Guiding Principle 1: People are Different. 

People are all different, and each is brilliantly unordinary*. 

It is our intention and delight to get to know the people who come to Bramblewood well, just as they unordinarily are. 

By holding a warm curiosity for individuals and how they experience the world, we resist falling into our dominant culture’s pattern of making unhelpful age, or other ‘norms’, based assumptions, we create a foundation for authentic relationships and for people to come to realise that they truly matter, just as they are.

At our most simple level, it is the flow of energy and information to us, in us and around us in our relational worlds, that determine how we experience and show up in the world.

From conception and throughout life we are awash with energy and information from inside us, around us and crucially, from our carer givers and closest family and community. It is in our receipt, processing, sense making and response to this information and energy flow that our selves, our identities and our sense of belonging, unfold. 

  • We perceive information from the world using our senses. (Primary sensory differences)
  • Our nervous systems process this energy as information. (Sensory processing differences)
  • The meanings we make from the information we process depend enormously upon our relational context (e.g. how valued, understood or accompanied we feel at that moment), our neurobiology, past experiences or trauma.  
  • We act upon the meaning we make from the information in myriad ways relating to our development, nervous states and contexts (behavioural/communication differences).

Our ability to regulate the flow of energy through our nervous systems, and to a great extent how we ‘behave’, is directly related to how much warmth and attunement we have received for trusted others in the past.


[*Unordinary is a quiet, inside sort of feeling, an ‘already am special’ feeling, rather than an outward pull of ‘I must be extraordinary’ type of feeling, that we have to work for, or have to strain to keep up, otherwise we risk losing our something special. Unordinary depicts the shining seam of the effortless brilliance of every person which can become buried beneath masks of ‘normal’ or of adaptive coping mechanisms, for example. For a perfect essay on unordinary see David Whyte’s substack.]