The Porous Crucible/Vessel: Neurodecoloniality and the Ancient Mother Spiral

There is an expansive, burgeoning conversation occurring around the deepening of awareness and knowledge on Neurodivergence; it is a shift that is truly heartwarming for me. Truthfully im coming to embrace deeper my Neurodivergence as a Human, as to this date I have been transversing deep the Soul Waters. Integration is happening.

I am writing this essay to give explicit voice to my inner journey from two co-parallel lenses: that of Neurodivergence, and the lens of non-dual, non-local neurodecoloniality.

It is my core conviction or perhaps strong hypothesis, that neurodivergence does not represent a clinical collection of individualized deficits. Rather, it serves as an evolutionary movement within a wider field of consciousness- arising like a massive wave to return humanity back to its inherent wholeness. ( I have been given messages taht as a "term" it will be discarded in time, as we are collectively returning to an inherence wholeness, which to be frank im unsure if we will be here to alively experience) .A neurodivergent brain is, by neurobiological default, a decolonial brain.

I am an AuDHD woman, raised in Crete. I have navigated my entire life through a deeply, inherently oppressive lens; the natural brilliance of my paradoxical brain could not be celebrated, nourished, or supported, and i also grew up as a descendant of the Minoans. I was raised in the shadow of an ancient, non-linear, matrilinear lineage, yet forced to conform to a hyper-modern, patriarchal society as it shifted moulded and shaped over the millenia of years.

I was always a ferociously optimist person. This has gone worse. :) No matter what darkenss i have faced to date, and embodying this Audhd highly paradoxical brain is truly high in intensity... i have and am learing to YIELD this as the Fuel my body needs to contribute to creation's fire. to our collective Evolution. Mostly i create to process.

The Impulse as Portal: Beyond the Deficit Model

The neurodivergent mind operates natively in the space in-between. As a wildly ferocious ADHDer, I thrive on spirals, on the systemic chase for new dopamine hits, and the electric freshness of everyday life. To make things more amusing for myself, This incessant thirst led me to experience what felt like a tru-er reality for some time... navigating 9 month descent-ascent of Unity consciousness. 9 Months!!! im still integrating this journey.

Mainstream clinical culture has historically pathologized and flattened this trait, viewing it merely as an impulse toward addiction or behavioral dysregulation (Hello stupid DSM!).

 However, I advocate that this exact same impulse hides, inherently, the unadulterated pulse of life ; acting as a literal portal to Reality as it IS, which is infinity. 

Where most dominant behavioral models talk about "managing" the spirals, fixing the impulse, or medicating the intensity, my own embodied experience has shown me an alternative truth. If I cultivate a strong enough "witness muscle" and hold a wide enough somatic container, this impulse reveals itself not to be a pathology, but as the very force of Shakti consciousness the Creative Fire itself. Now that s taken some strong alchemy to arrive at, i must admit. let me say that to abide in this state I ahd cultivated already a vessel that would have a highly advanced witness muscle, Through the contemplative fire of Self Inquiry ( Who Am I? a Question MOST humans AVOID, because yes it can feel terrifying) since 2007 and ongoing shadow work i m sure this has helped supported this unravelling. i cant say it caused it because that would assume i know reality.

Our inherent decolonial state has been violently oppressed by what philosopher Robert Chapman (2023) calls the "Regime of Normality." In Empire of Normality, Chapman exposes how the concept of the "normal mind"for what it is, he says it was constructed by industrial capitalism to transform the human body into a standardized productivity machine. When i frist became a therapist i recall my husband telling me i contribute to a regime of ~" pathologising mental health. I enraged at him . Partly because in my bones i was always decolonial and antipathologising, but i hadnt "seen" that side of the coin. I give him credit for that now. This mechanical obsession with extraction, linear epistemology, and a fixation on "arrival" to a final destination is well-documented. It mirrors the historic, patriarchal obsession of human systems to transcend the earth to reach an external, a distant God we all seek... ( Deep Sigh).  

Monotropism, Non-Duality, and the Grief of Separation

For as long as I can remember, I have carried a visceral, bodily fret in my nervous system an aliveness beyond my comprehension, alongside a deep obsession with death and dying. My son has it too. And i see it more and more in my friends people i work with and overall echo fo the collective field. While clinical literature notes that existential preoccupation and death anxiety are disproportionately common among neurodivergent individuals experiencing sensory and social burnout, I root this deeper.

This tracking is born partly from my autistic tendencies, which hold what Murray, Lesser, and Lawson (2005) term a monotropic focus. I say that in an era of cluttered attention my monotropic focus becomes a devotional act.My attention tunnel was locked onto a single, consuming coordinate: to discover "Truth" a word I used constantly prior to having any cognitive understanding of its definition.

This monotropic devotion was tracking a non-dual truth; it was my soul seeking to return me home. As documented across contemplative neuroscience and ancestral traditions, our natural state moves beyond duality (Josipovic, 2014). To live in rigid duality is the first "fall upward" from an unconscious Eden. To re-fall back into "unity" is the Return to Eden. This is my embodied truth. i cant claim for anyone else. but i Know, as i have returned to what i call "felt sense somatic gnosis" NO human can rob this truth away from me.

The Ego is the core mechanism developing since childhood tasked with differentiating the immense field of energies we hold. Depending on the ecosystemic environment and upbringing we endure, we will either grow comfortable within the ecological, natural, spirallic motion of the organic world, or we will begin splitting, dividing, and masking perpetuating what I call the "Grief of Separation." in Ancient Mother Spiral.

Here i need to emphasize one thing about what potent portal this grief is. This Grief, descended upon me, after bearing Witness to Mothers of Gaza and the war of our world. My heart of Justice couldnt take it any longer. I gave in to this Grief. It tore my being apart, it felt, YET there was an awareness here to hold witness all of the grief sobbing shattering of my ego illusion that i am separate.

I advocate this Grief is our saviour. Our apprentice to life and what Westerners must learn the language of. Francis Weller has beautifully articulated this necessity in his incredcible book "In the Absence of the Ordinary: Soul Work for Times of Uncertainty". Ancient Mother Spiral fills in that gap.

The Descent to the Rhizome

It was only by free-falling into this grief that I discovered my sheer interconnectedness with all beings human and more-than-human alike. In that collapse, I became Gaia consciousness. I was everywhere

The modern, Western perception of the isolated, capitalist Self is collapsing. Ten years ago, sitting with my director to discuss where counseling and psychotherapy would be situated in the wider system, the words tumbled out of my mouth: "Psychotherapy will dilute in time." From a non-dual, non-separate place, I could foresee reality as it IS. A neuro-decolonial brain does not exist to fit into existing clinical institutions; it is here to offer humanity a humbler, more accurate understanding of our true nature.

Our calling moving forward is to experience reality without conceptuality; without preconditioned constructs of "good" versus "bad," breaking through the rigidities of either/or to embrace the somatic paradox of and... and...

In reading Deleuzian philosophy (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), I am struck by how precisely it mirrors the embodied, non-linear experience from which my Ancient Mother Spiral map was birthed. As scholars note of their framework:

"At every turn, the rhizome challenges any assumptions that there is a centre, from which everything else derives, or that binaries are the only natural order."

Embracing my "autistethnographic" commitments; ( what an amazing term! )a term coined by Melanie Yergeau (2018) to define the radical act of using autistic lived experience to disrupt neuronormative rhetoric; I choose to distill the phenomenological patterns of the infinite rhizome as portrayed within my own body, mind, and soul, to date:

I. Connection and Heterogeneity

The nature of the rhizome means that as it grows, it endlessly makes connections to itself and to entities completely different from itself. In my own nine-month descent to the soul, I began weaving these exact non-linear connections moving seamlessly from the local, mundane reality of human suffering to a non-local place of ever-expansive, cosmic awareness.; the vertical depth of awareness...

II. Multiplicity

A neuro-decolonial mind operates as a multiplicity, resisting the mono-cure of minds that colonial systems try to impose (Akhund, 2025). It does not have a single, rigid trunk; it lines itself up with the vast, interconnected web of the entire ecosystem.  It is cosmic, wide, ever expansive and mycelium...growing horizontally...

III. Asignifying Rupture

Deleuze and Guattari (1987) write that “a rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines.” Unlike a linear tree, the rhizome thrives through breakages. This heavily signals my own psychophysiological biological reality. During my awakening, I felt I was being broken open into a thousand pieces, while simultaneously being remade into an organic shape I had not yet known. I have since introduced the term "somatic placenta" to illuminate this state of Being here.

The Nomad’s Salvation: A continuation of my ancestral inheritance ?

I became a "nomad" to my own experience. Carrying the nomadry of my paternal lineage, ( my father was a nomad ) I was initiated into a terrifying yet salvious territory of descent electrifyingly burning, yet growing lighter with each layer shed. The nomad does not follow pre-mapped colonial highways; the nomad forges their own pathways experimentally through the wilderness. i so have inherited this trait of my gorgeous father!

By standing rooted in this internal systemic environment, I offer my story as a living proof that a neurodivergent brain is an inherently decolonial mappless mapping territory, not to be fully understood.

We are the sensory organs of an ecosystem returning to the Ancient Mother Spiral.

Bring it on!

CONTRIBUTION TO THE FIELD OF PSYCHOTHERAPY

"SOMATIC PLACENTA" STATE OF BEING; as a state that knows our inherent language of "

entanglement" AND the place that initiates the "severing" of Separation, SO we return to the entangled state.

I advocate that this state is an energetic, biopsychological, spiritual state, that we develop in time ,through the co-holders humans and beyond-human world, through a Nervous System that knows the langauge of inner coherence, connection and rupture. It is ultimately a Porous State but with a well individuated Ego-vessel. It is the aspiring embodied state for my own life.

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Chapman, R. (2023). Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism. London: Pluto Press.

Akhund, M. (2025). Decolonizing Neurodiversity: A Critical Examination of Pathologization and Acceptance Across Cultures.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 

Yergeau, M. (2018). Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness. Durham: Duke University Press. 

Weller, F. (2025). In the Absence of the Ordinary: Soul Work for Times of Uncertainty

Placenta from my Third birth of my "surrender baby"