Interview with Teresa Summer on How to Stop Pleasing Others and Start Living for Yourself
- 3 hours ago
- 8 min read
Teresa Summer is a holistic yoga teacher, transformational retreat facilitator, and Rapid Transformational Therapy (RTT) hypnotherapist who works between Austria and South Africa, blending yoga, psychology, and nervous system work through her method, LifeFlow360. Across her teacher trainings, retreats, and one-on-one sessions, she has come to see disconnection from oneself, often built up through years of people-pleasing and old conditioning, as one of the deepest, most common blocks to a genuinely fulfilling life. In this interview, she talks about what years of working with people in these different settings have taught her about lasting change, where traditional yoga practice can fall short, and how her own experience of not feeling seen shaped the way she now meets her students and clients.
Teresa Summer, RTT Therapist & Yoga Life Coach
What does helping someone "finally" return to themselves look like in your work today?
There's something that happens when you step away from your everyday life, even just for a few days, and let yourself simply be. We carry so much of our daily noise with us, the roles we play, the responsibilities we hold, the pace we've gotten used to, and we rarely give ourselves the space to stop and ask what we actually need. That's what a retreat with me is for, and often it's also where people first meet me, before going deeper still in a one-on-one RTT session. It's a chance to reset, to re-evaluate, and to re-align with who you truly are underneath it all.
My approach is holistic, because you are not just a body or just a mind, you are both, and everything in between. I meet you exactly where you are, and together we journey through your story, from the root cause of what's been holding you back to the full transformation waiting on the other side. You don't just leave with new information. You leave changed, clearer, lighter, and finally, truly you.
After more than 20 years in yoga, what led you to bring hypnosis, breathwork, and coaching into your practice?
I always felt there was something more to yoga than what I was experiencing. So I went searching for that deeper element I could feel but couldn't quite pinpoint. Training after training took me deeper into new experiences, and I slowly began to understand how the dots of life connected. I discovered that no single modality, on its own, was complete.
For example, I suffered from chronic back pain for around eight years, and even as a yoga specialist, I couldn't heal it. It was only when I turned to hypnosis and uncovered the root cause, that my body braces whenever my husband is in a mood, that I was finally able to heal it completely.
That's exactly why my retreats and RTT sessions now weave all of these modalities together, rather than relying on yoga alone. Not everyone is drawn to yoga, so why not meet people where their interest actually is?
What have you learned from training yoga teachers that changed the way you understand personal transformation?
What I've noticed, over years of training yoga teachers, is that people almost always start out simply, wanting to learn yoga, either to teach it or to bring more of it into their own lives. By the end, they're astounded at how much more they get out of it than they expected. Most come to realize the training itself becomes their therapy for life. I've had people tell me that after years of conventional therapy, one weekend of a single modality shifted things therapy never touched, entire life problems, transformed.
What this taught me is that we're all more alike than we think. Every human carries the same underlying issues, just in different flavors, different stories. That's exactly what makes a strong, grounded facilitator: their own inner work. You cannot guide someone else's transformation if you haven't faced and transformed your own first.
That insight is exactly what now shapes my retreats and one-on-one RTT sessions, real personal work, not just information, is what actually changes a life.
Where do you think traditional yoga practice can fall short when someone is trying to change deeply rooted patterns?
I think traditional yoga practice only speaks to a minority of people. Not everyone feels a natural pull toward the traditional Indian roots of yoga, the Sanskrit chants, the deities, the rituals that carry deep meaning within that culture but can feel foreign to someone who didn't grow up with them. That's one place traditional yoga falls short.
The ancient yoga texts, the Vedas, the chants, they don't really address deeply rooted patterns. They give us guidelines on how we should be, but it's far easier to tell someone how to be than for them to actually become that. What if someone can't, because of patterns rooted deep inside them? People need to understand what's blocking them before they can unblock it. Simply telling them how to behave doesn't hold, it isn't lasting.
That's why I believe a holistic approach, drawing on various modalities, speaks to a Western mind in a way it can actually relate to, and it's exactly why I've built my retreats and RTT sessions around that approach, rather than yoga alone.
Why do so many women lose connection with themselves while building a life around other people's needs?
So many women are raised to measure their worth by how well they take care of others, being a good partner, a good mother, a good employee, a good daughter. Somewhere along the way, "What do I need?" quietly stops being a question they ask themselves. It's not usually a dramatic loss, it happens gradually, one compromise at a time, until they wake up one day and realize they've built an entire life around everyone else's needs except their own.
What I've seen, especially in the women who come to my retreats and sessions, is that this isn't a character flaw, it's a deeply rooted pattern, often formed long before adulthood. They learned early that their value came from giving, not from simply being. So they keep giving, even when it costs them their own identity.
Reconnecting with yourself isn't about becoming selfish. It's about recognizing that pattern, understanding where it came from, and finally asking the question you stopped asking years ago: What do I actually want? That's where real transformation begins, not in doing more for others, but in coming home to yourself.
What are the first signs that someone may be living from old conditioning rather than what they genuinely want?
The clearest sign is a nagging sense of "Shouldn't I be happier than this?", even when life looks fine on paper. You're ticking the boxes: the job, the relationship, the routine, and yet something underneath feels hollow or restless, and you can't quite name why.
Another sign is chronic over-explaining or over-justifying your choices, even to yourself. If you constantly need a good reason to want what you want, chances are it isn't really your own desire, it's a decision filtered through what you think you're supposed to want.
Physical tension is often the earliest signal, long before the mind catches up. Tight shoulders, a clenched jaw, a stomach that reacts before you've even registered a thought, the body tends to know you're out of alignment before you consciously do.
Then there's the pattern of saying yes when everything in you is screaming no, just to avoid conflict, disappointment, or guilt. That reflex almost always traces back to old conditioning, a belief formed long ago that your needs come second. Noticing these moments, rather than pushing past them, is usually the first real step toward change.
How does your LifeFlow360 approach connect body, mind, nutrition, and energy when someone feels stuck?
LifeFlow360 works from one simple belief: when someone feels stuck, it's never just in their mind, and it's never just in their body, it's in all of it at once. So instead of treating those parts separately, I connect them.
Say someone comes to me feeling stuck in uncertainty. We start with the psychology, where they were taught to doubt themselves, where stability or self-worth was missing growing up. Then we move into the body: close your eyes, locate where you're actually holding that uncertainty as physical tension. From there, we move, often through something as simple as cat-cow or child's pose, to physically release what the mind has been gripping.
Then nutrition comes in, uncertainty breeds frustration, and frustration usually drives us toward certain foods, so we look at what that pattern is feeding. Finally, energy: how you feel shapes the environment around you, and that environment feeds straight back into how you feel, so shifting the internal state shifts the external one too.
When all four move together, "stuck" stops being one fixed thing and becomes something the whole person can actually work their way out of.
How has your own experience of not feeling seen shaped the way you meet people in your work?
I became a people pleaser very young. I learned early on that I was responsible for how my parents felt, and not being seen as a valuable human myself, not being treated as one, is what shaped that pattern in me. It showed up everywhere: accommodating every guest's and client's needs, always saying yes to whatever suggestion came my way, never really saying no. It showed up in my marriage too. For years I had no real opinion of my own, I simply slotted into my husband's, and over time I became more a version of his personality than my own.
It's been a long, interesting journey to unwind that. Walking towards finally being me has been intense, but I feel like I'm getting to know myself for the first time in this life. That's exactly why I meet my retreat guests and clients the way I do now, I see them, really see them, because I know firsthand what it costs when nobody does.
What would you want someone who feels disconnected from herself to understand about finding her way back?
The first thing I'd want her to understand is that finding her way back to herself isn't a threat to the life she's already built, it's what finally lets her show up fully within it. Without that connection, you're not really living; you're functioning like a machine, running on beliefs you absorbed from other people and quietly mistook for your own.
She doesn't need to fear that changing means losing her relationship or her children. What actually changes is how she meets them, with more wisdom, more patience, more finesse than before. Whatever in her life is genuinely solid tends to deepen rather than break, because she's finally showing up as herself instead of who she thought she had to be.
This isn't about dismantling a life. It's about rooting it more honestly. Once she does that work, what she gains is something no amount of pleasing anyone else could ever have given her: real clarity, real peace, and a sense of freedom in simply being who she is.
For a reader who feels that pull to finally return to herself but doesn't know where to start, what would you say to her?
Trust that pull, because you wouldn't feel it if there weren't something real underneath it. Start with a few days on retreat to reconnect, or a one-on-one RTT session if there's something more specific you're ready to face, and come as you are, because I'll meet you exactly there.
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