This is a topic I’ve meant to write on for quite some time, in fact I drafted a post several months ago but didn’t get so far as publishing it because the controversial and abstract-sounding nature of the topic made me hesitate about how to “pull this off” in a way that was relatable. However, now feels like the time to have another try because the effects of choosing to stay more grounded has been one of the biggest things to improve my overall health stability this last year, along with the dietary and lifestyle factors I discussed in my last post.

In summary, I want to discuss the topic of “spirituality” and how, perhaps especially when combined with a neurodivergent brain, this entire area or approach to life can become desperately precarious and ungrounding to your mental and general health. To be clear, I still consider myself to be a “spiritual person” because I do believe that there is far more to life than can be seen with the eye or proven; however, because of my autistic black and white thinking and strong preference for a kind of intellectual absolutism (a constant search for “the answer” as if there is only one to be had…a thought occurs to me, perhaps this is what attracts me to searching for the Absolute in the first place…trying to determine the system, a pattern, anything to make sense of it all) rather than being satisfied with things left feeling very arbitrary and hard to pin down. Add to this a tendency towards obsessive hyperfocus when I get engaged with a topic, a ravenous pursuit of spiritual information seriously ungrounded me for quite a lot of years, starting in about 2011 and only beginning to let go of its grip this last couple of years.

So as you can see, this topic might seem controversial to anyone who considers themselves to be a spiritual seeker or, equally, to any of my readers who is not in the slightest bit spiritual but I urge you to keep reading and see where I get to with this because it feels important to a person’s ability to ground firmly and healthily in their physical body, whether or not they identify a tendency towards abstraction as “spiritual pursuit” or some other form of dissociative interest they pursue, since this is just one form it might take. It’s certainly been very important and impactful to me and my health to realise this and wake myself up to its effects and, its fair to say, I have now taken myself to one extreme only to come back the other way, which has shown me just what a difference it can make.

Two things conspired to convince me it was time to write this post. The first is that a friend contacted me about a message she had had in a dream containing a warning not to visit the spiritual side of life too often. She’s had pretty precarious health for quite some time, more precarious than mine, so this intuitive dream (and I do so strongly believe in intuition) seemed spot on and like a good sign to me that she is starting to get that she too needs to become more grounded in her body. I shared with her the following insights, which I had hesitated to share with her before.

I told her that her dream message reminded me of intuitions that I’ve been getting for the past couple of years to cease allowing myself to engage quite so eagerly with spiritual matters and sources of information, and to become much more discerning about it all in general. For a good number of years, I couldn’t get enough of anything with this spiritual component to it (I even blogged about it fairly prolifically in another blog site that predated this one; which I have finally decided to take down from the public domain as it was keeping me hooked to experiences I would rather not have shared so freely, in hindsight). I pursued this interest via my own experiential explorations, my tireless reading and research, my inquiry into various schools of thought and spiritual belief (things like Buddhism, Gnosticism, Ayurveda, etc, my autistic mind obsessed with discovering what was most consistent between all of them, even Mayanism and mind-bending ideas such as quantum theory as a method for making sense of apparent chaos, which I don’t deny still fascinates me), various outlandish spiritual healing modalities that I pinned all my hopes on instead of seeking out more practical help or via other “channels” of so-called spiritual information. I now see how desperately ungrounded I became whilst I was doing this as a full-time preoccupation in my life…and being grounded is just so important to health. Like in so many other areas of my AuDHD life, I just didn’t seem to know when to put the brakes on.

I really lost my footing with the real world because I became more part of that “world” than this one, almost obsessed with the spiritual side of things, courting otherworldly experiences and abstraction all the time but it did no favours whatsoever to my physical health or day to day life; more on that and its intersection with autism below. When things became especially hard, I would only use this to reinvigorate my purpose, telling myself it was a sign I was getting somewhere and that my increasingly ungrounded state was a sign I was becoming less tethered to all the most “negative” aspects of the physical domain (spiritual self-justification at its worst). In reality, I was becoming desperately unbalanced in both my physical and mental health and these ideas I cherished really weren’t doing me any favours at all!

These days, I’ve turned off all my interest in channels and mediums and I don’t particularly court contact with anything terribly abstract in my own day to day life, preferring to stay fully grounded in my human experiences, warts and all, and just allow intuition and insights to come though in their own organic way. I’m sure this attitude is responsible for my much more stabilised health this last year (occasional flare-ups excepted). Even when I called in help with clearing the heavy energy in the cottage we were renting before Christmas, which I shared about here, it felt more like I was calling in a spiritual plumber and I chose not to get any more engaged with it myself than if I had been showing the plumber where the leak was and asking them to do the job for me; in other words, there was no need for me to get my own hands dirty as that was what I was paying for them to do for me. Which is to say, I’m still open to this kind of thing but I don’t choose to step over the line into it so much anymore as I strongly sense its not good for me to do so; I’m just too sensitive and fragile in my physical health to cope with it any more and there’s a point where it can start to lift me out of my own body and become precarious.

I also found it wasn’t great for my relationships with other people in my life and, with relationships already being a weak area due to my autism, this really wasn’t life enhancing. For quite a long time, most of the “friends” I was making were online via various spiritual interest forums and websites and none of them (excepting one, more on that below) felt real and grounding, no one was ever really there for me when I needed useful, practical, friendship in my daily life, in fact many of them would refuse to accept I even had health issues or would treat it like a failing, and it just exacerbated the whole effect of me having apparently opted to vacate my physical life to live somewhere else, engaged in almost total abstraction and just going through the motions of every day life like it was far less important, a sort of subplot to my dominant spiritual tilt on things. Again, perhaps this tendency to take things to an extreme and to be unable to commit to one perspective fully without completely ditching its opposite was a sign of my autistic black and white thinking but then I didn’t know about my autism at the time (which made it all the more precarious since I couldn’t see this pitfall).

Since making the decision to depart from this way of living, I do feel somehow less top heavy or fragile than I once was, physically; including less overly sensitive (a topic I was talking about just the other day…diet has certainly helped with this but this other choice about spiritual engagement has been another huge factor). I also feel much happier for being more engaged with three-dimensional reality and less distracted by other dimensions, it has to be said, and I now look back…not quite with regret but certainly with a little bit of sadness at how out-of-this-world I allowed myself to become for about a decade there as it made me very aloof sometimes and probably quite hard to relate to, even as a parent. I’ve come to realise that there’s plenty of time for all that other-worldly stuff when we turn back to dust and join the other side at the appropriate time, at least in my view. Someone who has known me for decades said to me just yesterday that I sounded like Helen again and I take that as a good sign: I’m “back” in a way that suggests I was out of it for quite a long time, which is easily done when you engage with the “other side” so much that its your first priority or main perspective on things instead of an adjunct.

The other thing that affirmed my decision to write on this topic is that I came across a recent episode of a podcast that I follow “Autistic at 40” presented by late-diagnosed autistic Toni Borneo in which she talks on this very same theme and it was as if she was outlining all the very same issues I’ve also experienced and the same realisations reached about needing to find a healthier place to be in, especially in relation to certain autistic traits that made her (also me!) particularly susceptible to diving in too deep with spirituality. The episode is so good and thorough that the best thing I can do is encourage you to listen to it here. When she says “I want to uncover ever possible truth, I want to turn every stone of knowledge, philosophy, transcript, teaching and learning about the ideas around all of this” I relate entirely as this is me to a tee; I’ve always been this way about anything I get my teeth into and I can’t honesty change that as its how my curiosity-fuelled brain works but, when allowed completely free rein in pursuit of some absolute concept you believe in so fervently, this can become completely untenable, exhausting, demoralising and self-defeating. It can take you to the very precipice of possibilities that will never throw back any truly life-affirming answers and which can often cause you to lose your footing with reality, as seriously happened to me for a quite while and which really began to reflect in my health somewhere during the middle of the last decade, lasting for quite a few years when I was really most engaged with it all, during which my health was becoming more precarious, fragile and overly reactive and sensitive all the time.

Toni talks about identifying with the auyervedic term “vata”, being the most airy, ungrounded, etheric of the three doshas that are used under that system to describe people’s personality types. Well, I also identified strongly with being vata during those times (I wrote about it several times in this blog, you can look it up), in fact it was confirmed to me that I was vata by an auyervedic practitioner that I saw for a series of treatments, who used certain body cues such as core temperature and pulse to determine this. This trait was making me like straw in the wind, or sometimes like straw when a match has been lit far to close nearby, in other words extremely vulnerable and precarious in my health. I also began to identify with being an INFJ personality type; confirming that I can be very abstract and aloof, even in this somehow taking comfort in the absolution of this single, identifiable, testable label that somehow succeeded in “nailing” me and my traits…and yet it really confused me that at other, more grounded, times I would run the same tests and come out as an INFP personality, which is somewhat less ungrounded and generally more involved with life; how could that be? In hindsight, it all depended on how much I was allowing myself to engage with abstraction at the time and this wasn’t ever going to be something I could pin down about myself or hang a firm label on. My time would have been better spent practicing how to more fully engage with my day to day experiences than in pursuit of these various systems for boxing myself up, though they did help to confirm to me that I was in a vulnerable state, which was the beginning of me beginning to question if there was anything I could be doing about it.

It wasn’t making me happy and really wasn’t getting me anywhere being so obsessed with such knowledge and, meanwhile, it wasn’t helping me with my biggest area of deficit, being my challenges when it comes to staying appropriately aware of my own physical body, which really is a weak point for me (as it is for a lot of autistic people) or relating to, and connecting with, other people. These factors only got worse and worse, the one plus point being that my issues in these areas became so stark, in the end, that they eventually flagged up to me that I am autistic and then I was able to fixate on a much more useful, far more personally relevant, area of hyperfocus that would help me to reengage with life. My autistic realisation was, in many ways, what saved me from the precipice because I was now able to see, for the first time in my life, just how many wrong conclusions I had drawn about myself to do with all the ways I was, indeed, different to other people, not because I was faulty or abhorrent but just wired in a slightly different way, something I could learn to embrace and work with in order to make my day to day physical life more viable (and then not need spirituality as an escape route).

By then taking all the steps that I did to get to know more about my particular version of neurodiversity, which includes a mixture of autistic and ADHD traits along with factors such as synesthesia and high sensitivity, I was able to make my life in the physical realm so much more comfortable and acceptable to me that the constant escape into abstraction no longer held so much appeal, I no longer wanted or needed to avoid the physical reality I was dealing with, in fact the best thing I could do was to engage with it and learn how to make the most of it.

Going back to what I was starting to outline above, some of the key points that I have found to be quite problematic about spiritual seeking in conjunction with an autistic mindset, some of which are alluded to in the above podcast episode, include, as I’ve said above, the trait of cognitive absolutism (black and white thinking, rigidity or lack of flexibility, a need for predictability, preferring rules with little interpretive room…), an almost obsessive need for answers and to uncover universal patterns, resulting in a tireless search for meaning which can become quite overly hyperfocused, combined with a tendency towards taking things very literally which puts me at risk of taking information that is sometimes meant to be more symbolic as though it is factual, also of absorbing some really disquieting information, believing it and so becoming traumatised by it (if this has been hard for me, as a fairly intelligent and reasonable person brought up in an open-minded family, I can only imagine how much harder it can be for an autistic person brought up surrounded by a lot of religious dogma).

It can also be quite a lonely pursuit so, in tandem with inevitably taking on some dark information along the way, you are left to deal with it all alone or risk joining in with groups of people that get carried away into the realms of conspiracy and fear-mongering, places that my sensitivity is particularly ill-equipped to deal with. As Toni says, YouTube is full of this stuff and its almost impossible to avoid once you start to delve into spiritual topics with any degree of curiosity or sense of purpose, hoping to uncover answers to questions that your mind is hungry for and, as I found out for myself, once an idea has been allowed to seed in my autistic mind its impossible to get rid of because the very nature of the way it collates data, means that it is going to be stored in there for the rest of my days, incase it might be “useful”, triggering off traumatic responses at will whenever an association is made. There are certain types of information out there that I now realise I shouldn’t go anywhere near, tempting as they might be, much like I know I can’t imbibe certain substances or ingredients due to my high-sensitivity (Toni points this out too) so I just know I need to resist them at all costs. At some level, I even sense that I needed to go through all this in order to become more discerning in the end, but its been one hell of a haul trying to pull myself through it unscathed!

Toni uses the words “unterethered”, “outlandish” and “unhinged” to describe the sort of information I am taking about and it really got to me, just as it clearly got to her, until the point when we both seem to have made a conscious decision that enough is enough and to get ourselves out of there. Like her, I simply can’t handle such material; to borrow her words, “it’s too dark, too big, it’s too unsettling…its just too big in its implications. If some of the stuff I’ve read is true then it would make it impossible for me to continue on with the rest of my life in any form of normal way. It makes living the day-to-day ridiculous and pointless”. I too became that overwhelmed by some of the information I came across from certain sources, plus the unwieldiness of some of the enormous preoccupations I was wrangling with, adding to which I found the human behaviour around certain spiritual topics to be just as abhorrent in some quarters, if not more so, than in more grounded circles; it certainly wasn’t as nonjudgemental or benign as I would have hoped. I sometimes think of the phrase “curiosity killed the cat” when I ponder the way my particular brain is wired to keep probing in areas that aren’t necessarily good for me and I’ve had to learn to temper this trait, for my own mental and physical health, or I would have been unable to continue on in any viable manner, something I came to realise just in the nick of time, about two years ago; since which acting on this has been a real life saver, I now believe. Anyone who also used to follow my other blog, as I know that applies to a few of you, may recall that it was about then that I ceased to write for that website and focussed all my attention in here, where I mostly write about the real, physical impact of living a neurodivergent experience of life and this feels so much more grounding and important than anything I ever shared before in my more abstract, if always well-meaning, posts of that other era.

It really impacted me to hear someone else describe some of the experiences that I’ve had with spirituality, especially because she is also autistic and has some of the traits I’ve already listed, meaning her pursuit of this kind of information could take her off too far and too wide, into some very deep waters and dark, occult, often deeply traumatising material because there literally are no limits to such speculation, it’s all out there to be found readily available on the internet, just waiting for an enquiring mind to go after. I had come to realise this for myself in the nick of time but I still felt very alone in the experience of it because who else could I talk to about the effect it had had on me, impacting me even now as a traumatic after-effect of opening myself up too wide for my nervous system to cope with? Either my friends were still interested in all this stuff or they were as disinterested as they could possibly be; no one I knew could relate from this uniquely autistic experience of spirituality, until I listened to this particular podcast episode (which demonstrates the power of shared autistic experiences, particularly in the form of podcasts, I find, because voice delivery makes it feel like I am in direct conversation with someone who relates, but also, hopefully, in the form of written accounts like mine since I know I am not able to deliver what I have to share in spoken form, its just not my strength to do so). Autism can already feel like a tremendously isolating and lonely experience but to go through deep existential trauma all alone is the most isolating thing of all because no one else knows you are going through it or how to relate if you try to explain to them what they could only every understand if they had ever probed the very edges of experience the way your curious mind has tended to do and then come back feeling even more alienated from your physical body than ever, which is only ever going to have a very detrimental effect on your health.

It sounds like Toni, much like me, reached a sort of precipice where she could go no further with these threads of enquiry without falling into a dark abyss or point of no return, she even refers to it as the edge of psychosis. For me, that turning point seemed to happen in the year after my very close internet friend and confident on all things spiritual, Kat, died after a very long struggle with cancer, leaving me even more bereft of the kind of deep-and-meaningful, no topics barred kind of friendship I longed for than ever. Some of the very lengthy and deep conversations I had had with her had taken me very close to the edge of my own physical reality because of the fact I was trying so desperately to keep her company in her own terrifying journey, with her life slipping away from her entirely against her will and then, when she was gone, I genuinely felt at risk of going after her if I didn’t bring myself up short and stop some of my behaviours to do with spiritual enquiry. After all, if I was at all curious to know whatever she now knew, having left her physical body behind, or to remain close to her the way we once were then the only way to do that was to leave my own; not a conscious thought but there was a vulnerability to me during that phase.

It was around the same time, and this does feel so connected, that I began to come to terms with, and feel more comfortable and accepting of, the knowledge that I am autistic, something I had only been playing with the year that she died. With new clarity, I began to realise that spirituality had become another area where I tended to give up some of my power, not to an individual (as had happened in a previous marriage), or to an idea of an externalised god since I don’t subscribe to that, but to other channels and mediums of so-called information rather than leaning into myself as a far more reliable source of information and safety cues. In hindsight, this is quite ironic since well-honed intuition and very high-sensitivity make me the perfectly equipped vessel to draw my own concussions from the realm of less tangible information; I don’t need a mediator or interpreter to tell me what I ought to be believing. In fact my friend Kat was a big advocate of using intuitive or synchronistic information as a nudge to explore the depths of your own wisdom, not as some concrete “message” or “prophecy” from the other side but as a nudge towards what you already know.

So I began to steadily dissociate myself from channeled sources of information around that time and immediately began to feel better, not because such information wasn’t sometimes in sync with my own thoughts and beliefs or even encouraging to me to hear but because it goes against the grain of the very preference for autonomy that is hard-wired into me as an autistic person, someone who has always done far better whenever I have leaned on myself as my own most trusted source and ally. I’m never at my best when I look outside of myself for definitive answers: have always done much better, felt stronger and more stable in my physical experiences, when I assess a situation myself, in my own logical way (note: my version of logic doesn’t exclude intuition since it is perfectly logical to me that we all possess senses that deal with the more abstract kind of data that can be felt rather than seen), but not when I hand over my rationale to an outside source who is likely having a very different experience of life to mine. Seeking commonality in a spiritual sense has been just as disorienting to me as it ever was when I tried to run with the pack at school….it never worked out then either and was also never the sustainable thing to attempt in the long run, tripping me up and burning me out eventually, however much I might have told myself it was a good idea at the time. I was born to be a lone wolf and, like an animal, I operate best using a combination of my own intellect and instincts.

So, its fair to so say that, as a result of all this, I’ve since reached a much more happy and comfortable place and have certainly grounded my body much more firmly onto the planet I live upon, smelling the roses much more often and quite contented to deal with physical imperfections rather than go off in pursuit of an ideal that divorces me from my own body. I’m no longer on some sort of mission to come to know it all and I no longer think that this is even possible for one person to achieve whilst still in a human body. I’m able to engage with my version of spiritual belief in a far more healthy way than before, one that is much more akin to the very simplistic, inbuilt sense of wonder and curiosity that I had as a child that was open to everything, without needing to judge or label everything I came across. I’ve always been prone to experiencing insights that feel naturally intuitive or instinctive and I focus my range of consideration on those now instead of the spiritual material that others might be eager to share with me (plus I am able to quite confidently say that I have seen and heard it all before). I’m comfortable with where I have landed, nor would I ever deny that that I have a spiritual perspective, like I used to do before all this happened…because I do still believe that there is so much more to life than what you can see or touch with your hands; I just don’t need to make a song and dance about it. I say this because there was a time years ago (from my mid 20s until the time when spiritual curiosity took me over in my mid 30s) when, like Toni, I would generally label myself an atheist, probably to protect myself from scrutiny or to distance myself from religious dogma (which I have never held with), but that was just another form of self denial and of masking and, therefore, has to be dropped completely now if I intend to be true to myself.

That said, I don’t promote these thoughts when I am with other people, they just happen to be part of who I am and I will stand by them if questioned, but with no need whatsoever to become defensive or get into a debate. I am now able to live comfortably with my spiritual viewpoint on things hovering there in the background but not always dominating the way I process a situation. It used to be the primary way I perceived things, as though seeing through a spiritual lens, and I was always dialled in at the wider level of a situation, which only took me out of the wavelength of present company even more than my autism innately does (it really wasn’t helping me to integrate with other people, though perhaps I was subconsciously using this perspective as an excuse, or shield, for my autistic traits, long before I even knew why I had them) but now I try to deal with things via my bodily experience first. This has the effects of strengthening my weak spots, such as various social deficits and my already compromised ability to stay present in a situation, which is so easily distracted, plus (since my gut feelings and other senses can be quite compelling) my intuitive abilities are still there, like a sort of back-up system that I can draw on whenever needed, however now kept under much better control so that I’m not so easily distracted by over-sensing all the undercurrents going on in a room. This means I can better deal with the actual words people are saying or the straightforward and often quite pleasurable details of physical life…the good food, the pleasant sounds, the camaraderie, the lightheartedness, the sun through a window, all of which provide pleasant stims to keep me engaged, once I pay attention to them. I feel more real, more engaged and more human than I did for a lot of years and it’s all got to be much better for my physical health than the way I was before.

One more point I want to add: A trend I’ve noticed for years is that I tend to more easily gain the kind of big picture or gestalt perspective on things I crave when I’m least grounded in my body, often as a result of intense pain, which sometimes compels me to dissociate from my physical state. So, in hindsight, I now suspect that I have had this long-running tendency to unconsciously use that kind of physical state, milking it, almost courting it, so that I can get my teeth into the big juicy questions of life that obsess me. Not to say I made myself ill but that I didn’t always make the most life affirming decisions when it came to handling my symptoms. At certain choice points, I can see how I’ve made a semi-conscious decision between the choice of, say, taking proactive steps to recover my body more quickly or to linger in a state of dissociative torpor a little longer, just so I can get down some juicy insight I’m in the middle of “downloading”, and it’s been an entirely self-sacrificial and ultimately self-defeating kind of behaviour whenever I’ve chosen the latter; one that has only prolonged my chronic health status. It reminds me of how I read that shamen would sometimes imbibe poisons so that they could reach the other side and bring back information. In other words, I’ve been dicing with death…quite literally, yet without even consciously knowing it…and it’s time for me to draw a line under that kind of tendency, once and for all, by noticing when its happening. There’s no idea I could possibly have access to, no spiritual insight important enough to my life, that would make putting my own health at risk worth the trade-off…that would be far too paradoxical for words…and I would do better to concentrate on staying much more grounded in my body, come what may, even if that feels extremely limiting, painful or restrictive compared to my brain’s desire to probe into the wildest corners of existence.

I now realise that I need to commit fully to my body for whatever length of time I have left in it and there are tools I can use, for instance simple somatic practices such as self-massage, skin brushing or stroking, certain mat exercises, dance, immersing in water, even laughter, that can curtail the tendency to float off and bring me back into my physical body, even helping with pain management and making it much more comfortable, acceptable and desirable to be grounded in my three-dimensional life.

Even as I type these realisations, I can feel the fog lifting in my head this morning, which began as what felt like a typical crash day including a lot of pain, the kind where I can see the fork in the road and a big part of me feels almost compelled to plunge into abstraction…yet I know its not the best, most life-affirming choice to do so. It’s like taking that first sip of caffeine (not that I ever do) once I’ve made the more life-affirmative choice to stay more present; suddenly I feel more alert, less aloof and abstracted than I felt when I first woke this morning and, though I might have let go of a stable load of “useful” insights by breaking out of my reverie, I would rather have a better, more grounded and engaging, day than get marooned out there in the depths of the spiritual ocean, once again.

Its tricky because, when I overdo things or become more stimulated than I should, my body’s default is to shut everything down for a while but that’s not to say I should abuse these times by engaging with another source of exhaustion and overwhelm, being the kind of abstraction that takes you out of your depths (which, at its worse, can be far more overwhelming, overstimulating and even traumatic than this physical world; believe me). I’ve now learned my limitations plus the need for some boundaries and am much happier playing in the shallower waters of my spiritual beliefs, without the need to plunge into the depths and get swept away. I no longer torture myself with the so-called desperate “need” for answers from that domain, which was always going to be a case of chasing after the uncatchable hare, it would always outpace me, but rather accept that whatever I most need to know will come through to me exactly when I most need it, no effort required. Meanwhile, I get to enjoy feeling much more stable in my body than I have for a very long time, flare-ups from overdoing things aside, and this has got to be a good thing as I embark upon this next stage of life.

I want to say a very sincere thank you to Toni Borneo for being prepared to share the insights that she did in her podcast, it has been so helpful to me personally (that link again, Autistic at 40 Series 2 Episode 11 – My Autistic Spirituality).

Disclaimer: This blog, it’s content and any material linked to it are presented for autobiographical, general interest and anecdotal purposes only. They are not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, or prescribing. Opinions are my own based on personal experience. Please seek medical advice from a professional if you are experiencing any mental or physical symptoms that concern you.