Teal Swan Talking love, relationships, motherhood and much more

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

being. I may have an aspect of me that is sensitive and walks into a crowded room and is overwhelmed; to the opposite I may have an aspect of self that is capable of taking over the room and speaking to a large audience. When we do parts work we are letting the psyche go only into that which is, in this case, sensitive.

Paul: Is there a process for when we are in tricky spaces that we can go into a place and actually relax into it and let it go?

Teal: Let the emotion go?! No! The reason I say this is because the attitude of going into an emotion, feeling it and letting it pass, is to miss the fact that emotions are the carriers of personal truth. Usually an emotion has a very important message to convey and it’s not until you get that message and make some subsequent change, whether it’s to a thought or to an action, that it will indicate differently; like a compass, you want to change direction so there has to be an action. What I am hoping that people understand is that every single emotion is a conveyor of personal truth and a container of personal truth. If you sit with it for long enough, waiting for that personal truth to come to the surface, even using your mind to explore when it began, why it began, and what it tells you about yourself, then it acts as a guide throughout your life.

Paul: I want to talk about humanity and the idea that the human is so sacred. Where do you think we are at, where are we going and what is the contribution we make to the divine?

Teal: If I was going to sum up the contribution that humanity offers to the divine, it is the conceptualisation of self, it is the exploration of self, it is the defining of self and the intellectualisation of self. It is I am…fill in the black, the discovery of I am is what humanity does for the divine. Where we run into the light and the shadow side of humanity, is the ego. The ego is the concept of self, which is our contribution to source, that comes with having to realise the shadow side of self, which is separation. This is where we find ourselves in terms of where humanity is today. The awakened ego — we can consider as the exaltation of humanity is where we understand that ultimately, what we are is choice. All the great teachers since the beginning of time have been

“I think that emotions more than anything convey needs, especially when we are talking about triggers.” 33

trying to teach humanity this — choice and the choice to love. What choice does as it relates to the self concept is, it allows us to intentionally manifest what it is we want to be, rather than saying, this is what i am and I am fixed and fused to it whether i like it or not. It is in that that we can express all these positive traits. We know what those are with humanity, the creativity, the capacity to build community, relationship, the exalted forms of humanity, and essentially choose what we are, when we do that, that’s essentially source. It is a big game right?

Paul: You said to me last time we met, go into the shadow because there is gold there. That really resonated with me. How are you approaching the shadow now?

Teal: My goal is to release more resistance so that I can go deeper into the shadow. If there is a friction point within me towards something that I am meeting in the shadow, I have created more shadow. I have created a resistance state. Nothing has changed, there is more of an exploration into what people are unconscious of, the unconscious patterns that are destroying their life - the discovery of aspects of self that were buried that can enhance their life. Shadow work can create this full body excitement when you find that friction point and work through it. I’m not going to say it isn’t terrifying, but it is always valuable.

Paul: When your inner child gets activated, and you are in this animal reaction, feeling triggered, upset and scared. I know you use a completion process for this kind of work. How do you approach this?

Teal: One of the best techniques for this is a 4 or 6 breath. Breathe all the way into the capacity of your lungs and hold for a count of 4 or 6, depending on your lung capacity, then blow it out. The more panicked you are, the less lung capacity you have. If you practice this for two minutes, you will begin to notice that reactivity will start to back down. There is a disconnection between that aspect of self, being the inner child and your entire nervous system. From that place you will be able to meet the needs of your inner child. It’s about being objective enough to understand and meet the need that is being expressed by that inner child part. If we have the awareness of what that activation is about; if we can create enough space there, which we can when you are using your breath, even the quality of our conversations change.

Paul: I want to ask you about empaths. These people find the intensity of the world is so much for them, could you speak directly to empaths?

Teal: While we have the capacity to develop a sensitivity, this is evolved from a particular circumstance. The genuine capacity to attune to somebody to such a degree is born from trauma. With empaths, the skill they develop is the capacity to attune, but they specifically use it to attune to what is the most dangerous or low frequency thing in an area. Empaths are trying to protect themselves by tuning into the thing that has the lowest frequency in the room, the thing that poses the most risk. The empath has, through trauma, developed the skill of attuning. They attune to their environment immediately; that is an incredibly impressive skill. You will see that a choice that was made, based on circumstances that made them feel unsafe in their childhood; that attunement is part of their self protection mechanism.

Question from the audience at the end of the event.

There is a split within me, as with so many women in our society regarding the desire to have children and the desire to not have children. I can’t figure out what is truly in alignment for me and my partner regarding becoming parents.

Teal: I think one of the most difficult parts of life, and this applies to the decision to parent or not, is we have to have the capacity to look at our top values and prioritise them. Write down your values and put them in order of priority. List both the part that wants children and the part that doesn’t. Is there an arrangement that meets both needs? Pick your top priority, and make a decision; that is your choice. As a woman, the question is between career or children, it is not possible to have extreme versions of both. Every woman has to be in that reality and stop selling each other on the fact that you can have tons of both. The motherhood career split is the bane of existence for women who have careers. Even though we do need to move into this place where a woman has a choice and is valued either way, we need to come out of this position where women are in a lose-lose situation. If they choose a career they are respected but they are also not liked very much. Competence levels go up, likability goes down. What I am also noticing that has to change, is that women who are powerfully choosing motherhood, they need to be received in society in a way where they are valued, not in this position where they lose respect but gain likability.

I have been doing shadow work with a completion process practitioner around the feeling of not being good enough or valuable to anyone or anything. Is there any insight you can give me to overcome this?

Teal: What I need is for you to work with this aspect of you that is actually getting a benefit from not having any value. There are many different strategies that a person uses in order to stay safe. Some of those strategies at face value would seem selfsabotaging. In childhood if you struggled a lot with disappointment, it would be beneficial for that person to create a self that is incredibly cynical so as to prevent themselves from blind siding with disappointment. A cynic might say I don’t know how to get out of this negative mood I’m in all the time, and that is because it is serving them. There is a part of you that protects you by keeping yourself in a space where you see yourself as having no value. It is the protector part you have to work with, that is using the strategy ‘there is no value in me’.

There is a part of me that is blocking selfawareness. I have a part that is blocking shadow work. I try to step into parts but it is blocked, like my mouth is covered, it’s muffled.

Teal: That fact that you can describe this feeling of being muffled is brilliant, because you are judging yourself. ‘I can’t because of this’ - that is getting into it. Sometimes you get to a part and that is what will happen. A lot of times when parts present that way, we don’t spend the time to do that, because they tell a narrative that it’s not working. What I am hearing is, it’s working 100%, that’s the truth of that aspect. It’s muffled, it’s telling you it’s not working, but that is the part talking! Only by understanding these needs can you begin to crack through that resistance.

Find out more about Teal Swan and her work: tealswan.com/

“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”