Develop Your Sensory Lexiconary!

The second of my fabulous learning opportunities came in the form of Joanna Grace's Develop Your Sensory Lexiconary day.

It was long-anticipated and my appreciation was only increased by the external and internal barriers that threatened to get in the way right up to the last minute. (I won't digress here but thanks to nice people who are kind to me. You probably have no idea it was you who made that minute or hour or day manageable.)

As expected it was a captivating day, stuffed with knowledge, insight, inspiration and food for thought. Home time arrived and I felt like we'd only just started! I wish I could have brought everyone I know who works with sensory beings. (Sensory beings are people whose primary experience and understanding of the world is sensory, as opposed to linguistic beings who experience and interpret the world through language. Think about people with profound and multiple learning disabilities or complex autism, young babies and people with later stage dementia.) And then I'd have sent them on the Sensory Stories day and the Sensory Engagement for Mental Wellbeing day. I really must not sit and extol their wonders here. Suffice to say your understanding and practice WILL be transformed if you attend.

The day in full swing! Sensory delights galore!

I'm obviously not going to recount the whole course content, but in short, Jo takes her delegates on a journey through seven of the senses, exploring the development of each and ways to choose and use resources in an engaging and meaningful way. These sensory conversations, when facilitated effectively, support both cognition and mental wellbeing: I would assume this is a goal for anyone regularly interacting with sensory beings.

I fell asleep on the bus on the way home, but not a chance during the day: I was hooked! It's not just listening (although Jo is a particularly engaging speaker) - you are constantly exploring resources, experimenting, seeing snippets of theory in action through video, being thrown tantalising tidbits of research and rabbit trails there isn't time to explore, and learning through doing and through questions and comments from other delegates (it is also a great way to discover who else is in your area and what they are doing and to steal little bits of expertise or stash away contacts for later!).

Why, thank you for asking,
yes we did retro-nasally taste Skittles!

I've been on two of Jo Grace's training days before, but I still learnt plenty and came away inspired and full of ponderings on people I spend a lot of my time with. I didn't know that biting something really hard floods the body with calm chemicals (or why). I didn't know that detail is as exciting to the brain as high contrast black and white images in early development. I didn't know that rap might be more "beneficial" than Mozart for a baby. I hadn't thought about intentionally supporting the development of subconscious senses (eg. proprioception/vestibulation) with conscious ones: pairing a clear fixed visual experience (or very localised sound source or directional stream of air) with the vestibular activity to give the brain a double whammy of easily processed input to help make sense of the world.* And you can't afford to miss the empirically evidenced effects of swearing (including different types of swearing and why they have the effects they do).

You'll recognise this one
if you've heard
me on JABADAO!

I was reminded of what we get from early developmental experiences: they are the most easily processed - what we have had most exposure to and most practice interpreting. They are like junk TV for the mind: it can just lie back, not really engage and mindlessly (as it were) enjoy/survive the moment. It's why many of us sleep in those early snapshots of developmental movement, why pink light is calming,* why a heartbeat rhythm soothes and why heavy-based scents are relaxing (they are closest to our own natural smells which we are socially conditioned to declare repulsive).

Ever since, new thoughts keep coming to mind about the people I spend my days with. My friend who needs lots of squeezes and constant proprioceptive/touch input - would it be even more calming in a heartbeat rhythm? Another friend who needs to explore everything by mouth - I can support his development by providing resources he can hold at the same time to aid his mental mapping skills to develop through his hands as well. I could go on, but I won't!

When you are taken through all the jobs your brain is doing when looking at a red ball being moved slowly from left to right (and the difference between that and a static jiggling red ball!) it is a wonder anybody learns to understand the world visually, and really highlights the monumental effort and athleticism that people approach the world with every single day. Linguistic beings take so very much for granted.

We also miss out on so much. It's well-understood that it is beneficial to spend time with people of different demographics, and here is a case in point. Experiences created with sensory beings in mind benefit everybody (I won't ramble on about why - it may well be self-explanatory, but do ask if you're not sure and I will be happy to ramble!). Sensory conversations are fun, interesting, challenging and engaging just as any other conversation: they are time spent getting to know somebody, seeing the world from their perspective, hanging out with somebody, being present.

With all its flaws and quirks, I marvelled at the human brain today.

Just a couple of current favourite sensory experiences for me ;)

Credit for all those little gems to Joanna Grace. Find her on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn as well as her website The Sensory Projects to find out more (she can probably point you to the right research sources, which I am less likely to be able to!) 

* And as an interesting incidental link to my previous post, Jabadao already do this when they tour with the Tig: the dancers wear black, white and red and the lighting is pink. I told you their work is based in research, and it's not just the movement stuff!

Sensory Series Part I: Sensory Experience can be Shared

I've had a blogging hiatus. No particular reason, but I haven't felt the urge to write anything for a while. It's been an interesting time in my life, blog-writing hasn't seemed to be the right response, and I have perhaps had less space for bloggy thoughts to develop.

The idea has been tapping at my brain cells a little recently though, and I thought autism awareness week would be a good opportunity to make a comeback (missed it slightly!). I've had plenty of food for thought, with some genuinely life-changing training through my job, which will probably come to you soon in some form or another!

What I want to talk about today comes from a bit of a journey of sensory awareness that I've been on recently.

I've discussed before that I don't have too many really troubling sensory problems, but over time and with discussion with people similar to me I have come to realise that my sensory world nonetheless has an enormous importance in my life.

It has the power to make things a bit more tricky (I am thankful that it doesn't generally have the power to render me drastically less functional), but more importantly it has the power to make things amazing! My sensory world (which is really just my experience of the world) can hold the key to calmness, freedom, joy and even connection to others.

Curling up in a blanket always wins!

I learnt fairly quickly after discovering my autism that I can benefit from sensory input. Touch and proprioception are the biggest ones for me: I love to be wrapped tightly in a fleecy blanket or to wear clothes that give tight, even pressure, I love to lie on the floor, I feel safest when curled in a ball, when as much of my body surface is in contact with something else as possible.

Recent training with JABADAO in "Developmental Movement Play" gave me so much insight to the importance of awareness of our bodies' sensory needs - for myself and others - that I will probably write a separate post about it (or several!). It is no exaggeration to say that my life and the lives of those I care for have been changed and will continue to change as a result of the time on this training.

This was the first time that I discovered that positive sensory experiences didn't have to just be for me, on my own. They can actually be an invaluable form of communication between people, much deeper and more fundamental than linguistic communication that people with spoken language naturally turn to.

Upside-down is good too!

Through JABADAO and my work, I also came into contact with Creative Humans, whose director Amy Manancourt not only runs this truly inclusive (a word I'm actually not fond of for many reasons, but Creative Humans really are just a group of people being and creating together) company but provides massage therapy and yoga therapy too. Amy demonstrates a profound understanding of the body and what it needs. Through practising my own movement play and visiting Amy for treatments, I have begun to attend to my body and what it needs, having a greatly beneficial effect on my wellbeing.

At my most recent treatment, Amy suggested that I attend her company's upcoming workshop for an opportunity to move my body. It didn't take much persuasion, and as I knew pretty much what to expect, my excitement overrode any anxieties I would normally have about the new situation. I was not disappointed. My anxiety tends to be primarily social- and communication-based, and I have to say that this is probably the least stressful occasion I have ever attended!

Now, movement play is all about bodies and what they need, and communicating on a fundamental level without words getting in the way or lack of words being a barrier. Words are simply not used. Even (or maybe especially?) for a wordy person like me, this is a perfectly freeing environment. At the workshop, I didn't have to negotiate anything verbally. The session begun when I arrived, and I could just slowly join the area, moving as my body wanted to.

What took me a little by surprise was how much and how easily I connected with the other dancers and participants. There was freedom to observe, to copy, to try things out, to make suggestions, to be alone or to be with others. I was strangely aware of the therapeutic effect of the environment I was in. I was truly me, and actually connecting in the most real, authentic way that I ever have. It was safe, I was real, and I was a part of things without having to pretend or "translate". I had only really experienced that maybe twice before: once during an "experiential" session on my Music Therapy module at University, and then during the JABADAO training when Penny (Penny Greenland; JABADAO founder and director) came and worked with me briefly.

For me it's novel to be calm whilst connecting

Movement play was just the beginning of my journey with sharing sensory experiences. It works with the touch, proprioception and vestibular senses, which tend to be my "best" - my "go-to feel-good" - senses. If I need to put myself right, get myself feeling right in my body, feel real, it's movement, curling up, wrapping up that do it for me. So I suppose it's a bit of a no-brainer that I felt I had found my people when I discovered this area of work.

However, starting from that point has prepared me for an expansion of awareness of my sensory world and the possibilities of connecting through it. The other training I have been on this year has been with Joanna Grace of The Sensory Projects. Jo is a sensory engagement and inclusion specialist and came to my workplace to deliver a training day on Sensory Stories. Just as with Penny from JABADAO, I could have spent days listening to Jo! Some people seem to have an almost endless well of insight, wisdom and experience to learn from, and an engaging manner of presentation to match. These are two of those people!

After the Sensory Stories day (which I would recommend to anybody working with sensory beings - people whose primary experience of the world and understanding thereof is sensory rather than linguistic - or in fact many others in the care or education sectors) I was lucky enough to be able to attend Jo's annual training day on Sensory Engagement for Mental Wellbeing. I was astounded and quite outraged to hear that although one study found 84% of their survey group of people with PMLD (profound and multiple learning disabilities) to be displaying signs of low mood/depression, most of these people have no appropriate mental health support because they are unable to access what is routinely provided. Add to this that the problems are often not recognised due to apparent lack of change in wellbeing, or changes being attributed to pre-existing conditions, and it can make for a pretty dismal state of affairs.

"You have time for me" is another of the
strategies for mental wellbeing

Thankfully people like Joanna are working to change this by finding and sharing strategies to support the mental health of sensory beings: how can we make it true for every person that "I am safe", "I can effect change", "The world is a place I can explore" etc? I'm not going to go into an of the content here, but you can find Jo on her website (see link above), Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc.

My point in all this rambling is that I began to properly link together sensory input with its effect on my mental wellbeing (and to begin to observe that in others). When working with sensory beings, here is a basis for the fundamental connection that I feel so strongly through movement play: a place where people interact as equals, both providing valuable input and opinions. It doesn't only happen through movement - that is just where I found it first, and maybe the most meaningful channel for me.

When we find that point of true connection, we do wonders for the wellbeing of both parties.


P.S. This post had a sequel but I deleted it in a moment of brain malfunction, so you'll have to wait until I've re-written a less good version. Sorry!