- Speaker #0
All humans are spiritual. All humans have experiences and insights and questions that they want answers to.
- Speaker #1
Welcome to NeuroDivergent Spot. I'm your host, Sam Marion. My pronouns are he, him, and I am a multiply neurodivergent therapist, speaker, and creator. My work focuses on all things neurodiversity. My particular interests are in autism, ADHD, learning differences, and learning disabilities. I'm excited that today's guest is Asher Walden. So, Asher, would you please introduce yourself to the listeners?
- Speaker #0
Sure. Yeah, my name's Asher Walden. I have a doctorate in comparative religions, and I have created this thing called the Empyrean Deck, which is kind of a tool or a model to approach spirituality. And in particular, it's meant to be a language or a framework to explore spirituality for people who think differently. In other words, for people who, for various reasons, simply don't fit into standard models of religious practice or religious institutions. And I am not an expert in neurodivergence. I don't have a lot of academic training. What I do have is my own experience of being Pretty, pretty neurodivergent. And in particular, the, the, my integration experience over the last few years, which has kind of fed into and collaborated with, I guess, the development of the deck in a number of different ways.
- Speaker #1
Before we continue, I've got a quick disclaimer. This podcast is for information purposes only and should not be seen as a replacement for therapy, healthcare, or legal advice. I'm really excited about this conversation. I grew up in a small town in South Georgia, so I grew up around a particular religion. I sort of joke that I grew up in, you know, we talk about the Bible Belt, and I grew up in the buckle of it kind of thing. It's very much part of the culture to the extent that, but it's strictly, you know, Christianity and a certain primarily conservative. um flavors of christianity we'll say and it's so much a part of the culture where elementary school has a weekly symbol a weekly assembly called chapel um and the high school chorus once a month when when i was in high school i don't know now but once a month performed in a different church every month around the county uh and it was singing christian songs so it's that's that's where i grew up and i think this is such an important uh, conversation because for people who think differently,
- Speaker #2
um,
- Speaker #1
and I don't want to steal your thunder, get too far ahead, but,
- Speaker #2
um,
- Speaker #1
you know, yeah, there's just so much about this. This got me excited. So, uh, I just want to jump in,
- Speaker #2
uh,
- Speaker #1
to hear more. Cause I said, I that's, that's where I'm from today is I'm that excited. Uh, let's just start first question. Like everybody, what has your neurodivergent journey look like?
- Speaker #0
Sure. My neurodivergent journey really started around three years ago, give or take, when my daughter was actually diagnosed. We knew my wife has training in early childhood education, and she was seeing the signs, and it was important to her to actually get that on the books. because she was doing well in school at the time, but the concern was that as she grew older... those differences would make a bigger difference. So as soon as that happened, I started learning more about neurodivergence. And my wife was kind of ahead of the curve on this one. So she was exploring her own neurodivergence and saying, well, there's a reason my daughter is the way that she is. And guess what? There's a reason my dad and both my parents are the way they are. And so I started from there, sort of seeing those things in my own life, and slowly, surely interpreting all these other aspects of my life. my relationships, my education, that all of a sudden made much more sense the more I learned about autism in particular and neurodivergence more generally. So it's been a roller coaster. It's been very emotional. It's been a lot. It's been in some ways very challenging, but it's also been really great for my relationship with my wife and for my family, I think.
- Speaker #1
I love that you shared so many positives in that. I think that's so powerful. One of the consistent themes amongst guests, and I say this every time somebody does it, is to talk about when they came to recognize their neurodivergence and then reflect it over their life, how much more made sense. And that's such a consistent theme. Something unique that you brought forth, though, was talking about how you started seeing things, started with the child, and then go, wait a second. If this is my child, but this is just like me kind of thing is also a common experience. I even know of a family who, before having their child tested, basically one of the parents was like, hey, let's learn about the testing process. So I'll be the guinea pig because everything you're talking about is just like me, so I'll do it first so we know what it's like before. our child does it. And, you know, that was because they're like, it's all the same.
- Speaker #2
And,
- Speaker #1
you know, so it really is a fascinating experience. And I think it's so powerful to see the traits and the strength behind it. So, yeah, thank you for sharing that. Well, let's keep going. I really want to get into the spirituality part of this conversation.
- Speaker #2
Yeah.
- Speaker #1
Asher, you have said that autistic people often approach and experience spirituality. differently. What are some of the unique spiritual needs or insights that tend to emerge with the neurodivergent communities, and how can traditional spiritual frameworks fall short?
- Speaker #0
Yeah, so I think that the key word there is framework. So all humans are spiritual. All humans have experiences and insights and questions that they want answers to. And where the neuro... where I think neurodivergent people and neurotypical people sort of part ways is that neurotypical people primarily learn about the world socially, right? Primarily the way neurotypical people learn about the world is through their peers, through what they see on TV, what other people say. Neurotypical people by and large will believe what they believe other people believe. And so if everybody around them is going to church, And if everybody, if their family goes to a particular pastor or a particular, or as a member of a particular political affiliation, that's their primary source of information about the world. Not that they don't have their own direct experience. For neurodivergent people, it's just the opposite. Primarily, our information about the world is our own experience. What, you know, coming up with reasons, coming up with evidence, making connections so that um If we want to explore spirituality, if we want to understand what it means to be spiritual, what it means to be human, we have to do a lot more work, right? Because we have to get that in. We have to find ways of getting that firsthand. So spiritual experience is a much more important topic or a much more important category for neurodivergent people. And so if neurodivergent people haven't had a lot of spiritual experiences, positive religious experiences. then they will tend to throw the baby out with the bathwater, you know, and they'll just assume that religion just is this kind of social thing where everybody agrees with one another and then judge everybody else who doesn't agree with them. Right. And I think that that's sort of a shame because I believe that religion is so, so important and spirituality is so, so important and that these religious traditions have a lot of wisdom. But again, the way we have to approach them as neurodivergent people is different, and there are not a lot of good models out there.
- Speaker #1
You know, I'll share personally a big thing that I've struggled with maybe my whole life around religion and spirituality was the disconnect that I saw between what people said they believed and how they behaved. growing up in a small town. knew this about people. And everybody seemed to accept, and it didn't make sense to me, why people could do this thing on Saturday night, but then Sunday morning show up at church and talk about life as though Saturday night didn't exist, or that trip they'd just gone on, or, you know, these kind of things. And it's, that was such, and it's probably still is for me, such a big struggle. around just navigating religion and spirituality just seeing these divides uh and i think quite frankly when i look around our country right now i i i see this it feels like this divide between what people say they believe and then choices that they make uh and that's such a big hang-up for me and i don't know how common that is amongst uh neurodivergent folks or that's unique to me i don't think it's unique to me though um But yeah, that's the personal, how I experienced the rules told on Sunday with behaviors I saw. It was my experience was so confusing.
- Speaker #0
That's something that I was kind of exposed to in my research as I was learning about what it means to be autistic and watching TikToks and watching Facebook reels about people's... Oh, this is what I... Sure. A lot of people have noticed, specifically a lot of what neurodivergent people notice is that the neurotypical community... Well, it's not a community, but just general neurotypical people have a very high tolerance for hypocrisy. a very high tolerance for white lies, a very high tolerance for kind of inconsistent beliefs. And again, I think it's because of that social epistemology thing. I think it's because people, you know, most people will just sort of say that they believe whatever that other people believe. And they're not really aware of any hypocrisy. They're not really not aware of the contradiction because they don't have that cognitive dissonance. Neurodivergent people are very, very sensitive to cognitive. dissonance because we are not able to tune out inconvenient thoughts. One of my favorite questions, I think it's a great question that I think you should ask people. I think you should ask people, what do you envy about neurotypical people? And what I envy about neurotypical people is that they have this magical ability simply not to think about things that bother them. If there's some truth about the world, like some impending doom, poverty, hunger, genocide, whatever it is that they don't want to think about, they can just not think about it. And to me, that just seems unbelievable. To me, all these thoughts are just there all the time. And they're very distressing thoughts. And part of why they're so distressing is I can't do anything about them. So if I had the ability just not to think about things that I just can't improve on, My life would be a lot easier, be a lot smoother. On the other hand, there would be a lot of things that are actually really important that I would need to think about that I would not be thinking about. So it's a, it's a, it's a blessing and a curse, right?
- Speaker #1
Uh, yeah, I was talking to somebody not long ago, and this is not so much about, you know, a big consequential thing, but it's just an event that's happening. I said, I think the problem and why it's so frustrating is the people who plan the event, none of them experience anxiety. So they didn't think through all the details that I would have liked them to have thought through,
- Speaker #2
uh,
- Speaker #1
until the last minute, like they just needed one anxious person who would have been like, wait a second.
- Speaker #2
Uh,
- Speaker #0
this is going to stress people out.
- Speaker #1
Right. You know, where, where the little stress points, uh, cause, cause I do show up and I think through all the details and I, and I am that person who would like to know the answers to questions. Uh, and, and it's, yeah, there's a lot of details that people are just sort of, they're okay showing up. And, um, And without all the forethought, but I can't do that. I had to think all the way ahead.
- Speaker #0
I think that that's social. Another thing, I know we're at charts here, but another thing about that social epistemology is that you always know you'll be able to figure something out. Like you have like a kind of basic trust, I guess, that says that if you're in a situation that's new and different, you just ask someone or you just watch what everybody else is doing. I can't do that all that well. My ability to read the room about what other people are doing and just sort of do it, it's not natural. Sometimes I can figure it out and sometimes I can't. But even when I can figure it out, I have to take the time to look at what everybody else is doing and make some kind of rational or logical conclusions about what I'm supposed to be doing. And that's stressful. That's work for me.
- Speaker #1
No, I'm with you. I'm trying to figure out. I make it see what somebody's doing. But because I don't understand the why underneath it, I get it wrong by just a little bit because I didn't quite get it.
- Speaker #2
Yeah.
- Speaker #1
So let's keep going here. Fascinating conversation. I'm loving this. So you've created what you call the Empyrean Deck. It's rooted in wisdom traditions but intentionally non-dogmatic and accessible. So how did your neurodivergent perspective shape the structure and tone of the deck and what makes it particularly resonant for neurodivergent users?
- Speaker #0
Sure. So two things. On the one hand, it's a structure. It has a structure. And on the other hand, it's based on experience, personal experience. So the cards in general are a systematization, I guess, of the archetypes, what Jung called the archetypes. They're these basic sacred images or sacred models or the ways in which the sacred appears and the way in which we experience the sacred in daily life, right? How do we experience the sacred? We experience the sacred fruit. beauty, through math, through order. We experience the sacred through music. We experience the sacred through intimacy and relationships and friendships. We experience the sacred through setting out on a quest or a goal, right? We have this idea, I'm going to go and do something, and that's sort of a sacred thing. So the idea is that these are things that are in your life. Remember, it's about your experience. It's about understanding what's sacred in your own life. And so the cards are really just placeholders whereby people... neurotypical people, neurodivergent people can sort of ask these questions for themselves. If they come up with good answers for themselves, and they can answer these questions with all these different categories, like all those different kinds of examples I just gave, then they end up with a system. You end up with a complete package of what systematic theology is supposed to do, except it's not someone else's theology, it's not someone else's dogma. It's the theology of your own life, your own experience, your own answers to these basic questions. And the idea is that if we're all asking the same questions and we're all asking them sort of in the same way, we'll probably come up with similar answers, but they don't have to be exactly similar because our lives are not exactly similar.
- Speaker #2
Um,
- Speaker #1
I, I think I'm understanding this is it's, it's a powerful tool to sort of take someone spiritual experience and make it a little bit more tangible, find some language for what they're feeling and experiencing and getting an intentional structure to it.
- Speaker #0
I think that one thing that they say is that neurodivergent people have a hard time giving language, giving words to their experience. Their experience is so rich and so kind of complex and so kind of distinct, like kind of feel all these, there's all these sort of subtle feeling tones. that it's really hard to kind of carve the lines. This is anger. This is fear. This is nervousness. This is excitement, right? Because they all kind of feel physically sort of similar. So being able to just have a kind of glossary, I guess, for these big feelings. And again, that's what the cards are. It's like a glossary. It's like a list of words that, as soon as you know that anxiety is one thing, but fear is something a little bit different. As soon as you have those words in a sense of what the difference may be, then you can say in your experience, you know what, this isn't anxiety. This is actual fear or vice versa. And as soon as you kind of understand that, then you can make some different decisions about how to engage and interpret that. So my idea was to do that with all of the kinds of experiences that we call sacred, anything of intrinsic value, anything that gives us energy, anything that feeds us.
- Speaker #1
um now all that makes a lot of sense to me in my clinical work i rarely rely 100 on somebody's ability to say what they're thinking or feeling i i always offer up expressive options artwork uh sand trade just you know things like that uh that um just give people more options to express what they're feeling inside that can just go much further than relying on their own brain to find the words the spoken language without some other tools so that that makes a lot of sense um so i i want to keep going be trying to be mindful of time here well question number four um your background spans zen practice academic philosophy psychedelic exploration and fatherhood has neurodivergence helped you find patterns or connections between these simulating disparate experiences or have they required you to
- Speaker #0
Yeah. So yes, it was a short answer. It's a very short answer. I think that generally people, oftentimes people who are neurodivergent have strange life stories. They kind of jump around a bit. I don't know if you've noticed this. They have a hard time settling at one job, one career. They kind of bounce around. And that certainly has been true of my own life. Anyone looking at my life from the outside would see something that looks pretty chaotic. And in my case, that's been in a benefit, right? Because it means I went very, very deep into Buddhism for a while. And then I was sort of all done. And I moved on and I went very, very deep into Christianity for a while. And then I was done. And I went into Taoism, right? And I went to the I Ching, which is really, really... And that's been good for me, because it's given me an opportunity to go a pretty deep... dive into all of these different religious traditions and spiritual practices so that my experience with them is sort of deep enough in my literacy, I guess, has been deep enough that I feel very confident in being able to draw these resources together and to put them together. And then on the flip side, yeah, I want to make order of that. I want to put it together. I want to systematize that. And so the deck has been the way I've been. I've finally sort of succeeded in putting all those things together.
- Speaker #1
That's really fascinating to hear, just the deep dives into the different, you know, religions and spiritual practices. Yeah, the balancing between things is very relatable. I'm in private practice as a therapist. I do some speaking and training stuff, podcasts, some social media. But I would have told you in graduate school that I was headed into corporate leadership. And I was headed that way until I realized I hated living my life with spreadsheets and numbers and metrics because it wasn't about taking care of people. It was about meeting metrics. And so, yeah, I pivoted hard. You go back before that. um you know my my if i listed out all my jobs i you know commercial fishing gutter cleaning in college up on you know you know things just just random stuff construction yeah yeah i bounced around and even though i'm in social work that's it's easy to see where i would have ended up running machinery for a living things like that i was good at it i enjoyed it um yeah so yeah it's that bouncing around but just thinking about the different places a person could find themselves
- Speaker #2
Uh,
- Speaker #1
yeah. And how you brought it all together, I think is really, really, really interesting.
- Speaker #2
Um,
- Speaker #1
this is the point when I like to kick it back to you to say of all the things we've talked about, is there anywhere you'd want to deep dive a bit more or share more that maybe there's something that you think is important that we haven't had a chance to get it out yet?
- Speaker #0
Um, I actually, I think we did a pretty good job of, of, of touching on a lot of things. sort of briefly, I guess the thing that I would, I think the thing that I would sort of come back to is actually that maybe neurodivergent people and neurotypical people, you know, are not that foreign to each other, or at least they shouldn't be that foreign to each other. You know, that I think that when you see Bye. I think that societies do well when there's a lot of room for mutual understanding, right? I think that a healthy society is a society in which there's a place for a lot of neurotypical people to be working in corporations and working in sales and working in factories and doing the work. the sort of economic work, I guess, working in fields, you know, doing the work that to sit, to kind of, to kind of maintain the structure of society. And, and yet there's also room for neurodivergent people to be, you know, making art out of toothpicks, right. Or making music that's, that has these weird mathematical properties like Beethoven did, or, um, you know, kind of of exploring deep dive into religion. and spiritual practices and coming up with these ideas that are just sort of transformative. I think that, and I know this really isn't one of the questions that we talked about, but I just think it's really important. And one of the things that I am interested in looking at in the future and sort of learning more about is not just sort of the differences between neurotypical people and neurodivergent people, but the ways in which those differences really complement each other and the ways in which We need a society in which both of those things are possible. Does that make sense?
- Speaker #1
Yeah, I'm curious. Where do you see spirituality's place in helping to bridge between different ways that people exist in the world?
- Speaker #0
That's a really great question. I think that spirituality, whatever else spirituality is or says, I think that there's this basic element that we usually describe as transcendence, right? And the basic idea is that none of us can make sense of our lives from within our lives. That within our lives, what we experience is things we like, things we don't like, things that make sense, things that don't make sense, goals that are sometimes successes and sometimes, you know, abject. failures, right? And all these things we sort of kind of bounce on, right? We bounce along. And the only way to make sense, we all have this sort of craving, this hunger for that thing to make sense as a whole. But we can't do that from within our own lives. The only way we can do that is by understanding the way our lives fit into some larger pattern, some larger whole, whether that is your family, whether that's taking care of other people through being a doctor or a nurse or a teacher or some other caregiver, whether that's through kind of social justice or civil rights. The only way to make sense of our lives is to understand that larger whole, or whether it's a scholarly community or a research community, a community of quantum physicists who are part of this project to understand this aspect of the world, right? The only way our lives make sense, the only way we find the meaning is to find those larger networks and to... and to kind of tie into them. So the Empyrean deck is basically your options, right? The Empyrean deck is sort of a list of the ways in which people make meaning for their lives and the sort of basic elements of that. So again, it's not a doctrine in the sense of this is what you should do. It just gives you options or ways of thinking about it. It gives you a language for asking the questions in the right way.
- Speaker #1
I want to use this as sort of just a segue into wrapping up because that makes a lot of sense to me. And I'm wondering, would you just share with us, if people are hearing this thing and you know what, that sounds really like a helpful tool. I think I'd like to explore that. Well, if they want to learn more from you, how can they go about doing that?
- Speaker #0
Sure. So the simplest way is just to go to my landing page, which is EmpyreanProject.com. And the Empyrean Project is sort of my name for. for not just the kind of production of the deck itself, but for the kind of teaching and talking that I do around it. Because I'm also thinking about different ways to sort of get it out there. On the one hand, it's like a product, right? I'm going to sell it. On the other hand, I really think of it as a learning tool, an exploratory tool that people could use in a number of different ways. So for me, it's sort of a nonprofit business, right? To sort of get it out there. So yeah, that's where they would look, both to learn more about the deck itself and also within a month or so, you'll actually be able to order it directly from the manufacturer.
- Speaker #1
Got it. So I really appreciate you sharing all that. Certainly that'll all be linked in the show notes. People can go straight there. They can find the link, get directly to you. Thank you. Thank you so much for sharing with us today, for being here. letting me ask you some questions. It means a lot. So thank you so much.
- Speaker #0
Thank you. It's been a lot of fun.
- Speaker #1
And everybody, thanks for listening to Nerd Average Spot. Remember, I'm Sam Marion. If you enjoyed today's episode, if you know anybody who could benefit from listening and learning, please share it. Give us a like. Give us a follow. Thank you so much for being here.
