Teal Swan

Teal Swan (born Mary Teal Bosworth; June 16, 1984) is an American spiritual influencer and author. Swan and her teachings are the subject of documentaries and podcasts. Publications, including Eonline, The Guardian, and the BBC have noted that some of her teaching methods on how to manage mental health issues have been found controversial by her critics, claims denied by Swan and some of her proponents.

Swan was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on June 16, 1984, and was raised in Logan, Utah. From an early age, she has claimed to have extrasensory abilities, including telepathy and the ability to communicate with the dead. Swan reports that these claims contributed to her being socially ostracized and bullied in her youth. This social ostracism, in turn, led to her interactions with the mental health profession.

In 2006, Barbara Snow, a therapist working with Swan, filed a police complaint alleging that Swan had endured twelve years of ritual abuse. Such allegations by Snow were not unprecedented, aligning with a history of similar claims during the period known as the satanic panic, prevalent in the late 20th century. The era was marked by numerous publicized legal cases in the United States, including the McMartin preschool trial, the Country Walk case involving Frank Fuster, and cases in Kern and Thurston counties, some of which were re-examined in later years. The investigation into Swan and Snow's abuse allegations ended due to a lack of evidence, resulting in case closure.

In 2011, Swan released the book The Sculptor in the Sky. That year, she held her first event, at a Salt Lake City recital hall, speaking to approximately twenty people.

Her teaching methods sometimes guide participants to envision their own deaths, occasionally by suicide. In 2019, Lebo Diseko from the BBC cited Swan's viewpoint on suicide:

In the video, Swan urges those who are feeling suicidal to seek medical help, but goes on to say that in her experience, for some people, this may not help long-term. She instead suggests that suicide be seen as "our safety net or our re-set button that's always available to us". She argues that viewing it in this way enables people to set the idea aside, and instead concentrate on what they can do to make themselves feel better in the present.

She also suggests an exercise in which viewers are told to lie down on the floor and imagine their deaths in "grisly detail". Swan argues in the video that by doing so viewers will realise that there is "nowhere to go but back to life... so why leave?" She stresses in the video that killing oneself would "create a devastating ripple" for loved ones, and "it does matter if you are here or not here... You don't want to die. What you want is an end to your pain."

— Lebo Diseko