Hello and welcome to another episode of Mindfulness Plus. I'm your host Thomas McConkey. Thanks so much for listening today. Some of you know this, some of you won't, that this

month, April, is World Autism Month, where we recognize all the beautiful souls in this world

who have incarnated with neurodiverse minds.

I'll say more about that in a moment, what I mean by neurodiversity, if you haven't heard that term.

But I'll also say that I know about autism month because I actually have two siblings who are on the autistic spectrum.

One of them, Joseph, I live with, and he's one of my best friends.

And I love this term neurodiversity.

Sometimes you hear neurodivergence because it emphasizes that people with different kinds of minds, different kinds of brains, aren't necessarily

just disabled, but they actually have a unique way of experiencing the world, a unique way of

processing reality and making meaning. You could even say, I don't think it'd be an

exaggeration to say that within neurodiversity, we find certain superpowers. And I want to talk about

one superpower that I often experience with my brother Joseph, because it relates very much to this practice of transformation,

of mindfulness, of waking up and all this good stuff.

And that superpower is, well, it's best understood in the form of a story.

So a couple years back, it was May, my birthday, May 20th.

And on the day of my birthday, at the end of the day, I had a really great day.

It was simple, you know, just being up in the mountains and eating good food and that was about it.

It was just good to be alive that day.

And I remember coming home in the evening and just feeling deeply content.

And I bumped into my brother Joseph in the kitchen and he said, hey, I got you a birthday

present.

And he handed it to me. It was a little figurine of Hank Schrader, the DEA agent from Breaking Bad. So Joe and I, we, you know,

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