Autism & Mindfulness
By Alex Badila
Rocks stacked in front of an ocean.
“Sit for at least 20 minutes,” said the instructions. “20 minutes is just ‘settling down’ time.”
This was quite daunting. I had signed up for an online Vipassana meditation course to improve my mindfulness practice. I was used to shorter meditations, however, ones that were at most 20 minutes long.
“For the first section,” continued the instructions. “Count your breath, thinking, in, out, one, in, out, two, and so on. If you become distracted or lose count for any reason, start back at one. When you reach ten, go back to one.”
Okay, simple enough.
“For the second section, count your breath differently, going one, in, out, two, in, out.”
Weird, but okay.
“For the third section, take out the counting and just think in, out, in, out.”
This was something I was used to doing, so that was no problem.
“For the fourth section, sharpen your focus to the point where the air first touches, noticing its touch going in and out.”
I wasn’t used to this, but I assumed he meant to focus on the nostrils, which didn’t sound too hard.
So I sat and followed the instructions. When counting, I found I was able to go up all the way to ten and start again, and for the fourth section, I felt the air touch my nostrils easily.
Turns out I was doing it all wrong.
“Whenever a thought comes up during your counting,” explained the video on the site. “Just start again at one. For a while, you might be going ‘In, out, one, oh. In, out, one, oh.’ That is fine. You will get better at it with practice.”
Great, so it was much harder than I thought. But wait, there’s more!
“For the fourth section, the place where the breath first touches is usually the upper lip. You might not be able to sense it at first, so you can use saliva to moisten it.”
So it wasn’t the nostrils! Man!
So I sat again with this in mind.
In, out, one. Concentrate. Wait, that’s a thought. Start over. In, out, one. I did it! Nope. Thought again. In, out, one. Be still. Man, how is this even possible?
I was getting really frustrated. It was very hard to get past one. Even when I did and went on to two, I would start doubting myself and thinking that I must’ve been distracted and not noticed.
I emailed the instructor.
“Is it actually possible to go up to ten without any others thoughts coming up?” I asked. “It seems impossible.”
“Yes, it is possible to get a ‘perfect ten’,” he answered. “But that is not what you should be striving for. Meditation is not about working towards a goal.”
Classic meditation instructor answer, which proved to be illuminating and frustrating at the same time.
I was not fond of this.
*****
I started to seriously get back into meditation last September. It was the main reason why I had gotten into Buddhism. When I heard my temple had a meditation class every Thursday evening, I jumped at the chance!
However, slight problem: I was taking a technical writing course that would conflict with it. Aw, man! How was I supposed to do meditation now?
That’s when I searched for an online meditation course, that I could do in my own time, and found the Vipassana course mentioned above. I signed up for it without a second thought!
I also ended up dropping the technical writing course, which meant I could do the Thursday evening classes, as well.
So I was doing that course and the Thursday meditation session, which I soon found out was based on Zen Buddhism. That session was a lot more straightforward. It was a mix of sitting and walking meditation. Both meditations were about focusing on the breath, which I was used to doing. The walking meditation advised to match your steps with your breathing, breathing in and taking a step, and then breathing out and taking another step. It was mercifully simple.
Now, if that wasn’t enough, a friend of mine knew about my interest in meditation and Buddhism, and let me in on what she was doing for employment.
“Hey, I think you would be interested in this,” she said. “It’s a research project studying the effects of mindfulness on autistic adults. Wanna join?”
Since I was both a mindfulness practicer and an autistic adult, this seemed like a match made in heaven!
Now let’s put into perspective how much I was meditating: I was doing 20-30 minutes of Vipassana meditation every day, along with a 2 hour meditation session on Thursday (which was half meditation, half discussion), and another one hour meditation course for autistic adults on the same day (the meditation portion was about 10-20 minutes). I was going to reach Enlightenment in no time!
All jokes aside, meditation and mindfulness have helped me a lot. I am less stressed and overall happier because of it. I believe it can help autistic adults with their mental health challenges, and the evidence backs me up.
During the mindfulness for autistic adults course, I learned all about the scientific studies done linking autism and mindfulness. Thanks to the science of neuroplasticity, your mind can change over time, for better or for worse. By exercising mindfulness, you’re training the brain like a muscle. What you train the brain to do is to focus on the present moment, which is a radical thing for most people. We are usually caught up in constantly ruminating, either about regrets from the past or worries about the future. By focusing solely on the present moment, we start to realize that things aren’t as bad as we thought they were.
Vietnamese Zen Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh says that we have everything we need to be happy right here in the present moment. That quote has been life-changing for me. It made me stop running after external things, thinking that they will make me happy, and made me turn inside to focus on myself. What I found was able to give me a more lasting happiness.
There are other things that mindfulness teaches us. It teaches us that everything is impermanent, nothing lasts forever, which includes our emotions. When we feel intense negative emotions, it feels like they will last forever. But mindfulness tells us they don’t. What makes them last really long is rejecting these emotions, trying to force them down and repress them.
I don’t want to feel this way! This isn’t fair! I wish it were different!
This only makes the negative emotions stronger. The best way to deal with these emotions, according to mindfulness, is to accept them and let them pass. If you ride the wave, it will inevitably end, and you will start to feel better.
It’s okay to feel this way. This, too, shall pass. My emotions are valid. This sucks for now, but it’s only temporary.
This revelation has helped me immensely.
The last mindfulness teaching I would like to cover is decreasing judgments. By judging other people and ourselves harshly, we suffer a lot more.
That person is such a jerk. I am worthless. I will never be able to do anything. I am a horrible person.
Mindfulness teaches us to let go of these harsh judgments and just accept how things are. It’s the same solution to intense negative emotions, only now we’re focusing on people.
I accept both my good and bad qualities. That person may have been rude to me, but maybe they were having a bad day.
This is easier said than done, of course. It took me a lot of time and practice to get to this point. But it is possible!
There is a way to handle the hard parts of mental illness, and that way can be through mindfulness.
*****
Finally, I would like to talk about adapting mindfulness practices for autistic individuals. Not everyone can sit perfectly still for 20-30 minutes, and I have found this can be quite a struggle for autistic individuals specifically.
During the mindfulness for autistic adults course, I learned that I was free to modify the meditations to suit me better. This was a total 180 from the Vipassana course I was taking, which said that I had to do it exactly as they told me to.
After I had finished the Vipassana course, I kept up the practice, but I started struggling with it. 20-30 minutes are no problem for me, because I have done quite a bit of meditation in the past, but a lot of times the sitting would end up being longer than that. Some meditations had seven sections to go through, and I was encouraged to not use guided meditations or look at the clock. I was told that, after a while, my body would have a sense of how much time had passed, and I would know instinctively when to move on to another section.
I never got to that point. A lot of times I went way over. I remember one time I ended up sitting for 55 minutes. I found from experience that after 35 minutes, I start to get restless, making continuing the meditation a chore. Once I felt that restlessness and still had a bunch of sections to go through, I started rushing through those sections just to get to the end. This was not good, because I was told to focus equally on all sections.
So I abandoned the Vipassana meditations for a while in favour of shorter meditations, of about 10 minutes. However, these felt way too short. I wasn’t getting that much out of them.
Then I remembered what I was told in my mindfulness for autistics course, and I ended up modifiying the Vipassana meditations to suit me better. I made the cutoff point be 30 minutes, no matter what. I looked at the clock after every section to see how much time I had left. I even started counting how many times I was saying the phrases just so I could get a more standardized time for each section. This was another big no-no, because it was part of “the calculating mind”. I didn’t care. I did it anyway.
By adjusting the meditations to fit my specific needs, I was finally happy with them, and was able to progress. The plateau I had reached had finally been surpassed!
So the lesson here is that if a certain meditation exercise doesn’t work for you, change it! You are free to be as creative as possible. Can’t sit for 20 minutes? Make it 10, or even 5. As you practice it more and more, you will be able to do it for longer periods of time. Can’t even sit for that amount time? Then move! There are a lot of moving meditations out there you can find, like the walking meditation I mentioned earlier.
There are no clear right and wrong ways to do mindfulness. Feel free to experiment and find what works for you.