The Rich Roll Podcast - The Awakened Brain: Lisa Miller, PhD On The Neuroscience Of Spirituality

Episode Date: January 10, 2022

The many benefits to cultivating a spiritual practice are obvious to those with experience—but it’s a pursuit too long dismissed by skeptics and scientists. That is, until now. Recent research in neuroscience, genetics, and epidemiology now establish that humans are not only universally equipped with a capacity for (and inclination towards) spirituality, but that our brains, when so awakened, become more resilient and robust—and our lives more meaningful and content. Here today to discuss the emerging and fascinating ‘science of spirituality’ is the woman who helped pioneer it, Lisa Miller, PhD. A leading generational psychologist on the benefits of spirituality, Lisa is a graduate of Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned her doctorate in psychology. She is currently a professor of psychology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and is the Founder and Director of the Spirituality Mind Body Institute,the first Ivy League graduate program and research institute in spirituality and psychology. Dr. Miller is widely published in leading academic journals, has appeared on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and Weekend Today as an expert, and her first book, The Spiritual Child was a New York Times bestseller. Her latest work (and the focus of today’s discussion) is The Awakened Brain, a groundbreaking exploration of the neuroscience of spirituality that sets a bold new paradigm for health, healing, and resilience. My exchange with Dr. Miller is centered on the intersection of hard science and spirituality—what neurology, neurobiology, genetics, epidemiology, and psychiatry can tell us about the mental health benefits of cultivating your own awakened brain. I think you will find her work fascinating, full of counterintuitive findings and practical advice on the many concrete ways to access your own innate spirituality—and more importantly, how this can be deployed to enhance things like grit, optimism, and resilience. In addition, we explore the many ways you can leverage the awakened brain to insulate yourself against addiction, trauma, and depression. Ultimately, this is a conversation about how to build a life of greater joy and enhanced personal fulfillment to better thrive and contribute to the greater well-being of all. To read more, click here. You can also watch it all go down on YouTube. And as always, the podcast streams wild and free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. An intellectual delight from start to finish, I thoroughly enjoyed talking to Dr. Miller, and I sincerely hope you enjoy the listen. Peace + Plants, Rich

So much of suffering in life comes from being out of alignment with deep truth. Much of our own happiness, our joy, comes from asking the question, what is life showing me now, and being surprised. The reason we have people who don't get better from recurrent depression or who in their process of recovery are stuck is because we have shut down our innate capacity to feel this deep love and connection that's in and through all of life with fellow living beings, with one another.

Being able to see life as alive and guiding, we're built for that. That's not a belief. It's not a theology. That doesn't come from a religious leader. That comes from a scientist saying that we have in our brain a series of circuits that allow us to see the deep nature of life that is in fact buoyant, that is in fact a consciousness field through which we are loved, held, guided, and never alone. There's a meta-analysis, a study of studies conducted by Wu and colleagues that showed a 62% decreased relative risk of completed suicide. And that goes to 82% when our spiritual awareness is shared in a group.

We've got to look at one another and see the presence of God, spirit, consciousness in one another. And we've got to speak about it and live that way. We are dying as a culture because we have shut off our awakened brain. But if we listen to one another and see one another as spiritual beings, souls on earth, children of God, you pick your language, right? Then we have a shot. The Rich Roll Podcast. There are many ways to tap into a heightened awareness of the world around you, as well as many benefits to cultivating a spiritual practice. These benefits are obvious to those who practice them, but also too often dismissed by skeptics and scientists until recently, because hard science, neuroscience, genetics, epidemiology

now establishes that humans are not only universally equipped with a capacity for an inclination towards spirituality, but that our brains, when so awakened, become more resilient, more robust, and in turn, our lives more meaningful and content. Here today to discuss this emerging and fascinating science of spirituality is the woman who helped pioneer it, Dr. Lisa Miller.

A generational leading psychologist on the benefits of spirituality. Lisa is a graduate of Yale University and University of Pennsylvania, where she earned her doctorate in psychology. She's currently a professor of psychology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and is the founder and director of the Spirituality Mind-Body Institute, the first Ivy League graduate program and research institute in spirituality and psychology. Dr. Miller is widely published in leading academic journals.

She's appeared on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and Weekend Today as an expert. Her first book, The Spiritual Child, was a New York Times bestseller, and her latest and the focus of today's discussion is entitled The Awakened Brain, which is quite a groundbreaking exploration of the neuroscience of spirituality,

as well as a bold new paradigm for health, healing, and resilience. A few more things to add about the conversation to come, but first. more things to add about the conversation to come, but first. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find

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And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care. Especially because, unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. A problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders,

depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen,

or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one,

again, go to recovery.com. Okay, Dr. Lisa Miller, Lisa Miller, PhD. So this is, dare I say, a quite fascinating discussion about the intersection of hard science with spirituality. What neurology, neurobiology, genetics, epidemiology, and psychiatry can tell us about the mental health benefits of cultivating your own awakened brain. I think you'll find it quite compelling,

full of counterintuitive findings, as well as practical advice on the many concrete ways to access your innate spirituality and how this can be deployed to enhance things like grit, like optimism, like resilience, and also leverage to insulate yourself against things like addiction, trauma, and depression. And ultimately, I think prove helpful

in building a life of greater joy, of greater personal fulfillment, and contribution to the greater wellbeing of all. So here we go. This is me and Dr. Lisa Miller. Lisa, nice to meet you. Thank you for doing this. Great to meet you, Rich.

Excited to talk to you about my favorite subjects, science and spirituality, and the interesting inextricable link between them. You've had a fascinating career looking at this in depth for a long time and we're gonna unearth all of it. Fantastic. I think the first thing we should probably do, and I'm reluctant to even ask this question

cause I'm sure it's the first question that everybody asks you, but I feel like we need to get it out of the way. In terms of evaluating the sort of scientific-based benefits of cultivating a spiritual life, we should probably define what you mean by spirituality. Great, so thank you. So as you are well aware,

scientists do not define spirituality all told, but we can use the lens of science to identify threads of lived human spiritual life that have enormous impact on the rest of our lives, our health, our wellness, our performance, our ability to connect and love. And the two threads within lived human spirituality where I focus in the awakened brain, are the two areas where the lion's share of science says our lives are entirely different. These two threads of lived spirituality are entirely game-changing when it comes to our possibility and our realization. And they are one, the seat of transcendent awareness, which is to say our innate hardwired capacity to see into the deeper nature of life

where we see that we are loved, held, guided, and never alone. There's a capacity hardwired in us to see a transcendent relationship with life. That is the first of the two. And the second is that that might be shared with one another so that we can show up and be part of that symphony of life

where we're loved, guided, held, and never alone. Cause we treat each other that way. And how do you parse the differences between spirituality kind of casting this broad, you know, umbrella versus religion? So spirituality and religion are two different things. For two thirds of people in the United States, they go closely hand in hand. So two-thirds of people in the U.S. will say,

I am spiritual and I am religious. My deep spirituality, by which usually is meant this thread of lived spirituality identified in the awakened brain, my seat of transcendent awareness, my capacity to be in a deep dynamic relationship with the deeper presence or spirit in life. That is held in my faith tradition, the prayers, the ceremonies, my community, the rituals. 30% of millennials and fewer with each older generation say I am spiritual, but I am not religious. For me, I experienced spirituality in nature, art, my family. So religion is through the lens of science has been shown to be transmitted entirely environmentally.

It is a gift of our ancestors. It is shared by community. But spirituality, as I'm discussing it in the awakened brain, our innate capacity for transcendent awareness and that that might be shared shared that is hardwired. It is not merely a gift of our environment. So spirituality is innate and the environment alone transmits religion.

Sure, innate and also heritable, which is something you get into, which is super interesting. But before we even do that, I suspect that, and you talk about this in the book, that it is a challenge for many and obviously some within your profession to kind of reconcile science and spirituality. It presents this conundrum, this conflict,

spirituality being something that is considered outside of science, that is, you know is something anecdotal and observational. So walk me through the process of trying to drill down on how you actually study, not just the impact of a spiritual life on one's mental health, but just identifying it in a situation where it can be calibrated to produce results

that are reliable and compelling enough to draw conclusions from. So which many people will say, indeed, I am not spiritual, I am very scientific. And very often, certainly there was a huge ice age around spirituality in the scientific community in the 20th century, it's starting to thaw a bit now. But for most of the 20th century,

and still many people, the bad gift that science as a profession gave our larger society was a false split between spirituality and science. And that is indeed a very false split. It turns out that science is a method. It's a lens. Whether you're talking about genotyping or MRI studies or long-term clinical course studies,

science is a form of observance. And we can point that lens at just about any question. And the host of questions are broad. We can ask questions that are compelling and new, or we can repeat the same questions we've asked a hundred times before. The questions we ask live within the imagination of the scientist. So the limitations that science faced on turning our lens to ask questions of spirituality in the human life were limitations of the culture,

the climate, the vogue in which scientists were immersed. They were not limitations of the scientific method. Now with the shift in culture came a shift, really the thaw in the Ice Age of the imagination of the scientist. And as culture really, in some ways, academia was the last of the party. Our culture became much more spiritually aware before academia got on board.

And as the group of scientists who were early in this transformative process, being amongst those labs that really brought the lens of scientists who were early in this transformative process being amongst those labs that really brought the lens of science to spirituality in the human life. Still to this day, I can say there's a number of scientists who've yet to separate the difference between the scientific method and the vogue tastes and appetites and the culture around academic science, which are actually sort of implicitly, latently secular material. There's no reason that the scientific lens has to be limited to interpretations or understandings

that are simply, I don't mean materialistic, although that can come with material, but material only that which we can touch, which we can point to. I literally have friends who are scientists who say that because you've shown the neural correlates of spirituality in the brain, we now know spirituality is real.

That is a limitation in the culture of scientists, not in our method. Yeah, that's wild. Do you think that this innate proclivity for cultivating spiritual awareness to developing the awakened mind as you call it is something that is specific to humans? Does it exist across other areas of the animal,

phenotypes out there, or is this a human thing that is particular to our species in the way that bees know how to make a hive or spiders know how to spin a web like something that's or birds know how to migrate in certain kinds of patterns. That's just built into us. The awakened brain that we have allows us to tap into the deep field of consciousness

where there's a unity in and through all life, right? I almost, at times you can almost feel the rhythm. There's a single rhythm in and through life. Every other living being is tapped into this field of consciousness. Every other living being is in deep communication and aware of one another. And I'll give you an example by way of a story.

One day I'm kayaking down the river by my house and it feels so empowering and it feels so good. And it's a day with very high waves. It was one of the highest days. It was March right after the thaw in Connecticut where I live. And suddenly I hear, and two or three geese are looking at me and then bending their neck way to the side,

as in go right, go right. And I'd have to be arrogant beyond words to not listen to three geese calling in unison saying, go right. So of course I paddled right. Narrowly to avert a huge, barely covered cement impediment in the middle of the river.

The geese saved me from capsizing. They probably saved me from worse, right? I go further down the river, new geese. Again, warning me that there's these deep pylons right underneath the surface of the river. I steer again. Further down the river, no more geese. I hit a pylon.

I flip over. My kayak's full of water. I look up and there's two humans on the shore. They look at me flailing in the water with my cap size kayak, turn their back, get in their Mercedes and drive away. We're the only ones.

I like that it was a Mercedes. That's a nice touch. Yes, right. And of course you can't write this stuff, right? Yeah, this idea of synchronicity, right? This idea of when you're present, you're paying attention and you're cultivating that awareness that you're enhancing your capability to tap

into this idea of oneness or shared consciousness. That's almost teetering on kind of a panpsychism, you know, idea of consciousness itself. Every other living being who I've encountered is able to tap into this unit of consciousness. And we have the capacity, we're all endowed with an awakened brain. We need to choose to use it, to flip on the switch and to be in deep relationship with all the other living beings. I

can tell you a hundred stories where this is yet to be, the switch is still on in childhood. So young children up until really puberty, when they get a strong message that this deep form of awareness isn't real, it's really the greatest violation when they get a strong message that this deep form of awareness isn't real. It's really the greatest violation our culture hands a young adult, that your deep unity with all life isn't real. But up until that point, children are in relationship with all living beings.

And I'll give you one more, may I share one more story? Yeah, sure. Okay. My oldest son, Isaiah, who's in the story, he's in the awakened brain. He was about six years old,

maybe seven. And he found a dead bird in our yard, stiff, dead bird. So he did what most children naturally do, which is he made a burial for the bird. And Isaiah's way of honoring the life of the bird was to take a shoe box, line it with soft leaves. It looked almost like an Egyptian funeral pyre. Gently place the bird into this box and send the bird down the river. It looked like the Nile moving down the river. This bird in this beautifully lined, you know, soft coffin, if you will. Ar-roo, ar-roo, suddenly in unison. Dozens, it felt like hundreds, but dozens of birds, arr,

are marking the transition of the bird from this life to the next. I didn't know that there were that many birds surrounding our home. I would have never with my naked eye have seen these birds up in the trees, but we heard them. And I've heard so many accounts of animals honoring the transition between this life and the next for one another and for other living beings. So we are the ones who've gouged out our eyes. We are the ones who are deaf to the call that every other animal hears. And we have a choice. We're already built with what we need to dial right back in to the family of life.

We're already built to be in relationship with birds, to be in relationship with geese and all other animals. Yes, we're in relationship with our own dog and maybe our cat. But if you can be close to your dog, then certainly you can be close to a goat or a cow or a squirrel. And when we actually pay attention, we find... Please, one more story. May I? Go for it. Yeah. This is what we're here to do. Okay, good. I'm teaching my class at Columbia. I started the Spirituality Mind Body Institute at Columbia, and we teach courses that are foundationally spiritual in orientation to human flourishing and recovery within a psychology

department. The psychological wellness that is derived through our spiritual awareness. And in this class, there are probably 40 graduate students, and we're talking about respect for all life, right? And the importance of being in relationship to our sisters and brothers, whether the four-legged, the winged. And right as we tell this story, there's a cockroach, a New York cockroach, running through the floor under the feet of the students. And one by one, they're going, ew, cockroach, and picking up their bags. And one by one, they're going, ew, cockroach, and picking up their bags. And one of them, someone yells, no, don't kill it, don't kill it.

And this cockroach is running around, and they're lifting and spinning their chairs. And finally, I said, this is a lived synchronicity. Who is amongst us? And they said, well, the cockroach. And I said, the fellow living being. And once everyone in the room started referring to our guest as the fellow living being, the fellow living being came up to the front of the classroom.

And I do not exaggerate, took the front, if you will, leg and went like this. It was almost like a salute. Saluted and then took off. Goodbye, guys. Okay. So this depth of consciousness, I would say our smartest place, this deep intuitive sense where you can be in France

or China or India, you don't need to speak the same language, but you know of the heart, what the fellow person's about and what they're saying to you and how they feel if they have your best interest in mind. Our smartest part, it has been my experience, is in every living being. And we can

use our heart, our deep knowing, our awakened heart to be in connection with all life. The child does this naturally. It doesn't take that much practice for us to reawaken what's ours. Yeah, that's what I want to get into. I mean, what's fascinating about the stories you just told and kind of your overall story is that what you just shared could be considered relatively kind of woo-woo-y, but you're not somebody who's teaching yoga and lived on an ashram. Like you're reared in a very achievement oriented

environment, you're very accomplished, you're a hard scientist, and you've arrived at this perspective through some pretty rigorous science, initially through the lens of depression, particularly childhood depression, to identify these spiritual markers and the impact that they have on mental health.

So maybe walk me through how you came to be interested in this field to begin with. And may I share amongst my stories now that you've heard the ones with lots of visuals, a scientific story to answer your question. In identifying the converging layers of science that point to our awakened brain as inherent to who we are, our awakened brain as necessary to our flourishing

and wholeness and performance. We use multiple, multiple levels of analysis. It started with epidemiology and epidemiology of course, is the practice through which you effectively look out the window of the airplane at 10,000 feet and you identify patterns. The lights are on in this village, the lights are off in that village.

What might be said about the use of power and energy between the two villages? Well, patterns, right? And looking at patterns through the lens of epidemiology, I was a risk and resilience scientist. I wanted to know what was the pathway to health? What was the pathway to recovery? And normally we'd say, well, look here,

if you have good parents, you are 20% less likely to become depressed. Well, look here, if your needs are provided for, if you have enough material resources, you are 15% less likely to become depressed. Using this standard model, this epidemiological risk and resilience model, I asked the question back in 1997,

first time this was ever published, how does a child do if there's a strong spiritual life in the family? Were you castigated for even asking that question? More like teased. These people were my friends and they taunted me mercilessly, right?

Actually, to be honest, people who didn't know me would walk out of Grand Rounds presentations. It was not the taste or the appetite. It wasn't the culture of science. Grand Rounds being where you share the work that you're doing with your peers. Yes, well, at that point I was relatively junior and people who I so admired in the scientific community

got up, walked up the aisle, exited the double doors and then slam. I'm not interested in spirituality. So, you know, that I took, I had a choice, right? I could either decide, wow, these people who are so successful as scientists, they don't like this. I better quit and change.

I could play to the crowd, right? But I took the evocativeness of the topic and the complete absence. I mean, it was a very arid, dry desert. There was not one published peer review article on spirituality and mental health in the first two decades of life. That's wind of onset for the lifetime course.

So I took this to mean the work needed to be done. And I took the complete disdain of some scientists who not on scientific grounds, but as a matter of taste and appetite didn't take to the topic. Sure, which is fundamentally anti-scientific, right? To allow that kind of bias or preconceived notion of what spirituality is or is not,

or the impact that it may or may not have to just be dismissive altogether from the outset is not really an objective way of looking at problems. That's not science, right? That's scientism. That's sort of a, like you say, a bias, a flavor of the month. Right now we're not studying spirituality.

What's hot and big in science is we are studying parenting or we are, you know, but I took that disdain as evidence that the work needed to be done. And so that was my choice, that I wasn't gonna play to the crowd. I was going to pursue the thing that I knew in my deep inner wisdom was't gonna play to the crowd. I was going to pursue the thing that I knew in my deep inner wisdom was healing and helpful to young adults.

But what was also, what was the catalyst beneath that? Like, why were you interested in this to begin with? I mean, I know you spent time early in your career in various institutions, seeing how mental patients were treated and had a sense that things might not be being managed as well as they could be or should be. I opened in the awakened brain telling the story

of being on a New York City inpatient unit. I call it unit six because it was very typical of the time. So I don't wanna lay a trip on those people. But there were people who were simply not getting better on unit six who had been admitted three, five, seven times to the hospital. And their files, this was pre-computer, were six inches thick. They weren't getting better. And treatment, as usual, was leading to suffering after decades and decades of nowhere.

And so I noticed that patients were pulling me aside, knowing that I was interested in hearing about their spiritual life, knowing that I was interested in hearing about their spiritual life, knowing that I was interested in hearing about this wellspring of hope in this place of deeper awareness. I'll give you an example. This fellow who had been admitted 11 times,

diagnosed with schizophrenia, hiding behind the door one day jumped out and said, Dr. Miller. And I startled and he said, come here, I have to talk. And so he pulls me back behind the door with him. And he says, you need to understand something. They say I have schizophrenia. Yeah, I do.

But there is the world, little T and the world, capital T. And when things get so painful in little T, the world, that I can't take it anymore, then I move to the world, that I can't take it anymore. Then I move to the world, capital T, where Mother Mary is my mother and I am Jesus. He was well aware that he was moving between levels of consciousness. When one was too painful, he was going to another, but he was doing what many people struggle with.

And this is people with and without diagnoses, hanging out at the level of consciousness that feels better, as opposed to the level of consciousness that is actually a place of clarity and discovery and awakening. So he was aware that he was putting his hand on the mental gear shift, getting out of the daily living that was too painful by living at a level of consciousness that was not apropos for the moment. And this was going, I was pulled into a kitchen once by a woman, 40 years, an inpatient.

And she was about to be sent upstate, which is a little bit of a death sentence in the mental health world. Dr. Miller, will you come with me? And we're not talking just the kitchen and the pantry, way, way back, she pulled me to the pots and pans room so that no one could hear us. And there she said, Dr. Miller, tomorrow I go upstate, clear and strong, nothing diluted, nothing psychotic. She said, will you

pray with me before I go? Now she happened to be Catholic. I'm not Catholic. She pulled out her rosary and she started saying the rosary. And she said, no, Dr. Miller, will you pray your way? She didn't want me to pretend to be Catholic. She didn't want me to say the rosary. She wanted me to speak from my spiritual heart for her. And as we prayed for one another, she prayed for me as she was going upstate

and she prayed for me, this 28 year old intern on the Upper West Side of New York. she prayed for me as she was going upstate and she prayed for me, this, you know, 28 year old intern on the Upper West side of New York, please God watch over Dr. Miller when I go upstate. That's a generous heart. No one else prayed for me that day. Yeah, that sense of selflessness and altruism. Deep love.

That is part of that awakened brain state, you know, on the precipice of going full, one flew over the cuckoo's nest, right? Well, that's what's missing. The reason we have one flew over the cuckoo's nest, the reason we have 11 admissions, the reason we have people who don't get better from recurrent depression,

or who in their process of recovery are stuck, is because we have shut down awakened awareness. Our culture has shut down our innate capacity to feel this deep love and connection that's in and through all of life with fellow living beings, with one another. Our ability to get out of painful times, like now, right now, right now,

half the people in the United States are depressed. It's time for us to reawaken. Biden's flipped the switch back on. The country is supposed to go back to work and everyone's still slogging around depressed. And we have a choice. We can hold in a state of depression. We can devolve into a deeper depression, a major depression.

We can try to take away the sharp edges, of course, with substances, or we can try to use this moment of despair as an invitation to an awakening. And we are hardwired to be able to use suffering as an impetus for growth. In fact, trauma is a catalyst for growth. Every bit of data says that to be the case.

So how do we do that? Practically, sounds good. I'd love to stop being depressed. How do we do that? There are hardw good. I'd love to stop being depressed. How do we do that? There are hardwired ways immediately quarter inch under the surface that we can turn back on to use suffering as the catalyst for growth, to use our struggle as a moment of awakening.

And one of them first and foremost, is to start to take seriously our inner experience as hard data. From the time that we were very young children, we're taught that what's real, and it's the same time that we were very young children, we're taught that what's real, and it's the same mistake that we were just talking about, which about the idea that scientists had a taste and appetite for things that were actually,

can you touch it, can you see it? Where's the taste and appetite for the transcendent, for the spiritual? Well, we've been educated out of our awakened awareness. We've been educated out of our spiritual awareness. We've been educated out of our spiritual awareness. The first thing I found, and I've worked with hundreds, probably now thousands of people, is that we need to honor again our inner wisdom.

That what is real is outer. This bottle's real and there you sit before me and the camera's real and all this is real. But so too is the deep knowing of a mystical experience, of our intuition, of our gut instinct. These forms of knowing need to be honored and integrated with empiricism and logic. We teach young children starting in kindergarten

that how do you know that point on the page to how you know it? Don't tell me you just know that. But there is such a thing as spontaneous awareness and direct knowing. Don't tell me it came to you in some type of dream. But that is a very powerful, I mean, we know through all sacred texts

that important knowledge comes through dreams. Yeah, but our culture over indexes on the mind over the heart, right? And we're taught from the outset that to indulge the heart's messages is to be blind to what the head is telling us. And all of our social signaling directs us to pay attention to mining,

the development of the head and ultimately, the corresponding muting of the heart. And so it isn't until we face a trauma or a struggle, if we're not habituated to kind of being heart-centered, it isn't until we have some kind of life altering problem or we suffer a loss or something happens to us that we're compelled out of pain, as you mentioned earlier, to kind of indulge that aspect of who we are.

And therein lies like the opportunity to kind of reemerge more whole out of such an experience. And science mirrors this truth. This is a absolute fact, what you say, Rich, that we looked at people with a very deep, strong personal spirituality. Some were religious, some were not. Catholic can do Jewish, Muslim, spiritual, but not religious. People with a deep spiritual compass

were two and a half times more likely in the past 10 years to have suffered deep despair. So while we can strengthen our spiritual core in many ways and there are many paths to awakening, very often it is exactly as you described, it is through suffering that the world as we knew it doesn't hold, the ground shifts, it cracks under our feet and there is a deeper look into life.

And when we do look more closely, we see there is a unitiveness. We see that life actually is buoyant and has our back, that there's something in life that is actually guiding. Life is very much alive and conscious. This realization, and we put people in the MRI, people to recover from depression through a deepening of spiritual life. And what we found was that they had thick cortex. The cortex is processing power across regions of perception, reflection, and orientation. They effectively had strengthened the bicep of their spiritual awareness through suffering. And once they did, once they were strong, for the next lift, the next time something very heavy was thrown their way,

they were 75% protected against recurrence. And that went up to 90% if they were otherwise at hard risk. High risk meaning genetically predisposed, high risk meaning really thrown a lot of tough stuff in life. So when we choose to struggle to grow, when in fact despair is an awakening time, we are armored against subsequent depressions.

And not only that, but we look into life in a much more expansive and illuminated way. There's much more upside. Let's go deeper into the hard science piece of how you've drawn these conclusions because I think it's super interesting, like figuring out how to devise these studies and the process of taking people through this, you know, procedure with fMRIs

to kind of discover what you've discovered. The first thing is that when I looked through the lens of epidemiology, I saw that the magnitude of the protective benefits is to kind of discover what you've discovered. The first thing is that when I looked through the lens of epidemiology, I saw that the magnitude of the protective benefits of a personal spirituality, how much it keeps us healthy and safe as compared to anything else we'd identified in science

was at least threefold greater, right? So if we have good parents, we're 20% less likely to get depressed, right? If we have a strong personal spirituality, we are 80% less likely to become addicted using DSM criteria, 80%, right? That's so a young adult. I mean, that's in scientific parlance,

that's like off the chain. Off the chart. Nothing's 80%. Right, right, a standard deviation above as compared to below the mean and a tendency to say my personal spirituality is highly important to me. Nature is a sacred home. I turn to God for guidance in times of difficulty.

My family is spiritual to me. So the sense of daily lived spiritual awareness, turning on the awakened brain, walking each day with this deeper understanding and look into life, turning the lens into that level of resolution. That is 80% protective when we're going through the window of risk for onset, which is late adolescence

and emerging adulthood. So that is so huge. Well, and Rich, when it comes to despair and suffering, right now the number one killer of young adults in our country is suicide. A young adult, 19 year old is more likely to die by his or her own hand than in an auto accident. So if we're gonna say to our kids,

buckle up, we've gotta get ahead of this. And it's pushing down now into middle school. Well, there's a meta analysis, a study of studies conducted by Wu and colleagues that showed a 62% decreased relative risk of completed suicide. And that goes to 82% when our spiritual awareness is shared in a group.

We've got to look at one another and see the presence of God, spirit, consciousness in one another, and we've got to speak about it and live that way. We are dying as a culture because we have shut off our awakened brain. But if we listen to one another and see one another as spiritual beings, souls on earth, children of God,

you pick your language, right? Yeah. Then we have a shot. Yeah, I mean, it seems that, you know, given the data that you just shared, it would be elementary that some aspect of this education be built into the experience of young people as they emerge into adolescence.

So they have a basis point or at least a vernacular around these ideas and these practices so they can be self-sufficient or at least equipped with tools to go on their own exploration as they mature. But that's just not part of our educational system. But it can be. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of like, you know,

separation of church and state and the sort of confusing confluence of religion with spirituality. Like it becomes very complicated and perhaps even politicized to even discuss this, right? Like how do you do this? If we have the politics, exit the room, right? And speak only from science and young people surviving

and not killing themselves, right? Young people surviving and being at peace within themselves. Then let's look just squarely at the science. And the science says we are all innately spiritual beings with or without the embrace of religion. We're all born with the spiritual core. And if we build the spiritual core, we have physical fitness for the physical core,

we need spiritual fitness for the spiritual core. And if we do, we are 80% less likely to be addicted, 60% less likely to take our lives. We're able to be whole and thrive. We have disintegrated the spiritual core from the rest of the person and disintegration is unhealth. So how do we put the spiritual core back in? Well, if it's a public school or the public square, it's minus religion. That can happen at home, but spirituality exists independent of religion.

And how can we do that? Again, at home, the religious embrace of spiritual awareness is important for many families. Roll with it, do that at home. But in a public school, we can strengthen the muscle of transcendent awareness of spiritual values towards one another. And in fact, when we look in the MRIs at the neural correlates of the awakened brain, of all forms of spiritual practice, that which most correlates

with a strong spiritual awareness is love of neighbor. Love of neighbor and service altruism. That can be part of every classroom. You know, circle time, whether we're five years old or sophomore year by the locker. Of all people on earth, you were put next to your classmate who struggles with low EQ.

You know, your classmate doesn't really know how to talk to people. Your classmate maybe is a little awkward. Were you put there to bully her and make her feel horrible? Or were you put there perhaps as her and make her feel horrible? Or were you put there perhaps as some form of inspiration or guide? Might you even be what I call a trail angel for her? We can recast who we are to each other as helpers and healers. Love guided, held, and never alone. Can we show up that way for one another? And that can be taught in school. But the other things that need

to be taught that are part of our natural awakened awareness are listening to our inner wisdom as hard data. And we need to reboot our capacity for transcendent awareness in a way that is inclusive, certainly constitutional, and in the language of life. And there are practices in the awakened brain for reawakening our brain, but we could do one if you want to do one. Yeah, we can do it. You want to do it? Great. our brain, but we could do one if you wanna do one. Yeah, we can do it. You wanna do it? Great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This one I wanna honor my teachers,

as I think, you know, as in many traditions, this was taught to me by the late Gary Weaver. And I've done this exercise with thousands of people, none of whom have ever felt offended because it's in the language of life. And I do this with the US Army and I do this with people on Wall Street and I do this in homeless shelters. I do this everywhere. All right, let's do it.

Let's do it. Okay. I'm going to invite you to clear out your inner space, five breaths, and then we'll do about a 90 second visualization. Okay. Five breaths. 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. Anybody living or deceased, who truly has your best interest in mind. Anybody living or deceased who truly has your best interest in mind.

And with them all sitting there, ask them if they love you. And now you may invite your higher self, your true eternal higher self, the part of you that's much more than anything you've done or not done, anything that you have or don't have, your true higher self, and ask you if you love you. And now finally, you may invite your higher power, whatever word that may be, however you know,

your higher power, and ask your higher power if they love you. And now with all of those people sitting there right now, what do they need to share? What do they need to let you know? What do you need to know right now? what do you need to know right now? And when you're ready, I invite you back.

This is your counsel, and they're always there for you. Who shows up may change, depending on where you are in your road of life. And you can ask them different questions, depending on where you are in your road of life. And you can ask them different questions depending on where you are in your road of life. But your higher self, your higher power and those who truly have your best interest in mind, this is a form of deep awakened awareness. This is the deep loving consciousness

that flows in and between us and through us. And we are built to be able to see and know this level of love and relationship. It's beautiful. I love it. A way of connecting with, you know, a sense of community and support also to like feel appreciated, feel loved.

Loved, never alone and guided. So that deep awareness, we are loved, guided and never alone. We have flipped back on our ability to know and see that. It was true whether or not we paid attention, just like I could have paid attention or not paid attention to the never alone, connected, guided by the geese. It's true as or not we paid attention, just like I could have paid attention or not paid attention to the never alone connected, guided by the geese.

It's true as embodied by one another. And it's true in our direct transcendent awareness. So how does this go when you do this with the army? They love it. They do that? They love it. I'm so interested in your work with the military. Oh, it's so, I have to tell you that

it has been profoundly moving, the work with the military? Oh, it's so, I have to tell you that it has been profoundly moving, the work with the military. First of all, the military is a highly innovative, data-driven, creative institution. I have seen such love and care at the highest levels of the army. I delivered the science in the awakened brain to the four stars, the vice chief, the chief, and the secretary of the army.

Wow. At the Pentagon in a back quiet room. No shit. In a split second, they all got it. They were deeply aware of what the science said about the hundreds of thousands of young soldiers in their care. The four stars, it was very interesting.

One man who has trained 300,000 soldiers in the past couple of years said, there's not a single thing in the science that surprises me. This is a mirror of the challenges we face right now, which is we've never seen young adults show up on day one as fragile, as given to despair and struggle. And this is indeed the way through. We strengthen the physical core.

We strengthen the mental core. We must strengthen the spiritual core. So for two years, I've worked very closely with the leadership of the Pentagon to develop spiritual readiness. We call it the Spiritual Readiness Initiative. We've been to Fort Bragg. We've been to Fort Jackson.

We've been to Fort Hoodgg, we've been to Fort Jackson, we've been to Fort Hood, Fort Leonard Wood, everywhere. I have not seen one commander, general, lieutenant, nobody who has felt unnerved or uncomfortable. The science mirrors what in a deep human way they have already felt and experienced. And the science being that cultivating this awakened mind allows you to in turn develop grit, perseverance,

a sense of community, a sense of altruism, all of these things that the military relies upon in order for it to be successful in its campaign and kind of create a cohesion amongst its union of people. The military on day one, who shows up at the door? The military gets a big slice of American pie. And the challenges they face are the challenges that are not merely the military's.

I hear the same thing that I hear in the military when it comes to rates of suicide, when it comes to despair, when it comes to breaches of relational ethics, like sexual assault, racism, and extremism. The very same things the military struggles with, I see in higher education. In many of our most admired institutions, same problems. And I also see it in my work with large private sector companies taking in 18 through 25-year-olds. They say our young adults have never been more fragile. We don't know how to train them because the fear of failure is so great.

They hide their weekly records. We don't even know what they're doing. And if you push them, they crumble or quit. Right, exactly. So the fragility, the rates of depression, addiction and suicide, and the inability to bond and connect. And with that inability to real feel brotherhood and sisterhood is on tough days,

real anger at times, even violation of one another. So this is not the military's challenge, but alone it's our American challenge. But the military is leading away in a data-driven approach, using the science and the awakened brain to address really the plague that has attacked young adults, the inner plague, the diseases of despair. I mean, our kids, I have three teenagers.

I know very well what's going on right now. There has never been such suffering, such loneliness, a genuine isolation. And they're trying so hard. They're so kind and gentle to one another, the culture of Gen Z. And they speak to each other almost like a parent speaks to a young baby.

Okay, honey, don't worry about it. Because they're in such pain. But the military is actually doing something institutionally to transform the environment around young adults. And they're saying, we've got to move from a culture here in the army,

but certainly this is generalizable to every other institution, where our culture is one where we treat each other transactionally. I am your boss, perform for me. I am your teacher, let's see if you mastered the material, right? We've got to move from relationships

that are merely transactional to relationships that are transformational. Now, 50 years ago, that was actually in the air and water that there was a generativity implicit and really almost morally incumbent upon the boss or the teacher. But as we've moved to narrow performance as the goal and narrow outcome and success,

we have lost what we just experienced in the visualization, which is a sense of one another's higher self. And I'm sure that's exacerbated by the virtual work environment that we're all contending with right now, where it's just the occasional Zoom call and then it's performance metrics. And it's all about

whether you're hitting your numbers or not. And there is no real deep emotional relationship amongst coworkers and kind of hierarchy in the workplace. It's purely transactional, right? It's really capitalism as a moral or relational theory. Capitalism is an economic theory, but it's trickled down into our relational fabric and it's lonely and it's isolating.

The problem is that the young adults who were raised in this culture today have not developed the bicep, have not built the muscle of the form of awakened awareness, the transcendent awareness that sees spirit and goodness or godliness in one another, that sees this deep sense of brotherhood and sisterhood, even if we're in intensive competition

or today we had a very serious argument. Is there a deeper landing pad, a deeper seat of human experience we share? That's just not there. And I mean, young adults have never been so lonely. And because of the feeling of isolation, the very real sense of being unsafe in the world, right? The fix-its have all been in the band

of what I call achieving awareness. You know, we've got to handle this by, you know, strategizing better. And we've got to handle this by coming up with, you know, solutions where we, you know, distribute money differently and we've got to figure out ways of working in a way where people are punished when they do things that are wrong.

And they're working in this narrow band of yesterday's thinking. But if we're gonna solve this problem here, then we need a new form of thinking. And good news is we're hardwired for it. We just haven't used it. We need to use our awakened awareness. Yeah, it's about going to the yesterday

before yesterday's thinking. There's an ancient kind of indigenous, you know, truth in cultivating spiritual practice that we have kind of just considered to be archaic. And yet on some level, we could talk about neuroscience and all of that. And I wanna get into that, but a lot of this is going back

to what we intuitively know and cultivated in earlier incarnations of civilization. And there was such a sense of duty and love the elder had for the younger. That's missing, right? If a student is in a classroom of 400 students and comes up to the professor, the professor needs to see that child far from home

as someone's precious daughter or son. The professor has to see that that is an emerging adult seeking truth, not just trying to master chemistry or philosophy or psychology. And the sense that we are mentors and guides for one another in higher ed is almost gone. It's become transactional. The army, as compared to any other institution I've seen, has the greatest commitment to

being fathers and mothers for their children. They say many of our soldiers come from houses, not homes. And there's two paths to the army. One is a passion to serve and the other is running from a horrible situation. And both paths can lead to an outstanding soldier and a strong military career. There's a possibility for renewal, for deepening

that we're more than just what we brought to the table on day one. The army cultivates young men and women. I can tell you there are Republicans, there are Democrats, there are people from the West Coast, the East Coast. Everybody's in the army. It is a big slice of American pie.

The felt sense of brotherhood and sisterhood is extraordinary. And when I share the science of the awakened brain with a tank commander, with a commanding general over a fort with 40,000 people, no matter who I share the science with, they're saying, hey, wait a minute. This is the form of deep connection.

This is the form of human love and bonding that is really the glue in the army family. We can do what the army is doing in our other institutions and large corporations and higher ed, we can do this. But we've got to own our responsibility to one another. Yeah, it's almost as if the success that the army is having with this type of modeling could prove to be a Harvard Business School,

case study that could be replicated in corporate America and in educational institutions? It is so readily transferable what the army has discovered. The army's used the science of the awakened brain and in a top-down vertically integrated way. They've said through all levels of training, whether it's basic training or time at promotion, or when one moves into the second half of one's career

and is responsible for thousands of other people, there needs to be a form of spiritual growth and strengthening. The more responsibility we have for other people's lives, the more we need to make awakened decisions when their lives are on the line. And when you listen to people in the very top echelons of the Pentagon,

they speak in terms of knowing deep in their inner awareness, the most important decision I ever made was to get into that helicopter. And it wasn't driven out of logic alone or out of the numbers alone. I just had an inner intuition. It was in my inner wisdom, my heart that I knew to get on that helicopter.

And I saved six people's lives. It's so counterintuitive in so many ways because the military is premised upon chain of command, right? It doesn't matter what your intuition is telling you. You do what I tell you to do. You follow in lockstep with your orders. Well, he or she who gives orders, gives better orders when they use their awakened brain.

And in fact, the role of making an awakened decision was something that the leadership took to immediately. There's an awareness that, well, let's tell it through the MRI stories. Yeah, I mean, let's get into the neuroscience because I wanna talk about the areas of the brain that get lit up or they get turned off and all of that. First of all, like constructing the study,

like how do you come up with what the study is gonna be? And then you're putting people into the fMRIs. We should talk about what an fMRI is and what it can tell us. And what you discover about these different areas of the brain and how they're impacted by cultivating the awakened mind, the awakened brain. That is an elegant way to ask the question.

And I can't wait to respond to it. So using the lens of epidemiology, it was clear that those threads of lived human spirituality, which are protective against addiction, which are part of our strengthening and deepening in the path of recovery and renewal from trauma or depression were this sense of transcendent relationship, right? The capacity to perceive transcendent relationship and that that might be shared.

So knowing that through the lens of epidemiology, there was something heritable built into us, a form of spiritual awareness that had such a huge impact on our health and wellness. It seemed that we could try to operationalize that dimension as a task in the MRI scanner and live action, watch people engaged

in a deep transcendent relationship. So that's what we did. We sat around the table for 18 months and used previously validated ways of working in MRI studies to come up with an in-scanner task that represented that thread that had been identified over 10 years of epidemiological work. And here's how we worked together.

Spirituality MindBody Institute, my institute, together with Mark Potenza and Rajita Sin at Yale, together, literally for a year, we sat around and figured out the method and then for another six months operationalized it. And here's how we did it. 18 months just to devise the experiment. Yes, because the most meaningful part of a research study

is the question and its method, right? This had never been done before. And in fact, scientists had said, you can't operationalize spirituality. It's too broad and vast. And that's where using multiple levels of inquiry, bringing a finding from epidemiology into an MRI scanner allowed us to make progress,

as well as working between labs. You know, the Manhattan Project didn't have one guy or one woman's lab. It's collaboration. So Brigitte Sin had found over 15 years that when we tell a story, a memory, in a way that's very palpable and rich and has lots of sensory points, real anchors in it that bring us back in time, we elicit the same neural correlates as if we were there plus memory.

And Mark Potenza working with Brigitte Asin had become one of the leading experts around addiction. And he had found that the addiction loop in our brain, the insulin striatum is the same, whether we are addicted to alcohol and drugs or pornography and the internet or gambling, it's the same, I've got to have it, right? So they had worked together, Rashida and Mark in the past, developing this in-scanner task when it came to craving,

when it came to telling stories of addiction, hungry, and I need to have the drug, I need to have, I've got to get to Vegas, I've got to have this roll of the dice. Well, when I approached them, I said, we know from epidemiology that there's nothing as protective against addiction as a strong personal spirituality.

Can we watch that in the scanner? And of course, as open-minded creative scientists, Mark and Regina were thrilled. We sat down for a year and a half, and we took the following question after a year and a half of inquiry to 18 through 25-year-olds. We said, tell us a time when you felt a deep connection with your higher power. Some people say God, Jesus, Allah, Hashem. Some people say the universe or oneness with all life. But tell us a time where you felt a deep connection with a deeper, deeper presence of life

that was loving and guiding. Nobody was confused. 18 through 25 year olds in New Haven. A lot of them were Yale students. A lot of them were agnostic, some spiritual, but not religious. Some not friendly to the whole idea of religion. Nobody was surprised.

Everyone had an important experience, everyone. And how many people, what was the population size? Well, okay, so in order to, you know, in MRI studies, there's often very small samples and you can publish a study with like 10, but we had about 30 people who went through every phase of this study. And in this study, whether they were Christian, Catholic,

Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, spiritual, but not religious, no matter what their background was, the same neural correlates ran as they told us that narrative. And what is a neural correlate? So as they, we wanted to be very precise. We literally knew at what point in their study they felt this unit of experience.

So we had them tell their stories. This is part of Rajita Sen's method over 15 years. Tell the story, tell it again while it's audio taped, play it back in earbuds in the MRI machine while the fMRI is running so that we can pinpoint to the T what neural correlates are seeing, what happens in the MRI

as you say this specific little passage in your story. And right at the point where the young adults would say, I'm walking down the street, I'm completely depressed, I've just been turned down at five out of six medical schools, I'm such a loser, I'm never going to be a doctor like my mother. But then suddenly I see light in the leaves and I know that God has a plan for me. Or suddenly I see light in the leaves and I know that life is buoyant and I will be a healer in the way I am intended. Or suddenly I see light in the leaves. And I know that there's a path for me greater than anything I know yet that aha,

the reshuffling of meaning that is illuminated and speaks to a true part of myself. Right as that part of the narrative is told, we saw coming up online four major components of what we're calling the awakened brain. The first is that quieting, I'm such a loser, quieting the racket, the default mode is powered down. Now that you can do through mindfulness,

that's simply getting present. That's the network of rumination. Exactly. Right. Right, now, very often, because we have a hungry culture, many people are taught mindfulness to get present and it's helpful, but it only stops there. It only gets us present.

When in fact, what then is potentiated is that we are at a threshold to cross for being present into a state of awakened awareness. It's mindfulness plus, it's crossing into, and the next three loops are first and foremost, just as we were held as children and our parents are grandparents arms, we feel loved, we feel held, the bonding network is engaged

and we are aware that life itself is holding. The next is the parietal. That's the frontotemporal network. Yes, exactly, right. So that was the, yes, that was the article. And in fact that, well, I'll tell the whole story. Then the next piece to come online is the parietal. It puts in and out heart boundaries.

So just as there's a sense of discrete and specific experiences, you have your path, you live in California, you have your family, you look like you, and I live in Connecticut and I have my family, we are distinct, we are magnificently diverse, we are different. And at the same time, there's a deep common unit of experience,

a common human heart. The parietal puts in and out hard boundaries so that we can toggle between a sense of difference and common love, common felt being. And then the final piece, which is- But just to put a finer point on that, reduced activity in the parietal lobe allows the influx of this sense of commonality among all.

Is that right? Yes. Is that fair? That we are connected or one. Exactly. And then finally, this is a particular importance to innovation, to decision-making. The Army's really championed this dimension of awakened awareness. We move from a narrow top-down dorsal attention network,

tactical, strategical. We've got to get out the red door. We've planned, we're prepared. Everybody's trained. We're get out the red door. We've planned, we're prepared, everybody's trained, we're going out the red door. But today here live, the red door is jammed. We can't get out. That's a metaphor of course for life.

Everything was in the bag, A plus B plus C, of course it was me who was gonna be promoted. And then they what, they brought in somebody? Or A plus B plus C, I was the one, it was my turn to be quarterback. It was my turn to be on the varsity football team. And what? I got cut?

So it all didn't add up. The red door stuck. And because the red door stuck, we shift in a state of awakened awareness from the top-down narrow bowling alley perception of the dorsal to the bottom-up ventral attention network. We have a much broader field of perception, far more information.

And many people say that the right answer, the new possibility pops, the yellow door. Never would have seen the yellow door. But the yellow door leads to a landscape that was surprising, that could be magnificently, in the big sense of the word, prosperous. I meet the person who I am best friends with the rest of my life.

I find a line of work I never dreamed of. I end up in a city am best friends with the rest of my life. I find a line of work I never dreamed of. I end up in a city that was so very much at home. The yellow door opens and that possibility of bottom-up perception leads to a form of creativity and innovation the army calls situational awareness that allows us to align with the way life really is. You can see the whole chessboard as opposed to the one piece that you can't move the way that you want it to move. Yes, and your opponent played something you never dreamed based on the books he'd play, right?

Right. That's why it's harder to play a bad opponent than a good one, right? But that's the real chessboard that's actually here now. And when we have actual alignment with the light, what is life showing me now? What is the chessboard actually telling me now? We're able to make much better decisions. So much of suffering in life comes from being out of alignment with deep truth. Much of our own happiness comes, our joy comes from asking the question, what is life showing me now?

And being surprised, finding yellow doors. And yellow doors can be people we never know we'd meet. Can I tell you a story? Yeah, you're telling my story right now, but go ahead. Oh, I wanna hear your story. No, no one wants to hear my story, but like I'm so connected to what you're saying because this has been my own personal journey

that I had to figure out for myself as somebody who like you, you know, grew up in a traditional trajectory and being addicted to achievement and success as a, you know, as a means of acceptance and love like a marker for love and all of that, and kind of running the gamut with that and bottoming out and having problems with drugs and alcohol

and getting sober and then having an existential crisis. And it's been this very slow, glacially slow process of trying to reconcile heart and mind so that they could live in unison with each other. And it's been a journey of trying to connect with that situational awareness and paying attention to what my heart was telling me, even if it was at odds with everything that I ever knew

or everything that I thought was right or correct for me. And this kind of battle or war that took place with inside of myself, that finally led me to a place of such pain that I almost felt like I had no choice but to engage with the heart in a way that I hadn't before. And a trust and a faith that that would direct me in a way that this other way of living couldn't,

that has created the situation that I'm in today over many years and not in any kind of linear fashion, but truly it has been a journey of reckoning with the awakened brain that has taken me from a place of despair into one of deep fulfillment with what I do and who I am. Knowing of the heart deploys the strategic capability of the head,

but the knowing of the heart guides the journey. Sure, and that's a very difficult- And we're taught ass backwards in school. Yeah, exactly. And to do that, to engage with that is almost an act of great rebellion and one that will be criticized and ridiculed by anybody that you care to share with them, because it is completely at odds with how we're taught to direct our lives. And yet the rich traditions, indigenous traditions, spiritual traditions, the knowing of the heart

discerns what is true and right, our awakened heart. Yes, but those people were uneducated. They were brutes. They didn't know what they were talking about. Now we know better. We've had the age of enlightenment. We've gone through the Renaissance and we are now in the age of science and reason.

So science and reason is fantastic to implement, right? The knowing of the heart sets the compass, the direction, where there's real value, shows us the yellow door. And then we can discern with the knowing of the head, how best to lay our plans to move through the yellow door, but we only found it at the heart. So I think that the heart points to what is true. And then the head can help us strategize

about how actually to leave the ashram or the mountaintop and go down and create a beautiful podcast. Yeah, but the head shouldn't be making those huge decisions. The heart should be making those. And then the head has to figure out how to kind of, guide you towards that thing that you feel the calling towards. No, because we have overemphasized the head

telling the heart what to do. We have a donut size hole in our heart as a culture, and no one feels more pain than our young adults who are completely immersed in this. This is a form of disaggregation of our true being. We are unwhole. And this is why the young people are suffering so much right now

because we have deauthorized their knowing of the heart. It's tragic. It is a crime. You mentioned earlier, and you talk about this in the book, the idea that an individual in young adolescence is in this prime situation to kind of cultivate the awakened brain or this deeper awareness.

Like how did you discover that there is this kind of window of opportunity at that age for that exploration? So whether or not anyone ever told me this is coming at 15, 16, suddenly I wonder if everything you ever told me, mom and dad is true at all. And everything you ever told me, pastor, priest, imam, rabbi, was that true at all? So the assumptions of how the world's built and what is good and what is evil, or if there even is in an ultimate sense, good and evil, these are profound existential questions. These have to do

with the foundation of life, right? The nature of reality. It's all a 52 card pickup. And this happens whether or not we tell the young adult it's all a 52 card pickup. And this happens whether or not we tell the young adult it's coming. The wisdom traditions, the religious traditions, the indigenous traditions all knew that with biological puberty, moving into middle and late adolescence, there was, as we change physically and look different,

we change spiritually. They knew this. And whether we're talking about Bar Mitzvah, the Anipi, the sweat lodge confirmation, every tradition marks puberty as a time of augmented spiritual awareness. And they were met with rites of passage to honor that and kind of anchor it.

Precisely. And now we know to mirror that deep truth of humanity through thousands of years, that when we look through the lens of a twin study, there's a 50% increase in the heritable contribution going from middle to late adolescence of spirituality with or without religion. So whether or not there is a tradition to greet the young adult coming of age,

whether or not there is a rite of passage or a ceremony or a guide. The young adult hungers for ultimate transcendence and meaning, nagging questions of the head, desires of the heart for connection, love, illumination. This happens. But when we leave him or her out there willy-nilly, they're flailing, they're lost.

And what would be a hunt for transcendent truth devolves into the cheap backdoor of transcendence through addiction, right? I get a lot of emails from young adults who say, you know, I was looking for transcendence. I was looking for that sense of love and buoyancy. And I took the tricky backdoor. And at first it felt great. And then I slid further and further down. Young adults know what this is. I mean, you've mentioned that the awakened brain

and depression are kind of two sides of the same coin. But what you just mentioned reminds me that addiction is part of that as well. Like it is a flip side and you hear, long time in recovery. And there's this sort of adage or trope in the recovery community that, you know, the addict is the spiritual seeker.

They're just seeking for those answers in unhealthy ways. But ultimately it's that emptiness, that hole in the soul, that yearning that leads them towards drugs and alcohol as salve or as a vehicle for a different state of consciousness to tap into something that has meaning outside of individuality. And so can we show up honestly for the teen or the young adult and say, I get it.

I appreciate the hunger for transcendence, that warmth, that felt of buoyance, that almost that offensive numinousness, you can almost see that warmth, that felt of buoyance, that almost that sense of numinousness. You can almost see that warmth, the joy. In our day, it was the lit lighters at a concert. The whole room had a glow and we felt like we were one, this sense of being one. I get it, but do you still feel it the next day?

It felt so great last night. It felt so connected last night when you were using, but do you still feel it today? Or was it sort of a false way in? And I think that we need to honor the transcendent hunt and support the transcendent hunt because when we don't, the young adult goes shopping and it can be the false sense of connection

through using drugs and alcohol. It can also be that going shopping means they find bad teachers. And a lot of things that end up looking like extremism or even terrorism are the young adults shopping for a spiritual teacher. We've got to show up. We've got to know this is coming.

Hardwired, booted up, look at it through twin studies. It is absolutely a fact that with puberty comes spiritual growth, spiritual hunger. And the extent to which we support as adults, the formation of the spiritual core is the extent to which that young adult is protected against addiction and depression going forward. Right, so ostensibly what you're saying is,

with this explosion in adolescent depression and addiction rates going through the roof, that part of the antidote or the treatment protocol has to be cultivation of spiritual awareness to take people through some protocol where they can connect with their awakened brain in some way to ameliorate or combat the instincts that are leading

towards this mental health crisis that we're contending with. And if we do, it's a setup for life. The formative work of late adolescence, the initial depression, if you will, sophomore slump, go back to being a sophomore, if you can bear it. And I think- Sophomore in college or high school? Sophomore in college.

So I invite everybody to think about being a sophomore in college and I'll go first. I was a sophomore in college and I'd come to college so confident and my mother loved me and my father loved me and I had great friends from growing up. So I got to college and the greatest time I went to parties, I was dancing, everything was fabulous. And I met my first boyfriend and I thought, oh,

he's so funny. He's so smart. I've never met anyone so interesting. He's a wrestler. He's so beautiful. He must really love me. And he said he loved me and it was wonderful. And we went out for a few months, but then he broke up with me and I couldn't believe it. I said, wait, you said you loved me and now you don't love me anymore? He's like, no, I truly loved you. I truly did. And I just don't feel that now.

I'm like, well, how could you have loved me in November, but not love me in February? How could that be? And also, how could I not be lovable? I mean, my mother loves me and my father loves me and my best friend. And it set me downward spiraling into this existential quest that I now understand through science,

every 20 year old is primed to have. The trigger was that my heart was broken. It was my first terrible breakup, but the landing was into this deep existential pit. And I thought, well, if we can love each other one day and not the next, then love isn't permanent. So if love isn't permanent, love isn't real.

And actually, I'll call this fellow Jason. If Jason loved me one day and Jason doesn't the next, then is there really a Jason? Is Jason stable? And this is the type of existential wondering that the sophomore runs with. Now, some are more prone to words than others, but these felt sense of here today, gone tomorrow

leads to a form of struggling. And I share in the awakened brain, sophomore year, I ended up in the basement of my dorm at Yale, literally in the basement, because in the freezing cold of New Haven in the winter, there was a hot water boiler in the basement of my dorm at Yale, literally in the basement, because in the freezing cold of New Haven in the winter, there was a hot water boiler in the basement that was at least warm. And I could sit there all night by the hot water boiler

and wonder, well, does life have permanence? And is there meaning written into life? And this reached the point, which is actually normative. Does God exist? I mean, I'd grown up feeling God know, feeling God's presence my whole life, and my mother cries at the presence of God. But does God exist? Because Jason broke up with me. And that is the type of thing that psychotherapists on college campuses, psychotherapists that work with young adults in general, need to understand doesn't merely have

an answer in, you know, negotiating our relationships interpersonally understand doesn't merely have an answer in negotiating our relationships interpersonally. Doesn't merely have an answer in identity work. Doesn't really have an answer through the lens of the DSM as an adult adjustment disorder or some sort of moderate level major depression. That is grappling with existential truth for which we are hardwired. The trigger differs from person to person,

but wondering what is real, what is true, is there good and evil? Does love exist? Does God exist? Do I matter? Does Jason matter? That we are built to do. And with that process,

there is a hunger to know the deepest nature of life and a depression in not knowing the answer. Yeah. I wonder whether that process is precipitated more commonly these days by a more profound sense of despair rather than my mother loved me and why am I not lovable to him?

Isn't it more typical that the young individual is repeating this narrative of I'm entirely unlovable or I look terrible and I hate my body and I can't make friends. It's more of a darker, you know, disposition that is much more kind of dire. Yes. And also, you know, mom and dad, you say you love me, but, you know, you're handing me a world that's on the edge of environmental collapse. Or of environmental collapse or my teachers say they know things, but they're handing me a world that's full of political rifts

and immature behavior amongst adults. And I think that the answer is in the young adult, but it's not in the way that we're talking to them now. We need a new way of thinking and a new way of engaging the young adult. And that way looks like what? And that way is you say, you can't stand your body. You say, I love you, but I wasn't there in the way you wish I was there for you. Let's connect with the deepest, truest part of yourself. I invite you to connect into the deepest place

of your inner wisdom from which you can start to receive and perceive direct awareness of the yellow door of a way forward. We have shut out the young adult from her or his resource for recovery and renewal. We have locked them out of the kingdom. And all it takes is the key to get back in.

They have it. And we can help them do that. We can help them reawaken. We can help them ignite their, I call it awakened awareness, their seat of transcendent awareness, where they can feel direct connection to this pulse of life.

And that can be taught. I mean, honoring our inner knowing, connecting as we just did in our visualization with those who truly have our best interest in mind. It could be a grandparent who died 20 years ago, right? It has to do with talking directly to God or feeling, asking the universal question and hearing the answer. Whether it's through my mind's eye and my relationship with my higher power, whether it's through a synchronicity, whether it's through the care of the geese or the duck or the wind, being able to see life as alive and guiding.

We're built for that. That's not a belief. It's not a theology. That doesn't come from a religious leader. That comes from a scientist saying that we have in our brain a series of circuits that allow us to see the deep nature of life that is in fact buoyant,

that is in fact a consciousness field through which we are loved, held, guided, and never alone. And so on a very practical level, if there's a parent listening to this, who's dealing with one of their adolescents who's struggling at the moment, what are some of the practices or tools that you can relate that could be conveyed to this young person

to help in that process? I'll share very concrete things we can do. First of all, our young adults, as much as they may be rebelling and pushing us away, don't want us to even see them listening to us. Remember every word we say when we speak from our deepest truth. So if I can tell the story of sitting in the basement

of my dorm in college and wondering if God exists, but then going that summer to the Gulf of Mexico and seeing light on the water and not radically hitting my head against the wall, ruminating, asking, does God exist? But in that moment, feeling, and then of course God exists, knowing in a deeper, direct way,

of course we are held and loved. That deep awakening in our own paths, our children will listen to every word. I'll give you an example. When I was a child, my mother was very profoundly spiritually connected, very vocal about her spiritual life. Prayed out loud, cried at the sight of my brother and I.

Thank you, God, for these children. Thank you, God, for the sunset. You know, just full of life. And my father was a very quiet, reflective academic who would read on the back porch and was very cautious in making any assertions about spiritual life. But it was my father who the very morning

after his mother died, I was about nine years old. I woke up as I always did at 4 a.m., went downstairs. But I was very surprised that morning to see my father almost in a ball. This is my father, 6'5", handsome guy, basketball player in a little ball, on the carpet by our living room couch. And I walked over, I said, dad.

And he said, I had a dream. This was within 24 hours of his own mother's passing. Grandma came to me in my dream. And whereas grandma loved to dress up and wear pretty clothes and jewelry, in this dream, grandma's in a very everyday gray suit. It was a suit I saw her wear many times. And there grandma and I were walking down Grand Avenue

in Des Moines, Iowa, where my father grew up. And he said, you know, and it was very raw and he certainly was not philosophizing. It was as real as could be. He said, you know, I don't know what to make of it, but I guess it means that grandma had always walked with me as my mother, she would continue to walk with me as my mother.

And the grandma was letting me know that. Okay, so fast forward, I'm decades down the road. When I think of my father and the depth of our relationship, I go there. When I think, do our ancestors walk with us? I go there. I've published reams of articles showing that an Indian in China and Mexico, there's a deep awareness that ancestors walk with us. I've published reams of articles showing that when we know that we're less China and Mexico, there's a deep awareness that ancestors walk with us. I've published reams of articles showing that when we know that we're less depressed and addicted. But I know it's true that our ancestors walk with us because my father shared his dream.

It had 100% proof of concept, hard data in the felt awareness of that very awakened bond. That was real. Yeah, it's a beautiful story. But that's who we are. So, yeah. And the fact that it came in the form of your dad, the unlikely kind of spiritual seeker

in comparison to your mom, which makes that story all the more kind of poignant. Yeah. And he didn't know what it meant in a theoretical or theological sense. It was 100% hard data because it was his genuine experience. Sure, and yet it requires kind of reckoning.

Like I feel myself even like wanting to dismiss those stories because they're all sort of individual experiences and who knows what's going on in people's brain neurochemistry, of course, in the wake of his mother dying, he's gonna be reflecting on that. And it's not surprising that there would be, you know, some kind of dream and we can just,

you know, kind of dismiss it and say, well, that's cute or whatever, but that's not necessarily real. Well, and that's why we're depressed is because we dismiss half our form of human knowing. And it's the part that's buoyant and loving and guiding and doesn't leave us alone, right? So, you know.

But when it wants you to deal with something, like the way I always think about it is, you know, the universe is knocking on your door and it knocks gently like, hey, I'm gonna give you a little dream. Maybe look at this. Or, you know, there's gonna be some geese that are gonna fly above you. Maybe you wanna pay attention to that.

And every time that you dismiss it or refuse to look at it or deny it, the next knocks a little louder, the next knocks a little louder until suddenly cops are involved in maybe jail or mental institution. Like it just gets increasingly more and more intense until finally you reach some inflection point that entails a bunch of pain where you have no choice but to look at the thing that had you paid attention to it earlier on would have saved you a lot of consternation and toil. I agree with you.

The universe terms the volume up until we hear. And so where are we trying to get? We're trying to get, as you described so beautifully into a dialogue with life. What is life showing me now? What am I being told here? So we don't step on an inert stage where we control everything narrowly,

what I call achieving awareness, but we don't control the skies, we navigate them. We'll get swallowed up in the waves of the ocean if we think we're gonna control them. We have to get up on top and surf them. That sense of being in a dynamic relationship with the guiding spirit in life. What is life showing me now?

Opens up a path that is one of discovery. We don't make our way in life. We discover our way in life. I have no idea what my life's gonna look like in 10 years, but I know when I'm in a state of deep alignment where I'm listening to life and life is opening doors. And I know when I'm not, when I'm not it's been both to my peril

and everyone around me. In other words, there's a relinquishment of the instinct to enforce your self-will and a reckoning or a reconciliation with the idea of surrender and acceptance. It's more like surfing than it is like pushing a rock up a mountain. And this is the great dilemma

for every high achievement person, right? Like you wanna force a result. You have an addiction to a certain outcome and our lives are directed towards, you know, increasingly becoming, you know, sort of climbing this mountain towards achievement or some imagined destination. When in truth, the greatest miracles in life

and the greatest discoveries and the experience of deep fulfillment and connection comes with relinquishing all of that, letting go and being in the allowing. But that requires synchronicity with that invisible force. You have to do enough inside work so that you are attuned to those signals

and present enough and integrated enough with who you are so that you can be aware and act in accordance with the signals that you're receiving. And synchronicity is a- And that's, yeah, this is the whole synchronicity thing that you talk about's, yeah, this is a whole, the whole synchronicity thing that you talk about in the book. That is a knock at the door, right? That is one form of life talking to us now is synchronicity. I love, obviously like my first kind of passion with all of this stuff is addiction and recovery. And it's always interesting and at times quite frustrating

to have conversations about, you know, how to get sober and what recovery looks like. Because I'm, you know, basically somebody who got sober in AA with a very traditional kind of rigor of the 12 steps. And there's this sense that, you know, because a lot of the language and the vernacular in the big book and all of that is sort of antiquated

and colloquial, that the spiritual piece in the 12 steps is like the fly in the ointment or a bug rather than a feature. And anybody who's kind of gotten sober or maintained sobriety through this program understands that spirituality is at the very core of what this experience is all about. It's not something that's off to the side

or something that you can kind of choose to not engage with while you do the rest of it. And to my mind, the work that you've done and all the science that you've done over the years really proves this out for me. Like it validates this methodology. I'm so grateful indeed that this can be brought to people who are overcoming and being renewed in recovery.

Yeah, because people will say like, well, I'd go to AA, but like, I can't get down with the God thing, or I can't, you know, I'm not a religious, it's not a religious program, it's a spiritual program. It's a God of your choosing. You know, your higher power can be the group. It can be anything you want it to be.

Like, but people, and this is a big piece, I think, there's a lot of people who have spiritual trauma or religious trauma, like because of some experience when they were younger, where it doesn't necessarily have to be physical abuse, but some level of bad experience occurred in their relationship to anything spiritual that a door comes down and they shut themselves off from that completely.

That is a story I've heard from hundreds of people that I was a very spiritual child. I felt connected. I maybe prayed through my faith tradition or just felt this deep, loving, numinous connection. And then there was a bad messenger and the messenger could have been a little bit bad or a lot bad, but he or she didn't walk the walk, right? They talked the walk, but they didn't walk the walk. And when the young adult sees hypocrisy or far worse is even violated by the messenger, there's a tendency to throw the spiritual baby out

with the bathwater, right? And here's where, you know, our confusion as a culture between religion and spirituality is really at play. We have a non-conversant society around spirituality and so much so that, you know, I will give a two-hour talk on the science of spirituality as being distinct from religion. And then out by the water cooler, someone says, what's the difference again between spirituality and religion? We're just tone deaf as a culture, but they're two entirely different things. Spirituality is an innate capacity

for transcendent awareness through which we are in touch with our higher power or the goodness and spirit in and through one another. AA is abundant with the presence of God or spirit in and through one another. One sponsor, the commitment, the humility, the open-handedness, those relationships are real. It's all in there, the altruism, the commitment, the humility, the open-handedness, those relationships are real. It's all in there, the altruism, the service,

the meditation piece, the, you know, availing yourself for others, the surrender, the acceptance. It's all baked into it. Fellowship mingin. It is a profoundly spiritual community and showing up for one another under all circumstances, being present and transparent, love. So I don't care whether you just, you know,

robbed a bank and went to jail or just got $5 million. I look at you with love. And non-judgment. And non-judgment. That is a spiritual relationship. That's an awakened connection. That is alive and well in AA and NA. It is one of the few places where you can truly find

a pan-denominational or non-denominational spiritual community. But you also do find spiritual communities in faith traditions. You can go to a temple or a mosque. So our culture has really foreclosed spiritual growth because we're so anxious about religion. If someone's religious, great. Find your spiritual life through your faith tradition. If someone's not religious or uncomfortable with religion,

your spirituality is still alive and well, and you can still cultivate your spirituality through other forms of connection. And AA is, if only AA could be prevention. Right. connection and AA is, if only AA could be prevention. Right, I mean, I've often thought that anybody can improve their lives through the process of undergoing these steps and being part of some version of that community, like it would be a better world

if this was scaled up and like kind of just part of everybody's experience of learning how to contend with each other and ourselves. And ourselves. And that we are so much more than what we've done or not done, what we have or not have, right? That there is a soul on earth in every one of us and that we can speak to each other

into your deep higher self. And just the courage to be that honest and the power of that vulnerability. And it's so unifying, it creates that sense of cohesion because there's the implicit trust that comes with that, that I think bonds people and makes you feel connected in a way that nothing else in my life has been able to provide me with.

And I always like, like, you know, in the podcast, like I wanna, because I've been at thousands of these meetings, like I'm always trying to cultivate some version of what that experience is like for the listener or the viewer, because I just think it's so beautiful and sacred and special. See, AA is an awakening experience.

It has all the components that nourish and awaken our awakened brain. Everything. Awaken connection to love and feel oneness with one another. It doesn't matter if you're from this hood and I'm from that hood and you look like that and I look like this and I'm zipped up by a bodysuit. That deep common human heart, our common seed of experience, that is at the center. It has awakened attention. What is life showing me now?

I am lying there on the floor. My husband's walking out for me. I just lost my money. What is life showing me now? I am lying there on the floor. My husband's walking out for me. I just lost my money. What is life showing me now? It's not showing me that I'm a loser. Life showing me now is that there's a yellow door that I am not walking through. And the witness, the testimony, the transparency and the love, that's the way it can heart.

The love, like the idea that somebody who is so broken and has nowhere to turn can walk into one of those rooms and be embraced and not judged. It's just a truly beautiful and unique thing. And it's real love. See, that's who we really are. We can be that way outside of AA. We can be that way at the bank or at the company or in our family.

So, this is who we really are. It's hard. Well, I think that what goes on in AA and NA can be a way of life proactively. We talked about what could we do in schools. Couldn't we take those very same principles and apply them to schools? That in this classroom, we look at each other with love. It doesn't matter if you just got a C or an A, if you were just made captain or cut from the team,

this is your brother, this is your sister. That can be taught. Yeah, that would be good. But it's so immediately within range. That is not a pie in the sky. That is not a pipe dream. It seems like a very low bar and yet at the same time, almost impossible. Well, all we have to do is ratify it.

The army did it, right? Right. 2 million people, a million enlisted, a million contractors. They decided driven from the top, right? Secretary of the army, chief, vice chief. We are going to be a spiritually supportive institution. Young adults are coming to us broken, addicted,

suicidal, fragile. We are going to nourish and support their spiritual core. If the army can do it, yes. So can Columbia and Stanford and the University of Arizona. And so can every single company, from convenience stores to fast food restaurants, we can be institutions that support the spiritual core of young adults. I wonder in the course of doing all these MRI studies,

if there's a sense of some spiritual practices or traditions being more impactful or profound in terms of the areas of the brain that are getting lit up or turned off than others. Because I suspect there might be somebody listening or watching this who's like, yeah, I'm not down with the spiritual thing. I don't really know how to connect with that.

But like, maybe I can meditate. Like maybe I can do that and just keep any kind of, anything woo-woo-y out of it completely. Like, is that sufficient or, you know, how do you parse these various traditions in terms of efficacy? It's very, very comfortable for most people to talk about meditating

when it has to do with getting still and present, right? And I would say, okay, so if you're comfortable doing some form of mindfulness or getting present, you're now at a threshold. Do you wanna do mindfulness plus? Do you wanna do meditation plus? Do you wanna do meditation plus? You're keying in on that achievement, like, ooh, I wanna get to the next level.

Which is see where you're going beyond getting present and your attentional work of getting present, which is very, very important. Stop the racket. It's the first of the four loops of awakening, right? Get present. Where are you going? You honor your own direct experience.

What are you seeing? What are the connections that are far too unprobabilistic to have just happened spuriously by chance? What might really life be showing you now? So to become curious, keen witnesses, scientists of our own future, look into what's possible. And then I would say, once again,

there is nothing as profoundly strengthening of our awakened brain as being loving to one another, the way people are in AA, the way we can be in families and in schools. We are far too transactional. Let's be loving and transformational. Let's truly show up in a way where I truly have your best interest in mind. I where I truly have your best interest in mind.

I mean, truly have your best interest in mind means that you might get hired, you might get fired. It's the Y-axis, not the X-axis. You could hire me, you could fire me, you could train me, you could promote me, you could demote me. That's on the X-axis. But the Y-axis all alone is, do you truly have my best interest in mind

as a soul on earth, as a child of God, as made of life itself? Do you see me as a spiritual being? That's another type of way of living together. They're not antithetical. Yeah, and in terms of things that are considered antithetical, they're just the way that we introduced this whole conversation.

There's science over here, there's spirituality over here. These things sort of live at odds with each other. But to my mind, the more deep your exploration into science, the more mystical and magical it becomes. And which is why I was kind of delighted that you went into the quantum physics in the book and talking about entanglement and sort of the way that particles are not location specific

and yet tied to each other and what we can kind of extrapolate from that to help cultivate a sense of wonder and awe and openness to things that we can't necessarily see with our five senses. And that there is no difference between inner and outer. That if you have a dream or an intuition, or you wonder, what is gonna be the next turn in my path?

Should I take this job? Should I marry her? Should we move across the country? And then suddenly the guy on the bus sits down right next to you and said, you seem just like the type of person who'd pack up and move across the country. That's far too improbable to happen by chance. Well, one was an internal question. And one was a so-called external experience, the guy on the bus.

It is unparsimonious to think that that is random. It is parsimonious to think that's one thing. Parsimonyony of course, being the index of good scientific interpretation. So there is an emerging science that shows there's a unit of consciousness field. And then the consciousness field is not just information. It has love and intention.

And this is the fabric of reality that we are designed to see. Just as we have loops and parts of our brain, they're allowed to see a glass of water. And on some level, I am certain in some way that this glass of water is here. When it comes to the capacity to perceive the unit of guiding nature of life, we're built for that too.

And when we pay attention to it, we see that indeed it holds water, that is time-tested and true and our lives become much more buoyant and actionable and yes, even more outwardly successful in terms of good traction with reality. When we use our awakened capacities, when we take that data as real, it bears fruit.

It proves over time. What's your take on the role of psychedelics in fostering this awareness or development? I've seen it go different ways for different people. I think when you look at indigenous traditions, there's a lot of preparation, there's a lot of integration around this. And I'll share with you, I've seen people,

well, let's get it off the question of psychedelics. I'm gonna talk about a Buddhist nun, okay? May I? Okay, this is a woman who for three years, three months, three weeks and three days sat in a box to deepen her awareness, right? To strengthen her perceptual capacities. And she indeed went into profoundly transcendent forms

of awareness and had mystical experiences. When she came out, there was no reintegration process. And she was not guided in how to rejoin the world. She was, the community said goodbye, thanks. I said, this woman goes out into the world. She's now Buddhist nun, but her teachers didn't help her reintegrate in this case for this woman.

And she felt probably quite accurately at a very deep consciousness level called by the Dalai Lama. And in her sense of calling, she put on her robes, she packed her bags and she stood out on the lawn waiting for the Dalai Lama to pull up in a car and take her to her next assignment. It's the same mistake that was made on the inpatient unit between the world and the world. It's the wrong level of consciousness

for the matter at hand. Was she called by the Dalai Lama? I have every reason to think she was. Was he going to pull up in a car in her suburban town? That would be far more unlikely, right? And not being clear about the difference between the two was a problem of reintegration. Right.

And that appears very much like mental illness. Yes. I mean, she's in her front yard in a suburban town waiting for the Dalai Lama to drive up? Yes. Okay. It appears as mental illness, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it is a confusion about where she is, right? And what it is to be called, the levels of significance around being called, right? And that is a confusion that can happen no matter how we augment our awareness, whether it's gradually over time or whether it's jumpstarted. But in either case, we need to reintegrate and find a way to take our awakened understanding and lay that down in a way that's actionable and aligned with reality.

It can go either way, but we need good teachers. We need good guides. Yeah. So essentially what you're saying is it can be a trigger. It can crack a window open and provide you with some level of awareness that perhaps you wouldn't have been able to cultivate on your own, but it's really less about that

than it is about what you're gonna do in the aftermath of it. How are you gonna bring that home? Right, and I feel like a lot of the focus around psychedelics is on the experience itself rather than on the integration piece that you were talking about. So if someone can come home

and there's their lover of eight years, and I've seen this happen, you just don't understand the bigger truth. Relationships are getting cratered. That's right. And you're not as deep. Every single one of us on earth is subject to letting narcissism slip in.

Nothing like a little spiritual superiority. Right. So this relationship isn't working for me anymore. And I've literally seen divorces over this. It seems to me that integration says that if you've reached a deep understanding and you're further down the spiritual path than someone else, you go back, you get your lover

and you bring him or her with you on this path. You invite them. That's the responsibility rather than the abandonment because this no longer works for me. And sorry, kids. Yeah, I'm off to be bigger, right? So that's very damaging. That has exactly, yeah, I'm off to be bigger, right? So that's very damaging. That has exactly as we're saying to do with integration.

Yeah, it's interesting. I have such a dilemma in my own mind. I mean, it comes up all the time on the podcast and it's been offered to me, but as somebody who's been sober for a long time, I don't know that it's the path for me. I think I've had my awakening experience and I know what works for me.

And I don't doubt that there are experiences perhaps that are unavailable to me that I could experience by doing that, but I don't know that it's necessary for me. Then again, I'm like, well, maybe I'm cutting myself off from reaching a higher plane of awareness. I don't know. Solve this problem for me, Lisa. It sounds like you're very far down

an authentic spiritual path that involves augmented awareness. And that when that can happen organically and in dialogue with life, that it's, you know, this is an inspired form of awareness. We can cultivate readiness for awakened awareness, but where we actually go and what we see, that is, I would say guided by God

or the spirit or consciousness. We can create the conditions for augmented experience and we can create the conditions and the intentions for transcendent or mystical journeys. But where we go, that is whether you say God or the higher power or the nature of life or spirit, or there's plenty of words within our rich indigenous traditions for where we go, but we're not mighty mouse.

We don't control where we go. And we, I think need a big spoonful of humility in our culture because the spiritual path is guided and potentiated by spirit. It's confusing. Well, my point is that spirit, the force of life will guide us where we need to go. When we say, yes, what is life showing me now? What are you showing me, God?

What yellow door might be here? Okay, this red door, it slammed in my face and crushed my toes. So there must be some other door. Yeah, I think that there's- That I am meant to walk through. Is it not advisable to advise a little bit of caution in terms of reckoning with your intuition?

And I say this because doesn't it require like some level of inside work prior to that? Like you have to be integrated or have kind of worked through, whatever kind of psychological drama or turmoil that you've experienced to get to a place of, I don't know, authenticity, I don't know what the right word for it is,

but a sense of self-understanding and self-awareness such that when that intuition arises or that instinct or that impulse, you know, percolates up, that it can be trusted. Because if you're out in the world and addicted to behavior patterns and you're living your life reactively, like you're gonna say, well, I have an impulse

or my instinct is telling me that I should go do this, but you're being impulsed by something that is not really your higher voice. It's just some outside stimulus. And because you haven't done enough work, you can't parse the two. So when I was working through some of my most difficult times, when I was working through depression,

when I was working through really painful moments, I worked at multiple levels at once. So I did the basic work around, okay, what patterns have I picked up from my parents? And what are my patterns in the world? Important, what you might call sort of relational psychologists called ego-based work. What are my ways of coping and handling the world?

I worked at that level and I went to the Anipi and I worked in prayer and meditation and I worked with a Jungian analyst. So I think we are needy at all levels of growth and never is it more of a crisis than when we're in pain, right? This is why our suffering is an invitation, is really the invitation of our lifetime

to addressing pain at all levels, at the relational level, learning how to treat one another, at the level of coping, the ego level, what are my patterns? And at the transcendent level, where are you, higher power? What say you, higher power?

And what say you through one another? All these people showing up. Your trail angels, is what I call them in the way. Yeah. So I think we need everything, all hands on deck. And that's why whether someone, if someone's deeply depressed, whether or not we choose to take medication,

we still need to do the spiritual work. It's not enough to feel better because it is formative work. It is the foundation for the next round in our lives. And when it comes to young adults, whether or not they need medication, whether or not they need medication, whether or not they take medication, they still need to do the work of awakening because that is the foundation for the rest.

They're building on the foundation, their values, their direction, their capacity to be in deep dynamic relationship with the spirit and through life. They're building that through their suffering. Yeah. So of course we wanna make pain go away, but at the same time,

let's not miss the opportunity of their lifetime to strengthen their spiritual core. And I think you said that of all people that present with depression, or maybe it was just young people that actually only one third of those are patients who qualify for some kind of medical or pharmaceutical intervention.

There's a difference between clinical depression and the depression that ensues because of some kind of life event that's more to the common experience of being human. Why doesn't Jason love me? Right, that is a developmental depression. Developmental depression as our spiritual capacity boots up,

it can often feel in this enlarged hunger for transcendence, this acute desire for illumination and connection and nagging for truth. It can feel like a half empty glass of spirituality. And the other, the empty piece is developmental depression. It's ennui. And I hear from young adults, it's when I don't allow myself to ask these questions

that the depression sharpens, that it feels more acute. We have to do this work of formation. We have no choice but to go on a spiritual quest. Every tradition has known it. When we foreclose the quest, what we get is the big donut-sized hole in the heart. We get the lack of formation, the lack of the knowing heart, the perceiving heart that is a direct connection to God or the higher power, the perceptual organ through which we say,

ah, red door slammed. Where's the yellow door? Ah, he left me, she left me, but look who just showed up. This ability to see that life is dynamic and full of surprises. And we don't make those surprises and we don't make that dynamism, but we can embrace this give and take, this dialogue with life, that is quest. I think that's beautifully put.

And I would say a nice place to end it, but I think there's one more thing that I wanna explore, which is helping people figure out a path forward if somebody is listening to this or watching it and they have difficulty or they struggle with the idea of connecting with something quote unquote spiritual, or they have kind of just an allergy to the vernacular

or the terminology itself, like what are some means by which a person can begin to kind of connect with that sensibility that could kind of catalyze them along their path? The knowing of the heart is real, that's hard data. So honoring and respecting the hunch, the little whisper and the tiny, tiny little sapling of a hunch, honor that. Give it love, give it attention.

When you pay attention to your flashes of awareness, when you catch a synchronicity out of the corner of your eye and say, I think I saw something, honor that. Treat your perception as real. And when you do, it grows very, very quickly. Tenfold, a hundredfold. Listen to yourself and honor your inner knowing as hard data. And the second thing is I invite you to draw a road of your life.

And this is in the awakened brain. And on the road of your life, I invite you to put a door that slammed in your face. Put your red door where A plus B plus C was all lined up and you wanted that so bad and it was yours and the door was stuck or the door slammed. And only because it slammed, you found the yellow door. And I invite you to draw that yellow door

on your road of life. And because you found that yellow door, you need to shift direction and take that pen or pencil and show the curve, if not the hairpin turn, the about face in your road of life to go through that yellow door. What was on the other side? What was there that was magnificent,

that was much more vast than you ever envisioned? Now on that road of life where the red door slammed and you did the hairpin turn and went through the yellow turn did anyone show up at that time? I mean, it could have been someone that you've lived with for 30 years or it could have been someone you met right there at the junction,

but can you draw them in there? And what did they say to you about the yellow door? And what did they say to you about the red door? That person at the junction that changed your life, might they be a trail angel? And as you step back, could you populate your road of life with not just one or two red doors and yellow doors,

one or two trail angels, but have there not been dozens, if not hundreds of trail angels and red doors and yellow doors? And actually, as you step way back, have there not been dozens, if not hundreds of trail angels and red doors and yellow doors. And actually, as you step way back, where are you and someone else's road of life? How important you are and how important we are in this symphony

that we can all see when we look through our awakened eyes. That's so beautifully put and really powerful. I think that, you know, this process is enhanced with the more present and aware you are, the more red and yellow doors you see in your life, right? Like if you're just stumbling through life, you're not aware of when doors are opening or shutting, but the more you're kind of anchored in the moment

and really paying attention to what's going on around you, I think we're all visited with these things on the regular. And when we use our awakened awareness to see yellow doors and red doors and walk through them and say thank you to our trail angels and inhabit that role for one another. Like recognizing it, like expands it. Expands it exponentially.

Life is buoyant, life is loving, and it is anything but depressing. Good, because we don't need any more depression, Lisa. That's right, depression is about not getting what we want, not being who we want, but from an awakened perspective, life is full. We've just got to figure out where that yellow door is. It's different for everybody.

Yeah. Well, it's so nice talking to you. It's great talking to you. Yeah, that was great. How do you feel? Amazing, wonderful talking to you. I feel good. That was very uplifting. The book is The Awakened Brain.

You can get it everywhere. Also the spiritual child, your first book which I have not read yet, but I'm gonna read that next. So thank you. I love this book. I'm at your service. Anything I can do to help get your message out. And if people wanna connect with you,

what are you up to next or where should they go? I know you've got your website and all that stuff. Yeah, absolutely. I'd love people to visit my website. It's lisamillerphd.com, the awakened brain. And we also have the spirituality mind body Institute at Columbia University. And they're welcome to connect with us there.

Yeah, can we just drop in? You are always welcome. You might wanna drop in. I wanna come to a class. Are you teaching this fall? I would love you to come to a class. I'm on sabbatical my first 16 years. I will be there in the spring. All right, I'm coming to a class this spring. I would love you to come to a class. I'm on sabbatical my first in 16 years. I will be there in the spring.

All right, I'm coming to a class this spring. I look forward to that. All right, excellent. We'll put you to work. You're gonna have to talk and lecture. I'm not talking. I wanna sit in the back and watch the cockroaches. That's what I'm gonna do.

Unfortunately, you will be invited to the front. Oh no. Okay, all right. I look forward to it. We'll figure it out. Thanks, thank you, Lisa. Peace. Peace. That's it for today.

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