Teal Swan is an internationally renowned speaker and best-selling author. She’s a survivor of severe childhood abuse who used her own tragic life story to encourage millions of people around the world toward truth, sincerity, freedom, and pleasure.

Often, when you are coming out of trauma in your lives, it feels like you are simultaneously dying and being born when you are doing this work.

There’s a moment when you’re in the middle of it when you feel like you are holding your breath. You know that if it doesn’t shift, something significant in your life will explode, implode in some kind of way. And my vision for you today is to give you tools to help ease your expression into whatever it is that you’re seeing.

I want to talk about spiritual journeys and how we use them in our lives when we’re starting to see the truth of our experience but don’t feel like we can believe it yet. And I also want to address what happens if your spiritual path has no room for your abuse and how you can use that to help yourself.

So the way I’m going to do this is I’m just going to speak off of my heart and what comes up in regards to spiritual journeys, meaning where you go when you start uncovering the truth of your experience. And I hope that it will give you some tools for whatever journey or path you’re on or considering.

For most of us, when we start to see the truth of our experience, it’s unfathomable at first because we experience anything outside of what we believe is true as an attack on who we are. And so often, there’s a moment where our entire world is shattered into a million pieces, but we lead with our eyes closed. Like it’s just too hard to look at what is really happening and all the implications that come along with that. And so we often put up these defenses where we block it out of our minds and pretend like nothing ever happened whatsoever.

So I’ve had some clients who were like, “Well, I had my first memory of sexual abuse, and then I just got really into meditation and started focusing on my third eye and traveling to other dimensions and trying different kinds of astral projections.”

And that was a great comfort zone for them because it felt like they could keep pretending that nothing had happened, and then they were able to conceptualize it, and they were able to avoid feeling the feelings of their experience. And so you can see how this would happen, particularly for people who are not wanting to face the truth of what happened to them.

But, if we really want to integrate our experiences and become more conscious beings, I think that we need to do a few things:

One, I think we need to start looking at our past experience as an opportunity for expansion.

Two, I think it’s important that once you’ve had your first memory of this abuse or any kind of abuse that you really try to do what you can to focus on it and feel the feelings of what happened to you.

And here’s why: when we feel the feelings when we allow ourselves to experience that pain and that suffering in whatever form it takes for you, then you’re able to start seeing through it.

And here’s what’s happening when you don’t face your feelings: when you dismiss them or avoid them or try not to feel them, what happens is that you start to believe that what happened is not accurate.

So in closing, I want you to know that there’s nothing wrong with either taking a spiritual journey or not taking one. It doesn’t matter when it comes to your healing process; what matters is that you honor whatever it is that you’re seeing and feeling in your life. And I’m here for support and any questions you might have regarding this topic.