Neurodivergent Spirituality: Spiritual Direction for Autism, ADHD and Prayer

Made to Wonder: Spiritual Direction for the Neurodivergent Soul

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from spending years trying to think in shapes that don’t fit you. Many neurodivergent people know it well. The constant effort required to translate your inner world into something legible, linear, and neatly packaged. This invisible labour never quite stops. The fatigue and loneliness that comes with never quite feeling seen, known or fully understood is very real.

I am AuDHD (autistic and ADHD) late diagnosed in my 40s, and I recognise that kind of exhaustion from the inside. I also know from my own journey how it can become entangled with faith. The church, in its many forms, has not always been an easy place for those whose minds and bodies work differently: long services, unspoken social codes, abstract or heavily verbal teaching, the quiet pressure to engage in particular ways. For many neurodivergent people, these things have signalled a deeper message than inconvenience. It can become the insidious internal belief that who we are on a fundamental level does not belong in these spaces.

If you carry something of that history, I want you to know that you are not alone. It is part of why spaces like this one exist. The narrowness of communities that haven’t had the imagination to warmly embrace all of who you are is not a reflection in any way of the deep, limitless acceptance and love offered to you by the one who created you with such care and beauty. There is space for all of who you are, and you deserve to be fully, completely welcomed in tangible ways that are more than an afterthought.

Made to Wonder. Neurodivergent Spirituality

Spiritual direction gave me somewhere to explore my own neurodivergence and spirituality that was both incredibly freeing and deeply healing. The wondering and unanswered questions I brought were as welcome as the knowing. I could follow a thought sideways or stay with an image for a long time without needing to explain where I’d arrived. I could say “I don’t know what this is yet” and have that received not as a gap to be filled but as something genuinely worth sitting with. For a mind that moves associatively, that finds meaning in metaphor and texture and unexpected connection before it finds it in neat, easily explained thoughts, this mattered more than I can fully express.

Having such an embodied and affirming experience as a directee deeply shaped who I am and how I approach my own work as a spiritual accompanier. Receiving that quality of care planted something in me, a conviction that this is what the space of spiritual direction is for. Not the production of insight, not the tidy movement from question to answer, but the slow, unhurried opening of something that was perhaps always there, waiting for a little space to breathe and the unhurried time to notice.

Spiritual direction gave me the room to expand not only my understanding of myself, but also that of the Divine. Gentle invitations and permission to notice what brings me joy and makes me feel most alive and most fully myself opened within me the ability to recognise many ways that Love was already reaching out and actively present in my day-to-day. Spiritual direction helped me discover that the simple act of taking a breath can be prayer. That walking can be prayer. That sitting with a stone in your hand and attending to the particular weight of it, the roughness or smoothness under your fingers, can be a form of presence every bit as real as words. One of the places I have known this most fully is a favourite rocky beach in mid Wales. Sitting on the shore, listening to the waves shift the stones and hearing them settle again into stillness. Something about that sound and rhythm brings me wholly into the present moment, and it is there that I find what prayer, at its heart, perhaps always is: the opening of ourselves to the awareness that Love is already here, already active, already closer than our next breath. That attentive noticing, careful and unhurried, is itself one of the oldest forms of dwelling with God. My tendency to attend closely to small things, which I had sometimes experienced as a kind of failing or distraction, began to feel more like a way of being that was a sacred gift from Love, inviting me to see the Divine in places others often miss.

I see this in the people I accompany now too. The moment when someone realises that the way they have always moved through the world – the noticing, the wandering attention, the thinking in images rather than concrete facts – is not an obstacle to their spiritual life but is, in fact, already a beautiful expression of it. The moment when a directee recognises their innate wholeness and belovedness is one of the most significant and sacred things I get to witness as a spiritual accompanier. It is holy ground when parts of ourselves we’ve long felt needed to be tamed or held at a distance are allowed to come closer and be received by Love.

Embracing Playfulness and Presence in Spiritual Direction for Neurodivergent Minds

There is a playfulness in good spiritual direction that I hadn’t anticipated when I first encountered it, and that I seek to carry into my own practice as I have found it so life-giving as an AuDHD person. A willingness to try things, to work with imagination and image and story, to let something remain unresolved because the unresolved thing is alive in a way that a conclusion wouldn’t be. This suits many neurodivergent minds deeply. Playing with the associative leap, the unexpected connection, the image that arrives before the idea; all have space and room to explore within spiritual direction. I have learned to follow those trails with curiosity rather than redirect them toward something more conventional, because very often they are exactly where the real thing is.

Stones, fidgeting, nature and eye-contact

In practice, I keep stones nearby as a fidget when I meet with directees, as I find holding them to be grounding and they help me remain more fully present. And I invite my directees to feel free to do the same. A familiar object, something gathered from outside, a fidget. No explanation needed or expected. Good spiritual direction, wherever you find it, should feel something like this, a space where you are free to be settled in whatever way is real for you. Movement is also welcome; if someone needs to shift or rock or look away from the screen or pace a little, that is not met as disconnection or distraction. In my experience, it is very often what makes real presence possible.

Eye-contact is not assumed or necessary. Video cameras can be on or off. Silence is held as open space rather than an awkward gap. I try to stay aware of the language I reach for, knowing that the inherited vocabulary of spiritual direction can sometimes create distance where it was meant to invite connection, and that a simpler, more immediate way in is usually worth looking for.

And I bring nature in wherever I can, because the natural world has a way of meeting people that formal language sometimes can’t. Even over Zoom, something shifts when a session begins with a moment of quiet attention to what is outside. What can you see from where you are sitting, what did you notice on the way here, what has caught your attention in the ordinary world today? A quality of light. The sound of rain. The warmth of a mug of tea. These are not distractions from the spiritual. For many people they are, and have always been, precisely where the Spirit speaks most clearly.

Embracing Neurodivergence in Spiritual Direction: Welcoming the Unfinished Journey

As a neurodivergent woman, I want to say something directly about words, and the pressure that can gather around them. Spiritual direction is not a space that asks you to arrive with your experience already sorted and ready to present. The searching is welcome. The half-formed thing is welcome. The silence where the words haven’t come yet is welcome. Part of my work as a director is simply to hold that space open, to resist the pull toward resolution, to stay comfortable with not-knowing, so that the person I am with can be comfortable there too.

To any fellow directors reading this: the neurodivergent people in your care, or who might one day find their way to you, are not bringing you a problem to be solved. They are bringing you a mind that has often had to find God sideways, through the body, through image and sensation and the living world, because the more conventional doors were not always open to them. That is not a limitation. It is a kind of richness, and it will ask something good of you.

And to anyone neurodivergent who has wondered whether spiritual direction is a space that could hold you, your kind of attention, your way of moving through the world, your particular and irreplaceable way of encountering the Divine, I hope this is some small encouragement that it can. You do not need to arrive already translated. You are welcome as you are, in the fullness and beauty of who you were created to be.

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