Episode 36 — We NEED Autism
Guest: Dr. Zach Bush • Date: February 25, 2021
Episode Overview
This week’s episode will change the way you look at autism.
Dr. Zach Bush joins Autism Parenting Secrets for an extraordinary conversation that reframes autism not as a defect to fix, but as a vital expression of human evolution. He explores how the rise in autism mirrors humanity’s disconnection from nature — and how this awakening can guide families toward deeper meaning, compassion, and wholeness.
Parents are invited to shift from fear to curiosity; from “How do I fix this?” to “What is this here to teach us?”
Through his holistic lens as a triple-board-certified physician and founder of multiple regenerative health initiatives, Dr. Bush shares how reconnecting to nature, community, and presence helps parents support their child with reverence — and lead from calm, not panic.
About Dr. Zach Bush
Dr. Zach Bush, MD, is one of the few triple-board-certified physicians in the U.S., with expertise in internal medicine, endocrinology, and hospice care.
He is the founder of Seraphic Group and Farmer’s Footprint, organizations focused on regenerative soil, human health, and ecological restoration.
Dr. Bush’s work bridges the science of microbiomes, the human body, and the health of the planet — offering a truly integrative vision of well-being and human potential.
You’ll Discover
Why autism is part of humanity’s evolution — and not something to “fix.” (7:48)
The deeper spiritual role of autism and why some souls choose this journey. (13:42)
How surrender and acceptance create breakthroughs in connection and peace. (16:13)
How to reframe “control” and see your child as a guide, not a project. (20:33)
How emotions can distort perception — and how to reconnect with truth. (27:58)
The daily practice that helps parents release fear and become more present. (33:27)
Referenced in This Episode
Full Transcript
Dr Zach Bush [00:00:00]:
What soul signs up for that journey? What soul signs up to say, yes, put me in a body that 18 months of age is going to suddenly lose verbal skills and no longer be able to look my mother in the eye and be overwhelmed emotionally and physically and my neural inputs be completely overwhelmed for the years until society comes around me and begins to support my healing journey into my role. They can see their role. Prospectively, they're signing up for that journey.Len Arcuri [00:00:33]:
How is it possible for a parent of a child with autism to become the superhero their child needs now? I'm Len.Cass Arcuri [00:00:40]:
And I'm Cass. When our son was diagnosed with moderate to severe autism, we went all in. We spent over a decade learning everything we could on how we could transform to to help our son thrive. And guess what? He's doing it. This year, he ran for class president.
Len Arcuri [00:00:57]:
Each week on this podcast, we will be sharing the secrets needed for you to become the superhero your child needs.
Cass Arcuri [00:01:05]:
If you wanna learn how to tap into your innate superpowers to help your child thrive, visit autismparentingsecrets.com hey guys, it's Cass. I am so excited you are here. A few weeks ago, we had an amazing conversation with Dr. Zach Bush. It was so powerful. And the good news is this is part one and there is a second part that will air next week. Dr. Zach is truly a light for humanity and the wisdom and inspiration he shares in this discussion will truly touch your heart.Cass Arcuri [00:01:38]:
It's a message that everyone needs to hear. So please share this conversation with others. This will change the way you look at autism forever. And the secret this week is we need autism.Len Arcuri [00:01:51]:
Hello and welcome to Autism Parenting Secrets. This is a extremely special episode because Cass and I created this podcast for parents of a child with autism. But we didn't create it because we wanted people just to listen to us and what we think. Our goal was to bring in the thought leaders and the true sources of inspiration out there who are doing amazing work. And there is nobody who fits that bill. I mean, the person we're talking today is on the top of that list. And we're just so deeply honored to have Dr. Zach Bush join us to be able to spread, you know, his message, to share his insights and his bio.Len Arcuri [00:02:31]:
If you go to ZachBushMD.com, you will see his bio, you will see his long resume. I'm just going to boil it down to the essentials. First and foremost, this man is just a beautiful human being. Secondly, he happens to be a triple board certified medical doctor with a real deep knowledge and expertise. And on top of that, he is such a change agent. He is not out there talking and putting theory out there. He is actually being the change and starting initiatives and not for profit and really kind of just putting the power back into all of us to be able to be the change that we want to see in the world. So he's got a long number of topics that he can go deep on and really share phenomenal insights.Len Arcuri [00:03:16]:
And for us, though, he knows as well as anyone we've met the particular challenges that parents can face, you know, in bringing in a child and just setting them up for success and overall wellness. So we're going to go and cover a lot of topics today and we're going to let Dr. Zach talk. But we just couldn't be more thrilled to have him on the podcast.Cass Arcuri [00:03:37]:
Welcome Dr. Zach.Dr Zach Bush [00:03:39]:
So glad to be with both of you and the whole audience. It's just a real thrill.
Cass Arcuri [00:03:43]:
We're just excited and I just. The one thing that I know having heard you speak many times is there's something like 7 billion people here at the same time. And I do think that our kids, kids with diagnosis like autism are truly here to teach us.Dr Zach Bush [00:04:00]:
It is a beautiful place to begin. The idea of a life being the animation of a body from a long lived soul is really fascinating to me. Certainly we've built thousands of years of religious philosophy and we've been peering into this with all of human effort for so long now, trying to figure out what is spirituality, what is the soul, what is trying to be expressed through these human lives that we live. And when you look at the scale of humanity today, it's like you say 7.8 billion souls globally, it's just a stunning number. It's very hard to wrap your mind around the concept of a thousand million, but to see a 7,000 million people. And it's one of the things that I was struck with again just last night over dinner with my wife. We were in a restaurant, we've never been in this Turkish restaurant. And they had this whole live video of streetscapes of Istanbul.Dr Zach Bush [00:05:01]:
And here's this incredible city, incredible history to it, thousands of years of architecture and culture and I've never been there. And look at all the people walking around that I've never met and look at them all on purpose and look at them all touching each other and look at the kids holding their parents hands and look at the elders, you know, hugging the young woman on the street. And it's just I often wish that just for a split Second in the day, we could glimpse the power of 7.8 billion souls in alignment on a planet instantaneously. And that gives me a sense of the potential of humanity as much as it also, of course, underlines our destructive capacity. And so with the maelstrom that we've been over the last thousands of years, which is this consumptive, destructive kind of empire building concept of human society, human consciousness that we need to take over, we need to fight against the microbiome, we need to fight off the germs, we need to fight off the big animals, we need to kill everything that's larger than us. We don't get killed. This kind of fight or flight behavior of the human journey has been so ingrained in us. And so now when we look at this moment of the birth of a new millennia, with this next century being this first step towards a new possibility, and then we realize that there's indigenous wisdoms that have run for many of them for 600 to multiple thousands of years, that have been predicting this moment, that there would be a cataclysmic change on the planet and within humanity at this moment.Dr Zach Bush [00:06:35]:
And that would be a transition from a species that has been going in vicious cycles to a species that's flying straight for the first time, I get very excited to know that indigenous wisdoms have seen this hope and have seen the possibility of this. When we take a look at that moment, when we start to close our eyes and float above the stress within our homes, within our families, maybe their psychosocial stressors, economic stressors, health stressors. We just take a deep breath at the end of 2020 here and float above that for a moment with your eyes closed and look down at your family and float up a little higher, look down at the block that you live in, and then the community you live in, the city, float up high enough so that you can see the United States or Australia or Canada or Mexico or Europe, wherever you're listening from, and then float up higher to that, that stratospheric level where you can see that, that thin blue line that separates Earth from the dark, vast expanse of vacuum space. And that thin blue line we back up from again and we step into the darkness of space. It's frigid cold there. There's no impact of solar radiation there. For warmth. It's near absolute zero.Dr Zach Bush [00:07:48]:
You would die instantaneously, frozen like an ice cube, if you weren't protected by heated space in there. And so our astronauts floating out in space right now, our astronauts at the International Space station. They're looking down on this fragile earth right now. And in that, we can start to see the patterns of events and start to make a different sense out of them. And autism being one of them. Autism now moving from 1 in 5,000 kids to 1 in 30 kids over the last 40, 50 years. What is that telling us? It's telling us that this is what we need as a species. We need autism.Dr Zach Bush [00:08:27]:
We need this to be part of the collective consciousness with 1 in 30 kids. Remember, we've got 300 million people just in the United States, but with 1 in 30 kids coming to this world, even if things plateaued right now and we were still at 1 in 30, and 20 years from now, we're likely to be at 1 in 3. But even if we just stopped at 1 in 30, those children will be the population of the United States. At that point, you're looking at over a million children, potentially 10 million, in the United States, who are now adults with Autism Spectrum disorder. Why do we need that? We clearly do. Because it's what's happened. This is our journey. The path has already been proven.Dr Zach Bush [00:09:11]:
And so we need autism in our environment. And so why? We can dive deep into that idea as to all the layers of why autism, what is it showing us about toxicity of our behaviors, our collective consumer behavior, our collective industrial behavior, our collective technological behavior? But deeper than that, the why. It's the who for me first. Like who. What soul signs up for that journey? What soul signs up to say, yes, put me in a body that 18 months of age is going to suddenly lose verbal skills and no longer be able to look my mother in the eye and be overwhelmed emotionally and physically and my neural inputs be completely overwhelmed for the years until society comes around me and begins to support my healing journey into my role. They can see their role prospectively. They're signing up for that journey. And so I look at my own path, and I'm just overwhelmed by the fact that my soul didn't have to pick that courageous journey.Dr Zach Bush [00:10:14]:
My soul had such an easy journey, and I feel a huge opportunity to express more grace and pour more resources into these souls and children for the ease that I've had. And then if we back up a little further and say, what is the soul that jumps into a mother that will have an autistic child? How courageous is that journey? How courageous is the soul that jumps into the father that will see his family taken to the brink of bankruptcy and often into bankruptcy out of the healthcare costs and the lack of support from the social structures at hand, the lack of education, who jumps into the bodies of the grandparents of that autistic child to see their children beat down to severe exhaustion and, and to quit their jobs or to turn over their retirement to help support this third generation of autism. These are courageous soul journeys. And each of you listening right now are somewhere in that mix, I'm sure. And so my hat is off to you. My deep reverence for each of you, the autistic children that are affected by this show within this audience, the mothers, the fathers, the siblings. It is very challenging to be a brother or a sister to an autistic child. And I see those siblings so often being the greatest protectors over their siblings.Dr Zach Bush [00:11:35]:
They have an intuitive sense that parents don't have sometimes, or have a different perspective that a parent could never have on how to increase the communication capacity and to be a conduit of information, to be a translator for their sibling with autism. And so my hat's off to the siblings, to the aunts and uncles, to the cousins, nieces and nephews. These are family units that are being mobilized around autism, which is telling us something about what we need. We need families to be reunited over important things. Autism is one of these. And so it can be a real gift if seen through that different lens. And so I hope that each of you can start to look through that lens, because there's going to be a daily tendency, especially for the male brain, to think that you're failing, to think that you're not doing enough. I want you to know that you're doing everything you can possibly do.Dr Zach Bush [00:12:29]:
And it is enough. It's enough for your child, even if it looks like that child is none of the support that you would wish for, has none of the social or educational support you would wish for that child. Maybe you've gone bankrupt. Maybe you've lost everything. Maybe you just lost your home this year, you lost your job this year. Everything that has unfolded is on purpose. It's for the extremity of the experience of doing what you're doing right now, for experiencing exactly what you are experiencing right now. It is enough.Dr Zach Bush [00:13:00]:
You are enough. If you are broken right now, you are called to be broken right now. Your soul signed up for a journey into brokenness right now so that you can put yourself and your family and your child back together in a different model soon. And that's the promise of brokenness. And is that if you hold on with curiosity and a spirit of co creativity with the universe, energy will flow to you. If you can let go of the tendency that we all have to shift into the victim mentality of why me? It's, there's no way out. It's hopeless, it's helpless. That's your human mind acknowledging that there is no human solution here.Dr Zach Bush [00:13:42]:
And I want you to feel that and know that there is no human solution for your child. There is no human solution for you. There is a spiritual calling for your child and for you. And you've stepped into it and you are enough.Len Arcuri [00:13:54]:
And isn't a big part of that to surrender to that concept, you know, because you can't just mentally embrace it. It's deeper than that.Dr Zach Bush [00:14:03]:
That's probably the answer to life itself. Right there is, you know, the cliff notes to a successful life is surrender, motherfuckers. Like, it's that intense. Like, you know, I can't put enough English language around the word surrender to tell you how important it is. And everything else in my own life, I have had to surrender everything, including at moments of my life, surrendering the belief that I could be a parent at all. I saw a moment in time where I felt like I was losing my kids. I was losing everything I ever thought I was living for. And I was in a massive state of hopelessness, a massive state of desperation.Dr Zach Bush [00:14:43]:
I was in sheer panic, fight or flight state. And it was those same children that I thought I was losing that put me back together again. And what was happening is I was fundamentally changing my relationship to my kids. And they were becoming adults at young ages and they were becoming souls on purpose, not under the influence of Zach. And that's a relief. See if you can cut your children out from under the influence of you because they came here not to be your child. They came here to be a soul on purpose, to light this world up. And so the sooner at a youngest age possible, you can as a parent realize you are being called to be witness to these children, not to really parent these children, not to control the environment for these children not to be their pathway.Dr Zach Bush [00:15:30]:
You are here to be witness, celebrate. See the beauty in your children, surrender them to the universe. What energies are going to come to them outside of your influence, outside of your careful OCD effort for control of their environment because you want to protect these children that seem so injured. I'm not even convinced they're injured. I see children go from non speaking to speaking without ever having to learn how to talk. So it's not like their brain has been damaged. These autistic minds are doing something in a realm that we don't understand at the neuroscience level, we don't understand at the spiritual level. These children are here doing something that is so mysterious and so bizarre.Dr Zach Bush [00:16:13]:
Surrender to that trust in that trust in the mystery of what your child showed up to do in their nonverbal state, in their maybe pre verbal state or verbal state or their post verbal state, whatever stage. Understand that the weak and vulnerable five senses that we attribute to the human is scratching the surface of what we can really sense and what we can really do if we start working biophotonically towards one another to heal one another, to heal the spiritual journey of humanity as a whole. That's what these children are here to do. They're here to heal the journey of humanity as a whole. And so if we surrender into that.Cass Arcuri [00:16:49]:
And we've witnessed, I mean, we witnessed that firsthand what you're talking about. And as soon as we kind of got over our own shit that we were doing and judging and correcting and just let Ryb, like, you know, Rye taught himself how to read. Basically, yes, we had speech, but taught him speech, but then taught himself multiplication. Like, he just innately knows so much that as much as we're empowering him to be that best version of himself. And, you know, yeah, he came through me, but he's here for his own reason. It's our job to support him to really thrive. And that's what, you know, our intent is for of the parents that we support is to help empower them so they can basically help their child thrive, so they can then do whatever they're here for. Like, what is those gifts that they're here to really shine for humanity.Dr Zach Bush [00:17:43]:
Ry is such a good example of a reorienting force. Right? It's not too often that are not too uncommon that we're in the exam room together and he's in the room, we're having a conversation. I can start talking to Ryan. We can have a fun conversation. He'll usually tell me something I've never even heard of or imagined. He's got some so many brilliant little aspects of his knowledge base that blow my mind. And then we'll kind of fall into a natural kind of human, adult conversation. And then Rye will just have enough that he's just like, this conversation needs to go a different direction.Dr Zach Bush [00:18:17]:
And he will interrupt us, and he will take us in the direction we just had not been going. And if we back up for a moment and realize that Rai's sense of the perspective of a conversation has nothing to do with the information traveling through our Words. I think he is seeing that group of his parents, a doctor, in a space that he feels safe. It's much more similar to something like church. It's a fellowship experience. He's there for the spiritual experience of being in fellowship in a safe space where he knows his parents are being supported and he can see that support and he's glad for that. He feels seen, and he doesn't often seem feel seen maybe by the world. And so this is what he is experiencing, that space.Dr Zach Bush [00:19:03]:
He's not there for Zach's words. He's not there for to hear his parents questions couldn't care less, really. He knows that the questions are missing the mark. He knows my answers are nowhere near the mark, but. But he knows that we care and we love each other and he wants to see the three of us loving each other and embracing each other on this journey of humanity. And he's almost orchestrating that, like, okay, you guys are taking this way too freaking seriously. Let's lighten this moment. I'm stepping in.Dr Zach Bush [00:19:33]:
Shake up the room. All right, there's the levity back. Everybody's laughing again. All right, you guys do your thing for a few minutes and he'll shake us up again the moment we start taking ourselves or our perspective on the situation too seriously. Because we don't have it. We don't have the answers. We don't have the perspective. We're so two dimensional because we've been trained out of it.Dr Zach Bush [00:19:52]:
We've been forced to let go of our intuition. We've been forced to let go of our real sense of self. And so rai is a joy, as a reorienting force. And so in your family, it's interesting to imagine a situation where the child is suddenly seen as a reorientation force instead of a disruptive force.Len Arcuri [00:20:13]:
Yep. No doubt. We see that he's the teacher. And I know, going back to my frame of mind, initially I thought I was going to kind of parent the autism out of him. Right. To kind of teach him and to figure things out. And, you know, I think now I've landed where all I am. I could be a really super helpful and loving guide.Len Arcuri [00:20:33]:
Right. I could be there, an ally. But I don't have the answers. I know he's teaching me much more than I'm teaching him. And that just presence and that connection, it does outweigh everything else because he sees right through the words. He sees through all that. You're absolutely right. And I guess the question is, how can a parent kind of get that concept Even more because it's one thing to hear it, but I mean we have been trained our whole life to strive and to keep going and to keep pushing.Len Arcuri [00:21:02]:
How does one, other than meditation or something like that, how does one put that into practice?
Dr Zach Bush [00:21:08]:
Yeah, the, I mean the answer is it's a lifetime practice to move that, that. And that's not something that you throw a flip a switch on. I don't think, I hope, I would love to think that we can get to a place as humanity that we could throw the switch and just be in a high consciousness state and be connected to sources at the kind of level that these children come into the world with. But assuming it, it remains a lifelong journey as it has been for, for our 200, 000 year history as homo sapiens. The journey into that is, you know, you mentioned meditation. I think the whole purpose of meditation and mindfulness obviously is to come present in the moment. And to come fully present is one of. It's another way of saying absolute surrender.Dr Zach Bush [00:21:48]:
You have to surrender everything that's ever happened and everything you hope to happen to be completely present right now. And that's ultimately your calling. Right? It's fascinating that what I just described sounds impossible unless you're four years old. And that's just how you live when you're four. That's what you do. You actually don't stake anything on the past week. That's why we have so few memories of before kind of age five or six is because we haven't yet learned how to hold on to the past. And so we don't.Dr Zach Bush [00:22:19]:
And we're just speeding forward the amount that we will learn in those first couple years. We learn language and we learn patterns of behavior. We learn emotional communication. The complexity of what we're learning demands full attention. Be fully present right now and do not for a moment look back. There is no nostalgia in a four year old. I'm struck by. I just had an all staff meeting a few minutes ago and, and all of these adults reflecting on what do I love about the holidays or what, you know, what are the.Dr Zach Bush [00:22:51]:
My favorite memories. Maybe that's good, but it's not what we did before. We learned how to hold on to the past. We made those memories by being fully present. And so if we're going to be fully present this Christmas, what are we going to let go of? You know, it doesn't mean the past disappears or is irrelevant or is unloved or uncared for. It just means it's not relevant to today. And so, and if it is relevant, it's relevant in ways we can't understand. And so it's, it's different than trying to cling to that experience in the past, to have a new experience today.Dr Zach Bush [00:23:24]:
We have to let go of all of that so that the magic that created those memories becomes possible to recreate today in a new fashion for a new future, for a new memory today that would be just as ingrained in our experience, in our soul journey as that four year old was under the Christmas tree or whatever it is that you're remembering. And so come fully present and surrender the past. Try to let go of your emotional memory because it's the most traumatic thing that we have. The emotional part of the brain wraps around the memory center in the brain. So all we have is short term memory in the brain. We haven't ever found a hard drive in the brain. We don't have a long term memory storage in the brain, which is really weird. It seems to be stored peripherally.Dr Zach Bush [00:24:06]:
And so we seem to store all of our long term memory out in our fascial planes perhaps, which are kind of a separate neurologic system from our brains and peripheral nerves. It sits right below our skin. It has this weird dynamic electrical potential within it. And so maybe it's within the fascia, maybe it's within tissue itself, within the water structure of the tissue itself. These are some of the ideas that are out there right now as to where do we really store memory, but in the brain, when we go to access that, we usually access it through the emotional cortex of the hippocampus. And so the memories you are going to recall easily are those that are wrapped in emotion. It's why nostalgia or trauma or fear or guilt tend to become the dominant memories of our life. And it tends to define the narrative that we tell about ourselves, which of course dumbs our down our experience down radically.Dr Zach Bush [00:24:57]:
Right. I'm so fascinated by the fact that we were neurologically wired to experience right now and not to remember the past very well, you know, but you know.Cass Arcuri [00:25:08]:
It'S crazy because Ry can remember dates, he can remember basically everything. Hey, do you know where we were on November 12, like 2000 end? And you just like, how do you do that? And that's part of these, part of the gifts that these kids have, that. And it's, you know, and it's funny because sometimes he'll tell us stuff when he wasn't even talking, like, just like, how do you remember we had that conversation? But yeah, it's, it's truly amazing.Dr Zach Bush [00:25:35]:
And tell me this is. Because this is fascinating with Ry, but tell me if I'm wrong, but from what I've heard from him over the years, he never tells me an emotional memory. He tells me on November 12th, we were here and we were doing this thing and there was no emotion attached to this thing. We just happened to be driving on this road and I saw this sign.Len Arcuri [00:25:55]:
True, true.Cass Arcuri [00:25:56]:
And even if something was like when he fell and had to get stitches, he states it matter of factly versus and he doesn't cry like getting stitches.Dr Zach Bush [00:26:06]:
It was an event that occurred. Yes, on December 1st. I had stitches and I was in the emergency room and the doctor was wearing a blue hat. I don't know why he's wearing a blue hat. But then he also had like the stitches were actually in this little package that had this cellophane thing. Like, he's so damn specific about his memory.Len Arcuri [00:26:23]:
And the route we took to the.Dr Zach Bush [00:26:24]:
Hospital and the route you took to the hospital, I mean, it's that that level of exquisite detail. And so the thing about Ry that strikes me is he has learned to or he has never forgotten how to access the knowledge field. When we are trained into an emotional state of knowing or an emotional state of experience, and therefore an emotional state of memory, we forget all the details because we can't really store that memory until we access it via an emotion. And if we start to define our narrative experience that way, each emotion lasts biochemically about seven seconds and then it has to be re triggered to last any longer than that. And so what we're doing is we're taking these snapshots that are then warped by the emotion itself. They've done this a lot with eyewitnesses, right? A crime happens and there's a car involved. And you ask 32 witnesses and you'll get seven different colors of that car. And so it wasn't a black car, it was a red car.Dr Zach Bush [00:27:22]:
And have them saw it as a white car. And it turns out it was a blue Honda. Nobody knew it was a blue Honda. There was people that thought it was a Chevy. Some people even thought it was a pickup truck. Like, it's unbelievable how inaccurate. Even in a big dramatic situation, our perception is because it's being coded by emotional filters that screw up the reality that we're actually experiencing. And so what are the emotions, mom and dad, today that you are experiencing that are screwing up your perception of your child or your perception of your child's journey or your perception of what that journey should look like or your perception of what the journey has been.Dr Zach Bush [00:27:58]:
Your emotions are screwing it up. And that's really, you know, sounds like an asshole thing to say, frankly, from some guy who doesn't have an autistic child to say that to a parent that does. Like, how am I supposed to do that journey without emotions? No, the emotions should happen. They are natural and they're actually holy. They're divine capacities of the human experiences to have emotion. And so I don't want to say that you should do it without emotion. I just. I want to say that there's an opportunity for you to disconnect the emotion from your entire narrative.Dr Zach Bush [00:28:29]:
Dive into the grief. Don't push the grief away. Hold on to that whole experience, all five layers of grief. If you haven't read the five layers of grief, please read those. You have to read those as a parent of an autistic child, because you're going to grieve over and over and over again because change is always going to be happening. Change is going to happen to the friends you thought you had. They're going to. You're going to have to change the social group you thought you had.Dr Zach Bush [00:28:54]:
You're probably going to change the church you thought you had. I mean, it's going to get that intense where there's not an area of your life that's not going to change because of this autistic reality within your life. And in all of that change, you're going to have to grieve. We think of grief being associated with trauma and loss, but in fact, change itself requires that whole, whole journey. And my wife has done a really good Instagram live recently on this with a woman who does a lot of grief trauma counseling. And so understand that the changes in your life are inducing those grief patterns. And to be present with those emotions, don't push them down in the base of your lungs where you tend to store unresolved grief and then lead to all kinds of trauma. Breast cancer and lung cancer and lung copd, emphysema, chronic bronchitis, you know, chronic respiratory issues, blah, blah, blah, all from unresolved grief.Dr Zach Bush [00:29:44]:
So don't do that. We got to let that out. But then to have the discipline to try to find the quiet space within your body and it's commonly down, like in the floor of the pelvis, like this safe. There's an energetic space where your soul sits down near the center of your pelvis. And in that space, if you can learn to access that, there is no emotion. Emotions happen up in These high energetic centers up top, up in your chest. And so sinking out of those emotional centers to become centered into that soul space and say, I am here, I'm enough. Okay, let's start with that.Dr Zach Bush [00:30:19]:
I am here, I am enough. And there is no emotions in this space. And what is the narrative that's real? And start to tell your narrative from that soul space instead of the emotional chest or the mental, you know, brain. Those are dangerous places to tell your narrative. It's a dangerous place to program your child into with the narrative they're playing out. And so it's a very important thing because codependence is bred very quickly. If you're up in your headspace or heart space with this journey and you will become codependent with that child that has been labeled as disordered or labeled as diseased. That child, the perception of that child leads to the belief that you need to plug in all kinds of you around that child to complete them or to protect them.Dr Zach Bush [00:31:05]:
And you've now stifled their whole energy field and who they are trying to become. And so having that energetic distance of, I honor you, I revere you, you are the teacher, I am the student sitting there as you guys have talked with Ry. Those are daily exercises because the world is telling you the opposite every second. The world is telling you the opposite. You're responsible. There's nobody else going to help. You have to do everything. You have to educate your child, solve for the, the emotional and social deficits in that child's life.Dr Zach Bush [00:31:37]:
It's overwhelming. It's overwhelming. I can't imagine as a parent, I can't imagine the journey you all are on as parents of autistic child. My soul wasn't. Wasn't on that journey. And I'm tempted to say that wasn't a courageous enough, you know, I wasn't courageous enough maybe to take that journey, this cycle around.Cass Arcuri [00:31:55]:
And so I think you have a courageous one. You have your own courageous journey.
Dr Zach Bush [00:31:59]:
Different, different courageousness. And I, I see it as, I see it as on. On its knees. My soul is on my knees. To each of you as souls, your journey is. Is of the bravest and highest calling. And it's separate from your child's and, and it's separate from your child's, and it's separate from your child's. And so you guys, I think, are leading the charge with this podcast with your own experiences to say, as a community, we need to start to support one another at the parent level, at the sibling level, at the parent and grandparent level.Dr Zach Bush [00:32:32]:
We need to support one another, to break the cycles of co dependence and emotional memory, to become totally present right now, to learn what we must learn from autism so that we can move forward and not see a generation with one in three with autism, because it's no longer necessary. Because we learned and we found out what we needed to. And the autistic children rose as a group, as a population to teach humanity what we needed to learn from them. And if we're listening carefully and we pivot quickly, there won't be a need for a higher burden of this disorder in our. In our communities.Len Arcuri [00:33:06]:
That's absolutely beautiful and, and it does. It all comes down to just presence, acceptance. And it's a practice every day to just do your best and to get better and better at that. Because it is. We know it's not a switch that you flip, but it is a practice that you can cultivate just to become just more allowing and accepting to what is.Cass Arcuri [00:33:27]:
And it's amazing when you do be able to shed and become present, how connected your children then become. So where Ry started to. Where Ry is now, night and day difference. He's doing everything everyone limited him telling us he couldn't do. We have clients who, you know, same thing with their children who basically were told they were broken and now their kids are social, they're connecting. They're asking parents to hold hands together and take a family walk. You know, so things that. So it's not, you know, don't listen to the limitations of others know in your heart.Cass Arcuri [00:34:01]:
But I loved how you said, you know, it's not thinking with your brain or thinking with your heart. It's also checking in with that sacral space to really what is best. As I move forward, I think, you.Dr Zach Bush [00:34:13]:
Know, I such a beautiful description that you just did there. And I also want to honor both of you and what I've seen because over the years of witnessing your family, I think it's maybe been six years or something now. I have to say, in a weird way, for all of the strides that the world recognizes in Rye, he's the only one that hasn't changed. I think the two of you have come light years in the light. You bring into the world, the passion for humanity and other parents that you bring, the traumas that you've released from your bodies and your minds and your spirits, the sense of overwhelm that you were in when I first met you is gone. Like, you guys are making bold decisions. You guys are making extremely courageous decisions for your family to Uproot, sell your house, rent, get on the road, take the family on a journey. Those are huge things for any family to decide.Dr Zach Bush [00:35:10]:
And to see you guys doing that journey, I can't wait for the roadshow. I can't wait for, for Ry to come into communities and shed his knowledge and light into communities all over the country as you guys go on the road. And I'm not holding you to that, maybe that's not the next step, but there's just this sense of you guys are blowing the doors off of what a whole family has been told they could or couldn't do with an autistic child in the midst. And so not only is Ry finding his freedom, your family unit, and therefore your community around you, the extended family, the spiritual community, the larger autistic community, is going to watch the doors blow off as you guys become more and more joyful in your co creative process. And Ry will find out was the conductor the whole time and he saw the whole path and he didn't need to change. He just needed to be heard a little bit better at times. But he didn't need to change because he already was connected to Source at a level that for generations your family has forgotten. And you guys are reconnecting to a memory of who you are for reals and what you're really here to show up and do.Dr Zach Bush [00:36:14]:
And so I honor both of you. As much as I enjoy Rai's journey, I've seen exponential growth in the two of you and I've learned much from that. So thank you for teaching me.Cass Arcuri [00:36:25]:
Thank you.Len Arcuri [00:36:26]:
Thank you so much. And we know that our change could never have happened unless we curated our environment and surrounded ourselves with people who did allow us to see things differently, who gave us that support. Which is why we drive for four hours to come visit you at the M Clinic and to experience the wonderful people there in your practice. Because it is that right support of who you have around you makes a huge difference. Because otherwise every parent, I think, starts in isolation. I'm going to do this myself. I'm not going to coordinate. I'm not going to be part of community.Len Arcuri [00:37:00]:
And the power is in the community and the people who you allow in. And there's no question, you have absolutely been a beacon of light for us. And we can't, from the bottom of our hearts, we couldn't. Thank you more strongly. So thank you very much.Dr Zach Bush [00:37:13]:
Beautiful. Well, I'm, I'm delighted to be in a star field of human souls and it's one of them out there. So I'm delighted to be shining in the same universe you're living in and each of your joy. So thank you for for your journey and the vulnerability and sharing that journey with the groups of people around the world through this podcast is a real service. So it's something that only parents of an autistic child can open up and have this level of vulnerability and and show a journey that few would want to share. So thank you for your courage and your vulnerability and transparency in the journey.Cass Arcuri [00:37:48]:
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