Vinay's method incorporates three techniques in rotation. Yes, sorta like CrossFit. Two types of conventional mindfulness meditation, and another he refers to as "sitting with negative feelings."

Sitting with negative feelings being the practice @jessicawildfire@mstdn. described last month, along with reasons why we need it, in You Need a Mourning Routine.

Read that here:

https://jessicawildfire.substack.com/p/you-could-use-a-mourning-routine

[fin]

#WhoTalks

Vinay Gupta was a multiply traumatized child. To survive, he meditated. In time he became Hindu clergy. As clergy, his focus hasn't been on teaching. It's on, yep, planet-scale human overshoot.

When Vinay does teach meditation it's with the explicit goal of enabling people to remain functional and not flinch or shy away from seeing.

So as to be useful, able to make competent responses to what is in front of them before, during, and after a collapse scenario.

#WhoTalks

http://files.howtolivewiki.com/.meditation_2015/

Beginning to round out the autism threads now, bringing them back home as to why this all belongs on Global Dark Theme.

Hashtags that've brought matters along to this point :

#Spring2020AutisticLockdown (~18)
#LatN (5)
#GDTautismIntro (8)
#WhoTalks (13)
#LivingInFear (2)
#DPSO! (7)
#traumapants (next)
#pantrauma (later)

Spoiler: none of this, it turns out, has anything to do with autism.

It has everything to do with trauma.

An experience not at all limited to autistics.

Me, there's nothing I'd rather be posting about than the drama of planet-scale human overshoot.

Fortunately for the non-traumatized, there is at least one other, safer and better-marked pathway to becoming able to see and say what others don't.

It involves a practice @jessicawildfire@mstdn. wrote about not long ago.

I'll come back to this. Vinay first.

#WhoTalks

Trauma's one way though to join "those who have eyes to see." Things to say.

Writer Michael Ventura, talking with James Hillman, said of his therapist:

"He was an old man, a Jungian. I was going on and on about [Ventura was sexually abused by his mother], and he sort of smiled and said,

"You know, what happened to you, it forged your connnection with the soul's mysteries, didn't it? And that's what you write about, isn't it? Would you rather have been writing about something else?"

#WhoTalks

Not a fan, anyway, of Leonard Cohen's line about cracks being "how the light gets in." Traumatized people as broken objects. Passive recipients of The Light.

Much prefer James Hillman's "Wounds are eyes." How the psyche sees. Traumatized people as active perceivers. Souls with agency.

Not enough agency, maybe, to unsee what we need to. We suicide. Drink. Plenty of bad outcomes and consequences. "I just want you to hurt," sings Randy Newman, "like I do."

#WhoTalks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQ0RWmuMEkA

Autistics would have read that room better.

Looking back from Sep 11, 2012 it was autistic @andrea who summed up, "If I had to pick a metaphor for US of the last 11 years, it'd be an elephant dying of anaphylactic shock after a bee sting."

Yes then.

It's a dynamic we see working at a population scale.

One way we "diverge" is that—thanks in part to our treatment at the hands of neurotypical culture—we are much better prepared psychologically for population-scale trauma.

#WhoTalks

Except wait, no. One question.

Is this a dynamic we see working, then, at nation-scale?

It was neurotypicals who named the WTC site Ground Zero, oblivious to the far worse horror an actual ground zero would mean.

Neurotypicals who later welcomed to the Winter Olympics nations who'd been bombed back to the stone age a few times, often by us.

Then during pre-games ceremonies, made them look, just sit and LOOK, at the tattered American flag rescued from the WTC ruins.

#WhoTalks

Except wait, no. One question.

Is this a dynamic we see working, then, at nation-scale?

It was neurotypicals who named the WTC site Ground Zero, oblivious to the far worse horror an actual ground zero would mean.

Neurotypicals who later welcomed to the Winter Olympics nations who'd been bombed back to the stone age a few times, often by us.

Then during pre-games ceremonies, made them look, just sit and LOOK, at the tattered American flag rescued from the WTC ruins.

#WhoTalks

We're so withdrawn primarily because hell is neurotypicals. The hashtag for those quotes:

#Spring2020AutisticLockdown

Discussion includes *already* having *learned* to self-isolate, not by choice but for their own survival. Both due to and at a further cost of significant trauma.

Autistic or not, trauma will leave you with fewer illusions, better able to see things for what they are. Half-assed lockdowns during a deadly pandemic included.

(It's okay, we're headed back home now.)

#WhoTalks

Autistic masking is a trauma response to stigma, invalidation, and marginalisation. It requires us to project acceptability, an effort which takes up an enormous amount of energy to sustain itself, leading to high rates of self-harm, a high suicide rate, and an early average range of death.

But somehow pointing this out means we're living in fear and need help for anxiety.

— @ebk, h/t Kieran Rose

#LivingInFear #WhoTalks

"Covid is a vascular, neurotrophic illness that can wreak havoc on the immune system & lead to longterm disability, but somehow pointing this out means you're living in fear and need help for anxiety"

— @Chantzy

#LivingInFear #WhoTalks

Right now let's talk about trauma and perspective. I'm still posting days of AutismTwitter discussing non-autistics' oh so traumatic experience of "lockdown."

These are my people, and I can tell you that not one of us comes to adulthood without having been traumatized by the world's twisted grasp of autism.

This makes the fact that we're autistic, secondary.

That trauma, sustained by stigma and a $4T autism industry annual gross, is what marks us, and truly makes us different.

#WhoTalks

Then there's Vinay Gupta, whom I've quoted making the bold claim that "nearly everybody else" save him is "enslaved to a blinding mechanism."

I'll come back to Vinay.

@plaguepoems is a seam of gold. Pure, ah, jackpot.

@jessicawildfire, less shiny treasure than needful toolset lending library. She recently for instance offered up a method capable of dismantling the kind of "blinding mechanism" Vinay speaks of.

I'll come back to that too.

#WhoTalks

The Man Whose Job It Is to Constantly Imagine the Total Collapse of Humanity in Order to Save It (2015)

An interview with Vinay Gupta: software engineer, disaster consultant, global resilience guru, visionary.

"Coming from almost anybody else, this would sound like the ravings of a madman with a particularly entrenched messiah complex."

#WhoTalks

https://www.vice.com/en/article/qbxej5/global-resilience-guru

The Man Whose Job It Is to Constantly Imagine the Total Collapse of Humanity in Order to Save It (2015)

An interview with Vinay Gupta: software engineer, disaster consultant, global resilience guru, visionary.

"Coming from almost anybody else, this would sound like the ravings of a madman with a particularly entrenched messiah complex."

#WhoTalks

https://www.vice.com/en/article/qbxej5/global-resilience-guru

"Imagining darkness, after all," I wrote recently, " is kind of what we do here".

But I mean, who *does* that? Who *talks* about this stuff?

I've two answers.

-

Yes, we say, I Am the Algorithm. But, the only other restricted-focus accounts (that aren't humor accounts) I've noticed here are tilling adjacent fields:

@plaguepoems and @jessicawildfire.

And me. Three self-appointed see-ers of darkness, in a sea of general purpose/info-sharing/makeyoulaugh accounts.

#WhoTalks