This blog is going to outline the story of Teal Swan.
To give you an idea of where this story is headed, this is her bio from the publisher Hay House:
Teal Swan is an internationally recognized spiritual leader and an influential new voice in the field of metaphysics. She was born with a range of extrasensory abilities including clairvoyance, clairsentience, and clairaudience. Teal survived 13 years of physical, mental, and sexual abuse before escaping her abuser at age 19 and beginning her own process of recovery and transformation.
Today, she shares what she has learned with millions of people, teaching them how to find forgiveness, happiness, freedom, and self-love in their lives. She reaches a wide audience through a range of powerful and accessible online resources and through various publications, media interviews, frequency artwork, and Synchronization workshops that she presents around the world.
Teal Swan is not her real name, surprisingly. She was born Mary Teal Bosworth on June 16, 1984. She was born in Santa Fe, NM and moved to Logan, Utah with her family when she was young. I can’t find too much on her parents, but I have read that she has a younger brother, Sky.
Logan, Utah is an area that has a high number of practising Mormons. Teal has said that from an early age she felt like she didn’t belong. She was often bullied for having different beliefs to her peers.
Teal has said that she knew she was ‘different’ early on to her classmates. She noticed that there were differences in how she reacted to events, versus how her friends reacted. Teal’s mother has said that Teal was ‘hypersensitive’ when she was growing up, especially to sound. Teal has said that she was born with extrasensory abilities such as clairvoyance, “clairsentience”, and “clairaudience”.
Teal has spoken to the media many times about her apparently traumatic childhood. She claims that from the age of 6, she was raped, abused and ‘psychologically tortured’ by a family friend. This abuse apparently went on until she was 19 years old.
Teal also claims that she was subjected to ritualistic Satanic abuse for over a decade. She told the Huffington Post:
“When I was 12, I was placed on a metal table in a veterinary office after hours,” says Teal. “The cult trainer of the group had black mesh over his face. He hooked me up to electrodes, placing gel under each one and used an old projector to project images of dead animal carcasses onto the wall in front of me. Every time he would change the slide on the projector screen, he would shock me. He kept saying ‘Look what you did,’ over and over, trying to suggest that I had killed all of those animals.”
Teal has said she was subjected to this abuse in an attempt to suppress her extrasensory abilities and alleged clairvoyance – all stemming from her hypersensitivity.
Teal spoke to a reporter named Chris Oswalt about another abusive episode:
“He would be driving and suddenly he’d be like 20…19…18…17. He’d pull over to the side of the road and that was my cue to get out of the car and run. I was suppose to evade him for a certain period of time. Like two-three hours. I would be trying to run away and he would track me. If he caught me, I would get punished. Like my rib cage is covered in these scars because he would count. Back then I would get really proud of myself when I would get away from him instead of realizing I was being chased by someone who killed children,” Teal said.
This cult that Teal became involved in is called The Blood Covenant.
Teal has said that she attempted multiple times to take her own life. She ended up escaping the satanic abuse when she was around 19.
When she was around 27, in 2011, Teal started to tell her story. She released a book called The Sculptor in the Sky.
This is the book’s Amazon bio:
“You can not have a life, you can not lose a life… You are life. It is you who hold the power to decide yourself back onto the path you intended…the path of welcoming and becoming your own bliss.” The Sculptor In The Sky, the new book by spiritual catalyst, Teal Scott takes you on a journey of rediscovery of the universe of god and of yourself. This extraordinary book challenges us to reconnect with the eternal essence of our being and to expand our ideas about the reality we live in It is a must have for the curious, the wanting and the ready. A provocative guide to answering the questions that every person asks at some point in their life.
Teal also started her YouTube channel in 2011. She now has 1.29m subscribers on that platform.
Teal hosted her first public talk in 2011, and she had around 20 guests show up to see her.
Teal’s rise to ‘fame’ seems like it was steady. During 2015, she received her first major media coverage discussing the use of her mantra, “what would someone who loved themselves do?”
There is an article on her from 2018 titled “Woman’s bizarre claim she is actually part alien’
American Teal Swan has been labelled a ‘cult leader’ and ‘Gucci guru’ in a damning exposé published on Medium.
The article claims Teal has previously said she works with 11 other aliens in an ‘intergalactic Green Peace’ type organisation.
“She says she has x-ray vision and hearing, that she can inject herself into people’s brainstems to revive them and can hear tectonic plates moving,” the article reads.
Believing she is part human, part extra-terrestrial, as well as ‘nonphysical’ Teal apparently once said that an entire “panel of Arcturian beings – sixth dimensional beings” chose the way she would look in this life.
Teal also claims she can hear a person’s ‘bones, organs, nerves, veins’, and can ‘see the future’ through visions and dreams.
“How do I have all this information? It’s because I’m extra sensory,’ she has said. ‘I’m not limited to this dimension or time-space reality,” it is claimed that Teal said.
“I did not come to earth with a specific message. I came here as a course turner. I am the game changer.”
Teal calls her followers the ‘Teal Tribe’. I have seen her followers also called ‘Tealers’.
She established a ‘Teal Tribe’ commune in Costa Rica. People pay upwards of $2k per visit to the commune, where Teal hosts spirituality workshops. Some of her followers are so devout, that they have actually moved to Costa Rica.
Her commune there is called ‘Philia’.
In today’s fast paced and abrasive world, most of us spend our time on guard. We cannot truly be ourselves and let others really see into us because we don’t feel emotionally safe around other people. Philia is a place where people can be emotionally safe enough to dropping their masks and allow their full vulnerability to surface and to be held by others. As a result, by visiting Philia you are opening yourself up to genuine heart to heart connections and friendships that can last a lifetime with both other guests and the people who live and work at Philia.
The staff at Philia are all trained to be completely emotionally present with all guests as well as to facilitate The Completion Process. Many people who visit Philia, come to take a break from life. However, we often find that we end up taking all of our emotional baggage on vacation with us too. This is expected at Philia. At Philia, when emotional triggers surface, our certified practitioners are available to support and guide you through the past trauma that is surfacing so that you can create a new life as a result, free from limited beliefs and fears.
The commune website mentions that guests will undergo ‘The Completion Process’. Here is some info on that from her website:
The Completion Process is a comprehensive approach to healing core traumas that recur as emotional triggers that prevent us from living empowered lives free of fear. The Completion Process is an 18 step visualization that walks you through an emotional trigger following the emotion to the earliest memory, then resolving the child’s needs through both the mental visualization of resolution and providing awareness through the adult perspective of the events that occurred.
Related to the Completion Process is Teal’s method of teaching. She often encourages ‘tealers’ to imagine their own deaths, often by suicide.
This info is from a BBC article in 2019:
Her brand centres on giving mental health advice, much of which is aimed at people who feel depressed, or suicidal. Swan, whose beliefs include reincarnation and the power of crystal healing, says her experience as a survivor of several suicide attempts gives her particular insight that she claims mental health professionals lack.
A Refinery29 piece notes that while Teal is not directly encouraging suicide and that she claims to have “the strategy to help people out of suicidal thoughts”, nevertheless her “highly-triggering comments and extreme views on suicide that trickle into almost every piece of content Teal produces” are potentially harmful, as evidenced by the way Teal compares followers with suicidal thoughts to “stray cats” and “orphaned children”.
I think this might be a good point in the episode to explore Teal’s teaching and suicidality.
The BBC article that we mentioned earlier outlines the story of a female named Casey, who took her own life. Casey’s mother Sarah started to trawl through Casey’s social media, looking for answers.
She discovered that Casey was in the ‘Teal Tribe’ facebook group. Casey had posted in the group that she had tried to take her life on a previous occasion. In response, two people, including one of the volunteers that help moderate content in the group, replied with Teal’s video entitled “I want to kill myself (What to do if you’re suicidal)”.
This info is direct from the BBC article:
In the video Swan urges those who are feeling suicidal to seek medical help, but goes on to say that in her experience, for some people, this may not help long-term. She instead suggests that suicide be seen as “our safety net or our re-set button that’s always available to us”. She argues that viewing it in this way enables people to set the idea aside, and instead concentrate on what they can do to make themselves feel better in the present.
She also suggests an exercise in which viewers are told to lie down on the floor and imagine their deaths in “grisly detail”. Swan argues in the video that by doing so viewers will realise that there is “nowhere to go but back to life… so why leave?”
She stresses in the video that killing oneself would “create a devastating ripple” for loved ones, and “it does matter if you are here or not here… You don’t want to die. What you want is an end to your pain.”
Casey took her life two weeks after making the post. Her mother Sarah has said:
“While I believe that there [was] more than one undercurrent happening in the life of our daughter, you would have to convince me otherwise that Teal’s teachings did not play a significant role in the mind of our daughter when she took her life.
The BBC reporter approached Teal at one of her events in Chicago and asked her about the idea that she was promoting suicide.
At first she laughed at that idea, saying: “That’s pretty funny. It’s really funny to me.”
Then she took a more serious tone.
She said to call her a proponent of suicide was “ridiculous” and said that anyone who does so obviously hasn’t watched her videos.
When I put it to her that two young people who were members of her group had taken their lives, the atmosphere grew tense.
“I am not aware of them,” she answered.
She then grew visibly angry, saying that she was the reason more people hadn’t killed themselves.
“If you look at the demographic of people who are interested in my type of material – you’re working with an unstable group of people.
“[To suggest I am] responsible for suicide in people who came to me suicidal, that’s pretty insane.”
Teal said that she felt a lot of anxiety in regards to the Facebook group. “You start a Facebook group hoping that it’s going to be a place for all these individuals to come to. Then let’s say somebody does decide to kill themselves out of this large group of people who are already suffering before they get to you.
“I’m trying to get moderators who are on different time zones but let’s say one of us doesn’t see it [a suicidal post]. And now somebody says you should have seen it. Now it’s your fault they committed suicide.
“We think about this all the time. You’ve got people who are vulnerable. What are you supposed to do when you can’t catch all of it?”
But she also admitted that the volunteers who help run the page receive no training and few instructions on what to do if they do see posts in which someone says they feel suicidal.
“Sometimes it feels like you have a psych ward, with nobody tending the building and you can’t afford to pay them to attend the building. And who’s going to sign on for that type of a job anyways?”
I put it to her that perhaps social media is not the right forum for such sensitive discussions.
“That’s actually my question I ask myself a lot [and] I think about my 15-year-old self,” she says.
“I’m thinking about what I would have wanted when it was three o’clock in the morning and everybody else in my household was asleep.
“If there had been somebody on a YouTube video telling me how to feel differently I would have wanted that.”
In 2020, Teal released her first novel ‘Hunger of the Pine’.
This is the bio from GoodReads:
Aria Abbott has never had a home. Drifting through the foster system for most of her life, she finally finds herself in a situation so unbearable that she has no choice but to run away. Sleeping on the streets pushes Aria beyond any suffering she has felt before; the only thing worse than seeing no escape is the knowledge that no one in the world cares enough to try and find her.
Enter Taylor, a homeless young man with a charismatic smile and a dream of fame, fortune, and the sunshine of LA. Swept up in his energy, Aria and Taylor board a greyhound bus and never look back.
In this bright new world, Aria will discover a whole community of people living in the shadows, in the margins of society. As Taylor follows his dreams, Aria follows her heart. But she will discover that it isn’t always clear who you can trust, that strangers can be kind, or treacherous, or sometimes as familiar as your own reflection, if you’re willing to look hard enough.
SOURCE LIST –
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teal_Swan
https://www.huffpost.com/archive/ca/entry/ptsd-abuse-women_b_12445530
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50478821
CLIPS FROM THE PODCAST
https://youtu.be/NKtbJvL2xWI
https://youtu.be/9-DOgGZ_0Yg
https://youtu.be/HxHXP_R9tU0
https://youtu.be/aovyvsmyHCI