Zen Practice With Autism, ADHD & Anxiety

I saw someone online the other day ask what unique obstacles folks with autism when starting to meditate. I don’t really know the answer to that, but I can talk about my personal experience of meditating with autism, ADHD and anxiety. I have generalized anxiety disorder and nearly my whole life I’ve had 24-7 anxiety—not like panic attack level of anxiety, but physical tension and a voice in my head telling me I should be doing things faster and better than I’m doing them. I recently also found out I have autism (level 1) and ADHD—I had no idea of this my whole and it was a big surprise to me. Some things made sense right away, but a lot of things didn’t. I’m still sorting it all out about 9 months later, but it makes a bit more sense now.

I started meditating and doing yoga about 25 years ago to try to help with my anxiety. For some periods, I’d meditate every day, but for most of that time, it was on and off—sometimes I’d meditate a lot, sometimes not at all. Pretty much the whole 25 years, I practiced in the Thich Nhat Hanh tradition. I often went to an in-person local Sangha. I’ve gone to maybe two weekend retreats where Thầy was there and gave, another weeklong retreat at one of his monasteries when he wasn’t there and maybe 5 or 10 two or three day local retreats. I’ve occasionally done weekend Soto Zen retreats in other traditions or just meditated at different Soto Zen centers at their daily meditation sessions. For a couple years I attended a local Vietnamese temple in the US where very little English was spoken every weekend and I learned (and have now forgotten) the Heart Sutra in Vietnamese.

I’d say the results for me have been mixed, if one were to ask. I still have anxiety, although probably less. I also now take anxiety medication and I didn’t usually at the beginning. Honestly it’s pretty hard for me to think what my life would be like if I had never started meditating, but I can’t possibly imagine it would be better. I certainly have more patience and am somewhat more centered and very rarely get bored anymore. I am probably much happier, but it’s hard to attribute that to meditation directly or any one thing—probably some is just learning as I grow, probably quite a bit was therapy and I assume some of it was meditation-related, although I’m not sure how much exactly.

I am just an ordinary dude, far from enlightened or anything like that. And it should probably be said, I’m speaking about Zen off the cuff and am not a Zen teacher and have certainly never been ordained or bestowed the title of Dharma Teacher or anything like that. So take everything I say with a grain of salt.

Lately, I have had a little trouble reconciling the Thich Nhat Hanh tradition of pacifism with my own ethics. It seems pretty clear cut to me that violence was justified during Hitler’s reign. I’m not sure what Thầy’s monastics would say about that—I should probably ask them or do some more research. I do think some degree of non-violence can transform the world for the better, though.

But back to my own lived experiences meditating with autism, ADHD and anxiety—I imagine I had more obstacles than people without those issues did. But at the same time, I assume my autism is one of the reasons I got so deeply into meditation. Probably for a decade or so, meditation and Zen was my main special interest. I’ve read many Buddhist books and listened to many Dharma talks. I’ve read/skimmed the first few books of the Pāli canon. I’ve read Dōgen’s Moon in a Dewdrop. My favorite sutras are the Heart Sutra and the Diamond Sutra. My favorite poet is Shinkichi Takahashi. One of my favorite movies is Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring. Autism is in many ways of course a double-edged sword and to some, just a curse and nothing more, but I personally view my autism nowadays quite positively (that is not to say it probably didn’t cause me quite a few decades of suffering there), a true gift in many ways. I am grateful I was a Buddhist nerd there for awhile. I’d say without a doubt, I think everyday now at some point about something I picked up in that time.

One manifestation of my autism is probably that I am terrible at small talk. I used to spend a ton of energy trying to keep conversations going through any awkward silences. Now I just ride the silence out lol. I just sort of meditate in my head if I don’t know what to say. I am grateful for all the hours I’ve meditated over the years in times like those. I have many examples like that, like most meditators probably do—I am always sort of meditating when the dentist is working on my teeth; I’ve had a couple difficult medical procedures that meditation helped me get through.

I think one obstacle my autism has given me in my life is often approaching things the wrong way—and sticking with that wrong way for way too long. It’s easy to get bogged down in details and not see the obvious big picture that other see. That probably applied to my Zen practice and possibly meditation, too. People always say, “Just sit. Don’t think of what’s good and what’s bad.” But “spiritual materialism” for me has often been a tricky trap for me. “Meditation good, not meditating bad”, “peaceful mind good, ADHD mind bad” were and are probably voices frequently in my head. I wonder if neurotypical folks might just “get it” a little faster than I did. Hard to say, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

ADHD is probably an obvious obstacle to meditating. But even then, who cares? Meditating is meditating, whether it’s peaceful-mind or wandering-mind. I assume us with ADHD see the fruits of meditation later than others and possibly fewer than others. But it’s definitely not some kind of deal-breaker or something. Meditation has probably helped with my ADHD a lot.

I was hoping this post would be more wisdom-filled and less filled with “I read this and I attended that and I’ve meditated for x years”, but it did sort of turn out that way.