They watched in quiet astonishment as the young boy, who normally recoiled from new environments and often covered his ears and rocked back and forth in an attempt to soothe himself, crawled into her lap, awkwardly grabbed her face and smiled. His mouth tried to form words to communicate whatever was behind the smile, but language remained a difficult task, and a little squeal was his offering. She allowed his pale fingers to travel across her mouth as he watched her lips intently. He made another sound as if to say, “Teach me. I want to learn to talk.”

“Jacob, see those blocks over there?” She pointed to several rectangular wooden blocks scattered across the carpeted floor a few feet away. His eyes remained fixed on her lips. “Can you put all the blue ones together, all the yellow ones together, and all the green ones together?” He remained still, continuing to hold his gaze on her lips. The parents watched anxiously, certain their child could not understand the directions.

Jacob remained still for a moment and then crawled out of Judith’s lap, walked to the blocks and sat down, his thin legs bent in a “W.” He leaned forward, grabbed a blue block and lifted it to his nose. He placed it near his right knee and reached for another rectangle. He brought the green block to his nose, holding it there for a moment. He placed that one in front of him. The room was quiet as Judith and his parents watched.

Jacob continued to bring each wooden block to his nose, his eyes looking to the side where Judith sat, and then place them in piles of color, just as Judith had requested. It was a slow and methodical process as Jacob pressed each piece of wood to his tiny nose. Once the dozen blocks were sorted, he grunted and moved to the corner of the room and collapsed onto the beanbag chair where he watched the leaves outside the window dance in the wind. He hummed quietly to himself. The task had taken much of his energy.

Judith thanked him for helping sort the blocks and finished the meeting with some final questions of the parents about Jacob’s daily life.

Once the family gathered their things and left the room, Judith scanned the floor and her eyes rested on the piles of colored blocks organized by Jacob. “Could blocks really be sorted by smell?” she wondered. It seemed an absurd notion, but she was adept at stepping outside of expectation or fast assumptions. The willingness to entertain possibilities beyond what her logical mind instructed proved an integral ingredient to Judith’s success in allowing her to understand her clients’ behaviors and to assist them in their development. Behaviors offered their own communication, and Judith eagerly sought whatever message those behaviors tried to convey.

She turned off the light, closed the blinds of the window to shut out the late morning sunlight, and she sat next to the blocks. She closed her eyes and brought each block to her nose, breathing in whatever scent the painted wood might hold. At first, she could discern no difference in smell among the blocks. But as she continued to hone her focus on the input to her sense of smell, she detected a tiny speck of difference between the colors. She closed her eyes and reached for block after block, bringing it to her nose just as Jacob had done. And placed them in piles, sorted not by the color they visually offered, but by the slight difference in smell of the pigments of paint. Once she had finished, she opened her eyes and saw she had successfully sorted them with only a couple of mistakes. She smiled. It WAS possible that Jacob had used his sense of smell to assist in the task.

His parents reported that he often smelled objects and people, inappropriately according to our social norms. To the casual observer, it appeared odd and disordered behavior. But as Judith would explain in the next meeting with Jacob and his parents, it offered clues to how Jacob’s brain sought to bring in information from the world around him. And to make sense of it, so he would feel safe and try to engage in a world that often was overwhelming to his senses.

In that meeting the next morning, Judith shared with the family what she had learned about Jacob’s sensory systems by observing, without judgement, what his body sought, what it avoided, and how it organized itself. She discussed how his eyes struggled to work together and how he often utilized his peripheral vision to assist him. She talked about his sensitivity to sound and how it might impact his acquisition of language. She explained why he might rely on his sense of smell to process his environment.

She pointed to a handout that mapped how the brain brings information, through cranial nerves, to the brain, and how our sense of smell is hard-wired to be our most accurate sense. Jacob’s body and brain had intrinsically known that smell offered a reliable sense when his visual and auditory systems could not supply accurate, consistent information.

As the morning progressed, Judith taught Jacob’s parents activities to help his sensitive and overwhelmed systems communicate with one another with more efficiency and ease. Gentle, simple movements that assisted his visual and auditory systems to function better, so that language and social interactions were not so challenging. A special massage technique to calm and organize his tactile system. Slow rhythmic movements to stimulate his vestibular system, the body’s internal GPS.

Judith’s understanding of the brain and her approach that helped thousands of individuals move from limiting, self-protective behaviors to better functioning in their daily lives, had its genesis in her own dysfunction.

Judith, born with numerous neurological challenges and structural irregularities, received varied labels throughout her life in attempts to define her behaviors: epilepsy, autism, ADHD, PDD-NOS, OCD, ODD, traumatic brain injury, synesthesia, and more. She said simply, “I’m just me!”

In her adult years, technological advancements allowed scans to reveal, more clearly, the irregularities in her brain, including the absence of a portion typically associated with language. This revelation finally explained much of her challenges throughout her life, including unintelligible speech as a child, profound deafness by age 9 and clonic/tonic seizures. She was cruelly teased as a child for her behaviors. She endured ground-breaking cranial-reconstruction surgery that returned her ability to hear but had its own stressful consequences.

While her excruciating sensitivities demanded extreme forms of self-protective behaviors, they also carried a gift: the ability to feel into the areas of overwhelm and follow them to where their origins might be. And to understand the reasons behind many of her own behaviors that others viewed as odd, disordered and inappropriate. She listened to her body and its own inherent strategies to not only survive but to achieve. As she continually sought victory over her challenges, she focused her own education on understanding the brain/body connections. Instinctually protecting her exquisitely sensitive systems during those early years, and with the assistance of her family and professionals to support her talents, she excelled as a student and worked her way to graduate studies in human development,  neuropsychology, neurorehabilitation, visual processing, sensory-motor integration, and education. In her quest to understand the complex connections of the mind/body, she also studied numerous alternative therapies; always eager to learn and engage various approaches, to help others achieve more ease in life, and to express their own unique gifts in the world.

Her own internal challenges and achievements formed the foundations of what would become her approach to assisting others: The Holistic Approach to Neurodevelopment and Learning Efficiency (HANDLE).

HANDLE applies the concept of neuroplasticity, the capacity of the brain and nervous systems to form new connections to compensate for injury. Despite the missing “language piece” of a typical brain, her gift for public speaking in her adult life was magnificent proof that the brain can compensate for injury and damage.

Judith spent eleven years as a single mother in Israel, where she brought her knowledge of the brain’s ability to re-wire itself (learned from her own challenges) and her approach to treating behavior and learning issues at their roots. She received Israel’s National Prize for Early Childhood Education for the program she designed to treat at-risk populations of young children. She taught preschool and kindergarten teachers how to integrate therapeutic activities into the school day. Her success astounded the state department of education (who had brought in specialist after specialist with little success) and awarded Judith the prize for her contribution.

Back in the United States, she was urged to teach others what she had been doing for several decades on her own, and in 1994 she founded the HANDLE Institute in Seattle, Washington. She funded its start-up and expansion with her personal credit cards along with her passion to help others, working 80 and 90 hours a week to serve a population she understood from the inside-out. Her mission: to move “hundreds and thousands from dysfunction to function, from despair to hope.”

Judith received many awards through the years for her achievements, including the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Award for Public Service. HANDLE Practitioners now assist clients in 31 countries and the number continues to grow.

While Judith received impressive accolades for her work, and witnessed HANDLE training and services travel the globe, her greatest joy was meeting a client wherever they “were.” Just as she joined Jacob on the floor of her office, sorting colored blocks in a unique and improbable way, she understood the wisdom and power of listening to the body’s own language through non-judgement and gentle guidance to wholeness and better functioning. She knew first-hand the importance of seeing beyond whatever label might be placed on an individual and to allow their “just me”-ness to be seen, acknowledged and celebrated.

Although Judith passed away several years ago, her legacy of compassion and helping others continues through the HANDLE Institute.

Bio:

Judith Bluestone created the Holistic Approach to NeuroDevelopment and Learning Efficiency (HANDLE®) and later established the HANDLE Institute in Seattle, WA. Her work as an advocate, teacher, therapist, and lecturer assisted thousands of individuals to move from dysfunction to function. She is the author of “The Fabric of Autism: Weaving the Threads into a Cogent Theory” and “The Churkendoose Anthology: True Stories of Triumph over Neurological Dysfunction.” Visit www.handle.org to learn more about the HANDLE® approach.