Get Booked – Teal Swan The Anatomy Of Loneliness

Hello, I'm Hazel and this is Get Booked for Women's Radio Station. I have such a treat in store for you today with the speaker, TED Talk pro, spiritualist, and author Teal Swan here to chat to us about her latest book, The Anatomy of Loneliness. Thank you for joining us here today. How you doing? Wonderful. It's good to be back here. Heartbeat of the universe is London. So yeah, always a lot going on. Oh yeah. Yeah. Have you been here often? Yeah, about 5 times before. Ah, right. So you're a pro then? No, always learning, always learning. Now I want to get straight into The Anatomy of Loneliness. I have realized a lot about myself in this book and I'm only halfway through it. I've had to stop and start to digest the information you kind of help people realize about themselves. And I even wrote a blog about it, which I was telling you about a little bit earlier off air. And it's just about how I need to get back to me now that I've realized a few things about myself. Why don't you tell us, I know you went on quite a journey to write this book. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, well, what's ironic is that this book actually started back in my teen years, but I didn't know it. I was miserably lonely. I mean, isolated to within an inch of my life, tried to commit suicide multiple times. So I was miserably isolated. And I really didn't think much of it, didn't think that it was an epidemic issue, thought it was just my issue. Then got out of that, ended up in intentional community, and started traveling the world actually doing what I'm doing today as this sort of personal transformation revolutionary.. And it didn't matter where I went in this world, everybody, regardless of their gender, regardless of what culture they came from, they were all saying the same thing, which is, "I feel isolated and lonely." So I was like, "All right, this is a bigger issue than just me." But that's the whole thing, isn't it? It's about drawing people's attention that we don't need to be isolated because a lot of people are feeling the same way, not necessarily for the same reasons, but you explore the variety of different reasons. Now, you went on a— Was it a bit of a tour? I went on a shamanic journey. Yes. Yeah, well, I decided once I saw this was an epidemic issue, and bigger than that, that it's a major social issue, because loneliness actually is what's fueling all crime on the planet and all addictions. Yeah, I've just finished that section as well. Once I saw that, I mean, it takes people back when I say that because they're like, what do you mean? Well, in order to inflict pain on somebody else, whether it's stealing or killing them or whatever, you have to perceive yourself to be separate from that person. So loneliness actually is underneath all of these conditions in the world today. And when I saw that as this big huge problem, I was like, you know what, I got to get to the heart of this. What is it that's creating this? Because it's bigger than just being in the room with other people, because as we know, that can make you feel even worse, even more isolated. So I'm like, loneliness has to be something that is much deeper than just what meets the eye. So I chose the shamanic path and I went down into the rainforest of Costa Rica and did a 3-year journey. Wow, that's quite a journey. When was this? The last 3 years. I'm literally— I just came out of it like in the beginning of this year. So wow. And I mean, this book, I've read a part where you said it pretty much wrote itself. How quickly did you get all the words on out on this book? Well, it took 3 months to put the thing together because what happened is that when I was down there doing this journey work, I want— I set the intention to understand loneliness So when I went on this journey, it was like that was all I was focused on. And I kept coming back with these insights. And so for anybody that's familiar with the shamanic path, it is a rough path. So I would emerge— I'm not familiar at all. Oh, are we going to need a few more hours? Maybe. Um, it's really intense. So, you know, I was diving into my own loneliness and diving into the sort of existential picture of loneliness. And I mean, I emerged with these notes on these lined pieces of paper that were, like, covered in vomit and, you know, tears and just crumpled, you know, into a backpack. And I came out with them. It was just a pile of these papers. And when I looked through them, I had the answer to loneliness and what creates loneliness, how to topple the pillars of loneliness, and what to replace it with. And so I organized it into this book. But what's in that book was written on those papers. And do you feel like you could help anybody? Yes. And do you think that with what you've got to say, anybody who's feeling lonely, you can solve their loneliness or help them to understand it? Obviously there's a difference. It depends upon their level of commitment. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I don't want to take anybody's free will away. I mean, if somebody wants to choose connection, absolutely. I can make it so that in a period of time, depending on the person and their particular circumstances and level of dedication, I can take a person from a state of suicidal isolation to complete connection. That's incredible. And you, you are— you're clairvoyant? Yes, and much more than that. Oh yes. And tell us a little bit more about that, because didn't you say that you knew from pretty much infancy? Yeah, I was born this way. So the way— it's almost a disability. That's the way to understand me. Most people who are coming into the spiritual field have an idea that these abilities are something that is developed, but for me it was exactly the reverse. Kind of like, you know, you look at an autistic child and when they come into this life. It's like they've got a disability for interacting in a certain way. When most people are born into a physical embodiment, they're born with the apparatus that's necessary for them to be totally plugged into this— let's call it a matrix, right? And mine was disabled, so I can't fully participate in the third dimensional reality. It's like a blinding— it's almost like if you're listening to 5 different radio channels at one time, and that comes with some severe issues. But it also comes with the capacity to understand pre-manifested reality, which is everything here on a different level. Yes. Okay, so how, how does that manifest itself? Like, as we're chatting now, if you were to take a medicine that's high in DMT, you would see how I see the world every day. I'm like walking around on a permanent ayahuasca or psilocybin trip. Everything is moving. There is nothing that is static. I'm looking through bodies into organs and vein systems. I can zoom in even on your genetics and zoom out I mean, it's pretty intense. What are you picking up from me? That's the problem. I hate when people ask me the question because my issue is like, it's like a Bible. You must have known that was coming. No. Oh, see, I could write a Bible on a person, like an absolute Bible on every person that steps in front of me. So I never know like what they want me to zoom in on, you know. It's like, it would be— I'm gonna compare this question. It would be like if If an alien landed on the planet today and said, "Tell me about Earth." So then you're like, "Well, what part of Earth? I mean, do you want me to talk about Earth?" Where do I start, right? I don't even know whether I'd dare to read that book if it was a Bible on myself. That's why people don't like being in the room with me very much. Aw! 'Cause everyone's naked. Well, that's a bit like constantly being at home with me. Me, my kids, even the dog and the cat, they never wear clothes. It's ridiculous. Obviously I've been reading this book and as I said before, you have to digest the information that's in it. You can't speed read it. You've got to— Good to know. You've gotta break it down. And again, as I was saying off air, I've been reading it and it's made me realize so much about myself that I've had to kind of stop, write about, because I find I help to understand what's going on in my head by writing it down. Yes. As do most people. Some of the bits, I mean, actually, do you know what? It's on my iPad. There was a bit that I actually took a picture of. I just found it incredible. It was how cover emotions work. And if you experience self-hate today, some aspect of you was rejected or hated by those who were supposed to love you. And how people are constantly needing approval And also there was another bit that I read recently, actually it was this morning. It was on fear and when we fear people, we push them away, which again causes loneliness. But there's so many things that we can be fearful of about other people. Do you wanna, I mean, obviously you wrote the book, so can you explain a little bit more about COVID emotions? Yeah, cover emotion is an emotion that sits over the top of whatever genuine emotion you're feeling, sort of like ice over a lake. That's the best description I can give for it. So let's say that I'm feeling desperate, despair. Despair is such a low frequency state that the emotional system actually has like a self-save mechanism, a little bit like when the body goes into shock, right? We know that when the body goes into shock after a huge trauma, um, it's automatic. Yeah, shock preserves your body, actually. Yeah. So cover emotions work the same way. Whenever you are in a vibrational state, that's what your emotions are basically reflecting. They're reflecting that you've, you've dipped into a vibrational frequency which makes you a match to very dangerous things. So, so it's a self-save mechanism that actually kicks you into the just a higher vibration, high enough basically to not be a mesh to, um, super dangerous experiences. But it's not genuine. So if I'm in despair, the next cover motion for that would be desperation. So I get kicked into the state of desperation. So let's, let's imagine that. Let's say that there's a mom who's lost their kid down a stream. And there's no way they're going to get their kid. That is, it's too fast of a current. They're drowning. So despair is that state where you, you would totally give up. It's like you have to literally accept the fact you've lost your kid. You cannot survive that emotionally. So what will happen is you get kicked into desperation. And when somebody's in desperation, that's when they're running around. It doesn't matter whether the kid's lost, they're like running down the bank full speed. So the fight or flight— yeah, well Fight or flight is more like a biological affective reaction that comes in in response to that vibrational frequency that you've now dipped into. But the COVID emotion will keep you out of that vibrational space. So the desperation is keeping you out of despair in the same way that anger keeps you out of fear. And these are all subconscious processes. Yeah. Which is why you've written this book to help people kind of understand what's going on that they might not necessarily know is happening. Yeah, that's the problem. I mean, it's a problem. It's what I love the most. My career is about helping people with what they don't know that they don't know, which is most things. So most of us are walking around operated completely by what we're unconscious of. And so it's only the process of awareness that's gonna bring a person into a space where they're now able to choose. Now, this is such a vague question, but I wanna see if you can try and answer it. If there's one major piece of advice you could give to somebody who is suffering from loneliness, what is the one thing you could tell them to do? Go in the direction of your emotions instead of away from them. I'm gonna have to explain that. Yeah. Do I have time to explain that? Yeah, well, we're gonna— well, do you know what? Why don't we— we'll head off and do a couple of adverts and we will be back in about 3 or 4 minutes and then that gives you a chance to put together the perfect response. Yeah, great. We'll be back in a couple of minutes and we are here at Women's Radio Station with Teal Swan discussing The Anatomy of Loneliness. From all the presenters and the team behind Women's Radio Station, thank you for listening. You've been the most amazing audience with your sparkling enthusiasm and support. So from our hearts, we would like to wish you a very Merry Christmas. And a wonderful New Year full of joy and surprises. I'm Tamina Zaman, founder of Empower and Enrich. 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We're currently welcoming donations to help towards our running costs to keep this important initiative alive. To donate, simply head to our website Every little will help. Hello, and I'm Hazel. This is the second half of today's Get Booked for Women's radio station. I have I've got Teal Swan in the studio with me. We've been chatting about her latest book, The Anatomy of Loneliness. Now, before the break, I asked you the rather broad question, what one piece of advice would you give to somebody that's suffering with loneliness? Go for it. My answer was sit with your emotions. This is why. Your emotions are always conveying a message. So earlier we were talking about COVID emotions, right? What's ironic is that in today's world, we teach— we treat emotions themselves as covers, covers to personal truth. And we spend our lives trying to escape from emotions. So like, we're in London right now. If you walk down any street at 10 o'clock at night in London, what you've got is people that are, you know, pissed drunk and stepping out of those bars and puking in front of you. And it's almost like a culture, right? This is an escapism from emotion. So if you look at the, the basic culture here It's one of pretense. So you walk around and you never show what is really going on with you, and political correctness is really important. So people are having emotions and having thoughts about things they stuff down every day. They're basically stuffing down their own personal truth. That's British, uh, mentality for you as well. Yes, it is. So underneath each one of these emotions though is a personal truth. So if I'm angry right now, my personal truth might be that some boundary got crossed. But if I am avoiding the emotion, then I never get the personal truth. So I'm actually pushing a part of myself away. Now aside from doing some of the more complex processes which I'm putting forth in this book, this is the most simple and most important one that you do. Each time you have an emotion, instead of turning away from it or trying to get away from it or using a coping mechanism so as to not feel the emotion, you deliberately feel it instead but sit in it and feel it long enough that that personal message comes up. So it's almost like begins this alchemical questioning process. You can do it really fast once you get good at it, but to begin with, you got to sort of direct your attention to it. So let's say that I'm feeling an emotion right now. I might just very briefly, even if I'm on a London tube, right, I might close my eyes, and instead of trying to tamp down that emotional state, I will invite it to get bigger. So I am— I can actually mentally imagine it coming— usually it starts at the heart area for people. I imagine it going through my arms, I imagine it coming up through my face, and I'm just observing the sensation almost like I'm watching it, watching it and feeling at the same time, but inviting more of it. Now I'll start to question it. When did this start? What is it that started it? Why did I have the reaction that I had? Now that always surfaces some sort of personal truth for me. I don't want to be here. I do want to be here. I like this. I don't like this. Whatever it is, it's telling you about yourself. It's only when you get those messages that you can actually start making the right decisions for yourself. But it's all— it's all— the thing is, a lot of what you're talking about, a lot of people who are suffering with loneliness, again, it is something that is subconscious. Now, like meditation, you've got to practice to be able to do this. So likewise, we need to practice to be able to address and understand what our emotions are and what they're trying to tell us. So that we can, as you say, go forth with them and go towards them? It's not a question of whether someone's lonely or not. They're lonely. We're a lonely species right now. It is very rare. This is what I need people to get. Like, part of it is we got to eradicate the shame and loneliness. We don't need to be ashamed of loneliness. Everyone's lonely. Yeah, like, I've shaken hands with— I can literally count them on my hands, the amount of people that aren't lonely on the planet. Who are they? That's what I'm saying. Most of them are living in like communities. You'll never meet them because they have no reason to be out in the, you know, rest of the world because they have their connection, they have their communities. They're not living like we're living in the modern day. So if you're living in the modern day world, you're a lonely person. Yeah, because the modern day world is conducive to feeling lonely because we're all hiding behind Twitter and Instagram and work, and we're too busy with this and we're juggling this and yeah, and we're living in single family households. Yep. So you're lonely. Mm-hmm. Okay, yeah. It's such an incredibly deep subject. We could probably discuss this for hours and hours. Oh, for hours. I could do hours upon hours upon hours upon hours. Now you do a lot of TED Talks, don't you? YouTube. YouTube. YouTube. Yeah. I do tons of YouTube, yes. And you get, you know, just a few hundred thousand views. And I actually found that when I was reading your book, the way that the, uh, the way that what you've written comes across is like you're speaking to us in a YouTube video. I kind of felt like you were standing in front of me talking at me— not at me, with me, to me, involving me. Um, and it was, it was quite an interesting way that I found the way that you were, you were talking to me and getting the information across. Um, you do— you— how often do you do these YouTube videos? Every Saturday. Well, I try to do more too, but like, I have one that I release on every single Saturday for the series that I do called Ask Teal. It was really important for me. This was my vision to begin with. I really wanted a way to reach, you know, the mainstream, and I wanted to reach people who couldn't otherwise be reached. So I was watching a homeless guy actually who was digging around a trash can, and I was like, that guy can't afford a $100 session with me, and he can't afford a workshop ticket either. So how do I get information to that guy? And I realized that every single library, at least in America, has a place where they can get on the computer. So I was like, if I do free videos, this is how I'm going to do this. And, you know, I get a lot of crap in my field because people keep telling me you're not going to be able to continue ramping up your business if you're selling everything for free. Right. Well, I refuse. I absolutely refuse. Like, I'm super, super intense about this because my goal was that somebody who is suffering from whatever it is— I mean, I teach to everything. I teach human suffering, so whatever it is that a person suffers with, I have videos about that. I wanted them to be able to go there and actually change their life. These videos are anywhere between 15 and 30 minutes, sometimes even longer. Yeah, there's quite a few that are nearly— 48, I think, was one that I watched the other day. What's your next topic going to be? I'm quite intrigued. Well, the next one is super intense. I'm showing actually the split because what I'm talking about in this book, ironically, is that it's a process of internal fragmentation, which creates the majority of loneliness. But we don't see our own fragmentation because we identify with ourselves as a singularity. So when I shake your hands, I say, "I am Teal Swan." I don't introduce myself by 400 different names. But the reality is that we all have split consciousness. So I have several different aspects to my personality which can be treated as individual selves. And, and it's because we don't see ourselves in this way, we don't understand what's really going on with us. That's why we're confused, why we can't make a decision, because we've got part that's going right and part that's going left. And we all have these very incredible, you know, these deep, deep splits. And within a collective consciousness, there are several identifiable splits that we all share. So like women walking the world today, we all actually have a split in us between the aspect of us that wants the traditional role of a woman and a part that doesn't want the traditional role of a woman. And this is part of the confusion, not only within our own gender, but men looking at us, they're like, I can't make sense of this, I can't make heads or tails of this. Do you want me to open the door for you, or do you not want me to open the door for you? We do today, but not tomorrow. Yeah, yeah. Well, part of that is because we— there's a lot of stuff that went along with the traditional roles which allowed us to be in our feminine essence. And a lot of us coming into the, you know, the feminist movements, into the modern world, we've lost a lot of that, and we're really sad about it. So it's almost like there is this tear within all women. Oh, there's a tear within men too, but we're not stagnant. We're ever-changing. We can be who we want to be when we want to be it. But that— but that's the thing, that's not the split, that's femininity. Femininity works like water. It's when we— part of this split is that we've, we've been told we have to not be like that, actually be like men. So part of the, the split is I am this very dynamic sort of, you know, different, different mood at different times type of being naturally. But in the real world, that doesn't work. You know, when I'm on my period, for example— and by the way, it is very serious. When a female is on her period, she's in the winter of her body. Like, we need to be actually withdrawing into a lot more solace, into the sort of wisdom, internal reflection type of process. But we cannot do that when we're in the world competing with men in the workplace. There's so many women that are sitting there going, yep. So, so that's what I'm saying. This is a split. We're forced not to be that way even though we are that way. So, so if you look at these two splits, you should— I did a video already on the female split. I used myself as an example. It was super scary. I worked with my own split. In front of people. But what I did for this upcoming Saturday is I did the split within men because when I did that video, everyone's like, "What about guys?" And there is actually a same split. There's a split between the men who want the traditional male role and the aspect of them that doesn't want the traditional male role. It was very different to the female split. I was surprised, but I'm exposing that this Saturday. Make sure that you all go and check it out. Where can they find your YouTube channel? Basically, if we type Teal Swan into Google, Everything comes up, doesn't it? You're very easy to find. Oh, we have somebody nodding in the background going, "I found you." Now, one of the things that I do want to discuss with you is something that really struck a chord was how loneliness and self-worth are so inextricably linked. That really got me. Self-worth. It got you? Yeah. It's a lot of what you talk about is kind of common sense, but we don't always have time for common sense or time to appreciate it. And a lot of what you've written about, I kind of went, "That's so obvious. Why has it taken me 36 years to realize that that is why I've done what I've done? That is why that person is that way. That person's not a pain in the bum. This is what's been going on with them. And this is just something that they've had since infancy. And this is how they know to proceed with life to get what they want." need. And it's what they see of their self-worth. And it's, it's, uh, yeah, I'm trying to say, uh, it's Head Flip. Head Flip. Yeah, that's better than saying the other word. Uh, it was— I'm not allowed to swear on air. Um, but it is an incredible book, and I do wish you all the best of luck. Can you tell us a little bit about— I mean, you can definitely get it on Amazon, And you have done an Audible version, haven't you? Um, actually I'm recording that in December, so no. But so it is coming? Yes, it is coming. Um, where else can we get your book from? I think the best place to get it actually is on my website, and it's just tealswan.com. I tried to make it easy for everyone. Yeah, that is pretty easy. So if you go to tealswan.com, you get— you can see all the books basically in a bunch of different vendors. So that's probably the easiest way to get Guten Abend. And they can make sure they go and look at all your YouTube videos, especially the one that's coming out on Saturday. Thank you so much for joining us today, and, um, yeah, hopefully you'll come in again and speak to us. I would love that. Great, thank you. Women's Radio Station is looking forward to a great 2019 with more shows coming your way. All the presenters and the team behind each program would like to say a big thank you for listening. We are the voice of women worldwide and we cannot be without you. 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We're currently welcoming donations to help towards our running costs to keep this important initiative alive. To donate, simply head to our website. Every little will help.