Cultivating Sensitivity is Cultivating Giftedness

In this episode of the Gifted Neurodivergent Child Podcast, I delve into the significance of sensitivity and its impact on giftedness and neurodivergence. Through personal anecdotes and thought-provoking insights, I cover how sensitivity in both body and mind shapes abilities and challenges societal norms. 

Highlighting the story of a young girl at a performance and the exceptional teaching of patient teachers, I emphasizes the importance of recognizing and nurturing unique gifts within children. I also shares her vision for creating learning environments that cultivate holistic intelligence and urges listeners to embrace and understand the sensitivities of themselves and their children for a more enlightened future.

00:00 Introduction to the Podcast
00:19 A Story of Sensitivity and Genius
01:17 Understanding Sensitivity and Giftedness
03:29 The Role of Teachers in Nurturing Giftedness
05:38 Celebrating Somatically Gifted Teachers
08:27 The Importance of Somatic Intelligence
12:16 Challenges Faced by Gifted Individuals
21:53 Reforming Education for Neurodivergent Children
25:19 Conclusion and Call to Action
25:23 Disclaimer and Legal Information
 GiftedND.com copyright @2024 

Transcript

Cultivating Sensitivity Is Cultivating Giftedness

[00:00:00] 

Lillian: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the gifted neurodivergent child podcast. I'm Lillian Skinner. Today, we're going to talk about how amazing sensitivity is. 

I was recently at my daughter's. Performance concert. I'm not sure what it was. It was something where they were reading essays they did. The kids all stood up and introduced their friends and wrote about how amazing their friend was. 

The last little girl to go when she stood up, she put her hair over her face. She walked to the podium and then she didn't talk.

Her mother said, you can do this. 

Everybody else said. Come on. Come on. 

The teacher walked over and said, “Can I help you? Her response was to put more hair in her face. She was so cute. It was really adorable. She wouldn't do it. So, the teacher read her essay and it was great. It was [00:01:00] really great. She wrote the best essay of all the kids. 

It was profound and deep and really saw the person she was writing about. It was really the most impactful. I couldn't help but think what a genius she might be because she got her teacher to say it and didn't have to. Everybody else got up and performed like trick ponies. 

We have this narrative that says, if a child is not conforming, there's something wrong with them. That each child is a blank slate that must be written on. They must be the one that does the bidding, but that is not the brightest child. That is the average child. That's why average is the ideal. We have a society that wants to write on the slates of all these children. Then we have people like this little girl, me, maybe you, maybe your children. 

Because we are not blank slates. We are born with certain tendencies or sensitivities that push us in one direction or another. We don't have a lot of control over that because they are hard wired at a body and brain level. We have sensitivity at the body. We have sensitivity of the brain. That determines what our giftedness [00:02:00] is and what our differences are. ADHD, I believe, is Sensitivity of the body. Sensitivity of the brain is autism. That is high ability to imprint on the brain that is high ability to condition the body. 

We have lots of ADHDers who excellent athletes are, because it's a part of somatic intelligence. We have lots of scientists who are excellent thinkers and they're autistic because it's sensitivity to imprint on the brain. We need to recognize that sensitivity is the reason we're taking these extra inputs and are able to use them. 

I have a theory that most of our chronic diseases or differences have some value. We just haven't looked at them that way. Because we focus so much on the average, we haven't really tried to look at the differences. By going by the ideal that they've chosen, which is average, normal. We miss out on the giftedness that somebody has if they are an outlier. 

I have Ehlers Danlos. As do many dancers. It gives me incredible [00:03:00] flexibility. I must maintain my strength to keep my flexibility healthy and safe. I could be a very good dancer. But I was never put in it because I grew up poor. So, I didn't get that opportunity. if you're not allowed them, if you don't go into them, they turn into things like Ehlers-Danlos, they become an issue. However, if we looked at our sensitivities and try to understand them. Then it becomes a different sort of scenario. Then it becomes the use of , understanding of, and cultivation of them as if they were the talent, because they are the drivers of the talent.

I think it should be noted that this little girl was demonstrating what a great teacher she had. She was comfortable enough to let her teacher read it for her. I can honestly say there's never been a point in my life where I would have let someone do that for me. I would've felt too much shame being on the spot. 

We need to understand that this teacher was exceptional. The situation was exceptional. Her peers not judging her were exceptional. The fact that she didn't cave to the parents saying, come on was exceptional. [00:04:00] We don't recognize how amazing children are that go against the grain. They are the bravest. They are the ones who are showing incredible intelligence. The Ability to see the big picture and put their needs first. It is natural for her to want to put her needs first. She has higher needs because She's more sensitive. 

Her development is going to be different. It's going to be longer. It's going to be deeper. 

 She's willing to put herself on the outside of the group to continue the healthy development. I felt privileged to watch that. I really want to make sure that everyone understands that is not dysfunction. That is an indicator of intelligence and wellbeing. 

Lillian: That is also an indicator of someone who has high somatic and cognitive intelligence. They came together to be that beautiful essay. That's what this little girl was showing us. She was showing us her body sensitivity, which gave her the ability to see her friends so deeply. Then her cognitive ability allowed her to write this essay, but it [00:05:00] came in the cost of her sensitivity. 

 Then it showed us her teacher's ability who came over and read it with her. Who didn't force her to do it, who didn't make her feel bad. But saw her where she was at. Because he had such incredible somatic intelligence and was realizing it.

Unfortunately, it's rarely found. 

In this case, this teacher wasn't my daughter's teacher. He was the teacher for the other class. My daughter mourned that. Because that teacher was the one she wanted. But she did have a teacher like him. She had a teacher that was even better than him. Mr. Danny. 

She still talks about Mr. Danny. 

I want to talk about Mr. Danny. Because Mr. Danny was one of those sensitive children who was not seen as gifted, who was not seen as special or somebody who was going to go on to do great things, because he has somatic giftedness. When indeed Mr. Danny is deeply gifted. 

Mr. Danny could have a classroom of 30 screaming children, losing their minds, [00:06:00] all neurodivergent and meet each one of their needs individually. This is an amazing accomplishment. He liked larger classes because he felt the children could learn more from each other and that made it worth it. He is right. Neurodivergent children learn, especially from each other. I had never met another human being who thought that. I was like Mr. Danny, how brilliant of you? 

He came across as an adult who never grew up from being a child. He still moves through the world like he was eight years old. He had a beautiful smile. The warmth that exuded from him and children loved him. They felt safe with him. This is extraordinary, especially for a man. He was serving classrooms grades one through three. The kids that other schools are rejecting. He was taking on and turning into amazing students. Mr. Danny had a gift for educating, seeing, and understanding people where they were at. He could go back to being a kid because he had all those memories stored in [00:07:00] his body. 

He felt what those children were feeling, and he met them where they were at. Those children blossomed under his care. My daughter looks back at him as her favorite teacher. She's had some great teachers over the years. But Mr. Danny will probably always be her favorite teacher. 

Mr. Danny talked about how he didn't feel valued in the world. His father didn’t see him as a success. But he was good at what he did. He was even better than he realized he may be the best teacher I'd ever seen in my life. 

I go out of my way to find teachers who are like Mr. Danny 

I will stop a person in a grocery store if I can see their somatic giftedness is that high. I can't tell you how beautiful and rare it is when you see a person who has somatic giftedness that is exuding out of them so that other people are comfortable. 

High Somatic giftedness looks childlike because children possess it. It's not about being less than because we're childlike [00:08:00] as neurodivergence, it's about us retaining our somatic intelligence and Mr. Danny wasn't stripped of it. Which is phenomenal because almost everyone is stripped of it. 

So, Mr. Danny moved through the world as approachable as a human being could possibly be and be an adult. Because he still maintained his giftedness. We demean the people who are so brilliantly gifted in their somatic intelligence because we have been programmed out of ours and told that's the way to be. It shows that you're not as brilliant as Mr. Danny in somatic giftedness. 

That is a gift, and our system doesn’t pay you for it. They don't recognize it. They talk about it as if it's emotional intelligence, it's way more than emotional intelligence. That is body intelligence that connects to your mind, and you give that gift to others. 

 The lack of recognition, and value of it in our society is a great crime. 

We don't understand somatic giftedness. But somatically gifted people are the people who see other people. They feel them. [00:09:00] They sit with them, they are patient. They love them. It is a beautiful thing when you have a friend who has high somatic giftedness. 

I have very high somatic giftedness; all the savants do. It's what drives the inputs that are cognitively realized. However, I also have high cognition. That puts me in a different realm than Mr. Danny. I am not like him. While I can see children. I cannot work with him like he can. What I am good at is understanding the big picture. The theory. 

I don't want to be involved in day-to-day work. My sensitivity is so high, mentally and in body. I would lose my mind because I've taken so many inputs and I wasn't given the space to process them. The thing that I can do more than anyone else is process my inputs to cognition. This is what makes me different. 

It makes me exceptional, but this is how it works. We are all naturally gifted. The sensitivities that drive us to the place we're supposed to be. I had to make this [00:10:00] space. That is what the future will require. We're going to have to make our spaces. My sensitivity is so high. I have Jacksonian seizures because I take in so many inputs and have so much brain growth that my extreme version makes me the person that sees this and forces that way to go. 

But Mr. Danny, I'll give you this course for free if you go through it, because I think you're such a great teacher. 

I am made as an extreme version of humanity so that I can make change. That's what I've come to realize. My family are prodigious savants, and prodigious savant means you are very sensitive at mind and body, but it is a spectrum. 

I know that we are extreme, and it forces us all to live near the wilderness and kind of be people who do podcasts, but we are deeply in touch with those we are in close relationships with. 

People are both afraid of and starving for the way I move through the world. The authenticity that I have. And it's [00:11:00] because they are looking for it, but then we've all been conditioned at the body level to fear it, to run away from it. That that it's bad. But why have we been conditioned at the body level that somebody like Mr. Danny or somebody like myself for outliers are bad? Because we are the ones who can make great change because we are the ones who would be valued in our natural communities. 

But the system must subvert that we got to let that go. We have got to let that go for children too, because what our children need more than anything else is to be exactly who they are and to know exactly who they are. So, they can fill the roles that are going to be there in another 5, 10, 20, 30, 50 years, because everything's going to change. That’s what we typically find. We must understand that having high somatic giftedness or having high cognitive giftedness does not all result in the same outcome. It is a spectrum. As it gets higher in one space or another, or both, you become the extreme version.

I do not fit into the system. In part, because my [00:12:00] intelligence is not one that they can harness. But also, because my intelligence is about the future, and we have been too focused for so long on the present. Now that we need the future, suddenly, I've been declared brilliant. But before that I was, what is wrong with you, Lillian? This is something that you must realize for your child.

Your child is about to become gifted. Or they are about to become doubly gifted. if they have not been up until now. Because your child is more than what they say. But our systems need to control them. It needs to let them know that they need to fix themselves because that's what they do. They make you focus inward so that you're not focusing outward and noticing how messed up everything is. It has gotten this far, this bad, because the most sensitive, wonderful, deep thinkers have been trying to fix themselves and not the outside.

From the moment you are born, they oppress your somatic giftedness. The swaddling they did at birth, my children hated and quickly [00:13:00] pushed out of. Then I Found out that swaddling is somatic oppression. Putting diapers on is somatic oppression. They don't do that in all parts of the world. There are places where the mother detects the babies need to go potty, then put them on a toilet or a towel or something else. Because this is how a mother gets to know their child. I did this without realizing it with my children, because I wore them so much, I knew when they had to go bathroom. My Children potty trained very early as a result of my knowing their patterns. But we don't do that here. We put them in a diaper. 

We have many methods styles such as putting a child in a stroller, then putting them in a seat in the Western world. That are oppressions of somatic giftedness. So, your child fits into close spaces, behaves, and doesn't run around free. 

Researchers of indigenous groups or native groups often talk about how brilliant their children are. Part of the reason is that the child is living a lifestyle that opens  up their somatic giftedness. This is the giftedness of the body. The child maintains the [00:14:00] connected intelligence or integrated intelligence that they were born with. I struggled in school because of my unified intelligence. Because I have an extreme form of it. It's considered a form of genius.

But it was never recognized as genius in the systems, and it will never be recognized as genius in the systems. Because It's not harness able. The key is the harnessablenss. Cognitive is harness able. Those of us who have giftedness that's not, we are destroyed in the systems for it.  They don't want us competing with them. So those of us who could start our own enterprises or be things that be quite amazing. They're not going to be cultivated. I am not meant to be a CEO for somebody else's company. I'm meant to be my own. So instead of trying to teach me that it tried to break me. So, I didn't compete with those that are in the upper-class, who are already in the leadership pool. I must become pliable or out of the way. 

Somatic intelligence is the intelligence of the body. Those who have higher somatic intelligence can [00:15:00] transfer that intelligence up to their brain. So, they're more aware of manipulation and people trying to force them to do things that they don't want to do. This is called PDA, pathological demand avoidance. People with high somatic intelligence have pathological demand avoidance and are aware that they're being made to do things that are not working for them. 

Cognitive intelligence is something others can direct. But the children who are most sensitive are those who are both cognitively and somatically gifted. And we call them twice exceptional. The twice exceptional are the gifted because they have that sensitivity of the body and the mind. Our systems have pulled apart, their intelligence, but some children maintain their integrated or unified intelligence. But we only seek the math and science gifted in our systems. 

I, as a humanities kid, who's really an extreme outlier was crushed repeatedly because that's not the kind of talent they want to foster. They're not interested in having a healthy community. They're interested in maintaining a society [00:16:00] that they get to dictate how everybody moves and functions. Part of that is the focus on cognitive. 

By focusing on the cognitive, they can tell you what the rewards are. Money is the reward. That's not a natural reward for humans. Naturally awards would be love. Natural rewards would be safety, security, a healthy life, but we've turned it and changed it. 

So the awards are now money. Things like gold toilets, sports cars, and designer handbags, which don't make a lot of sense. The reason is that we've been cognitively manipulated to see things as having more value than other things. But Love really is the greatest, most valuable thing. Your child, who's sensitive in the body and sensitive in the mind knows that. 

But we break that connection, and we cause them great harm and they turn into somebody who could be very successful. Someone who gets financially rewarded but the cost to them emotionally is their humanity. It's their ability to be a part of the group. The cost for everyone is environmental [00:17:00] and you can see the ramifications all around us now.

We don't even recognize giftedness in humanity. We don't recognize it other than writing. Writing is not the understanding of how people move to the world. It's the understanding of writing beautiful words that people feel. It's even bigger than the fact that we don't understand intellectualism in humanity. We don’t even understand that we all have different communication styles. I can clearly see and tell if people are gifted in somatic, cognitive, or they're twice exceptional based on the way they talk. 

Twice exceptional people tend to use story. They use story science as their main way of communicating. Because they see the world complexly. So, they're trying to give you all the details. The cognitive people use more academic speech. They'll use big words, but they won't use it in ways to make it deeply relatable. ... 

 Somatic people use a lot of emotion. When I'm talking to people. I am not good at the extremely academic or the extremely emotional. Because my brain likes it to be [00:18:00] because I need it to be multi-dimensional. My brain is very spatially gifted. 

 I struggle when people go to extreme academic, where it's a lot of words with little context. Or extremely emotional, because my emotions have meaning. If you give me a lot of emotions, it means nothing because they literally mean different words for me. I have a clarity that is extreme on what are my emotions are saying. 

I have been told my whole life that I need to communicate better. But what they mean by better is more average. I communicate very well. I take very complex ideas and break them down and put them into a story science. People who I need to hear understand it. I didn't need to communicate better. I needed to communicate like average. with the advent of AI. That's very easy for me to do. I can take what I've written, put it into AI and ask them to make it more average. It's fantastic. AI is a translator for the outliers. But at the same time, it will replace the value of the cognitive.

 When I'm communicating with people who are like me, I don't [00:19:00] use AI because they learn the way I learn. If you've ever met someone who says they don't have a genre, they're likely twice exceptional. Because twice exceptional people are seeking other twice exceptional writers, artists. We don't care what genre it's in. We know that they will write or make in a way that we love. 

If you're asking how that can be. It’s because our education system has been turned into a religion. They give you one answer and it's the right one. But I'm certain that's not how education is supposed to work. That's not how the greatest teachers of humanity saw it. Learning is done through debate. It's done by going back and forth. It's about understanding and having context around things and asking questions to get greater depth of knowledge. It's about knowing the world, not just parts. Also, while knowing that there's never one perfect answer. There's a multitude of others that could be. Based on different circumstances, et cetera.

 now we're running into this black and white sort of thinking. It's partly because we have simplified everything [00:20:00] to 2d. That's what Dr. Linda Silverman’s talked about was the 2d, 3d perspective. It's partly because we have separated our emotions and intellect. 

So, we're moving through the world as only body oriented or only mind oriented. You're going to be a dancer or you're going to be a scientist. There's no, in between. But there are polymaths, people who have so many gifts. The reason is that their brain is still connected in some ways and they're going back and forth and learning and connecting everything. 

There is a reason why we have not advanced as much on the humanity side as we have on math and science. We value people who have the ability to write very emotional things. More than that we value the people who think logically about humanity, the people who are actual, , intellectuals about humanity. 

This is going to come across as harsh, but I really don't understand how we can see Brene Brown's work is PhD level intelligence. I knew in kindergarten what she says about emotions. Emotions have always talked to me. I can have conversations between my emotions in my intellect between my subconscious and my conscious. I can go back and forth and ask my [00:21:00] body to explain why it's feeling away or why it's doing something. This is a beautiful thing. It gives me clarity about why I'm doing something when somebody's making me feel a certain way, and it's not actually in my best interest. 

In other times this would have been declared in sanity, but right now it's allowable because they're letting us come out because the future is changing, and they need all the people who have these gifts. So, we're allowed to be again. 

Your children's potential is amazing. We have been told the opposite because they were trying to get everybody into the workforce so that they could serve the building of the nation, the functioning of our society, but it came at the expense of the outliers. It broke my parents. Please don't let it break your children. 

If you're struggling with your children. If they don't want to go to school, if they hate life. Listen to them. Understand what the sensitivities are. Try to figure out a way to cultivate those sensitivities. I am building micro schools, and I am training teachers for those micro schools. Right now, in my savant circles, [00:22:00] trying to help people get out there as quickly as possible, how our somatic works, how our cognitive works, how to connect them and how we develop our full intelligences. 

Most of the people I'm working with already teach. Now we're adding new ways of teaching. I'm not trying to start from scratch. I'm trying to take what we have and understand it in other ways. I am working with people so that teaching is holistic. We understand what the somatic and cognitive are doing fully. What the other intelligences are. Because they have not touched them at all in the systems really. We have such greater depth for those of us are spatially gifted. 

We have been denied our spatial giftedness, and this is extreme intelligence. This is outlier intelligence, and they have been breaking these people for the last hundred years, probably the last 500 years. We have not cultivated these people since the enlightenment era. These people have been missing because our systems have been breaking them. It's time to bring them back. [00:23:00] Those who create new, do not worry about perfection because creating is not about perfection. There is a percentage of the population who've never cared about perfection. I don't need perfection. I'm not building airplanes. I'm trying to figure out how to make new things. You may need perfection when you're recreating the same thing repeatedly. 

But what I'm trying to do is create new. To understand wholeness, to understand what was broken. They weren't concerned about the humanities because the humanities. needed to be oppressed for them to create their industrial war complex that they've built. But we need to worry about the humanities because the only people that can figure this out have been denied their intelligence so they could build that industrial war complex. 

This is why society keeps breaking. You cannot repress the most sensitive people and treat the most brilliant as disposable because it serves you. It's about the group too many have forgotten that. 

We have denied the intuitive people, [00:24:00] but now the intuitive people are the only people are going to be able to guide us in the future. Your sensitive child is tomorrow's leader and there is nobody who's going to compete with them because our sensitivities are unique. 

We keep saying we must go backwards. But nobody's telling the full truth on that. It's not just going backwards on our living, to farms and towns. We must go backwards on everything. We will not be able to farm the way we used to. We will not be able to use the old data. We will have very little from the old world that will apply to the new. We're going to be looking at so much change between AI and ecology. That the only ones who are going to be able to navigate in the future are the most sensitive ones. 

 If we can teach them and make them whole. So that they don't have to unbreak to be effective later. That is ideal. I had to heal myself for 20 years after going through the systems for 20 years. Your child's best interest is knowing themselves. 

How they move through the world in a completely different manner. If you are like this and you are [00:25:00] interested in being one of these teachers, please contact me. If you're interested in being part of our micro schools, please contact me. 

I am not proclaiming to say, I know you. I don't know you. I know me. That's how it works. We know ourselves and what I can teach you is how to know yourself and that's it. That is what healthy is. 

That's my podcast for this week. I hope this is valuable. Thanks for listening. Take care.

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