Autsit: Meditation for people on the autism / neurodiverse spectrum
Click HERE to sign up for our mailing list. Contact us at(Pacific Times)
| 1st | Sunday | 11am | in-person+online |
| 2nd | Wednesday | 9am | |
| 3rd | Sunday | 5pm |
NOTE: There is NO in-person meeting on July 6. We will meet online on that day.
Autsit Meetings
The Autsit meditation group is for people on the autism / neurodiverse spectrum (and their allies). We also refer to the group as Internet Autistic Meditation. It meets online via Zoom three times a month. One of the meetings is also in-person (see below). The facilitator, Anlor Davin, is ordained as a priest in the Soto Zen tradition but the group does not follow any formal practices apart from basic upright sitting. Beginners and the curious are very welcome. There is one 30-minute period of meditation, then a short talk and informal discussion. The meetings last an hour. These meetings are free and open to autistic and other neurodivergent people as well as their respectful allies. Practitioners of all faiths or none are welcome.
👉 The in-person meditation is now being held hybrid at 11am on the first Sunday of each month: online, and at the Autistry at 850 4th Street in San Rafael, CA. There is free parking on the street and at public parking a block away.
To ensure security, a link to the Zoom meeting will be emailed to you some time before the actual meetings (if you are on the mailing list—see above to join) so check your mail for that as the meeting approaches—and be sure to check your Social, Promotions and Spam folders if you don't see an expected email. The links will be different for each meeting. For security please do not share the link on social media!!
NOTE: The 1st Sunday meet is at 11am to allow people from Europe to join, and the 3rd Sunday meet is at 5:00pm (Pacific Times) to accommodate people across the Pacific.
(For history buffs, here is our pioneering Online Meditation Hall started in early 2012, now migrated to Autsit as above.)
The Autsit Retreat (See the latest here)
Check out the retreat description below and the reports from past years to see if you'd like to join us. We will be giving priority participation to people who sit with us regularly (via Zoom) during the year. If you would like to apply for participation in the next Autsit retreat please contact us at the email address at the bottom of this page and we can send you an invitation letter with details. We hope to see you there!
My name is Anlor. My partner Greg and I are both on the autism spectrum and both long-time sitters. I am priest-ordained in the Soto Zen lineage. (See a Tricycle magazine article about Anlor here.) Conventional meditation retreats are often too crowded, socially demanding, environmentally overwhelming and inflexible for autistic people, so we decided to put together a small meditation retreat friendlier to people on the autism spectrum. Realizing that others might wish to attempt something similar we made these reports of our experience.
   |
Autsit 2011 Autsit 2012 Autsit 2015 Autsit 2016 Autsit 2017 Autsit 2018 Autsit 2019 Autsit 2021 Autsit 2023 Autsit 2025
|
The Autsit retreat gives us a chance to practice with our autistic traits and foibles in an autism-friendly environment. We learn not to bang doors and cupboards, to turn glaring lights down for each other, and to work with each others' autistic sensitivities and idiosyncrasies in general. We see that autistic traits like mild obsessive-compulsion have two faces: They make meticulous workers but also lead for example to use of napkins, paper towels and toilet tissue in quantities pitting private compulsion against care for Earth's dwindling resources. Similarly, it makes a lover of tidiness an efficient work leader but also a testy and disagreeable one. An autistic love of structure occasionally clashes with an autistic distaste for imposed structure. One person's peaceful quiet behind earplugs is another person's unpleasant need to speak loudly to be understood. And so on. These sorts of problems are likely to come up in any group of autistics, and the Autsit retreat provides a space for autistics to face these problems using ancient meditative tools in a dogma- and sensory-overload-free environment, surrounded (not too closely) by others with compassion born of shared autistic experience.
If you want everything to be perfectly safe the Autsit retreat is not for you. There are rocks to trip on and cliffs to fall off at the very least, and the nearest hospital is miles away. The back door shows bear-claw marks, and we're not talking about a pastry. (A bear did in fact get into the cabin years ago.) For autistics with frontier-friendly natures, though, the mountains with their silences, winds and waterfalls, pine scents, wild creatures and dangers demanding little social ability, but serious ability with things -- this is a real home. In the wilderness we do not practice to become well-behaved crowd-dwellers: We practice to become ourselves -- outliers who happen also to care for a troubled planet.
In our closing meetings everyone usually expresses great satisfaction with how the retreat turned out. It seems, then, that they are a success! Go and make one yourself.