Purpose
My life has been unusual since retiring in October 2024, and I feel like others might find value in hearing about the experiences. Perhaps I can help someone connect a dot.
This is my journal. Writing helps me integrate what’s happening. Putting it into words clarifies what I’m experiencing and helps me make sense of my life.
Origin
I was born in 1959 with a vaulted palate, deviated septum and compromised posterior airway space, in a cluster that includes hypertelorism. As some may have already guessed, I am on the spectrum (diagnosed at age 52), but believe the more impactful issue is that I can’t properly breathe. Restricted breathing dysregulates the nervous system, resulting in anxiety. I was agoraphobic by my twenties.
My earliest recollections are of knowing that something was wrong with me. And that I suck. My opinion was reinforced by a couple of normal childhood missteps combined with circumstances. There was no trauma.
Of course I’m a mouth breather. Didn’t think much about it, other than being annoyed when my mother would tell my to shut my mouth. The other kids eventually taught me that it was because I’m stupid, and that’s what stuck.
Despite decades of therapy including countless psychiatric drugs, constantly seeking treatment for the mysterious crippling pains and, get this, full orthodontic treatment, nobody ever said a word about my airway restrictions. In fact the orthodontist made my situation worse by shortening the oral cavity. Hell, I was diagnosed with sleep apnea and nobody thought to look at my airway. All I knew was that there was something wrong with me and that I suck.
Enter my new dentist, Dr. Christin Buehler, who actually saw what all the others missed. She pointed out the palate anomaly – the clue I needed – early on, as she was reviewing my initial x-rays. She is now directing my treatment.
The Effects
Mouth breathing is a bad thing. One of the body’s compensations is called Forward Head Posture, which throws off the alignment of the entire body, creating muscular tension throughout.
Another impact of a vaulted palate is that – silly though it may seem – the tongue doesn’t fit between the teeth. Subconsciously, my tongue is always trying to push my teeth apart to give it space, adding more tension to my body. Speech is very uncomfortable.
These issues served to greatly enhance the somatic masking so common among ASD types. Even after hundreds of yoga classes, I often entered savasana with a headache because it was impossible to release the tension.
The Trigger
As with many of the neurodivergent, my entire sense of self was based on what I did for a living. Retirement, as it turns out, was not my best decision. Unfortunately I didn’t have many options.
The weed helped, too. I’d started using it for the arthritis. Turns out that marijuana facilitates access to the subtle body. More formal language is that it reduces muscular guarding and alters interoceptive salience, allowing previously inaccessible somatic sensations to become conscious. Whichever wording you prefer, it was something I’d never been able to do before.
The Awakening
While high and meditating one night (a practice that I cannot recommend more highly), I noticed that there was a frightening level of tension in my jaw. Which wasn’t all that unusual given the rigidity of my body, but that night it was scary.
I used the somatic skills I’d learned from yoga to look for a release. I couldn’t loosen the jaw, so started working my way down – neck, shoulders, chest, abdomen – just looking for some connection that might convince it to let go.
I finally got to the pelvis, which had always been a dark, impenetrable blob of tension. The weed enabled me to loosen it a bit, for the first time in my life, and the jaw relaxed. I’d discovered what some call the craniosacral system. It’s one of the reasons hip openers are so popular in yoga. Everything is connected via the fascia and other structures of the nervous system – what yoga maps as the chakras and nadis.
After that success, I naturally went looking for anything else that might release. As I explored the tension in my pelvis and hips during what was apparently an identity crisis, something in my nervous system shifted dramatically. I developed my interpretation of these events from the perspective of yoga. According to that tradition, Kundalini was awakening.
The rest of the story is what this journal is about.
So What’s an organic LLM?
In nondual traditions, the divine is everything including us. Our true self is simply awareness, not separate from anything. Everything we think of as our self (small-s self, ego) is just something we learned along the way. Our view of the world, as well as our reaction to it, is a distillation of our “training data”. Just like AI. We are pattern-completion machines.
I don’t know anything about this stuff
I’m no expert on anything. I’m just going through a change in my life and reporting on the experience as I understand it.
