Off the Deep End with Teal Swan

The Deep End, S1E1, "The Lost Toys"
True Believers, S1E4, "Teal Swan and the Wellness Tribe"

One of the first things I learned about Teal Bosworth Scott Swan — or teal, as I now refer to her— was that she was very, very famous. So famous that I wondered how it could be that I'd never heard of her. She reveled in her "fame" in a way that I'd never seen any "spiritual teacher" do. That was way back in 2013. In the years since, she's parlayed her social media popularity into some book deals and a smattering of regional interviews, but her path to mainstream success has not been a smooth one. As discussed here, it's been a bit rocky for the self-described"celebrity" who wanted to reach people on "every single continent," and was designed pretty and white by an Arcturian panel for that very reason.

She was, in her own words, "completely duped" by Gizmodo and Jennings Brown, who created "The Gateway" podcast. An interview with OZY magazine had been "antagonistic," by daring to ask her standard journalistic questions about the criticism of her. Her foray into mainstream media was starting to look more like a collision.

And then it got worse. She was interviewed by Lebo Diseko of the BBC, whose reportage lead to some of her videos being pulled from her YouTube channel and the abrupt removal of Teal Tribe from Facebook.

Now teal has been thrust into the media spotlight in a way I've never seen before. Over the past month, two documentaries have debuted. On May 2, she was featured in the fourth episode of Vice's True Believers series, "Teal Swan and the Wellness Tribe." And on May 18, the first of four scheduled episodes of The Deep End aired on FreeForm, then on Hulu. (Full disclosure: I had what I think were fruitful discussions with producers and reporters for all of the above.)

The Deep End has generated a lot of buzz, so, for the first time ever, a news search for Teal Swan brings up a lot of articles and mentions. On the downside for teal, a lot of that reporting includes the c-word, cult: 'The Deep End' Trailer Reveals the Cult-Like Influence of Teal Swan, A New Freeform Documentary Looks Into How Possible Cult Leader Teal Swan Took Flight, What is Teal Swan's real name? All about the cult leader ahead of Freeform's The Deep End documentary.

And then there's the other c-word: con artist: Who is Teal Swan, the controversial spiritualist or scammer in “The Deep End”?, Teal Swan, The Controversial Spiritualist Or Con Artist In “The Deep End,” Has A Name.

Any mention in legacy media like the Washington Post should be considered great publicity, but it reads:

The Deep End (Freeform at 10) A four-part docuseries — that will also stream on Hulu — about the wellness/spiritual influencer Teal Swan who has been accused of effectively running a cult.

Worse, some articles have noted her relative obscurity.

When Freeform first announced The Deep End, it chose not to mention that its docuseries would be about Teal Swan. Instead it referred to her as a “controversial female spiritual leader.” In many ways, it’s an omission that makes sense. Though Teal Swan is far from a household name, she has an extraordinary amount of influence over her followers.

The Deep End seeks to answer the question that has haunted many who have stumbled upon Swan’s videos. Is this woman just a popular alternative healer or is she a potentially dangerous cult leader?

The biggest tip-off that this massive boost to her public profile is not flattering is teal's muted response to it. She and her team are not promoting The Deep End, despite their full participation in it. They've mentioned it only obliquely and apparently grudgingly. It all looks to me like damage control, not great damage control, but damage control.

Two days before it aired, she posted on her blog An Explanation For My Non-Response Approach to bad press and "haters." There is much in this post that's nonsensical, but the biggest problem is that it's entirely false. None of us who've been on the receiving end of her ire could call it a non-response. She responded to my first blog post about her by writing one about me and siccing her flying monkeys on me. Beyond the swarms of vitriolic comments and emails, there've been mass reporting attacks on my Facebook page that have gotten my blog blocked repeatedly, and I've seen screenshots of her defamatory, if comical, attacks on me in Messenger threads. I've also seen the kind of venom and vicious defamation she's aimed at others, particularly former friends/followers and exes. She responds. She definitely responds.

Lest we forget, she put out a two hour video called Teal Swan Answers To The Allegations. I broke that down here. Did she forget that she did that? Is she ok?

She also put out a fresh, new welcome message. Even in those brief few minutes, she manages to shoehorn in a complaint about people misunderstanding, fearing, and twisting her meaning. I'm not sure if she's expecting an influx of new potential followers, courtesy of this surge of media, but she sure seems to think they'll need to be inoculated against having a bad impression of her.

The night before the documentary aired, Blake Dyer intimated that there might be some reveals about his departure from Teal Eye, the company he founded with his long-time, mostly platonic companion. Blake announced last September that he was stepping back from his many roles and responsibilities as teal's second banana. From a safe distance, we could all see the outlines of this transition: engagement to fiance #1, teal unhappy over Blake's priorities, break-up, engangement to fiance #2, marriage, departure from teal's world. It seems that some of this drama has played out in front of the film crew, and having seen at least some of that footage in the first installment, leave say, this could get very interesting. Writes Blake:

I can't really explain the power, ferocity and magic that has lead my life to change in such a dramatic way in the past 2 years. In short, everything has changed in that time. My family, friends, career, place of living and relationship.... I won’t lie it has been a messy, painful, trying and often terrible road with moments of beauty and compassion in between. And in a mind bending staggering addition, an award winning documentary crew was there to capture some of those trials, giving me the precious opportunity to look back upon my actions to gain further awareness and reflection.

At some point on Saturday, three days after the first episode aired, teal quietly slipped a video of her response to it on the main page of her website, well below the fold. It's titled simply "Documentary Episode 1 Thoughts." What documentary? You'd have to listen to it to know. But I will save you the trouble. There are things she likes about the first episode of The Deep End and things she does not. She really likes the parts where her fans and supporters show their love and appreciation for her. She dislikes all the parts that made her look like a "very hard, harsh, cold, dismissive, unworkable, domineering, competitive, and angry" woman, with a "superiority complex," because all of that was taken way out of context.

The next day, she posted the video on her YouTube channel. If she's posted it anywhere else, I haven't seen it. It's not on her official Facebook page, and I've been told by people who can see her profile page— because, unlike me, they are not blocked — that it's not to be found there, either. The following image has been at the top of that page for a couple of days now.

She seems to be reacting and, dare I say, responding to media that she does not think is representing her in a way that makes her "look good," which, for some reason, she thinks is their job. It's all sort of veiled and indirect, but she is very much making her displeasure known.

The Deep End, S1E1, "The Lost Toys"

I think The Deep End is a much better title than what teal actually said.

My rule is if you wanna come within 50 miles of me, you better be ready for the deepest end of the pool.

How many ends does this pool have?! I can see where it might have many ends and quite a range of depths, because it covers 50 miles, minimum. So that's one very large, bizarrely shaped pool. I can't quite imagine it... and I don't think I want to.

I think it was very generous of the documentarians to edit her mass of mixed metaphors and weird imagery into such a pithy title.

teal swan always sounds like she's paraphrasing the average of a dozen self-help books from the front table of a 90s-era borders

— Snake🫀✂️ I love ardra (@eroticacid) May 20, 2022

This is a very lush, cinematically beautiful production, so much so that I fear it risks glamorizing teal's world. And a glamour concealing a murky darkness is teal in a nutshell. The style is observational, with no narration, so it gives the viewer that fly on the wall feel. The access she granted them is incredible and surprising, after her previous brushes with mainstream media.

After the podcast came out we spoke to many production companies about adapting it for TV. The Documentary Group was the clear choice. I knew we could trust them to take a trauma-informed approach to an incredibly sensitive story. Everyone at TDG is brilliant and compassionate.

— Jennings Brown (@tjenningsbrown) May 19, 2022

Jennings Brown, in a recently aired podcast interview, A Little Bit Culty, explains that he reached out to teal's team, post-Gateway furor, and asked them if they'd be interested in working with The Documentary Group. Despite their chilly response to him, they said "sure." (He also mentions that they had sought to have him take down the articles he'd done for the podcast series, which he did not do. I expect he got the same toothless legal letter I did, practically begging me to take down my post. I didn't either.) So, yes, her willingness to let in cameras and microphones again, after a request from someone she thinks "duped" her is a little surprising. In the interview they ponder why she may have done that. My theory: She's an exhibitionist who loves to be filmed and photographed and believes wholeheartedly in the force of her own charisma.

Brown admits that he was "manipulated" and "controlled" by her, in their first sit-down interview. I've seen this with other media professionals as well. The reality, for which teal has been totally unprepared, is that professional journalists have editors, other sources, fact checkers, multiple processes in place to prevent any one source or subject from controlling the final edit. The fourth estate is by no means perfect and media professionals can and have been gamed, but these aren't the sycophantic YouTubers teal depended on during her ascent. These are professionals who answer to other professionals.

Teal Swan is a real life version of Kristin Wigg’s “don’t make me sing” skit, except she’s terrifying and def a cult leader.

— Cait Dickey (@CaitDickey) May 20, 2022

"I'm a mirror. What a mirror does is it shows you the reality," says teal to a workshop audience, a few minutes into the episode. The grandiosity of this statement should be a glaring red flag. She has been calling herself a mirror and a "universal reflector" for some time and I believe she took this notion from Human Design. But if she truly believed in oneness and our holographic universe, as she claims to, she would know that everyone and everything is a reflection. We are all mirrors to each other. As my teacher, Cherokee Mystic Virginia Sandlin, always said, "I am not the source of your reality. From my perspective, you are my reflection, and from your perspective, I am your reflection." (I may be paraphrasing this slightly.)

But teal keeps positioning herself as speaking from "source perspective" as if, somehow, others are not. She claims to be"a mirror of the universe within the mirror hologram that is our earth." In a hologram, every cell contains the entire image. Every one of us contains the entire universe, in every particle of our being. This mystical concept is a totally equalizing principle, but in her hands, it somehow becomes self-aggrandizing and further enshrines an alarming power over her followers. 

From that vaunted pedestal she asks a woman, who is seeking to understand her lack of direction and motivation, "Why are you still here on the planet?" All roads lead to suicide, with teal. The woman seems stunned into silence, passively nodding. From there teal presses her to the same sort of binary, get off the fence, choice that she presented Leslie Wangsgaard with, by her own admission. "It's like part of you is trying to find an answer and stay alive and part of you is like 'I'm just gonna take us out.'... Like when we're really facing that decision point, play out both sides... go to the worst of the worst case scenarios and make your mind up. None of us are gonna get out of this thing alive..." It is certainly not the first time she has said something like this, one on one, and to a depressed, suicidal following that she has cultivated. If you want to know why many of us call her "the suicide catalyst," this is one more example.

Teal Swan really fixed her mouth to ask a woman(who clearly sounds suicidal) in front of a bunch of people “so why are you still here?”

— Did you check ya mama’s house? (@fascino_vic) May 19, 2022

Amazingly, teal manages to come off even worse than she does in that scene, as this thing goes along. There's a jawdropping exchange between her and a retreat participant who asks her if she has enough respect for anyone that they could challenge her, as she does with everyone else. "Why? I should have someone above me?" she says, implying that she is above everyone she calls out. "I don't look up to anyone." Someone might exist who has more "awareness" than she does, but she has never met them. Her anger at the suggestion that she should have mentors or even equals who can call her on her shit is staggering, but it's fully in keeping with her escalating arrogance.

Watching the ‘Deep End’ on Hulu, the second Teal Swan said there is no one above her and she’s never met anyone as aware as her I knew this was a cult🥴

— Ciara (@spirituallmilf) May 23, 2022

We also learn that it's Blake who has been doing teal's henna treatments... for 17 years. So one of his many responsibilities has been unlicensed cosmetologist/colorist. Who is doing her hair now that he's gone? And he is gone, as discussed above.

I will have much more to say on the Blake resignation saga, but I will table that until we see how the backstory plays out in the coming episodes. This episode saw him in a heated exchange with teal over bringing Juliana into their intentional community. It is, again, an ugly side of teal playing out before an unflinching camera.

the most disturbing part about the teal swan doc so far, apart from the purposeful retraumatization, is the guy who says “same key everybody” before going into this little light of mine on mandolin

— scrump nugget (@_hylocichla) May 21, 2022

True Believers, S1E4, "Teal Swan and the Wellness Tribe"

Vice's True Believers series runs six episodes, each focused on a different controversial spiritual or health and wellness organization, and teal's is the fourth. It opens with a gut-wrenching interview with the parents of teal follower McKenzie Faye Lazarz who killed herself at 18. They believe that teal’s messaging was pivotal in their daughter’s decision to end her life. As the episode unfolds, they demonstrate, through a montage of teal’s videos and interviews with key figures from teal’s inner circle, how her parents could have reached that conclusion.

I cannot listen to the story of how this teenage girl ended her life without weeping. And I can’t help but think about teal’s reaction when Lebo Diseko of the BBC asked her about the two very young people from Teal Tribe who killed themselves on her watch. “I’m not aware of them,” she shrugs.

As teal’s ex-husband Sarbdeep Swan says in this documentary, “When you tell vulnerable people, who have nothing to live for, that you have all the answers, that suicide is a reset button, then people will kill themselves. She knows this, but she doesn’t care.”

Some of the most affecting moments come from the interview with teal's ex-boyfriend Jared Dobson, aka., Fallon. There's a certain poetry to that, for me. It was teal's disturbing, degrading, and classically culty treatment of Fallon that moved me to put pen to paper and write my very first blog post about teal. Here he opens up about the events that led up to her kicking him out of the house and out of the tribe. "And the last thing she told me is that if I were you, I'd just go kill myself. There's no help for you. There's nothing anyone can do."

So then we have to ask the question do we really want this to work. And what's interesting is that when she asked herself that question the answer was, "No. I'm done." There's nothing that any healer could ever do for that type of vibration, which is totally fine.

It's seems like she gives up on those she deems suicidal very easily. If she can't fix them, no one can.

Besides, they're just hitting the reset button.

Watching this Vice documentary on cults and I just can’t believe the lack of personal accountability so many people have in destroying their own lives!

Teal Swan, has BLOOD on her hands and yet her platform still exist?

These cult leaders are truly deranged.

— BRI LUNA (@YungKundalini) May 20, 2022

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