Attraction, Sexual Energy & Self-Acceptance: A Conversation with Teal Swan

In this thought-provoking podcast, Teal Swan offers her unique insights into love, attraction, and the complex world of pornography. Teal discusses how these elements impact our relationships and personal growth, exploring the deep psychological and emotional connections that shape our understanding of intimacy. Join this engaging conversation to delve into a candid discussion about the influences of modern media on love and attraction, and gain new perspectives on navigating these dynamic and often challenging landscapes.

This podcast was recorded in December 2012.

What if the very thing we crave most in love—the magnetic pull, the chemistry, the intimacy—is also our most potent tool for self-transformation?

In this deep and raw conversation between Stephen James and spiritual teacher Teal Swan, we uncover a radically honest lens on attraction, sexuality, and the shadow work needed to create true connection. This isn’t another fluffy conversation about “divine union.” This is a truth serum about how your relationships mirror your inner wounds, how society has sabotaged our relationship to sex, and why the key to spiritual evolution might just be found in your most primal energy.

What Is Attraction—Really?

To Teal, attraction is not random. It’s not a spark of fate or a cosmic joke. It’s vibrational math. “Attraction is when, on an energetic level, you’re a match to someone,” she explains. That resonance pulls you together like magnets, creating the familiar chemical rush we associate with love and desire.

But here’s the twist: you’re not always drawn to someone because they’re “right” for you. You’re drawn to them because they mirror where you are. Your current state of self-worth, your beliefs about love, your unresolved wounds—all of it is reflected in the people you’re most pulled toward.

If you struggle with self-love, chances are you’ll attract someone who triggers that struggle, not so you can suffer endlessly—but so you’re forced to grow.

Love Reveals What Love Is Not

“Love is designed to show you whatever love is not,” Stephen offers. Teal agrees. Love, when real, doesn’t just soothe—it surfaces. It brings to light everything unlike itself. It triggers the hidden, the repressed, the unhealed.

That’s why the work isn’t about finding the perfect partner. It’s about becoming the person who can meet love fully. And that starts with one of the most radical acts of spiritual rebellion in our world today: self-acceptance.

Radical Self-Acceptance (Not Resignation)

We’ve been sold a lie that transformation is about fixing yourself. Teal says otherwise. “If you want to attract an aligned partner,” she says, “start by finding approval for everything you hate about yourself.”

This isn’t about giving up. It’s about embracing your wholeness. True self-acceptance means taking the parts of you you’d rather disown—your irrationality, your sensitivity, your chaos—and finding the gold in them. Why? Because the more you accept yourself, the more others will too.

Approval is love. And love doesn’t wait for perfection.

When you learn to love your so-called flaws, you shift the frequency of your relationships. Instead of attracting people who judge or shame you for those parts, you start drawing people who celebrate them.

The Shadow Work of Sexual Energy

Most spiritual leaders avoid talking about sex. Why? Because it’s full of shadow.

But that’s exactly why it matters.

Sex, in its purest form, is the merging of polarities. It’s the unification of separation. “Sex is the most natural spiritual expression of love,” Teal says. “It’s the clearest reflection we have in the physical world of Source itself.”

The problem isn’t sex. The problem is the stories we’ve inherited around sex—the shame, the programming, the trauma. Religious suppression. Cultural conditioning. A porn industry that replaces intimacy with performance and photoshopped ideals.

If you were raised to distrust connection, if you weren’t emotionally mirrored or safely held as a child, your sexual energy will reflect that. It will become distorted. Detached. Disassociated.

But healing doesn’t start in the genitals. It starts in the psyche.

Healing Begins with Connection

Teal shares a deeply personal example. Having experienced sexual abuse, she developed a pattern of mentally dissociating during sex. She couldn’t be present in the room—until she did the internal work to build trust in herself.

“I stopped trying to fix the sex,” she says, “and instead focused on my relationship with connection, with self-approval, with trusting that I would make the right choices for me.”

That inner shift changed everything. Without trying to force anything sexually, she eventually attracted a partner who made presence feel safe again—for the first time in her life.

This is the essence of vibrational alignment: when you do the real work inside, your outer world rearranges to reflect it.

The Problem with Porn & The Loss of Intimacy

Porn isn’t just entertainment. It’s education. And for most young boys, it’s a brutal one.

“When boys associate arousal and climax with porn from the age of 12,” Stephen says, “they condition themselves to only feel pleasure through disconnection.”

Teal agrees. The moment of orgasm is a spiritual gateway—a dissolving of the ego, a merging with Source. But when that moment is linked to artificial, disconnected imagery, it wires the brain away from intimacy.

We don’t need more sex. We need more presence. And we need a complete rewrite of how we teach young people about connection, bodies, and love.

Sexual Energy Is Your Power

At its core, sexual energy isn’t just about sex. It’s life force. Creativity. Presence. The raw expression of the true self.

To suppress sexual energy is to suppress your aliveness.

To awaken it, you don’t need a partner. You don’t even need sex. You just need to stop abandoning yourself.

“Sexual energy,” Teal says, “is the drive to bring the truth of who you are to the surface. To stop dimming. To stop trying to fit into a world that wants you to shrink.”

This is why healing your relationship to sexuality is not a luxury. It’s the foundation of power. Real power. The kind that doesn’t come from control, but from embodiment.

Final Thoughts

Your sexual energy is not separate from your spiritual journey. It is the spiritual journey. It’s your shadow and your light, your pain and your potential.

You don’t need to be perfect to find love. You need to be whole. And wholeness begins with radical, honest, fierce self-acceptance.

Love isn’t out there waiting for you. It’s inside you, waiting to be reclaimed.