Integrative caregiving

20/11/2025

I woke up feeling so overwhelmed about our plan to create an inclusive community for high-support, non-speaking autistic young adults and their families. How were we to achieve such an audacious plan?

With all sorts of heavy, negative thoughts I headed off to yoga and met a new yoga teacher who gave a great class. I am quite fussy about my yoga teachers but she was really good and I went over to her at the end and said “you are now one of my teachers here.”

We started talking and I told her our plan and then she told me, amazingly, she had received our PowerPoint from someone who has a special, big plot of land in the mountains. I literally felt chills all over my body. We have only sent that plan to a couple of people here and she had seen it!

We have to trust the signs, trust our intuition and go with our dreams.

08/11/2025

Here’s my mother, Dr. Anita Shkedi (standing to the right of the man wearing the burgundy jacket) with the Japanese Special Olympics equestrian team in Fukuoka, Japan.

She is an expert in therapeutic horseback riding, has written books on the subject, working with children and adults with physical and cognitive challenges and for over a decade she has also specialised in trauma and PTSD.

My mother was also a caregiver to her husband, Giora, who sadly passed from early onset dementia more than three years ago.

She has also lived more than 30 years with the deep loss of my brother, Jonathan, who died in combat in 1993.

Despite everything, she continues to keep her spirit alive with her travels, workshops and tireless work with many people who have found therapeutic relief from the beautiful healing energy of horses. She inspires me because she still chooses to fill her life with the things that fill her with passion and life.

30/10/2025

Our youngest was turning 10 and she asked for us all go ziplining in Costa Rica. We were all up for the idea but we weren’t sure if Leia wanted to do it. Even though we are still emerging with her spelling, we decided to do a multiple choice question.
“Leia do you want to go on a zipline or stay in the car?”
To our surprise and delight she wrote zipline.
But you know, the mind still doubts, did she really mean it?
We are being taught with Spelling to Communicate to “assume competence” and guess what, that doesn’t just mean with a spelling board. It means in every area of her life. This is radical in that it means we are having to widen our lens and have faith in a wider set of possibilities.

To have a family experience like this was magical. We were all on a high!
Thank you .yarkoni for your magnificent video. ###x

13/10/2025

This year, after 18 years of searching for ways to help my non-speaking autistic daughter, Leia, communicate, I began working with the Spelling to Communicate method — and everything changed.

In April, we started online sessions with a team in Virginia. For the first time, Leia wasn’t just participating — she was motivated and making progress.

In September, we traveled across the U.S. for two intensives in Virginia, and in October, I volunteered at a spellers’ camp in California — a space filled with love, humor, and pure intelligence. Watching children and young adults spell their thoughts into words was nothing short of miraculous.

This journey has shown me that our limits are not real. When we show up again and again — calm, patient, and without judgment — transformation happens.

Don’t believe anyone who tells you you’ve “reached a plateau.” We are meant to grow, evolve, and rewrite the story — for ourselves and for our children.

With love,
Tanya 💛

13/10/2025

It’s hard for me to convey the bliss I felt volunteering at a non-speakers autistic spellers camp led by and .community in Idyllwild, California. I honestly felt I was experiencing the next level for autism and disability in general. This was an environment where everyone was welcome and new possibilities were endless. To see children express their humor, creativity and deep intelligence surrounded by their families and an amazing team was beyond uplifting and emotional. I came away with my heart full and a feeling that nobody can ever tell you “how things are” and that if you are willing to think outside the box, there is probably someone else around you who is doing the same thing too. No limits. My heart expanded so wide. I can’t wait for the next camp.

13/10/2025

It’s hard for me to convey the bliss I felt volunteering at a non-speakers autistic spellers camp led by and .community in Idyllwild, California. I honestly felt I was experiencing the next level for autism and disability in general. This was an environment where everyone was welcome and new possibilities were endless. To see children express their humor, creativity and deep intelligence surrounded by their families and an amazing team was beyond uplifting and emotional. I came away with my heart full and a feeling that nobody can ever tell you “how things are” and that if you are willing to think outside the box, there is probably someone else around you who is doing the same thing too. No limits. My heart expanded so wide. I can’t wait for the next camp.

26/07/2025

How can we thrive while drowning in exhaustion, while making life-or-death decisions, while carrying grief and responsibilities most people wouldn’t last a day handling?

So many of us lose ourselves in this role and of course it makes sense. But the way you experience caregiving and specifically your loss of self is shaped by what you focus on, what you believe, and what you repeat. In other words, your habits, more than anything else, help construct your daily reality which then becomes your identity.

I’ve been a caregiver for eighteen years and I too have resisted this idea, in fact for the longest time it never occurred to me that I could experience my caregiver role in any other way. But here’s what I’ve come to understand: Your current circumstances are not just happening to you. They are a reflection of the choices you make every day—consciously or unconsciously. That may be hard to hear. You didn’t ask to be in the situation you are in. But this isn’t about blame; it’s about power. It’s about you moving into the driving seat of your life.

17/06/2025

17/06/2025

I cannot even begin to describe the importance of my meeting with Marian, her husband Douglas and her son Henry who is non-speaking with a rare genetic mutation. We met at a music event in the middle of the countryside in Portugal where her husband was playing on the drums and she immediately began talking to me on a level that completely confirmed that we were frequency aligned. We had even scheduled meetings with the same coach within a day of each other (meetings that we had both scheduled months ago) and immediately both of us felt we were able to be our most authentic and evolved selves. A few days later she and her husband invited us for lunch and then later went to another music event together where we sat together (two families with our special needs children) in a completely neurotypical setting where we felt our presence was needed as much as theirs. This is to me what inclusive community should feel like. We each inspire and learn from each other and I am so grateful to Marian for allowing me to identify this feeling on our journey.

20/05/2025

A caregiver might not say, “I’m living with trauma,” but they might say:

● “I don’t feel like myself anymore.”
● “I’m always on edge, but I don’t know why.”
● “My body is exhausted, but I can’t rest.”
These are clues that trauma is living inside you silently, unconsciously, and powerfully.