we talk to
teal swan
AWARENESS, LOVE AND WHERE HUMANITY IS HEADED. by Kate Stuart | Interviewer: Paul Congdon
In this conversation with Teal Swan, we unpack lofty ideas around awareness, love and where humanity is headed. Teal Swan has a series of workshops to give people the space to realign their path. Unpacking the idea of self love, what this actually means, and how you can begin to practice it daily, she gets to the root of some of the problems that hold people back in life. It is only by asking the tough questions to yourself that you can begin to redirect yourself onto the path you want to go. Paul: Awareness is a hack to cut through the noise, so I wanted to ask you about your perspective on awareness. Teal: My perspective on awareness is complex, it’s something that exists on different levels. When I use the word awareness, I mean at any level. That could mean diving into and deeply exploring your trauma, that is one level of awareness. My goal in awareness is to make it so that a person essentially exists or gathers awareness from any one of these dimensional spaces. So they can dive down into the minutiae or they can swim upwards into that macrocosmic, more objective perspective. It’s a different vantage point. I feel like being at any of these different vantage points offers something valuable. The mentality around awareness that I hold is more similar to the ancient gurus of India. Have you heard the term paramahamsa before? It means supreme swan. The reason they gave spiritual teachers that title is because they believe that the swan had the capacity to transcend all dimensions and therefore gain awareness of all these dimensions. It is the choice, the choice whether to take the objective perspective or to dive down
into a subjective perspective, that makes awareness what it is and makes it so comprehensive. Paul: I am going to ask you to describe the ideal relationship. How does it look, does it exist on this planet? Teal: There is no ideal relationship, because an ideal relationship is one that is in alignment with the best interests of both people involved. If we want to go a step further, it’s when the relationship itself is in alignment with the best interests of both people involved, in a way that is pleasurable to both people. It’s when the best interest brings about pleasure in both, that is when we can consider the ideal relationship, but the problem with getting into what that would be like, and what that would look like is because it is unique to the individuals experiencing that. We have to get outside the box, what you’ll notice is that even when you have a non-traditional relationship, they are still trying to fit that into the structures of marriage, a domestic partnership or whatever that looks like. We are going to have to get way more creative to find the ideal relationship. Paul: So that leads me on to love. How do you define love? Teal: I define love as, taking the other person as a part of oneself, to no longer see the division; however part of love is to recognise differences. I am putting it out there as simple, but the choice to love is the most difficult practice of all, because when we feel like our own best interests are opposed, we slip into a narcissistic state, we start to defend our best interests and we actually start to no longer care if the other person is experiencing joy or
misery. At that point we are really out for ourselves and the choice to love is the opposite. When somebody is opposing your best interest, to take them as a part of you is very difficult. When you take someone as part of you, you are going to act in their best interest because there is no way to act against their best interest without hurting yourself. That doesn’t mean you throw away your own needs, what you are looking for is the win-win scenario where you are trying to find the highest and best for you both. Paul: You have a course on self love at the minute, I would love a little taster of how people can get in touch with their own self love. Talk us through that? Teal: I want to give people a mental conceptualisation of self love, because it’s so abstract. Most people don’t understand what love is, most people don’t understand what self love is. To love oneself, you have to recognise yourself as an ecosystem. Self love only arises when you recognise the self as a multiplicity. There is a recognition that there are different parts of self, and there is an aspect of self that I am pushing away. It’s an interesting practice because you are recognising the parts of self almost like you would recognise others. Underneath all hate, is pain. If I perceive a part of me to be causing me pain, which I do if other people push me away because of it, I now will start to hate that aspect of myself. The process of self love is to reverse that. You have to become aware of the parts of yourself that you have split yourself off from, and are in active rejection of. Parts work is my favourite tool for self love. In parts work what we’re doing is allowing our entire body to become possessed by one aspect of our
