My Embodied Experience of Autistic Joy
For Neurodiversity Celebration Week, Neurodiverse Connection’s Development Lead, Kay Louise Aldred, shares her personal exploration of Autistic joy as an embodied experience.
This Neurodiversity Celebration Week, at Neurodiverse Connection, we honour the many ways Neurodivergent individuals experience and express their ways of being and doing in the world. One of the most profound expressions of this is Autistic Joy, which for me, is an embodied, heart-led, and deeply spiritual experience that transcends external validation and is accessed from within and through my body.
I experience Autistic Joy as a free-flowing lifeforce, a creative wellspring that rises from the depths of my being and manifests in spontaneous, felt-sense-led, instinctive and intuitive actions. It is an unrestrained expression of my true essence and goodness, moving up and out of me, into the world, uninhibited and full of vitality. This joy is not momentary, nor is it contingent on external factors or stimulus—it is a state of being, a well within my heart that has always been there, despite the many years it was obscured by trauma and inaccessible to me because of this.
“Drumming especially allows me to feel the pulse of life itself, the rhythmic connection between my body and the world around me.”
Through devotion, ritual, dance, movement, sounding, and drumming, I access the state of flow—a space where my spirit is liberated from societal conditioning. In these moments, I am fully present, absorbed in an expression that is inherently non-verbal yet deeply meaningful to me. Drumming especially allows me to feel the pulse of life itself, the rhythmic connection between my body and the world around me. When I drum, I move beyond thought, beyond the constraints of language, and into a realm of pure expression and union. The vibrations resonate through my body, grounding me, freeing me, and allowing joy to surge upward and outward unhindered. Dance and movement further deepen this liberation, as my body shakes off stagnation, loosens from rigidity and restriction, and reclaims the organic, fluid motion that was once stifled by (particularly) educational expectations of being still and conformity. It is a spiritual experience, that allows me to remember my expansiveness and reconnects me with my authentic self.
However, as I mentioned, my ability to access this joy was not always possible. For years, unresolved trauma meant I lived in a state of nervous system dysregulation, stuck predominantly in freeze and fawn responses, disconnected me from my innate joy. The freeze state is a protective and adaptive survival mechanism—when the nervous system perceives overwhelming danger, it shuts down to preserve energy and avoid further harm. In this state, emotions, movement, and expression become compromised or frozen. Joy is blocked because the body is in survival mode, adaptively prioritising defence and protection over openness, connection, and creativity. Only through nervous system healing, trauma release, and moving into regulation, healthy sympathetic and parasympathetic states, have I been able to return to this embodied sense of joy. It is a profound reclaiming—not a fleeting happiness, but a deep, resonant well-being that originates from within me and radiates outward.
“Joy is something to cultivate, nurture, and fiercely protect.”
To access joy, I had to liberate my body from societal conditioning and ‘normative’ ways of being. The expectation to move in a certain way, communicate only through words, and suppress my natural rhythms created a disconnection within me. I had to unlearn the belief that valid expression is only verbal or logical. I had to disengage from the world of should and analysis—the rigid frameworks that had kept me constrained—and step fully into felt experience, my instinct, intuition, and hyper-sensory aliveness. It was only in doing this that I could reclaim the joy that had always been waiting beneath the surface.
Joy is something to cultivate, nurture, and fiercely protect. It requires conscious nurturing—actively choosing environments, relationships, and practices that support its growth. Just as fire needs tending, so too does joy. It is not a passive experience; rather, it is an active, living force that thrives when honoured and safeguarded.
To explore more about neurodivergent well-being and how we can nurture our authentic selves, consider attending the Neurodivergent Wellbeing Approach Training running this spring and summer. This training provides insights into nervous system regulation, trauma recovery, and self-knowing for neurodivergent individuals.
As we celebrate Neurodiversity Celebration Week, may we recognise and honour the diverse ways in which joy manifests. May we create spaces of regulation where Autistic Joy can thrive—where it is not only welcomed but cherished as the heart-led, liberating force that it can be?
Neurodivergent Wellbeing Approach training
This training is a holistic, Neurodivergent-friendly wellbeing curriculum led by Kay Louise Aldred.
The training offers education and practical strategies for Neurodivergent individuals, their family members, friends, caregivers, and professionals who support them.
Find out more at the link below.
