A Person of Yin and Yang

Finding My Spiritual Home in Quakerism

Alone with God

I attended my first Quaker meeting for worship just before my first semester started at Haverford College. I remember sitting down on the cushioned bench and picking up the pamphlet next to me to read about how worship works. It explained that Quakers got their name from the way some people quaked when offering vocal ministry to the meeting. 

From the silence, the first message-giver spoke about the Jewish tradition of requiring ten grown men, called a minyan, to be present at every service. He told an anecdote in which a synagogue had only nine grown men present, so they forced a boy who just had his bar mitzvah to attend the service. That was the conclusion of his message. 

How mysterious, I thought. Why had he just given this message? What did it mean? I contemplated it for several minutes, and then I understood. But I was a newcomer, so initially I did not want to speak. Yet as more time went by, I started to feel that I couldn’t hold it in anymore. I started quaking, like those early Quakers I had read about. 

So I stood up to speak, and all I said was this: “How many must be present at a Quaker meeting? Only two: yourself and God.”

I sat down, relieved from giving voice to a ministry that had swelled up within me. After several more minutes, a third person spoke, and she danced while she did so. She shared that she found the Quaker practice of sitting still and silent in your seat limiting and that movement was also a way of communicating and being with the Spirit. Then a fourth person spoke, resonating with the third message and sharing about his own relationship with movement. 

This first meeting that I attended left me impressed. The way that the spiritual presence of everyone at the meeting drew out of me, a newcomer, a succinct message that addressed the spirit of the first message. It felt like a powerful welcoming, not just into the Quaker community but also into the fountain of my inner wisdom. And for two people to challenge the Quaker norm of stillness by voicing their desire for movement made it clear that this was a community that welcomed critique and new ideas. 

This first experience of Quaker worship made me realize that I had spiritual gifts that I wanted to cultivate. So I kept going to worship that first year of college, continuing even when meetings switched to online worship due to the pandemic. Quakerism quickly became my spiritual home.

Seeking Differently

Since that year, my attendance at worship has been much spottier, for various reasons. I got busier, as many college students do. I developed bipolar disorder in my sophomore year and became burdened by emotional turmoil. Eventually, I was placed on medications that turned me from an early bird who woke up at 7 a.m. without an alarm to a night owl who could easily sleep past 10 o’clock. This made it much harder to wake up in time to attend morning worship. I didn’t attend at all for months at a time. 

Because of this and because I have not yet become a member of a meeting, I still consider myself a seeker rather than a full Quaker. But my spiritual yearnings have grown over the years. They have grown as I have grown into my complex identity as a nonbinary, neurodivergent, Chinese American young adult with a mental health difference.

In particular, my neurodivergence and mental health differences have strongly shaped my spirituality. Being bipolar makes me intensely spiritual when manic: suddenly everything makes sense about life, and I appreciate every little detail, even the crinkle of plastic wrap. But depression can be spiritual in its own way, as it immerses me in the shadow dimensions of life, into caverns of deep questioning. Autism—which I was diagnosed with last year along with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)—gives me a strong commitment to the truth (honesty) and to my truth (authenticity). It also makes my relationship with rules intense: either I obsessively follow rules, obsessively rebel against rules, or obsessively create my own rules.

As a child, I was very strict with what I considered to be moral rules, ranging in gravity from being a pacifist to always eating my vegetables. Perhaps if my family were religious, I would have been devoted to a religious tradition and its doctrines and moral codes. But I have had to find my own spirituality and make meaning of life for myself. Influenced by Daoism and Buddhism since childhood and exploring Quakerism as a young adult, I have sought a syncretic spiritual foundation that could embrace all the parts of me, from my ancestral roots to my canopies of dreams. 

My spiritual journey has been in part a process towards defining my experiences for myself. Mainstream psychotherapy and psychiatry often neglect the spiritual dimension of life and fail to recognize that altered mental states can be incredibly meaningful to people, even when they are coupled with intense struggle. Though I do use diagnostic language to map my experiences onto Western psychiatric frameworks, it is not the only way I understand myself. I consider myself to be yinyang ren, a person of yin and yang. It is an identity and a philosophy at once, encompassing many of my social differences—my Chinese heritage, my bigender fluidity, my bipolar condition—while grounding me in a spiritual pursuit of energetic balance.

Each time I have returned to meeting after a long absence, I have been someone new. Yet each time I return, the Spirit is much the same. 

Challenges in Community

My journey with mental health and neurodivergence has taken me to places that others have not been, both literally and figuratively. My young adulthood has been defined by crisis: whether it is the personal moments of extreme distress that at times led to hospitalization, or the multilayered social and environmental crises that fever our world. Spirituality has been a way to cope and stay alive and to interpret the synchronicities in my life. Even when I did not attend Quaker worship, I could ground myself in the spirit of the message I gave at the first meeting I attended and be with that of God inside of me.  

But looking back, I’ve realized that that first vocal ministry of mine was missing a critical component of Quaker practice: the value of community. As an autistic person who struggles with maintaining relationships, regularly engaging in community can be difficult. My strongest relationships tend to be with neuroqueer people with whom I practice mutual aid. When I need you and you need me, it is harder for me to forget about you. But the ideal of intentional community is part of what brought me to Haverford College and to Quakerism. I initially did not realize how challenging community living would be for me. 

Neurodivergence and mental health differences can pose challenges to living in community, both for the person with these experiences and for the people around them. In my young adulthood, I have been in situations where I hurt a person or otherwise neglected the needs of a community (Quaker or not), that I was a part of. Usually the issues involved either not having full control over myself in times of mental unwellness or not understanding a social situation in the same way other people did, thus believing a certain action to be right when it was not. But it was also often the case that social and physical environments were simply not designed for people like me, and this mismatch caused problems. 

I was at an educational summer program once that turned out to be very mismatched with my neurodivergent needs. Due to my autistic struggle to navigate certain social situations, I unknowingly hurt many people around me. Some of these people then shunned me without explanation, which confused me. I was left not knowing for weeks what was going on until the director of the program called me in for a meeting and explained the specific harms that I had caused. At that meeting, I decided to leave the program, as I did not want to cause any more harm. 

In this case, retreating from the community in order to care for myself and allow the community to recover in the aftermath of conflict was probably the best path forward. I don’t blame the people involved for not communicating clearly to me what I did wrong, as they were likely afraid of my response and did not know that I was autistic and genuinely trying to improve my social awareness. But now I know that for me—and probably for a lot of autistic and neurodivergent people, as well as people with mental health differences—the best way to address conflicts that arise due to differences in functioning is to be direct and clear about what went wrong but also gentle and patient with learning to improve. Sometimes, I may not have the capacity to fix or even understand the problem at the moment. Yet given the time and space to process my experiences, I can learn and grow from what happened. 

I suggest that people be not afraid of approaching us neurodivergent folks with critique, even when we are sensitive to it. We need love and care just like everyone else, and often that means being honest and direct with us, just as some of us may be characteristically honest and direct with you. It may take longer for us to figure out how our strengths and challenges interact with the needs of a community, but we deserve the chance to learn. 

A Garden for Neurodivergence

I long for mentorship from spiritual people who experience neurodivergence or mental health differences, who might accompany me on my path of meaning-making and healing. I have been reaching out on my own to folks I know to try to find guidance on my journey. I wonder what it would look like for Quaker meetings to create apertures for connection around spiritual intensity and idiosyncrasy. What if we renewed the practice of eldering to nurture the mental and spiritual health of community members, paying special attention to the needs of the most marginalized or vulnerable?

Many young Quakers and seekers come into the Quaker community having embraced the language of neurodivergence to describe themselves. But my suspicion is that within the Quaker community, there are many people, especially older folks, who might be considered neurodivergent yet have never thought of themselves as such. The democratic, undogmatic nature of Quakerism attracts many independent and creative thinkers, who may be more likely to be neurodivergent. What potential there is then for mutual guidance and connection around social difference! People of all ages may learn from one another to embrace their quirky selves and deepen their spiritual commitments. People, young and old, need each other to grow and thrive in their personal journeys. 

I would love for there to be affinity groups within the Quaker community that explore the topics of neurodivergence and mental health differences, perhaps similar to the existing groups supporting those identifying as BIPOC or LGBTQIA. I know from speaking with neurodivergent Quakers that many of us tend to feel lonely and may find it difficult to discover new people whose experiences are similar to our own. Each of us has unique gifts and challenges, and we each experience a unique relationship between neurodivergence and spirituality; together we may support one another in developing our personal ministry. 

It would also be wonderful for Quaker meetings to create space for worship activities that are more accommodating to the needs of neurodivergent people. For example, thinking of the messages at the first meeting I attended, I wonder if there could be worship offerings that permit people to move their bodies or to be less silent. This could mean meetings for worship that have different or more flexible rules in place, or it could mean other worshipful activities, such as singing and dancing, especially as a group improvisation. There could also be offerings on days and times other than Sunday mornings, which may make it easier for anyone who is not an early riser to attend. 

It must be kept in mind that not all neurodivergent people are comfortable disclosing their identity or access needs. I’m unusually open about my neurodivergence and mental health difference and intentionally use my openness to advocate for the needs of others. Ideally, Quakers should work as a whole to be better informed about common access needs of neurodivergent people and make events accessible as a default. In particular, as a lot of people hold onto outdated information and stereotypes relating to autism and ADHD—not knowing, for example, how those conditions can manifest differently for adults and for women, nonbinary people, and trans people—meetings need to update their knowledge and make it easier for neurodivergent people to communicate and meet their specific needs. 

In this way, Quaker communities can become sanctuaries for neurodivergent people and anyone who feels different, lonely, or lost. It’s not about labels and diagnoses, though such language does help some neurodivergent folks to understand themselves and discover one another. It’s about honoring all the different songs and dances of the human spirit to the music of the universe.