Spiritual Practice and Social Connectedness

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As someone who has always struggled to create an emotional connection with people, I have become intrigued with the idea of using spiritual practices to enhance this ability. I am wondering if anyone else has explored this for themselves and what type(s) of practice you have found to be the most helpful for what social-emotional aspects of yourself.

By spiritual practices, I mean things like reiki, energy healing, various types of meditation/breathwork, etc.

I am noticing more and more how the people I meet who practice these things are exceptionally sensitive to social nuances and are very emotionally attuned. This makes me wonder if they go into spiritual practices because they are skilled and inclined in this direction, if the actual practices help them gain these skills, or both.

Just as a note:
I do not wish to start an argument about whether they are evidence based or not for the things they are claimed to treat. I am not implying curing autism, just working on certain aspects of myself. I would say there is definitely evidence out there on the emotional benefits of touch and meditation. Close social contact could be a desensitization practice for anxiety. Although I am intrigued by the potential benefits for someone who is NOT naturally socially adept like myself, I go into this with an open mind and take everything with a grain of salt.

Generally I would agree with Fnord on this one with one exception.

Many mothers caressed their child to soothe them. Babies have immature nervous systems and need help to regulate their emotions. When a mother hears her baby cry and responds, her baby begins to develop the tools, both physically and emotionally, to calm themselves. They learn to regulate their own distress. One such tool is using touch and skin-to-skin contact to soothe a crying infant. A mother’s gentle touch and strokes is an important tool for normalizing stress to an infant, to comfort them, to communicate to them that they are safe.

Temple Grandin explains:
Touch stimulation is beneficial to normal babies (Barnard and Brazelton 1990, Gunzenhauser 1990). Institutionalized babies who received supplemental tactile stimulation, developed more normally (Provence and Lipton 1962). Premature babies who receive stroking and tightly bound swaddling also are reported to show definite benefits (Anderson 1986, Field et al. 1986, Lieb et al. 1980).

The strong need for touch stimulation is suggested in Harlow and Zimmerman's classic experiment (1959): baby monkeys would cling to and press against a soft cloth mother surrogate which provided contact comfort, over a wire surrogate that provided milk.

As an infant grows into a small child, they find surrogates to fill this role, often a teddy bear or stuffed animal or a soft blanket. As adult Aspies under constant stress, touch therapy can be used to calm our inner core. Stuffed animals evolve into live animals, such as cats and dogs. Petting animals can resolve stress in a manner similar to a mother stroking her child.

As we move into adulthood, another aspect of touch therapy is professional therapeutic massage. In general, massage therapists’ work on muscle and other soft tissue to help you feel better. In Swedish massage, the therapist uses long strokes, kneading, deep circular movements, vibration, and tapping. Sports massage combines techniques of Swedish massage and deep tissue massage to release chronic muscle tension. It’s adapted to the needs of athletes. Myofascial trigger point therapy focuses on trigger points—areas that are painful when pressed and are associated with pain elsewhere in the body. Massage therapy is sometimes done using essential oils as a form of aromatherapy.

Many Aspies experience loneliness and isolation. Self-harm is driven by isolation and the longing for touch. It has been suggested that massage therapy may be very beneficial for treatment of this condition.

Committed mystics tend so be strongly self-absorbed. If suggest from this that it may harm your sense of connection to others. New Age types are generally just in it as a feel-good, fast-food kind of spirituality for the weekend, and not really indicative of the real temperamental features of the mystic.

The title of this thread was "Spiritual Practices and Social Connectedness". So I see my comments falling under Social Connectedness. The main driver behind many of the negative traits exhibited by being an Aspie is stress. So using tools such as touch to minimize stress in the core will reduce the unconnectedness and allow Aspies to better connect socially with others.

I don't want to get into an argument with Fnord or others on this topic, so take this just as informative of lesser known practices. Quaker practice is spiritual and community-based. Meetings, which are mostly held in silence, sometimes are said to get "gathered" in which the spiritual experience of the meeting seems to hold all in community. It can be an intense experience (and Fnord and others are free to interpret this anyone way you want.) The point is the that experience is real and it draws people together.

Long time Quakers - and people from AA with very long sobriety - and experienced and practiced Buddhists --- seem to exude a peace and tranquility that can be felt by anyone in their presence. Others are drawn to those with a deep spiritual practice (not religious conformity and other nonsense). In this sense, I see becoming grounded in one's own identity and spiritual practice makes it easier to have social interactions, even for aspies. As Prometheus points out a lot of mystics are self-absorbed. Other mystics make it their daily purpose to work to make the world a better place.

Once again, please don't jump all over this, guys. I am not that good at expressing things that are largely ineffable. This is not new age stuff, it is not religion as most understand it, etc. etc.

While it's undeniably true that some "New Age" folk are self-absorbed, charlatans, or full of "woo", to say they that they all are is no different than saying that all Muslims are violent, all Jews are greedy, all Gays are pedophiles, or all Negroes are lazy and criminally inclined. Overgeneralization of groups you know little about is the basis of all bigotry.

prejudice
noun
prej·​u·​dice | \ ˈpre-jə-dəs

1:
injury or damage resulting from some judgment or action of another in disregard of one's rights

2:
a (1): preconceived judgment or opinion
(2): an adverse opinion or leaning formed without just grounds or before sufficient knowledge

b an instance of such judgment or opinion

c an irrational attitude of hostility directed against an individual, a group, a race, or their supposed characteristics

Sure, and I understand the difference between Popular Spirituality and Spiritual Development. The former is transient, and lasts only until the next "spiritual" fad comes along, while the latter is a life-long process.

New Age? Been there, done that, bought the tea-leaves. It's a form of Popular Spirituality. While some practitioners may be genuinely sincere about their own Spiritual Development (for a while, at least), when they start commercializing their spirituality with magical thinking and worthless fetish items (i.e., charms, talismans, et cetera), then it becomes faddish wooism.

For example, psychotherapy is a treatment technique for mental or emotional disorders. There are many types of psychotherapies. Some have been empirically tested and are known to be very effective, such as Cognitive Therapy. Many New Age therapies, however, are little more than a mixture of metaphysics, religion, and pseudo-scientific pretense. And while there may be reasonable disagreements over what constitutes successful therapy, the person undergoing such therapy should not require one to believe in a pantheon of gods, reincarnation, alien abductions, channeling, possession by entities, inner children, veganism, miracles, auras, chakras, chi, ley lines, second sight, homeopathy, divination, or any other metaphysical, religious, or pseudo-scientific fantasy.

Meditation isn't just part of the new age movement, rather, it's pretty diverse. It also doesn't have to be spiritual, rather, for a healthy state of mind. For example, you can use it for mindful breathing while using your imagination.