel rich, you’re gonna feel like you were successful. But you, you really want to just feel those things anyway. So you can’t have those feelings until you get the result of a big company, or whatever it may be. Meaning that we’re often I call it a power leak are often waiting on life to give us permission to feel the things that we want to be feeling. And that’s not life’s job. That’s not other people’s job. It’s our job. So we flip that around, and we take the power back inside of ourselves, I feel abundant, I feel really successful. I am operating at peak optimal, you know, efficiency and joy inside of myself. Okay, well, now you give me reasons to feel that way. I challenge you, I dare you, you aligned to me, not me to you. And I think that was that’s one of the biggest, you know, awakenings or Takeaways you can you could have right now that all the things you’re waiting to feel you’re waiting on other people or situations to change or your boss to do something for you or recognize your talent. Or you’re waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting. So you can feel how you want to feel on all of these outside variables that really have no reason to, or even want or even know that you’re there waiting on them to make you feel a certain way. So we don’t do that anymore. In programming. We create our feelings inside of ourselves and challenge the world instead to match us. And you know, one other note I wanted to mention too is this practice this philosophy I found over the years is really perfect for people who have struggled with meditation first of all, because you’re not clearing your mind, you’re actually creating a very rich emotional landscape in your mind, and you’re giving your mind something to do. And we often have very, you know, anxious minds of minds that have, they want to help out. It’s like a friendly, I always call it like my friendly dog, my German Shepherd, he’s like, I just want to help you. And like, just don’t tell me to sit for an hour. I hate that, you know, and like, yeah, you want me to throw you a bone and play fetch. So I’m doing that with my mind and giving it that, incidentally, if you have ADHD, you’re also gonna love it. If you are a big reader, and you love books, and you can already immerse yourself in other worlds, you’re going to love it. So it really appeals to a certain, you know, pie slice of the population as kind of an ideal practice, whereas others may have, have failed. And I don’t know, I encourage people to find their own way with it. Get as woowoo as you want. You know, for me, it’s an ideal way to contact the universe, you know, to to be in the space of all that is, and let it know, this is what I’m going for. For other people who aren’t that way. They’re just saying, Look, I have so much anxiety, I need to practice a countering emotion. So today, I’m going to try to call up a feeling of peace and, and safety. And I’m gonna hold that feeling for as long as I can inside me, because I’m not waiting for something outside me to give it to me, I’ve got to figure this out myself. And I’m gonna keep doing it until I can sustain that and feel that for a good five minutes, or whatever I want. Right? So I mean, those are two extremes that you can use this for me, I mean, I am using the whole spectrum of it.

george grombacher 21:39
So there I think it’s all super powerful. And I can’t wait to dig deeper into it myself. So thank you so much for coming on summer where can people learn more? How can they how can they engage?

Summer McStravik 21:52
Thanks, George. And thank you for letting me you know also share it with everybody and with you. Even even if it’s a brief overview, it’s enough to it’s it’s one of those things where if you hear it and it just hits you right, you go oh my gosh, yeah, I needed that it’s time if that no big deal. Find me at flow dreaming.com Find me on your app on your phone flow dreaming for meditation and manifesting find my podcast also called Flow dreaming, everything is flow drew me on Instagram though, under my name, summer mix traffic and I have a tutorial on YouTube with that teaches people much more in depth. This practice is like a five or six or seven part tutorial and it’s all free. I’ve always taught this process 100% for free for people that I’ve made available, other things that they can use practice with, such as playlists, like the same way you might do a guided meditation, I have a guided flow dream for you. So I’m doing the heavy lifting by telling you what to see and what to feel to create or shape certain aspects of your life. So all of those are great starting places and you know, I even give people free flow dreams as soon as they come to my website. I’m like here, take these enjoy them, play them in the car, play them as you lay in bed, play them whenever. So those are I’ve got a ton out there. Like I said, I’ve been doing this for several decades. I love it.

george grombacher 23:18
Well if you enjoyed switches I did show some of your appreciation and share today’s show with a friend who also appreciates good ideas go to flow dreaming.com and dig more into all the things summer and I had been talking about you find an app the flow dreaming, what is the name of

Summer McStravik 23:36
the app again, low grinning from meditation and manifesting low dreaming

george grombacher 23:40
for meditation and manifestation. Find the podcast flow dreaming where you listen to your podcast, summer mix traffic on Instagram and then go to the flow dreaming YouTube channel and take advantage of the tutorial that summer has been talking about. And I will certainly link all of those in the notes of the show. Thanks good sir.

Summer McStravik 24:00
Thank you so much George for this opportunity to talk with you and and all of your audience. Appreciate it.

george grombacher 24:06
My pleasure. Until next time, remember, do your part by doing your best

george grombacher 16:00
So if I want my iPhone, and my Tesla and my Bitcoin to work, we need to get the metal out of the ground.

Pierre Leveille 16:07
Absolutely. Without it, we cannot do it.

george grombacher 16:13
Why? Why is there a Why has production been going down.

Pierre Leveille 16:21
Because the large mines that are producing most of the copper in the world, the grades are going down slowly they’re going there, they’re arriving near the end of life. So and of life of mines in general means less production. And in the past, at least 15 years, the exploration expenditure for copper were pretty low, because the price of copper was low. And when the price is low, companies are tending to not invest more so much in exploration, which is what we see today. It’s it’s, it’s not the way to look at it. Because nobody 15 years ago was able to predict that there would be a so massive shortage, or it’s so massive demand coming. But in the past five years, or let’s say since the since 10 years, we have seen that more and more coming. And then the by the time you react start exploring and there’s more money than then ever that is putting in put it in expression at the moment for copper at least. And what we see is that the it takes time, it could take up to 2025 years between the time you find a deposit that it gets in production. So but but the year the time is counted. So it’s it’s very important to so you will see company reopening old mines, what it will push also, which is not bad, it will force to two, it will force to find a it will force to find ways of recalibrating customer, you know the metals, that will be more and more important.

george grombacher 18:07
So finding, okay, so for lack of a better term recycling metals that are just sitting around somewhere extremely important. Yeah. And then going and going back to historic minds that maybe for lack of technology, or just lack of will or reasons, but maybe now because there’s such a demand, there’s an appetite to go back to those.

Pierre Leveille 18:33
Yes, but there will be a lot of failures into that for many reasons. But the ones that will be in that will resume mining it’s just going to be a short term temporary solution. No it’s it’s not going to be you need to find deposit that will that will operate 50 years you know at least it’s 25 to 50 years at least and an old mind that you do in production in general it’s less than 10 years.

george grombacher 19:03
Got it. Oh there we go. Up here. People are ready for your difference making tip What do you have for them

Pierre Leveille 19:14
You mean an investment or

george grombacher 19:17
whatever you’re into, you’ve got so much life experience with raising a family and doing business all over the world and having your kids go to school in Africa so a tip on copper or whatever you’re into.

Pierre Leveille 19:34
But there’s two things I like to see and I was telling my children many times and I always said you know don’t focus on what will bring you specifically money don’t think of Getting Rich. Think of doing what you what you like, what you feel your your your your your, you know you have been born to do so use your most you skills, do what you like, do what you wet well, and good things will happen to you. And I can see them grow in their life. And I can tell you that this is what happens. And sometimes you have setback like I had recently. But if we do things properly, if we do things that we like, and we liked that project, we were very passionate about that project, not only me, all my team, and if we do things properly, if we do things correctly, good things will happen. And we will probably get the project back had to go forward or we will find another big project that will be the launch of a new era. So that’s my most important tip in life. Do what you like, do it with your best scale and do it well and good things will happen.

george grombacher 20:49
Pierre Leveille 21:03
Thank you. I was happy to be with you to today.

george grombacher 21:06
Damn, tell us the websites and where where people can connect and find you.

Pierre Leveille 21:13
The it’s Deep South resources.com. So pretty simple.

george grombacher 21:18
Perfect. Well, if you enjoyed this as much as I did show up here your appreciation and share today’s show with a friend who also appreciate good ideas, go to deep south resources, calm and learn all about what they’re working on and track their progress.

Pierre Leveille 21:32
Thanks. Thanks, have a nice day.

george grombacher 21:36
And until next time, keep fighting the good fight. We’re all in this together.