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On flow state… The ground of being for Autistic people

Please take the time to look at the two YouTube videos linked in the podcast notes… press pause and return when ready.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znwUCNrjpD4&t=23s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYUhJ9N699c

For Allistic people, imagine if you can a single-minded drive and passion to follow one’s curiosity, interests and purpose deeply into flow state.  This is a magic space beyond our sense of self, limitations, and sensory overwhelm, where immediacy of the moment… and a quiet voice unerringly guides us from moment to moment.  Can you see or feel the sense of completeness in the flow state of your autistic friends when they are in such a place?

This is the flow state that is our Autistic “ground of being”.  It is a state of altered consciousness.

The Allistic “ground of being” is not flow consciousness, although flow is accessible to all.  The “ground of being” for Allistic people appears to this Autistic observer to be conversation.

Conversations with your most intimate friends can be magical when it exists in a kind of language dance.  This language dance is centered on the point of view of a self, and its place with others, in community and in the world.  

This is a verbal, interpersonal state of exchange in which we creatively articulate our perspectives to feel heard, appreciated, and understood.  This space of exchange is where the self that we each imagine we are is revealed in the immediacy of the moment… in which magic happens and our sense of who we are is refreshed.  We could call it being heard or being loved… the effect is a self-narrative of that self’s place in the world that is purified and renewed… a kind of sacred space of reinvigoration.

For my Autistic friends.  

I know many Autists can easily connect to the experience of reaching a flow state, where time runs differently, where there is a unity in our field of experience.  My own sense is of being in the experience of being held, guided, empowered and in some quiet way, being set free.

Here is perhaps a tough question for my fellow Autists;  Can you imagine accessing (needing) the kind of experience we get in flow state, but finding it in self-narrative, conversational exchange with others?  I am not talking about the flow state of verbally revealing our passions in a kind of monologue or data dump (which I admit feels great).  I am pointing to an interactive exercise in which you have a self, she has a self, he has a self, we all have a self, and we compare notes on self-ing.

One reason I have a problem with this self-narrative, conversational exchange is that I seek not to have a fully formed self, it gets in the way of reaching my flow state.  So instead I and many Autists seek to connect in these moments with narratives about our experiences, which easily looks like being self-centered and feels like we are not doing the verbal, conversational dance correctly.  This is one angle of the double empathy problem.

Can we all begin to see the disconnect?  Refreshing and refining one’s sense of self in conversational exchange can be a kind of confusing and exhausting experience for others.  Experiencing and sharing one’s flow state with others can be considered rude and pointless.

No wonder one of us has to be labelled as disordered.

So what do we do, move to Autlandia?  Not necessarily…

Allistic people can learn to not be demanding to rip us out of flow the moment they have a conversation they need us to participate in.  

Here, the use of language is critical, see my podcast on Being in language together – Peacefully.  This is an exploration of the misuse of