I met Teal spring of 2003 and have lived with her for the majority of that time since.  I have always described my life with Teal as Epic and like a wild, beautiful and magical roller coaster.  She had just escaped from 13 years of consistent ritualistic abuse and torture.  Her life was literally in a chaotic turmoil.  I watched her fight for life every day.  That first year she was seizuring every other day and cutting once a week.  At the same time she was helping me navigate the loss of my brother and helping me find my own voice and helping me to see how I was desperately trying to escape myself.  I had never seen anything like the pain she was going through.  I saw that no-one had just been there for her and that is exactly what I wanted to do because of the compassion I had seen come from her towards other people.  Teal’s Mind Blowing compassion for her abusers sent me into tears one night.  I realized the power of this ability despite the atrocities done to her.  Another thing that blew my mind about Teal was the consistent aim to see me attain my highest good regardless of whether it affected her life in a negative way.  Even if it meant ending our relationship and her losing yet another supportive figure, she was constantly having me check with myself about the best decision for myself.

Growing up with a Mother that I was afraid of, I was incredibly good at placating people and giving them answers I thought they wanted to hear.   At least I thought I was good at that until I met Teal and she saw straight through a false constructed personality built to protect myself from the world.  We continued living together with various people over the next 10 years.  She helped me with radical self acceptance, developing decision making within myself, living life passionately, not wasting time, listening to my intuition, standing up for myself and escaping my self defeating personality.  She deconstructed the aspect of me that gave people the answers they wanted to hear to the detriment of my own voice.  I helped her with stability, re-integrating physical touch as a loving act rather than an abusive act, true friendship and not needing anything from her for my presence and unconditional love.

Teal has always been a natural teacher and her desire to share her knowledge and teach finally overcame the fear of exposure to her former abusers 3 years ago.  Since then I have been wanting to spread the message that helped me heal my life to others.  When this message was spread, people started accepting it immediately and were healing their own lives with her words just like me.  And people also shared our vision of what the world could be.  With authentic communication, a desire to heal ourselves and others and living in a healthy manner in relation to ourselves and others, sicknesses became unhidden and sick aspects of our society also became glaringly apparent.  Dreams were born to Reform the Justice System, Reform End of Life Care and form Healing Centers all over the world.   Again others shared this vision and wanted to help us tackle these goals.  We also saw a system of living that was inherently sick that involved nuclear families that were broken and alone.  We are social beings, but we are being isolated and societal messages of Independence keep people apart.  We saw intentional communities being an answer to this problem; similar to villages in early humanity where people help each other, eat together, build together, help raise the young etc…  So much of the “Living Together” has been sucked from our society.  We are separated as socially unacceptable of flawed vulnerabilities are kept behind closed doors.

Part of this dream to see a better world and using our company to facilitate this change and a desire for Intentional community inspired us to invite several volunteers into our home as intentional community members in the spring of 2013.  One aspect of traditional villages and Intentional communities that we overlooked was that people generally like separated living quarters.  Teal’s message of healing has come from both Universal Inspiration and healing from the darkest places that any human has traveled.  She has experienced the loss of herself.  Wishing for death as a reprieve from the pain.  Living for years in torture as an abusers puppet in order to save her own family’s lives.  Teal is a true warrior, to have survived first of all, and to attain the level of compassion and healing where life is simply OK, is a feat few can understand. For this she is a Beacon of Light to others that have experienced any form of suffering in this life.  To simply see her life and know that life can be OK is enough to give the hope that so many are desperately grabbing for.  A lot of people don’t survive through the suffering.  They either break and die of misery, or their minds break and people become their enemy.  In Teal’s ability to heal she often reaches these broken people and gives them hope, but often the road to healing is long, arduous and perhaps may never be completed in this lifetime.  We unfortunately attracted a couple of these people into our community last year (Cameron and Fallon).  And despite countless hours of work to help them heal, they were both still attached to the identity of being the victim because it was the only way for them to see themselves as good.  They began to see Teal’s as the perpetrator.  Our own boundaries and self preservation forced us to separate many in the community and we had to preserve the sanctity of our space.

One of the people who was invited to be a part of the community was Cameron.  I must take partial responsibility for her addition to the community.  Teal and Cameron met in Santa Barbara.  When Teal met Cameron, she turned to me and said, “DO NOT let Cameron near this” (meaning our work).  It was her opinion that Cameron needed a “perfect guru” and was unequipped to emotionally handle the reality that spiritual teachers get angry sometimes and sad sometimes.  A person who cannot handle that truth, cannot be in the inner circle of support that a spiritual teacher builds around themselves.  Fallon and I both ignored Teal’s advice and told her that she needed to practice unconditional love.  We did not at that point see the side of Cameron that Teal saw immediately.  We promised Teal that Cameron was so organized that she would help her immensely and we even promised that they would not have to spend time together.  Teal reluctantly agreed.  I regret doing that.  In fact, even Fallon admitted to me and Teal on bended knee while apologizing to Teal that he regretted it after Cameron’s colors began to show.  We did not understand that an intentional community has to be intentional.  You have to select the members of a community based on who is capable of that kind of intense self-awareness and personal accountability.  You can’t just throw people together and expect it to go smoothly.  We found that out the hard way.

Cameron was not wanting to change her life, she wanted a savior and when Teal did not rescue her in the ways she wanted to be rescued, she became disillusioned and simply turned Teal into another person to blame as a perpetrator in her own victimhood.  When Cameron was volunteering, she seemed to resent the fact that she was volunteering in the first place.  Several times, she would offer to do things for Teal or the rest of us and then hold it against us later.  She played the Martyr.  She would feel threatened by Teal for reasons unbeknownst to us, she would then attack Teal out of the blue in her own house.  Teal would spend hours talking Cameron through her pain into a space where it seemed as if genuine healing had taken place, only to have Cameron do the exact same thing the next day.  When Teal was spending more time trying to restore harmony with Cameron than she was spending on her career, it became obvious that Cameron was not actually helping, she was taking away from Teal’s mission.  It was a group decision, made by all of us in the community, including Cameron to temporarily separate her and Teal until more healing could be done.

A bit Later Cameron went to the Workshop in New York a year ago.  A woman named Jo Jo showed up at the pre- workshop gallery show and went behind Teal’s back and managed to convince a group of people there that Teal was illuminati and that they should not attend the workshop the following day.  Cameron was one of the people who easily fell in with Jo Jo.  Because Cameron was already having trouble with Teal, Jo Jo provided the validation she needed to justify how she felt about Teal.  Cameron then progressed after her return to try to convince every other volunteer that Teal was illuminati and was controlling their minds and that they had to stop supporting her.  She has progressed to turn many of Teal’s advocates away from and against Teal.  Teal is convinced this is a mirror of her experience of being brought up in a Mormon town.

Cameron wanted to go home from the minute she came here.  When Teal decided she couldn’t live in the same house with Cameron given all of Cameron’s deep shadows that were reflecting through Teal, Cameron decided to leave the community of her own volition.  She of course turned this into “being kicked out”.  The day before Cameron left, Teal confronted Cameron on her “snake in the grass” behavior.  Cameron laughed and said “what do you expect me to turn against you and start posting horrible stuff about you and try to ruin your career?”  Teal looked her dead in the face with all of us present and said “Exactly”.  We have all been blown away to see Teal’s prediction come true.  This is exactly what Cameron has done.  She has presented herself as an informant to Teal’s avid hater groups and considers herself credible because she lived with Teal.  Only the rest of us (8 in total) have also lived with her and for much longer, and we completely disagree with her perspective about Teal and what Teal is like and how it is to live with Teal and in this community.  Cameron felt threatened (I don’t think I’ll ever fully understand why).  She then tried to turn everyone against each other and when she didn’t manage to do that, she betrayed us all and turned herself into the victim.  It has been truly depressing and shocking to watch it unfold.

What has shocked us more is that people have taken what she has said seriously.  I suppose because Cameron claims she lived with Teal (for two weeks) people instantly see what she says about her as valid and credible.  This is why we have decided to respond to Cameron’s stance.  By saying that she stands alone in her opinion of Teal and that is coming from people who have also lived with Teal for much, much longer than she did.  We feel like living with Teal is difficult only because living in the same house with a Spiritual Teacher, means you can’t hide anything or escape yourself with Teal around.  Living with Teal is like being on the fast track.  But living with Teal is magic and epic and intense and inspiring.  It is a blessing that many people will never be so lucky to experience.  To me, it is incredibly unfortunate that we had to learn the lesson about how to do intentional communities right in this way.  But the other aspects of intentional community, I have loved.  And I intend to live and die in an intentional community.  Teal and I intend to live the rest of our lives in the same intentional community.  I would not have made that decision for my life if Teal were a bad person.  With Teal, what you see is what you get.  that’s the point isn’t it?  Authenticity.  With Teal, she is the same behind closed doors as she is in front of them.  she is the same person on screen as she is in real life.  And we will continue to spread our message of dreams, inspiration and healing and let people use them to heal their own lives.  Nothing we say or do alone can change a person’s life.  They have to be wanting the change as well.  And many people do.  Any time a great revolution rolls around, there will be great resistance to it.