Teal Swan

Latest episode of Teal Swan

When we become aware of this aspect of life, we begin to live our lives differently. We begin to allow the qualities of that consciousness to penetrate through our lives. We become living embodiments of that consciousness. This is what the concept of living Buddha or living Christ or becoming an embodiment of the higher self is all about. This incorporeal, united consciousness is imbued with certain qualities such as unconditional love and awareness and spaciousness and presence and creation and destruction and stillness and expansion etc. Spiritual teachers are here to help people to allow these specific qualities to shine through them. But spiritual teachers tend to focus on or specialize in teaching other people to embody one of these qualities, whichever one they determine from their individual identity is most important to embody. This would not be a travesty if this united consciousness were straightforward. But it is not. It contains many contradictions. For example, one of the qualities of source is stillness; the other is expansion (which is a kind of movement). A teacher of stillness can teach stillness to the degree that their disciples reject expansion and thus disallow themselves from embodying the expansion aspect of their higher self and experiencing the beautiful gifts inherent in that experience. A teacher of expansion can teach expansion to the degree that their disciples reject stillness and thus disallow themselves from embodying the stillness aspect of their higher self and experiencing the beautiful gifts inherent in that experience.

If it is poorly tended, it is the root of the damage that we do to each other on this earth. It is the heart of war. It is the destroyer of connection and as such, it ruptures relationships. When conflict arises, we are being called to embody greater depths of intimacy and harmony. We are being called to become as aware as possible of ourselves relative to a subject. We can either answer that call or allow the conflict to drag us into deeper levels of unconsciousness. We can seek a meeting of minds or we can become reactive and try to end the conflict through power struggle. The struggle for power and control is the enemy of conflict resolution. Relationships involve the inevitability of rupture. The degree of security and joy felt within a relationship is really about our capacity to create repair. People, who cannot repair ruptures in relationships, cannot do so because they feel power and control over others is safety. When conflict arises their ego, which is in a state of fear, immediately seeks to win or to punish the other. Their ego seeks to stay safe and survive by being right, justified, good, and victorious so that the other person is the one who is wrong, unjustified, bad and loses. The down side is that this person cannot maintain relationships. This person also remains unconscious. This person lives in a state of starvation as they lack secure connection and intimacy.

Complaint is the act of expressing discontent or dissatisfaction, finding fault or negativity in something. Complaining is indicative of a state of suffering. If we are complainers, we have 2 glaring primary unmet needs. The first is for our pain to be seen, heard, felt and acknowledged. We feel alone with our pain. When we complain, we are desperate to have someone acknowledge our pain. In fact, we feel incapable of moving forward until someone does. And the second unmet need is to feel good about ourselves. We need to feel as if nothing is wrong with us and as if we are worthy and have value. In this episode, Teal offers a radical new perspective on complaining.

First, we have to understand what commitment is all about. Commitment is a state of dedication. But we can simplify commitment in this way: To commit to something is to give your energy to something… To put yourself into something. The more committed you are to something, the more of your energy and therefore yourself you put into that thing. If you sit with this idea of commitment for a minute, you might already be experiencing the awareness of what exactly scares you so badly about commitment. If not, I want you to ask yourself “What is so scary about giving my energy to something or putting myself fully into something?” I’m going to give you a hint here: Most fears on this earth, (if not all of them) boil down to the intense fear that something will be lost. For example, even if your fear is that you will gain problems, the flip side of that fear is the fear that you will loose inner peace.

In this episode, Teal provides the listener with a lesson about the history of Christmas. She also reveals the truth about Santa Clause. Teal then goes on to address the question of what parents should tell their children about Santa Claus.

The conscious control of your breathing induces various mental, emotional and physical states. This is the basis for the therapy modality called breath work. Today, I’m going to focus on one method of conscious breath control that is my own personal favorite. Breathing through the pores. You can use this technique as your daily meditative practice. It is common knowledge that as humans, we breathe through our lungs. But what the average citizen is unaware of is that we also breathe through our skin. It is called cutaneous respiration. We can use our skin to breathe in much more than just air. We can use our pores like mini chakras to pull non-physical energy into our embodiment. Our skin also exhales. It helps the body release toxins. It sweats. This is wonderful on an energetic level because it means we can use our pores to inhale any positive vibration and exhale any negative vibration. The baseline technique for pore breathing is to begin by watching your breath as it is drawn in and out of the lungs. Then gradually, shift your conscious focus to your skin. Begin to intend that your skin take on the quality of a sponge. See the breath coming in as energy. Consciously focus on your skin beginning to soak in that energy with every inhale so your whole body is breathing it in, not just your lungs. Feel it accumulating inside you. This is a Prana practice. You can keep the practice like this. Or you can add the element of exhalation.

Most of us can say that at some time in our life, we have experienced boredom. Some of us struggle with boredom chronically. Boredom is defined as a state of weariness and restlessness as a result of lack of interest. Interest is really about attention and focus. When we encounter something that we want to focus our attention on, we are engaged in life itself. In the body, we start to feel movement instead of stagnation within our being. This is actually the somatic experience of expansion. The purpose of coming into physical life is expansion. So when we feel the expansion that is the result of being interested in something, we also feel a sense of purpose. It is a feel good feeling. Focused attention creates the movement (otherwise known as growth) here in physical embodiment. When we feel the lack of momentum, the stagnation of energy in our being as a result of not being focused on something we want to be focused on, we feel two opposing emotional states that pull in opposite directions. Fatigue and restlessness. The restlessness is actually a reaction to the feeling of stagnation; it seeks to try to get that feeling of momentum back by all means possible. Because we are largely unconscious beings, most of us are not aware of what we are focusing on when we feel bored. If you will stop to watch your thoughts when you are bored, you will see that your thoughts are all revolving around not having what you want. Your attention is focused on what is preventing you from what you currently want. For example, when you are a kid and it’s raining outside and you want to be outside playing, but the rain is preventing you from doing that, it feels like the movement within your being is stalled out.

Blowing the whistle on Spiritual Teachers, Gurus and Self Help Experts as people in danger of being the least authentic and most dangerous people of all lies in the basic principle of fragmentation. The teacher who preaches enlightenment or a higher dimensional perspective are often bull dozing or leaving behind many aspects of themselves!

Some of us are lucky. We are born into a family or a society where we feel like we belong. For others of us, because of our terrible self-concept (which is the result of shame), we feel the only places we belong are places we wish we didn’t belong. And for others of us, the lack of belonging we feel plagues our life. We feel fundamentally disconnected. We don’t feel like we belong anywhere. We don’t feel like we belong with anything. Belonging is one of the highest frequency vibrations in this universe. In fact, we could consider oneness, love and belonging to all be different “tones” of the same color. But it is not simply that. It is also a basic human need. So many of us in the spiritual field believe it is not only possible but also good to transcend human needs. We use our spiritual practice to work against our own biology instead of with it. But it is not possible to un-need something that you need. It is only possible to meet that need in a different way. We need to feel as if we belong in order to feel ourselves to be connected with or one with anything in our lives instead of completely alone. We are social creatures. Human beings that are isolated die in a similar way that a plant dies if it is not given water. But the sad thing is, without a sense of connection and belonging, a person will die even if they are surrounded by other people.