13. Sensory congruency

TRANSCRIPT:
Hello, siblings. Welcome to the sensory siblings podcast. I'm your host, Louisa Shaeri. And this is beaming to you from The SOLA System, the liberatory framework and unmasking unschool for creatively identified autistic folks who were seeking another way to see no and be yourself. This is a radical reimagining of what's 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 features and cells. It all starts within.

Hey, siblings, how are you? I am through the unstructured and inconsistency of summer. 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. There's something I wanted to share with you and tell you about before we dive into this week, which is on the 8th of October, I'm doing a free training, which is all about how to get visible as a creative person who may be you 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 they feel hardwired. And being more visible feels like the threat of social death. 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 will be over zoom webinar.

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 be more visible. Online, especially. But you know, in any way in your life. But yeah, specifically for those who you want to get more visible for your work, you want to get more visible for the work you want to do in the world. And you don't want to be the world's best kept secret anymore. And yeah, so if this sounds 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, 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 to 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? What are your thoughts? What is your self concept? How do you feel about yourself? What is your experience 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 is accurate and serving you or not. If it's 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 when we offer ourselves up visibly to the world. That fear will be massive. If your self image your self concept has internalised 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 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 how do you see you. So we're going to 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 I'll also do podcasts, maybe the next one will be a taste of what is to come in that. But today, today, I want to connect the dots between seeing yourself or conceptualising yourself, your self concept, your idea of who you are, and connecting 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 talked about in The SOLA System, the model of reality of who you are being right now. And the model of reality of who you are becoming. 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 going to say explicitly right now, autism is just a made up concept and made up story that has so many different versions, mainly by people who are outside of the experience it refers to, and have made decisions and judgments about what they see, according to their own models of reality. And in comparison to a notion of normal that they may have been socialised 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. It's like giving meaning to bodies. And that don't fit their idea of how it's supposed to be right. So I'm saying that because I 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. No one is an authority. There are plenty 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 gives you feels good gives you so much power. And it also then allows other people to have their own mind. And you don't mean need to make that mean anything about you are 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 will also offer that allows you to not be attached to one specific story as a source of your validation.

You're already valid. So now it's about; 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, your sense of self, or even consistent in how you express Who you are, self is just who are you being right now, in the present moment, there is no other moment. And so those are some thoughts or 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 as 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. 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 emerging 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. And to have the tools, the relational context, to moral realise those possibilities in the material, right to move from who you are being in the reality that you're 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 gaze of observation and comparison. Right? It's a colonisers perspective, it's 'I see you, 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, I actually want to offer that it's the doing, where the differences reside. And so I'm going to 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. You maintain the internalisation of it. So we are all unpacking this, right? This is not unusual, nothing's gone wrong, the fact that you recognise 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're still lovable, right? 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 may be carried some ableism. Then, to unravel, it means to come to your own thinking write 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, unravelling. Liberalism 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 or 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

wholly visible thing? Does it mean that I'm not worthy of existing exactly as I am with all my humaneness all my flaws and weaknesses? Does it mean that mine make me less worthy of that attention? So having your own mind and taking up the full bandwidth of your power to decide that yes, I am enough and to define who you are for your for yourself from the place of already knowing that you're enough. That is how we address it. More I think gets us into trouble. Is that focus on self right is locating difference as something that can exist within a single body? 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 own bodies. And that it's more about, who do we get to become? 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 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 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 no, right? It's either empowering or disempowering. It's either enabling or disabling. It's either affirming, or denying. And so the difference is, in tools, which tools are yes, which extend your capabilities which increase your agency to not have to over adapt to just be able to determine your life yourself. So therefore, perhaps it's not your body that we should be labelling but the tools and whether they offer you or not, whether they're accessible or not, whether they are 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. I think this 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 organising, by which we can extend an express and enable the self and also exalt the self back into the human, 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 nose 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. And how we address that belief is a whole other podcast and it is probably the number one belief that siblings have to work through in The SOLA System. It shows up in a whole 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 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 own validity. So a big part of transforming the structures in your life to fit you and in our collective lives. Systemically structurally, 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 way or at this processing your current, your present circumstances and your present reality? And how do we do that while believing our bodies? 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 making technologies our bodies offer up with the insights it speaks to us with the emotional truths it 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 a being okay. So what this is really about is maximising saying yes, in a big unequivocal way, maximising our turning up the volume on the body mind that you have in the circumstances you face. So that what is in your power to change? You're 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're at allowing and being with what your body offers up, and experiences you're actually having. And saying yes to them, and being willing to accept and listen to them to the and they might not be listening, that might not be a helpful analogy, but you're paying attention to perhaps the emotions and the sensory and cognitive messages it offers up to you. In this episode, I'm going to address the cognitive bit, okay. And to give you another way, in another framework, that perhaps helps process your current reality, or 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,

meaning making, discerning, and so on. 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 going to share a concept I use in The SOLA System, which to sum it up quickly, is about sensory congruency, 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 organise 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 going to be a bit different from the way that mainstream tooling or widely available thinking and design structures have been assuming have assumed, right. So what this means is that if you are coming to this question of neuro divergence or autistic status traits in adulthood, if you've been late diagnosed, or if you're new to 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 normalised right?

And to also notice and allow in and embrace the things that you may already do that reflect that. So for me like sitting in positions where I experienced pressure or rhythm, or some other kind of sensory feedback loop, or sunglasses on public transport where as fluorescent lighting or listening to a specific song on loop for a month, cutting out itchy labels, given myself tonnes 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 aspects 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, emerging in singular areas of focus. So or if you have been assigned ADHD status, there may be several areas of focus at once. And I'm going to share some research in a minute that you may have read if you have my book 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 SOLA System, you'll know what I'm talking about.

Anyway, so the tangent I want to 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 written language, or mathematical language, something like this.

Okay, so storytime, I studied art, and then Sonic arts. And for a couple of years, I was involved in the improvised music scene in London, and a very specific niche within it. And so this involved doing live gigs, where I would be, you know, in a room with an audience with other musicians and sound artists. And we would be communicating to each other through sound. And using sound to replicate the existing energetic environment of the room with the, with the audience in it, well, 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. 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 or 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. So I did a few performances were 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 these kind of black light sensors on me and then their torch waves waving around their torches would then create sound. And it was a good idea in theory, but somewhat lacklustre in its realisation 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 shining the audience while turning on a deep warm mix of tones. 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. I like a sunset in my own mind. 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, kind of gave them this immersive, sensorial experience, they kind of energetically went on a journey. And people got a lot from it, and they liked that one. And I kind of saying that because I want to speak about this kind of immersive, sensorial

sub linguistic way of thinking. And there's also filmmakers that do this really well, right like Jacques 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 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 really noticing as a femoral in its own right, rather than just a consequence of a thing happening. I also love The Colour of Pomegranates by Sergej Paradjanov, it's a complete symbolic language that I'm not going to do justice to. But the 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.

So this kind of totality, of immersion, sound and cinema, and vision and this kind of sensory play of that kind of using that as its own language. As for me being 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. And so I'm really speaking to that, because I want to speak to these experiences that we maybe have that K, 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, 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, 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.

And those are really helpful because it allows for that sense of are I do that is that a thing that we do. But I want to give you another way to think about these sensory experiences and lived experiences in general that is more like an organising principle that makes sense of all of it at once. And yeah, so that is this concept of energetic concurrency or sensory congruency being the thing that affords us understanding that affords us sense-making this concept is derived from a theoretical framework by nearly Livi, which was then used to

create a piece of research and, and several studies by Anna Remington and her team at the Centre for Research into autism and education (CRAE). And what Anna Remington found was in this early study was that the in their trial, that group of people that they had in their research, who had an autism, who assigned the status of autistic right, had a larger perceptual capacity. So perceptual capacity means How much experience we are processing in any given moment. In the research by Nillie Lavie, 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 jest and generalise and kind of give a fake a summary of something within your perceptual awareness, but wit for which you no longer have the capacity to process in detail. So what Anna Remington's study showed is that autistic people seem to, according to the, you know, the people that they tried this with, seem to have a larger perceptual capacity. So what this means is that when other people fill, right in the theory goes that we have to use up our capacity at all times, right? 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 made, has maybe reached their capacity and therefore, they are summarising discrete parts of their environment or what they're focused on into jests. For us, we're still processing them in detail. And where maybe, that just did summarised chunked way of thinking is really useful for quick social communication, right, because if you can quickly transfer a tiger is coming then or food over there, then that AIDS survival, right. So so the the perhaps you could theorise that the general population their level of of perceptual capacity, our social communication and linguistic communication is attuned to that, right. So you can quickly summarise 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 jests and words for things, and by social rituals that are kind of maximised for that more typical capacity, 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 jesting. 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 accounting for. 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's goes on. So where some people can easily and happily walk through, 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, you're still picking up all of the my new details and processing them and aren't at a place where you can just summarise and vaguely generalise that into the background. So we can take this and run with this and in The SOLA System, and also in the Interdependence Protocol a little bit. We go into a 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

this bit of research as something that I have found really useful, but also want to 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 and how we then make sense of our perceptions. What do we then do with extra capacity? If we're not justing if we're not summarising it yet, and what I want to offer is that for us, the mean doesn't arise in though in chunking, those discrete parts of world and then choosing and prioritising between them, to know what to process in more detail, 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 I, 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. So, we have this extra perception, this extra stuff in our perceptions, extra stuff that we're processing, we are not processing in a way that is supported by standardised social communication, by the way that things are explained by the way that information is laid out, by the way that environments are designed, and so on. 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. So I'm also thinking about now, when you see starlings, starlings that do that murmuration in the sky, they're all kind of interrelated in their movements. Whereas, if you think about a chair, where someone is just able to just and summarise and chunk it into this object of a chair, perhaps we are still processing it as a set of curves, and colours and textures that are conveying a specific sensory or aesthetic or affective imprint. That might be within our own mapping of meanings. also connected to specific feelings and sensations that may 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, maybe doesn't attend to an account for. And so we come across as not having understood things, where in fact, perhaps we're 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 two, interconnected and interrelatedness of any specific area of focus. You might also apply this to subjects, 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 deeper level. We then find pleasure in those things that can captivate and kept and fill up our perceptual capacity that afforded us that level of detail and congruency a that in its form or its subject matter. And so it's those areas of our experiences that offer us this feeling of

being with an 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 prioritising between generalisations and chunks, 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, that we lose sense of what is important. So there's good and bad on either side, none is better than the other. A larger perceptual 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 processing, that isn't available in a lot of the mainstream ideas of 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 making sense of what we produce with that extra capacity in a different way as well. It makes sense of things like echolalia. And while 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 SOLA System that you learn straight away when you come in, and then we unpack it, depending on 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 sensory experience if the subject matter if the embodied experiences that you're having are difficult to process, I would offer that 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. And having to make those micro decisions and discernments. Between chunks like T shirt 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 an intellectual pursuit that is

perceived as a as a higher level of intelligence than your average person. 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 easier, hard. And that is what I would offer with sensory congruence. So yeah, I want to 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 emergent strategy by Adrian Marie Brown. And I felt so much affinity with Aaron's book emergent strategy. I refer all her books, but specifically this one because of the of the way that it puts forward the system's thinking and this biomimicry approach to thinking about social organisation and thinking about problem solving, that is 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 discrete parts, rather than understanding things as a system and as a whole within which something is being nurtured or not. And so I say that as well to just really emphasise 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. And that right now, systems thinking, this kind of understanding of the whole, through sensing all of the parts and how they work together, this kind of energetic sensibility, these are all highly valuable right now, because of how much we need to recognise that, you know, we aren't separate chunks, we aren't distinct pieces, that you can put two together and compare them 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 going to be compounded by other barriers that you face. Because what makes sense to other people is, so what makes sense to the majority, perhaps to your typical perceptual capacity person, is affirmed by a lot of what social communication is, what the how things are designed, how knowledge is transferred, to the degree that their reality, their models of reality, are so resourced, by tools, that is incomprehensible to them, that there are other ways of making sense, right, other realities, other structural things for how to interpret and exist and be with our experiences, and other insights that they maybe don't have, that do exist. And so a lot of dark 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 contexts and for agency. And because of the way that this type of thinking has been, you know, devalued and squished out of institutionalised communication and knowledge has been under resourced in our kind of mass industrialised

social services, and that when we think of it this way, we might also be able to process and validate this impasse between us, right, so instead of being angry with them, that they are intentionally misunderstanding that they are intentionally making this hard, we might then recognise 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. And so that maybe allows us to then process that the sadness in that, but also come to a peace with how other people's idea of you might be their best effort, their way of explaining you in their own 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 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 this sense making and systems thinking, to flourish, activating those possibilities that come from that is, is the thing that I'm about, right? 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 SOLA System is, you know, it's a system, right? 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 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 wave form an energy beam. My hope is that these themes, these kinds of congruence, see 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, 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 in every everyone around you. 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. This is not what you know, we're going to talk about neuro diversity, 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 neuro divergent. 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 to what is off being offered? And what has been well resourced. And,

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 you're 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. 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're experiencing yes as the predominant experience of your life. And, therefore, 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 calm and let me know what resonated and how does this how is this expressed for you? And I hope it has given you another way to think about being so called different in a world that too often says no. Thanks for listening to this week's sensory siblings podcast, head over to solasystems.xyz where you can join the plus siblings Discord server, and discuss the topics explored with other listeners. And if you're ready to go deeper into activating your future self, I want to invite you to join my six month unmasking. unschool called The SOLA System + Siblings. 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 solasystems.xyz/siblings, where you can join The SOLA System + Siblings and I will see you inside