Greetings fellow human,
Happy hump day once again. Big news on this end. The proof copy of all three programs finally arrived.
500,000 words. A lot of coffee. But soon we will have a full barrage of arrows launching at the catastrophic modern care-industry worldview deeply complicit in humanity's suffering.
Until then, here’s the most-shared media, excerpts from programs 1 and 2 in the Somatic Academy:
The biggest hit, which, honestly, is always a surprise at review time, was the sharing of results from fecal microbiota transplants for a gut infection that accidentally resulted in the removal of an ADHD diagnosis. A reminder: This is not new technology. The Chinese reported using it in the 4th century AD. A 2026 paper finally revealed that Greco-Roman texts weren’t lying, as physical evidence of the practice was discovered inside vessels amongst ruins at Pergamon. Do we all quickly go out and find a local practitioner who can help us with this? Possibly. But that’s not the point. The point is, once again, ADHD is not a healthy variation, an ethnicity, or an identity. That is a lie constructed by magic bean companies who enjoy useful idiots acting as attack dogs for the groundless ideology. It is a survival response. When we discover these findings, we use them to motivate us to quarantine our gut health. Are we doing our best? Are we testing low GI? Low gluten? Low sugar? Low processed? Intermittent fasting? When we do, do we have a chart that reports our symptoms daily and lets us make choices that reflect our sovereignty over our experience? Or are we living on autopilot and screaming at a flying rock we call ‘non-inclusive’? Choice is ours, but so are the consequences.
The second most shared video revealed the neural results of our modern worldview. As we have done this entire project, we compare our grandparents’ worldview, our modern worldview and a body-led worldview. Yes, three worldviews, not two. That conversation in itself is absurdly confronting for many people, because we were brought up to believe our modern worldview is not one. It’s fate, and with it came ‘rationality’ and ‘progress.’ Yet, our amygdala is larger than our grandparents.’ This, of course, is associated with anxiety. Our IL-6 levels (more on that in a moment) are higher than our grandparents’. Our hippocampus (a strong predictor of emotional regulation) is smaller than that of yoga practitioners. Our DLPFC (top-down control centre) is smaller than almost anyone in the last two thousand years, because low volume of that area is how we get ADHD. Which is quite simple to achieve by deprioritising and reconfiguring the role of fathers. Maybe, after 500,000 years, we don’t need him? Maybe when we do, he is best as mum 2.0? We are allowed to have as many ideas as we like, but if we refuse to quarantine them, then we may be living the lie that our ideas don’t have pain potential. Adults who grew up without their fathers have a smaller DLPFC. Father-child interactions are dominated by neural synchrony in the DLPFC (also positively associated with father-child oxytocin levels). People with ADHD have a smaller DLPFC. The rate of ADHD in fatherless homes is double, the same risk as high exposure to exhaust fumes. If dad’s not there, then we may have to carry out some DLPFC workouts alone. Incredibly, praying the Our Father hyperactivates this exact area. Otherwise, we roll out the yoga mat for quite an interesting trajectory. Yoga practitioners initially supersize their DLPFC until decades pass and it shrinks. What’s this associated with? The absence of negative emotional experience to reappraise. It’s no longer needed. We found bliss. Or, we can rebrand men as toxic, and divorce as household diversity (or better yet, female empowerment), and allocate any developmental shortfalls to the personality prison of the next generation, because the modern worldview solely judges fairness for those dead in half a century at the cost of all those who come after. Choice is ours, but so are the consequences.
Our third most shared video related to neural excitability. It’s fascinating how many pathways we can uncover within the body that predict the symptoms we head into the therapy environment to correct, and how we fall for the lie that all we need to do is reappraise our circumstances by swapping cognitive cassette tapes. Objectively, observationally, that does not work. Meta-analysis tells us that. The big psychology associations and universities go to great lengths to hide that CBT, for most people, especially if they are in a passive defence response, is a coin toss at best. If we doubt that, all we need to ask is the frequency of magic bean prescriptions. If CBT worked, why the beans? If the beans worked, why do I have to keep taking them? That’s not a solution. That’s a subscription. But therapy can work. I’ve enjoyed hundreds of hours of it. I finally got to enjoy it because my therapist was trained in the Somatic tradition. More broadly, CBT success has been shown to depend on variables such as compassion and the presence of in-session tools such as breathwork. Hmm, what does that tell us? Well, what did glutamate predict? It is inversely associated with perspective taking and positively associated with the likelihood of having no close friends. What the video didn't cover, but that adds further context, is that glutamate falls during psilocybin interventions and correlates with the positive experience of ego-loss. We can wear a ‘social justice’ hat and bond with other people over every new manufactured problem that comes our way, therefore creating the conditions of attachment: problems and outrage. Or, we can admit that we are likely in a survival response. In that response, we are likely not much fun to hang around because we see the world through the filter of our unmet needs. We take the body to safety. After we do, we see others for who they are, and we all enjoy each other's presence, not being an emotional punching bag or resource to manipulate. Or, we pretend whilst sitting in a white-walled room, with a modern colour pop pillow, and an Ikea print, that drawing up our disempowering past and reappraising our poor relationship with it is all our homeostasis requires and success in achieving it is unrelated to the state of our bodily vessel. Choice is ours, but so are the consequences.
Take the body to safety before expecting others to find us an appropriate target for attachment.
Take the body to safety to fill the development gaps we may hold from our lack of parental investment, even if they did their best.
Take the body to safety by reducing inflammatory diet choices that are quite capable of remodelling the brain.
Nobody tells us that, do they? That perhaps our gut is the source of our disturbance, our underdeveloped (but malleable) brain is the source of our disturbance, and our neural excitability is the source of our disturbance. What else might we have missed? That brings us to our weekly work-in-progress update.
In Australia, a disability scheme has successfully recreated the British attempt to get rid of snakes in India. We don’t want snakes, so bring them to us dead, and we will pay you. What did the Indians do? Breed snakes. Kill them. Collect rewards. Clever, no? What does the disability scheme do? Provide an average of $34,700 support per person per year with an autism diagnosis. Now Australia has the highest autism diagnosis rates in the world.
But funding for autism, is that not a good thing? Would that not help us in our quest to alleviate human suffering? Depends where the money goes. As we have always shared in this project, the growth of modern autism is not low functioning. It is not your 1990s autism. It is high and medium functioning autism, and you can find videos online that guide you with talking points to push you from high to medium, if that is your goal.
So only 15% of recipients are low-functioning. The remaining 283,000 people are medium to high.1 This is our low-hanging fruit. How much of the $9.8b is being spent on targeting inflammation? Are we even aware that it should be a target?
Well, let’s pick out one of our favourites: IL-6.
This has been shown to upregulate NKCC1, which turns GABA excitatory.
This has been shown to shut down the necessary ingredients to convert estrogen precursors in women into estrogen, with the destination instead becoming testosterone.
This has been shown to upregulate excitatory synapses.
What are those pathways like in autism? They are autism. Excitatory GABA is sufficient to create both autism and ADHD. Females with autism have significantly higher testosterone levels. Everyone with autism, based on post-mortem studies, has substantially more excitatory synapses.
What has been shown to be associated with higher IL-6? We know:
Women low in estrogen (this is bidirectional, as estrogen suppresses IL-6)
Women high in testosterone.
Men low in testosterone.
High omega-6 diet.
Non-meat diet.
Perceiving discrimination.
What has been shown to be associated with lower IL-6:
Loving-kindness meditations.
Prayer.
Church attendance.
Cold water swimming.
Sauna.
Yoga.
Carnivore diet.
Vitamin B supplementation.
Volunteering.
Those lists are not exhaustive. They are symbolic. We are not going to bypass that perceived discrimination. In an interesting study, simply reporting that you perceived discrimination was associated with higher IL-6 levels. Not actual discrimination. Which is little different from our studies on rejection sensitivity, where ‘lived experience’ researchers' goal-seeking ‘non-inclusive environments’ found that most participants reported that rejection was mostly imagined. Incredibly, the author still blamed schools.
Why do we concentrate on that? Because, as humans, yes, we can be clever, but we can also be extremely stupid. We tell young kids with an autism diagnosis that the only variable to their distress is this ‘non-inclusive environment,’ our catapulting rock through space, and they will perceive discrimination everywhere they look. Of course we do. GABA is excitatory, sex hormones are flashing infertile, and our brains are hoovering up the insignificant that makes just walking outside sensorily insufferable.
Who is telling kids this? People with jobs paid for by you. Reframing Autism, which received $455,000 in taxpayer funding,2 has a free course.3 Some of the first steps after the introduction are:
“For non-autistics, respecting the choice of the majority of the Autistic community by using IFL [identify first language] is a tangible signal that you are an ally.”
“The use of functioning labels, which designate an individual as “high-functioning” or “low-functioning” or categorise them as having “mild” or “severe” Autism, are deeply harmful to the Autistic community, regardless of an individual’s support needs.”
Watching a TEDx talk that tells you that discovering the world was round, not flat, is a useful comparison to understanding autism as ‘neurodiversity’ and not a medical condition.
Excuse the language, but this is utter bullsh*t. Our highest expression is love. That requires low personal distress scores, and the physiological experience of it is dissolving two (or many) bodies into one. We can observe this via heart rate synchrony, blink rate synchrony, neural synchrony, hormonal synchrony, and, of course, endorphin release (which oxytocin is a proxy for).
That last pathway confirms that separation is the root of our suffering, as our pain pathway, the endogenous opioid system, functions as our scorecard of attachment. Insecure attachment is physically painful. Secure attachment is euphoric.
What is this self-other blur associated with? MINIMISING DIFFERENCES. Our bodies confuse another for us, and they confuse us for them. It’s not spiritual beliefs. It’s not a religion. That is what science tells us.
If you tell people with autism that an appropriate method of care is:
Identifying as an additional category that is not simply being human.
People who do not join you in that category may be prone to errors in remembering the lines for this fairy tale, and that means they are not an ‘ally.’
This is not disorganisation. This is human authenticity.
You are placing a brick wall between them and especially their family.
You are placing concrete boots on them, and potentially their (future) children.
You are complicit in suffering that includes the increased chances of violent crime, chronic pain conditions, and self-harm (of which IL-6 has a strong correlation).
There is a lot wrong with us. I know the pain that our disorganisation produces. However, the strongest act of courage is to, yes, accept ourselves at this point, but also love ourselves so much that we believe we are worthy of even more. To revere this life opportunity with such intensity that we do not waste any time on any other activities other than sculpting this bodily vessel into a finely tuned machine that, once safe, can be used at our direction, rather than dragging us, or, many times, feeling like we are at war with it.
What if that government half a milly, what if that government $9.8b was, at least in part, directed toward:
Balancing sex hormones in men and women in autism (the ones used as cannon fodder for gender ideology)?
Practising loving-kindness meditations that strongly predict not only self-compassion but also compassion for others. Reducing the chances we see another as capable of discriminating against us.
Improving our diets.
Moving our bodies.
Volunteering in the community. Focusing on how we can serve others, and wondering how that might serve us incidentally. Perhaps ‘the community’ starts with our family?
Would we not feel safer in our bodies? Would we not increase the chances of symptom reduction once we recognise the love we seek relies upon that as a target? Again, this is not exhaustive. It is symbolic, illustrative. Which path will we take?
Are we going to build a worldview of victimhood that ends at a Spider-Man meme? Or,
Are we going to build a worldview of personal responsibility that ends in dissolving the illusion that we are separate, recognising we are all fingers on the same hand?
Choice is yours, so are the consequences.
To your healing 💙,
Jas
https://dataresearch.ndis.gov.au/reports-and-analyses/participant-dashboards/autism?_gl=1*1wpaoek*_gcl_au*MTU2ODY0MDQwOS4xNzg4ODIwOTY2
https://www.health.gov.au/ministers/senator-the-hon-jenny-mcallister/media/455000-to-improve-experience-of-autism-assessment-and-diagnosis?language=en
https://reframing-autism-s-school.teachable.com/courses/autism-essentials/lectures/42782444