Teal Swan

Thousands of years ago, Siddhartha Gautama (who would come to be known as the Buddha) stumbled upon a truth about the universe. The truth was about the danger of extremes. At the point that he discovered that truth, he was very much living a life of extremes. He had dedicated his life to the path of asceticism. This way of life was so extreme that it was said he grew thin enough that he could feel...

The person who has allergies, is a person who has been insensitive to their thoughts and emotions to such a degree that they de sensitized to the discomfort of the emotion and so, their body had to develop the sensitivity. If we have allergies, we have been stuck in negative emotion and we simultaneously believe or have believed (around the time that the allergy developed) that there is no resolut...

Enlightenment is only the beginning, because after enlightenment you still have to engage with physical life, and physical life was designed to be a means for creating expansion. Physical life is a learning hologram. No one who is alive is exempt from expansion and so, no one is exempt from contrast. And as long as there is contrast, there is the recognition of what is unwanted as well as the reco...

Relationships are the real heart of expansion... Which means they are the most contrasting experiences we have in our human lives. They are the source of our greatest joy and the source of our greatest misery. Relationships create the means for our personal evolution. And so in order to have successful relationships, we need to learn how to flow with the current of that change. We need to learn ho...

Most of the fatal dynamics in relationships involve negative tailspins. These are dynamics where a pattern in the first partner causes a pattern in the second partner which exacerbates the pattern of the first partner, which exacerbates the pattern in the second partner and so on and so forth until the relationship in and of itself disintegrates. There is a common tailspin that occurs in partnersh...

To a certain degree all people wrestle with what is. We have an intolerance for things the way they are and so we want to change it. This tendency is a beautiful thing because it makes our lives and our world improve. If we tolerated the fact that we could not fly, we would never have invented the airplane for example. However, some of us don’t simply wrestle with what is. We are warriors. We figh...

I’m going to start this article by just telling it like it is… People suck at relationships. Not that I blame most people for this. Relationships are the central part of life and also the hardest part of life and yet our schools teach us a minimum of 13 years of math and science and geography and history, but nothing about relationships and how to make them work.

For relationships to work, they have to feel good to both people in the relationship. This is true no matter what kind of relationship it is (friendship, partnership, family relationship, work relationship etc). Obviously this is much easier said than done. But one of the top reasons that relationships do not feel good and are unsustainable is: Incompatibility.

When most of us enter into a relationship, we do so because we can’t wait to be near someone. We get butterflies in our stomach. Wild horses couldn’t hold us back from them. We finish all of our other tasks so that we can get to what we really want, which is to just be with them; enjoying their presence and connection. But for some of us, at a certain point in the relationship, something changes....

There is a little boy. His mom was a stay at home mom and his dad was a lawyer. His parents have decided to get a divorce. They move into different houses. The boy has to go back and forth. Because they got a divorce, the mother had to start working and so the boy is put in daycare. He only sees his dad on weekends.

I have been traveling the world and will continue to do so with the message that it is ok to not be ok. We live in a society that is obsessed with happiness. The message is that if you aren’t feeling happy, something must be terribly wrong with you. But today, we are going to look at another dynamic. We are going to look a barrier to happiness, which is when the only way to be ok is to not be ok.

As a race, human beings are experiencing a huge transition right now in their consciousness. They are going through a ‘hundredth monkey’ experience. The hundredth monkey is essentially a condition where one monkey discovers something new (like a new tool to use) and that monkey teaches it to another and that one teaches it to another until by the hundredth monkey, there is a shift in the entire sp...

Authenticity is a word that you hear flying around spiritual communities and self help gatherings and psychology offices all the time. I myself am leading an authenticity movement. But what does authenticity really mean?

Do you frequently find that you need space to yourself? Do you identify yourself as someone who likes to be alone? The human race is a social species. Our species survival depended (and still does depend) on each other. Technically the top human need is connection and the single biggest threat to our wellbeing is isolation. So how can it be that you need space, how can it be that you need alone ti...

An experiential exercise for self awareness.

When it comes to success and happiness, nothing is more important than being ‘in the flow’. We hear ‘being in the flow’ as a buzz word phrase around the world today and it sounds like it would be a good feeling thing, but most of us have no idea what the hell being in the flow actually means. I’m going to clear that up for you today so you know exactly what it means and how to do it.

Compassion is a form of connectedness that goes beyond thought and language. It is spontaneous. Compassion is a form of connectedness because it arises when we feel a sympathetic commonality with someone. In other words, we experience a shared felt experience of pain. There is a harmony inherent in shared feelings, as well as shared understanding. When we feel compassion, we feel sorrow and unders...

A while back I did a video called Meaning, The Self-Destruct Button. In that video, I demonstrated how the meaning you assign to an experience can destroy your life. Today, I’m going to show you how meaning can save your life. I’m going to show you how finding meaning and a way to make the things you do really matter, will totally transform your quality of life.

Relationships are life. If you look at life, all life really is, is a collection of relationships. You have a relationship with your self, you have a relationship with things in the world and you have a relationship with other people. Obviously for us to feel safe in the world, we have to feel free from harm in our relationships. But most people are confused about exactly how to create a safe rela...