The One You Feed - When Mental Health Intersects with Spirituality with Dr. Lisa Miller

Episode Date: March 19, 2024

In this episode, Dr. Lisa Miller shares her journey into understanding where depression and mental health intersect with spirituality. Drawing from her early experiences as a psychotherapist and her groundbreaking epidemiological and MRI studies, Lisa highlights one perspective of certain types of depression and its transformative potential as an invitation to spiritual awakening and growth. She emphasizes the importance of nurturing one’s spiritual life to cope with life’s challenges, offering valuable insights for personal growth and self-discovery. Her perspective on emotional awareness in navigating inner emotional landscapes serves as a valuable resource for empowering listeners with a deeper understanding of the intricate relationship between mental health and spirituality. In this episode, you will be able to: Discover the different types of depression to gain a deeper understanding of mental health challenges Explore the role of spirituality in overcoming depression for a holistic approach to emotional well-being Cultivate awakened awareness for mental health to develop a more conscious and mindful relationship with your emotions Understand the impact of existential yearning on personal growth to enhance your journey of self-discovery. Learn strategies for integrating spiritual and cognitive awareness to empower your emotional growth and well-being To learn more, click here!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Very often, depression is a hunger to developmental depression. In your soul, your natural spiritual awareness is hungering to engage and expand. So depression is not lost time or downtime or wasted time. It is the invitation to an awakening. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.

We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast

is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast.

Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Dr. Lisa Miller, a professor and founder of the Spirituality Mind Body Institute at Teachers College, Columbia University. She's a leading national expert in spirituality, health, and thriving and development. Dr. Miller has also authored 100 peer review articles on spirituality and mental health in youth and family. She is a grant-funded clinical scientist, fellow of the American Psychological Association, and former president of the APA Society of Psychology and Spirituality. Today, Lisa and Eric discuss her

book, The Awakened Brain. Hi, Lisa. Welcome to the show. Eric, I'm so grateful for what you're putting into our world and the type of depth and open-handedness and open-heartedness that you're trying to help us make as a new normal. Thank you. We're going to be discussing your book, The Awakened Brain. But before we do that, we'll start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild. And they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear.

And the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. In every single second, we make a choice.

We can feel it. We can feel the surly wolf one and we can feel the loving expanse of wolf two. And it is a choice. It is a determined choice where we take the tuner and move to the channel. Is it the channel of selfishness and limited list and zero sum game? Or is it the channel where love begets love? And if I'm just a little bit generous, the universe comes back a thousand fold. What's the choice right now, this second? So when you say that, that it's a choice, right? I think we have a choice to choose what channel we want to try and listen to, right? And, you know, I know there's been lots of times in my life where I try and turn the channel to the connected side, the expansive side of things,

channel to the connected side, the expansive side of things. And it feels like there's nothing to tune into there. And then I find myself kind of back over in the other. And I think we're going to talk a lot about the role of spirituality and depression in this podcast, right? But that's part of what entrenched in depression feels like for me. I make the conscious effort to change the channel, but there's nothing coming through, at least it feels like, on that channel. So I don't think you're talking about that we do something and immediately feel a particular thing. I think you're talking more about a conscious effort to at least try and look in that direction. Would that be a way to say it? So Eric, I'm coming to you as a clinical scientist, but I wouldn't dare open up my mouth about depression if I hadn't walked that very painful, at times it just felt like dread,

like the boogeyman was over my shoulder. I've been depressed. I know what this is. So I come to this not just as a cold clinical scientist, but as someone who's really suffered and had this experience of major depression. And what I would say is that it is a journey, right? A gentle journey with ourselves through which we can cultivate two forms of perception. And the one that will get us up and out in time is a deep relationship with the universe, time is a deep relationship with the universe who i call god the higher power will you use your word jesus hashem alamed it is the deep force in us through us and around us and yes medication can be very good and yes treatment as usual can be very helpful but alone it is insufficient without the upside the portal to the landscape of the good wolves. And that is the expansive capacity,

what I call awakened awareness. And it turns out through the lens of science, this porthole for expansive awareness, where we feel the loving sense, the unity, the next guy who comes around the corner, well, he's God's child too. We're here to help him and him and her. That capacity is cultivated and it is cultivated, although it is our birthright, as a form of our awakened brain. So something I'm going to be doing a little more often is ask you, the listener, to reflect on what you're hearing. We strongly believe that knowledge is power, but only if combined with action and integration. So before we move on, I'd like to ask you, what's coming up for you as you listen

to this? Are there any things you're currently doing that are feeding your bad wolf that might make sense to remove? Or any things you could do to feed your good wolf that you're not currently doing? So if you have the headspace for it, I'd love if you could just pause for a second and ask yourself, what's one thing I could do today or tonight to feed my good wolf? Whatever your thing is, a really useful strategy can be having something external, a prompt or a friend or a tool that regularly nudges you back towards awareness and intentionality. For the past year, I've been sending little good wolf reminders to some of my friends and community members. Just quick little SMS messages two times

per week that give them a little bit of wisdom and remind them to pause for a second and come off autopilot. If you want, I can send them to you too. I do it totally for free and people seem to really love them. Just drop your information at oneufeed.net slash SMS and I can send them to you. It's totally free and if you end up not liking the little reminders, you can easily opt out. That's when you feed.net slash SMS. And now back to the episode. So let's talk about the word spirituality. It's used throughout your book. You talk about there being a biological basis for spirituality. You say that there's nothing as protective against depression as spirituality. So what does that term mean to you? Because it's one of those words that is similar to love in that it means a thousand different things to a thousand different

people. So what are we talking about here? That's right, Eric. People hear that word and like, what do you mean? Find that. What do you mean by spirituality? And many people, when they hear the word spirituality, actually think religion and they don't think any religion. They think the religion that was delivered to them by a torchbearer who was a human being who might have been quite voible. So let's back this up and say, wait a minute, you know, every single one of us through the lens of science is a naturally spiritual being just as we're physical and cognitive and emotional beings we can look through the lens of a twin study and say yes twins raised together twins raised apart how much of spirituality is inborn versus environmentally formed and it turns out that spirituality is our birthright, hardwired. It is one-third innate,

two-thirds environmentally formed, which means that every single one of us on earth is a naturally spiritual being. There's a natural spirituality and more specifically, a capacity to be in a sustained relationship with the universe. My word is God, a higher power, but this loving force that's in us, through us, and among us. In AA, when we say we're handing it over, we're not handing it over to Mr. Nobody. We're handing it over and it is caught by this buoyant, loving force. That is our birthright. And if we support it, it is two-thirds environmentally cultivated nourished then we have a strong spiritual or that is the inborn awakened religion up i didn't answer you religion is

environmentally transmitted yeah so whether i'm hindu catholic christian muslim whatever i am that religious cultivation of the spiritual the the religious embrace, the prayers, meditations, text, community. Religion is a gift of our parents and grandparents, our community. They might choose a religion and immerse. It's environmentally transmitted. They are two different things. Although they go hand in hand, religion and spirituality, for about two-thirds of people in the United States. They say I'm spiritual, yeah. Right, right. You know, spirituality being a word I've

used a lot on this podcast over the years. I taught a program called Spiritual Habits that we're rebranding this time around. Slightly different program, but a lot of it's similar. And the reason I did is because that word, again, has seemed problematic. I feel like I have to talk a lot about what I mean by it. And my view of spirituality might be slightly different than what you're describing. And so I just, in the spirit of dialogue, like to throw it out there and kind of see. Tell me your view. I want to hear your view. Yeah, yeah. I mean, my view is spirituality is about being connected to the things that deeply matter, right? That, for me, is what it means to me. Now, maybe I'll tell a little story here that I think will be interesting. I'd love a story. I got sober in 1994 from heroin addiction.

And I got sober in Columbus, Ohio in 1994 in a 12-step program. And higher power and God meant God. It meant sort of the Christian God. It meant an interventionist God that would come in and help you get sober, right? And I did everything I could to believe that. And I got sober. But ultimately, some bad things happened in my life, and it sort of fell apart for me, right? And part of the thing that caused it to fall apart for me was I was looking at people that I loved who were dying. And they were people who came to AA, and they seemed to be doing the same things I was doing. They were going to meetings, they were calling their sponsor, they were praying, like they were making as good an effort as I thought.

And they died. And it became very hard for me to believe that a higher power out there was choosing me over them. It came to be to me something that I was like, well, if that is the way of the universe, I don't think I want it. Right? If it's a universe where some of us get picked and some of us don't. And so eventually that sort of breaking with spirituality led to me going back out and drinking again. And I didn't go back to heroin, but I was out about four years and I realized I was just as sick inside. And I came back and I find myself in AA again in central Ohio in the same program, right? And I went, I have to find a spiritual path for me.

If I'm going to actually work the steps, if I'm going to be in this program, I got to figure out what this means to me that I can actually really believe, right? And where I landed was I believed that if I lived my life according to certain principles, right? Principles of kindness and love and generosity and not being so self-centered and being honest and all these things. If I lived that way, it didn't mean that good things would happen to me, right? It wasn't like I was doing the right thing and the universe was going to dole out to me the right goods, right? But I felt that I could both A, stay sober as long as I did that, and B, handle whatever life brought my way. So my spirituality in some ways felt colder, right? Because it didn't feel like there was a force out there that was particularly loving or

not loving. Now, from there, I went into Zen Buddhism, and I landed in a place where feeling the deep unity of everything, experiencing that and seeing like, oh, this is all actually really connected, you know, sort of broaden that spirituality out. But that's kind of where where I landed. And so when I hear things about a loving force, I sometimes get hung up, right? Because I look at that and I go, but it doesn't seem that that force loves things equally, right? There are lots of spiritual people in Gaza right now who are praying their ass off and are dying. And so that's just my sort of perspective. So talk to me about kind of what you're hearing in what I'm saying in

comparison to your experience and what the science would tell us. That was a long diatribe, by the way. Apologize. This actually is Lisa's interview. Well, Lisa's interested in your journey. And thank you for sharing that because Eric, that was very beautifully generous of your heart. So this is what I'd say. I'd say that there is a deep love in us, through us, and around us. My word is God. That we are loved and held, and we are guided. We are never alone. And our awakened brain, our inborn awakened brain is built that we can engage and choose.

We say yes. And build it if we say yes. Whether it's through prayer or 12-step or meditation or service to deepen our awareness, strengthen the muscle to see that we're loved and guided. You're loving God. What do you ask of me now? I just did not get what I wanted. I just lost the person I love. The fact that there's a loving God doesn't mean we get our deliverables. It doesn't mean that we call the shots. Do you know, I mean, there's a movement out there that I just think is so tragic called

manifestation. Yes. That somehow it's so-called spiritual to send out what you want at the ego level. And think that, no, that's not spirituality to me. It is a dialogue with a loving. Can we do a practice, Eric, to share this a little bit? Can we do a practice right here? Sure. Okay. Let's try it. I'm going to invite you and your beautiful community

it's an invitation to, in this 90 second practice, close your eyes, clear out your inner space for five breaths. I invite you to locate a time where you wanted something so badly. It was him or her or them to say yes. It was that job, that opportunity, internship. That red door was yours. and you did everything right a plus b plus c

tactically you researched everything strategically you go for your red door you grab the handle but it's stuck and you can't believe it's stuck because a plus b plus c you did everything right you kick the door maybe you're angry it doesn't seem fair. In time, you might be depressed, but only you have no choice. It's stuck because it's stuck. You turn, you turn 50, 80, 140 degrees and over there, over there is a wide open yellow door. You might have said yellow doors don't exist. You've never heard of yellow doors. A wide open yellow door.

Someone who made you feel alive. Someone who touched your heart in a way that you've never felt before. A job where you're seen beyond what you've known in yourself. That yellow door was not what you had wanted. It was better than what you'd wanted and better for you. So as you sit back now and there's that stuck red door and the hairpin turn and the wide open yellow door, how really are the most important things in our lives form? Is it narrowly through planning and strategy? Or is there a time where there are opportunities bigger and beyond what we knew were possible, where we were to become something that we didn't even know existed? Because manifestation is very

small. That's a small way to live. That's the red door. I want that red door. And if I can't do it with my hands, I'm going to send it out with my mind and consciousness. But that's appetite and ambition. That's only based on your appetite today, back historically, what your parents said you wanted, what you thought you wanted. The yellow door, the guided yellow door has information that we have yet to discover. That is a dialogue with a living universe. That is an open system, a way of being, where we're connected to the great sacred presence in us, through us, and among us.

The unit of reality. So what I think is that we don't get our red doors. Thank goodness we don't get our red doors, because our lives are actually an adventure. And sometimes it hurts, and sometimes we lose people we love and sometimes we're betrayed and sometimes it hurts so much we can't even believe it but that is the meat and potatoes that is the grist for the mill of walking through yellow doors and they are divine yeah it reminds me of a story i love

it's an old daoist story right about the the farmer and the horse, right? It's a similar sort of thing. You know, a farmer has a horse, and it's his most valuable possession, and it runs away one day. And his neighbor comes over, and he's like, that's terrible. I'm so sorry that that happened. And the farmer says, well, you know, it could be good, could be bad. And then a few days later, right, the horse comes back with like three other horses and now the guy is immeasurably rich and the neighbor comes over he's like oh my god you're so fortunate you're so lucky you know we'll see right you know who knows and then his son is out riding one of the new horses throws gets his leg broken and the neighbor again who just is not getting any wiser right

we're all getting it at this point. The neighbor is not yet goes, Oh, it's so terrible. I'm so sorry about your son. And the farmer, we know what he's going to say to him. All right, we'll see. And then a few weeks later, the army comes through and conscripts every able bodied young man and his son isn't taken. And right, this story goes on and it kind of goes on and on and on. Right? And it just kind of goes on in that way, right? And so, you know, to me, the yellow door thing, right? My biggest yellow door is I had a solar energy company that I poured my heart and soul into and I wanted and it failed. And out of the failure of it is this podcast started and I am a way better podcast host and far happier doing what

I do in the world now than I ever would have been doing that. And I think we all have those sort of things in them. And term I'm going to use here is narrow spirituality, right? I'd be saying that we're being open, right? We're being open to what else might emerge, right? And to me, it's that- And the universe is alive. The universe is alive. There's no doubt about that. And like I said me it's that the universe is alive the universe is alive there's no doubt about that and like i said it's sort of interconnected right it even the most fundamental levels of science we are sort of seeing things are interconnected and the more we learn about ecology and systems theory which is permeating all aspects of science we're realizing

more and more that to take anything on its own outside of its relationship to everything else is to see a very limited viewpoint. So your awareness of this unit of reality that is a foundationally loving unit of reality, unit of love, your awareness is an awareness of something that's real. The universe we live in, this matrix in us, through us, around us, we live in a big embrace of a loving conscious universe. And we are like rays of the sun, emanations of this great source. So when we realize this and pay attention to this, and I mean like, you know, when I'm in traffic and I want to lay on my horn, or when someone was just incredibly rude to me and I have a choice to be rude back or to think, wow, they must have had a really harsh day or wow, they must have had a really harsh life or wow, how can I be so loving that when someone's totally shitty to me, I'm

loving back, right? That is knowing that we're emanations of this loving conscious source. That's a choice, your beautiful two-wolf story, every minute. And it is a habit. We build this habit, but it also is a habit that dials into a seat of perception where we feel in our heart, we just know in our being that we're part of this loving unit of reality of which you speak. That's our awakened brain. That's our birthright. That is our natural spirituality. And in every tradition, it has a different name, right? That is the upstream deep seat of awareness, our awakened brain, that we are in a unit of loving reality.

But downstream is given many different names and tellings and stories. Whether we say we are handing it over, or that is God talking to us, or I am one with all creation, or that is the force of life in and through crow and mountain and sun, however we tell it, we are still connecting to this deep unit of loving reality. So can we hold, you know, in one hand, this deep truth, and in the other hand, realize that we also have different zipped up bio body suits and different GPS coordinates that we are a point and we are part of the wave and live out the narrative of our separateness of bumping into each other in the subway and both wanting the same money at work and both wanting the same role in a play and look at

these so-called moments of scarcity and so-called competition in a way that actually has in our deeper heart an expanded reality. Okay, I didn't get the lead, but maybe there's something else. There's a calling for me. There's a yellow door out there. Yeah. Let's go back a ways here. And we've mentioned the science of this a couple times, right? But let's go back to what first put you on this trail of being interested in trying to see the role of spirituality in our overall well-being. Like, what even put you on the trail? Eric, when I was starting out, I've been a clinical scientist and a psychologist for 25 years.

When I was starting out, actually even a little longer than that, there was absolutely zero talk of spirituality in mental health, in psychotherapy, inpatient units, in private practices. No one talked about spirituality. And so as a new psychotherapist, I was on an inpatient unit where people were having the hardest months of their entire life. The pain was unbelievable. They had faced trauma. They had suffered losses.

They were biologically driven, perhaps in some cases, to depression or bipolar. It was true of the suffering. And in a psychotherapy climate that didn't talk about spirituality, the patients were letting me know what they needed. They'd knock at my door and whisper, Dr. Miller, can I see you? And see you meant leave the practice office, walk down the linoleum hallway, go into the kitchen, into the pantry, and sitting by the pots and pans, total pain. Dr. Miller, will you pray with me? That happened to be from a woman who was Catholic, but of other faith traditions, Eric. Some were Jewish, some were Hindu, some were

spiritual, but not religious. Some were in terrible pain and reaching for ultimate reality in the language of life. You know, what is real, what is true. And I started to realize that depression was actually a banging at the door for an opening of our spiritual heart, that depression was actually yearning for more. And the more wasn't to like be fancier or more rich or have more of something. The more was the more of our deep being of connection to this unit of loving reality of which we're a part. The more of depression was, hey, there is in you an ache because you've yet to arrive at the full expansiveness of where you are being hauled and pulled.

That there was an arc, you could say a teleology, a thrust in depression. Basically the ignition. Depression is the ignition to rev the engine and to become more, to in ourselves feel more. So I saw that. And I spent the next 25 years of my life developing a science, MRI studies, genotyping studies, epidemiological studies, so that the mental health field could get a picture of the deep relationship between spiritual emergence and depression. And so talk to me about some of the early science. I think you started epidemiology, right?

That was your first sort of process of looking at this. And what did you find? So as you suggest, epidemiology is the view out the 10,000 foot aerial window. When you're looking at the airplane and you see patterns of cities, epidemiology is patterns amongst people. And what we saw from the distant view of epidemiology was that people with a strong personal spiritual life were 80% protected against addiction, were 60% protected against depression, were 82% less likely to take their life going through our epidemic, suicide.

to take their life going through our epidemic, suicide. So there was nothing in the clinical sciences profoundly protective against the diseases of despair as a strong spiritual core. That was the first pass. But you know, Eric, I thought back to the patients on the inpatient unit, and I just knew that yes, spirituality is healing. Yes, spirituality is protective.

But how do we build it in the first place and why was it that in the most excruciating hour people were saying help me reach for the deep love that's in us help me reach for the ultimate sense of being held and it dawned on me that maybe it wasn't so easy and it's not like oh there's spiritual people that don't get depressed then there's unspiritual people who do get depressed. That was not the case. That actually it was a deeper, richer story. And in time, we were able to move from epidemiological studies to MRI studies and found that, hey, you know what? The very same people with a very strong spirituality today that even have a thick, strong awakened brain today didn't get there easy they

were 250 percent more likely to have suffered to have had a major depression in the past 10 years depression is the gateway to spiritual awakening we are hardwired so that our suffering brings us deeper opens our heart more profoundly to be able to feel the loving presence in us through us. Again, my words, God or higher power, but you can say the unit of loving universe, this capacity to know and feel what is real. We are built to see it and feel it because it's real, but we get there through suffering. The bottom cracks, we can't believe how much it hurts. And as I said, Eric, I've been there. I mean, is there any meaning in life? And are people just inherently random? Is there no moral compass

building to the world? And if we really take seriously these times where we don't know, it's a tough pill. It is a tough pill. So what I want people to know is that depression is not only held in a medical model. Yes, there are times where a piece needs to be fixed in our brain, but very often depression is a hunger to develop mental depression. And your soul, your natural spiritual awareness is hungering to engage and expand. So depression is not lost time or downtime or wasted time. It is the invitation to an awakening. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast,

our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts?

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And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And so these people that were in this unit, we're talking about people who were showing up again and again and again, like serious mental illness, right? But you saw in them a hankering towards spirituality. So what was the difference in what was not allowing spirituality be protective in their case, right? Because they may have been interested in it, but it wasn't protecting them, right? Because they were, if we were going to be gauging people on being ill, right, they were the most ill. They kept coming back into inpatient again and again. So what's the difference in someone there who's got an inkling in that direction and someone who's actually able to use a spiritual worldview to heal themselves or to protect themselves against mental illness. That's right. So, Eric, I was hearing the yearning

and just the emergence, the nation's emergence of the spiritual heart, hungry to grow and expand. But it was unsupported because remember one-third innate, two-thirds environmentally formed. No one was walking with them. And there I was fine, you know,

but I realized there was so much more that needed to be done. So could we actually do another practice? Because I think this opens up a. This is a nice place in which to convey. I'm going to invite you to take five breaths, clear out your inner space. in your inner chamber, I invite you to set before you a table. This is your table. And to your table, you may invite anyone, living or deceased,

who truly has your best interest in mind. Anyone living or deceased who truly has your best interest in mind. Anyone living or deceased who truly has your best interest in mind. And with them all sitting there, ask them if they love you. Ask them if they love you. And now you may invite your higher self,

the part of you that is so much more than anything you may have or not have, anything you may have done or not done, your true, eternal higher self, and ask you if you love me. And now finally, you may invite your higher power, whatever your word, however you know, your higher power,

and ask if they love you. And now with all of those people sitting there right now, what do they need to let you know? What do they need to share? What do they need to shower him more? And when you're ready, I invite you back. This is your council, and they are always there for you. Who shows up may change depending on where we are in our road. And we can ask what is on earth. That is a nice practice. And they're real. They're not imagined. You are detecting something real. You are imaging something real. So that is handing it over. We are built to have an awakened relationship

with those who truly have our best interest in mind, higher selves, our higher power. These are sacred, transcendent relationships. They're always there. They're walking with us, alive or deceased, our higher power. Some people say, I saw light on the water. Some people say, I saw a white light. Some people say I saw Jesus. People see it different, but whatever they see is an image of some deep loving presence that is real, that is unitive and there for all of us. One presence for all of us and then seven billion different images. So far with the science, we've sort of seen that viewing the world this way offers protective benefit or that suffering often leads us as an opportunity to start to view the

world in this way, which then gives us these positive benefits. So it's clear that this as a view, you know, the science seems pretty clear that this is healthy for us, right? Talk to me about where you go next, right? Which is into some of the fMRI studies. And what is that showing us? So Eric, the practice we just shared is literally handing it over. We are taking what's on our heart. What do they need to tell you now? And you can bring questions like, why is this person so cruel to me? Or why is my boss so limiting of me? And take these questions to your accounts. This is literally handing it over to the higher.

We're built for this and we can guide ourselves up to the edge where we do hand it. So this is how we're built and we're built from day one. Because this is our birthright, there should naturally be neurocircuits. There is a docking station in the brain, body, mind, and soul. So there are certain circuits in the brain that sustain this awareness. And I don't mean to apply biological reductionism. Again, I'm not saying the brain makes this up. I'm saying that we are connecting with something real and its landing pad is the brain, the docking station. So we invited people together, the Spirituality Mind-Body Institute, my institute at Columbia, and our colleagues at Yale Medical School.

We said, come on into our MRI lab. And effectively, we invited them to host counsel, as you and I just did here now, here listeners, which is to say, tell us a time where you were in a transcendent relationship as we just were, relational, spiritual. And what we found was that about, you know, well, was what the national average might predict. About two-thirds of people were in a transcendent relationship, like holding counsel, as told within their faith tradition. In the third chair, they saw God or jesus or they saw their ancestors and knew their ancestors walked with them that was about two-thirds of people and about a third of people said i saw light on the water i saw forest i saw infinity i saw mount rainier in chair three they

were spiritual but not religious and whether or not someone was religious and spiritual, or spiritual and not religious, and whether or not their religion happened to be that they were Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, Catholic, Christian, the same neural circuits ran. There is one awakened brain, and we all have it. Well, it's there for all of us if we choose to engage it. We are all born with the wiring to awaken, one third innate, and then it is a choice to practice and cultivate our natural awakened awareness. So what was so beautiful is that there's one spiritual brain. I mean,

this should make religious war beyond obsolete. This should make disputes about ultimate reality viewed as, well, that's actually downstream of who we really are. And who we really are is we're all spiritual beings. Now, of course, there's human variability, just as there is with music. You know, there are people for whom this comes more easily. There are people for whom this is more pronounced. But just like we all hear music and love music and move with music it's there for all of us our natural spiritual awareness and just like music practice builds we literally by way of analogy build the muscle we strengthen the awakened brain the second set of findings from our MRI studies is that people who sustain and focus on building their spiritual awareness, over, in this study, eight years, over time,

showed a stronger awakened brain. There was a thicker cortex across regions of the awakened brain, which are regions of perception and reflection and orientation, the parable of pecunious and occipital, which means that sustained spiritual life actually builds and deepens our awareness as you are just sharing through your meditation practice and through your journey. It becomes a go-to place in new norm. So listener, consider this your halfway through the episode integration reminder.

Remember, knowledge is power, but only if combined with action and integration. It can be transformative to take a minute to synthesize information rather than just ingesting it in a detached way. So let's collectively take a moment to pause and reflect. What's your one big insight so far and how can you put it into practice in your life? Seriously, just take a second, pause the audio and reflect. It can be so powerful to have these reminders to stop and be present, can't it? If you want to keep this momentum going that you built with this little exercise, I'd encourage you to get on our Good Wolf Reminders SMS list. I'll shoot you two texts a week with insightful little prompts and wisdom from podcast guests. They're a nice little nudge to stop and be present in your life,

and they're a helpful way to not get lost in the busyness and forget what is important. You can join at OneYouFeed.net slash SMS. And if you don't like them, you can get off the list really easily. So far, there are over 1,172 others from the OneYouFeed community on the list, and we'd love to welcome you as well. So head on over to one you feed.net slash SMS and let's feed our good wolves together. So people who are nourishing this part of themselves are seeing consistent changes in the brain. Yes. That look similar regardless of exactly what the flavor of this thing is. Beautiful. Yes. So they could be Hindu, or they could be spiritual, not religious. They could be

Jewish. They could be devout. It doesn't matter. We're doing the same deep thing in terms of the capacity to perceive the transcendent relationship, that we are loved in hell, guided, and never alone. Just as you and I shared in council, we are loved in hell, guided, and never alone. Just as you and I shared in counsel, we are loved and held, guided, and never alone. When we build our awakened brain, over time, we are protected against recurrence of depression. We are neuroprotected through sustaining our spiritual life against recurrence of depression.

We still have hard times. There can still be moments of sorrow and sadness, but the deep downward spiral to major depression is less like why? Because we develop a spiritual response to suffering. I just got fired. My husband just left me. I just lost my money. That hurts and that hurts like hell, right? But I don't necessarily need to say I am such a loser, the depressive downward spiral. It always happens to me. I am unworthy or turn to habits which are destructive. Instead, I make a choice.

In my language, loving God, what do you ask of me now? In another language, I meditate and I feel that I actually am part of all the love that is part of all creation. meditate and I feel that I actually am part of all the love that is part of all creation. Or in another practice, I might go to the anipi or the sweat lodge and realize that there are messengers in crow and in sun and in one another. So we are loved hell and never alone. And a spiritual response to trauma, post-traumatic spiritual growth, despair, depression, trauma, post-traumatic spiritual growth, despair, depression, developmental depression, is our birthright. We are built to be more, not less, through these times of tremendous struggle. There's something you say in the book that I wanted to explore a little bit because it

was another thing that I got kind of hung up on. And it was, you say, in a secular materialist world, we make meaning. But in my developing spiritual awareness framework, meaning is revealed and we interact with it. We are in dialogue with life, right? And our times of doubt, struggle, and depression often serve as portals to our awakened life. Because the idea that in a secular world, we make meaning, I feel like that we are always making meaning, right? But there are ways of making meaning that are more conducive to a open, loving perspective in the world. But you're suggesting that there is actually an external meaning to us, which there's the inner skeptic in me that goes, I don't know if I believe that's true, right?

So talk to me about why you see it that way. Or are we basically talking about the same thing? We're just using slightly different words. I might start here, which is to say that inside every one of us is a table of knowers. We have multiple ways of knowing. We have logic and we hammer things out. I want to get this job. I'm going to have to go through this door first. We have empiricism. I need to get the data to figure out which car I want to buy or do I really want to take this risk?

And then we have intuition or gut instincts. We have mystical awareness, and we have spontaneous direct knowing, just now. And we have synchronicities, far too improbabilistic to have happened by chance. We see the deeper meaning in a synchronicity. There are multiple ways of knowing, and these are all valid. They all yield hard data. But we have way over-emphasized empiricism and logic, and just knowing, I just know it in my gut, surefire. I mean, have you ever noticed something

in your gut and just, it was right? I mean, you took it, you went with your gut and that was bedrocked. Have you ever had that type of experience? I've had that, but I've also had plenty of experiences where I was absolutely certain I was right in my gut and it turned out to be very wrong. I mean, I was convinced that heroin was absolutely what I had to have for a number of years. That felt deeply intuitive. It felt at a cellular level. It was also deeply misguided. It was a response to my trauma, not a response to my awakened awareness, to use your terminology,

right? So yes, I've had both. Does it feel the same, though? No. I've been able to tune in over time to these things that are more a response to trauma, have a desperation to them, or they have a energy of sort of clinging that's in them that is very intense. And the other is more subtle and more open and more quiet. Right. But I think it's taken me a while to sort of be able to sort

of sort those things out. So yes, I do notice a difference now. But I don't think I could for certainly a fair amount of time in my life. I don't think I could tell the difference. But you honed your inner instrument. You honed your inner, yes. And you learned the resonance of something that was life-giving, an instinct that was expansive, and an instinct that came from another place. So what I would say is that we are built to be able, if we cultivate and gently and caringly give it attention, cultivate an awareness of different forms of knowing. And that just as when we shared the road of life practice with the yellow door, there are yellow doors built for us. I don't think that we go out there in the world and are narrowly makers of our past.

I think we're scoffers of our journey. That's not fatalism. I don't mean fatalism. I mean there's a living dynamic, a dialogue between us and the force in life. So the contemporary narrow view that I just can't emphasize enough of so-called manifesting is literally getting on Amazon and ordering the life you want. And that is a much smaller life than the universe has in mind for you. The universe has yellow doors in mind for you. The universe has people that love you in a way you hadn't been loved. The universe has yellow doors in mind for you. The universe has people that

love you in a way you hadn't been loved. The universe has ways that you can give that you didn't even know you could do yet. That's a bigger life. And we get there through being in dialogue. Hey, what is life showing me now? Not just, hey, I didn't get what I want. Why didn't I get what I want? Slamming my head on that red door versus, okay, what is life asking of me now? Who do I need to become to be able to love radically enough to stay in this marriage or love this child who hates me? Or, you know, who do I need to become? And the end game is not tit for tat and somehow fair and equal, like the red door story.

That's achieving awareness. That's zero-sum game, you know, But it's not a zero sum game. Awakened life is a life where it doesn't matter what you get back. It's all about your emergence and becoming. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the

answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's gonna drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. God bless you all. Hello, Newman.

And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In my Habits That Matter program, one of the very first core ideas is intention.

And that word has gotten strung out in the manifest world to a certain degree, right? You set your intention and then you will get these things. And in my mind, intention is not about what I'm going to get or what's going to come to me. It's all about who am I going to be? Who is the person that I am? And what are the behaviors that are going to allow me to be that person in the world? It's a complete sort of flip of the way the law of attraction has used the word intention. And it's a complete focus on who do I want to be in general and really in almost every situation we find ourselves in, right?

Who do I want to be at dinner tonight with my children? Who do I want to be with my coworkers? Who do I want to be with my partner? Who's the person that I want to be? And that's kind of what intention is to me. I think it's fundamental to any sort of well-lived life. That's a masterpiece. That's a spiritual journey, right? It's not a show. It's about a becoming. It's magnificent. Beautiful, Eric. I want to dig into a couple other areas here a little bit. And one is,

you said that it seemed that this was the place where psychology had become stuck, bound by three limiting assumptions, right? One is that the brain creates thoughts. Second is that all meaning is interpretation. And three, that we feel better by rearranging our thoughts, by disputing the thoughts that make us unhappy, and replacing depressing thoughts with a new framework that helps us tell a brighter story. And I've been very interested in this idea because over the course of 600 episodes, right, one of the things I've been asking people all about is the relationship between thought and emotion. Do thoughts cause emotion? Do emotions cause thought? And to me, it has become very clear

that it's a bi-directional thing, right? That it's actually not one or the other. I can look in my own life and see both. I can see times where my thoughts cause a certain emotion and I can see times where there's just an emotional weather and all my thoughts get filtered through that, right? It's like I wake up and before I even have a thought, there's a sort of mood system that's there, right? So this kind of going back and forth between these two. And you say something at one point about CBT, and you're saying that it's also in a colleague of yours study about depression and rumination. And you say women that are depressed are capable of having positive thoughts, but they feel the benefit of those positive thoughts less intensely than women who aren't depressed, right? And I find that a fascinating thing because it's saying that if you just change your thoughts, that's not the whole game. So say

a little bit more about that because I think all of us can look at in our own lives. And if we look at the clinical data, CBT has its effectiveness. There is a place for working with your thoughts in a skillful way, right? There's no doubt about that, but it's certainly not the whole story. So what are we not understanding when we think that's the whole game? It's such a rich, I mean, we could talk for hours and, you know, maybe I'd love if you invite me back, we'll keep going. Okay. Let's do this piece today, which is I have a colleague who I just cherish, Alarion Mikulioff, who's a shaman.

He is the last Aleut shaman. So he lives on the Aleutian Islands in Alaska, in the last of his lineage, and he wrote the book, The Wisdom Keeper. And he says things that I say in the awakened brain in a traditional way. In the awakened brain, I talk about awakened awareness and achieving awareness. What Alarion Mikuliaff says from the shamanic tradition is that Western society has it upside down.

We prioritize the head, so to speak, the thinking of the head, and then commandeer the head to direct the heart. But traditionally, shamanic understanding is that you cultivate the heart as an instrument of knowing. A heart perceives what is true, a true North Star, and then sends direction to the head to implement. So let's look at Western culture. If we let the head guide the heart, I want this. How am I going to get that? Why doesn't he like me? Those are the thoughts of the head. How am I doing compared to her or him or them on social media? How am I doing compared to the Joneses? Well, those understandings and drivings of head, calculations of the head, commandeer a heart that has craving, that has competitiveness or envy, that has yearning

and dissatisfaction. That is a setup for misery. What if we flip it around as is found in traditional shamanic culture? The heart, what is true? What is really valuable? What is my path? What is the nature of our lives? Unit of love. The heart perceives the ultimate direction. What is God showing me now? What is the universe guiding me to see? Turn right here. I've always turned left. The universe says turn right. That is the knowing of the heart. And the head then discerns, how might I best serve my divine direction? How might I best love this person who's very difficult? How might I best love this person who's very difficult? The head then implements.

That is an alignment that is a spiritual path. That is a stance of quest because we go after what's true from the direction of the heart and we figure out how to do it with the head. I agree with Elyria and we have it backwards. The bottom line is that that formulation of head guiding heart isn't awakened life. It's opening up to what is the universe asking of me now? Where am I being guided now? What am I to contribute here? You know, when you get tap, tap, this one's yours, that's the universe tapping you. Right. A lot of though, what we've learned is that even people who are making a rational decision are doing it based on emotion. The emotion is telling them what to do,

and then their brain figures out how to justify it. So it's almost as if, I mean, maybe it's the way you're describing that the head is driving the heart, but it almost sounds like it's a heart that's not working very well. That's driving everything, right? When you talked about, I want this and I want that, like that's desire, right? And desire we tend to think of as coming from the heart, but it's a heart to me that has been co-opted by, you know, different types of desire, mimetic desire, which is like, I know what I want based on what you want and craving and fear. It's almost as if, I mean, I agree that it's a cultivation of the heart. And my experience has been when that heart gets going in a certain direction, the brain will follow it because that tends to be, in my experience, what it often does.

It's trying to justify what the heart says anyway. experience what it often does. It's trying to justify what the heart says anyway. So I guess I would say that every emotion is informative. If I take my finger and touch a hot stove, ouch, that hurts, because I'm touching something real, heat. An emotion is touching something real. If I feel craving, it's because I'm touching something real, which is I'm deploying a repetitive eye. If I feel empty because I'm deploying something real, a false bearing or a false sense of self. Emotions are our friends. They're telling

us information. If we can look at these emotions, whether they feel awful or whether they come from a place that feels like the first wolf, or the second wolf, where does it come from, this emotion of your two, you know, your very important, terrible. I think no matter where it comes from, the emotion is revelatory. It is the best information we have onto how are we engaging

our inner being, to your point. And if what we're feeling is craving and surliness, it is helpful information that we might redirect and reposition our deep seat of inner being. Turn the channel to a more expansive spiritual, what I would call, waking channel. So this brings up another sort of interesting question that I'm curious what you think about. Because I've dealt with depression in my life a variety of different ways, right? But I often think of it in two broad camps. Camp one is that I take it seriously and I attempt to resolve it somehow, right? And sometimes that is useful, but sometimes that seems to be a dead end.

And I take the opposite view of it, which is that I don't take it seriously. I treat it as a passing mood system, right? I often call it the emotional flu. I don't quite know why I have this in the same way I can't pinpoint who gave me the cold virus. I don't know where it came from, but it's here. I know the ways to take care of myself while it's here. I know the ways to take care of myself while it's here. So I'm going to do those things. But beyond that, I'm not going to attribute a ton

of meaning to it because when I do, I seem to spiral further down the hole sometimes. And so, you know, on one hand, the fact that we say depression and emotion is revelatory, one hand, the fact that we say depression and emotion is revelatory, yes, I think it can be. But it seems to me that there are times that I don't know what they're about. And I found it better to not make a big fuss out of it and let it sort of pass. But that's to sort of ignore its revelatory character. Now, we could say that that's taking a broader perspective, right? A wider lens, a different lens on it, right? Which is to say that, you know, as a human being, there are mood systems that come and go for, you know, maybe it's something I ate that I didn't like or any number of different things.

I didn't sleep well enough three days last week. But what do you think about that? Do you think that we should explore every emotion every time? Or is there a place to simply say like, okay, you know what? I'm going to do the things that I know help in this circumstance and I'm going to leave it at that. Lovely, lovely, lovely, lovely. So Eric, in my journey, I would say that not all depressions are the same. So when I'm getting a virus, in addition to having a headache and a stomachache, I can feel depressed as a symptom of that virus, right? And that hue, that sense of depression, I can, oh, I'm getting

sick. It's a symptom. The brain's an organ. And just as I have an upset stomach and a sore throat, the brain is affected by this virus and I'm feeling depressed. That hue of depression is different than when I feel existential anxiety or when I feel a yearning to figure out what is the purpose of my life. So we have this huge word, depression. Right, right. You know how the Eskimos have many names for snow, right? Well, our culture is a little tone deaf when it comes to depression. We've yet to have many names for the different hues of depression. And there are feelings of so-called, yes, use the same word

depression, that I'm feeling sort of out of sorts and down and low because I have a virus. And then there's a very different feeling that deserves a different name. And I'll call it for the moment, existential yearning or spiritual hunger or feelings of worthlessness, not because I'm not cute enough and rich enough, but because somehow I've yet to emerge into the being that I feel called to be or that I'm born to be. And that is a developmental depression that's on our side. It's propelling us into a quest and they feel different. But I think your attunement to knowing the difference between different hues, as you were describing of emotion, different gut instincts, I think we can draw a tune to, wait a minute, what kind of so-called depression is this?

There's actually many different shades of feelings that come from different places and are propelling us to different places. You know, from a scientific point of view, even the people who came up with the DSM Diagnostic Manual on Depression themselves ran a study and said, you know what, in this so-called category, there are actually many different subtypes. And some have a lot to do with sort of the body feeling low, but others have to do with a sense of being and self and purpose. So this big, huge term, this catch-all category, this basket that we call depression, actually has tremendous heterogeneity, many different types. And they are different. So I'm so glad you're opening this up because there are times where really what we need is medication and that's it.

you're opening this up because there are times where really what we need is medication and that's it and then there's other times where whether i am or am not on medication i am as well being called to cross the bridge to the next station in life where depression is a developmental knock door to an awakening and a growth and i think we start to in our long journey draw tune to the different feeling at hand and that's a richness in our life that you're describing. Yeah, that's really well said. I mean, I think one of the biggest insights I've had over the last couple of years is how much tiredness feels like depression. Yes, right. And I just didn't really get it. I didn't really get it, right? And so there are a lot of late in the evening, if I've had a really busy day,

where that feeling is there. And it makes a world of difference what I call it. Because if I say, oh, I'm tired, then I know go to sleep and you'll wake up and it'll be different. But if I say I'm depressed, all of a sudden, I'm bringing a cascade of meaning into this thing, right? Because that word is very weighted for me, given my past, right? You know, depression means there's something wrong. Depression means that something needs to be done. Depression means that we could be headed towards bad territory. There's a lot of meaning there. Tired is a word that carries far less freight in my mind, right? It's just like, oh, you're tired, go to bed, right? It's taken me till I was 50 years old to really notice how similar they are. And given the nature of how we

sometimes we were talking about thought causing emotion or emotion causing thought, emotion will cause thought. So the thoughts that come out of that can be very similar. It's because it's just a habitual response. Emotion feels like this, here come the thoughts, right? But the minute that I sort of realize what the emotion is, is a different thing. I can then look at those thoughts and just go, Oh, ignore them. Right. In the same way that when I'm sick or or even better examples of I don't sleep well the night before, I know that lots of things the next day are going to look lousy to me. And I don't seem to have the skill to like completely turn that off.

So all I do is go, yeah, that's just let that all go today. Don't even pay any attention to all that noise because you're really tired and tomorrow you'll feel differently, right? And I think you've used this sort of attuning an instrument, right? Which is, I think what a lot of this is, is this paying very close attention to our own experience. And that's one of the things I always loved about Buddhism was this idea of like, don't believe what I say because I said it. Try it out. Pay really close attention in your own life. And that is a skill that I think is, to use a phrase of yours that we're going to talk about in the post-show conversation, that's a questing mindset,

right? It's a mindset that says, let me be curious about what's happening here and let me be willing to look at it from different ways. Eric, I would even say that whether it's through Buddhism or meditation or prayer, that you are sharing the validity of our observing eye, the higher part of ourself that looks down upon the inner landscape of our emotional life, the chairman of the board that we are over our own lives. We all have a chairman of the board. We all have an observing eye. And I think one of the great moments where we come out of depression is when we free ourself from the tossing seas and this quicksand and the morass. We say, wait a minute, there's a part of me that is real. I call it the

soul that looks down upon my inner life and says, look at that or wow, that's a part of me that is real. I call it the soul that looks down upon my inner life and says, look at that, or wow, that's kind of a nuance, or ooh, that one hurt, you know, but it's disidentified. There's a breezy space, there's a distance. And we have the natural authority to step back from the flow of our emotion, to sit in the throne, to be the chairman of the board and say, you know what? I have a choice in my relationship to the flow of my inner life. I have a choice in how I want to relate to what's coming at me. And I even have a choice in what I call these things. The fact that the doctor calls it depression, depression, depression, depression, doesn't mean I have to. I can call that, oh, that's kind of a viral foul mood.

You know, meaning I'm feeling sick, I have a sore throat, and I feel like I have a viral foul mood. And this over here, no, this is an existential yearning. I can feel a spiritual growth. Spiritual growth can feel, when we expand, like a half-empty glass of spirituality. What is the hollowness in me now? That's a real hollowness that is helping us. That's for us. That's not a disease that's pecking at us. That is a calling of growth, and that's for us. So those are very different feelings, and I can name them existential

yearning and awakening versus viral foul mood. So listener, in thinking about all that and the other great wisdom from today's episode, if you were going to isolate just one top insight that you're taking away, what would it be? Not your top ten, not the top five, just one. What is it? Think about it. Got it? Now I ask you, what's one tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny little thing you can do today to put it in practice? Or maybe just take a baby step towards it.

Remember, little by little, a little becomes a lot. Profound change happens as a result of aggregated tiny actions, not massive heroic effort. If you're not already on our Good Wolf Reminder SMS list, I'd highly recommend it as a tool you can leverage to remind you to take those vital baby steps forward. You can get on there at oneufeed.net slash SMS. It's totally free. And once you're

on there, I'll send you a couple text messages a week with little reminders and nudges. Here's one I recently shared to give you an idea of the type of stuff I send. Keep practicing, even if it seems hopeless. Don't strive for perfection, aim for consistency, and no matter what, keep showing up for yourself. That was a great gem from recent guest Light Watkins. And if you're on the fence about joining, remember it's totally free and easy to unsubscribe. If you want to get in, I'd love to have you there. Just go to oneufeed.net slash SMS. All right, back to it. Well, that is a wonderful place for us to wrap up. You and I are going to continue in the post-show conversation.

You've got another practice to lead us through. And we've talked about achieving awareness and awakened awareness. And you talk about how integration is the key, right? How do we integrate these things? And you then also talk about something called a quest orientation, which is the questing brain is the way we integrate these two things. So we'll be discussing that a little bit more in the post-show conversation. Listeners, if you'd like

access to the post-show conversation, ad-free episodes, a special episode I do each week called Teaching Song and a Poem, and the good feeling that comes from supporting something that you value, go to whenyoufeed.net slash join and become part of our community. Oh, I should mention too, we have monthly community meetings now, and maybe Dr. Miller will join us for one of those in the future. So thank you so much. This has been a really enjoyable conversation. Thank you for your work and thank you for taking the time to share it with us. Eric, thank you for sharing the awakened brain and thank you for connecting so deeply. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast.

When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really No Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like

why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.