I Went to Yo Samdy Sam’s Wild Brains Retreat
Yo Samdy Sam is a YouTuber known for videos exploring autism and neurodivergence in general and has helped many people on their journey discovering their autism. She also helps neurodivergent business owners, entrepreneurs and solopreneurs to build their businesses in a way that works with their brains. As part of this, Sam recently put on a three day retreat for ADHD and autistic entrepreneurs. So how was it? Let’s find out.
Firstly, this blog today is based on a YouTube video I put out. If you would prefer to watch instead of read, you can find the video here:
Now I need to start off by saying that I’ve never been to a retreat before. I have the bored easily hyperactive side of ADHD combined with the hyper-rational mathematician side of autism, so I’m confused by the idea of relaxation in general and spirituality always makes me a little uncomfortable so I’d always thought they were reserved entirely for people with a lot less hyperactive energy and a lot more spirituality than myself.
Fortunately for me, not all retreats were like this and the business side of things was what attracted me to the Wild Brains retreat. So in this post I’ll be breaking down what the retreat was actually like as well as the top five things I learned along the way.
So starting with the fundamentals: The retreat itself was situated in the middle of Yugen Forest in The Netherlands. It’s not a place that is well connected by public transport, however lots of lovely participants were able to help with the navigation and many people were willing to drive people to and from the nearest stations which was incredibly kind of them and shows the calibre of people we had on the retreat.
Gorgeous scenery and absolutely amazing weather.
The place itself was beautiful, with an emphasis on sustainability, there were so many plants and flowers growing, they had chickens on site and the environment was both beautiful and clearly well-cared for.
We stayed in glamping tents which was an interesting experience for me because I’m someone who has always been a bit put off by the idea of camping. However, having a glamping tent to stay in meant there was a beautiful comfortable bed in the middle of the tent and I actually slept surprisingly well for being in a different environment that I wasn’t used to.
There were only three downsides to the glamping experience and your mileage may vary here but for me, those were:
I had a massive spider chilling out on my tent entrance one evening when I came back to change and while I’m not terrified of spiders, I definitely don’t want one touching me so that was a fun ordeal trying to encourage the spider to go away to safety so I could use my tent without freaking out. I’m aware this is me being a bit of a wimp but I thought I’d throw in this amusing story.
I wouldn't be mean enough to add an actual image of the spider but I need to demonstrate how much this freaked me out.
On a similar vein (pun intended), I have very tasty blood and so in the late evening and early morning when mosquitos thrive I was eaten alive. For the most part I did use insect repellent, particularly in the evening, but I learned quickly that I needed to cover my entire body on the way to my morning shower because they would find me and make a meal out of me if I didn’t, and it wasn’t a long walk outside to the showers!
Finally, I have a pretty bad sense of direction and while I was confident with the journey from the tents to the showers/toilets in the daytime, in the night time where visibility is basically zero aside from the occasional helpful lamp I was full of anxiety needing to find my way to and from the tent and the loos after night time had fallen.
The food itself was good although wasn’t so good for catering for say autistics with a more bland palate, but they were good with handling food allergies, and the locations for the workshops and activities were a combination of a beautiful building made of recycled materials that looked handcrafted in its own special, quirky way, and a giant tepee which opened up to the countryside at large for relaxing, more intimate workshops and activities.
So with those fundamental principles reviewed, here are my five biggest takeaways from the event as a whole.
Part 1: The importance of having a tribe.
One of the things that became clear to me very early on in the retreat was how important it is to have a tribe of like-minded people to surround yourself with, whether virtual or in real life. This really put into context how lucky and privileged I am to be surrounded by so many wonderful neurodivergent people in my daily life, and through interacting with the other participants I realised that not everyone there is as lucky as me from this perspective and being in a room of fellow ADHDers and autistics for the first time was a profound experience.
I'll be honest, I didn't take any pictures with the amazing people I hung out with so instead here is a stock image of "friends".
Often we suffer as a result of the double empathy problem, in which we are very capable communicators with other neurodivergents, as neurotypicals are among themselves, but problems occur in cross-neurotype communication. Given the majority of the population are neurotypical, this often means us struggling to meet their standard of communication which is both difficult and draining.
However, being in a room full of people who just get it is freeing and helps us understand ourselves better and validate our lived experience. And this is why having a tribe is so powerful, it’s knowing that you are not alone and that there’s a place where you don’t have to work to fit in because you are valued for you. And that’s beautiful.
Part 2: Stimming as normal
I never really identified as stimming or being a fidget before my diagnosis but I remember very clearly my ADHD assessor asking me about it and having the realisation that I’d been playing with my sock the entire assessment. I move my legs a lot when I’m seated and I fiddle with pens during meetings or when I’m thinking.
I’m also very good at masking however and can suppress this when I need to, instead shifting my body in much more subtle ways or actively suppressing it altogether. So the openness and embracing of stimming in the retreat was a real eye opener for me and when I got home I felt the absence of its acceptability in a way I’d never noticed it before.
Upon arrival we were all treated to a fidget as part of our welcome pack. I’ve never had a fidget before and didn’t expect to really use it but actually, I loved my fidget and I kept it on my person for the entire event, regularly fidgeting with it during workshops and really finding a benefit to having it in my hands.
One of my fellow participants also was keen on origami and brought along a huge amount of origami paper that he was willing to share out and so I found myself loving the learning as he taught me folds and using that as another way to stim, repeatedly recreating the shapes I had learned as a way to keep my hands busy and my mind quiet while I listened to the speakers in the workshop.
A collection of origami creations during one workshop!
There was an embracement of dancing with multiple opportunities for silent discos that many of my fellow participants took as an opportunity for movement in a judgement free zone. I personally am not a dancer and much preferred the engaging conversations over the opportunity to dance but I do relate to that need for physicality and love the feeling of walking and exercise so I can completely understand how dance is an incredibly freeing stim for other people.
I particularly noticed how much I’d grown to appreciate the stimming and fidgeting once it was removed from me. The evening after I was in a social situation where I didn’t know everyone there and in the moments where I couldn’t easily find my way into conversation among people I didn’t know, I really wanted the opportunity to pull out the origami paper I had on hand and start folding again, however I didn’t want people to misconstrue this as me being antisocial so I suppressed the urge and eventually found my way back into socialising again.
Part 3: You don’t need to work crazy hard.
As part of a completely different conversation on the last day, we ended up on the topic of working hours and while I wasn’t surprised to hear that I was working so much more than other people, I was surprised to hear HOW much more I was working.
Being driven and having an amazing work ethic is always something I’ve prided myself on, and when I think back to my YouTube series on ADHD and entrepreneurship, I remember picking up on one of the advantages ADHD entrepreneurs had identified in themselves which was the fact that they were driven and therefore had the capacity to work incredibly hard. I guess I had subconsciously taken as fact that I am a hard worker and I will always need to work incredibly hard and long hours to be able to achieve in a world that is not built for me.
And that’s not to say that if people work fewer hours than they are not hard workers, I believe that everyone there was passionate about their businesses and giving them all that they could. But rather it taught me that hard work and drive don’t have to be working constantly, don’t have to be feeling bad for “wasting” a weekend playing switch when you could have been more productive. It’s okay to take more time for rest and that resting is neither a morally bad or an unproductive thing to do.
Honestly, I love my Nintendo switch (especially cosy games) but there have been many occasions where I haven't let myself play because it's not productive enough. So I'm working on a mindset shift here because I do enjoy playing!
What becomes difficult for me is when I’m not yet at my goals and therefore feel the urge to work more to reach them. However, this doesn’t mean I need to work harder. Rather, the old cliché, that I need to work smarter. Leverage technology and support to build systems that remove burden from me, to lighten my workload. And that lightening my workload doesn’t have to mean that I spend my time doing more work instead. It’s okay for lightening my workload to mean that I can work less instead.
It’ll take me a while I think to internalise this concept. I am very much caught up in the London hustle having spent my whole career here, but I like the idea of working less while still achieving so for me this is an important learning and hopefully a big step on my journey.
Part 4: The importance of rest
I alluded to this in the last part but I think academically I knew that rest was important. I know that I need to sleep to be able to function. I know that if I lift heavy weights or do intense cardio then my body needs physical rest to be able to rejuvenate and go again. What I didn’t know though was that there are different kinds of tired, and that different kinds of tired require different kinds of rest to rejuvenate us.
In a wonderful workshop by Sara Kedge we looked at the difference between physical, mental, emotional and other kinds of tired, our individual signs that point towards that tiredness and what kinds of rest that we need to be able to restore ourselves.
For example, when I’m mentally tired after a long day of braining or a particularly intense period of learning, my brain physically hurts and I will say out loud that my brain hurts. I’m slow to respond to questions I’m asked and can’t really hold a conversation. I tend to sit on the sofa and disassociate, staring into space and not moving.
Now the rest I need in this situation is different to the rest that I need when I am physically tired. When I am physically tired I often stretch out my muscles with yoga, and then sit or lie on the sofa and do something fun with my time. When I’m mentally tired however, yoga isn’t happening. I don’t have the capacity. And in fact I don’t even have the capacity to sit and do something unproductive. I instead need to be still, need to have no responsibility, need quietness and aloneness because my brain needs to rest so it can reset itself and begin to work with me again.
I never considered myself to be someone with an affinity for the water but I keep using it as an example with my clients so maybe I should re-evaluate that.
I also encountered a profound statement about rest from one of my fellow participants, and I can’t remember exactly how he phrased it so I’m going to paraphrase it into what I took from his words; and that’s that rest isn’t unproductive. In fact, rest is part of work. Because you can’t do work if you are not rested, and if you’re resting with the goal of being able to do work then that IS productive and that is part of work. Rest is important, productive and valid and we shouldn’t feel guilty for needing to do so.
Part 5: There is no one neurodivergent way forward
In a room full of my fellow ADHDers and Autistics, it was clear that we had so much in common. We were a tribe, a beautiful bunch of creative people, but there were also many ways in which we were different.
Many of my fellow participants were spiritual, were moved by connections with the world, the planet and people that I didn’t experience. Others trended more hyper-rational like me. There was excitement when a tasty plate of mushrooms was brought out for dinner when I immediately noted to avoid that one because the sensory experience of eating mushrooms is something that I cannot cope with at all.
I feel like mushrooms are a polarising aspect of autism; I know so many autistics who love foraging for them and so many who find them a very unpleasant sensory experience!
One participant mentioned that he wished the retreat to be longer because the stress of travelling on the first and last day brought too much anxiety to the retreat. I would have found a longer retreat more stressful because it means more time away from my hobbies, my work, my family and pets and the comfort of my home.
All of these things are small differences and more unites us than separates us, but it does emphasise that while we have so much in common, each of us is a different human being with our neurodivergence presenting in its own unique way. We all have different needs and different views forward for the future.
And so it’s not just a conversation of needing certain accommodations for autism, or other improvements for ADHD. It’s about meeting the needs of each individual person, regardless of what their diagnosis says on paper.
And this really reaffirms to me that I’m in the right space. Because by coaching neurodivergent individuals in a person-centred way, it means that we build a life and career that suits them instead of trying to fit them in boxes that don’t work. Through meeting the person right where they’re at and growing with them in a direction that they want to go in, I’m having real world impact in a way that makes so much more of a difference than if I just focused on neurodivergence in itself.
In a values exercise in the workshop I had to keep asking “why is that important” until I stumbled across something that I couldn’t take any further, something fundamental to my values that can’t be broken down anymore and the word I landed on was awe. I value being amazed, inspired and awed at the things I see in life and in the world and so I leave you with one last thought:
I am in awe of amazing neurodivergent people who are building lives that work for them in a world that often doesn’t. I’m in awe of the amazing unique brains with creative ideas and interesting views on a range of topics. I’m in awe of what happens when we bring a community together and allow each individual to shine within it. And I’m in awe of the potential still to come.
If this resonates with you and feel you would be interested in talking to an adhd and autism-friendly coach, feel free to get in touch. If you’re looking for more blog posts, you can find them here.
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