Dr. Lisa Miller
Appearances
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.
The School of Greatness
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.
The School of Greatness
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.
The School of Greatness
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.
The School of Greatness
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.
The School of Greatness
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.
The School of Greatness
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.