HOW TO BE SOVEREIGN *ABOUT* THIS CRAZY MODERN WORLD WHEN YOU’RE NEURODIVERGENT 👑

By Lian Brook-Tyler

I recently recorded my solo show All The Everything (a monthly variant of the Waking The Wild Show) and the topic was ‘How to be powerful and responsible about your neurodivergent needs and gifts’ - there’s a link to the show below.

The invitation within the episode was to be conscious and sovereign about your neurodivergence… honouring what comes with that, and the wounding that will make that challenging, without making yourself, others or the world wrong.

Tracey Aldridge-Russell, precious WTW alumni and a viewer of the live making of the show made a brilliant request “I would love to hear your illumination around noting that our crazy modern world doesn’t serve the whole, without wrong-making our crazy modern world!”

There’s more to this request than meets the eye and therefore it warrants one of my epic posts to illuminate it!

First, a quick definition of what I mean by “making wrong”, it’s to see something as separate and other, to fear it, to demonise it, to want to reject it and destroy it, and really, to be a victim of it.

And now we need an unashamedly abbreviated and concatenated origin story, abbreviated because it begins several hundred thousand years ago, and concatenated because it needs to link together a lot of seemingly separate tales.

Throughout human history and across the world, it has been typical for specific people within a group to be more able and adept than others to work with magic and spirit - those people could be described as shamans or medicine men and women.

Whilst the way these people work varies across cultures, a key aspect of their role is often similar: to be the intermediary between the human and spirit world - to keep things in balance - for the wellbeing, even survival, of their community.

If you’re reading this, I suspect you don’t need me to tell you how out of balance this crazy modern world is, what you might not have considered is that it’s caused by an imbalance between the human and spirit worlds. This imbalance is due to our modern culture’s lack of understanding and honouring of Spirit, whereas in more natural and ancient lifeways, humans are held in rituals, ceremonies and offerings that honour Spirit.

The simplest way to explain this was provided by WTW Soul Guide, Sara J. Sanderson:

World + Human - Spirit = Crazy

World + Human + Spirit = Balanced

An episode on ‘offerings’ with my shamanic teacher Jez Hughes which goes deeper into this topic is linked here.

So who are the people who can fulfil the archetypal role of the shaman to maintain that balance in today’s world?

It is our hypothesis at Waking The Wild, that neurodivergent people, and particularly autistic ones, are designed in a way that makes them more sensitive and open to magic and spirit. There’s many reasons for this hypothesis but for now, I’ll just gesture towards research that’s shown that autistic people hypermetabolise endogenous DMT (aka ‘the Spirit molecule’), though I actually discovered this research many years *after* we arrived at this theory. If you’d like to know more about that research and our views on neurodivergence and magic, check out our ND resource page here.

As an extension of our hypothesis, it seems reasonable to suggest that perhaps some neurodivergent people’s role is to be an intermediary between the human and spirit worlds to bring balance for the wellbeing of their community.

So with the origin story told… we’ll return to Tracey’s request… “I would love to hear your illumination around noting that our crazy modern world doesn’t serve the whole, without wrong-making our crazy modern world!”

Or put into a question… how and why might we clearly see the challenges created by this crazy modern world, and yet… choose not to make the world wrong?

To answer that question, let’s remind ourselves of one of my favourite quotes, by Jung, natch “What we resist, persists.”

And even more ouchily, Werner Erhard said it thus (I’ve paraphrased as I’ve only been told of his take on this distinction rather than the actual words he said)… if we do X to avoid Y, we will get more of Y, and therefore X will never work. For example, if we put on a front in order to feel more confident, it will only highlight to ourselves our lack of confidence, and therefore it will never work.

So the reason we might choose to not make the world wrong, is because we understand that in doing so, it only lodges the perceived wrongness more firmly into place AND (this is also the how)… the way for almost anything to change is to recognise that as Carl Rogers said “What is most personal is most universal”, and so the best place to start is with the personal, for change to begin with ourselves.

If we’re struggling with this crazy modern world, it is a call to:

1. Devote to loving and accepting ourselves, especially the parts that are conditioned and tamed (aka crazy and modern!) that we’re projecting into the world… “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself, just as I am, then I can change.” (Another Carl Rogers gem)... So that they can be healed and integrated.

2. Get on with our work… Our work of working magically to bring the human world and the spirit world into balance (again, starting with ourselves).

If you’re neurodivergent, you’re probably magical, and if you’re magical, this crazy modern world is probably why you’re here… and I mean literally why you’ve incarnated here and now.

The neurodivergent are more sensitive to the modern world, not only because they have to be more sensitive generally in order to be open to spirit and magic, but because they need to have suffered the sickness of the modern world in order to know how to work with it and heal it.

Just as shamans will be taken to their knees by shamanic sickness - being overtaken by the spirits of sickness, which if they survive allows them to understand those spirits and their ways in order to know how to heal others who are experiencing those spirits, so too we must experience how this modern world ails, in order to heal.

It’s an essential part of preparing us to do the work of bringing the world into balance.

And then, how will we bring the world into balance?

That story is still being written but right now, it’s Waking The Wild doing what we do, for example, supporting our students to embrace their neurodivergence or to go adopt (or rather, be adopted by) a tree, or one of my friends who helps people to create their own medicine pouches, or another friend who works with top corporate execs to bring love into business, or maybe you doing whatever it is that you do… we are working to bring our crazy modern world into balance.

Let our myth unfold!

All my love and blessings.

 
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