13.sensorycongruency
===

[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 possible when we redefine ourselves from within by unlearning who we are, not making self-connection.

[00:00:32] Our goal, activating the languages of our sensory oriented perception, and creating the culture shifts to activate futures and cells. It all starts within.

[00:00:46] Hey siblings, how are you? I am through the unstructured and inconsistent of summer. F and it is that way for me because I have kids and so I come out of the usual kind of way of doing things and the usual level of control over my own time and, and now I'm back and I'm not fully settled, but I'm here and podcasting regularly again, and I'm really excited about that.

[00:01:28] There's something I wanted to share with you and tell you about before we dive into this week, which is that on the 8th of October I'm doing a free training, which is all about how to get visible as a creative person. Who maybe you are offering up your creativity in some way to the world. Maybe you have a creative profession, but those habits of hiding are getting in your way and that they feel hardwired and being more visible feels like the threat of social death.

[00:02:09] And yet you want your work seen, you want to be out there and have more opportunities and make that work so you can keep doing it right. And you want to overcome this belief that staying small and secret is the safest place to be. So if that resonates, this is for you. And it's gonna be two hours long and it'll be over Zoom webinar.

[00:02:35] So you won't have your camera on. You can just be present, be in the chat. Taking notes, reflecting as I go through and share lots of ideas from the solar system that are specific to being more visible online especially, but you know, in any way in your life. Um, but yeah, specifically for those who you wanna get more visible for your work, you want to get more visible for the work you wanna do in the world, and you don't wanna be the world's best kept secret anymore.

[00:03:12] And yeah, so if this sense of interest, come join us in the Discord community. There's so much amazing discussion happening in there. And you can also find the details of this training. And yeah, join us in the Discord. You don't have to even participate in the discussion. So if you've been holding back from diving in.

[00:03:35] I want to encourage you to just consider that you could just take out your phone and click the link in the blurb of this episode and just do the scary thing and see what happens. And really that when it comes to the question of being seen, being visible, I want offer that this is really about how do you see yourself, so how do you see yourself as in, not visually, but what is your thoughts?

[00:04:04] What are your thoughts? What is your self concept? How do you feel about yourself? What is your experience of, of, you know, thinking about who you are and whatever that experience is, is what will be magnified with visibility. So your experience with visibility shows you whether your self concept and your thoughts about yourself.

[00:04:29] Is accurate and serving you or not. If it feels negative and completely impossible, then it shows you where your work is, which is to transform that self-concept into one that is less attached to what other people think, because you've built up a self-concept that feels good to you, good enough to get past that little bit of fear that comes up.

[00:05:03] When we offer ourselves up visibly to the world, that fear will be massive. If your self image, your self concept, has internalized a lot of messages that you aren't enough or that that's a negative, that there's something about you inherently that is negative or that warrants, um, negativity. And so you may then be in a practice of trying to not receive negativity, of trying to control other people's thoughts, trying to control how they see you and where your work really is, is to how do you see you.

[00:05:46] So we're gonna get into all of that and apply it to going about the work of meeting people, being out in the world, being visible, sharing your work, and how to stop being secret and small and hiding as much as you might be if you want to not be so secret. Okay? So, um, I'll also do a podcast. Maybe the next one will be a taste of what is to come in that.

[00:06:16] But today, today I want to connect the dots between seeing yourself or conceptualizing yourself. Your self concept, your idea of who you are and connect it with being where you are at your current models of reality, your current models of self. In the last episode I talked about this idea of models of reality and there being two that we talk about in the solar system, the the model of reality of who you are being right now and the model of reality of who you are becoming.

[00:06:56] And today is about the being. It's about the being who you are right now. And it's also about the processing of realities. Be it the one that you are being or the one that you're becoming. And I've said it before in different ways, but I'm gonna say it explicitly right now. Autism is just a made up concept, a made up story that has so many different versions, mainly.

[00:07:25] By people who are outside of the experience it refers to and have made decisions and judgements about what they see according to their own models of reality and in comparison to a notion of normal that they may have been socialized into. Right. So that's where a lot of the stories that are widely available about what autism is means, or what the people for whom that is referring to, and assigning that status and classifying what those people mean.

[00:08:08] It's like giving meaning to bodies and that don't fit their idea of, of how we're supposed to be. Right. So I'm saying that because want to offer that, is it really true that you are autistic? You get to decide if it's a story that benefits you or not. You also get to decide what it means to you. So you get to write the story of who you are.

[00:08:36] No one is an authority. Uh, there are plenty of people who have made themselves an authority on autism, so if that's what you want, you want someone to say definitively this is it, then you can go and find those people. But I would offer that if you're listening to this, it's because you exploring and deciding for yourself, it gives you feels good, it gives you so much power, and it also then allows other people to have their own mind.

[00:09:07] And you don't mean need to make that mean anything about you or about them. You have your own mind, your own models of reality. They have theirs and you can let them be wrong about you knowing that theirs is belongs to them. So let their thoughts be theirs. You do. You, and I would also offer that that allows you to not be attached to one specific story as a source of your validation.

[00:09:39] You are already valid. So now it's how, well, how do you want to tell the story of who you are? And that might be different every day. That might be different in every different scenario with different people. And you aren't required to be fixed in your identity or sense of self, or even consistent in how you express who you are.

[00:10:01] Self is just who are you being right now in the present moment? There is no other moment. And so those are some thoughts I offer to try on if you like them, if they feel good. For me, one version of the story that I also like to offer is, well, maybe autism is a, is a, is a classification. Applied to a specific segment of the vast array of humans that exist with body minds that disprove the ableist fiction of normal.

[00:10:35] And my goal in general, and also with this episode, is to help you believe your body, mind, to believe, and therefore begin to more and more nurture and activate the emergent possibilities offered up within you, through your uncommon sense, through your insights, through your truth, through your lived experiences, and also through that pull to create something that doesn't yet exist.

[00:11:08] And to have the tools, the relational context, to more realize those possibilities in the material, right, to move from who you are being and the reality that you are in. Into who you're becoming next. And part of that is acknowledging difference, right? Okay, I'm different. But then also dismantling the idea that any single person can in themselves be different, different from what difference always implies and requires an external, uh, gaze of observation and comparison, right?

[00:11:50] It's a colonizer's perspective. It's ICU and I decide what you mean. From my perspective and vantage point, I've assigned meaning to your body. You are different. These, this person over here isn't different, this person is different. And so thinking of yourself as different while it can illuminate and allow for doing things differently.

[00:12:19] I actually wanna offer that it's in the doing where the differences reside. And so I'm gonna talk a bit more about that. So one of the difficulties many of you, many of us have with visibility is that if you openly identify as autistic, then you can open yourself up to ableism. But if you don't, you reinforce the impact of ableism.

[00:12:45] You maintain the internalization of it. So we are all unpacking this, right? This is not unusual. Nothing's gone wrong. The fact that you recognize that this is the case, you are still worthy of love and acknowledgement and appreciation and inclusion. So can you love yourself? Even when you're still working on this, you are still lovable, right?

[00:13:12] So ableism is just thoughts. And then maybe some structures built on top of those thoughts, but it's many thoughts, right? And so to unravel this double bind of how to be visible in ways that are deviating from the types of visibility that have been offered you, that maybe carries some ableism. Then to unravel, it means to come to your own thinking, right?

[00:13:44] Your own thoughts in yourself of what this means for you, what your experiences mean, what your so-called differences mean for you. Okay? So unraveling ableism is working on your own thinking and transforming that. So having your own mind, making up your own mind to does this mean that I'm less than it?

[00:14:07] Does this mean that I'm not enough? Does this mean that I am not worthy of being seen and not worthy of having my work be out in the world as a wholly visible thing? Does it mean that I'm not worthy of existing exactly as I am with all my humanness, all my flaws and weaknesses? Does it mean that mine make me less worthy of that attention?

[00:14:36] So having your own mind and taking up the full bandwidth of your power to decide that, yes, I'm enough, and to define who you are for your, for yourself, from the place of already knowing that you are enough. That is how we address it. And what I think gets into us into trouble is that focus on self right is locating difference as something that can exist within a single body.

[00:15:07] Is that looking at individuals as if they are these singular, distinct, separate entities rather than beings within communities and within systems and within environments. And part of then how we might shift our thinking is that the difference isn't in our bodies, and that it's more about who do we get to become?

[00:15:42] How much of ourselves can we infuse in how we're being, how we are expressing ourselves in relationship, in specific environments and with specific tools. So the confusion is created by the idea idea that it's you, that's different, and that you need to somehow figure out those differences. And that you need to know who you are in order to then explain those differences and justify your existence, and I want to offer that how you come to know yourself is by experiencing yourself in the present and that that is something that's enabled or not to greater or lesser degrees by the tools available, by the resources available, by the meanings that you are thinking with and how all of that, each of those things is either saying a yes to your body or a no, right?

[00:16:45] It's either empowering or disempowering. It's either enabling or dis disabling. It's either affirming or denying. And so the difference is in tools, which tools? Or a yes, which extend your capabilities, which increase your agency to um, not have to over adapt, to just be able to determine your life for yourself.

[00:17:17] So therefore, perhaps, uh, it's not your body that we should be labeling, but the tools and whether they offer you or not, whether they're accessible or not, whether they're workable or not. And I think this is for me, where I want to take the discussion. It needs to be an identity question right now, perhaps, but I don't think that offers the ultimate solution.

[00:17:45] I think the solution is a question of tools. It's a question of language and meaning and space and design and structure and ritual. All the things that might be. Technologies, structures, ways of organizing by which we can extend and express and enable the self, and also exalt the self back into the human.

[00:18:11] When you don't have as many possibilities readily offered up around you that are saying yes to your body, to your tendencies, to your ways of being, unless you've been explicitly acknowledged that there's a lot of nos for you, the tendency will be to blame yourself, right? To assume inadequacy, to find fault in yourself, to wonder how come me, how come them to begin to believe that you are the problem, that you are the reason that there is something not quite valid or real, or enough about you.

[00:18:49] And how we address that belief is a whole other podcast, and it is probably the number one belief that, uh, siblings have to work through in the solar system. It shows up in a whole, uh, a whole range of different ways for each person. But to say it simply how we address it is to come to really know in our bodies and live from the model of reality that you are valid because you exist, you are valid because you exist.

[00:19:22] Your existence proves your validity. But the experience of having tools and structures and social meanings around us predominantly saying no, the impact of that will be self-doubt, will be to question your own body, to question your own mind, to question your own experiences, to question. Your in validity.

[00:19:45] So a big part of transforming the structures in your life to fit you and in our collective lives, uh, systemically, structurally, uh, it begins with saying yes to your body for you to begin with that, for you to believe it. And so I want to speak to this, this being where you're at, this processing your current, your present circumstances, and your present reality, and how we do that while believing our bodies.

[00:20:21] So it's also down to how do we get to be in our body or not, right? Do we get to believe it and then trust it and then move accordingly? Do we get to believe it and then make decisions based on, on that? Yes. Do we get to express and communicate with the sense sensemaking? Technologies, our bodies offer up with the insights.

[00:20:46] It speaks to us with the emotional truths it, uh, shares with us and also with the cultural heritage that we inherit with the forms and environments and societies and ways of being together that we are around. How much do these communicate a yes to our being? Okay? So what this is really about is maximizing, saying yes in a big, unequivocal way, maximizing or turning up the volume on the body mind that you have in the circumstances you face.

[00:21:24] So that what is in your power to change your, uh, taking up that full bandwidth of that. Okay? So I want this episode to be a yes. To some more parts of you that maybe haven't had enough yeses. Okay? So being where you're at, and specifically what I'm talking about in this episode is processing where you are at allowing and being with what your body offers up and experiences you are actually having and saying yes to them, being willing to accept and listen to them, to the, and it might not be listening, that might not be a helpful analogy, but yet paying attention to perhaps the emotions and the sensory and cognitive messages it offers up to you.

[00:22:22] In this episode, I'm gonna address the cognitive bit, okay? And to give you another way, in another framework that perhaps helps process your current reality. All your intended reality, whichever one it is today, is about processing, making sense of where you're at, specifically the cognitive. So cognitive meaning mental processes, thinking, perceiving, um, meaning making, discerning and so on.

[00:22:54] So I want to offer your specific sensory and processing style as a design imperative. What does that mean as a call to do things in a specific way as a call to, or an invitation to structure things in a specific way? And I'm gonna share a concept I use in the solar system, which, uh, to sum it up quickly, is about sensory congruency.

[00:23:28] Or energetic congruency. So this is really about how anytime you're trying to learn something new, trying to process a new experience, trying to make sense of something. So organize the sensations into meaning, into an understanding, into an idea, or a set of thoughts or communication or an approach. The way you will do that best is obviously gonna be a bit different from the way that mainstream tooling or widely available thinking and design structures have, uh, been assuming, have assumed, right?

[00:24:11] So what this means is that if you are coming to this question of neurodivergence or autistic status traits in adulthood, if you've been late diagnosed. Or if you are newly exploring this in some way, there will be lots of new room for you to explore the possibilities of how you be in your body, how you navigate your life, how you support your cognition, your processing in new ways that maybe aren't normalized, right?

[00:24:50] And to also notice and allow in and embrace the things that you maybe already do that reflect that. So for me, like sitting in positions where I experience pressure or rhythm or some other kind of sensory feedback loop or sunglasses on public transport where it has fluorescent lighting or listening to a specific song on loop for a month, cutting out itchy labels.

[00:25:20] Giving myself tons of time and practice to adjust to new rhythms, stuff like that. I want to go on a tangent before we dive into the, the framework and the idea of sensory congruency and the more practical aspect of it. And to do this because of how many of you are creative. And to kind of set the scene a little bit to what I'm talking about, which is really about this attunement to energetics, right to patterns, to emergent forms, to deep dive immersion in singular areas of focus.

[00:26:07] So, or if you have been assigned a DHD status, then maybe several areas of focus at once. And I'm gonna share some research in a minute that you may have read. If you have my Bit loss ecology, or you may know about if you've taken the mini course Interdependence protocol, which is also available in the Discord or you're in the social system, you'll know what I'm talking about anyway.

[00:26:33] So the tangent I wanna go on to begin to speak about this orientation, this perceptual orientation to, or this embodied sensitivity to energetics and systems thinking and patterns in a whole, is to speak to artistic sensibility. And those of you that have this keen sense of aesthetics and sensory meanings, or who are super good at a very particular way, a particular language like using.

[00:27:12] Written language or mathematical language, something like this. Okay. So story time. I studied art and then sonic arts and for a couple of years was involved in the improvised music scene in London and a very specific niche within it. And um, so this involved doing live gigs where I would be, you know, in a room with an audience and with other musicians and sound artists.

[00:27:50] And we would be communicating to each other through sound and using sound to replicate the existing energetic environment of the room with the audience in it, or this is how I thought of it anyway, and connect with that and then. Transform that energetic space to kind of take it somewhere else. So improvised starting where we're at and then taking it somewhere new.

[00:28:17] And I remember this intention that I had to transform the room right to, to grab them energetically and then give them an embodied experience with sound and with the other sound artists and musicians as well, where we would all going on this kind of same energetic journey. And then after a couple of years, I started experimenting with adding my body.

[00:28:44] So I did a few performances where one of them, I had light senses strapped to my body, and then they were hooked up to speakers and then I gave the audience torches and they would wave the torches in the dark and then they could kind of see me. And I was dressed in black with this kind of black. Light sensors on me and then their torch waves waving around.

[00:29:13] Their torches would then create sound. And it was a good idea in theory, but somewhat lackluster in its realization. I didn't really know what to do with myself on stage. They didn't really know what to do. I had another performance that was a bit more successful of suddenly turning on a bright light, um, shining at the audience while turning on a deep, warm mix of tones.

[00:29:40] And that meant that they couldn't look at me because of this bright light they had to shut their eyes. Interesting, right? Using light to make everyone not see you. And the light was a big round, tungsten, so it was warm on their faces. So it was like this big warm sun. And then I faded the light and the tones very slowly, like a sunset in my own mind.

[00:30:03] And then I had the sound of wings fluttering and flapping around in my mind, they were like crows or bats bringing in the night, and then the whole thing lasted about four minutes. And yeah, it kind of gave them this immersive sensorial experience that they kind of energetically went on a journey and people got a lot from it and they liked that one.

[00:30:26] And I kind of saying that because I want to speak about this kind of immersive, sensorial, uh, sub linguistic way of thinking. And there's also filmmakers that do this really well, right? Like Jacque Tati comes to mind. His films speak to this aesthetic of everything on a sensorial level is interconnected and in some kind of communion, everything is included and heightened into.

[00:31:00] A hole. Everything is in a dance and especially the sound, he really turns up the sound and makes it the thing that you are, um, really noticing as ephemera in its own right, rather than just a, a consequence of a thing happening. I also love the Color of Pomegranates by Serge Para Janov. It's a complete symbolic language that I'm not going to do, do justice to it, but to pace the movement, the way each scene is set up visually as its own kind of picture and its own logic all coming together in a way that for me is completely captivating.

[00:31:41] So this kind of totality of immersion that sound and cinema and vision and this kind of sensory play of that, kind of using that as its own language. It has for me been a very generative source of artistic exploration for me. That fantasy of imagining all the senses into a single dance is something that I've connected with in my mind to the extent that it feels like it's just this whole internal language.

[00:32:13] And so I'm really speaking to that because I want to speak to these experiences that we maybe have that, okay, they might not necessarily be alike, but there's this sense that there is meaning in the sensory. That meaning is not just linguistic or structural or conceptual, but it's also sensory in the beginning of researching the words and experiences of other autistic people that you may have go on looking for those pieces of self recognition.

[00:32:53] What you find is a lot of. Specific examples of what someone finds sensorially difficult or pleasurable or good or bad, or a specific way of modulating or transforming the sensory or interacting with their bodies and the sensory, but without having a kind of overview or holistic way of understanding why or how.

[00:33:17] And without having a more concrete way to describe and explain it to others beyond that specific example, right? So we start to get attached to those examples as if those are the signifiers of our differences, as if that's what affirms us, and trying to replicate that as a way of trying to be ourselves.

[00:33:41] And those are really helpful because it allows for that sense of, oh, I do that. Is that a thing that we do? But I wanna give you another way to think about. These sensory experiences and lived experiences in general, that is more like an organizing principle that makes sense of all of it at once. And yeah, so that is this concept of energetic congruency or sensory congruency being the thing that affords us understanding, that affords us sense making This concept is derived from a theoretical framework by Neilly Levy, which was then used to, uh, create a piece of research and, and several studies by Anna Remington and her team at the Center for Research into Autism and Education.

[00:34:37] And what Anna Remington found was in this early study was that the, in their trial, the group of people that they had in their research who had an autism, who were assigned the, the status of autistic right. Had a larger perceptual capacity. So perceptual capacity means how much experience we are processing in any given moment.

[00:35:05] In the research by Neil Levie, this was about distractibility and how much of your attention can stay on the task, how much a task uses up that capacity when it doesn't other stuff spills in, distracts you. When it goes beyond your perceptual capacity, then you start to need to gist and generalize and kind of give a fake a summary of something within your perceptual awareness, but for which you no longer have the capacity to process in detail.

[00:35:41] So what Anna Remington study showed is that autistic people seem to, according to the, the, you know, the people that they trialed this with seem to have a larger perceptual capacity. So what this means is that when other people fill, have, right? And the theory goes that we have to use up our capacity at all times, right?

[00:36:02] So the amount of capacity that we have, we're always at capacity and we're just processing what can fit within that. So what this means is that where the general population is, may has maybe reached their capacity and therefore they are summarizing discreet parts of their environment or what they're focused on into Gists.

[00:36:27] For us, we're still processing them in detail and where maybe that gist did, summarized, chunked way of thinking. Is really useful for quick social communication, right? Because if you can quickly transfer, um, a tiger is coming then, uh, or food over there, then um, that aid survival, right? So, so the, the, perhaps you could theorize that the general population, their level of, of, um, perceptual capacity are social communication and linguistic communication is attuned to that, right?

[00:37:16] So you can quickly summarize chunks of world of experience with words and that you can process those then very quickly, one at a time in a linear fashion. And while the people that are served by. This way of communicating and by gist and words for things and by social rituals that are kind of maximized for that more typical capacity.

[00:37:46] Right? So a conversation or a social interaction or ritual will suit that for us. We are still processing the details and taking in sensory details and are not chunking the same things and are not justing. And so this extra experience is spilling into to our, what we're processing that other people aren't taking in, aren't referring to, aren't, um, accounting for.

[00:38:18] And you could possibly say this, with so many aspects of life that have been designed by humans, right? That they are kind of attuned for a specific way of a specific amount of processing that's been going on that goes on. So where some people can easily and happily walk through, uh, or be in a bar with lots of background noise and lots of visual distraction and still have a conversation for other people, that background noise is still spilling in.

[00:38:56] You're still picking up all of the mi minute details and processing them and aren't at a place where you can just summarize and, and vaguely generalize that into the background. So we can take this and run with this and in the solar system and also in the inter interdependence protocol a little bit.

[00:39:17] We, um, it, I go into, I kind of extrapolate that into various different aspects of life, like how can we apply that to different things? But I just wanted to give you, um, this bit of research as something that I have found really useful, but also wanna give you my interpretation of it. That is another layer on top, and this is a theory that I'm offering up to you for really what are the differences in how we then make sense of our perceptions?

[00:39:49] What do we then do with that extra capacity if we are not justing, if we are not summarizing it yet? And what I wanna offer is that for us, the meaning doesn't arise in those, in chunking those discrete parts of world. And then choosing and prioritizing between them to know what to process in more detail.

[00:40:10] I would offer that we are instead processing that detail in the whole, so in the whole field of what we're paying attention to and then where the meaning arises. Is in the interconnectedness or the relationship between those details, IE in the patterns, in the emergent forms, in the level or not of congruence and of energetic sense and whether or not there is a pattern, whether or not there is some kind of harmonious or interrelatedness between all of the details that we're processing.

[00:40:55] So we have this extra perception, this extra stuff in our perceptions, extra stuff that we're processing, we are not, um, processing in a way that is supported by standardized social communication by the way that things are explained, by the way that information is, uh, laid out by the way that environments are designed and so on.

[00:41:23] Um, there are things that we do collectively. There are designs that work. If I think about dancing to music together, perhaps that is congruent. There are things that we do right, that offer congruency, that offer that type of sense making that is oriented to, yeah, the energetic, the sensory as where the meaning arises.

[00:41:53] So I'm also thinking about now, uh, when you see Starlings starlings that do, that mermaid in the sky, they're all, uh, kind of interrelated in their movements. Whereas if you think about a chair where someone is just able to gist and summarize and chunk it into. This object of a chair, perhaps we are still processing it as a set of curves and colors and textures that are conveying a specific sensory or aesthetic or effective imprint that might be within our own mapping of meanings.

[00:42:37] Also connected to specific feelings and sensations that maybe also correspond to memories and before we've got to the idea that it's a chair or that is also present. And so when someone says chair, there's a whole lot of other things going on that that kind of social communication, uh, maybe doesn't attend to and account for.

[00:43:07] And so we come across as not having understood things. Where in fact perhaps we are understanding other things and we arrive at understanding in a different way that is perhaps less accounted for. Okay, so this perceptual orientation to emergent forms, to interconnected and interrelatedness of any specific area of focus.

[00:43:37] You might also apply this to, um, subject, right? So a subject of focus. This is why we like these immersive deep dives. We like to map out all of the aspects of something before we understand it, but then maybe when we understand it, we understand it at such a, a deeper level, we then find pleasure in those things that can captivate and capt, uh, and fill up our perceptual capacity.

[00:44:10] That afford us that level of detail and congruency either in its form or its subject matter. And so it's those areas of our experiences that offer us this feeling of, um, being with, of understanding, of cognitively penetrating something, of knowing that nice feeling of knowing where other aspects of our life maybe don't offer that or contain separate chunks of world that are designed in ways that have nothing to do with each other, where there is no interconnectedness because they are attuned for people who are processing separate chunks one by one, and who are prioritizing between generalizations and chunks.

[00:45:06] And so are wired for knowing what's important to pay attention to, and we perhaps are wired for interest and what interests us and therefore offers meaning. Where that can lead us into trouble is if we go so much on the feeling of interest, uh, that we lose sense of what is important. So there's good and bad on either side.

[00:45:36] None is better than the other. A larger perceptive capacity is not better or worse. Right. And it's also not a binary, as binary as I've made it, but I wanted to offer this as an kind of overarching way of thinking about the way that you perhaps experience, uh, processing that isn't available in a lot of the mainstream, um, ideas of.

[00:46:04] What differences are that are described as autism that make it about the outward appearance of difference, which is really just the outward byproducts of processing differently and, and making sense of what we pro what that extra capacity in a different way as well. It makes sense of things like echo and, well, there's just hundreds, hundreds of traits that you could collect up into this overarching system, and it's one that we, this is one of the core concepts in the solar system that you learn straight away when you come in and then we unpack it depending on.

[00:46:51] Your how it, you know, how it shows up for you in the specific problems that you're facing. And my role then is just to affirm it. Your role is to learn to believe it. So yes, when there's no sensory congruency, if the parts are disjointed and disconnected, if the center experience, if the subject matter, if the embodied experiences that you are having are difficult to process, I would offer that.

[00:47:21] It's because there isn't that sensory congruency or subject matter congruency, and it's that that creates overwhelm. And this is why certain tasks that perhaps seem basic to other people are maybe harder for us because yet it might be basic to collect up the washing and put it in the washing machine, but moving into different rooms, into different sensory environments.

[00:47:51] And having to make those micro decisions and discernments between chunks like t-shirts is not so easy when there's so much more going on on a sensory level. And yet maybe you can go deep dive into a, uh, an intellectual pursuit that is perceived as a, as a higher level of intelligence than your average person.

[00:48:19] And so some, one of the things that you might then experience is, well, if you can do that, why can't you do this basic thing over here? And that way of measuring what is difficult about different tasks just doesn't apply, right? We needed, it's a different, completely different way of measuring what makes a task easy or hard.

[00:48:39] And that is what I would offer with sensory congruence. So, yeah, I wanna offer sensory congruence as a design imperative that helps people who perhaps think like you and me, if this did resonate. Interestingly, my book Loss Ecology, it came out, it was published just a month before Emergence Strategy by Adrian Marie Brown, and I felt so much affinity with Adrian's book, emergent Strategy, and in fact all her books, but specifically this one because of the, of the way that it puts forward, this systems thinking and this bio mere approach to thinking about social organization and thinking about problem solving that has become a bit more adopted and known now, but has been so missing from so much of the kind of linear and chunked ways of looking at the world through discreet parts.

[00:49:41] Yeah. Rather than understanding things as a system and as a whole within which something is, um, being nurtured or not. And so I say that as well to just really emphasize that there are infinite possibilities, infinite gifts within the ways that you perceive and think. And so believing your body is not just about not being in resistance to it, it's also about what happens when you believe your body to such a degree that you can then develop those gifts and offer them up as things of value in the world.

[00:50:29] And that right now, systems thinking, this kind of, uh, understanding of the whole, through sensing all of the parts and how they work together. Uh, this kind of energetic sensibility. These are all highly valuable right now because of how much we need to recognize that, you know, we aren't separate chunks, we aren't, um, distinct pieces that you can put two together and compare them.

[00:51:06] That each part is also a part of a whole. Okay, so, so the other side of this of course, is that this is also an invisible barrier that is gonna be compounded by other barriers that you face, because what makes sense to other people is, uh, sorry. What makes sense to the majority, perhaps to your typical perceptual capacity person is affirmed by a lot of what.

[00:51:37] Uh, social communication is what, how things are designed, how knowledge is transferred to the degree that their reality, their models of reality are so, um, resourced by tools that is incomprehensible to them. That there are other ways of making sense, right? Other realities, other structurings for how to interpret and exist and be with our experiences and other insights that they maybe don't have that do exist.

[00:52:20] And so a lot of that being invisible and outside of what many people feel that they can imagine as being possible. So other models of reality that come from bodies that don't have as many cognitive tools or languages or structures or sense making shortcuts and shorthand that social communication often offers to the majority and therefore don't have as many tools for creating context and for agency.

[00:52:57] And because of the way that this type of thinking has been, you know, devalued and squished out of institutionalized communication and knowledge has been under-resourced in a kind of mass industrialized, um, social services. And that when we think of it this way, we might also be able to process and validate.

[00:53:27] This impasse between us, right? So instead of being angry with them that they are intentionally misunderstanding that they're intentionally making this hard, we might then recognize that maybe they just don't have the capacity to be able to make that leap, especially because their ideas, their way of thinking is so affirmed.

[00:53:53] And so that maybe allows us to then process the, the sadness in that, but also come to a piece with how other people's idea of you might be their best effort, their way of explaining you in their own, uh, ways of thinking and processing their models of reality. But, and so not to put so much weight in how other people see you and think about you as if that can be.

[00:54:26] A source of legitimacy and validation for your own body. So sensory congruency, how can you create more of it? How can you reclaim this inner knowing resource instrument of knowing for yourself? How can you increase your practical application in the structure of your structuring of your life, in the way that you be in a body and allow for that energetic and emergent sense making and systems thinking, um, to flourish, activating those possibilities that come from that is is the thing that I'm about right.

[00:55:12] This has been the motivation. This is partly why I offer what I do. And so for me, this is really about. Affirming that and then putting it into practice as a way of creating clarity for how to be that comes from within you. Right? This is why, also why the solar system is, you know, it's, it's system, right?

[00:55:41] It's based on the idea that we are constantly changing and that a system of selfhood helps us kind of collect all of the disparate parts of our existence into some kind of thematically congruent whole, a circular repeating one that reflects that on a philosophical level. It's also why the S in the logo is a waveform, an energy beam.

[00:56:08] My hope is that these themes, these kind of congruency in the thematic aspects of it, adds this extra, yeah, congruency and understanding this kind of overarching metaphor. Within which all the parts can then be housed within a system. And this is also why this is never about a specific how, right? If you go on courses and trainings that are based on a specific how, then there's always adaptation involved, right?

[00:56:39] Because it's not going to take into account these pre-cognitive, sub linguistic technological differences of what your how needs to be. What means that you get to understand something and apply it. And so what you actually need instead of a specific how is support to get to trust your own how and be validated in the work of finding it for yourself, inventing it, and being okay with that, not being understood by everyone and every everyone around you.

[00:57:12] And then, so coaching is also about your experiences, your brain, your body mind as the source of your own truth. And about offering a mirror to that and to any of the thinking that gets in the way of you being a yes to yourself to finish. This is why it's never for me about just creating more adaptations to the status quo.

[00:57:38] This is not what, you know, if we are gonna talk about neurodiversity to me, that this idea of diversity, of diverging, that diverging from a norm, it's again, still putting it in your body. You are the neurodivergent. And what we really need to do to do is get underneath to, to this question of tools, to this question of how do you be and that your how needs to be different, uh, to what is off being offered and what is being well resourced and.

[00:58:16] You know, really get underneath to that baseline circumstance of accepting that you exist, you should exist. Your existence is a doorway to possibilities that, um, you are not here to overcome your body. And that the possibilities within, through that doorway of you know, your existence and saying yes to it, that starts with belief in you.

[00:58:50] It starts with you say yes. When you say yes to your own body, to your processing style, to your sensory experiences. You allow them in as a welcome instruction for how things can be structured in a way that means that you are experiencing yes, as the predominant experience of your life and therefore.

[00:59:13] Get to live in the way that you need to live and therefore get to create the things that you're here to create. Okay, that's it for now. Come join in the discord, come and let me know what resonated and how does this, how is this expressed for you? And, um, I hope it has given you another way to think about being so-called different.

[00:59:43] In a world that too often says no.

[00:59:50] Thanks for listening to this week's Sensory Siblings podcast. Head over to Solar systems.xyz 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.

[01:00:15] 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.