Awakened Brain: The new science of spirituality
Lisa Miller, Ph.D., and professor of the clinical psychology program at Columbia, compiled compelling research in her new book Awakened Brain, showing that we all have the genetic capacity to have spiritual experiences and that spirituality protects us from depression and anxiety to a higher degree than any other mental health intervention. Dr. Miller uses science to add clarity to shape an otherwise abstract notion and provides practical ways to engage spirituality, even if it’s withered.
What is spirituality?
Spirituality is:
Moment of deep connection with another being.
Feeling of awe and transcendence.
Experience of synchronicity.
A stranger who did something that changed your life.
It’s anytime you feel held or inspired by something greater than yourself. It’s connection with a higher power or a surge of connection at a concert or a sporting event. It’s also not limited to these definitions or examples. Your heart knows what spirituality is to you.
As bestselling author, Sarah Ban Breathnach, puts it, “I do not want to impose on my readers my own view of Divinity, which is always expanding, thank Heavens… many exquisite and descriptive names for Divinity, all of which honor the sacred in the ordinary: Source of All Mystery, Piercer of Doubt, Kindler of Hope, Ever Present Provider, Compassionate Listener, Guardian of the Hearth, Holy Source, and Mother Plenty.”
Is spirituality subjective?
Dr. Kendler, a foremost leader in psychiatric-epidemiology in twin studies, was the first to show that there might be a genetic capacity within us for spiritual experience. His research was the first major empirical study supporting the important distinction that people can be spiritual with or without being religious, and religious with or without being spiritual.
His research showed that a person’s degree of spirituality is:
30% heritable (genes)
70% environment (how we’re raised, our relationships, the things we do)
We are not just cognitive, physical, and emotional beings – but also spiritual beings. Like any innate capacity — to learn a language or sing — there is variability in its strength. But ultimately, the ability to be spiritual is our birthright. It’s something we are each born with the capacity to experience. Dr. Miller says, “Whether we identify as religious or spiritual, our brain has a natural inclination toward and a docking station for spiritual awareness.”
Each of us is endowed with a natural capacity to perceive a greater reality. We can consciously connect to the life force that moves in, through, and around us.
The awakened brain is the neural circuitry that allows us to see the world more fully and thus enhance our individual, societal, and global wellbeing.
Are you skeptical?
If you dig science, read on.
Using a 15-year longitudinal study looking at non-depressed control subjects who shared similar demographics with people who were depressed, they found non-surprising variables that increased depression:
Effect of maternal depression on childhood depression: 2x increased risk
Poverty increased childhood depression by a 40% increase
An affectionate but not overly controlling parent cut childhood depression by 18-30% to combat these effects.
Then she introduced two spiritual questions into the study:
How personally important is religion or spirituality to you? (personal devotion)
How frequently do you attend religious service? (personal conservatism)
When mother and child were high in spirituality, the child was 80% protected against depression.
Put differently: a child is five times less likely to be depressed if spiritual life is shared with a mother.
Even when controlling for mother’s depression, poverty, a stormy home, intergenerational transmission of spirituality held the same astounding 80% protective benefit.
Spirituality was the largest protective benefit anywhere in the resilience literature.
Given one in four children report feeling depression and anxiety1, finding resilience tools are critical to helping the current and future generations.
Teens with a strong personal spirituality were 35-75% less likely to experience clinical depression, and no other mental health intervention came close to those preventative rates. She posits that the ballooning addiction and depression in adolescence could be a sign of spiritual struggle.
Using personal assessment data from almost 2,000 twins, a gold standard in scientific research because it helps show traits more influenced by genes or environment, she found:
Low levels of depressive symptoms are related to high levels of personal devotion (thus, if you have a high degree of spirituality, you’re less likely to be depressed)
Personal devotion can serve as a buffer against stressful life events (illness, grief, divorce)
Personal conservatism – or solely religious practice – didn’t have the same buffering effect.
Having a personal relationship with a higher power (god, nature, higher intelligence) is the most protective benefit
Third, personal devotion decreased lifetime risk for alcoholism and nicotine dependence. Spiritual people are less likely to be addicted
Given the astounding substance addiction epidemic in America, these are compelling findings. What if this is the missing piece for a staggering crisis?
From struggle to spirituality
Throughout her book, she questions how psychoanalysis treats the symptom level instead of listening and asking questions to see if a person is in their process of spiritual emergence and struggling to form spiritually and feeling unsupported.
In the mid-1990s, it was the trend to medicate patients through experiences of struggle and pain. Psychologists were generally trained to see suffering but not the emergence of a spiritual or existential journey.
Dr. Miller met the Jungians who relied on dreams to reveal our wounds and emerging opportunities for healing; on archetypes to show universal human tendencies and development paths.
Carl Jung, one of the most famous psychoanalysts, is known for theorizing about the human unconscious, including the idea that there is a collective unconscious all people share. According to Jung, the human collective unconscious is populated by instincts, as well as by archetypes: ancient primal symbols such as The Great Mother, the Wise Old Man, and the Tree of Life.
He believed that the concept of the collective unconscious helps to explain why similar themes occur in world mythologies around the world. He argued that the collective unconscious had a profound influence on the lives of individuals, who lived out its symbols and clothed them in meaning through their experiences. How different would it be to view the human struggle as a spiritual process instead of a symptom to fix?
What if it’s hard to believe in spirituality?
Perhaps your spirituality has atrophied. Religion has disheartened you, and dogma has you down. Deadlines and to-do lists fill up your mind, not natural wonders and mystery.
30% of our spirituality comes from our genes. We have the capability, and we have to learn to engage the spiritual and awakened brain or let it atrophy.
It’s easy to let midlife, kids, and careers take up our emotional and mental energy. Most days, there isn’t enough energy left to explore spirituality, nevertheless, clean the kitchen.
When we realize that we live in two worlds - the one where we buy groceries and commute to work and the transcendent world - that’s bigger than our individual life and to which we all belong, it becomes easier to live in and straddle both. We embrace this contrast and duality rather than fighting it; our lives become fuller.
We are the errand runner, lunchmaker and interconnected with every being. We are part of something bigger.
Engaging Your Awareness
According to Dr. Miller, one of the first steps in engaging more spirituality in your life is to shift back and forth from Achieving Awareness to Awakened Awareness.
Achieving Awareness: this is the perception that our purpose is to organize and control our lives. We set goals, plan, work, and strategize from this mode. Our foundational concern in this mode is How can I get and keep what I want? This mode is advantageous, and it’s how we build rockets, code software, and type blog posts. However, when we overuse this mode, paths of depression, anxiety, stress, and craving are carved. Loneliness and isolation can occur if this is all we have.
Focused Awareness
Awakened Awareness: using a different area of the brain, we literally see more, integrating information from multiple sources of perception. Instead of seeing ourselves as independent makers of our path, we are seekers of our course. We ask, “what is life showing me now?” It allows us to perceive more choices and opportunities available to us, understand the relationships between events in our lives, and be open to creative leaps and insights. We don’t lose sight of our goals, but we take off the blinders. Here you pay attention to where the doors open and close in life, leaning into the flow of life instead of treading upcurrent. Your awareness expands, letting the sounds and sights come to you without squinting or resisting them.
Awakened Awareness
An example of awakened awareness is listening to what the stranger says to us on the bus. No longer annoyed by the disruption, we hear the meaning behind their words. Perhaps it’s a message for us.
We move from an “either-or” mindset to a “both-and” mindset.
The world is fuller here. Take off the binary blinders and options multiply. Didn’t get the house or job you wanted? You see this as an opportunity for more options to appear or as a lesson to better understand yourself. Allow the everyday epiphanies.
How do we practice Awakened Awareness?
We must quiet the “little me” first. Do this through meditation, prayer, dancing, breathwork, journaling, nature, visualizations, etc.
The default mode network in the brain quiets down through any of these exercises. The brain’s default mode network is potentially the neurological basis for the self3. It’s where we think about others, remember the past, and think about the future. Reduce activity in the default mode network, and it will improve attention and working memory performance and promote positive health outcomes4.
The rumination racket turns off. Rumination is when we get caught in a thinking loop, going over the same question and thought, attempting to solve or understand it. The spiritually awakened brain - toward the back of the head, where the bottom of the baseball cap is, is engaged as we step into our spiritual awareness.
One way to do this is:
Close your eyes and use long, steady breathing to quiet your mind
Clear out your inner space. Invite an animal and see who shows up.
Ask, “what say you?”
Seeking Synchronicities
Part of seeking the path and tapping into awakened awareness is recognizing the synchronicities of life. Synchronicity is when two apparently unrelated events are joined with meaning - an inner knowing. These are flashes of meaning and insight.
In a purely mechanistic understanding of life, there’s no way that two separate events can be part of the same unified whole. The events are either unrelated or linked by direct cause and effect. This is living in achieving awareness.
Carl Jung suggested two things:
Mechanistically separate events are actually one at the level of consciousness
There is no real difference between inner and outer life
A research study at Harvard developed a study on synchronicity using semi-structured interviews. The more aware of synchronicity participants became, the more synchronicity they experienced. We seek symbols and themes that show us how we are part of the collective unconscious.
The more we pay attention to it, the more it becomes apparent, as when our eyes are more open to it, it picks up steam and becomes more abundant.
Looking for synchronicities goes hand in hand with increased spiritual awareness and better mental health. The more we practice engaging open attention, the more we perceive synchronicity, as we do, the more we become spiritually oriented - more aware of guidance, connection, and unity in our lives.
Using EEG, subjects with a strong personality spirituality gave off a wavelength from the back of the brain measured as alpha – the same brain wave engaged for meditating monks. This is the same brain wave that is jump-started in people who use antidepressants. Unfortunately, it goes away as soon as a person stops the antidepressants.
Alpha waves are not just in our brain. They are everywhere. Alpha is a resonance in the space between the Earth’s crust to one mile up, set and reset by lightning, and other activity in the ionosphere. High-amplitude alpha is everywhere. It’s the same wavelength of brains in meditation or prayer, shared by people holding hands in times of pain, the oneness of all life. We’re in resonance with the earth.
She saw yet again - an amazing intertwining of depression and spirituality in the brain. Opening up to the meaning instead of controlling the story.
According to Dr. Miller, “It’s less that we heal when we impose a more positive meaning on the world, and more that we shift toward health when somehow, usually through struggle, a bigger meaning is revealed to us.”
We seek the path in favor of controlling the turns.
How do you try it?
I invite you to look for synchronicities this week. Notice a second of connection with the world around you. Maybe it’s three green lights in a row as you’re late to an appointment. Perhaps a bird peeps at your window. Your kid squeezes your hand. You didn’t get something you wanted because there’s something better for you. You have a choice to believe these are cause and effect, or you are supported in your journey.
Try looking at these events from both perspectives, especially if you’re highly skeptical.
How does it feel to believe it’s just randomness?
How does it feel to believe there is oneness and interconnectedness in everything?
Get quiet for a few minutes and engage your awakened awareness. Look for insights for a looming question.
Most of all, don’t give up or force it. Believe you can, even when it feels difficult.
We are all on a path of awakening, again and again facing new challenges, closing and opening doors, moving ever and always toward great awakening.
Dr. Miller
