Episode One: Welcome to the Sensory Siblings podcast!

I’m so 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 too.

Over the last 2 years, it’s been a learning curve around: how do I want this work to exist where it doesn’t really have a precedent. We are breaking new ground here. Because we are creating solutions for ourselves that don’t depend on diagnosis, on invoking the pathological model, or even on changing other people’s minds. And the work that The SOLA System is all about is really creating a cultural context for creative outliers to reimagine and redefine our selves and our futures.

And breaking new ground is exactly where I like to be, but it still feels precarious, and I’m so grateful to those who have been with me for a while, while also being on your own journeys and I know that this is just the beginning of what is to come. So this podcast is about really grounding in; we get to decide what is coming; as that famous quote says: the best way to predict the future is to create it. So that is what this is all about. Creating the futures we want, by activating the potency within, the internal insights for what will most enable and extend and exalt what is innate and bring about new possibilities...

TRANSCRIPT

Hello siblings!

I’m so 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 too.

Over the last 2 years, it’s been a learning curve around: how do I want this work to exist where it doesn’t really have a precedent. We are breaking new ground here. Because we are creating solutions for ourselves that don’t depend on diagnosis, on invoking the pathological model, or even on changing other people’s minds. And the work that The SOLA System is all about is really creating a cultural context for creative outliers to reimagine and redefine our selves and our futures.

And breaking new ground is exactly where I like to be, but it still feels precarious, and I’m so grateful to those who have been with me for a while, while also being on your own journeys and I know that this is just the beginning of what is to come. So this podcast is about really grounding in; we get to decide what is coming; as that famous quote says: the best way to predict the future is to create it. So that is what this is all about. Creating the futures we want, by activating the potency within, the internal insights for what will most enable and extend and exalt what is innate and bring about new possibilities.

So just to give a brief background;

I am an artist by trade, making art for over 15 years, and a decade ago started to explore the idea that I might be autistic. And that the sensorial and sub-linguistic focus of my artistic work might have something to do with that. That this explained so much for me, and also gave me a different social context to what I was exploring. Which was about the body and mediation, and how mediation in all it’s forms don’t just mediate, but produce our embodied experiences.

I believe the role of an artist or anyone who is about creating what didn’t exist before, a big part of that is exploring what is at stake with a particular form of mediation; being the author, not just a passive consumer of its effects and affects.

So I started to consider that this urge and desire in me to express what felt invisible at the time had to do with this idea of being autistic. But I also had so many questions about: why this concept of autism carries such rigid and externally defined narratives that are worlds apart from what autistic people themselves experience. So my work has been about: what are the tools 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 then a complete rearrangement of my sense of myself and my past - an experience I’m sure many of you can identify with - that retrieving of suppressed parts and memories surfacing for review and re-feeling and reorganising into this self-revelatory relief.

It’s also been a negotiation with all things visibility. How to make what is so often misunderstood or misread or unseen, visible - and also how to create visibility for my work and my ideas, without deferring to either masking my way through, or becoming typecast into an idea of autism that had dominated media messaging. Speaking about myself as autistic would result in all manner of responses in other 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.

This seeking of visibility and the agency to self-define and self-determine my life beyond over-adapting into burnouts led me down many paths, including coaching. I’d always been interested in self development tools, but understanding what the barriers actually were meant I then had the context for distinguishing between what was about me, and what were the external circumstances and systemic issues I was confronting personally that were not just about autism, but about how much of our human designed world is built around archaic economic agendas and values that really don’t serve anyone. The critical thinking of contemporary art begun to feel impotent to solve my own and other’s barriers to being an artist that are or were just symptoms of wider issues. I needed to step up a level of courage to open up alternatives and coaching helped me learn how to do that through deepening my awareness of what my thinking and self-relationship was.

Another path was that I got arts funding to do some research and make a body of work, and that included spend two, year long residencies with autism researchers, and neuroscientists who were looking at embodiment - how we sense and make sense 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 idea that there is one single fixed reality within which we all exist. Everything I learned from neuroscience and my own intuitive gnosis, from coaching tools, and my past artistic work told me otherwise; that your body, your senses, your past, your environment, your cognition, the ideas and values you are socialised to interpret everything through, your tools, your habits, are all factors in how you make sense and experience a reality and a self. And that we don’t all experience the same reality.

That the uncommon sense of neurodivergent emergent and outlier folks is not an inconvenient thing that happened to ‘normal’ bodies, and 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. That you being alive points to other ways of wording worlds, making sense, structuring experience into agency, and in fact other realities beyond the one-size-fits-all, industrialist structures that underpin so much of what seems like “just the way it is”. Our existence points to other possibilities that have been eclipsed by the systemic invisibility cloaks of the past.

Out of these journeys, I created a liberator framework and process for how to individually and collectively emerge into greater visibility and agency, and over the last two years have been delivering and developing this in community. It’s called The SOLA System.

It has nine ‘planets’ or areas of focus that are divided into three main steps;

1. Unlearning who you are not (which is all about self definition)
2. Creating Self Esteem (which is all about Self connection)
3. Creating Social Esteem (which is all about Self organisation)

And I give it that name to speak to that goal of visibility and the idea of shining your light, of being a solar flare; emitting disruptive frequencies to earth possibilities beyond the stale old structures of limitation.

The planetary solar system as a metaphor for selfhood that could speak to how we are not distinct fixed entities, but always evolving with universe, through connection and movement and change, but with that central core energy that gives life.

And in this podcast I will be sharing a lot of the thinking developed in The SOLA System, which is rooted in the conviction that you are meant to be here - that’s not up for discussion. The only question is how. And the how begins in your relationship to yourself.

Because that sets the bar for everything else. You cannot experience connection with others if you aren’t in connection within 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 are trying to exist within other people’s world view.

So, we’ll be getting into all of this.

And if you are 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, and beyond reasonable adjustments to the status quo, and into reimagining how we might exist more fully, and how to actually begin that work in your own life, then hit subscribe.

Because I will be sharing tools and thinking for you to better see, know and be yourself, and for the culture shifts that make that more possible, as well as interviews with folks who have been through The SOLA System, and artists, and thinkers who are doing work that opens up more possibilities for cross-movement solidarity and meaning making and conceiving of cognitive difference in more empowering and interesting terms beyond these weird reductive checklists. And we will also talking about how we can make the most of this social and technological moment that is enabling new structures and technologies and ecosystems, including blockchain and web3, artistic ecosystems, clothing design, artistic work, sensory sense making, and digital identity creation and lots more.

Thank you so much for listening, and I look forward to connecting with you next week.