Divergent Obstacles, Divergent Gifts

In the coming months I’m trying something new. I’m going to run a series that will take a closer look at meditation for autistic people and ADHDers. What obstacles do we face? What adaptations might we need to make? What positive qualities and aptitudes do we bring to practice?

It has been a long struggle for me to establish a regular meditation practice and when I hear neurodivergent people saying that meditation doesn’t work for them, I get it. At the same time, I would say that establishing a meditation practice over the past two decades has been the best thing I’ve done. It is a thread that now runs through everything I do, a way to orient my life towards what really matters.

So, why this series?

I’ll start with an analogy: there have been some excellent critiques of various therapeutic approaches that, unless they are adapted, can be harmful for neurodivergent people. These critiques have helped me understand my own chequered history with seeking therapeutic support. Many neurodivergent therapists are now doing good work adapting therapeutic modalities to better help their kin and, lately, I’ve been wondering whether neurodivergent meditators, informed by an intimate understanding of neurodivergent nervous systems and sensory differences, might need to adapt meditation in a similar way.

One helpful first step is to dispel some common myths. I so often come across people online – both autistic people and allistics – who say that they are unable to meditate because they can’t empty their mind of thoughts, they can’t sit still, they’re just not very ‘zen’. It’s still commonly believed that meditation means immediately entering some special state of calm. These myths are damaging because, if we then sit down and all we notice at first is the mean thought, the fear, or the desire to scratch our nose, we believe we must be doing something wrong. Since, as neurodivergent people, we might have a history of feeling like we’re doing something wrong much of the time, for us this is particularly hard-hitting. But in truth meditation, like life, is messy and often noisy. If we’re really tired, we might fall asleep in meditation. If we’re really anxious one morning, we might notice signs of anxiety in the body. This isn’t, in itself, a problem.

Yet, aside from these myths, there might well be some real barriers we need to address. We have different brains, different nervous systems, and different ways of sensing the world. This means we come to meditation differently. For example, neurodivergent people often need to regulate their nervous systems through movement: the common instructions on physical posture in meditation might replicate early experiences of having to sit still in classrooms and at dinner tables, denying deep-seated needs. Additionally, since many of us struggle to identify emotions and to pick up sensory information coming from inside our bodies, exhortations to ‘look within’ might need to be interpreted differently. Equally, difficulties with executive function – the brain’s ‘admin team’ – as well as the possible presence of demand avoidance might mean we need particular strategies to help us establish a regular practice. I will explore these barriers in more detail over the course of the series.

On the other hand, during meditation – particularly on retreats – I’m aware that my nervous system does begin to settle over time. As far as I can tell, this is probably a result of the way monasteries and retreat centres are set up, offering a combination of deeply meaningful, structured activity and a soothing sensory environment, where interactions are governed by conventions that allow both for authentic connection and for space and solitude.

I was reminded of this recently while listening to an episode of the Divergent Conversations podcast on psychodynamic psychotherapy. Historically, there was a belief that autistic people, in particular, were unable to do this kind of therapy. This was based on the erroneous idea that we are unable to self-reflect. The guest, Dr Karissa Burnett, herself an autistic psychodynamic therapist, was countering this by pointing out that recognising some common autistic strengths, which she named as ‘heightened pattern recognition’, ‘attention to detail’, ‘nuance’, ‘deep processing’, ‘introspection’ and ‘self-reflection’, as well as ‘answering things truthfully’ and ‘not going along with the neuronormative script that’s expected’ led her to wonder whether, historically, witches, oracles, shamans and hermits might have tended to be autistic.1

I found this possibility fascinating and illuminating. It’s something I’ve wondered about at the present day too: whether many of the people who go deeply into meditation and other forms of awakening practice might, more often than not, be neurodivergent.2 Later in the same podcast episode, one of the hosts, the psychologist Dr Megan Anna Neff talked about her own experience as a client in Freudian analysis (a form of psychodynamic psychotherapy), saying it worked well for her because, as a neurodivergent person, she ‘needed a container that could hold complexity’. As I see it, meditation is another such container.

In addition to looking at potential barriers to meditation for neurodivergent people, I’m also planning to use this series to look at some qualities and strengths that might makes us particularly suited to it. These include depth of focus, a propensity to question everything, a desire for authenticity and the itch to tell the truth (even when it makes things awkward for us), sensory sensitivities, hyper-empathy and, possibly, our ability to pick up on the energy of people and places. Might it be that these strengths could work as antidotes to the obstacles we face? For example, is it possible that our ability to think deeply, to self-reflect and to ‘think outside the box’ might help us adapt the fundamentals of meditation so they work well for our own unique body-minds?

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Writing here on Substack is a way for me to work out what I think and feel, and to share that with other readers and writers, and the essays in the coming series will be the usual blend of personal story and reflection.

If you are an autistic person or ADHDer wanting to establish a regular meditation practice or deepen an existing one, this series is written for you. I hope it will help you think through some of the specific barriers you face and gifts you might possess, and to develop a relationship with meditation that works for you.

For anyone wanting a more practical companion to this series, I’m currently putting together a workbook that will help you craft a personalised plan for a meditation practice suited to your own unique needs and gifts. Offering bite-sized summaries, practices to try, and space to reflect, I’m hoping the workbook will be like a supportive friend, offering encouragement, inspiration, and validation of your own intuitive sense. I’m in the middle of writing this right now, more details coming soon, and if you have ideas about what might be helpful to you in this format, let me know.

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