Teal Swan

It is normal to want to feel good. The basic survival instinct is to shy away from pain and go towards pleasure. This is not in and of itself a problem. This instinct in and of itself does not cause suffering. Suffering is caused when instead of going towards pleasure, we resist the pain. And this, is what we have done with emotion.

Ego is not your enemy. It is a necessary tool. Without the ego, we could not be aware of oneness. It is our separate perspective, which is allowing us to see and understand the big picture of this universe. In other words, ego is contrast and contrast is necessary for expansion. Pretend you are an athlete. The person who is responsible for pushing you to be the best athlete you can be is none other than your biggest rival. And so is that rival an enemy or a best friend? But for the sake of this article, we will be addressing ego like an adversary in order to highlight it’s strategies and how it tries to trap you.

So much focus in the field of spiritual, mental and emotional health has been dedicated to the healing of dysfunctional relationship dynamics. Essentially a dysfunctional relationship is one where two people make an emotional “contract” and agree to meet each other's needs in what ends up being self-destructive ways: For example, one person feels unable to take care of themselves and the other feels inadequate. And so, they make an emotional contract that if the other person takes care of them, they will make them feel better about themself. A dysfunctional relationship is a relationship that is destructive instead of constructive. It is a relationship that ends up being powerlessly dependent instead of interdependent. As a result, it is never secure. It is never secure because it is a transactional relationship. The relationship is only ever as secure as the ability to fulfill on the subconscious contract involved in the transaction.

When we sleep, our consciousness returns to non-physical focus. It’s a bit like a mini death as we go back to source perspective. When we dream, our consciousness is essentially out of body. We are experiencing a higher frequency dimensional reality. A dimension that contains the blue print for what is in the process of manifesting. We are having an out of body experience albeit not a conscious one. And we are identified with our dreamscape until of course we learn how to lucid dream, at which point at which we are viewing our dream through the eyes of our eternal perspective which is dis-identified with that dream thought scape. If we were not out of body at least to a certain degree, our body would act out everything we encounter in a dream, which would be very dangerous to our health. In dreaming, because our consciousness is dissociated from our body, the aspect of our brain that controls motor function is disabled. Dreams are not happening all night. In the moment you are awakening, dreams are downloaded as your consciousness focuses into and through the higher dimensions to reach physical focus once again. The vibration is being downloaded and translated so that the mind can make sense of the vibration. We call these translations, dreams.

Regardless of whether we are male or female, we all have divine masculine and divine feminine energy within us. It is beneficial to draw on these energies within ourselves whenever they serve us. But it is especially important that we release resistance to the essence of the specific gender that we chose for this life. As it applies to men, the path of self-actualization asks that those who were born male, embrace and express their masculine essence.

You cannot have a sense of self without also simultaneously having a sense of other. Identity served universal expansion because source (otherwise known as united consciousness) could not become conscious of itself from a platform of non-identity. There was no contrast inherent in that. Oneness cannot comprehend oneness except from a vantage point of separation. Just like a fish cannot conceive of water until it has experienced air. And so, identity was conceived. A more practical way of explaining this as it relates to you is that the separate self, or ego is the necessary condition for you to experience oneness or enlightenment. Whenever we associate something with our self, we identify with it. It becomes part of us. We make it the same as us. This is what attachment really is. It is identification. And if that thing we identify with is ever threatened, we experience it as a threat to our own survival (a personal attack). One could argue that identification is a good thing when we identify with things that cause us to feel good. But the thing is, the minute we identify with something that causes us to feel good, it contains within it the seeds of it’s own opposite. Worthiness carries the seeds of unworthiness; excitement carries the seeds of disappointment. Far more troubling however, is that we often identify with things that cause us to feel bad and as such, we must keep those things alive in order to keep our own sense of self alive. A great many spiritual teachers will emphasize the importance of dis-identifying from things outside you, most especially other people. But it is my opinion that when it comes to identification, it is not other things external to us that cause us the most amount of suffering. It is identification with things we perceive to be internal to us. We are the most identified with the three primary aspects of ourselves; our body, our mind and our emotions. Each of these three aspects is inherently a different expression of source consciousness. We mistake these expressions to be the totality of who we are. A bit like a painter who has become so identified with his painting that he has forgotten that who he ultimately is, is more than his painting. We think we ARE our emotions, we ARE our body and we ARE our thoughts. And as such, we are so attached to them that they affect us immensely. They cause us to suffer. Those of us, who have painful emotions, painful thoughts or a painful body, suffer to the degree that life is a torment.

A great many of us on this earth expect disappointment in our lives. We live painful lives of constriction. And the restriction we suffer from is the restriction of joy. We do not let ourselves get our hopes up. In fact, we do not let ourselves feel positive emotion because feeling positive emotion makes us feel vulnerable to hurt. Most of us who expect disappointment, experience ourselves as a disappointment. We experience ourselves this way because growing up, we felt as if we were a disappointment to our parents or teachers or some other authority figure. We are hyper critical of ourselves. Nothing we ever do is good enough to mean that we have worth and value. The basic fear that lies beneath the surface of those who expect disappointment is the fear that powerlessness is the truth of our existence. This powerlessness stems from the belief that you do not create your own reality. The only people who fear disappointment are those who think that they do not ultimately have control over their lives. In this episode, Teal explains how to overcome the expectation of disappointment and then explains what to do when we experience an actual disappointment.

Those of us, who find our way to spirituality, usually have done so as the result of being in pain in some way. Our needs have not been met. We feel an empty dissatisfaction with life itself because of it. Most of us are also not strangers to self-abuse in its multitude of different forms. But even though we feel better once we find spiritual truths to live our life by, our ways have not completely changed. We use spiritual truths as a tool to beat ourselves with. And one of those spiritual truths that we use to torture ourselves with is sacred to us. It is the teaching of independent self-sufficiency.

The crown chakra is located at the very top of your head. If you place your thumbs at the top of your ears and extend your index fingers straight to meet each other, and then lower them to touch the top of your head, that is where your crown chakra is. The crown chakra is the chakra most associated with our spiritual connection. This is a fairly odd view because all chakras are in fact part of our spiritual connection. The physical body is a manifestation of source energy and so it is no less spiritual than the etheric body. But the crown chakra is associated with our conscious connection to source or the divine. It is seen as a bridge to the cosmos. When the crown chakra is open and in alignment, it’s appearance can look a bit like a halo, which is in fact one reason why so may of the spiritual drawings done thousands of years ago of spiritually transcendent beings like angels or saints show them with halos. As a person progresses through the path of awareness, the energy coming through this chakra (and all of the chakras in fact) has the tendency to change color from a deep violet purple, to a white light. The crown chakra is the center of consciousness, highest potential, intuitive knowing, integration of the whole, the opportunity to become a living embodiment of your higher self, the achievement of living enlightenment, the present moment, meaning, the bigger picture, devotion, trust, inspiration, the absence of ego, oneness and unity to name a few. Even though all chakras can be seen as a doorway for source energy to come into physical life, the crown chakra is the doorway for our conscious and eternal knowing and to come into physical life. When a chakra is out of alignment, meaning it is not letting life force in or is out of alignment for any number of reasons, it starts to affect your equilibrium. It becomes a serious imbalance within the system. When chakras are out of alignment, they appear small and do not absorb or emit much energy. They also change in their color, patterning, texture and sound.

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