Mind Matters : Guest Post by Ms. Archita Basu

 

Dear readers, giving a pause to my story, I would like to post a guest post by Ms. Archita Basu. Ms. Archita Basu has been my mentor for the past three years and guiding me with Akshat's language and emotional skills. I  consider myself lucky to get connected with her and thankful to her that she accepted my request to write for my blog. With her constant support and guidance, Akshat and I have evolved as better human beings and learned that, after all, the mind matters.

 About Ms. Archita Basu:

Ms. Archita Basu is a parent to an adult with ASD. Besides being passionate about autism, she has done Master's in English from Calcutta University. Her core autism education has been in M.Ed in autism from Birmingham University. She has authored a chapter in the book, Lives with Autism(2014), edited by Dr. Steve Mee, Autism Programme Leader at the University of Cumbria, UK. She has worked as a parental co-trainer with the trailblazing Inclusive Solutions, UK, and has certified training in behaviour modification(although she believes it needs radical tinkering in its content), the TEACCH approach by the legendary Dr. Gary Mesibov, Person-Centered Planning approaches, SCERTS, and the SPELL Approach by National Autistic Society, UK.

 She believes and advocates an eclectic strength-based approach in autism. Her foremost teachers have been the wonderful people on the autism spectrum and their families and, nothing can beat their personal experiences.

                                                                    Mind Matters

Home is a place we must all find. It's not just a place where you eat or sleep. Home is knowing. Knowing your mind, your heart, knowing your courage. If we know ourselves, we are always home, anywhere."

 The Wizard of Oz

 I am glad to be here,  thank you to  Akshat and his mother Ritu for giving me the opportunity and a free reign to express my thoughts. It has been such a joy to see and share their journey of discovery of their own minds. After all knowledge is power and knowledge about the workings of one's own mind is a superpower.

 Our lives are largely a product of our minds,  or the main thoughts and images that hold sway over it. So many times we routinely underestimate the power of our thoughts and be blasé about it as we declare that being stuck in a traffic jam is akin to" roasting in hell". We may be exaggerating but our literal subconscious minds pick on the imagery and recreate those sensations . So it's important to not only regulate our actions but also the thoughts that lead and trigger off those actions. Behavioral science would focus on actions,  but what about the rich myriad of the fabric of thoughts and emotions which run below the surface and drive our actions. We can only but ignore them at our peril.

 What lens are you seeing your life through? What are your main beliefs? Beliefs are a byproduct of repetitive thoughts. Our actions reflect our beliefs and sustained actions become habits.Everything and anything we do, have or are is down to our beliefs and the habits we create around them. Those beliefs are stored within our subconscious mind and although we are aware of some, we aren't of most because they have been influencing us systematically for such a long time that we have taken them for granted and don't question them anymore. They have become a habit. The habit of us. We have become them and forgotten that any habit can be updated, rewired as our brains are malleable and neuroplastic.

 Teach children to examine their thoughts , be an observer to thoughts, however they are not their thoughts. Autistic people sometimes fuse with their thoughts especially the unhelpful ones and that can trigger off a litany of issues like anxiety, rumination which can maintain the whole unhelpful thoughts- behavior cycle. Over identification with thoughts and especially unhelpful ones is generally a difficulty faced by people experiencing mental health challenges. Often analogies can be helpful. I used this with a young autistic man today:

 We sense a smell, pleasant or unpleasant like a whiff of wild rose or a garbage dump smell , we experience it but we don't become the smell . We should view thoughts similarly as smells, we feel them, but don't become them. They are not a part of us .

This analogy lit up his eyes ,a moment of understanding 😊

 

Often we find that children hold a disempowering image of themselves. Our mind moves us towards what we visualize of ourselves. Do we view ourselves as victims suffering at the hands of a capricious destiny or someone who is able to cope and thrive in spite of challenges and sees himself as an empowered human being? Here I would refer to "Psycho-Cybernetics"  - a term introduced by Dr. Maxwell Maltz. Psycho-Cybernetics sheds light on how one can use their mind to move oneself towards positive goals and success. How do our children view themselves? This is life changing, a fragmented self-image can actively thwart their dreams and goals, help them to visualize themselves as enlightened self-regulated beings embodying joy, spreading joy and achieving all their dearly loved aspirations.

Deity visualization in Vajrayana Buddhism is a powerful practice that imagines ourselves as we would like to be, as an enlightened being, and this enables us to actualize that state much more quickly. Is it not quite remarkable that Buddhism has been a forerunner to these modern visualization processes used by athletes, coaches,  CEOs and there is no reason why we shouldn't use its power with autistic people and make it a part of an empowering narrative.

BE that light !

And yes, before I sign off sending you all a link below to a very interesting quiz on Howard Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligence, which postulates that there are 9 different types of intelligence, parents explore it and if possible your children should do it too, you may be amazed at the revelations, it does reveal your dominant interests , strengths and bent of mind!

Lots of love

Archita

 

https://scienceofpeople.typeform.com/to/os0nb8