01_sensorysiblings
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[00:00:00] Hello siblings. Welcome to the Sensory Siblings Podcast. I'm your host, Louisa Shaeri, and this is beaming to you from the solar system, the liberatory framework, and unmasking unschool for creatively identified autistic folks who are seeking another way to see no and be yourself. This is a radical re-imagining of what's.

[00:00:26] Possible when we redefine ourselves from within by unlearning who we are, not making self connection. Our goal, activating the languages of our sensory oriented perception and creating the culture shifts to activate futures and cells, it all starts within.

[00:00:49] Hello siblings. I'm excited to be back. Some of you are listeners from the old version of this podcast, so welcome back and some of you are brand new, so welcome to you two. And over the last two years, it's been a big learning curve for me around how do I want this work to exist where it doesn't really have a precedent.

[00:01:11] We are breaking new ground here because we are creating solutions for ourselves that don't depend on diagnosis or invoking the pathological model. Or even on changing other people's minds. And the work that the solar system is all about is really creating a cultural context for creative outliers like you and I to reimagine and redefine ourselves and our futures.

[00:01:38] And breaking new ground is exactly where I like to be. But it still feels precarious, and I'm so grateful to those of you who have been with me for a while, whilst also being on your own journeys. And I know that this is just the beginning of what is to come. So this podcast is really grounding in that we get to decide what is coming.

[00:02:03] As that famous quote says, the best way to predict the future is to create it. So that's what this is all about. Creating the futures that we want by activating the potency within the internal insights for what will most enable and extend and exalt what is innate and therefore bring about new possibilities.

[00:02:25] So just to give a brief background, I'm an artist by trade making art for over 15 years, and more than a decade ago, I started to explore. The idea that I might be autistic, that this sensorial and sub linguistic, um, focus in my artistic work might have something to do with that. And it really explained so much to me.

[00:02:48] It gave me a different social context to the subjects I was exploring, which were about the body and mediation and how mediation in all its forms doesn't just mediate, but actually produces. Uh, embodied experiences of reality, and I believe the role of an artist or anyone who is about creating what didn't exist before.

[00:03:14] A big part of that is exploring what is at stake with a particular form of mediation, be it language or. Video or thoughts or any kind of thing that modulates or that translates experience into a particular form or structure that gives it meaning. So being the author, not just a passive consumer of its effects and effects.

[00:03:42] So I started to consider that this urge and desire in me to express what felt invisible had to do with this idea of being autistic. But I also had so many questions about why this concept of autism carries such a rigid and externally defined narrative that is worlds apart from what autistic people themselves experience.

[00:04:07] So my work has been about what are the tools, what are the forms of mediation being used here to define this way of being that feel like they don't actually fit? And what might better tools be? In that decade. On a personal level, it's also been an unwinding of past self-concepts and a complete rearrangement of my sense of myself and my past and experience.

[00:04:34] I'm sure many of you can identify with that retrieving of suppressed parts and memories, surfacing for review and refe and reorganizing into this self revelation and relief. But it's also been. A negotiation with all things visibility, how to make what is so often misunderstood or misread or unseen visible.

[00:04:58] And how to also create visibility for my work and my ideas, uh, without deferring to either masking my way through or becoming typecast into an idea of autism that comes from this dominant media messaging of what that means. So speaking about myself as autistic would result in. All manner of responses in people that were, everything to do with that miseducation that is most widely available and nothing to do with what I was trying to communicate.

[00:05:31] And the seeking of visibility and that agency to self define and self determine beyond over adapting into burnouts led me down many paths, including coaching. I'd always been interested in. Self-development tools in trying to learn how to be myself, but also understanding then what the barriers actually were meant.

[00:06:01] I had a context for distinguishing between what really was about me and what were the external circumstances and systemic issues that I was confronting personally, but that were not just about being autistic, but about how much of our human design world. It's built around these archaic structures, these economic agendas and these values, uh, extractive and linear thinking that doesn't really serve anyone.

[00:06:29] And the critical thinking of contemporary art that I was taught, begun to feel impotent to solve my own and other people's barriers to being an artist or being visible. And I understood that these were just symptoms of wider issues and that I needed to step up to a level of courage in order to begin to open up alternatives.

[00:06:52] And so coaching helped me learn how to do that through deepening my awareness of what I was thinking and what my self relationship was. Another path was that I got arts funding. To do some research and make a body of work. And this included spending two year long residencies with both autism researchers and neuroscientists who were looking at embodiment.

[00:07:17] So embodiment meaning how we sense and make sense of having of, of being a self and having a body and navigating the world. I published a book of poems and interviews called Lossy Ecology about how. Locating difference into individual bodies maintains the presupposition that there is only one single fixed reality within which we all exist.

[00:07:45] But everything that I had learned from neuroscience and my own intuitive gnosis and from coaching tools and from my past artistic work told me otherwise that your body, your senses, your past, your environment, your cognition. Your, the ideas and values that you are socialized into, through which you interpret your experiences, your tools, your habits, all of these are factors in how you make sense and experience a reality in a self, and that we don't all experience the same reality and that the uncommon sense of neurodivergent, neuro emergent, and outliers.

[00:08:25] It's not just an inconvenient thing that happened to normal bodies, that we don't solve the barriers by adding adaptations onto the status quo that we can preconceive of difference as revealing the fiction of normal and that you being alive points to other ways of welding worlds, of making sense of structuring experience into agency.

[00:08:53] And in fact, other realities beyond the one size fits all industrialist structures that underpin so much of our world and just seems like this is just the way it is. Your existence points to other possibilities that have been eclipsed by the systemic invisibility, cloaks of the past. So outta these journeys, I then created a liberatory framework and a process for.

[00:09:23] How we might become authors of these realities, how to individually and collectively emerge into greater visibility in agency. And over the last two years, I've been delivering and developing this in community, and it's called the solar system. And Solar spell, SOLA. And it has nine planets or areas of focus that are divided into three main steps.

[00:09:51] So step one, unlearning who you are not. So this is all about coming to self definition. Step two, creating self-esteem, which is all about the practice of self connection. And then step three, creating social esteem, which is all about self-organization, which has nothing to do with executive function and more to do with how do we restructure.

[00:10:20] Um, everything in our world to support the, uh, self connection and the kind of, um, sensory and cognitive style that we have. And I gave it the name of the solar system to speak to that goal of visibility and the idea of shining your light, of being a solar flare of emitting disruptive frequencies to earth.

[00:10:44] Possibilities beyond the stale old structures of limitation of the past. So the planetary solar system also works as a metaphor for selfhood that can speak to how we aren't fixed distinct, separate entities, but we are always evolving with universe through connection and movement and change, but with that central core energy within us that's giving us life.

[00:11:13] And in this podcast, I'm going to be sharing a lot of the thinking that has been developed through the solar system, which is rooted in the conviction that you are meant to be here. So that's not up for discussion. The only question is how and how begins in your relationship to yourself, because that sets the bar for everything else.

[00:11:35] You cannot experience true connection with others if you aren't in connection with yourself. You can't experience acceptance and belonging from others if you don't accept and belong to yourself. You can't create new structures and possibilities that support your cognitive and communication styles if you're still trying to exist within other people's worldview.

[00:11:59] So we'll be getting into all of this. And if you're looking for resources on how to unmask, how to think about yourself beyond the narratives that are about making sense of you to other people, beyond dominant paradigms, beyond the autism industrial complex, beyond reasonable adjustments to the status quo and to what doesn't work, and into reimagining how we might exist more fully, and how to actually begin that work in your own life.

[00:12:32] Then hit subscribe. I will be sharing tools and thinking for you to better see, know, and be yourself and for the culture shifts that are gonna make that more possible. As well as interviews with folks who have been through the solar system and artists and think is who are doing work that opens up more possibilities for cross movement, solidarity, for meaning making, for conceiving of cognitive difference in more empowering and interesting terms.

[00:13:01] Beyond these reductive checklists and so on, and we will be talking about how we can make the most of this social and technological moment that is right now that is enabling new structures and technologies and ecosystems, including things like blockchain and Web3 autistic ecosystems, clothing design.

[00:13:22] Artistic work, sensory sense making, and so much more. So that sounds interesting. Hit subscribe. Thank you so much for listening, and I look forward to connecting with you next week.

[00:13:36] Thanks for listening to this Week's Sensory Siblings podcast. Head over to Solar Systems dot XY Z, where you can join the plus Siblings Discord server and discuss the topics explored with other listeners. And if you are ready to go deeper into activating your future self, I want to invite you to join my six month unmasking unschool called the Solar System Plus Siblings.

[00:14:01] You're going to unlearn the habits of self negating, then create self-esteem, self clarity, and the self-belief to model the. Social esteem that will create culture shifts first in yourself, and then rippling out into everything you do and beyond. Head over to Solar Systems xyz slash siblings where you can join the solar system, plus siblings and I will see you inside.