Teal Swan - The Anatomy of Loneliness How to Find Your Way Back to Connection

Teal Swan was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with a range of extrasensory abilities, including clairvoyance, clairsentience and clairaudience. She is a survivor of severe childhood abuse. Today she uses her extrasensory gifts, as well as her own harrowing life experiences, to inspire millions of people toward authenticity, freedom and joy. Her worldwide success as a modern spiritual leader has earned her the nickname The Spiritual Catalyst and she is the bestselling author of three books: The Sculptor in the Sky, Shadows Before the Dawn and The Completion Process.

Also by Teal Swan

The Sculptor in the Sky

Shadows Before the Dawn:
Finding the Light of Self-Love through Your Darkest Times

The Completion Process:
The Practice of Putting Yourself Back Together Again

The Anatomy of Loneliness

How to find your way back to connection

TEAL SWAN

Contents

Promise me now
Promise me always
That even as they strike you down with myriad hatred and violence,
Even as they dismember and destroy you,
That no man can ever be your enemy.
The only thing worth anything is love;
Unconditional, invincible, limitless love.
One day when you face this world
Unburdened by the tyranny of fear and hate and greed
Your fellow men will behold you.
Across a thousand cycles of living and dying in full bloom,
Your joy will become eternal.
No sun or moon that ever rises
will ever see it fade.

Promise Me Now by Teal Swan

We are conceived in connection. We are suckled in the security and warmth of connection from the very moment that our mothers holds us against their breast. We cannot perceive the difference between our mother and ourselves, so it isthen, in that state of oneness, that we are the closest to who and what we really are. So close that we dont even bother to ask the question, Who am I? Theres no need to do so because we are notdifferentiated.

In the ecstasy of connection, there is a profound stillness of being. Our movement through life is not motivated by the angst of having to earn something that we are lacking. Instead, doing is simply a natural expression of being. Its this state of being that is most natural to us. And its this state of connection that has been corrupted in us.

This book explains how that happened, through no fault of our own, and what you can do about it. Your loss of natural connection has caused deep loneliness and desperate pain, but there is a way through it to a renewed feeling of sublime connection, which after all, is your birthright.

The loneliness epidemic

We live in a world with billions upon billions of people. And yet the feeling shared by most of the people walking the planet today is that deep down, each one of us is completely alone. Over the course of the years that I have been travelling around the world, teaching different demographics and leading a spiritual movement, it has become painfully apparent that if most people share this feeling of being alone, loneliness is more complex than meets the eye. It is more complex than just being around other people, and it is this deep sense of isolation that needs a remedy. But at the time that I became aware of this epidemic, I didnt have that answer. I didnt have the answer because I felt exactly the same way.

The word loneliness never seems adequate to describe the torment of starvation for closeness. My life had been plagued by loneliness. And fame, which came as a natural accessory to my career, only served to accentuate it like a magnifying glass. I had spent my life never feeling seen, heard, understood or wanted. Fame made finding that closeness that I craved so desperately even harder to attain. To the outside world it seemed that everyone valued and wanted me, but nothing could be further from the truth. People saw me, felt me and understood me less than before. I was surrounded by people but I was nothing more to them than the projections they placed on me. The only value I had, and the only reason they wanted me, was for what they could get through me.

When youre facing a problem without a solution, you are left with one option and that is to look for the answer yourself. I had found myself in the position of being a pioneer in uncharted territory. I saw all too clearly that loneliness was the number-one source of suffering on our planet and also what we are all trying to avoid through a multitude of different coping strategies. But you cannot avoid something and learn about it at the same time. So, I made the decision to do the opposite. The spiritual teachers of the old world were known to go into the desert or into a cave in an attempt to understand something about the universe. I decided to take the same approach. Only instead of disappearing into a cave, I disappeared into loneliness by shamanic journeying in Central America, where I decided I would look the devil in the face. It turned out to be a little more than a year-long process. Seeing loneliness for what it was, and its anatomy, allowed me to understand its opposite. By seeing loneliness clearly, I saw connection clearly. And so, I emerged into the world again ready to teach people about their loneliness and about connection. And it was with this new-found understanding in my heart, mind and body that I wrote this book.

The Anatomy of Loneliness evolved from the disorganized collection of notes I took, often on tear-stained paper. Papers that were stuffed into my backpack for every shamanic journey that I embarked on during that time period of my life. The book practically wrote itself through me. Using this information, I was able to turn loneliness into connection in my own life and in the lives of every other member of my community.

Unconsciousness can be like a virus that spreads from one generation to the next, but so can awakening. It is my vision that the information in this book will spread across the planet until we can officially say that we live in a world with billions of people and none of us feels alone.

The trauma of disconnection

We all have a different story about when we lost this sense of connection. But somewhere over the course of our young lives, we all experienced a fall from grace from that deep, visceral sense of connection. As a result, most of us proceed to spend the rest of our lives in a never-ending tug of war between the aspect of us that is desperate to get that connection back at any cost and the aspect of us that wants to push connection away at any cost.

The pain of losing this connection is the deepest form of trauma that we can experience. Trauma fragments us and splits us apart. It turns symmetry into disorganization. Stillness into panic. Harmony into war. Joy into suffering.

When we encounter this trauma, its as if we put on greycoloured glasses and most of us wear them for the rest of our lives. We see the world through the pain of these lenses. Through them, we perceive ourselves to be separate from the people and things around us. We perceive ourselves to be... alone.

The pain of the human condition is that we walk this Earth with multiple billions of other people and yet each of us feels alone. The trauma of our own disconnection causes us to perceive ourselves as disconnected from anything we see as other.

Its enough that this disconnection causes us pain. But the truth is, it doesnt stop there. This pain bleeds out across the planet. If you are truly connected to something, you cannot cause