The Discipline of Re-Organizing
Asperger's, Art, and the Search for Stillness Through Structure
I sat down this morning — the kind of morning when my Asperger’s mind demands order — to find a book: Selling Yoga, written by a friend who also happens to own several of my art pieces. I was sure it was on the shelf, but of course it wasn’t. After the move, my books ended up thrown together in whatever boxes I could manage. Now I’m left with the ritual of re-organizing — again.
I’ve learned to see that impulse for order not as a flaw but as part of my creative wiring. Living with Asperger’s has taught me how much pattern and rhythm matter — in art, in thought, in the smallest acts of daily life. What looks like rearranging books is really a form of meditation, a way of mapping the inner world outside myself.
It never fails: when I go hunting for one book, I find others that speak to me in ways I hadn’t expected.
This time, a copy of Autism and Buddhist Practice. Another, Buddhism for Beginners — the one I once thought I’d read alongside a friend. Then, What I Mean When I Say I’m Autistic. A couple by Danny Gregory (The Creative License and You Do You) that remind me why I’m sketching my life in ink. Even Spiritual But Not Religious?, written long ago by a colleague with expertise in interfaith dialogue.
The stack grows: The Foundations of Buddhism, which always tied my students in knots but which I now feel like rereading; Ambivalent Zen, a title that could serve as my autobiography most days; Wisdom as a Way of Life, Stephen Collins’s posthumously published bridge between scholarship and practice; Storied Companions, by my friend Karen Derris.
Each of these books is more than paper. They’re touchstones — to my teaching, friendships, diagnosis, and art. This is why organizing books has never been just a chore. It’s a secret ritual, a way of holding the fragments of my life in my hands again, even if the shelves never stay “finished.”
Yet this morning I began not with Buddhism or autism or Danny Gregory, but with yoga. Selling Yoga was what I wanted to find — and that, of course, reminded me how many times yoga has threaded itself through my story: not through daily practice, but through classrooms, art projects, colleagues, and lately, conversations with people like Maya.
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My first real encounter with yoga wasn’t on a mat but in a classroom. At UCSB, I signed up for “Yoga Philosophies of India,” taught by Gerald Larson, one of the world’s leading experts on Samkhya Yoga — although I didn’t know that at the time. The course pulled me into a world of technical terms, Sanskrit words, and the sharp distinction between yoga as philosophy and yoga as practice.
For a final project, Larson asked us to create something in addition to the usual exam and paper. I bought a large scratchboard, approximately 24 by 30 inches, and used the silhouette of a yogi in full lotus on the cover of our main text as a reference.
Scratchboard works in reverse — scraping black to reveal white — so the piece required me to think carefully about light and shadow. I set the yogi on a fragment of a planet drifting in space, meant to symbolize the dissolution of “self” into the greater universe. Larson liked it so much he asked to keep it. I said no. I still have it framed, buried somewhere in a closet.
Sometimes I wonder how different life might have been if I’d said yes and the work had hung in the house of a scholar of yoga, shown to visitors as part of his story.
From there, yoga kept showing up. At Princeton Seminary, before my first trip to India in 1989, I took a course on Hinduism, where we read the Bhagavad Gītā — with its three yogas of action, devotion, and knowledge, plus a fourth that is rarely mentioned. The professor, who would organize the trip, asked me to bring in the scratchboard piece. I remember stumbling over my explanation, but the art was already telling its own story. That summer, I spent ten weeks in India (mostly in Calcutta), breathing in the heat, chaos, and intensity of India — the lived context that the books alone had never given me.
Even outside the classroom, yoga found me through conversation. At a party for my then-wife’s job, one of her Indian colleagues asked about my studies. When I mentioned the Gītā, she laughed and said, “You probably know more about this than we do.” It was a joke, but it lodged in me. I knew I didn’t — not in the way she did — but I also knew that even a novice’s book knowledge could impress.
Another Indian friend in seminary gave me what felt like a backhanded compliment: at least I was trying, unlike most Americans who ignored India altogether. Both moments reminded me that yoga wasn’t just a set of texts. It was also about identity — who gets to “know” something, and what it means to be inside or outside a tradition.
Later, during my PhD work at the University of Pittsburgh, yoga resurfaced. I read a concise version of the Yoga Sūtras, worked as a TA for courses in Hinduism and East Asian religions, and had on my dissertation committee Joseph Alter, an anthropologist whose work on yoga and wrestling in India linked the practice to Hanuman, the deity at the heart of my own research. Alter’s books were so dense they often felt unreadable, but his presence on my committee was a reminder: yoga was never just philosophy or posture — it lived in bodies, communities, even the sweat of akhara wrestling grounds.
When I began teaching at Dickinson College, I carried the Bhagavad Gītā into my own classrooms. By then, I thought I knew something — but really, I knew how little I knew. One colleague was a tantric Buddhist practitioner, deeply engaged in rituals I considered off-limits to “real scholars.” I couldn’t understand why they had cross that line. Over time, I realized many scholars of Buddhism do. Fewer Westerners, though, become practitioners of Hindu traditions — unless it’s modern postural yoga, the kind found in studios across the U.S.
Still, the questions kept tugging at me: was I just an observer? Could I practice without betraying my scholarly stance? Those questions sharpened when I attended three Saturday-morning yoga classes taught by a colleague’s wife, who was also a professor and had been teaching yoga for decades. Both were part of my academic circle, not casual acquaintances, which made the experience all the more charged.
I was stiff, tense, and awkward. I couldn’t enjoy the practice. More than that, I worried what people would think if they found out I was “crossing the line” from scholar to practitioner. Was I betraying my role as an analyst? Becoming “one of them”? The anxiety was enough to keep me from continuing. I stopped after three tries, but the unease of that experiment has stayed with me. Now, however, I am ready to try again. Who cares what people think, really?
Even as I kept my distance from the mat, yoga kept circling back through scholarship and friendship. One of my colleagues — also a collector of my art — published Selling Yoga, a sharp analysis of how traditions morph into modern commodities.
I used it in my teaching and invited her to keynote the regional American Academy of Religion conference I organized for several years. It felt full circle: yoga no longer just a subject in my syllabi but a live conversation with a friend whose own scholarship straddled some of the same tensions I’d always wrestled with — insider and outsider, tradition and reinvention, scholarship and practice.
When I packed to move to California, Selling Yoga was one of the books I swore I’d keep. If I gave it away by mistake, I’ll be sore about it. Looking for it now brought me face-to-face with the other books that shape my present — on autism, Buddhism, art, and spirituality. Each feels like an unfinished conversation I carry with me.
And then there are the people. Elena, who made yoga part of her everyday rhythm, named Catholicism as her faith. Maya, who took it further — trained in India, taught yoga herself, and calls Hindu theology beautiful. There’s also Leela, who attends yoga class several times a week. And Tiffany, a woman I once connected with in Texas, who also practiced yoga. Driven, successful, business-minded — and admittedly, a bit of a snob. But she fit a pattern I’ve started to notice: the women who cross my path, the ones I pay attention to, are so often highly accomplished, disciplined, and somehow connected to yoga.
With them, yoga isn’t just a text or posture or class I once attended. It’s a lived experience, refracted back to me in real time.
What I keep circling around is this: yoga has never left my story, even when I tried to stay safely at the margins. Sometimes it’s been text and classroom, sometimes art and conferences, sometimes awkward practice, sometimes conversation, sometimes the spark of a relationship.
It always returns, asking me to pay attention to notice what discipline means in my life.
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And so this small search for one book — Selling Yoga — becomes something more. A reminder that the organizational principles I live by are inseparable from Asperger’s: detail matters, order matters.
And just as much, re-ordering matters. I revisit, rethink, and reshuffle because my mind never stops racing. What feels like the perfect arrangement one day demands a new principle the next. Unlike the Library of Congress or Dewey Decimal System, my shelves don’t sit still. They move with me.
This time, the principle is yoga — discipline, connection, the thread that has wound through my studies, art, friendships, and even new relationships. Another time, it may be something else entirely. But each cycle of re-organization is a way of taking stock, of reflecting on where I’ve been and where I might go next.
That’s what Aspie Art Journey is for me: not a finished system, but a practice — an artist’s way of navigating the world through an Asperger’s mind that seeks both structure and freedom. To organize and reorganize.
To return to the books, the art, the stories that have marked me. To begin again with hope — for new work, new love, new beginnings.
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Afterword
Lately I’ve been thinking about how certain ideas or practices — yoga in my case — keep circling back into our lives, whether or not we ever fully “take them up.” Sometimes they arrive through books, sometimes through people, sometimes through art.
I wonder: what keeps returning for you? A discipline, a story, a practice, or even a box of half-forgotten books that insists on showing up again, asking to be seen in a new way?
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Jeff Brackett
Artist • Writer • EducatorExploring the intersections of art, autism, and human connection through the ongoing creative project Lines on the Spectrum — an illustrated memoir in progress.
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