Heal Your Trauma and Build Emotional Abundance | with Summer McStravick

Michael: How are you, my friend?

Summer: Hey, Michael, super glad to be here. It's going to be fun.

Michael: Yeah. I'm excited to have you. You started this really interesting company called Flow Dreaming where you teach these unbelievable meditations financial abundance, instant alignment, flow dreams, you've written books, you have podcasts, you have courses, transformational work. You've done a lot. And what I'm really curious about is paint me a picture. How does one get to there?

Summer: Yeah. Oh, you mean doing all the things?

Michael: Doing all the manifestation, meditation, creating abundance. We live in a world full of lack.

Summer: Yeah.

Michael: how does one step into this?

Summer: So one of my obsessions, quite a few, but one of them is discovering our lack thinking, ‘cause you use the word lack. Some people call it scarcity for me. I look at lack. And this really plays so well into your work, all the things that are lives where we have. So I've spent a lot of my life looking for patterns of lack thinking in our beings, in our perception of where we're going. And over the course of my career, I've been through some crazy, gnarly stuff. One thing that I do know and do well is if I have a curiosity, I'm going to find out where that leads. And for me, it's led to flow dreaming. It's led to, I sometimes call it a process of emotional reconditioning, which means that instead of constantly feeling a spin of feelings that don't work for us anymore, the so called lack thoughts and so forth. We consciously create a brand new set of feelings about ourselves that we literally practice, we practice those feelings. We don't wait for the world to give us permission to feel them. And most people are in a powerless position of waiting for the world to allow them to feel things. And they wait and they wait for this to change or that to change. And I say, forget it. I want you to feel how you want to feel right now. And let's put the cart before the horse. So let's feel that way right now. So it's ended up that for me, I ended up being a lot really productive, right? I create these column flow, dream meditations, and they're really emotional reconditioning. Sometimes people call them energy activations but they are meant to get you straight into that new feeling state. And then for people who are a little more woop or, open to personal growth it's a way to directly communicate with your higher power. This is who I am now. See me and start aligning things that are going to match me. So it works on multiple levels from the psychological to the spiritual. Short answer. That qualifies as one of my actual short answers. Can you believe it?

Michael: Yeah, and I say this often meditation changed my life forever. It's single handedly one of the most important things that I've ever done, but it required just a lot of, use the word cup curiosity and it required that because the negative emotions that I had, especially spurring from childhood led me into this place where even though here's a great example of how much lack can impact your life. And the audience knows this, but, being 25, having been 50,000 in debt, 350 pounds, destroying a relationship, destroying my body, like that, even in abundance, that is a lack mindset. So I'm curious, like for you what was childhood like that would lead you down this path? Did you have a lack mindset? Did you have an abundance mindset? Obviously as kids, we don't have these words but what was childhood? ‘Cause I'm just trying to peg, like, how does someone get to that?

Summer: How does somebody fall into this line of work? It's like you becoming a trauma coach, right? I didn't intend it either. Not at all. All I knew is that I was finding techniques and things that were working for me that then began to work for other people. Our childhoods, I feel often set us up for the golden era of our lives. And it's a weird thing to say if you had a really sucky childhood, like how did, what are you saying? Again, in anything that you're encountering, including your childhood, I always say, look, nothing is an accident. There's something there for me. The gold is in the shit. Go find it, that's why that's why it's there. If you had an intention to become something or develop something or reveal something, express something, experience something in your life as a soul, as a growing being, you're going to get everything you need for that and some of us just happen to be like champ students were like, great. I'll take all the hard things, not just one or two and we end up like us. So my childhood. Oh, my God, in a crazy little nutshell. My mom was virtually a single mom most of the time. When she wasn't, she was married to a really abusive man, a physically abusive man, emotionally abusive man. I experienced my own share of traumas, when you have to flee your house when you are picked up from school and you never see your bedroom or your siblings or your neighborhood again. It's the same thing as having a house burned down. That sense of absolute loss and things can change unexpectedly at any time. And, that for me, I think was a defining moment, like I never want to be in a place of insecurity again. Aside from that I guess you could say I guess people know this. My group knows this, my mom was involved in a cult as well a religious cult. And so I spent a good deal of my childhood being absolutely pilloried and ridiculed and was definitely the monster of the group. There were kids who were not allowed to come into my front yard. Play at my house, any of that. So there were a lot of things going on to make me the ultimate outsider. And as I grew older, it definitely contributed to a sense of, I have to prove myself all the time.

Michael: Silence.

Summer: some of the things like we all have our own different set of things. And so I learned how to cover up and hide not appear too smart, not outshine anybody else, not sit in the front of the classroom, not step forward. It led to me dropping out of high school in 10th grade with a 4.0. And I didn't even know what college was, I had no clue, absolutely no clue. And my college counselors didn't guide me either. So I had quite a few, and that's just my childhood. So all these things that happen end up being things that I had to unravel later, and I didn't have a trauma coach back then Oh damn, where were you? I had to find my…

Michael: I was drunk.

Summer: Yeah. Okay. And I was hiding, you were drunk and I was hiding.

Michael: Yeah. It's interesting that in, in those kind of, and I've interviewed some other people over the years who've been in religious cults. I was really in one as well. And you look at that and it's it is just torment top to bottom about your lack of enough nest, your lack of, the idea that You're not going to heaven or however it is that your cult identified. You tack that on plus the absence of anything secure. I'm shocked you're even alive right now, to be honest. And I say that as a reflection of my own journey. What, where did that end up leading you? So you drop out of high school and then what?

Summer: The one thing I really loved to do at that time was sing. And I had a very fortunate experience meeting an opera teacher. And so I began training with her. So by the time I was 16, I should have been going into 11th grade, but instead I was going to college. She was a professor at a college and she got me a special exemption to come in and start studying. So I began studying opera when I was 16 with her and was there for several years, then I had a really big health crisis. My body broke down and I left from there though. I finally understood what college was. And that there were places you could go and learn really cool stuff and find your passion. So I went the route of figuring out how do I get myself back into college and what do I want to do there and who do I want to be there? So I come from a really intuitive family, a family of psychics and mediums and tarot readers and astrologers going way, way back, multi generational. So my goal at that time, and not to mention the cult my goal at that time was to create a really normal life, like not be any of that, not follow my mom's, multiple constant relationships and instability and so forth. I was going to be normal. So I ended up graduating in with a degree in literature. And I said, I'm going to go into publishing, and I joke now that. We strive not to be like our parents, right? We want to be anything but, but life oftentimes will lead you back into whatever gifts you truly have, and sometimes they do in fact come from your parents, like I love my mom so much. I don't blame her at all for anything that I experienced in my childhood. Which, her upbringing was worse than mine. We've talked at length she did better. Then she herself was treated. I ended up working for a publisher, like one of the largest mind body spirit publishers in the world and essentially trained under all of these spiritual luminaries like Louise Hay and Dr. Wayne Dyer and God, even Marianne Williamson and people who are amazing and spent a good decade there in corporate and then eventually moved out and began my own work with flow dreaming, which is a practice that. Yeah. I started back in the year 2000, actually when I was still finishing up college and I had my own little business that I created for myself, part of my upbringing, I think really instilled in me this need to be an entrepreneur and to try to control my own life through controlling, how I give my work out into the world. I think a lot of entrepreneurs have that upbringing as well.

Michael: Yeah. And what's interesting is you'll find that a lot of the people I've interviewed over the years are entrepreneurs. It's actually pretty rare that they're not to tell you the truth. And I think that's a big part of the journey because it's, I've said this for years. If you really want to figure out who you are, be an entrepreneur. I want to go back to something cause I think it's actually really important, I wrote a note here. You said that you don't blame your mother. You haven't blamed your mother. Oh, so many people are suffering in that because they, and rightfully and for years I blamed my mother, she cut my finger off and she was a drug addict, alcoholic in and out of institutions and rehabs. And until I didn't, it was like carrying a backpack full of bricks. Was that a journey of healing for you? Did you never blame her? What was that like?

Summer: I think because I was always pretty aware of what she had been through. There's a point I remember in my early 20s Late teens early 20s yet. Another bad thing had happened. Like she didn't always protect me very well. And I remember thinking why didn't I get a parent who could protect me? Why didn't I get somebody who could do better for me? Everybody else got it. It's almost like feeling cheated by God why did I get this? Everybody else gets a good, a good family, not me. And having those thoughts eventually just, it's like it just shifted one day. And I realized, what kind of bargain are you making with the universe that you should have the same thing everybody else has? It's not God stood there and put out its hand and said, here, you're going to have this too, or you can't. And therefore, because I don't like you as much or you're bad. So I had a reckoning on multiple levels, and one of them was to realize my mom was a human being, and she loves me dearly, and she has always stood by me and been there for me, even though she couldn't prevent herself from being in harmful situations that I was therefore exposed to, if she couldn't prevent it for herself and me that hurts me to the bottom of my heart. As a parent now, I can only imagine how she suffered not being able to prevent things to both herself and to me. Yeah, that's where the forgiveness comes from. It's just baked in and at a certain point you still acknowledge your parent as a parent, but you see them as a person and you stop putting the role of parent on them as much because that expectation of how they should be the right parents, you're really asking some other very unique and different individual to live up to all of the expectations that you have created for them. It's like trying to tell somebody to wear the clothes that you've chosen for them every day. And, as parents, we do our best, right? But I certainly couldn't be exactly the way that one of my children want me to be. If I did, then I'd be different for the other child. It just doesn't work, it goes in with your idea of radical autonomy, right?

Michael: Yeah, and there's the analogy you just used is actually a really wonderful analogy because if you tried to give me a shirt that I don't want to wear, I'm not wearing it.

Summer: Yeah.

Michael: And I mean that very genuinely and there's something it's human, right? Because you look at these people and at the end of the day, if you're like really paying attention and you're doing this work, what you come to realize is like they had a childhood also. And the truth is, this is a Neil Strauss quote, he said most adults are running around like hurt children. And it's a quote that I think about all the time, and we live in this society now in which, and I've, I fell victim to this as well, blaming my mother constantly, my stepfather, my grandmother, the community, the people and we live in this society now where this idea of doing the work, quote unquote, is almost like a badge of honor in this weird way where people are like, I'm better than you because I did these things. And it's no, you're not. You're still just as fucked up in one decision away from ruining your life as the next person and, but that doesn't mean you don't hold yourself to bigger and higher standards. And I think that one of the really interesting things that I've been able to navigate is leveraging this idea that the standards that I set my for myself are for me. They can't be for other people. And that's a lot of the space for forgiveness. And I'm going to fuck up too. I'm a nightmare. Sometimes that is just the human experience, but, it's interesting because you talked about as a parent, you can understand that pain that your mother must've gone through. One of the things people tell me all the time is you'll be a great dad. I don't have kids, but they always tell me that. And I'm wondering what are the positive influences that even though your mother wasn't always there for you, you've been able to pull over into your own motherhood.

Summer: I always joke with my kids I'm going to obsess someday over the things that I think I did wrong with you. I got you, I didn't deal with the other parents or kids a certain way or teachers or the school or there was that one time when I lost my temper. I'm going to obsess about a bunch of things that I think I failed at and you're someday we'll have a conversation and I'll tell you these things and you'll say, I don't even know what you're talking about. I don't remember that at all. Let me tell you where I think it happened. And then you'll tell me a whole bunch of things and I'll say, I don't even remember that day at all, that was not even right. It's like there's sometimes a mismatch of where we think we fail and where our kids are thinking we fail and we can't presume to know. So I keep that in mind, even with my kids, it's a constant question of my mom would say, how are you doing? What do you need? How can I support you? Tell me anything. I won't be angry if you tell me anything. So she kept the doors of communication really open. Even though in some ways it was an oddly strict and loose upbringing, I had, she had me home at midnight, no matter what she was there waiting, awake good things, but then the other areas were absolute chaos. So for me I try to keep as much continuity and recognize, in fact, it's funny, I had a conversation with my kids a couple of months ago and I said, where, is there anything I can be doing better for you?

Michael: Silence.

Summer: And my son said here's some things that I actually want, and he had a little tidy list, so we went through them. So I'm really always conscious about asking, what am I doing right? What am I doing wrong? And my kids are not afraid to tell me, which I take as a feather in my hat, because a lot of us were younger, afraid to, to tell our parents how we really feel or if we do we're told that we're stupid or wrong or bad for thinking that. So that's the environment that I try to cultivate.

Michael: Yeah, that's beautiful. And I do think, unfortunately, a lot of people do that. They do not actually allow the space for children to be curious or to share the truth. I certainly went through that. That's probably one of the reasons that I became a great liar. And I had to heal that journey and go down that path. And what's really interesting is you're faced with the series of variables every single day, that you don't really have control over and the only thing that you really truly have control over. And to cultivate and create, you said, this is the life I want my children to have. It actually first comes with creating the life that you want to have. And this is the place where most people get lost, they put everything before themselves, they put themselves at the back of the room. They certainly are not manifesting abundance in any capacity, there's no transformation, they're not flow dreaming, they're not going and making this life, the thing that they can have. And so what I'm really curious about, right? Because people often get missed in alignment. They do things that they should not be doing for people. They shouldn't be doing them for. And I know that's a big truth for this audience because I was one of them. I was a yes man. I was a do whatever you need. I was codependent. And now I'm like a super no guy. I'm like, no, the answer is probably no, and so I'm really curious like how do we get people into a mindset of abundance, of alignment, of clarity, while manifesting it's like all these words that I'm trying to put together into a little puzzle. What does that look like? How do you get people aligned? That's the hardest thing I think we struggle with silence.

Summer: Alignment's a word that you know, the personal growth and spiritual communities just toss around like nothing. I'm very specific with what alignment means to me. To go back for a second, you know how you were saying we often blame people in our past for how we feel today. Beyond my childhood, I've had a series of other things where, people have been villainous and there was a moment in my life where I realized every time I call up that feeling of anger against them or you messed me up or you derailed me or you took something from me, you took my money, you took my position, you took, something that's been some dastardly horrible thing. The villain who did it to me probably doesn't remember me at all anymore or they don't, they certainly don't think about it. It's not even in their world. I'm the one now, who's taken that on and institutionalized it inside myself, just like you would use institutionalization, institutionalizing with a person who, they get out of jail and they go right back to jail, right? They've created a set of comfort in that. A lot of us are still carrying these old wounds, but we're the only ones who's holding, who are holding that torch anymore. We, in fact, are giving the perpetrators what they've not even asking for anymore. Because we're still feeling the pain, we're still feeling the hurt. But we're now the ones who are bearing the torch for them, if that makes sense. So for me, one of the first steps is to release that and say, look, that person no longer has the ability to make me feel any certain way. They no longer, I withdraw the authorization for them to be, make me feel this way. And I consider anger and mad to be that as well. If I can get to the point where any of my past enemies, I want to hug and kiss, then I have actually finally trumped them. I've finally withdrawn all of their power over me. So that's one of the basis that I start with from there, it's okay who do you want to be? Who do you actually want to be? What do you think you're capable of being? And then we're going to go into the realm. When I work with my clients, we go into the realm next of I'd like to be this, but I don't know if I can. I don't know if that's really me. I don't know if. And so we have to explore what do you mean? Who says you can't be that way? There's nobody on this. I always point out, all these people are trying to tell other people how to live their lives as if they could be selfish enough to have two lives that they get to live. I'm like, nobody has that rule, there's not a single person on this earth who can tell you, here's how you need to be. And here's how I want you to be, and here's how you should be. If they try to do that, they're selfish little fucks, excuse me, but they have no authority for that. Why are you giving them any authority? You're going to get to decide. Now you and I are talking the same language, right? So we're getting that awareness. Okay, I get to decide, okay. If I get to decide what are the limits of my imagination and what are the limits of what I think I'm actually capable of. And I say, great, now we get to build this because you've been going around your whole life, waiting for other people to give you permission to feel a certain way, waiting for them to give you. Money. So you could feel a certain way waiting for all these things to give you something so you could feel something or become something. I said, what if we take all those other people out of the equation, right? Take all the power away from them. Bring it back into yourself. How do you want to feel? I want to feel like you said, abundant and prosperous. And I love talking about that abundance, prosperity, money, because for many people who've been through a lot of trauma and abuse stability and safety are a one, they're like the number one thing. Like you, I always say you can't build a skyscraper if you don't put a nice big cement pad down at the bottom, right? When you are building security and you're building money, that is your pat. You could build all kinds of stuff on top of that. So let's start with that. How do we make you secure? How do we make you abundant? And then that opens up other things like my worth is, I've only ever been paid this. And I say, okay, that was, again, was other people telling you what you were worth, telling your value in the marketplace, telling you this and that, and you believed it and you took it all in and made it you. It's not you anymore. What's you? So I say, let's feel what abundance is like. Let's practice the feeling. Let's go in and manifest the feeling. Sorry, I'm, I get on.

Michael: I want to go in. No, you're no, I love it. I'm literally taking notes as we go through here, but I want to go, you hit something that I know people are going to be like, I need to have the answer to this question, and I'm so curious to myself included as I'm always on this journey. You talked about most people need that pad that security first how do we make ourselves secure? to become financially abundant. Let's go into that because money is such an important part of this journey and so many people who grew up how we did live in scarcity and fear, or they do what I did for years, which is a self sabotage to make a million dollars and be 50 grand in debt, it's pretty insane. You know what I mean? And either the scarcity or the lack or the self sabotage or the self destruction or the self doubt, how do we actually make people feel secure and become abundant? What do we do?

Summer: Yeah. That is a journey, right? That's a coaching journey. To start with, because it's going to open up a lot of little doors as you go along. Most of us want security either so we can feel safe, right? ‘Cause we lacked a certain kind of protection growing up, or we want it for freedom because we were perhaps over controlled. And or dad always worked, from eight in the morning till eight at night. I never saw him and mom was always gone too. And that's all we're supposed to do is work these jobs just to get by, right? So their yearning is for freedom and that's what money will give me. So money gives you different kinds of security, but security doesn't always mean, you're tied to something. Sometimes it's freedom itself that we're actually going for. Poor upbringing as well, ended up with a multi million dollar company of my own. And a lot of that had to do with, I have something of great value. I want to shout it to the world. I want to shout it off the rooftops. But in order to do that, I've got to get over myself. And when I say get over myself, it's a phrase I use constantly, get over yourself, just get over yourself. Whenever I'm afraid to do something, pick up a phone, reach out to somebody, tell somebody here's what I charge, tell somebody you really should work with me, I can actually help you. Those sound like sometimes egotistical statements, but they're not. They're me standing in something I know deeply and I can say it, and I've had to teach myself how to do that and not fear the blowback and not fear someone saying how do you know? Or I disagree or I don't think you are. I'm like, it's fine, so be it, get it. I've gotten over myself, if you don't like it, not a problem. But when we're into ourselves, like that's how the coaching world always talks about playing small, right? Playing small is meaning you're putting your own personal fears and worries and lack of trust of self ahead of what you're able to give to the world. You're prioritizing your own insecurities over your gifts. So when I say get over myself, I'm like, my gifts have to come first, I'm in service to them. And the more that I give them my gifts the more feedback I get, the more my awareness of their actual value and potential starts to grow. So I call it a process of taking tiny steps like you don't immediately say I'm worth 20 an hour. No, I'm worth, 2,000 an hour, you have to grow into that through a series of small steps. But if you don't do that journey, you're going to keep letting the external world still tell you. And I have a word for it. I call it ceilings in our thinking. When you look up, like there's a ceiling above me now, if I didn't know better, I wouldn't know there was a sky or a second story above me because this is all I can see. This is all I've ever been exposed to is this ceiling, this eight foot ceiling in my office. So our first step is to say what's above that ceiling. What can't you conceive of? What is ridiculous and ludicrous? What would just be like never, ever happening in my life? I'm like, cause that's there. It's, that's a possibility. The second you can conceive of something, it now becomes part of your reality. And I firmly believe in my version of a higher power, I don't think we get ideas without the ability to succeed in those ideas. If so, that would be an incredibly selfish and mean spirited, cosmos to yearnings that you're unable to ever have. It'd be a giant tease of a life. So just like we have the dualism of everything up and down and black and white and here and there and forward and backward, Yin and Yang, if you come with an idea, you have the ability and the alignment to achieve that idea. So this brings me back into alignment. What we are inside is what the world is going to reflect back to us. That's like my core tenant. You make it here. And then it will come there because otherwise people try to make stuff outside them all the time they make it and they fall apart and they say, how come it doesn't stay? And I'm like, cause you, you built a house of cards. It's not you can't support it here. You can just build that thing over and over, it's like people who are always trying to make more money and feel I need more to get safe and feel secure and like I have enough. And I'm like, look, you could be making 3 million a year and you're still going to be telling me it's not enough. How come? Because it's not in alignment with where you've grown your 3 million self inside.

Michael: So that's my idea of the emotional home. Yeah, no, I love that. And that's the emotional home. That's the place where we get trapped. And this get over yourself, I wrote like a little arrow and I wrote get over yourself will end self doubt will end self sabotage because what are those two words have in common is self. And I think that a big part of that is healing. And I think One of the things I've discovered that has transformed my life so dramatically, and obviously I have just an insane background, but the truth is, as I look forward, I'm going to look back in these moments of building right now in the stage that I am, and I'm going to leverage that as evidence that supports where I can go next. And that's the thing that I think is really one of the cornerstones of creating the life that you want. Can you sit and evaluate the evidence that actually proves contrary to whatever the stupid thought you have is that is in your head about who you are and even I go through it right and I, being on stages with these amazing people just this past week I'm on stage with Dr. Josh acts and Dr. Ken Vu and David Meltzer and Ben Curtis and Preston smiles and I'm like, Am I supposed to be on here? And that's a instantaneous thought. I make it disappear immediately, I work my ass off. I should absolutely be on stage with these guys. But that thing is about finding the supporting evidence and people who are in debt. It's can you find supporting evidence that you're responsible for people who are in a bad relationship? Can you find supporting evidence that you've. Can be in a good relationship, right? And I think that's so much of it, but people are going to get trapped in this. Get over yourself idea and they're going to look at it either as facetious or they're going to look at it as selfish or they're going to look at it as self serving and they're going to look at it as what I see it as, which I hope more people will shift to, I see the idea of getting over yourself about becoming your truest version of yourself of relinquishing fear of letting go of being the hero of your own story where it's you have to stand in front of this mirror and look at your life and whether you're an entrepreneur or not, it doesn't matter, but if you don't have what you want, you've got to go look at yourself. And decide who you want to be. Are there any tips that you could really lay out to give us to get over yourself? Is it a conversation? Is it finding evidence? Is it doing something hard? What does that actually look like?

Summer: Yeah. I think this comes down to one basic emotion, fear. I, part of the work that I teach with flow dreaming and the emotional reconditioning and so forth is if we look at ourselves, we're either trying to get to a feeling or get away from a feeling, all the things that we're trying to create in our lives, whether it's a house or a car or a partner or money in the bank. Like, why do you need money in the bank? Cause I need to pay the bills. Why do you need to pay the bills? So that I can keep the lights on and keep my house, why do you need to keep the lights on and keep your house? Cause without my house, I'll be the homeless. Why do you not want to be homeless? Because if I'm homeless, I won't have opportunities and my family, I would feel devastated for my family. So you'd feel devastated. What would that make you feel like? I would feel like a failure. And then I would worry that I wasn't good enough and I would never be good enough. And that's the blackest hole I can experience. So I'm like, so that's really why you want money. So you don't have that feeling. So I said, let's look at all the things you're trying to create in your life and figure out what's the feeling you're actually going for. The only thing we're actually scared of, I think, it's feelings. And the only thing in the whole world, it's not being murdered or stabbed or even losing our someone we love so much. Yes, we'll miss their companionship and, but ultimately we don't want to, we don't want to feel lost. We don't want to feel lonely, we don't want to feel their lack. It's a feeling that we are most afraid of. So we start with that basic idea and then you look at what's the biggest thing we don't want to feel most of the time that's guiding us? It's fear, when we talk about you. Getting over yourself, the things I'm saying to get over is all those fears. So I had a year in 2015 where I realized that the only thing that I felt, the biggest thing, not the only thing, there's still plenty of things, the biggest thing that was holding me back from all the success or whatever I wanted to have was fear. So I made a challenge for myself. I called it my beyond fear challenge. Anytime I felt the emotion of fear, because I recognize, acknowledge every single emotion in the crayon box of emotions in our life, every single one of them is a tool that I used to sculpt either good things with or use as clues as what to avoid or heal. Every time I felt fear, I had to then do the thing. Now I'm only talking fear that's. It's about myself, not, go cross the freeway on foot. That's a fear that's grounded in, safety, physical safety. It's a blink blinking light that says, don't go there. But most of the fears that we experience are, if I do that, this, I may not get it. If I do that, I'll be disappointed. I'll look stupid. I'll regret it. I'm not good enough for it. They'll say, no, that those are the fears. So every time I felt fear, I had to go do the thing. It was a game changer. It was really hard because I realized right off the bat, you don't want to tell people about flow dreaming or get on, phone calls of people and tell them they should work with you. What? Why? Because what if they don't agree with me? What if they think I'm just trying to sell them something? Is that really what? So you're prioritizing again your own feelings over your ability to potentially help them and you're disrespecting them because what you're saying is you have more power over them and you can make them do something they don't want, which means you're not even seeing their own inner power and office authenticity and knowing this, you're not even honoring that. So it leads to these some big conversations when you start to go down that path. And eventually, that was also ironically the same year I was diagnosed with stage two cancer. And I look at my higher power, the source, God, flow, the universe. And I'm like, you guys, you just decided to challenge me with the biggest fear of all, huh? Death, leaving my two little grade school kids alone, really? But it was a game changer for me. Because I realized that I then had to go in and say, what am I afraid of? I'm afraid of loss. I'm afraid of the ultimate big thing. Okay, so the next question then becomes, how do you want to be in all of these situations? And that's another guiding credo that I teach myself and I teach all my students, great. You've been hit with something, who are you going to be in it? Not how are you going to overcome it? Not, how are you going to succeed through it? Who do you want to be in it? The outcome is unknown. If you acknowledge that the one thing you always have control over is who you're going to be through this experience. So I got to discover who I was through the experience of surgeries and chemo and baldness and radiation and like the whole thing. And I learned about a new me, a new different person in there. And I was really angry for a long time because when you go through trauma, you're pissed off. Like, why? What? In my case, my body, I felt betrayed me and God betrayed me and this was not fair and stupid and wrong. And that was way too young. And I realized, okay, again, remember how I talked about the victim and the person who continues to be angry at the thing long after the thing, and I realized now I have to come and reconcile my feelings around this. I've got to, again, trust my body. And again, I have to learn how to retrust the universe. Okay, who am I going to be in this? So I can stop having those negative emotions and let this thing and its torment end. So you see, there's so many avenues of growth and development, but as you move through them, like you always talk about, you become a stronger being. The stronger being attracts more clear, more precise, more on target things that you ultimately want around you in your life. So manifesting for me is not a gimmick. It's not Ooh, just manifest some money or whatever. No, money's not going to want to be with you unless you are money. Like you have to have, you have to be able to hold that, you have to be that. You have to be of that place inside yourself. And I know you don't have that in you now because nothing in your life has given you that before. But if you keep waiting for life to give you something, you're going to wait a long time. It has no reason to give it to you. You give it to yourself first and let's see what happens when we just flip the equation.

Michael: Yep, and it will give you the evidence that you need that supports that you can go to the next level, break through the next ceiling, have the next opportunity, the next health wealth relationship, whatever that thing is, and the universe is always conspiring in your favor. There's just absolutely no way you can't have the life that you want unless you put in a lot of effort and I come to realize through my journey through the people I've coached through, almost a decade of this is that. It takes as much energy to create your life as it does to destroy your life, and there's just no two ways about it. And since energy is only ever displaced, you choose where it's going, you pick the bucket. And if your life sucks and it's a nightmare, you need to take inventory about your decisions, your makings, your meanings, and why you are there. And ultimately what you just laid out going down this path of tracking like why is money important? I would argue that you should do that in all elements of your life about everything that you do. Why are the things that you do important to you? Why are you in that kind of relationship? Why do you have that kind of health? Why do you have that kind of wealth? And if you do that, I promise you, you will find the why and all of it, and that will be the cornerstone and the driver that will lead you down the path of ultimately This hero's journey of being unbroken and my hope is like truthfully, my hope is, and that's why we continue to do this show and have these conversations because it's not just me talking about it. Here we are sitting across from you this woman who has come through this very traumatic background in childhood, who didn't graduate high school and dropped out, who was an occult, who had abusive family situations and trauma. And yet figured it out and it's but wait a second, if she can do it, then why can't you? And my thought is very clear on this. And the answer is you can too, if you just get over yourself. My friend, this has been an awesome conversation. Before I ask you my last question, where can everyone find you?

Summer: Oh, I have a podcast too. It's called Flow Dreaming Still Kinda Woo. I lay out a lot of mindset pieces and techniques that I've used with thousands and thousands of students I've been teaching since 2004. So the podcast is greatflowdreaming.com is my main site. And I have a lot, like I, you said, I'm very productive. I have flow dreams, these recorded audios where I'm getting you into different emotional states and you're practicing them because a lot of us, if I say let's feel joyful, you're like, I don't know how to do that. Like my life sucks. Sometimes there's no way I can do that. I need to teach you how to feel that way without having a reason to feel that way. So we practice emotions on demand and we practice these gorgeous positive emotions because the more you experience or think something, in meditation, it's like you're creating these neural pathways every time you meditate, when you're doing the flow dreaming, you're doing the same thing, you're creating new neural pathways, except they're in your emotional centers and you could say you're spiritual centered. I am now more joyful because I practice the feeling of joy every day this week for five minutes. Now life is going, this person is fundamentally, the energy of them has shifted. There's now more of this and a little less of that. My website has all kinds of these flow dreams for feeling joy, for feeling confidence, for releasing childhood, forgiving your parents is actually one of them where we go through the emotional exercise of what does it feel like to absolutely let them go, love them, say thank you, I'm sure you provided something that I needed for myself and my ambitions as a soul to grow, here on this earth. Flow dreaming is a great place to start. And then of course, people can reach out and work with me too, if they want to, for a bigger, faster.

Michael: Yep. Guys, make sure you go to thinkunbrokenpodcast.com, look up Summer's episode for that and more in the show notes. My last question for you, my friend, what does it mean to you to be unbroken?

Summer: Oh, that's so layered. The first thing that comes to my mind is the Japanese pottery with all the little gold in it. What's it called? Ichia, Kfff I'm, Kintsugi, yes. Don't think it's so bad to be broken. I believe that your heart is made to heal constantly, the same way that your heart pumps blood and oxygenates your body and feeds it. It also is taking all the cellular debris, and the lymph and it's just, and it's cleaning it at the same time, your heart can do both and we can't be afraid of letting our hearts be broken, letting our lives be broken because they're meant to, because they're meant to continuously break and heal. And if you're not experiencing a little tiny bit of collateral damage every single day, it means you haven't risked anything, you haven't tried for anything, you haven't expanded into anything, if I throw a party at my house. I guarantee you, there's going to be glasses everywhere and napkins on the floor. There's going to be a mess afterwards, and I know it. It was a good party, the worst thing you want is a party where your house is, sterling clean afterwards. It means everybody was a little too cautious and safe. So for me, being unbroken and broken, they, it's they're a cycle, they're a circle, they're the in and the out, ultimately though. I want to be less broken in ways that hurt me and more broken in ways that expand me. Oh, and I think I'll leave it at that.

Michael: Thank you so much for being here, Unbroken Nation. Thank you for listening guys. Please remember every time you share this, you're helping other people transform their trauma to triumph, breakdowns to breakthroughs, and to become the hero of their own story.

And Until Next Time,

My Friends,

Be Unbroken,

I'll See Ya.