Dr Tara Swart: ‘The world needs spirituality right now’

Science, spirituality and manifestation could co-exist better than you might think. We spoke to Dr Tara Swart about life, death, and being open-minded in the face of tragedy.

Images: C Moulden, Randi Childs, Jermaine Binns

When you meet a neuroscientist, you expect a certain kind of conversation. Complicated terms, difficult theories, and a residual feeling of confusion at the end of it. Not so with Dr Tara Swart.

She’s hugely popular, and for years she’s been a leading voice working to show how to combine the scientific with the spiritual, helping us tap into our intuition and bring lasting transformation in our lives. Yet she’s just taken the biggest risk of her career by sharing the fact that her dead husband speaks to her from behind the grave. And it’s causing quite a stir.

‘I think it’s really struck a chord with people, we’ve received thousands of emails and I’ve personally received thousands of DMs, and I’m not exaggerating when I say thousands, from people with similar stories. And I just think it was such a taboo subject.

‘I hate to say this about myself, but when someone with authority and credibility, who’s been known and trusted as a scientist for decades now, comes out and says this, it has just given people so much permission to say the same thing.’

Her story begins back in 2016. ‘In my previous book, The Source, I basically shared that I manifested my husband. I did a vision board that had a big engagement ring on it. Prior to that, it manifested lots of work opportunities and travel but I was, I think, afraid of love.

‘And I literally had a conversation with myself where I was like, “If this manifestation stuff is what you claim it is, you should be able to do it for love.” I went from putting a tiny heart on the board to putting a proper big engagement ring.

‘And then in early February of 2016, I met Robin on a flight from Johannesburg to London. And after three months, we started dating. Six months after that, we got engaged, and a year later we got married. We were older, we really cherished each other.

‘And tragically, he developed acute myeloid leukemia and had four months of brutal treatment that basically didn’t work. So he passed away in October 2021, and everything that I believed in, like love and abundance and manifestation, was just shattered. I had to find a new way to get through the grief — and the life.’

‘And I had heard people talking about people who’d lost someone, talking about getting signs from them, but, and I was desperate to get something, but I didn’t get anything, really, apart from I saw a lot of robins in my garden. Enough to notice them.’

It’s a symbolism commonly associated with spirits — as the saying goes, ‘robins appear when loved ones are near’, but was particularly meaningful as Swart’s husband’s name was Robin Bieber.

Coming face to face

However, things were about to get much stranger. ‘Six weeks after he passed away, I was woken up at 4am by a massive thump to my shoulder, and I basically saw him standing next to our bed.

‘It was in the dark. My eyes were acclimatising, and he looked a little bit vague at first, but I could feel this effort of him trying to push through to be seen. And eventually I could clearly see the outline of his hair and his face and his whole body. And then as soon as he became that visible, he just dissolved from the top down, and my eyes kind of followed him. I saw his shins and his feet, and then I gasped, and then I just fell asleep.’

The obvious conclusion, of course, is that she was simply dreaming, but she’s adamant that wasn’t the case. ‘I was totally fast asleep then I literally felt this proper thump, like someone whacked me on my shoulder, and I was absolutely awake, I wasn’t dreaming, and I saw what I saw.

‘I was a bit afraid to tell people, in case they just thought I was so devastated by grief, I was starting to lose my mind. And I think that is a reason that a lot of people have resonated with my story. They’ve said “I thought I was going crazy until you said that the same thing happened to you.”’

This encounter was only the beginning. ‘I started noticing particular numbers everywhere, like his birthday on my phone, a lot of elevens, which are the number for Twin Flames. And I always said to him that he was my Twin Flame.

‘Then I started seeing a lot of fours, and I didn’t know what it meant. So when I looked it up, it said it’s a sign that your angels are guiding you and protecting you and you’re on the right path.

‘By that point, I was dealing with a lot of the legal and financial practicalities of becoming a widow, which was really hard. So seeing that number was comforting at first, and later it was like guidance.

‘So when I had to make big decisions, I would get messages from him to wait, or make certain decisions, or just know that everything’s going to be okay. ‘

She’s open about the way her experience has helped her. ‘At first it was, it was comforting to just know that he was still around. I remember often hearing bird song, and rushing to the windows to see if it’s a robin. And if I couldn’t see the bird, I’d sort of say to myself, “I can’t see you, but I know that you’re there”. And that became like an analogy for me.

‘For a lot of people who lose someone, the negativity of it stays with them for the rest of their life. And I knew that I didn’t want to live like that. I was always a happy person, and I didn’t want this to change that. So it’s helped me to not fear things, and be genuinely happy again.

‘And it’s nearly four years now and it just brings me joy, really, a sense of connection. Knowing that love doesn’t die. I really know that now.’

Her story is at once heartbreaking and euphoric, which is perhaps why it has resonated so much around the world. Since appearing on Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO in August, her story has reached millions of people. On release her book shot to number one in the charts on both sides of the Atlantic, and she’s clearly pinching herself about the reaction.

‘I’m very private, so I didn’t want to share what was just a sad story. I only ever wanted to share if I learned something that I thought could help people. And that’s why I wrote the book. Even though it was such a risk, I honestly did not realise how much it was going to help people. That’s been so validating. And it also makes me feel like Robin’s name is kept alive because everyone’s talking about him, like to be speaking to you, it just means that more people are going to hear about this.’

Opening our minds

But her work isn’t solely focused on her own loss and love. Instead, in The Signs she talks about how we can all open our minds to a richer existence by examining the way coincidence, synchronicity and serendipity affect our lives.

‘I became very conscious that I didn’t want to limit it to speaking about loss, although I didn’t realise how everyone’s lost someone, so it’s actually much more universal than I thought.

‘But I decided to say that these signs could come from anywhere: it could be God, it could be angels, it could be the universe. ‘It’s just different words for different people. But there’s some kind of cosmic soup, or collective consciousness.

‘There’s enough science to back up that the spirit or the soul or the psyche doesn’t disappear when the material body’s dead, and there is a way to tap into that.

‘I think it started when he actually passed away, and I was with him when that happened, and almost immediately I just looked at his body and thought, “I know that’s not him. I don’t know where he is, but that’s his body, it’s not him.” And I think that’s a spiritual belief a lot of people have.

‘This is a huge conversation that people want to have and feel permission to have and are sharing, which then brings psychological safety to more people.’

‘So for people who haven’t lost someone, I feel like it’s interacting with the universe. Rather than going through life feeling like it’s just you and your body and your material life, it’s about believing in something greater, which is actually really important. I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual. And I also acknowledge that 85% of people globally identify with a religion, so that’s really important. And I think the world really needs spirituality right now.’

Connecting to something greater

Following her husband’s death she didn’t work for three years, but now she has turned her focus on the power of connection. ‘We are technically and technologically more connected than ever before,’ she says. ‘We can be across time zones across the planet, but as humanity, I feel like we’re more lost, lonely and disconnected than ever.’

She describes this in terms of three pillars: with the self, with others, and with something greater. ‘When there are riots and wars, which there are a lot of at the moment, that usually indicates that there’s low levels of oxytocin, the bonding hormone, in society. And it disrupts the fabric of society, the things that hold us together, the things that we agree in a sort of unspoken way about how to treat each other.

‘If you look at dating apps and social media, the way that people turn up as so inauthentic and treat each other as disposable, is just so sad to me, and I think people, they’ve lost their sense of identity. They don’t have a purpose at all, certainly not one that’s greater than themselves, which we really need to be mentally healthy.

‘And in terms of something greater, the way we treat the planet and the environment is shocking. I feel like in the modern day, in the Western World anyway, we’ve broken ourselves by becoming so disconnected from nature. ‘Beauty and nature and arts and culture are so important for our mental health and our physical health, and our longevity.

‘A study recently came out that showed if you go to the theatre or the ballet or a museum or an art gallery every two months, your chances of dying go down by 31%! Even if you only go twice a year your chances of dying go down by 14%. I want people to know that, because it would be an absolute no-brainer to do that if you knew that.

‘People tend to dismiss art, they’re too busy for it. But when I was researching, I discovered there are so many citations that say that in Paleolithic times, art created a sense of meaning-making and belonging.

‘There are cave paintings from 40,000 years ago, so as we had no spare resources for anything other than survival at that time, that shows that art must be crucial to our survival. We must have instinctively known that. And 50,000 years before that, we were finding ochre and crumbling it and putting it onto our faces and bodies, which created a reproductive advantage, because we would be seen as more attractive and creative. And 500,000 years ago, we made tools that were more beautiful and symmetrical than they had to be to do the job that they were required for.

‘It just shows, art and beauty are really integral to the human experience.’ When you consider the way Swart has managed to make the most heartbreaking story so incredibly beautiful, it makes you think she might just be right.

And with that, our conversation ends. Her ability to combine the scientific and the spiritual fascinates me. But most impressive is her ability to endure a nightmare scenario and come out the other side smiling, with a story of undying, never-ending love, and a continued passion to share her knowledge, to reach out to others, and to live her life.

The Signs: The New Science of How to Trust Your Instincts by Dr Tara Swart (Rider, £16.99) is out now. Follow Dr Swart at @DrTaraSwart.