Dr. Lisa Miller
Appearances
Know Thyself
E129 - Know Your True Nature & Unlock Your Purpose in 2025 (Know Thyself Best Moments)
So let's start with a very simple understanding. Your personality is made up of how you think, how you act, and how you feel. So the present personality who's listening to this podcast has created the present personal reality called their life. Not their mother, not their ex, you know, they're responsible for creating their life.
Know Thyself
E129 - Know Your True Nature & Unlock Your Purpose in 2025 (Know Thyself Best Moments)
And if they think the same way, they act the same way, and they feel the same way, they're the same personality. And of course, they'll have the same personal reality. And I think most people try to create a new personal reality as the same personality. When it doesn't work, we literally have to become someone else.
Know Thyself
E129 - Know Your True Nature & Unlock Your Purpose in 2025 (Know Thyself Best Moments)
So then, if the majority of our thoughts are the same thoughts based on memories we have of experiences in our life, the moment we start remembering our problems, we're thinking in the past, right? So those memories have a feeling or an emotion associated with them. So the moment you think about your problems and you feel unhappy, Not only is your brain in the past, now the body's in the past.
Know Thyself
E129 - Know Your True Nature & Unlock Your Purpose in 2025 (Know Thyself Best Moments)
So it's that thought and that feeling. It's the image or memory and the emotion. It's the stimulus and response that's immediately conditioning the body to memorize that emotion. Now the body is literally living in the past because it's so objective.
Know Thyself
E129 - Know Your True Nature & Unlock Your Purpose in 2025 (Know Thyself Best Moments)
It doesn't know the difference between a real life experience that's creating that emotion and the emotion that person is fabricating by thought alone. So to the body, it's in the past experience 24 hours a day, okay? So now the body physiologically... is now in the past.
Know Thyself
E129 - Know Your True Nature & Unlock Your Purpose in 2025 (Know Thyself Best Moments)
So then the hormones of stress create the emotions of anger, and aggression, and frustration, and impatience, and competition, and hatefulness, and fear, anxiety, worry, insecurity, envy, jealousy, guilt, unworthiness, shame, suffering. Those are all derived from the hormones of stress. Turns out when that response switches on,
Know Thyself
E129 - Know Your True Nature & Unlock Your Purpose in 2025 (Know Thyself Best Moments)
when we perceive a threat or a danger in our outer world, the response from whatever condition in the outer world gives the body an arousal. And so then if you keep doing that and you keep giving the body a rush of energy, the body becomes dependent on its external world to feel something.
Know Thyself
E129 - Know Your True Nature & Unlock Your Purpose in 2025 (Know Thyself Best Moments)
So the arousal from your coworker, from your ex, from traffic, from the news, something in your outer environment is producing that kind of addictive rush of energy. Then people begin to use the problems and conditions in their life to reaffirm their addiction to that emotion. They need the bad job, they need the bad relationship, and they become addicted to the life that they don't even like.
Know Thyself
E129 - Know Your True Nature & Unlock Your Purpose in 2025 (Know Thyself Best Moments)
And so an addiction is something you think you can't stop or an addiction is something you know that is not good for you. And you do it anyway. So people are unconscious to the fact that the arousal from the stress hormones is knocking their brain and body out of homeostasis. It's knocking it out of balance the majority of the time.
Know Thyself
E129 - Know Your True Nature & Unlock Your Purpose in 2025 (Know Thyself Best Moments)
So we can actually think about our problems and create the same physiological response as if we were being chased by a predator. So what was once very adaptive becomes very maladaptive. So you turn on that response, you can't turn it off.
Know Thyself
E129 - Know Your True Nature & Unlock Your Purpose in 2025 (Know Thyself Best Moments)
Now you're headed for disease because stress is when the body's knocked out of balance and there's no opportunity for the body to return back to balance and order. That imbalance becomes the new balance and that's when we head for some type of disease or imbalance in our bodies. So then... Those emotions that we feel tend to drive our behaviors and we behave as if we're in the past.
Know Thyself
E129 - Know Your True Nature & Unlock Your Purpose in 2025 (Know Thyself Best Moments)
And if those emotions are just really chemical records from past experiences, then we probably more than likely remember the past instead of remember the future. So 95% of who we are becomes, you know, an automatic set of programs in our personality. So...
Know Thyself
E129 - Know Your True Nature & Unlock Your Purpose in 2025 (Know Thyself Best Moments)
So if we really teach a person how to think differently, how to act differently, and how to feel differently, give them new information, have them learn that information, have them teach that information back to somebody so it's wired in their brain, have them understand exactly what they're doing and why they're doing it so the how gets easier, remind themselves enough time to install the circuitry so that they have neurons and circuits in place to make a different choice to do a different thing,
Know Thyself
E129 - Know Your True Nature & Unlock Your Purpose in 2025 (Know Thyself Best Moments)
create a different experience and feel a different emotion. If you change your personality, would your biology change? The answer is 100% absolutely yes. And we can do it in seven days. Now, a person with a dissociative disorder or multiple personality disorder had traumas in their life, most of them,
Know Thyself
E129 - Know Your True Nature & Unlock Your Purpose in 2025 (Know Thyself Best Moments)
from childhood and the way they coped with the constant abuse was that they would just dissociate from this world and go to another world. And they would live in that world and create a different character than the character that's being abused or molested or whatever.
Know Thyself
E129 - Know Your True Nature & Unlock Your Purpose in 2025 (Know Thyself Best Moments)
And so each one of those different personalities, just like creating a new personal reality takes seven days, they've been doing that for so long that the myriad of personalities of thinking differently, behaving differently, and feeling differently produces immediate biological changes where the person is allergic to peanuts in one personality and not in the other.
Know Thyself
E129 - Know Your True Nature & Unlock Your Purpose in 2025 (Know Thyself Best Moments)
So in a sense, that speaks to human potential because that's exactly what we're doing. when we see people heal from chronic health conditions, I ask them, where is the disease? Where did the disease go? And 100% of the time they say, it's in the old person. It's in the old, I'm no longer that person. I'm somebody else. So of course the disease would exist in a different person.
Know Thyself
E129 - Know Your True Nature & Unlock Your Purpose in 2025 (Know Thyself Best Moments)
It's a different physiology. So teaching a person, after years of years of thinking, acting, and feeling the same way, running those programs, teaching a person how to become so conscious of their unconscious thoughts, so aware of the defaulting habits and behaviors, and to notice when they start feeling different emotions that you got to catch yourself
Know Thyself
E129 - Know Your True Nature & Unlock Your Purpose in 2025 (Know Thyself Best Moments)
from going unconscious and returning back to that person, for them to unlearn and relearn, to break the habit of being themselves and reinvent a new self.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
Consciousness is the capacity of one to know itself.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
Consciousness is the capacity of one, the totality of what exists to know itself. So it's the capacity to know by self-reflection. But the interesting thing in the way I look at this is that when one wants to know itself, And in fact, we need to start with a postulate because otherwise we run around this thing and we never get to it.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
So the postulate that I'm using is one is the totality of what exists, what potentially can exist and what actually exists. And I make a clear distinction because you cannot get something from nothing. Many theories of reality starts with nothing and you get something. I do not believe that that's correct. You have to start with some potentiality that becomes actuality.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
So when one is holistic, meaning it's not made of separable part, everything is interconnected within one. I mean, this is, you know, it goes back to the Vedas, I mean, you know, But it was very clear to me that that lack of separation was fundamental in my first experience, the awakening experience. I was not separate. I was the observer and the observed. There is no separation between the two.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
But that's also what quantum physics is saying. There is no observer separate from what is observed. Quantum physics is very clear about that. One is holistic, one is dynamic. It's never the same instant after instant. It's basically, it's always changing. So far, I have described quantum physics, what quantum physics say, not classical physics, quantum physics.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
And then I'm adding one wants to know itself. And it is in this one wants to know itself that there is the joining of physics and spirituality. It is the knowing itself. Okay, so if you believe that one needs to know itself, then one cannot be omniscient because otherwise it would know everything already. and there would be no evolution, we wouldn't be here certainly.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
So one wants to know itself means that one will have to continue to know itself because we know within ourselves that the more you know, the more there is to know, because the more connections between what we have known exist. And so there is an explosion of self-knowing that can occur. So, but one, if you start with this point,
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
Then when one knows itself, he has to bring into existence what he knows. It comes from potential existence, like the unconscious of one, into manifestation, which is existence. Like from a wave to a particle? From... A little bit like that, but not quite. We have to be careful not to read too much because it's from a potentiality which is neither a wave or a particle yet.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
It is even before you can even imagine what it is to actual, to an existence. But the existence that, so what happens is that Knowing and existing are two aspects of the same thing. Knowing and existing are two faces of the same coin. So when one knows itself, it brings into existence a part whole of itself. Because being holistic, it cannot know itself only partially.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
It has to know itself completely. but it has to know itself with this particular point of view. That was very clear to me eight years ago. It has to know itself in a point of view, like a perspective. But one has many perspective in which it can know itself. So now there can be many perspective in which one knows itself completely.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
And so it brings into existence a part whole, which I call consciousness unit is like the Monad of Leibniz. The Monads of Leibniz are very similar concepts. Leibniz is the only philosopher and scientist and mathematician that I know of that actually understood the concept, this is what I'm talking about.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
And I found it out later, but you know, to me, that was clear that it had to be something like that. based on my experiences, because in my 20 years where I was exploring consciousness, I had hundreds of different extraordinary experiences of consciousness.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
The revealed aspects of consciousness, they were certainly not, they were coherent with the awakening experiences that are described, but they illuminated different parts of this spectrum of capacity that consciousness has. So if we start there, then, you know, one wants to know itself, then the wanting to know itself is the will, the free will of one. One decides which way to know itself.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
That's free will. The essence of free will is the capacity of one to direct his own knowing, self-knowing, which is also the capacity that we have. That's what free will is for us. And the capacity to know itself is consciousness. So now we have defined free will and consciousness. And the two must work together. You cannot have consciousness without free will.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
It would be like you know something, but you cannot do anything about it. You know what you want, but you cannot act on that desire that you have. It would be foolish. The universe would be a joke. It would not be serious, inconsistent. So starting this way, you can unite physics, spirituality. The world now has meaning and purpose. The world, the entire universe has meaning and purpose.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
The materialism has erased simply by saying, oh, everything that exists must be measured. Otherwise it doesn't exist. How is it possible? Already quantum physics is telling you that a particle that is not looked at is not even in space and time.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
You can only be describing a deeper reality and only when you measure it, in other words, when a field interacts with another field, which is the field of an instrument, you have an event that manifests in space and time. And then you can say, you know, there is a particle here, for example. But quantum physics cannot tell you where you will find the particle.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
It can only tell you the probability of all the possibilities in which you could potentially find a particle. So there you go again. Okay, quantum physics is not describing reality. It's only describing what you can know about reality. Big difference. And probabilities have to do with consciousness. A classical system, a computer, in a computer, there are no probabilities.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
There are all certainties. This next state of the computer is determined by the previous state, period. So a computer can never be conscious because it doesn't have the characteristics of free will.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
Yeah, well, when I was starting from reading the neuroscientist books, neuroscience, I said, well, if the brain is an information processing system like a computer, which is how it is described, then I should be able to create a computer that is conscious.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
Yeah. So, and I tried for a couple of years. There was no way because there is no way, as I mentioned earlier, to convert electrical signals in a conscious experience. How do you do that? Through qualia. What is qualia? Qualias are not numbers. Electrical signals can be reduced to numbers. Qualia, not numbers.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
The love that you feel for a child, your child, is that love something that you can put in one number or a series of numbers? No way. It's richer, he has dimension that you cannot probe. You know that there is more to know about that love It goes deeper than you can even know. But the fact that you know that it goes deeper allows, motivates you to find out more about that love.
Know Thyself
E142 - Merging Science & Ancient Wisdom “We're All One Consciousness” (Compilation)
You see, it's not, it goes beyond number. See, the deepest feeling, the deepest longing that we have, like the longing to know ourselves, goes way beyond anything that can be put into numbers, transcends the ideal number, therefore transcends measurability, which is the basis of science.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
Some people experience the deeper nature of life within their own beautiful faith tradition, whether they're Hindu or Catholic or Jewish or Muslim, whatever their faith tradition may be. they experience the deeper nature of life and call it, my word is God. But some people say Jesus or Hashem, the universe. It doesn't matter what your word is.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
And I've never in my entire life heard anyone argue that there are two sources of all life. Everyone seems to agree there's one source of all life. And then there's simply a beautiful range of words that we apply to the source of all life.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
The source of life. So the source of life in your own quest, I invite you to consider is the source of life conscious? Does it know you? Does it show up for you?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
Is the source of life loving?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
The source of life is loving. Yes. Does a source of life come forth in everyone? If they allow it. If they allow it. The dialogue, the choice to be in relationship to source. And those are the questions that every single one of us has the opportunity to explore our entire life as a quest.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
spirituality through the lens of science is innate. Every single one of us is born with a natural capacity to awaken, the capacity for an awakened brain, every one of us. Religion, for many people, is the way that their natural spirituality is cultivated, built, given language and direction. But whether or not we are religious, and no matter what religion we may be, we all have the same
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
inborn natural spirituality. There is one awakened brain and 10.2 billion people on earth have the same awakened brain.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
The day we're born, we have the wiring to awaken. We have the circuits in our brain. And the human journey is innately a spiritual journey. That's not like just a beautiful idea, although it is lovely. It is a scientific fact. Here's the facts. Through the lens of science, we look at twin studies to see if any capacity is inborn or environmentally formed. So
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
eye color, height and weight, the tendency to get diabetes, all these things have inborn heritable components, personality temperament, right? So whether I'm an introvert or an extrovert, whether I'm laid back or tightly wound, that's our temperament. And temperament is half inborn, half environmentally formed. If I'm an introvert, I can push myself to go to the party.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
The same methodology, a twin study, can be applied to the extent to which spirituality is inborn or environmentally built. And it turns out that the human capacity for spiritual life through the lens of a twin study is inborn. We've known this for 20 years. We would have thought that people talked about it morning, noon, and night. We are naturally spiritual beings. Everyone, look at who we are.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
There's enormous confusion about the difference between spirituality and religion. Okay. Spirituality is our birthright. We are all naturally spiritual beings. Religion is a gift of our environment. And we may or may not like the way that it was walked and taught in our childhood or growing up. Whether or not we are religious, we are all spiritual beings.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
Unfortunately, because people might have a discontent with how religion was practiced in in their childhood home because people might not like their encounters with their own faith tradition. Many of us have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Many, many people. And the question is, wait a minute. If you throw the spiritual baby out with the bathwater, what do you lose?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
You lose your own authentic spiritual path. Take back your own spiritual path. There's no need to be reactive against people who did it differently or in your eyes wrong. That was their walk. Everything that you need, you already have to open up a spiritual awareness, to awaken and live in dialogue with the deeper force in life.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
So Mel, there's no question that if there is a religion where you feel at home, it is a wonderful thing. If you have found a religious home, that is absolutely wonderful because religion pulls together all that we need to nourish natural spirituality. There is a language of transcendence and a practice of a way to get there. There's a roadmap of the sacred reality.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
There's elders and babies all around you. So you understand the human journey as a spiritual journey.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
Option one is go find a house of worship where you do feel alive and you do feel the presence of the source of life, who I call God. Go where you feel God's presence and go where you feel people truly living out the truth. And if you can't find it, walk down the street or for some people across the country, there may be somewhere else other than where you grew up.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
such as you found, Mel, in the church at Harvard. The second option, the notion of dharma, that you can pick and choose in your own spiritual journey from different faith traditions. There might be something from Buddhism that speaks very deeply to you. There might be something resonant from Catholicism in your childhood.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
You know, Catholicism is wonderful at helping people see the deeper sacred reality in the daily material reality. That might be something you keep if you grew up Catholic. There's much to learn from every faith tradition. As we are on our own spiritual quest, we can effectively say, what is the me and not me that I pick up from different faith traditions?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
And then, of course, along those lines is what, from my very own childhood faith tradition, is me and not me. Some people say, well, I didn't like the guilt and the shame, but I sure liked the fact that people showed up for each other. If someone was ill, there was food at their door, and there were knocks on their door.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
And when you don't like the torchbearer, when the torchbearer doesn't walk the walk, but you know the flame is real, then the quest is to find other flame carriers. And it can show up in a parenting circle. We're not going to talk about like whose kid got into what college. We're here to walk with each. We're not keeping up with the Joneses. We're walking with the Joneses.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
And this is a spiritual parenting circle.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
Mel, just like there's one visual system and there's one auditory system, there's one spiritual perception system. And you actually see it in the brain. We see it in fMRI studies, live action in the brain. It doesn't matter whether our participant is Catholic or Hindu or Jewish or spiritual and not religious, the same neural correlates run.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
There is one spiritual brain and every human being on earth is endowed with the same spiritual brain. Now, of course, we can strengthen the spiritual brain. There's human variability, just as there's human variability for music or math. But the foundational components of the spiritual brain are identical in 10 billion people on earth. Everyone has the same spiritual brain.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
So first note, religious war is obsolete. You're fighting about nothing because there's one seed of human spiritual perception and you all have it and it's identical.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
In our MRI study, whether someone said I was praying in the pews of my childhood church when I felt God's presence, or if they said I was walking in Glacier National Park and I saw light on the ice and I knew there was something more. The identical neural correlates run. Spiritual but not religious, deeply religious. The same spiritual brain allows us to feel the transcendent relationships.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
There is in and through us the deeper, loving, transcendent relationship.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
You were born with the circuits to awaken. You were born with everything you need to awaken your brain. But this is a choice because while the wiring is in every single one of us, lived spiritual life is one-third innate, two-thirds cultivated and built. We've got to do our job.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
Science says you are spiritual. Science says spirituality is your birthright. No one is left out. Everyone is spiritual.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
Well, first of all, I invite you to be curious. Okay. Whatever you might think about your parents' religion or your grandparents' religion or the torchbearer who didn't walk the walk. You know, the flame is pure and bright. The fire is divine. But the torchbearer was a human being.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
who may have talked the walk, but not walked the walk. Whoever you met and whatever you thought, this is your spiritual path. And no one can do it but you. This is your authentic, sacred, spiritual journey. So let's start with the word God. I have heard so many people say, I just don't believe it with the guy in the beard. Okay, that's how a human being on earth described God.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
But what about you and your precious shot at life? How do you experience God? And what is God based on your own direct lived experience? What does your heart say? So, okay, for you, God might not be a guy with a beard. Is there a presence in and through life? that holds you and loves you so that when things have gone wrong, you actually didn't fall through a black hole of abyss? Were you held?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
Have there been moments where you were guided? Things way too unprobabilistic to have happened by chance. Synchronicities, use your word. You were guided. No question asked. And have you found that in your deepest, darkest moments, you actually were not alone? Someone shared up. You were loved. You were guided. And you were not alone. Wow. Do you want to call that God? Or you pick your word.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
Maybe you want to say higher power. But this living presence in a source of life, current of life, the river of life, whatever your beautiful word, in your own lived experience, have you felt loved and held, guided, and never alone? ever, even once. And who was that?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
Absolutely. Absolutely. Many people find that there was something that they were raised with. They dust off a rusty prayer. There's a place where their family went every summer. There's somewhere where they return to source. And deep, deep, deep within you, is there a joyous awakening? Is there something deep within you that feels peace? Is there something where suddenly you know you're not alone?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
You're part of all life, whether it's the beautiful Vista in Vermont. For some people, it's light on the water. For some, it's a fellow living beings. And for some, it's going to their house of worship from their childhood, sitting in the pews where they sat with their parents and grandparents or
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
being part of the pilgrimage to a sacred site, two-thirds of people say that it is through my beautiful faith tradition that I do experience the presence of the deep river, the force of life. And one-third of people say I feel the river as the river. It doesn't matter what you call it and what your map is. There's one river.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
And you are built to be able to have a relationship with this deep current through your life. Why is it important to have this? Ah, life unfolds entirely differently. You know, Mel, you've done such pioneering work on the little me, the controlling me, telling other people what to do is really a dead end.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
And when we open and take people as they are, when we decide to paddle with the river, not against the river, as you say so beautifully, and let them. we're going with actually the deepest force of life. The question is then, what is the deepest force of life? Well, I invite you to be curious. I invite you to explore how the deepest force of life has shown up for you.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
One of the most spiritual things you can do is go next door and shovel your neighbor's driveway. When you serve other people, you are enacting love held guided and never alone. When you simply help the elder person down the road whose spouse has died, when you show up to the mom's home who has a new baby and say, can I bring you two nights of dinner and take your kids to the park?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
That is spiritual. Why? Because you are walking the walk. You're a living prayer of loved, held, guided, and never alone.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
When you perceive remarkable confluences in your life, when you have moments of, wow, there's a synchronicity. Wow, how remarkable that I've really been searching for where am I going to put my kid in school? And this mom who sat next to me at the coffee shop is telling me about her. Her child just flourished. at the school down on the corner. That's a gift. Thank you, universe.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
What a wonderful gift. Thank you to the mom who told me. Thank you to the universe. Take note. Notice that unique, most unprobabilistic meaning. Know that that is a real event. That form of synchronistic knowing is real knowing. Reflect on it and then act on it. Go look at the school. Bring your kid.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
Another way, you know, many people have had extraordinary experiences in their life, a moment of unit of reality. I'm standing on the hilltop in Vermont and I feel the sun and the wind and I hear the birds and I know there's a oneness of which I'm a part in all life. It's a unit of experience and it's precious and it's sacred.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
Whatever your views of the higher power, it is in itself a sacred moment. Many people, particularly children, when they're young, will see parents who've passed or grandparents who've passed. This is not rare. It's not freaky. This is how we're built. We're built to be able to feel and know our ancestors and that they watch over us. These events fill our lives.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
The torchbearers did it that way.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
Your spirituality inside of you is a seat of perception. It is your ability to feel and know the presence of guidance in your life, to see synchronicities. It's your ability to feel and know the profundity. Why did this person show up in my life of all times now? It's your gift to be able to sense that. that even when everything falls apart, you are not going to, and you're actually buoyant.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
It's your sense that no matter how much I mess up and the things I'm ashamed of that I've done, there's something deep and alive and eternal, the flame that's worthy. Your soul is worthy. And your understanding of this doesn't need to be intellectual. In fact, through the lens of science, spirituality is not a belief. It is a deep seat of perception.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
Science shows us that we are built and wired to see and know the deep reality of life. It is a feeling of being loved. It is the sense of being buoyant. And it is not just a nice feeling like happiness. It is a perception of the truth of the way the world is really built. Spirituality is the relationship between one, your ability to see and know the deep sacred current in life.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
Two, that this current is real. And three, that every single day you have the opportunity to have a relationship. to ride with the current of life and see where the river is taking you. The brain is not a factory that makes spiritual thoughts. The brain is an antenna that receives spiritual truth.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
Yes, absolutely. So the brain actually is built, we are built to be in alignment. with the force of life. When we feel deeply aligned, when we use our inner compass to align ourselves with the deep force of life, then there's the fluidity of moving down the river. We have spent so much time in psychology trying to make people feel good.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
pumping people up with self-serving thoughts, that we've lost the deeper purpose as spiritual beings to whole person flourishing, which is to live in alignment with the deep force in life.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
Your emotions are accurate. If you're feeling guilty because you cheated on a test, you cheated on your spouse, that is an accurate index of your alignment with the force of life. You just made a betrayal. If you're feeling guilty, if you're feeling sad, Those are not pathological emotions. They're telling you something about your alignment with life. Those are a gift.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
Your emotions are for you, not against you. They are an index of your relationship to reality. Now, where do I go from there? Well, I'm not stuck. I'm not stuck feeling guilty or I'm not stuck feeling sad. That is the knock at the door to shifting my way of being. It's the beginning of my new way of being. It is not a, failure. I'm not off the spiritual path.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
I'm on the spiritual path being told, eh, course correction. And as I start to align, open my heart, feel the guidance, start to just be very kind to people, care for fellow living beings. care for myself, as I start to walk the walk of loving care, as I start to be nice to the people who totally annoy me. They're not evil. They're just annoying, right? Let them. Let them.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
So this takes us out of the seat of control. It's not about where I want to go and what I think I want, because everything I think I want is actually outdated. It's based on today backwards. You know, I want this apartment. That's what I think I want, but it's actually based on historical information.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
The synchronicities that guide me, the deep current in the river is taking me somewhere that I've yet to discover. I've yet to imagine where the river is taking me. And when we awaken and say, okay, life, I'll ride with the river. Okay, higher power. What are you showing me now? What do you want from me now? And go with the river. We are on a glorious adventure.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
We are going somewhere we never dreamed. And it is not what we wanted. It is better than what we wanted or better for us.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
May we do another practice? Sure. Okay.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
The road of life. The road of life. And it's in the awakened brain. Okay. I invite you to take five breaths again and clear out your inner space. I invite you to think of a time where you wanted something so badly, that job, him or her, them to say, yes, you wanted that school. You wanted it for yourself. You wanted it for your family. You wanted that red door. So you did everything right.
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Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
You researched it. You planned. You tactically were on the ball. You go for your red door and it stuck. You can't believe it stuck because A plus B plus C, you had done everything right and but the red door is stuck. You might kick it, you might shake it, no red door, no red door for you. And only because that red door is stuck, you have no choice. You turn 50, 80, 110 degrees over there.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
Over there is a wide, open yellow door, a wide open yellow door. You didn't know yellow doors existed, hadn't heard of them. On the other side of the yellow door is someone more right for you, is a job that makes you feel alive, is a mentor at a school that sees you in a way that you didn't even know you were capable of. That yellow door was not what you had wanted.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
It was better and better for you. You've crossed the yellow door to a whole new golden landscape. And as you sit back now, take a breath. I think of that stuck red door and the hairpin turn that took you to the wide open yellow door. Was there anyone at that hairpin turn? It could have been someone you met for two minutes at a coffee shop.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
It could have been a grandparent who confided in you a story that she'd never told before. There was a trail angel, someone at the hairpin turn pointing you to the wide open yellow door, giving you information. The trail angel at the hairpin turn.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
And as you sit now finally way back, stuck red door, hairpin turn, trail angel, and wide open yellow door, the yellow door that has so much to do with who you are and where you are today. How really are the most important parts of our lives formed? Yes, we have to plan, and yes, we have to do our part, but do we really have radical control?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
Or are we more deeply in dialogue with a force that guides us, in us, through us, that closes red doors and opens yellow doors and puts trail angels in our path? What do you call this deeper force in us, through us, and among us? And your ability to be an open system and listen, listen with an open heart and full eyes to the force of life.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
This deep river who I call God. is the force that pulls us along. And when we choose to be in dialogue, when we say, hey, what river are you guiding us to now? What higher power are you asking of us now? Okay, I just didn't get the thing I wanted 11 times. Maybe if I pivot, there's a wide open yellow door. Maybe, thank goodness, try as I might, bang my head as hard as I can, that
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
Red door is unyielding because there is over there, if I would just pivot, a wide open yellow door.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
I share in The Awakened Brain that I want to dearly and deeply for five years to start a family. So sure enough, my husband and I went to all the best doctors up and down the East Coast, the one who invented in vitro the highest rates of conception and still no children. And in this path, I got the picture after about 11 failed in vitros and plenty of little pokes and prods and disappointments.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
Every failed in vitro felt like a hideous funeral. oh, you're not pregnant. That felt like going to the funeral of the baby that wasn't born, the tiny little dead cell, right? So it was a very painful journey. And in this journey of struggling to conceive, I started receiving guidance. I received guidance from trial angels, some of whom were people.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
A guy on the bus came up to me and he said, lady, and I was pretty depressed this day, You look like just that kind of lady that would go all around the world adopting kids. Well, maybe we should. Another synchronicity. My mother calls out of the blue. She said, I just want you to know our neighbor adopted the most adorable little boy, little John Joseph. Just wanted you to know.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
Oh, and he's from Russia. Click, which is where we found our son. The synchronicities that guided us to our beautiful boy, Isaiah, on the other side of the world. The most profound of which was at one point, I have a big cousin, Mel. My big cousin, Big Jane. I'm Lisa Jane. She's Big Jane. And she called me and said, you know, Ms.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
Columbia Professor, you think you're so smart, but you're missing the point. You want to understand spirituality, you need to come out here to a healing ceremony. And together with the Lakota and Big Jane, I joined a group of women who were all praying for healing. And on that day, Mel, in that Inipi in South Dakota, every woman had come to pray for a son.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
One woman said, my son, he's not coming home. He's been using drugs. One woman said, my son, he's starting to leave his wife and kids. I'm worried for the family. Every woman was worried about a son. Until we got to Big Jane, who said, I'm here with my cousin, Little Jane. Little Jane has come looking for her child. I'm wondering if we could help her.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
And for the first time, I felt confidence in this journey to find a child. Every woman nodded. sitting in an inipi in South Dakota, knowing that there were people scouting for our child in Eastern Europe and Russia, what did the two have to do with each other? What did those two seemingly distant physical events have to do with each other? We said a prayer led by the medicine man's wife.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
The prayer went up through the top of the inipi, a collective prayer. And Mel, that night, after five years of weeping and pain and tears, That night, our son was found in Russia. Just as we are loved and held and guided, when we show up for others and are loving, holding, and guiding, we fulfilled who we really are as spiritual beings. And it doesn't work just through a ping pong match.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
It doesn't work always materially or mechanistically or things that we physically do. It all often passes through source. What does the research say and what have you found about spirituality and kids? Oh, so important, Mel. So, you know, I'm a parent like you. I have three kids. Parent culture is driven by all of us wanting to help our kids. We want them to get the best education.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
We want them to live in a safe community. We want them to cultivate themselves. But very often parent culture has a quiet, it's like a little sleeper cell in it. I call it radical achieving awareness that everything is actually measured by, well, how well are you doing? And what it sounds like at pick up and drop off is how'd the math test go? Did you guys win today on the soccer field?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
Well-intentioned, well-intentioned, available parents. But the child often hears radical things. ongoing, running, achieving awareness as contingent love. Am I doing a good enough job? And in fact, Mel, I have a friend and colleague, Dr. Sunya Luthar, who published 10 years of studies looking at the fact that when children feel contingent love, they actually get anxious.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
They actually get depressed because there's no such thing as good enough. It's really just running on a habit trail, running on a treadmill. What is the alternative for parents to it? unyielding achieving awareness. It's to bring awakened awareness, to bring spiritual life into every single moment of our parenting.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
So spirituality is not the thing we do only on Sunday or Saturday or only at prayer at dinner. Spirituality is the golden thread that we use through every moment of parenting. Spirituality is the conversation in the front seat of the SUV when you just lost the game and you just didn't get into your first choice college. And you know what? Maybe the universe has a plan for you.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
Maybe God wants something for you that you don't even know exists yet. Let's do the red door, yellow door practice. I wonder what's on the other side of this hairpin turn. So parenting from a spiritual perspective is making ourselves available as spiritual moms, as spiritual dads, as spiritual grandparents. Grandparents are tremendously important. How do we do that?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
How do we help our children understand us spiritually and support? How do we support our children spiritually? There's four things we can do as parents. The first is be transparent about your own spiritual life. So meditate in a visible place and say, do you want to sit by my side? Read poetry in nature. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood as we're hiking at a fork. Say a prayer out loud.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
When you do that, It says something tremendously important, life-changing to your children. We talk about the spiritual reality. It has a language and a way in. It is real. The spiritual reality is real. And our relationship in our home, in our family, goes to the bedrock depth of the spiritual reality. That's a whole different family.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
Oh, yes. I'm not looking to reproduce myself. I'm not looking for three little Lisas. I hope that by speaking authentically of my spiritual path, praying out loud, using the roadmap of spiritual reality every single day, my children then are authorized to listen to their own inner spiritual compass.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
Young people, these are very open, spiritual young adults. Meaning what? Well, they're born with an exquisite wiring to experience the deeper nature of life and see that in one another. And in fact, they're reaching for it by being careful about how they speak to each other and about human rights and animal rights. They're reaching for it. Gen Z is beautiful.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
We have given them a pretty empty two-thirds embrace, a pretty empty bucket of how to cultivate natural spirituality. And so they're searching for And to Gen Z, I say, you've got everything you need. It's a quest. You've got hardwired inability to feel and know the deeper nature of life. But what we failed to give you was the certainty that that was hard, valid knowing.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
We told you that things are only real if you can point your finger and touch them. We became, really, it's called radical materialism. It's only real if you can touch it. It's only real if you can measure it. That is tremendously disavowing. of the birthright of inner knowing. That is tremendously abnegating. It gets in the way of natural spiritual awareness.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
So Gen Z, we're sorry, but you still are built to be on a quest. And I know that you will find a relationship to your higher power. It is there. What are the steps? One, find your way to the presence. Some people do this through meditation and prayer. Some people find their way to the presence through pilgrimage. Some people use hallucinogens. It doesn't matter how you open, right?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
But once you find your way to the presence, it's important you can get back. And how do you get back? That is your practice. Find the presence in your practice to get back. Are you at it alone? Well, sometimes, but you need to be able to share this experience with other people, your spiritual people. So you have your practice, your people, And now it's time to understand what life throws you.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
What is life showing me now on spiritual grounds? That's your path. And finally, what's this all for? Not am I going to be a doctor, a teacher, a media presence. I'm going to be a soul on earth with a higher purpose. And when you can take those five pieces,
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
and go from feeling the presence, maybe once a fleeting time on a mountaintop, on an ayahuasca trip, in a moment of love, if you can take that fleeting moment of feeling the presence and turn that into a life, a fully integrated spiritual life, then life will do more than meet you halfway.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
And it all comes from one source, which is the atrophy of our spiritual core in global civil society. There's an antidote. There's an antidote. To all the stress and depression and addiction and suicidality, there's an antidote to the horrific ethics right now in our culture. There's an antidote, and it's one source, and it's the reignition of our natural spiritual awareness.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
Everyone on earth can do this. We can shift the conversation to be a foundationally spiritual conversation, and that pulls forward who we really are.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
The antidote to the mass mental health crisis is spirituality. Mel, when we look at the statistics with the sharp decline in mental health, there has been concomitant decline in personal spirituality. The two go hand in hand statistically. Why has this happened? Well, I think many people in struggling with their family faith tradition have thrown the spiritual baby out with the bathwater.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
They have lost sight of their deep spiritual bearings.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
I am so thrilled to be here, Mel. I love what you have put into our world, and it's a blessing to be here with this extraordinary woman.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
Mel, when we do MRI studies of the brain, we see a thick cortex across the regions of the awakened brain in people who day in and day out sustain their spiritual life. It could be walks in nature. It could be meditation or prayer. It could have been right action, service.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
Whatever their MO, their spiritual MO, people who live and breathe every day a dialogue with the deeper nature of life have a thicker, stronger brain across the regions of the awakened brain. So you have a healthier brain when you are living a spiritual life? You have a much healthier brain.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
And in fact, the regions that become thick and strong through sustained spiritual life are the very same regions that are not thick and strong, but thin. in people with recurrent major depression. What does that mean? I don't even understand what that means. So that means that we all have a brain that's very sensitive to how we live.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
And if we live a spiritual life, it gets thick and strong and we see deeper dimensions and yellow doors. But if we ignore this opportunity that we've been given to see life through spiritual eyes, the brain itself is... weaker, thinner, and less likely to perceive huge opportunities that lay before us. And I don't just mean opportunities for money or fame or him or her.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
I mean, the opportunity to live in alignment with your spiritual path.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
What does that tell you, Dr. Lisa? Well, it's absolutely a fact over hundreds of peer-reviewed studies that a strong spiritual, often spiritual and religious life, but a strong spiritual life is more protective against the diseases of despair and Thank you. We can strengthen our spiritual core in religion. Many people do, about two-thirds of us.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
We can strengthen the spiritual core outside of religion in nature.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
When we recover from despair through spiritual awakening, our brain tends to give off a very specific wavelength. You can measure it? We measure it with an EEG cap. And it is called High Amplitude Alpha. High Amplitude Alpha. Now, Mel, we talked about how two-thirds of depressions are actually spiritual hunger for more, for meaning. So two-thirds of depression are spiritual hunger.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
Two-thirds of depressions are spiritual hunger. The yearning for more, the existential empty bucket, the sense that there's somehow I'm not enough actually exists. is the not enoughness of how I'm being in the world, what I'm feeling in the world. It's not that I'm not big enough or rich enough or doing it enough.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
The not enoughness is a sense that there's a deeper, fuller way of being and connecting to the force of life. It could be that we are built to move through phases of despair so that we can deepen our spiritual awareness and connect more profoundly to the nature of life.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
Yes. We are built for tragedy and despair because we are built with a spiritual way of seeing and knowing. There's nothing that can break us because there is absolutely nothing that is more powerful than our direct spiritual connection to the deeper nature of life.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
And while I don't believe it, I see it through the evidence of science. Even better. I don't have to believe it because science is proving. Science has proven that there's nothing as protective against deep depression than a strong spiritual life. And there's nothing as curative in the path of trauma and addiction as in learning to hand it over, to be in the transcendent relationship.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
you will be able to see into the deeper nature of life and live a far more profound and meaningful journey. And that is you. There is no one left out. Everyone can do this.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
Yes, because curiosity is the force talking through you. If you're curious, if you're hungry, if you wonder, If you don't want to just kick it aside because you sense you might have short-circuited something in your own life, then that may just be the force moving through you. I invite your curiosity. Science does not say that the people who have all the answers are healthier and less depressed.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
Science says that the people on a spiritual quest are happier, less depressed, healthier, and have more deep running committed relationships, more purpose and meaning in their life. We don't need to have the answers, but we are built. In fact, it's a human imperative to be seekers and on a spiritual journey.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
You are on a spiritual journey. My hope for you is not that you get what you wanted, but that you discover what the universe has in store for you.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
What a joy to be with you, Mel. Thank you for who you are and what you put in our world.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
No matter where you are on that scale, you are a spiritual being. You are built spiritually. naturally spiritual. And so this conversation applies to everybody equally. There is no one on earth who's not spiritual.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
Yes. Mel, might we try and invite everyone into a practice? Sure. Okay. This is a practice that was given to me, I always thank the teacher, by the late Dr. Gary Weaver. whose focus was on working with people who said, ah, not for me, the spiritual stuff. Okay. And it's a direct practice in the language of life, shall we? Yes, let's do it.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
Okay, I invite you to close your eyes if you'd like, clear out your inner space with five breaths. And in your inner space, in your inner chamber, I invite you to set before you a table. This is your table. And to your table, you may invite anyone, living or deceased, who truly has your best interest in mind.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
And now you may invite your higher self, the part of you that is so much more than anything you may have done or not done, anything you may have or not have, your true eternal higher self, and ask you if you love you.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
And now finally, you may invite your higher power. Whatever word is yours, however you know, your higher power. And ask your higher power if they love you. And now with all of these people sitting here right now, what do they need to share? What do they need to tell you now?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
So Mel, you're living an awakened life. What does that mean? It means that you are aware in all those beautiful images that we are loved and held, we are guided, and we are never alone. Every one of us is built to be able to perceive that we are loved and held, guided, and never alone. These are not beliefs. These are deep lived experiences. So Dr. Lisa, what is spirituality?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
So human spirituality has three pieces. One is that we are built to see into the deeper profound nature of life. The second is that the deeper nature of life is real, alive, and guiding. And the third is that when you put the two together, every single day we have the opportunity to choose to live in dialogue with the deeper force of life, every one of us.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
You're physically wired to tap into it.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
And alive and working. Even if you ignore it, it's alive and working. But point three is if you are in dialogue, your life unfolds entirely differently.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
Understanding This Will Change How You Experience Your Entire Life
Every moment of my waking life, I'm not controlling my life. I'm not wishing my life to go a certain direction. I'm an open observer. to what the universe is saying to me now. At every moment in my life, I am an open observer, ready to perceive the direction of the universe. Some people call the deeper nature of life the universe or source. They'll say, I have felt touched by source.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Oh, yeah.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Deep rest. Because deep rest means that we go into the deepest sleep. We go to the dream world where we meet the infinite.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And when we wake up from deep rest, we are replenished. Refreshed. We are bright.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And the same is true with awakening. That after and through depression, we don't solve it. We don't figure it out. You don't have a pro and com list to get out of a depression. We don't churn what I call our achieving brain. I'm going to strategize my way out of depression. I'm going to research my way out of depression. There's another side of our brain, which is our awakening.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
our awakened brain. And just as in the dream world, we receive great replenishment, great renewal, great direction in our dreams. We know that we're loved. We know that we're guided. We awaken through, in the daytime, a depression into an awakening. We come to see that in our darkest, most painful moment, we don't fall through a black hole. We don't back fall into an abyss. But we're buoyant.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
We're actually caught. We're held.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And that's not something that you sort of figure out. It's something that you experience. It's something you feel in your heart and in your body. It is perceived. So spirituality is not a belief. It is the capacity to perceive.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
So it will never get us out of depression ever to use substances. But the desire that's often behind substance use is to transcend. Very often, when we look at the data, transcendence, which is really only found through a spiritual process— is so desired, the heart so hungers for spiritual awakening that we can take the tricky kind of cheap backdoor. Okay, I'll just have a few more drinks.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Okay, you know, I'm just going to do some form of as if I had transcended experience. And so we can note, hey, okay, I'm looking for transcendence. Is there a way that really has legs under it? How can I get there without the drugs? Because, you know, the impulse to go deeper is the hunger of the spiritual heart. How do we honor that? And every tradition on earth shows us a way.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
It doesn't matter if I'm Hindu or Muslim or Jewish or Catholic or Christian. It doesn't matter if I'm someone who walks in the forest or along the beach. It can be through deep service that we realize, hey, we're not alone. Altruism, love of neighbor. And we wake up and say, okay, I shoveled my neighbor's driveway. Okay, I babysat for this couple that's like out of their wits.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And suddenly, I'm not alone. And wait a minute, the world isn't fractured and lonely. The way we act brings into our inner being the nature of reality.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
If I am loving, love of neighbor, okay, right now we just had an election. I don't care if you voted red, blue, or purple. I love you. I love you as a fellow parent on the soccer sidelines. I love you as someone at work with whom I've got to get this job done. I love you as my friend of 30 years.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
In fact, I'm not even going to ask you who you voted for because it is not nearly as important as that we're souls on earth walking the earth at the same time, that we're sharing this journey. And in fact, in fact, it's radical love, it's civic love that is our responsibility. The government doesn't build civic love. We build civic love, the civic bond, and everything goes from there.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Every single person on earth is born with a capacity for spiritual awareness, but it is one-third innate, two-thirds environmentally formed. So our parents and grandparents, the 10,000 exchanges by the locker, If you're part of a faith community, the pastor, priest, imam, rabbi, no matter who it is in the first two decades of life, all weigh in to shape our natural spiritual awareness.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And as we get older, we pick our environment. We pick if we meditate and awaken. We pick if we pray and connect with our higher power.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
It is a choice. Handing it over is the way out of addiction. Handing it over is the way out of trauma. But we wait until we tank to hand it over when, in fact, we were built from the day we were born to be in a sustained relationship with our higher power. Wow. Why don't we realize that?
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Because the gift of the two-thirds of the environment being taught, being shown, praying, meditating by the side of a parent, hearing people talk about, you know what? I just lost my job, but I know that God has a plan for me. You know what? We were just robbed, but that's okay.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
I saw the full community come around me, and I know that we're never alone, and everyone in this neighborhood is an ambassador of our higher power.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
So overload. Yes. But you know who the one agent in this story is who is unflappable? It is you. And so you have every choice to be an agent of God. I don't care what is thrown at me. I don't care how much it hurts. I don't care if I'm loved back. I'm going to choose to love. Why? Why? Because it's the path to the deep, most buoyant love that we can feel.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Yes. Oh, it's so important, Lewis. May I share with you, I had the really life-changing experience to visit His Holiness the Dalai Lama a couple months ago. And I asked him a very metaphysical question that his resident scientists like. He wasn't interested. Not at all, Dr. Miller.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Next time. Next time. Next time. Well, so we'll show this forward. The Dalai Lama was not interested in my abstruse metaphysical question.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
The question I asked the Dalai Lama was, is it not the case that all living beings have a transcendent faculty through which they feel the unit of reality? So that the love that's transferred in the mother's milk to the human is the same love experienced by the baby goat or baby calf. And he looked at that and he said, you must love.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
One message. And then he went on to clarify his singular point, which is love is a practice. Love is a choice. So love is not just a feeling. Oh, it feels so nice to love. Okay, everyone's forsaken me. I don't feel love. I don't feel God's love. It hurts. That hurts real. We're not minimizing that, right? But that's not the story of love. Love is a choice. Love is a practice.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
So I've been betrayed, I've been hurt so terribly, and I'm going to choose to love more deeply. Really?
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Because it is the only way to feel the ultimate deep connection with the source of life, who I call God. It's your word. The universe chooses Hashem, your word. But this ultimate connection is the core of who we are. We are built, Louis, as an open system. We are built, designed in our biology to be in a sustained connection with the deeper force in life.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
We are built in our biology to be in a lived, daily, transcendent relationship. You can call that anything you want, but it is essential to being whole, to guiding ourselves. We can't navigate this earth as command control, as if we're the agent of all choice and power. the anthropocentric view. That is the source of pain. We don't control everything. How much do we control?
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
When we do a good job and we research and strategize, somewhere between 2% and 5%. Wow. 95%, the most important things in our lives, how do they come? So to really have a bigger life, to really be successful, is to be in dialogue with the source of life. And Lewis, you live this way. Yes. How did you find the true love of your life?
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Did you do a pro and com list or did a dialogue with the universe bring her?
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
So the Dalai Lama was right. Love is a choice.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Well, the proof's in the pudding. Yeah. Because there's a real Marta and a real relationship.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
When you met Marta, was there some sort of thing in your heart that you'd met something significant in your past? Someone of significance in your past?
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Yes. And focused on the spiritual.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
What a discipline.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
How did you realize? When was the awareness that not only are you spiritual friends, this is your spiritual life partner?
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And you listened to that.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Can you describe that feeling?
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Peace in your heart.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
100%.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
There's a godly bond.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
So, Lewis, we've even looked through the MRI and seen that when there's deep love, deep, deep spiritual love, godly love between two people, We are using the same circuits as when we talk directly to God. So as I may turn to my higher power, who I call God, I feel that same presence and love towards my husband. Wow. And that's after 30 years. Wow. So it lasts.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
We have charted this very precisely. And the first thing that everyone needs to know is that we are all capable of awakening. Every brain is built to awaken. Nobody's left out. But it's a choice. It is a choice and it is a practice.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
A spiritually connected brain is compared to one that has yet to do the work. Has three components. The first is that just as we are loved and held as children in our parents' or grandparents' arms, the bonding network comes up online and we can feel that we are loved and held. So, Lewis, that's not a belief. Our brain perceives. Mm-hmm.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
It feels it because we are detecting something real.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
It's not a brain in the box that made up, isn't it nice to feel love?
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
It believes it is loved and held. The brain perceives transcendent love.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
So we're moving here from the 20th century view of the brain that makes thoughts, like the brain in the box, to the emerging view of the brain that is like an antenna that receives thoughts or inspiration or transcendent presence. So when we receive God's presence— As incarnate beings, the bonding network comes up online, and we watch it through the fMRI that tracks blood flow.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
We watch the bonding network literally engage as we experience and receive God's love.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
It's, well— We are at peace. We have less stress. Cortisol goes down. There's a whole host of downstream problems from dysregulated cortisol, dysregulated diurnal patterns of cortisol. So when we sustain a relationship with God through practice, through prayer— Through meditation, through how we treat each other, as you just described, the choice of godly relationships.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
We literally host and welcome. God chooses when God shows up that we can invite and welcome God. And when we feel God's presence, when God touches us, the bonding network comes up online as we are incarnate and shows that we are loved and held. The second circuit that we all have is that there's multiple forms of attention. There's the bowling alley attention, which is— Narrow focus. Narrow focus.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And there's times for that, right? We need that discipline. But the bowling alley alone is insufficient. I've got to have it. I've got to get that job. I'm going to do A plus B plus C to close that deal. Okay. That is not an accurate map onto the structure of reality because life is full of surprises and hard left turns. And we have another attention network.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
There's another system of awareness, which is not our dorsal attention but our ventral attention where the floodlights come on and the world becomes a lot bigger and brighter and a new direction pops. And that allows us to receive guidance. What's that step called? So we are loved and held, as we all have a bonding network, and we are guided. We are built to receive divine guidance.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
We are built to perceive direction from the universe. Loved and held guided. And the third circuit, the third component of the awakened brain that we're all built with, ready to go, is that... You, Lewis, are in your chair, and I'm over here in mine. And we also have friends in New York and Cincinnati and London and Des Moines, right? We are separate beings.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And at the same time, we're part of this great oneness.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
The brain is built to receive and perceive separateness and oneness.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
The parietal region. puts in and out hard boundaries. As blood flows through the parietal region, we see that, okay, I have my zipped up bio-body suit and we're all wonderfully diverse and we live in different chairs. And at the same time, we're part of one family of life. We're part of one unit of consciousness. That capacity allows us to know we're never alone.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
That is the oneness. So if you add up all three circuits that run together, they don't run separately, we are loved and held. We are guided and we are never alone. That awakened brain is yours. It is there for everyone.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
We feel unloved. We feel lost and we feel completely painfully lonely. And that excruciating pain is a big bang at the door. It's an invitation to start to practice awakening, to start to use your awakened brain.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
There is no greater way. There is no profound and robust and enduring way to move out of despair as to awaken spiritually.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
So medication, I'm not against medication if you're in terrible pain and it's urgent and you need it now. Do whatever it takes to keep yourself buoyant.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
But that said, when we take away the medication, the majority of the time the pain comes back. as does the deep existential feeling of unlovedness, isolation, of being lost. Why is that? Because we have yet to engage our awakened awareness. We have yet to engage our spiritual capacity. We have a donut-sized hole because we haven't deployed this gift we're all given.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
We have within every brain the neurofoundation for a relationship with God. We have within every human being the inborn capacity, actually the inborn imperative, to be in relationship with our higher power.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Well... It's very easy to feel isolated, to feel lost, because the rich two-thirds embrace the socialization of our natural spirituality. Our environment. Our environment, our culture is pretty silent.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And yet we can choose to cultivate every single thing you've said. So 40 years ago in the United States, there was a decision made. It was made with a good intention to be inclusive, which was to throw all religion out of the public square. And you remember, we take down the Christmas tree, take down the Hanukkah. We're not talking about religion.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Someone's going to be left out. And the intention was good, which was to be inclusive. But it actually was radically exclusive. Everyone was left out. Wow. And we had an ice age, 40 years of an ice age. Wow. Where people don't talk about spiritual and religious life at work, at school, at a cocktail party, at a dinner party.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Yes.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Yes, but society now has grown up, and we've become much more pluralistic. We can comfortably talk about different genders and race and orientation as part of the fabric of our culture. It's time now to be pluralistic when it comes to our spiritual life. I want to know you. I want to hear about Diwali or Ramadan or Hanukkah or Christmas.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
I want to hear about the crossing of your grandmother, and I want to hear about the baby that came into your life in the deepest, most important way.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
The most important gift we give our children is a strong spiritual core. In fact, I would even go so far to say there is nothing that a parent needs to do more than strengthen their child's natural spiritual awareness. How do I do that? Every parent wants to know. Okay, look at those statistics. Your child will be less at risk for addiction, depression. In this epidemic,
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
82% protected against suicide when spiritual life is shared. Suicide is tragically the number one killer of high school students. Well, really? It's come to rival auto accidents. So it's not cancer or COVID by our own hand. And yet we have the antidote.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
I mean, Lewis, if I said, here's a pill, and you can give this pill to every high school student in the United States, and they are four-fifths protected against the epidemic of suicide, what school wouldn't give that out every day at lunch? What parent wouldn't give that to their child? And yet we have the antidote in us already.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And it's the realization of how we are built to be in a sustained connection to God or a higher power. Why is this not happening? Why is this not happening? Well, I think you hit the nail on the head. Parents don't know how, and they don't know if they're spiritual enough. So I went on the road. I thought it was going to be three weeks. It was three years with my first book, The Spiritual Child.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
So as half the United States and half of most of the post-industrial world is depressed.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And parents would raise their hand, and they'd ask questions. How do I help my child be more spiritual? What is spirituality? When parents started to cry was when they said, am I spiritual? So people don't know if as a mother, as a father, I'm spiritual enough. And the answer is you don't need to be because your child is spiritual.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And all you need to do is listen and be totally in awe of your child.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Yes.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
But you know what? Parents are so in love with their child that if we can just hold our tongue and listen, your child is going to come up and say, you know, I saw grandma.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Or your child is going to come up and say, does God love evil people too? And those are incredible moments. We don't need the answer. We can simply hold the moment and say, wow. Because often the child's actually not looking for an answer. They're looking to engage in the spiritual realm. Wow. And so they're really saying, can you walk with me here?
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
We have unprecedented supply of food. We have unprecedented quality of medical care. We are a very well-provided for society and still our inner life hurts. It hurts. And depression isn't just feeling sad. Depression can be an edginess. You know, a lot of times people are grumpy or hostile. Depression can be the sense of dread creeping up on us and anxiety like the boogeyman inside.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
The child's question is, is an opening for the child to learn to listen to their own heart. So we can say, you know, deep in your inner wisdom, What does your heart say? Or we can say, you know, do you want to sit with me now in meditation or prayer and see what comes to you as the answer to that?
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Teach the child to receive their own spiritual answers. I can tell you a story about that. I adopted my son from an orphanage north of St. Petersburg, Russia, the most delicious little boy on earth, madly in love with this little boy.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
He was 10 months when he came home. Wow. I knew right away that this sort of, you know, secular materialist culture was going to tell him a big story about not having been wanted and why did that mother leave you. And so I was going to get ahead of this.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And the way I was going to get ahead of this with my husband and I together was by talking about our authentic spiritual journey to finding Isaiah. Yeah. So from day one, we said, you know, we had really been five years list. We prayed hard for five years before we found Isaiah. And so from day one, Isaiah was a little 10-month voice, used to hearing Russian.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And we said, Isaiah, Mommy and Daddy, we prayed for Isaiah. And Grandma prayed for Isaiah. And Grandpa prayed for Isaiah. And everybody prayed for Isaiah because Mommy and Daddy had been crying for you. And then one day we heard they'd found Isaiah. And we took little baby, a plane, to a train, to an automobile, kids love transportation. Ran up the hill and there, there was Isaiah.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And we'd throw him in the air and we'd celebrate. The finding Isaiah story. And that's, you know, when he was one, two, somewhere around four. He got a little older, and they like symbolic stories. So here was little Isaiah. He loved to play in our backyard by a little creek, a river. And we'd point at the river. We'd squish his toes, and we'd say, Isaiah, you see this river here?
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
You came down this river. You were our baby Moses. Wow. And he'd say, I'm baby Moses. Say, that's right, Isaiah. Yeah. You came down. God sent you to us. So this was the story of finding Isaiah for a four-year-old. And we always told Isaiah the spiritual story of finding Isaiah. So sure enough, Louis, now he's eight. Driving my SUV, everything in parenting happens from the second row.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
His best friend Johnny's back there. Mommy, mommy, Johnny says, my name is not Miller, you are not my mother, and I am not Jewish. Wow. And I took a big breath. The day had come.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Right. And sure enough, that's right, he was prepared. And I held my tongue, prayed, and Isaiah whips around, turns to Johnny and says, I'm baby Moses. And Johnny said, what? And he said, no, I'm baby Moses. And pretty soon, Isaiah realized that Johnny just didn't understand, but that he was baby Moses. Mommy, this time more desperate, more agitated.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Mommy, Johnny says, what about the woman who gave me up? The story I'd always knew was coming. Yes. Ten years before, I expected it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But there it was. Again, I held my breath, said a prayer. And from the second row, oh, I know. God whispered in her ear and said that you were crying for me.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
So if we support the natural spiritual knowing of the child, when the tough questions come, they're ready to receive and perceive a spiritual answer directly from God. He, like every child on earth, has an awakened brain. But as parents, we build that day-in and day-out sense that just as you and your new wife are Have God in that bond.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Viewing your new wife and God willing, your children will have God in that bond. And our message to Isaiah from day one was that this is a family built by God.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Depression can be not wanting to eat, lying in bed, not having our game on at all for So depression is not just sadness. It's really powering down. And for a very long time, there was, most of the 20th century, people would say, depression, well, we can see that it has biological correlates. We can see that there's correlates in the brain.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And it's true.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
100%.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Depression, that's a medical illness, always and only, uniformly. But over here, you know, there's these people who are religious or they're spiritual and religious. That might be nice for them. But the view in the 20th century in much of mental health was that that's somehow a band-aid or a crutch. Religion or spirituality. It's somehow a crutch.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
It's a magnificent love story.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And the deep question is, what is life showing me now? What is God revealing to me now? What has my higher power just put in my path?
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
The more we pay attention to synchronicity, the more we are able to perceive synchronicity. And on the one hand, it's because we strengthen our eye. We know, yes, this is real. We take it to heart. We think about and reflect on what it might mean, and then we act on it. You chose to go another day to both of you to look at this more deeply, to walk a little further.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
But that only happened because you said, wow, this is way too unprobabilistic to have happened by chance. This touches my heart in a deeper way. This has that type of high pixel hit that has information that's yet to unfold before me.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
That is now the outdated—it was very prevalent for a long time—point of view. What we now know from science— is that just as depression has neural correlates, our spiritual awareness has neural correlates. We can track in the brain the circuits undergirding a transcendent relationship. And that's true no matter what religion you may be or if you're any religion at all.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Yes. And you knew it.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
So say yes to it. And we all have this capacity. Say yes to it. This is real. reflect what it might mean and then act on it.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
It's a practice. So the first time I might sort of be a little curious, wait a minute, I was just thinking about this guy. I haven't seen him in six years and he's right here. The same day I'm thinking of him. Or, you know, I have this question on my mind. Do I want to go, you know, east or west this summer? And a guy sits down on the bus next to me and says, you got to go west this summer.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
So that might catch my attention and seem unlikely. But I'm not sold yet because I'm a skeptic. And the skeptic's okay. The skeptic's welcome. The skeptic can even fuel the deepening of the journey.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Show me more.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And so when we actually allow ourselves to be curious, we start noticing how abundant. the universe really is, how generous God is in laying synchronicities in our paths to guide us. So the more we say, yes, this is real, the more we say, I'm going to reflect, I'm going to act on this, the more the next time we're quick to identify synchronicity. It's less likely to slip through our fingers.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
So when I started paying attention to synchronicities, I'd catch maybe one in three. And then it meant a path. And now I've lived this way for 30 years, and I catch 90%. I miss balls, right? But even when we do, it comes around another day in another way.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Because we're on our path. We don't have to be perfect to be on the path.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
So I open my day, and everyone has their own language and their own practice, but I can share with you mine. So I open each morning with a prayer. I go outdoors, and I mean, you know, it can be a sunny, bright day, or it can be freezing cold and snowing, and I go outdoors. And I open by saying, loving God, my word is God, thank you for a new day.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Thank you for sun and air and earth and water and trees and birds and for all living beings of the air, earth, and water and beyond. Please bless our family of life, and please bless, as a parent, our family. And I name our family. And then I say, please may I be present to you. Please use me as a vessel to serve you in love.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
that I might be you, see you, and act you, because all of us are emanations, like rays of the sun of God. Lewis, you are God, and the magnificent Marta is God, and all your friends and family and trees and birds are God. So may I be you and realize our being. May I see you in Lewis and in Marta and all living beings, and may I act you.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And please, at the end, I say, may I serve you in love, and please bless you, God. I saw that when I've been to holy sites. Please bless you, God, unto yourself. And then I've opened the day in service. So each day is an adventure. It's a spiritual adventure. I don't know where I'm going. I don't know who I get to meet. I don't know if it's going to hurt or feel good.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
It could be a day of tremendous loss. It could be a day of great discovery. But it is always a sacred adventure. So I don't need to have control. And in a world that's highly volatile, none of us have control. I mean, we have 2%, 4% control.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
So whether I'm Hindu or Catholic or Christian or Muslim or Jewish and spiritual but not religious, the same circuits run as I perceive a deep, sacred, transcendent relationship. I can say I feel a oneness with life. I can feel that nature is my sanctuary. I can say that God or Jesus or Hashem or Allah walks with me. However I understand the transcendent relationship, I'm using my awakened brain.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
But to have a really big, magnificent life is not to have the whole thing tightly clenched between our hands, but to have a stance, a sure-footed stance in quest. What God do you reveal to me now? What universe do you ask of me now? How might I love more deeply? The quest is the sure-footedness. And anything that comes...
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
whether it's wind or tornado or the love of my life, is part of this great spiritual adventure. It is the Star Wars of spiritual adventure.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
In dream life, yes. Because the very same symbol... that guides us through synchronicity, that you both had the child on your phone, is the very same symbolic language in our dreams and in our mystical experiences. It's a symbolic universe.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And we're being talked to all the time. And we're built to listen. So we're whole and we're guided and we're not anxious. And we have love and connection when we are an open system to God. And we are isolated and our heart hurts like hell when we're not connected.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Oh, very important. So important.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Yes. Yes. And that is exactly right. how that happens. So here's the flame of truth, God's presence, the fire. And here's the torch, and here's just me, the human torchbearer. And when we meet, particularly as children or adolescents, teenagers are exquisitely aware, when we meet a torchbearer who talks about the flame. The light. The light, the truth, but who does not walk the walk.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
When we see hypocrisy, there's a tendency to throw out the flame. Now, as a torchbearer, I could be a little foibled. I could be maybe hypocritical.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Say one thing and do another. Or I could be quite egregiously foibled and transgress. And the more that the torchbearer has failed the message, the more pain in the child and the more likely the child is to throw out the flame.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Now, the good news is that a spiritual injury can be healed. Spiritual injury can always be healed because every one of us has the God-given inborn innate capacity to connect to the transcendent relationship, has the inborn capacity to renew the connection with our higher power. How? And there's two ways. One is we meet a torchbearer who does walk the walk. Right.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Yes, someone who embodied is holding the flame and does walk in step, who is loving, who is unconditionally devoted, who speaks of God with the same love that they move out towards us. And that could be a parent. It could be a counselor. It could be a coach. It could be anyone. Right. The second way is that we can invite one another to have a direct connection to the flame.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And in some faith traditions, that can be through prayer or fellowship, but there's also practices in the language of life. And in fact, Lewis, I had... a very dear colleague, the late Dr. Gary Weaver, who for 36 years worked with boys who had been transgressed by torchbearers.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And some of these boys had been so transgressed, they didn't want to hear about religion, they didn't want to hear about spirituality, and they'd be so abused that they'd become abusers. Oh, man. And so the third time this young fellow would go before the judge, in came Dr. Weaver. And the judge said, okay, he loved Dr. Weaver. He said, you have a choice.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
young man, 15, 18 years old, you can go to prison.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And then done the same thing.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And he'd said, no, you can go to jail. Or you can go out into the Moab Desert with Dr. Weaver. And there he shared with them a practice that invited them right back to the flame. Wow. And I've done this practice, Louis, with bankers in Midtown. I've done this practice with generals in the U.S. Army. I've done this with kids sleeping under the Brooklyn Bridge.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
There is one awakened brain. 7.2 billion people on Earth have the same awakened brain.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
I've done this with everybody because there's one awakened brain and there's one source of all life, who I call God. You pick your term. And we can all get back to the flame. May we try it?
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Okay. It's 90 seconds. It's in the language of life. I'm going to invite you to close your eyes, clear out your inner space. In your inner chamber, I invite you to set before you a table. This is your table. And to your table, you may invite anyone living or deceased who truly has your best interest in mind. Anyone living or deceased who truly has your best interest in mind.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And with them all sitting there, ask them if they love you. And now you may invite your higher self, the part of you that's so much more than anything you may have or not have, anything you may have done or not done, your true eternal higher self. And ask you if you love you. Now finally, you may invite your higher power. Whatever your word, however you know, your higher power.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
So very often, depression is not always a medical illness. In fact, as we look two-thirds of the time, depression is not a medical illness. You can track its biological correlates as you can track the spiritual correlates, but that doesn't make it an illness. When you're lifting weights, you can track the biological correlates. That doesn't make it an illness. It's a strength, right?
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And ask 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 show you now? What do you need to know? When you're ready, I invite you back.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Well, it turns out that depression is actually... A hunger for spiritual awakening, at least two-thirds of the time. Why is this happening to me? Why did she leave me? Why did I lose my money? I just feel horrible. Yesterday, everything was fine. That hunger, just like we're hungry for food and we're thirsty, is the body, the mind, the soul. It's all one, body, mind, and soul, screaming hunger.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Hosting counsel.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And everyone at the table is a sacred, transcendent relationship, whether they're embodied or not embodied, whether they're here on earth or they've crossed over. Every single person, those who truly have our best interest in mind, our higher selves and our higher power. And we are built to be in that deep relationship. So hosting counsel is a way that we can reclaim our birthright.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And the proof's in the pudding because who comes around the corner but Marta?
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
So the question ultimately is answered by our lived walk when we actually awaken and we perceive that we're loved, held, guided, and part of the great oneness, never alone. And then we show up for one another in service, as you said so beautifully, to be loving, holding, guiding, and never leave anyone alone, then we're living an awakened life. And that is the glorious life that is our birthright.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
So purpose is written in and through us and in and through our past. It's not something that we need to develop on an eight-point list, but it's something that we can discover. Lewis, may we do one more practice?
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Okay. This practice I call the road of life.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
for an expanded awareness. Life as I'm living it, life as I'm seeing it, has gotten too small. And just as I grow in height or weight or maturity or my eyes change as I get older, our spiritual life changes. All of us.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
I invite you to locate a time where you wanted something so badly. That red door was yours. You wanted that job, that school, that team. You wanted him or her or them to say yes, and you did everything right to get that red door. You researched it. You were tactical. You strategized A plus B plus C. That red door was yours. You go for your red door. You grab the handle, but the handle's stuck.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And you can't believe it's stuck because you've done everything right, A plus B plus C. You might kick the door. You might rattle the handle. But only because it is stuck, you have to pivot. You pivot 40, 80, 120 degrees and over there. Over there is a wide open, sparkling yellow door. You might have said yellow doors don't exist. You've never heard of yellow doors.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
On the other side of the yellow door is someone who makes you feel alive, is a job that's more right for you, is a mentor who sees in you beyond what you knew was in yourself, a community where you belong. That yellow door was not what you had wanted. It was better and better for you.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And as you sit back now and you think of the stuck red door and the hairpin turn that took you to the wide open yellow door that has everything to do with who you are and where you are today, Was there anyone at that hairpin turn who maybe told you a story? You could have met them for two minutes at a party or in a coffee shop.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
It could have been a counselor, a grandparent who for the first time shared a story you'd never heard before, a trail angel pointing you to the wide-opening yellow door. And now finally as you sit way back, stuck red door, hairpin turn, trail angel, and wide open yellow door. How really are the most important parts of our lives found? Is it narrowly through planning? Sure, we have to do our part.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
But are we less makers of our paths and more discoverers of our journey? And are some of the most profound and important parts of our lives gifts of being in a deep dialogue with the journey of life? And in fact, stuck red door, hairpin turn, trail angel, open yellow door. Where in your road of life is your higher power? Where is God? Is God in the wide open yellow door and the stuck red door?
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Is God in the trail angel and in your openness to be in dialogue with the deep sacred force in us, through us, and around us? Have you been on a spiritual path all along? When you're ready, I invite you back.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
The road of life.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Which is a spiritual path. We're never off the path. When we're depressed, we're on the path. When we're errant, we're on the path.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Well, in The Awakened Brain, I write about what almost broke us, which was my husband and I for five years struggled with infertility. Oh, man. Wow. You know, Lewis, people do not talk about infertility enough. And since sharing the awakened brain, men and women, but primarily men, have come up to me and said, you know, my wife and I struggled for three years. No one talked about it.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
So when I was maybe about 19, I fell in love for the first time. I mean, it was flat in love. I couldn't believe it. I'd never been in love before. And he was perfect. He looked like a sculpture in a museum. Very nice. He thought I was so interesting. I thought he was so interesting. And he said, I love you. I said, you love me? I love you. And that was after three months.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
There was no one—none of my buddies I could talk about this with. You know, the right child comes in the right way at the right time. Becoming a parent is part of the road of life. And whether it's because you carried a child or carried two or three children or through marriage or through adoption, your spiritual child comes. God makes families.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
By far the hardest time for us was the struggle to find our children in all time and space.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
I was deeply depressed that we weren't conceiving.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
So I was 30. My husband was 31.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Six-month range. Which was emergence, emerging adulthood. And it was what I now know to be a hardwired spiritual emergence that first boots up an existential struggle. When we expand our spiritual capacity, it first feels like a half-empty glass of spirituality.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
But this was different because while there are three bridges of spiritual emergence, developmental depressions that open into awakening, if we say yes, there are also hailstorms and rainstorms and very unwanted life events, traumas.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And those are also a knock at the door for spiritual awakening, post-traumatic spiritual growth, a spiritual response to suffering.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
So my greatest discovery through our struggle of five years to find our family. was that depression was the prison house of my ego.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
That I had made myself miserable. I wanted a family so badly. I was so depressed we weren't conceiving. There are half a million children in foster care. There are 20 million children up for adoption around the world. I could have been a parent in three months, and I made myself miserable.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Because of my ego, my narrow view of what a parent was. And where the world opened up to me was when I realized in this very painful, long journey that what a parent is is profound love and ultimate commitment. And it does not matter if they have my nose or, you know— Your DNA. Yes, at all. Huh. It is God brings the soul on earth that is your child.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And that child is your spiritual child. In the same way that you met Marta, your child comes, whether it's through Marta's body or four through Marta's body and two from another country on earth. Those are your spiritual children.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And through the road of life, God makes sure you find each other. And you know in the same way that you knew Marta was your spiritual partner, that this is your spiritual child.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Be up for this grand adventure. Open your eyes to the guidance. Now, as it turns out, God is good and the universe is abundant, and the synchronicities come back and the road of life rises up to meet us. So it took me five years. It could have taken me 10. If I'd been a quicker study, I could have done it in two. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a dialogue. It's not a race.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And this in the spiritual path is where we go from the measurement of the human to the witness of the awesome dialogue.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Oh, I was, yes.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Oh, so at the time that my husband and I were struggling with yearning for children and this sort of dogging unexplained infertility, which I now know is a spiritual impasse. There was nothing in mainstream psychotherapy that was remotely helpful to us. Really? There was not one shred within mainstream psychotherapy, psychiatry. Nothing was there because we were having an ego death.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
After five months, he broke up with me. Wow. Devastating. Devastated. And I couldn't understand it. I really couldn't understand it at 19. You know, I thought, well, wait a minute.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Or talk about your feelings of longing for a child.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Yes.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And there wasn't, you know, there wasn't an answer.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Right.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Because I was stuck, Lewis, in asking over and over, why am I not getting what I want? How can I research this more assiduously to get what I want? What strategy? What tactic? I'm going to bang that red door till I knock it down. And finally, I got the picture. Wait a minute. Maybe I could stop asking, what do I want and how am I going to get it? And instead say, what is life showing me now?
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
What is life revealing to me now?
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Might there be a yellow door out there that's not what I wanted but better? Right. And as it turned out, we found the most beautiful boy on the other side of the world who awakened my spiritual heart. Wow. The second I saw his video, I became a parent. Oh, my gosh. I had this soaring love like I'd never felt before. I loved this little boy. And, Lewis, that night we conceived his sister naturally.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
After five years.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Really? Because I had become a spiritual parent.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Isaiah awakened my heart. Wow. And then I joined this infinite field of love, and Leah entered.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Five years of IVFs. We went to the team that invented IVFs. Oh, my gosh. It was a non-synchronicity. biological problem it was a spiritual in our case in our case because you tried everything physically medically oh everything the best naturally you know injections all of it oh I mean IVF and the whole bit over and over for five years IVF IVF IVF And Lewis, it was a spiritual invest.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Because the day I fell in love with Isaiah, after five years, we conceived Leah.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
How could that be?
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Right? So is love not real? Is love impermanent? And we'll call this poor guy Jason. Is Jason real? Like, do we change? Can we not count on each other? What do we count on?
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
They're spiritual twins. Oh. And they loved each other.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And I share in the awakened brain, there were some synchronicities.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
There were also some mystical experiences.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
One night I woke up out of the blue. Lewis, my husband was so depressed that he would lie on the floor.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
I mean, he was so depressed. So we had the jobs we wanted. We had the house we wanted. We loved our friends. And there was the biggest hole in our heart. And my husband, you know, 32, would lie on the ground. Literally, I'd look over the bed with him. And he'd say, our lives are hollow and meaningless without children. Oh, my gosh.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
I had a spiritual practice, but I had an impasse, a limitation that I had set before myself, which was I still doggedly asked, why am I not getting what I want? You know, there's this notion of manifestation of send it out and you'll get it.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And that's sort of like the Amazon shopping list, you know. But the bigger view that you've shared in your story with Marta is not, you know, I'm going to go on this app and that. And I want someone who's, you know, over 5'8 and someone who plays sports and someone who, you know, wants to focus on family. You don't make a shopping list and go buy a Marta.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
It's not done that way. It's a shift from what do I want and how am I going to get it to, wow, what is life showing me now? What has God just laid in my path? And that dialogue with life is an awakened life. That is using your awakened brain. And Marta, you knew. in your deep register of spiritual awareness.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
That was an awakened heart that knew that, wait a minute, high pixel head, this has meaning, this has profundity, this has sacred guidance that has yet to unfold before me. See, what do I want and how am I going to get it? I call it achieving awareness. That only is built off of yesterday's information. You know, as a kid, I saw people, you know, and families look this way.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
As a kid, my parents always said, someday you'll be a mom, do it before you're 30. And, you know, all that's archival yesterday's information. But the hidden heart, the awakened heart is, Receives that high pixel hit that has information that's yet to unfold before us in the future. The yellow door is better than what we want because we haven't even imagined what's on our spiritual adventure.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
So I think he was telling the truth and he thought he was telling the truth. He changed. And it gave me a shocking, really it was sort of a drowning sense of impermanence. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. The things I want so much in life, love. is impermanent. And that sent me at 19 into a downward spiral and a search. Wait a minute. Okay. Is love permanent? Are people permanent?
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
I would say that it is the Lewis approach, which is walking with an open spiritual heart, doing our part, but then looking with great love and respect and appreciation when someone comes along When a moment comes along, when a teacher, a lover comes along, you didn't expect it. You didn't know it would be that. No. You didn't know it would be ever.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
But you knew this is real. I'm going to take it and reflect on this as a gift. And I'm going to act on it.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Yes. So I am, to the wisdom undergirding your point, I am convinced that we get just the impasses we need.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Right? So why was I not getting pregnant?
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Just the ones for our journey to inherit the next station of our lives, so that we might grow and awaken and flourish spiritually to be prepared. So I had yet to be prepared to really be a spiritual parent.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
So on day one, you know, I mean, we thought— It's going to be easy.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Let's start a family, right, as if we hit all the buttons and control everything. Let's get pregnant as if humans decide when to get pregnant. Humans can create, if you will, the conditions. Humans cannot decide when to get pregnant. So off we went to the Caribbean, right? Lovely trip. Come back a few weeks later, what? Not pregnant. Oh, well, okay. First shot. Who gets first shot?
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
You're off to Sedona, right? Great vacation. Come back, what? No baby. And after about six months of this, it started to terrify me because I had this haunting, depressive feeling that we weren't going to get what we wanted. That's door number one, achieving awareness. What do I want?
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Yes.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
It's not working.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Terrified because no one sees this coming.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Yeah.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Right?
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
The invitation to go more deep and start witnessing life.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Oh, no, the baby doesn't come more quickly just because I'm completely depressed.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
No, no. See, just that impasse was the impasse I needed to start to do something parent or no parent, which was to start to look at the deeper nature of life, to stop thinking that I controlled things quite so absolutely. Wow. to stop being quite so careerist. I love my work. I'm passionate about my profession. But careerist is a certain ego attachment to it going my way.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
It's different than being passionate about your calling or your contribution. So this sort of layer of ego, this layer of control, I was bringing it to parenting. You know, I'm ready. Let's start. Time for us to get pregnant. And what I realized in this journey was that synchronicity started showing up gently, sometimes not so gently, that said, you know what? This really hurts.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
You feel really alone. But you're not alone. You are not alone. I'll give you some examples. So, you know, I came... Out of, you know, I mean, I was a very healthy, fit NCAA athlete. I was a fit, healthy person. I couldn't believe my body was failing me.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Like, how can I not be getting pregnant, you know? You know, I'd been a cheerleader. I'd been a field hockey player. I'd been a, not a decapitate, but a hurdler, one of your 10 events. And I couldn't believe that my body was failing me. You know, mighty, powerful. How could this be? And my husband is a fit guy. How could this be? So it really sort of was a ding. I'd say it was more than a ding.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
What are we really about? And I became more and more concerned about the existential nature of life at 19. And it was very depressing. I started getting more and more upset, more and more depressed, sleepless, anxious. I'd stay up and sort of look out the window and wonder. So I thought, you know, I really have to go to a therapist.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
It was more like a crash. We were a wrecked chassis. And our identity was wrecked. And here we had this fabulous life that we thought was everything we wanted. And it was nothing without a child. So right when we thought, like, this is it. Even, Lewis, I'll confess, I even... reached a point where I thought, is my life worth living if I can't be a mother?
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
I was 31 years old. I was in love with my husband. I had the work I loved. We had plenty of resources. Is my life worth living if I can't be a mother, if I can't have the thing I want? And it's not a bad thing to want. It's not, is my life not worth living if I can't have $100 million? It's like a baby, a God-given baby.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Well, everyone has their path. I can only speak for myself. But in my path. The child was a spiritual awakening. The road to finding our children, as the book tells you, was a spiritual awakening. And the child himself, the child herself, is this great, like a wellspring of God's presence. You can even feel it at the other end of the house. It's magic. Yes. It is sacred presence.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And the child comes out as pure spirit.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Take your child's lead would be the one bit. You know, I don't like to give parenting advice because it's more important to awaken the parent's own inner spiritual awareness. But that said, watch your child closely. Because every time that my two-year-old made us late, we showed up at the right time.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And every time the right child told the story, it ended up being a harbinger of what we were about to experience in our leader. Your child is a knower. Your child is born a knower with a direct connection to all the universe.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Yes. So, Luis, there was a gentle process. It took us five years. Where gradually I started to release the choke of my demanding ego. I've got to have it. I want it. How is it that we can't get pregnant? I'm going to research the better doctors up in Boston.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
At 19, I went to a therapist, and the therapist said, you know, what brings you here? And I said, well, I don't, you know, all my life I felt connected to God, and I felt connected to this deeper presence in life, and lately I just don't feel it. And I, you know, was in love, and love ended, and I just don't know, you know, what's real.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
What's wrong with the doctor?
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Point, point, point. And I stopped saying, why am I not getting what I want? And I started listening to God. I started listening to the synchronicities before me. I'll give you some beautiful examples. My shaman in my life is my sweet mother. And she called me one day. She'd been saying, when are you guys going to get pregnant? We didn't tell people we were going true. It was so excruciating.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
I remember going home to visit my parents. Walked into the guest room, opened the closet, and my mother had all these baby clothes.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Yes, and so she had been so disappointed. Dreaming about it, yeah. Dreaming of your grandma. Yeah. So my awakening in this road of becoming a parent was very gentle and gradual. There were a trail of synchronicities. Each of them actually— jaw-droppingly unlikely to have happened by chance. My mother calls and she says, honey, I just want to tell you a story.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
You know, there's this woman down the way. She couldn't be nicer. And she just adopted the cutest little boy. His name is Alan Jones from Russia. Bye, honey. And I thought, ooh, another synchronicity. I'm, you know, pretty bummed out, like very devastated. I just had a failed in vitro. And I still had to go to work. You know, I was a professor at Columbia. It's a lot of energy.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
The students are in their chairs waiting. Where's Dr. Miller?
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
So I get on the bus. I go up Broadway. And, you know, it's 11. I'm late, right? I'm not there at 8. I'm not there at 9. It's 11. It's 11. Who gets on the bus but a quite unusual-looking gentleman who is quite unusual. And I thought, oh, no, the unusual gentleman's looking at me. I mean, I was depressed. Basically, every failed in vitro feels like a death. That's how I experienced it.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
It is like a death, yeah. That's how in my heart it was felt, and my husband's too. So this man keeps walking closer and closer to me, and I thought of all days, not today.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
I mean, I like to be nice to— folks on the bus but i was not i was not at my best and closer and closer lewis he sits down right next to me on the lunch linoleum chairs you look so when he says lady you seem like just that type of lady that would go all over the world adopting children a big happy family wow and lewis at the next stop the gentleman gets off the bus he goes one stop who sent him
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Another synchronicity. So clearly, the message is starting to come through. Then finally, you know, fellow living beings, all living beings, are part of the same symphony, the same sacred path that we're on. So in our case, I'd come home. Again, this was probably the fourth in vitro, and I just had this haunting feeling. This had been with the team in another city that invented in vitro. Wow.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
I just had this haunting feeling that it wasn't going to take. Just knowing. Just knowing the deep inner wisdom. So, Liz, I walk up to the front step of our home. And on the front step, right in front of the door, there's something like slimy and moist, and I don't know what it is, and I haven't seen it before. And I look, and it's a little dead embryo. It's a dead duck embryo on my front step.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
We've lived there now for 30 years. Never before that day, never after that day was there a dead embryo on my front step. So it was confirmation. Right? Now, does this mean the universe is against me? No. No. The dead duck embryo doesn't mean that the universe is against me just because I'm not getting what I want today. The dead duck embryo means that you are actually supported.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
What's the point of all this? And the therapist said, hmm. Was your father there for you when you were little? And I thought, you know what? My dad actually was there for me when I was little. This isn't about that. This isn't a story about my early childhood. This is a story about a hunt for what's true.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
You are on a buoyant path. There is meaning written into life itself. Your journey, your purpose is in you, through you, and in front of you, all around you. But it was still depressing and not what I wanted. So, I mean, I hit the hay. I go to bed in the middle of the day. Not even in our bedroom. I can't bear to face Phil. I go to my study, and I hear on my study window, sliding door, and I look.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
It was the mom. It was the mama duck. Wow. Who come to my office door.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And she brought me a worm.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Her best gift. Okay, all living beings are connected. She was a mom who'd lost her hopeful baby. I'm a mom who lost my hopeful baby.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And we are in relationship. We are never alone. We are loved. Loved, guided oneness. Yes. Loved, guided oneness. And fellow living beings are in this with us. Wow. I'll tell you the most profoundly moving alignment. My husband and I... We're starting to get the picture, you know, that maybe there's a baby out there for us.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
To adopt, yeah.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Yeah, yeah. But I couldn't get my sticky controlling fingers off it. You know, achieving awareness is A plus B plus C. How am I going to make this happen? How am I going to make this happen?
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Yes.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Yes, versus a receptive dialogue with God's, an alignment with God's path. The road of life. So, final story.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
We're lying in bed in solidarity, Phil by my side. I'm just heading in vitro. Hopeful, hopeful, hopeful. We had gone to another city. We'd gone to Philadelphia to meet the team who, using seer ginseng, Woodsville had come up with in vitro. And they are excellent scientists and excellent doctors. But in our path for us, again— I had that sinking feeling.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
So there we are, lying in bed, and in this pretty overpriced hotel. It was only one night, so it was a splurge. The remote's broken. I'm like, why are we in an overpriced hotel and the remote's broken? This place doesn't work. My husband's hitting the remote. He's normally chair of the remote. There's one channel.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And in this hotel, we had no choice on bed rest but to watch four hours of a documentary. And what is it? It's a story of a little boy who lives in a garbage dump. in another country, and the little boy through the translator says, I don't care that I can't go to school. I don't care that I live in this trash heap. But it hurts so much to not be loved that I sniff glue to make the pain go away.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And at least I had the gut instinct to say new therapist, which is what you should always do if you don't feel at home with your therapist. Interesting. the therapist number two, from a psychodynamic to a cognitive therapist who works on your thoughts. And there we were, and I said, you know, I just don't know, you know, if there's meaning in life, if there's any value in life.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Wow. And I thought, you know what? This little boy needed parents. We needed a child. And what has kept us from being a family is our narrow-mindedness, is the prison of our own ego. And it was the opening to what became the road to find Isaiah. Wow.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And a synchronicity.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
They're for you.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And if you say yes, the yellow door is so beyond imagination. Wow. It is so full of promise and splendor. It's not what you want. It is so much better.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Lewis, I'm deeply touched and honored, and I want to Thank you for being a clear, profound voice, body, mind, and soul right in the middle of our culture, fearless, answering only to one source.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And I use Instagram, just dr.lisamiller.com.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Oh, I'd love to know how people resonate.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And these, at the time, were viewed as nothing but symptoms, secondary symptoms to a deeper medical depression. that a cognitive therapist thinks you can fix by changing your thoughts. And so I said, well, I just don't know if life has worth. I don't know what's real. And she said, hmm, you don't know if life has worth. Do you have low self-esteem?
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Love your enemy. Love your lover. Love God.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
That doesn't mean expose yourself to your enemy. That doesn't mean...
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Or that your enemy's right. Right. But as you said, Louis, the choice to forgive, to love them as a soul on earth, as flawed, as searching, as trapped within their own ego and illusions, it frees you to be part of the ultimate field of love.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Where anything's possible.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And you're on the road to life.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
To be in deep connection to God and live an abundant, godly life.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
I said, I'm embarrassed to admit I feel just fine about myself. I don't know if life has meaning. It wasn't about myself. And this went on and on. Because at that point, there had yet to be a science that showed that there is, in emerging adulthood, a hunt for what's true. And it is not easy. A hunt for, is there deeper meaning in life? And if there is, what is my walk on?
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
What is my purpose? To your point.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Well, I do think therapy is valuable, but it's only a piece of the story. And if you're in terrible pain, medication can be helpful, but that's only a piece of the story. Because that hunger, that yearning for a deeper significance, a deeper connection, is actually your innate, inborn spiritual hunger. And hunger is a divine hunger. It propels us on a quest. And we all have it. Nobody's left out.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Nobody's not spiritual. One spiritual brain, we all have it. We can trace it in your genes. This is yours. Really? But how do we discover it? People want to know, how do I get to that? Well, right where the pain is, is the portal of entry.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
My pain was here.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
I could feel it in my chest because I had a broken heart. And my question, which was held in my mind and my body and my soul, was, was love real? And because God is love, I wondered, is God real? And that is a pretty bitter question. Not only do we ask this at 19 or 20, we ask this again at midlife, and we ask this again as elders. There's three bridges, and we can't get around it.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Because spirituality is inborn. And like any inborn quality, just like we change and look different at 19 and 45 and 85, our spirituality kicks in. Interesting. We cannot get around these questions. And just as there's three bridges of beckoning that kicks off with sort of the ignition is actually part of the spiritual process. Wait a minute. Yesterday, everything was fine.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And today, I feel somehow caged in. I don't feel at home in my inner being. Right. It's so easy when I don't feel at home in my inner being to say, I don't feel at home. My spouse must not be right for me anymore. You know, I don't feel enough inside myself. My job isn't big enough. I'm not special enough. It's so easy to look outwardly.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And in a culture that's just knee-deep in measurement and obsessed with how big and good am I outwardly, sometimes the answer isn't outward. It's a deep seat of being inside ourselves.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
For the first bridge, it was only about six months. Although at 19, that feels like a very long time. Right. And I want to say that I see on social media, there's a lot of people in Gen Z who have a lot of pain.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Right? And that pain is not against you. That pain is for you. The pain in your heart at 19, at 20, at 25 is a deep calling to seek the presence of the deeper nature of life. Meditation, prayer, walk in nature, join a service group, your sangha, your minging, your fellowship. You will awaken. You are built to awaken. And the first step of awakening is actually the depression.
The School of Greatness
Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
Because it is not a pathological depression. Over two-thirds of the time in young people, young adults, it is a developmental depression. It's a banging at the door. It's a calling. It's like, hey, wake up. Wake up.
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Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More
And it was just fine two years ago to be as you are, but to rise to the next mantle of your being, not your outward getting, that'll come, but of your being, you need to answer the call.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
Right. And sure enough, that's right. He was prepared. And I held my tongue, prayed. And Isaiah whips around, turns to Johnny and says, I'm baby Moses. And Johnny said, what? And he said, no, I'm baby Moses. And pretty soon, Isaiah realized that Johnny just didn't understand, but that he was baby Moses. Mommy, this time more desperate, more agitated, mommy.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
It's not a brain in the box that made up, isn't it nice to feel love? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It believes it is loved and held. The brain perceives transcendent love. Wow.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
Johnny says, what about the woman who gave me up? The story I'd always knew was coming. Yes. 10 years before I expected it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But there it was. Again, I held my breath, said a prayer. And from the second row, oh, I know. God whispered in her ear and said that you were crying for me.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
So if we support the natural spiritual knowing of the child, when the tough questions come, they're ready to receive and perceive a spiritual answer directly from God. He, like every child on earth, has an awakened brain. But as parents, we build that day in and day out sense that just as you and your child
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
new wife have god in that bond feeling your new wife and god willing your children yes will have god in that bond and our message to isaiah from day one was that this is a family built by god wow that's beautiful it sounds like and it's true yeah yeah it sounds like you you were practicing the first eight years step one which is
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
so we're moving here from the 20th century view of the brain that makes thoughts like the brain in the box to the emerging view of the brain that is like an antenna that receives thoughts or inspiration or transcendent presence so if we when we receive god's presence as incarnate beings, the bonding network comes up online. And we watch it through the fMRI that tracks blood flow.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
We watch the bonding network literally engage as we experience and receive God's love.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
And the deep question is, what is life showing me now? What is God revealing to me now? What has my higher power just put in my path?
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
The more we pay attention to synchronicity, the more we are able to perceive synchronicity. And on the one hand, it's because we strengthen our eye. We know, yes, this is real. We take it to heart, we think about and reflect on what it might mean, and then we act on it. You chose to go another day to both of you, to look at this more deeply, to walk a little further.
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How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
Ah, it's, well, We are at peace. We have less stress. Cortisol goes down. There's a whole host of downstream problems from dysregulated cortisol, dysregulated diurnal patterns of cortisol. So when we sustain a relationship with God through practice, through prayer, through meditation, through how we treat each other, as you just described, the choice of godly relationships.
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How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
We literally host and welcome. You know, God chooses when God shows up that we can invite and welcome God. And when we feel God's presence, when God touches us, the bonding network comes up online as we are incarnate and shows that we are loved and held. The second circuit that we all have is that there's multiple forms of intelligence, of multiple forms of attention.
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How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
There's the bowling alley attention, which is- Narrow focus. Narrow focus. And there's times for that, right? We need that discipline. But the bowling alley alone is insufficient. I've gotta have it. I've gotta get that job. I'm gonna do A plus B plus C to close that deal. That is not an accurate map onto the structure of reality because life is full of surprises and hard left turns.
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How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
And we have another attention network. There's another system of awareness, which is not our dorsal attention, but our ventral attention where the floodlights come on and the world becomes a lot bigger and brighter and a new direction pops. And that allows us to receive guidance. What's that step called? So we are loved and held as we all have a bonding network and we are guided.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
We are built to receive divine guidance. We are built to perceive direction from the universe. Loved and held, guided, and the third circuit The third component of the awakened brain that we're all built with ready to go is that you Lewis are in your chair and I'm over here in mine. And we also have friends in New York and Cincinnati and London and Des Moines, right? We are separate beings.
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How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
And at the same time, we're part of this great oneness. The brain is built to receive and perceive separateness and oneness. The parietal region, puts in and out hard boundaries. As blood flows through the parietal region, we see that, okay, I have my zipped up bio bodysuit and we're all wonderfully diverse and we live in different chairs. And at the same time, we're part of one family of life.
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How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
We're part of one unit of consciousness. That capacity allows us to know we're never alone. So is that oneness or what is that? That is the oneness. So if you add up all three circuits that run together, they don't run separately, we are loved and held. We are guided and we are never alone. That awakened brain is yours. It is there for everyone.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
What happens to us? We feel unloved. we feel lost and we feel completely painfully lonely. And that excruciating pain is a big bang at the door. It's an invitation to start to practice awakening, to start to use your awakened brain.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
There is no greater way. There is no profound and robust and enduring a way to move out of despair as to awaken spiritually.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
So medication, I'm not against medication if you're in terrible pain and it's urgent and you need it now. do whatever it takes to keep yourself buoyant. But that said, when we take away the medication, the majority of the time, the pain comes back. as does the deep existential feeling of unlovedness, isolation, of being lost. Why is that? Because we have yet to engage our awakened awareness.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
We have yet to engage our spiritual capacity. We have a donut-sized hole because we haven't deployed this gift we're all given.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
We have within every brain, the neuro foundation for a relationship with God. We have within every human being, the inborn capacity, actually the inborn imperative to be in relationship with our higher power.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
Well, It's very easy to feel isolated, to feel lost because the rich two-thirds embrace the socialization of our natural spirituality. Our environment. Our environment, our culture is pretty silent.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
And yet we can choose to cultivate every single thing you've said. So 40 years ago in the United States, there was a decision made. It was made with a good intention to be inclusive, which was to throw all religion out of the public square. And you may remember, we take down the Christmas tree, take down the Hanukkah. We're not talking about religion.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
We have charted this very precisely. And the first thing that everyone needs to know is that we are all capable of awakening. Every brain is built to awaken. Nobody's left out. But it's a choice. It is a choice and it is a practice.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
Someone's gonna be left out. And the intention was good, which was to be inclusive, but it actually was radically exclusive. Everyone was left out. Wow. And we had an ice age, 40 years of an ice age. Wow. Where people don't talk about spiritual and religious life at work, at school, at a cocktail party, at a dinner party.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
Yes, but society now has grown up and we've become much more pluralistic. We can comfortably talk about different genders and race and orientation as part of the fabric of our culture. It's time now to be pluralistic when it comes to our spiritual life. I want to know you. I want to hear about Diwali or Ramadan or Hanukkah or Christmas. I want to hear about the crossing of your grandmother.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
And I want to hear about the baby that came into your life in the deepest, most important way.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
The most important gift we give our children is a strong spiritual core. In fact, I would even go so far to say there is nothing that a parent needs to do more than strengthen their child's natural spiritual awareness. How do I do that? Every parent wants to know. Okay, look at those statistics. Your child will be less at risk for addiction, depression.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
In this epidemic, 82% protected against suicide. when spiritual life is shared. Suicide is tragically the number one killer of high school students. Well, really? It's come to rival auto accidents. So it's not cancer or COVID by our own hand. And yet we have the antidote.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
I mean, Lewis, if I said, here's a pill, and you can give this pill to every high school student in the United States, and they are four-fifths protected against the epidemic of suicide, what school wouldn't give that out every day at lunch? What parent wouldn't give that to their child? And yet we have the antidote.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
in us already and it's the realization of how we are built to be in a sustained connection to god or a higher power why is this not happening why is this not happening well i think you hit the nail on the head parents don't know how And they don't know if they're spiritual enough. So I went on the road. I thought it was going to be three weeks.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
So a spiritually connected brain as compared to one that has yet to do the work has three components. The first is that just as we are loved and held as children in our parents' or grandparents' arms, the bonding network comes up online and we can feel that we are loved and held. So Lewis, that's not a belief. Our brain perceives
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
It was three years with my first book, The Spiritual Child. And parents would raise their hand and they'd ask questions. How do I help my child be more spiritual? What is spirituality? But when parents started to cry was when they said, am I spiritual? So... People don't know if as a mother, as a father, I'm spiritual enough. And the answer is you don't need to be because your child is spiritual.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
And all you need to do is listen and be totally in awe of your child.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
But you know what? Parents are so in love with their child that if we can just hold our tongue and listen, your child is gonna come up and say, you know, I saw grandma. Or your child is gonna come up and say, does God love evil people too? And those are incredible moments. We don't need the answer. We can simply hold the moment and say, wow.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
Because often the child's actually not looking for an answer. They're looking to engage in the spiritual realm. Wow. And so they're really saying, can you walk with me here?
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
The child's question is an opening for the child to learn to listen to their own heart. So we can say, you know, deep in your inner wisdom, What does your heart say? Or we can say, you know, do you want to sit with me now in meditation or prayer and see what comes to you as the answer to that? Interesting. Teach the child to receive their own spiritual answers. I can tell you a story about that.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
I adopted my son from an orphanage north of St. Petersburg, Russia, the most delicious little boy on earth, madly in love with this little boy. How old is he? He was 10 months when he came. Wow. I knew right away that this sort of, you know, secular materialist culture was going to tell them a big story about not having been wanted and why did that mother leave you.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
And so I was going to get ahead of this. And the way I was going to get ahead of this with my husband and I together was by talking about our authentic spiritual journey to finding Isaiah. Yeah. So from day one, we said, you know, we had really been five years list. We prayed hard for five years before we found Isaiah.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
And so from day one, Isaiah was a little 10-month voice, used to hearing Russian. And we said, Isaiah, mommy and daddy, we prayed for Isaiah. And grandma prayed for Isaiah. And grandpa prayed for Isaiah. And everybody prayed for Isaiah because mommy and daddy had been crying for you. And then one day we heard they'd found Isaiah. And we took little baby, a plane, to a train, to an automobile.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
Kids love transportation. Ran up the hill and there, there was Isaiah. And we'd throw him in the air and we'd celebrate. the finding Isaiah story. And that's, you know, when he was one, two, somewhere around four. He got a little older, and they like symbolic stories. So here was little Isaiah. He loved to play in our backyard by a little creek, a river. And we'd point at the river.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
We'd squish his toes, and we'd say, Isaiah, you see this river here? You came down this river. You were our baby Moses. Wow. And he'd say, I'm baby Moses. Say, that's right, Isaiah. You came down. God sent you to us. So this was the story of finding Isaiah for a four-year-old. And we always told Isaiah the spiritual story of finding Isaiah. So sure enough, Louis, now he's eight.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
Driving my SUV, everything in parenting happens from the second row.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
It feels it because we are detecting something real.
The School of Greatness
How To Awaken Your Brain To Heal Yourself
His best friend Johnny's back there. Mommy, mommy. Johnny says, my name is not Miller. You are not my mother. And I am not Jewish. Wow. And I took a big breath. The day had come.