Seers of the modern age: Could neurodivergence Be a spiritual gift marker?
Today I want to share a theory I’ve been holding for a while. Although parts of it may have some factual or scientific footing, what follows is ultimately my own perspective and thought process. My question is this: could neurodiverse conditions be linked to spiritual gifts?
As a spiritual practitioner, I’ve noticed a striking pattern. Many of the people I meet who identify as empaths, seers, energy workers, truth-bearers, or other intuitive roles also display traits associated with neurodiverse conditions. In my experience, it’s rare to encounter someone who is entirely neurotypical and also exhibits these particular gifts - though I don’t doubt such people exist. It’s simply not something I’ve personally witnessed.
When we think of neurodivergence, the first conditions that usually come to mind are ADHD and Autism. But neurodiversity is a broad spectrum, encompassing many different neurological profiles. In this piece, I’ll explore why and how I believe these kinds of conditions might intersect with spiritual sensitivity - and why neurodivergent minds may be uniquely tuned to certain kinds of spiritual experiences.
The bridge between science and spirit
Energy. What do we really know about it? At its core, energy is the lifeblood of existence. We can’t hold it in our hands or see it with the naked eye, but we experience its effects everywhere. A lightning bolt splits the sky. An engine roars to life. Your heart beats because of bioelectric currents flowing through your body.
For those who struggle to imagine “energy” in a spiritual sense, let’s draw on what’s already familiar. Take radio waves. They fill the air around us constantly, carrying voices, music, and data across vast distances. You can’t see them, yet when you turn on the radio, the invisible becomes audible. Or consider electricity - it powers every lightbulb, every device, every city grid, but it’s completely unseen until it sparks or animates matter.
Both are forms of frequency and vibration - unseen forces, undeniable in their impact.
Now, broaden that thought: if science already accepts invisible fields and frequencies that shape our reality, is it such a leap to imagine that spiritual energy might exist in a similar way? Many wisdom traditions speak of energy that animates life (called chi, prana, or spirit) a subtle current that can’t be detected by ordinary senses but is felt in moments of awe, deep presence, or connection.
Think about it: you walk into a room after an argument and sense the “tension in the air.” You meet someone radiant with peace and immediately feel calmer, lighter. Nothing was said, nothing was seen, yet something was transferred. Just as tuning a radio aligns you with a station’s broadcast, tuning your mind, body, or spirit may align you with higher frequencies of spiritual energy.
So while we may not yet have instruments to measure the spiritual currents of love, peace, or presence, that doesn’t mean they aren’t real. We already live surrounded by invisible energies that shape our lives every day. Spiritual energy may simply be another layer of the same vast spectrum - one we experience through intuition, emotion, and consciousness rather than sight.
Neurodivergence and sensitivity to energy
Many neurodivergent conditions are associated with differences in how the brain processes sensory input. This can mean heightened sensitivity (or sometimes reduced sensitivity) to the senses of taste, touch, smell, sight, and sound. In these cases, the brain isn’t simply “misfiring” or “working faster,” but rather processing sensory signals differently, often with greater intensity or less filtering than is typical.
For example, Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD) (which often co-occurs with autism and ADHD) can cause touch receptors to register sensations as much stronger than they actually are. What feels like a light brush to one person might feel overwhelming, even painful, to someone with sensory over-responsivity. Clothing tags, certain fabrics, or even the pressure of a hug can create real physical discomfort.
This heightened sensory awareness can be exhausting, but it also means that many neurodivergent people experience the world in vivid, layered detail.
When we explore neurodiversity beyond ADHD and autism, we see a spectrum of traits that can heighten perception, creativity, and intuition. Each condition comes with its challenges, but also unique strengths that, in a spiritual context, may have a link to sensitivities or gifts.
Autism often brings heightened sensory processing, intense focus, and deep pattern recognition. Autistic individuals may notice subtle details, rhythms, or symbolic structures in the world that others overlook.
The drive for truth and authenticity can make them powerful “truth-bearers,” unwilling to compromise what feels pure or just. This heightened clarity of perception can resonate strongly with spiritual discernment.
ADHD, on the other hand, is often linked with heightened emotional responsiveness and rapid, divergent thinking. The ADHD mind can leap across associations, generating ideas and connections that feel almost visionary. Many also experience hyperfocus, periods where attention locks onto something deeply meaningful. Spiritually, this can translate into bursts of creativity, intuitive downloads, or immersive states of devotion and energy work.
Dyslexia is commonly associated with challenges in traditional reading and writing, but research also shows enhanced spatial reasoning, visual thinking, and narrative imagination. Many dyslexic individuals perceive the world in pictures rather than words, allowing them to intuitively grasp symbolic or archetypal truths. This heightened capacity for metaphor, story, and imagery can lend itself beautifully to prophecy, vision work, or dream interpretation.
Dyspraxia (Developmental Coordination Disorder) often brings difficulties with motor planning, but many with dyspraxia report heightened creativity, empathy, and problem-solving. Because movement and coordination require extra conscious effort, dyspraxic individuals can develop unusual ways of seeing and doing, embodying a kind of outside-the-box awareness that can spill over into spiritual creativity and insight.
Dyscalculia, a learning difference around numbers, sometimes comes with heightened strengths in language, intuition, and holistic reasoning. People with dyscalculia may struggle with linear systems but excel at big-picture, symbolic, or intuitive insight capacities often linked with mystical or spiritual perception.
These conditions show that neurodivergence doesn’t just heighten the five senses - it can heighten different ways of knowing.
Now, considering that science already confirms how our senses can be heightened or altered in neurodivergent profiles, who’s to say that these same individuals cannot also attune to subtler forms of energy? If a person’s nervous system is wired to pick up on sound frequencies beyond what most people notice, or to feel the lightest touch as an intense sensation, why couldn’t that same sensitivity extend into realms we currently call “spiritual” or “energetic”?
From a scientific standpoint, we already accept that humans interact constantly with invisible forces. We navigate by GPS signals, live bathed in Wi-Fi, and receive medical scans that pass waves through our bodies all without perceiving them directly.
Neurodivergent individuals often report being more aware of subtle cues or changes in mood, micro-expressions, atmospheric “vibes,” or even physiological shifts in others before anyone else notices. In spiritual language, that looks a lot like reading or feeling energy.
This doesn’t mean neurodivergence automatically equals mystical power. But it does raise an intriguing possibility: if heightened sensory and emotional processing gives someone a richer data stream from the environment, it might also make them more receptive to subtler, non-verbal, or non-physical cues - the very ones traditions describe as energy, spirit, or presence.
The possibility of wider frequency
For me personally, my path has always been a weaving of two worlds. On one hand, I walk as a Seer, Seiðkona, and Völva - roles steeped in ancient Northern European traditions of vision, prophecy, and working with the unseen. On the other, I hold a deep respect for logic, evidence, and scientific inquiry. I’ve never seen spirituality and science as enemies. To me, they’re two different languages trying to describe the same landscape.
From my own experience, the correlation between heightened senses and being spiritually gifted feels self-evident. When someone is more sensitive to sound, texture, or emotional undercurrents, they are also (at least in my observation) more likely to pick up subtle shifts in energy, presence, or information that can’t easily be explained. In my practice, I’ve met countless people whose empathic or visionary gifts mirror the very same neurological sensitivities documented in research on autism, ADHD, or sensory processing differences.
And this isn’t just my private though.. Across history, many thinkers and scientists have entertained the possibility that what we call spiritual energy may correspond to forms of energy not yet fully understood by physics. Just as electromagnetic fields were invisible to our ancestors before we developed the tools to detect them, there may be other, subtler energies interacting with our nervous systems, our consciousness, or our environment. Some researchers exploring consciousness studies, biofields, or anomalous perception speculate about exactly these overlaps.
So for me, believing in spiritual sensitivity doesn’t mean abandoning logic. It means acknowledging that our instruments and models are still limited and that heightened human perception might sometimes act as an early “sensor” of things science has yet to measure. In that sense, the blending of ancient roles like Seiðkona with modern scientific curiosity isn’t contradictory; it’s a natural evolution of seeking truth in both the seen and unseen.
Ancient Norse and Germanic Perspectives
In ancient Norse and wider Germanic traditions, unusual sensitivities or altered states of mind were not automatically seen as weakness or illness. Those who perceived differently (whether through visions, dreams, or heightened awareness) were regarded as marked by otherworldly forces, and in many cases chosen for roles of prophecy, guidance, or healing.
The Völva, the archetypal female seer, embodied this. Practicing seiðr (a form of magic involving trance, chanting, and spirit-work), the Völva would enter altered states to gain knowledge of the wyrd (woven fate) and offer counsel to kings, warriors, and entire communities. Their abilities often placed them on the margins of society (respected, feared, sometimes even mistrusted) but their sensitivity to unseen currents was understood as a sacred calling.
Other figures, such as the spákona (prophetic woman) and seidkona (female seiðr-worker), relied on what we might now describe as sensory intensity, vivid inner vision, or emotional depth to read omens, interpret dreams, or channel divine will.
One ancient practice, known as útiseta (sitting out), involved going alone into nature (often at night) to sit in silence and enter visionary states. In these moments of deep openness, practitioners reported encounters with spirits, ancestors, or gods. This deliberate courting of altered consciousness echoes what today might be called heightened perception or sensitivity.
Underlying these practices was the Norse concept of hamr - a person’s spiritual shape or essence, which could shift or extend beyond the body. Those with unusual sensitivity were thought to be more fluid in their hamr, able to perceive or even travel between realms. This idea of a soul-shape resonates strongly with the modern sense of being tuned into energies or dimensions that others cannot easily access.
The myths themselves also reinforce this worldview. Odin, who sacrificed an eye to drink from Mímir’s well of wisdom, embraced pain and sensory loss to gain vision into hidden truths. Loki, the shapeshifter, broke every norm of logic and order, yet his unpredictability often opened pathways of transformation (loki to me in modern sense has what we would say ADHD with a Antisocial personality disorder profile).
These stories suggest that difference (whether in perception, behavior, or identity) was intertwined with spiritual power.
To the ancient Norse and Germanic peoples, what we might today call neurodivergence could well have been seen as a spiritual marker: a sign of closeness to the gods, the spirits, and the threads of fate.
Where modern science might speak of “heightened sensitivity” or “neurological variation,” their worldview recognized it as the raw material of seership, prophecy, and energy work.
When I look at neurodivergence through both the eyes of science and the lens of spirituality, I see more than just difference..I see potential.
What some might label as “disorder” ( I hate those words) I believe can also be understood as a kind of tuning, a wiring that opens a person to currents others may never feel. Whether it is sensitivity of the senses, emotional depth, visionary imagination, or an uncompromising devotion to truth, these heightened qualities echo what ancient traditions once recognized as signs of seership, prophecy, or spiritual vocation.
I don’t claim to hold the final answer. What I share here is my lived observation, my practice as a Seer, Seiðkona, and Völva, and my belief that science and spirituality are two ways of pointing toward the same mystery.
To me, the correlation between neurodivergence and spiritual gifting is not coincidence.. it is a reminder that human variation is woven into the very fabric of fate.
So perhaps the real question isn’t whether neurodiverse conditions are linked to spiritual gifts, but rather: what would our world look like if we began to honour them as such? What if, instead of trying to suppress or “normalize” these sensitivities, we cultivated them, supported them, and gave them sacred space?
My hope is that one day, society will recognize what our ancestors once knew - that those who walk 'differently' often carry vision, wisdom, and power that the world needs.