Caves, Campfires, and Watering Holes for Dandelions, Tulips, and Orchids 

Cavendish Space: psychologically and sensory safe spaces suited to zone work, flow states, intermittent collaboration, and collaborative niche construction.

DESPITE HIS ECCENTRIC COUTURE and the strange totem rising from his backyard, Henry Cavendish was not a wizard. He was, in eighteenth-century terms, a natural philosopher, or what we now call a scientist. (The word scientist wasn’t coined until the nineteenth century, when it was proposed as a counterpart to artist by oceanographer and poet William Whewell.) He was not only one of the most ingenious natural philosophers who ever lived, he was one of the first true scientists in the modern sense.

Silberman, Steve. NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity (p. 21). Penguin Publishing Group.

Since reading NeuroTribes, we think of psychologically and sensory safe spaces suited to zone work as “Cavendish bubbles” and “Cavendish space”, after Henry Cavendish, the wizard of Clapham Common and discoverer of hydrogen. The privileges of nobility afforded room for his differences, allowing him the space and opportunity to become “one of the first true scientists in the modern sense.”

Let’s build psychologically safe homes of opportunity without the requirement of nobility or privilege. Cavendish’s autistic ways of being offer insight on how to do that.

“Stimpunks addresses the idea of how education may provide ‘psychological & sensory safe spaces’ that simultaneously provide opportunities for ‘intermittent collaboration’, rather than enforced large group interactions, and ‘collaborative niche construction’.”

Stenning, Anna. Narrating the Many Autisms: Identity, Agency, Mattering (The Routledge Series Integrating Science and Culture) (p. 179).

Make Space for Cavendish

A school struggling with the ravages of American poverty has to first be a home — the kind of home the children may not have at home. A place that is relentlessly safe, that is both calming and exciting, that offers unconditional love, and that offers boundless opportunity.

That ‘home’ must be supportive and accepting, loving and encouraging, and it must provide the biggest possible window on to the world, on to the universe.

A home of opportunity.

What does opportunity look like? First, it looks like trust. It looks like freedom. And it looks like choice.

You must see your school as a home of opportunity | by Ira David Socol | Medium

Cavendish spaces are homes of opportunity that recognize that:

• Good ideas can come from anywhere.
• Everyone can contribute.

If Henry Cavendish hadn’t had a home of opportunity that suited his sensory and social needs, we would have lost him and his revelations to an asylum.

Let’s build homes of opportunity that meet the sensory and social needs of all humans. Cavendish’s life shows us the way.

In other words, make space for Cavendish.

Good ideas can come from anywhere.

Everyone can contribute.

There is no learning without the body.

Cavendish learning spaces are based on flexibility, interaction, movement and the role of embodied responsive experiences. We reject the boundaries of traditional classroom settings and look at how they not only restrict embodied experiences but lead to disembodied experiences and harm.

There is no learning without the body.

Embodied Education: Creating Safe Space for Learning, Facilitating and Sharing

A radical change to learning spaces is needed to enable children to be embodied, feel safe and feel liberated enough to explore and be curious about the world around them. We can work and learn in infinitely creative ways, but we need to be embodied in order to do that. To feel embodied, you need feelings of safety; people need to value strengths, validate difficulties, and provide support where needed. The work by McGreevey et al.(2023) based on the Life World Model by Todres et al. (2009) applies equally to health care and education. It offers a humanising framework for everyone, not just autistic people. Everyone deserves to feel a sense of togetherness and have their journeys make sense so they have agency and autonomy over their learning journeys.

…freedom of embodiment—that is, the freedom to indulge, adopt, and/or experiment with any styles or quirks of movement and embodiment, whether they come naturally to one or whether one chooses them—is an essential element of cognitive liberty, and thus an essential area of focus for the Neurodiversity Movement. The freedom to be autistic necessarily includes the freedom to give bodily expression to one’s neurodivergence.

Walker, Nick. Neuroqueer Heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities (pp. 142-143). Autonomous Press.

Neuroscientific evidence suggests that we can no longer justify learning theories that dissociate the mind from the body, the self from social context.

Emotions, Learning, and the Brain: Exploring the Educational Implications of Affective Neuroscience by Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

Timeless Patterns in Primordial Spaces

Our favorite tool for designing for whole bodyminds is “Caves, Campfires, and Watering Holes”.

Futurist David Thornburg identifies three archetypal learning spaces— the campfire, cave, and watering hole—that schools can use as physical spaces and virtual spaces for student and adult learning.

Australia’s Campfires, Caves, and Watering Holes: Educators on ISTE’s Australian Study Tour Discovered How to Create New Learning and Teaching Environments where Curriculum and Instructional Tools Meet the Digital Age, UNCG NC DOCKS (North Carolina Digital Online Collection of Knowledge and Scholarship)

“Campfires in Cyberspace” explored the idea that humans have always occupied one of four primordial learning spaces at any given time, ranging from the Campfire (home to the presentation of information by a teacher) to the Watering Hole (the domain of social learning from peers), the Cave (home of reflective construction) and Life (home to the construction of artifacts based on what we have learned).

In Cavendish Space, learners move between these spaces on their own, and computer technology has a positive role to play in each of these learning spaces.

When students have developed a little bit of metacognitive language around their learning spaces, they are also able to take control of their learning and their learning spaces – they can move to the space that best fits the type of learning that they are doing, and be able to explain exactly why this space is going to help them in achieving their learning goals.

Re-imagining Learning Spaces to inspire contemporary learning – Part One: Models for Change – Linking Learning

We provide caves, campfires, and watering holes so that dandelions, tulips, and orchids alike can find respite from an intense world designed against us.

Caves, campfires, and watering holes are…

• necessary to providing psychological safety and sensory safety.
• necessary to positive niche construction.
• necessary to intermittent collaboration.
• necessary to designing for neurological pluralism.
• essential to our conception of Cavendish Space.

In schools, we find that the cave form of learning is never a priority. This is a serious problem because the millions of dollars spent on many new schools will do little to improve educational outcomes if they are built without cave spaces. 

The Language of School Design : Design Patterns for 21st Century Schools : Nair, Prakash 

Developed by an alumni of Xerox PARC in its R&D heyday, “Caves, Campfires, and Watering Holes” have spread to progressive education, progressive workplaces, and the neurodiversity movement. Stimpunk Ryan helped create and run a multi-billion dollar company and a global Open Source community using the ideas that would become Cavendish Space. “Caves, Campfires, and Watering Holes” and “intermittent collaboration” provide core insight into how the creative teams Ryan worked on for 30 years operated.

“Caves, Campfires, and Watering Holes” and “intermittent collaboration” provide core insight into how creative teams work.

Stimpunk Helen was a classroom teacher working with kids with “Profound and Multiple Learning Disabilities (PMLD)” for 20 years. Helen with her classroom experience and Ryan with his tech team building experience were both working with caves, campfires, and watering holes and intermittent collaboration all those years.

At home, Ryan always liked small spaces. As a kid, he read books under the bed. The small space distanced him from the overload of his physical reality while stories transported him to fantasies and realities beyond his life, body, and experience. His pocket universes, though small in this world, possessed the depth and breadth for a book to unfurl.

He hid in closets. He created pillow and blanket forts and set up house in tool sheds. He sought and created small spaces in a big world of sensory and social overwhelm. He found room to be himself in edges, underneaths, and in-betweens.

…it is in solitude that students assimilate, synthesize and internalize learning so that it becomes knowledge and (sometimes) wisdom. s

(Nair, Prakash. The Language of School Design : Design Patterns for 21st Century Schools)

Likewise, Helen and her family spent years building niches in their home, building sensory spaces suitable to their bodyminds leveraging Helen’s classroom experience.

We were both making Cavendish Space long before we developed the language for it.

We independently re-discovered the “Timeless Patterns in Primordial Spaces” that have been with us all along.

Cavendish Space can be found in PMLD/SpEd/SEND classrooms as well as in tech companies. What works for early years children also works for adult professionals, of all neurotypes, profiles, and abilities.

What worked for Henry Cavendish works for everyone.

These are timeless patterns of human learning and collaboration that cannot be stifled without harm.

At our learning space, we use Cavendish Space to pursue special interests and intrinsic motivation. We use it to assist attention tunnels so that learners can slip into flow states.

Online and offline, we provide individual spaces as well as community spaces so that learners can progressively socialize according to their interaction capacity.

We use the timeless patterns and primordial spaces used by those who created laser printers, Ethernet, the modern personal computer, and the GUI. We use patterns and spaces that have been with humanity all along. These patterns and spaces are there at the heart of progressive, human-centered education. We repress these timeless patterns to our peril.

These are timeless patterns of human learning and collaboration that cannot be stifled without harm.

We repress these timeless patterns to our peril.

It’s About Finding the Right Niche

For an autistic person ‘it’s about finding the right niche’, because ‘if you have a particular interest, you can really thrive in a particular niche.’

Happier on the outside? Discourses of exclusion, disempowerment and belonging from former autistic school staff

Neuroqueer DIY: The place where we belong does not exist. We will build it.

…intentionally liberating oneself from the culturally ingrained and enforced performance of neuronormativity can be thought of as neuroqueering.

Neuroqueer Heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilitie

neuronormativity = a set of norms, standards, expectations and ideals that centre a particular way of functioning as the right way to function.

neuroqueer = subverting, defying, disrupting, liberating oneself from neuronormativity.

“The contemporary classroom is a temple of neuronormativity. Every act in the fight for the right to learn differently can be a neuroqueering act (based on Nick Walker’s Neuroqueer Theory, 2021). We suggest fundamentally neuroqueer learning spaces that enable “freedom of embodiment” and “cognitive liberty” are needed. We need learning facilitators to be ‘space holders’ so children’s bodyminds are allowed to live and learn authentically. Our Cavendish Space is an incubator and catalyst for neuroqueer becoming.”

We are asking: How can we transform and liberate the expectations of neuronormative education and create neuroqueer learning spaces?

We are suggesting: A neuroqueer transformation = unlearning, collaborating, creating

Let’s neuroqueer learning spaces, however we can. We must to survive.

DIY: It’s inherently part of surviving.

In the DIY tradition of punk and disabled communities, let’s hit thrift stores, buy lumber, apply some hacker ethos, and turn the compliance classroom into something psychologically safe and comfortable to a diverse team of bodyminds engaged in experiential learning.

In addition to building and transforming and iterating, we need to deconstruct.

We need Cavendish Space now.

Let’ s make space for Cavendish.

We build Cavendish Space with these tools.

We build Cavendish Space with these tools. We expand on each below, weaving in the story of Henry Cavendish and his autistic ways of being.

Caves, Campfires, and Watering Holes

Campfires are a way to learn from experts or storytellers; Watering Holes help you learn from peers; Caves are places to learn from yourself; and Life is where you bring it all together by applying what you learn to projects in the real world.

 The Language of School Design : Design Patterns for 21st Century Schools : Nair, Prakash 

One of the more interesting ideas emerging from attention capital theory is the surprising role environment can play in supporting elite cognitive performance.

Professional writers seem to be at the cutting edge of this experimentation, but I wouldn’t be surprised if, in the near future, we start to see more serious attention paid to constructing seriously deep spaces as our economy shifts towards increasingly demanding knowledge work.

Simon Winchester’s Writing Barn – Study Hacks – Cal Newport

Cavendish needed control over parts of his world in order to build his niche.

This is my space. It allows me to have control over one small part of a traumatic and offensive world.

AuDHD and me: My nesting habits – Emergent Divergence

And Cavendish needed intermittent collaboration.

Intermittent Collaboration

Groups whose members interacted only intermittently preserved the best of both worlds, rather than succumbing to the worst. These groups had an average quality of solution that was nearly identical to those groups that interacted constantly, yet they preserved enough variation to find some of the best solutions, too.

Problem-solving techniques take on new twist: For best solutions, intermittent collaboration provides the right formula

Our cave, campfire, and watering hole moods map to the red, yellow, and green of interaction badges (aka color communication badges).

The three-level and three-speed communication flow used at Automattic, WordPress, Stimpunks, and other distributed organizations reflects the progressive sociality of cave, campfire, and watering hole contexts and red, yellow, green interaction moods.

With our communication stack, we cover the three levels, three speeds, and three archetypal spaces of communication, collaboration, and sociality.

• Three Levels: Conversation, Discussion, Publication
• Three Speeds: Realtime, Async, Storage
• Three Spaces: Caves, Campfires, Watering Holes
• Three Sensitivities: Dandelions, Tulips, Orchids

First, and make no mistake here, all three sacred learning spaces will have analogs in cyberspace. If they don’t, then cyberspace will cease to exist as a domain of interaction among humans. Those using the new media will create their own analogs for these learning places, even if they are not designed into the system.

Campfires in Cyberspace: Primordial Metaphors for Learning in the 21st Century

Together, all these tools facilitate intermittent collaboration, psychological safety, and sensory safety. They help us develop and respect flow states. They help us solve problems together.

Niche Construction

He (Cavendish) transformed his whole environment into a playground for his keenly focused senses and intellect.

Silberman, Steve. NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity (p. 28). Penguin Publishing Group.

For an autistic person ‘it’s about finding the right niche’, because ‘if you have a particular interest, you can really thrive in a particular niche.’

Happier on the outside? Discourses of exclusion, disempowerment and belonging from former autistic school staff

Niche Construction

In Nature: Helping to ensure the thriving of an organism by directly modifying the environment in such a way that it enhances that organism’s chances for survival.

In Culture: Helping to ensure the thriving of a child by directly modifying the environment in such a way that it enhances that child’s chances for success.

Neurodiversity in the Classroom

niche construction may be every bit as important for survival as natural selection 

Reimagining Inclusion with Positive Niche Construction

The fundamental point here is that changing one’s environment can be just as effective – and often far more effective – in aiding that navigation than simply looking inside the head for solutions, or trying to – often forcibly – alter behaviours.

PsyArXiv Preprints | Smart Environments for Diverse Cognitive Styles: the Case of Autism

Positive Niche Construction

Positive Niche Construction–practice of differentiating instruction for the neurodiverse brain

Neurodiversity in the Classroom

In his book, Neurodiversity in the Classroom, Thomas Armstrong argues that the concept of neurodiversity is a “concept whose time has come.” What he means by this is to re-imagine how special education is constructed in our education system. The idea Armstrong highlights in his book is called, “positive niche construction” (PNC). Armstrong proposes this idea as an alternative to the more classic idea of “least restrictive environment” (LRE).

 Reimagining Inclusion with Positive Niche Construction

Positive niche construction is a strengths-based approach to educating students with disabilities.

 Reimagining Inclusion with Positive Niche Construction

Collaborative Niche Construction

Collaborative niche construction allows organisations and people to participate in the evolution of a living system and results in resilient social ecosystems.

The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale: Timeless patterns of human limitations

A Space of One’s Own

This is my space. It allows me to have control over one small part of a traumatic and offensive world.

AuDHD and me: My nesting habits – Emergent Divergence

In schools, we find that the cave form of learning is never a priority. This is a serious problem because the millions of dollars spent on many new schools will do little to improve educational outcomes if they are built without cave spaces.

 The Language of School Design : Design Patterns for 21st Century Schools : Nair, Prakash 

…it is in solitude that students assimilate, synthesize and internalize learning so that it becomes knowledge and (sometimes) wisdom.

 The Language of School Design : Design Patterns for 21st Century Schools : Nair, Prakash 

When we operate within a space over which we feel ownership—a space that feels like it’s ours—a host of psychological and even physiological changes ensues. These effects were first observed in studies of a phenomenon known as the “home advantage”: the consistent finding that athletes tend to win more and bigger victories when they are playing in their own fields, courts, and stadiums. On their home turf, teams play more aggressively, and their members (both male and female) exhibit higher levels of testosterone, a hormone associated with the expression of social dominance.

But the home advantage is not limited to sports. Researchers have identified a more general effect as well: when people occupy spaces that they consider their own, they experience themselves as more confident and capable. They are more efficient and productive. They are more focused and less distractible. And they advance their own interests more forcefully and effectively. A study by psychologists Graham Brown and Markus Baer, for example, found that people who engage in negotiation within the bounds of their own space claim between 60 and 160 percent more value than the “visiting” party.

Benjamin Meagher, an assistant professor of psychology at Kenyon College in Ohio, has advanced an intriguing theory that may explain these outcomes. The way we act, the way we think, and even the way we perceive the world around us differ when we’re in a space that’s familiar to us—one that we have shaped through our own choices and imbued with our own memories of learning and working there in the past. When we’re on our home turf, Meagher has found, our mental and perceptual processes operate more efficiently, with less need for effortful self-control. The mind works better because it doesn’t do all the work on its own; it gets an assist from the structure embedded in its environment, structure that marshals useful information, supports effective habits and routines, and restrains unproductive impulses. In a familiar space over which we feel ownership, he suggests, “our cognition is distributed across the entire setting.” The place itself helps us think.

The Extended Mind – Annie Murphy Paul

Living by her own rules has had a massive positive effect. She’s constantly making adjustments, finding new ways to make herself more comfortable. “Everything feels different, it really does impact everything. Like my body was masked!” she says. Now that her daily environment works with her body rather than against it, she feels physically and mentally free. Marta Rose writes that divergent design should honor the unique relationships Autistic people have to objects.

Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity (p. 16

It took me decades to learn how to change my environment to make myself comfortable.

@willaful

It took decades to learn I was allowed.

@steve_asbell

The place itself helps us think.

The colleagues invited to join him (Cavendish) for a dish of mutton must have seen something amazing: a house transformed into a vast apparatus for interrogating the mysteries of existence.

Silberman, Steve. NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity (p. 27). Penguin Publishing Group.

The place itself helps us think.

The Extended Mind – Annie Murphy Paul

Flow States

Wilson also recognized, however, that Cavendish’s reserve made it possible for him to conduct his research with such single-minded intensity. He was not self-absorbed; he was the opposite. He was wholly engaged in his study of nature, which provided its own form of communion—if not with the souls of other people, then with the hidden forces behind the visible face of things.

Silberman, Steve. NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity (p. 26). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

People need to feel appreciated and safe, to give themselves to an activity; and they need to feel like they are making progress to keep giving themselves to it. To get into The Zone, you need to know you’re getting somewhere, that you’re in the process of mastering a skill – you need ongoing feedback, whether from another person or another source. There is also something uniquely satisfying about working with other people effectively, towards a shared goal; in my experience there is no substitute when it comes to building a community.

Flow states are the pinnacle of intrinsic motivation, where somebody wants to do something for themselves, for the sake of doing it and doing it well.

Flow allows us to recharge, to feel a sense of achievement and satisfaction, and a kind of respite from the often-baffling demands of the school social environment.

Craft, Flow and Cognitive Styles

When focused like this an Autistic person can enter a ‘flow state‘ which can bring great joy and satisfaction to the person experiencing it.

However it can make switching between tasks and other transitions difficult.

Monotropism

If you imagine that an autistic kid at school is likely to be wrenched out of their attention tunnel multiple times every day, each time leading to disorientation and deep discomfort, you are on your way to understanding why school environments can be so stressful for many autistic students. If you can avoid contributing to that, you may find that you have an easier time with your autistic students: try entering into their attention tunnel when you can, rather than tugging them out of it. Parallel play is one powerful tool for this; start where the child is, show interest in what they’re focused on. If you do need to pull them out of whatever they’re focusing on, it’s best to give them a bit of time.

Craft, Flow and Cognitive Styles

Psychological Safety

Psychological safety is a condition in which you feel (1) included, (2) safe to learn, (3) safe to contribute, and (4) safe to challenge the status quo—all without fear of being embarrassed, marginalized, or punished in some way.

All human beings have the same innate need: We long to belong.

The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety: Defining the Path to Inclusion and Innovation

In the hierarchy of needs, psychological safety straddles fulfillment, belonging, and security needs—three of the four basic need categories (figure 3). Once the basic physical needs of food and shelter are met, psychological safety becomes a priority.

The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety

You have to be safe. You have to have time.

Safety and time.

Future Learning Design Podcast – The Philosopher & the Neuroscientist – A Conversation with Zak Stein and Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

All human beings have the same innate need: We long to belong.

The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety

Dandelions, Tulips, and Orchids

Neurodivergent people are hypersensitive to mindset and environment due to a greater number of neuronal connections.

They have both a higher risk for trauma and a large capacity for sensing safety.

Neuroception and the 3 Part Brain

In fact, much as they disagreed on many other things, as they did, Dewey and Russell did agree on what Russell called this “humanistic conception,” with its roots in the Enlightenment, the idea that education is not to be viewed as something like filling a vessel with water but, rather, assisting a flower to grow in its own way-an eighteenth-century view that they revived. In other words, providing the circumstances in which the normal creative patterns will flourish.

Democracy and Education on JSTOR

Sensory Safety

Understanding the sensing and perceptual world of autistic people is central to understanding autism.

Considering and meeting the sensory needs of autistic people in housing | Local Government Association

Understanding the sensing and perceptual world of autistic people is central to understanding autism.

Everyone has eight sensing systems: the first five being the familiar sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste. These five give us information about the world outside our bodies. Three internal sensing systems give us information from inside our bodies – our vestibular system (coordinating movement with balance), proprioception (awareness of position and movement of the body) and interoception (knowing our internal state including feelings, temperature, pain, hunger and thirst). Although not all the external senses are equally affected by the physical environment, we consider them all – as they collectively add to the ‘sensory load’ that many autistic people often experience. Any sensory input needs to be processed and can reduce the capacity to manage and process other things.

As many autistic people process one thing at a time, sensory stimulation can stack up. As the brain’s highways become congested, there are repercussions throughout the entire neural network. This can lead to headaches, nausea and the fight and flight response, this is what causes many meltdowns and shutdowns.

Considering and meeting the sensory needs of autistic people in housing | Local Government Association

Imagine having no choice but to zoom in on life.

Perpetual defense mode – the silent wave

“Patterns are a real problem for me. I get absorbed by them – they take all my focus and it’s really distressing. When I’m overloaded sound and visuals can become too intense. My ability to manage fluctuates depending on how overloaded I am. When I’m overloaded, I can’t manage visual clutter, things on mantelpieces and walls, open fires, pattered carpets or clocks ticking. These are all things that would seem fine on a good day but become too much.”

“I have massive sensory sensitivity. Especially to light and sound. My sensitivity fluctuates depending on how overloaded I am. If I’m not overloaded, then I can tolerate a lot more.”

Supporting Autistic Flourishing at Home and Beyond – Alexis Quinn artwork – NDTi

The divergent ways in which we process the world around us can also leave us fatigued and sapped of energy, as autistic people have “higher perceptual capacity” than our neurotypical counterparts, meaning that we process greater volumes of information from our environment. Autistic people commonly use the concept of ‘spoon theory‘ to conceptualize this experience of having limited energy resources. Initially theorized in the context of chronic illness, spoon theory can be explained as every task and activity (enjoyable or otherwise) requiring a certain number of ‘spoons’. Most people start their day with such an abundance of spoons that they can do whatever they choose, and rarely run low. We autistic folk start with a limited number of spoons, and when those spoons run dangerously low, we need to step back, rest, engage in self-care, and wait for our spoons to replenish.

Doing More by Doing Less: Reducing Autistic Burnout | Psychology Today

The long-term effects of misunderstanding or mislabeling sensory trauma can be catastrophic.

How sensory trauma affects how we grow develop and learn

Embodiment and Regulation

Embodied Education aims to integrate the body into learning spaces, and so careful consideration of the following policies and procedures are important for changing the paradigm in learning and sharing – which regulates the nervous system and promotes health and the intelligence of the body:

• Sickness
• Wellbeing
• Menstrual
• Menopause
• Trauma and Stress
• Neurodiversity and Neurodivergence
• Work/Life Balance
• Rest
• Holiday
• Team Building
• Reciprocity – Financial or other exchange

Embodied Education: Creating Safe Space for Learning, Facilitating and Sharing

Embodiment

Embodiment: to stay present in our own bodies to sensations, emotions and the external environment without going into dysregulation without going into fight/flight/freeze/fawn.

Embodiment and Sensory Systems

Embodied / Embodiment

Incarnated – to give bodily form to. In, through and of the body.

Embodied Education: Creating Safe Space for Learning, Facilitating and Sharing

There is no learning without the body.

Embodied Education: Creating Safe Space for Learning, Facilitating and Sharing

What does it mean to be embodied?

For our children to feel safe they need to feel
connected and regulated. We need to support them to
understand the way their mind, body and sensory
system all work together and to feel ‘embodied’. When people are regulated they will be able to learn, enjoy life and be the best version of themselves.

Embodiment and Sensory Systems

Somatic

Somatic: soma is ‘of the body’, being able to be in a relationship with the body and to support the body to do what it needs to do to be healthy.

This may involve releasing what we hold physically in the body (ie a trauma response).

Embodiment and Sensory Systems

…somatic psychology, a field which among other things studies how the organization and functioning of the psyche are entwined with the organization and usage of the body.

Walker, Nick. Neuroqueer Heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities (p. 170). Autonomous Press.

The field of somatic psychology encompasses a broad, diverse, and evolving realm of theories and practices, united by two central principles; these same principles underlie the transformative capacities of numerous practices from a wide diversity of cultures—various martial arts, yogic and ecstatic traditions, bodywork methods, embodiment-focused mindfulness techniques, and more—which are sometimes collectively referred to as somatic practices. The first principle is that body and mind are a single unified system. The psyche or self is constructed and organized somatically; subjective experience and the workings of the psyche are inextricably entwined with specific embodiments. Consciousness, experience, perspectives, mindsets, attitudes, sense of self, and capacities for feeling, cognition, and action are grounded in—and shaped and delimited by—ingrained habits of bodily usage and bodily organization, including habits of tension, relaxation, excitation, posture, breath, restriction, and movement. The second principle follows from the first: since the dynamics of the psyche are grounded in the organization and usage of the body, intentional alterations to the habitual organization and use of the body can effect profound transformations of the psyche (Grand, 1978, 2015a, 2015b; Heckler, 1984; Walker, 2019).

From a somatically-informed perspective, then, the states of psychological rigidity and reactivity that are obstacles to creativity are entwined with and anchored in chronic bodily rigidities. These bodily rigidities, which Reich (1933/1972a) referred to as character armor, have little to do with stiffness or flexibility in the conventional athletic sense; one’s degree of prejudice or open-mindedness cannot be measured by how easily one can touch one’s toes. Rather, the rigidities in question are deeply ingrained and largely unconscious patterns of habitual muscular tension or “holding,” which originate as instinctual defensive reactions to frightening or traumatic events, attempts to adapt to external demands in the developmental environment, or self-protective efforts to suppress feelings, excitations, and/or selfexpressions that are unsafe or unacceptable in the developmental environment (Conger, 1994; Grand, 1978, 2015b; Heckler, 1984).

The Use of Transformative Somatic Practices in Processes of Collective Imagination and Collaborative Future-Shaping – Nick Walker

Embodied Attunement

This section defends that Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC) can be described and understood as embodied misattunement with a neurotypical (sociocultural) environment (Bolis et al., 2018; Bolis, Dumas and Schilbach, 2023).

PsyArXiv Preprints | Smart Environments for Diverse Cognitive Styles: the Case of Autism

In phenomenology, embodied attunement refers to the way in which individuals experience the world through their embodied interactions with the environment. This includes the physical, sensory, and emotional aspects of our interactions with the environment. Embodied attunement involves a reciprocal relationship between the body and the environment, where the body is attuned to the environment and the environment is attuned to the body (Merleau- Ponty, 1962; Varela, Thompson and Rosch, 2017; Gallagher and Zahavi, 2020; Gallagher, 2022).

PsyArXiv Preprints | Smart Environments for Diverse Cognitive Styles: the Case of Autism

Phenomenologists posit that embodied attunement is a fundamental aspect of our experience of the world, as it allows us to navigate and interact with our surroundings in a meaningful way (Fuchs, 2002; Gallagher, 2008).

PsyArXiv Preprints | Smart Environments for Diverse Cognitive Styles: the Case of Autism

In conclusion, ASC can be understood as embodied disattunement with a neurotypical environment, such that individuals with autism may experience difficulties in their sensory, emotional, and bodily interactions with the environment, which can result in a broad array of challenges, including understanding and responding appropriately to social cues, regu- lating emotional responses, and processing sensory information.

PsyArXiv Preprints | Smart Environments for Diverse Cognitive Styles: the Case of Autism

Trauma

Understanding the nervous system and its functions, trauma, and trauma responses, is vital for effective learning, safe space holding and non-toxic wellness and spiritual communities –and in any learning environment. It is also important to recognise and understand the stress responses of the body. As an educator, facilitator, space holder or practitioner, working under the premise of ‘first do no harm’ is part of a well-rounded trauma-informed approach.

Embodied Education: Creating Safe Space for Learning, Facilitating and Sharing

Exceptional learning and growth organically flow from body comfort and regulated nervous system. These conditions activate curiosity and discovery, connection and resilience. Impactful learning will only take place if the nervous system has capacity and regulation.

Embodied Education: Creating Safe Space for Learning, Facilitating and Sharing

Trauma is the reaction within the nervous system and brain, which occurs when someone does not have the capacity to stay present to it. The experience overwhelms us and takes us out of regulation.

Embodied Education: Creating Safe Space for Learning, Facilitating and Sharing

Being trauma-informed means recognising the prevalence and impact of the behaviour, signs and symptoms of trauma on all members within the space, group, and institution –alongside understanding and being educated about stress and the nervous system, whilst avoiding possible re-traumatisation, dissociation, bypassing or adding to an individual’s existing trauma and stress. Trauma-informed organisations and practitioners understand adverse childhood experiences and the impact of them, alongside other types of traumas and their impact.

Embodied Education: Creating Safe Space for Learning, Facilitating and Sharing

Regulation

In practical terms, supporting nervous system regulation means tending to and responding to the body’s needs first and foremost. This means prioritising physiological needs. Things like taking rest breaks, keeping warm, cooling down, regularly hydrating, moving when the body feels it needs to, and going to the toilet as soon as you need to.

Embodied Education: Creating Safe Space for Learning, Facilitating and Sharing

Outstanding learning and care start with well, embodied and regulated children and adults – which starts with well, embodied and regulated staff – which starts with well, embodied and regulated leaders. This is what we are committed to being. We embody, lead, and behave by example. In a nervous system friendly, trauma-informed, embodied organisation, learning, facilitation and space holding is progressive, cutting-edge and the new paradigm being birthed through us – and is especially needed in the wake of the Covid 19 pandemic.

Embodied Education: Creating Safe Space for Learning, Facilitating and Sharing

...if we spend too long in activation, we start to experience an escalation of emotions and body symptoms, anxiety, and panic (flight, moving away from the threat), anger and rage (fight, moving towards the threat aggressively) and merging with others’ views and people-pleasing (fawn).

Embodied Education: Creating Safe Space for Learning, Facilitating and Sharing

Finally, if we feel we cannot escape the stress of threat we move into freeze, the dorsal vagal aspect of our nervous system. Here the body immobilises and collapses. We are completely overwhelmed, feel helpless, numb, depressed, and can dissociate.

Embodied Education: Creating Safe Space for Learning, Facilitating and Sharing

A stressor is the trigger for the activation of the body’s (nervous system’s sympathetic portion) stress response. The aim is to recognise the activation and our body’s preferred way of responding – whether it be flight, fight, fawn, or freeze –and to stay present to it, taking steps to manage and reduce it using the mind AND body.

Embodied Education: Creating Safe Space for Learning, Facilitating and Sharing

Space Holder

A space holder is someone who can create and hold a safe space for a person so they can be themselves around them.

Embodiment and Sensory Systems

A space holder is someone who can create and hold a safe space for a person so they can be themselves around them, knowing they will not be judged, they will be understood, valued and have an authentic meaningful connection.

As adults, we need to try and be embodied, calm and grounded to support our children to regulate, rather than expecting a child or young person to modify their behaviour themselves or change for external reward systems. We need to be a space holder for them.

Embodiment and Sensory Systems

Understanding the nervous system and its functions, trauma, and trauma responses, is vital for effective learning, safe space holding and non-toxic wellness and spiritual communities –and in any learning environment. It is also important to recognise and understand the stress responses of the body. As an educator, facilitator, space holder or practitioner, working under the premise of ‘first do no harm’ is part of a well-rounded trauma-informed approach.

Embodied Education: Creating Safe Space for Learning, Facilitating and Sharing

The Five Neurodivergent Love Locutions

“The Five Neurodivergent Love Locutions” are much about co-regulation and holding space.

Cognitive Liberty

I see cognitive liberty as a core value of the Neurodiversity Movement.

The term cognitive liberty was coined by Wrye Sententia and Richard Glen Boire, the founders of the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics. Cognitive liberty as an ethical value boils down to the idea that individuals have the right to absolute sovereignty over their own brains and their own cognitive processes. Advocates of cognitive liberty often break this idea down into two fundamental guiding ethical principles (originally inspired by the two “commandments” offered by Timothy Leary in The Politics of Ecstasy):

1. Individuals have the right to not have their brains and cognitive processes tampered with non-consensually.
2. Individuals have the right to tamper with their own brains and cognitive processes, or to voluntarily have them tampered with, in any way they choose.

Those of us who are deeply involved in transformative somatic practices or in the field of Somatic Psychology understand that the psyche is somatically organized, which means that each individual’s distinctive neurocognitive processes are intimately entwined with that individual’s style of movement and embodiment. Changes in movement and embodiment create changes in cognition.

This means that to tamper with a person’s unique individual style of movement and embodiment (for instance, through the behaviorist techniques that are frequently used to make autistic children suppress the outward signs of autism) is to tamper with that person’s cognition, and thus to violate their cognitive liberty.

In other words, freedom of embodiment—that is, the freedom to indulge, adopt, and/or experiment with any styles or quirks of movement and embodiment, whether they come naturally to one or whether one chooses them—is an essential element of cognitive liberty, and thus an essential area of focus for the Neurodiversity Movement. The freedom to be autistic necessarily includes the freedom to give bodily expression to one’s neurodivergence.

Walker, Nick. Neuroqueer Heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities (pp. 142-143). Autonomous Press.

Somatic Liberty

The breaking down of character armor and other patterns of inhibition is a powerful somatic approach to the liberation of creative potentials but is not necessarily sufficient. The capacity to recognize and attune to the deep internal stirrings of the creative impulse, and to bring creative impulses into coherent expression and enactment, can remain underdeveloped in individuals whose characterological rigidities and/or life circumstances have afforded them little opportunity to freely explore their creativity. Such individuals may still have difficulty accessing that creativity or bringing it into expression even after rigid patterns of embodiment and cognition have been loosened. Fortunately, this creative capacity can be developed, strengthened, and refined through various forms of somatic practice. Grand (2015b) observes that the creative impulse, like other phenomena that occur in the psyche, has a somatic com- ponent that one can learn to tune into on a bodily level. Through practice, “attunement to the somatic processes of unconscious creation can be learned,” enabling the individual to more effectively “follow impulses from their inchoate beginnings … to their enactment and solidification” (p. 215). Forms of somatic practice that can be especially helpful in this regard include those that involve a combination of subtle body awareness and spontaneous physical action, such as Authentic Movement (Adler, 2002), Continuum (Conrad, 2007), the physical theatre techniques developed by Alli (2003), and various approaches to dance therapy, expressive arts therapy, and play therapy (Grand, 2015b).

While somatic practices, in general, tend to focus a great deal on bringing about liberatory transformations within the bodymind of the individual, these transformations often include an expansion of the individual’s capacities for harmonious interpersonal interaction and collaboration. Through this expansion of relational capacities, somatic practices can serve to foster not only greater personal creativity but also enhanced participation in processes of collective creativity.

The cultivation of richer and more empathic interpersonal connections and of harmony and creative problem-solving on a collective level has long been an explicit goal of various traditions of somatic practice. Reich (1933/1972b) maintained that the psychological rigidity and repression that made people susceptible to participation in the horrors of fascism was anchored in their character armor and that the process of releasing character armor could serve as an antidote to authoritarianism and make people more capable of participating in the co-creation of free and egalitarian societies. Morihei Ueshiba developed the martial art of aikido with the express intent of fostering compassion on a societal level by teaching people on a bodily level how to act with mindfulness and harmony in situations of conflict (Leonard, 1999); in my own years as a practitioner and teacher of aikido, I’ve experienced first-hand how effectively that art can train one over time to consciously override one’s conditioned bodily defensive reactions, so that in the face of potential conflicts and challenges, one has the opportunity to choose harmonious, constructive, and creative responses over knee-jerk reactivity (Walker, 2018, 2019). More recently, somatically-informed thinkers like Menakem (2017) have begun exploring how racism and other forms of bigotry are anchored in acquired bodily defensive reactions and how somatic practices that address those habitual bodily reactions could thus play an essential role in helping individuals, communities, and societies to overcome pervasive patterns of bigotry and oppression. In short, the integration of transformative somatic practices into processes of collective collaboration and creative future-building would by no means be much of a stretch, as many of these practices have always aimed at fostering harmonious cooperation among humans and have always been inspired by visions of better futures.

The Use of Transformative Somatic Practices in Processes of Collective Imagination and Collaborative Future-Shaping – Nick Walker

Neurological Pluralism: Weaving Cognitive and Somatic Liberty

Neurodivergent people are psychological safety barometers.

When everything is a monoculture, diversity can look scary, wild, out of control. It’s understandable, but it’s unsustainable. To reconnect with diversity, we need to expand and rewild our thinking, and change our practices on a fundamental level. We need to notice and challenge the things that we take for granted.

But when we get too used to seeing monocultures, we forget that there can be anything else. We don’t notice what is being pushed out in favour of the familiar sameness we have gotten used to. Diversity becomes worrisome and weird and unfamiliar.

Counselling for different ways of being | by Sonny Hallett | Jun, 2023 | Medium

Recognizing diversity enables collaborative niche construction that supports monotropic minds, and any type of mind. Monotropic people are recognizing and diversifying monocultures so we have the flexibility to create our niche and get into flow states.

We must build for the psychological, social, and sensory safety of neurodivergent people.

• Caves, Campfires, Watering Holes
• Dandelions, Tulips, Orchids
• Red, Yellow, Green
• Conversation, Discussion, Publication
• Realtime, Async, Storage

These reductions are a useful starting place when creating Cavendish Space and designing for neurological pluralism.

When we design for pluralism, we design for real life, for the actuality of humanity.

Stimpunks was forged in the quest for survival and educational inclusion. We had to roll our own education, because even the “all means all” of public education failed to include us. We’ve learned a lot along the way and present to you Stimpunks Space as the syncretic synthesis of our forced interdisciplinary learning. That learning connected us with neurodiversity communities, disability communities, educators, doctors, nurses, autism researchers, sociologists, tech workers, care workers, social workers, and a long list of others.

We wove together the aspects of these disciplines that were compatible with our community of neurodivergent and disabled people into a human-centered pedagogy and philosophy. We left out the stuff incompatible with and harmful to us, such as all forms of behaviorism. We built a learning space that works for us using a zero-based design approach.

Neurological pluralism comes in the weaving, a weaving arrived at through neuroqueer deconstruction and construction.

Our threat-response learning system is turned to high alert. The flip side of this hyper-plasticity is that we also adapt quickly to environments that are truly safe for our nervous system.

Discovering a Trauma-Informed Positive Autistic Identity | by Trauma Geek | Medium

Make space for Cavendish.

A Closing Thought on Human Nature

…human nature is to nurture and be nurtured.

Emotions, Learning, and the Brain: Exploring the Educational Implications of Affective Neuroscience by Mary Helen Immordino-Yang