Autism Supports Awakening?!
So, what if autism is an experience that is asking us to wake up? Wake up and see this modern world for the succubi it is. Wake up and see that modernity is incredibly artificial, superficial, and not sustainable. What if we are being asked to wake up so as to embody new ways of living, sensing, feeling, and being!
The label autism is a lens, a cultural and medical viewpoint that funnels people based on perspective. Since it is a way of categorizing, learning, and supporting that many of us are coming to understand I am going with it even though we could also label autistic people as seers, unique, differently abled, and so on. What are qualities and ways that invite awakening that autistic people sometimes embody? Autistic folks are often incredibly honest, nature loving, social justice oriented, clear and direct in communication needs, sensitive to sensory and energetic input, and uninterested in or unaware of social norms and expectations that cut us off from who we are or what we value. I note these qualities and ways of being not to idealize or have unrealistic expectations of any individual or group but to say that within today’s context, those embodied ways of existing are a foundation for beings who are not as asleep and who have a lot of wisdom to share.
I am going to keep heading down this line of thinking about autism as an awake force asking for awakening and first I want to preface this sentiment with a few things;
First of all, I am autistic and I am very aware that autism shows up in a variety of ways. I am still going to follow this thinking based on those ways of being I named above – ways that make us look at the world through new or more real and sustainable (to the planet and ourselves) lenses. Second, I am very aware that autism is a gift and disability, and so many other things and interpretations. So, as I name the waking up that autism is, could be interpreted as, and invites, I also am quite aware and want you to be aware that folks with autism have very real needs, often compounded by industrial capitalist life, that we deserve support around. Thirdly, autism is a nuerotype (or a variety of nuerotypes with overlap) and is not a mental illness – but it does a damn good job at both exposing the sociopathic and narcissistic mental illness that is modernity and asking us to create and see a different world. Just like my transness is not a mental illness, neither is my nuerotype or spiritual and energetic ways of perceiving and existing in the world. And that brings me to my last point — we need to pause to accept and acknowledge how often reportedly overly logical, unengaged, bodily expressive, dysregulated, or overwhelmed autistic people are perceiving, feeling, and experiencing energy so that we can acknowledge that there are very real reasons for our modes of being or expressing. Often in today’s world these felt energies are fraught, chaotic, mechanistic, and complicit or in direct opposition to the well being of all beings.
I see and experience autistic people, friends, and family tuning into energy. I see emotional sensitivity and stimming as signs of moving, feeling, and experiencing energy. And I tune in to energy often, so much so that I have been engaging in stabilizing protection and boundary oriented energetic practices. I have also started to see if I can use experiencing energy as an offering in support of healing with and for others and so have begun furthering training around that. Even if us autistics don’t catch or care about social norms or the implications of certain wording at times, or if we are non-verbal, some of us are still catching and processing a lot of input through our senses and ways of knowing that mainstream modernity has failed to recognize due to lack of awareness and attunement and only recent scientific acknowledgment of energy. Energy is an experience, interaction, and communication. Nonverbal people, plants, and animals are actually communicating and sensing constantly — existing with what is more than pretense, production, and construction. We all are constantly feeling and sensing, whether or not we are aware of any given environmental or human input. Energetic communication happens through the senses, through feeling, through clairvoyant or auric seeing, through the body, and through thinking and stringing words together (which is why words are so potent, powerful, and meaningful in creation processes). These energetic modes of communication are why some autistics, healers, intuitives, and psychics can connect to aspects of information without directly being told. We can know, sense, see, or feel things sensorily, just like our domestic animal companions and the wild ones of land and sky. All human capacity for sensing and knowing goes way beyond sight, smell, sound, taste, touch, and the brain yet also works with those modes. Present day fallacies and values of logic, science, money, and productivity act as a dominating soul succubi-entity that strips us from our whole-body knowing, sensing, and feeling.
Is it possible that some autistics and healers are more exposed and receptive to energy? More permeable to the outside world or available as a conduit of the universe because we are not set on the social frameworks and beliefs and modes of behavior that consume so many individuals minds and hearts? Is it possible more people are opening to the ability to experience energy and in turn wake up from murderous sleepwalking? Is it possible we have been cut off from our feeling and sensing and asked to only look at our brains and logic as a form of control over us and our behaviors and what we will accede to?
From my view, if I were to live as mainstream western culture asked I would suffer a kind of soul death. Why? Because my autism does not allow me to push through my internal and sensory experiences. If I tried to push on I would likely come upon experiences I have already known, such as, persistent burnout, “meltdowns”, self harm, or unintentional and dysregulated harm to others. Since I have retrieved my soul there is no going back to the violent expectations and paradigms of the world I am still swimming in, around, and beyond. I both see and sense that many people are dead, numbed out, addicted, lost or on overdrive in their “ability” to “push through”. And are constantly harming others for the sake of profit, profile, and fake power, aka power over another, which is not real energetic power or life force. This is to say that the current expectations and systems of industry are not actually healthful for anyone, autistic or not, and many are not at all awake but rather sleeping and sleep walking.
Folks become dead to who they are and try to be someone based on outside false gains of material and empty productivity pats on the back from dead pals and then raise their kids under that same expectation of death. Sadly, this training to not be oneself starts early! Just today on the side of a school I read the words, “College starts in preschool” next to an image of a child about 5 years old who will likely be funneled into an academic world that severs and cuts them up into thoughts, critique, and brain so that they maintain an unknown self oppression and can also do that to others if given authority and ranking. On the whole, we do not raise one another to align with our inner truths, knowings, gifts, or quiet and slow abilities – especially because we are not raised alongside earth’s support of us as natural and nuerowild but rather are raised within patterns of both attempting to and succeeding at control and colonizing. Starting early we teach each other to be someone based on doing and exchanging that serve the consumption of our planet and selves in the name of intelligence, civility, constructed achievement, and false ease. People dead to self or soul and the possibilities of relationship to wild land and one another are such a loss and cause great harm. We are losing individuals, families, and human and natural world collectives and symbiosis.
The implications of being influenced by energy taken in by the senses or feeling are vast and push the mechanistic world view of productivity and objectivity that western societies expect people to live by. As a collective, if we paused more to feel emotionally and sensationally would we actually be able to stare at a computer for almost 8 hours a day or would our bodies ask for something else? Would we be able to cut down a forest without questioning who (plants, animals, soil, temperatures, and people) we are impacting? Would we be able to hold onto beliefs about people different from us so as to justify harm to them without feeling the pain, devastation, and anger that that very belief, and the actions attached to it, also cause us inside? From my view, at the point in which I actually truly and fully access myself I am also accessing everyone else and the web of energy that weaves us.
I’ll ask again, is it possible that some autistics and healers are more exposed and receptive to energy? More permeable to the outside world or available as a conduit of the universe because we are not set on the social frameworks and beliefs and modes of behavior that consume so many individuals minds and hearts? Is it possible more people are opening to the ability to experience energy and in turn wake up from murderous sleepwalking? Is it possible we have been cut off from our feeling and sensing and asked to only look at our brains and logic as a form of control over us and our behaviors and what we will accede to?
I do not need the religion of science and logic to accept and embrace my internal experiences of energy movement and informative communications via my senses and feelings but I know many do. If you do then look up quantum physics or energetic mapping. If you are open to knowing by direct experience then that is wonderful and a hell of a radical and life long practice at this time. At the level of bodily experiences of energy we are told when we are hungry or aroused, when a situation feels off in our gut or heart or elsewhere, when we are in physical or energetic pain, and when we feel sad about a loss or happy about a connection. We can decide how we want to learn to navigate any of these experiences. At this level of deep bodily energetic listening we are no longer robotic in the way industry and many religions need in order to sustain the physical and spiritual murder of our earth and one another. When we are internally listening and respecting energies of the natural world we are no longer moving solely by outside authority but also by our own autonomy and more in integrity with our world, values, and actual lived needs and feelings – feelings which often naturally have built in communal care, especially after beginning to heal from a colonized mindscape, because, as energetic and social beings, we need each other. Our interconnection and interdependence is inevitable and if we can wake up to engaging honestly based on what is present within and without then that has immense potential to allow us to create more life and aliveness consciously.
With love,
Jai
