Mindfulness on the Spectrum (Part 2):
What happens when awareness is not neutral?
As I write, I’m sitting in my office, surrounded by shelves of mindfulness and meditation books I have gathered over the years with great enthusiasm.
They represent decades of learning. Of practice. Of devotion, even.
There are teachings from Buddhist traditions, contemporary mindfulness approaches, trauma-informed perspectives, neuroscience-informed frameworks. Authors I respect. Teachers I have learned from directly and indirectly.
More recently, other books have appeared on my shelves too—on autism and neurodivergence.
I have also trained in neurodiversity-informed mindfulness approaches with practitioners such as Sue Hutton, whose work begins to bridge a gap I had felt, but not yet been able to name.
This body of work has shaped me.
And yet—
as I look at my autism and neurodivergent books, and at my mindfulness and meditation books, there is still very little that explicitly bridges the two.
Despite all of this richness, I still find myself with the sense that my internal “book” reads differently.
And as I look more closely, I begin to see why.
Across these texts—however nuanced, however well-intentioned—there are underlying assumptions about how the human system works.
About starting points.
Assumptions about attention.
About emotional processing.
About the body’s capacity to settle.
About what happens when we “simply” return to the breath.
Attention is not neutral
Research into autistic cognition offers one lens into this difference.
The theory of Monotropism, for example, suggests that attention may naturally narrow and deepen, rather than move fluidly across multiple fields.
This is not a deficit.
But it is a difference.
And it means that instructions such as “widen awareness” or “rest in open presence” may not be neutral.
They may require effort.
What is often described as a simple shift of attention may, in practice, be a complex act of cognitive effort. Transitions are not neutral either.
This is often my experience.
Depth, flexibility, and the cost of shifting
Practices such as śamatha, with their single point of focus, can feel like a natural fit for an attention system that already tends toward depth.
There can be ease here. Even a sense of coming home.
But this raises an important question.
If attention already stabilises easily, what happens when the practice asks it to do something different—to widen, to release, to rest without fixation?
Because the developmental arc of many contemplative traditions, and modern mindfulness moves from concentration toward more open forms of awareness—such as Mahamudra or Dzogchen, or simply, spacious awareness.
These practices point toward experience arising and passing within a wider field. An analogy often used is like becoming the vast open sky with awareness of the scudding clouds passing through.
And yet, for a monotropic brain that is naturally geared toward hyper-focus, this transition can be uneven, and sometimes, inaccessible.
Attention wants to stay.
To deepen.
To follow a thread to its end.
Spaciousness, by contrast, asks for something else—an ability to loosen, to widen, to not hold so tightly.
This is where the effort begins to show.
Executive functioning is part of this picture too. When my capacity to shift or sustain attention is reduced, open awareness becomes noticeably more tiring—there is a transition cost.
So what is often presented as a natural progression may, in practice, require a different kind of support.
Not more stabilisation—but more flexibility.
This is where approaches such as dual or even multiple anchors, as explored in neurodiversity-informed mindfulness, begin to make sense.
Not as a replacement for traditional practices—but as a way of gently training attention to move, rather than simply hold.
When the breath is not a neutral anchor
There is another layer to accessibility that feels important to name.
Much of mindfulness practice begins with the breath.
It is often presented as a neutral anchor—something always available, always present.
But this is not the case for everyone.
For some nervous systems, particularly those that are already sensitised or carrying a high level of internal activation, focusing on the breath can be dysregulating.
Rather than settling the system, it can amplify what is already there.
In these moments, being directed inward is not supportive.
It is triggering.
Where interoception is already challenged, even beginning with the body can feel like a significant demand.
Experiences such as Alexithymia can further complicate practices that rely on identifying and naming internal states.
What I have found—and what is increasingly reflected in neurodivergent-informed approaches—is that external anchors can offer a different kind of access.
Listening to sounds in the environment, for example, can be more spacious.
Less effortful.
Less intrusive.
Sound moves. It changes. It does not require the same degree of internal tracking.
And in this way, it can begin to open awareness more gently—without the demand to override what the system is already signalling.
To give an example, as I learn to stay within my own capacity and refine my access needs, I find more comfort and nervous system stability if I lie down to practice - sometimes with my knees up, supported underneath with a cushion.
I might start with a belly breathing practice, with focus on the felt sense of the breath in the body, and I might listen to sounds in the environment as I do this. A guided practice can act as environmental sound too, if it’s supportive of my needs that day; guided practices also save on executive functioning. Calm music or gentle rain sounds can also act as a secondary anchor.
Nervous systems, trauma, and underlying assumptions
When we bring in a nervous system perspective—as explored in the work of Stephen Porges—we begin to see that states of safety and regulation are not always immediately accessible, particularly for those carrying chronic stress or trauma.
For many of us with autism and other forms of neurodivergence, we are often carrying both.
Even within trauma-informed mindfulness, and neuroscience-informed frameworks such as those explored by Rick Hanson, there often remains an underlying baseline:
That with the right support, the system will regulate.
That attention can stabilise.
That experience can be accessed and processed.
And for many, this may well be true.
It is also worth noting that much of the foundational trauma research—including work such as The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk—has historically been framed through particular lenses.
As understanding evolves, there is increasing recognition that different bodies, different nervous systems, and different life experiences may not map neatly onto these models.
When neurodivergence and gendered experience are brought into the picture, for example, it becomes clear that the lens itself needs widening.
A deeper question
So as I sit here, surrounded by these books, I find myself asking:
Where does a different kind of processing land?
Where does an attention system that holds, rather than widens, fit?
Where does an internal world that is sometimes difficult to access—or overwhelming when it arrives—find its place?
I am not questioning the value of these teachings.
But I am beginning to see that they are partial.
A question that lingers
There is another question, too—one that has been quietly forming over the years.
In the writings of the renowned Zen master Hakuin Ekaku, there are accounts of his intense practice leading to profound health issues and mental dysregulation, followed by a period of recovery and integration.
It raises something that feels unexpectedly relevant.
What is the relationship between practice and strain?
There is a certain kind of value placed on intensity in some traditions, a kind of “cooking” process whereby, under intense conditions, realisations become possible. That’s especially true of longer retreats where there is an alchemical process of transforming the lead of the mind, into gold.
I used to manage these better. More recently they have simply caused a systems overload. That’s not a personal failure on my part. It’s that my system has been under too much strain for too long, and snapping points come sooner.
Something did happen in those earlier retreats. Something did develop.
Through immersion.
Through sustained effort.
And I don’t dismiss that.
But I can also see the ways in which I learned to push through.
To override fatigue.
To continue when something in me was signalling “enough”.
And now the “enough” comes much sooner than I might like.
And I find myself wondering—not whether development occurred—
but whether it needed to happen in that way.
So the question I find myself returning to now, within my own practice, is no longer simply how to practise.
But how to practise in a way that fits the system that is practising.
And that, in my experience, begins with a different kind of listening.
One that starts with fit, not force.
So much here resonates with my experience, particularly the piece around widening of focus/ awareness / attention. I find this exceptionally hard a lot of the time; and it's complicated by being AuDHD so I have the double whammy of being infinitely distractable by both internal and external rabbit holes. Really appreciate these perspectives and would like to learn more.
This explains so much of my experience, especially with breath work. My heart rate tends to increase when I follow a breathing pattern that’s supposed to slow it, for example.