If there was one practice you could add to your life to improve mental health, strengthen your brain, reduce anxiety, and experience greater peace, would you do it?
On a recent episode of The Kim Gravel Show, psychologist Dr. Lisa Miller shared what that one practice is, why it works, and how to begin implementing it day to day so you can reap the rewards.
A leading researcher in spirituality and psychology, Lisa Miller, Ph.D. is the New York Times bestselling author of The Awakened Brain and The Spiritual Child, and a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she founded the Spirituality Mind Body Institute. She has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles and held joint appointments at Columbia Medical School. She is Editor of the Oxford Handbook of Psychology and Spirituality and the founding co-editor of the APA Journal of Spirituality in Clinical Practice.
In other words, when it comes to spirituality, she knows her stuff!
Her first nugget of wisdom: scientists found that when a person lives out their spiritual life, they actually strengthen their brain.
“Every one of us, every single person, is born with a capacity for spiritual life,” Lisa said. “Just like we’re physical or emotional beings, we’re born spiritual beings. We know that through hard science. There are genes associated with our natural spirituality. There are circuits in the brain associated with natural spiritual awareness.”
In the first study of its kind—where scientists looked at MRIs in terms of psychology or psychiatry—researchers found that having a spiritual practice strengthens your brain.
While Lisa called the inborn capacity to be in a relationship with a higher power “our birthright,” she also pointed out that that relationship is one-third inborn and two-thirds cultivated, practiced, and built.
Kim pointed out that this discovery—that humans are wired for spirituality—means that spirituality exists whether we believe in it or not. Lisa said it does. All humans are built this way.
“Literally at the core of our brain, written into our genes, is the capacity, and actually the necessity, to be in a relationship with God. We’re not built to be a little human in a box all by ourselves.”
(Note: While Lisa said she uses the word “God,” this concept applies to any higher power.)
On one hand, “every little baby is born with the inborn porthole through which to connect with God. You … can see the circuits in our brain. When we look at studies, we realize that the porthole is in every single one of us, but that we must cultivate that gift.”
For some people, religion is a powerful way to cultivate our spirituality, our natural porthole to that higher power. For others, who consider themselves spiritual but not necessarily religious, Lisa said, “Curiosity itself is spirit working through you. As a scientist, I would say your innate spiritual hunger is already aflight.”
“There’s a deep natural hunger for spiritual connection,” she said.
With that in mind, Lisa shared a practice for everyone: religious, not religious, spiritual, curious—everybody.
If you like, read through the instructions and then try it for yourself.
Close your eyes, take five breaths, and clear out your inner space. Just open up and clear out peacefully your inner space, with your eyes closed. And here 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.
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 is so much more than anything you might have done or not done, anything that you might have or not have… your true, eternal, higher self, and ask you if you love you. And now, finally, you may invite your higher power, God, whatever your understanding is, and ask if they love you.
And now with all of those people sitting here right now, what do they need to show you now? What do they need to tell you now? What do they need to share with you right now. When you’re ready, come on back to the present moment and place.
Kim reported that after she completed this exercise, she felt so at peace and comfortable—and she considered whether such a spiritual practice could help children and teens with their anxiety, which is “through the roof.”
“This is not a matter of my opinion or the next person’s opinions,” Lisa said. “It is a factual, scientific answer that when we strengthen our spiritual awareness, when we strengthen our connection to God or our higher power, we are less depressed, we are less addicted. We’re at a far decreased risk for the epidemic of our time, which is, tragically, suicide. We have a way through suffering. It’s not that the hailstorm isn’t going to hit; it’s there’s an entirely different road through despair and loss, betrayal, pain. It all unfolds differently when we’re in a relationship to God, our higher power. It just is an entirely different life.”
Spirituality is a choice, Lisa said. We have to own that choice and take responsibility for our relationship with our higher power.
“Suffering is a knock at the door to awakening,” Lisa said. “When we suffer, we have the opportunity of our lifetime to awaken all the more to God.”
While Lisa acknowledged that “there’s a lot of trauma right now,” she said, “the data is very clear that we are built for post-traumatic spiritual growth. And when we look at how we do that, there’s four components. It’s accessing that experience, putting it in words. Sharing it in a group and handing it over to God or higher power, shining the light of spiritual awareness.”
“That process is not about just repeating the memory or telling it to someone,” Lisa said. “It’s invoking God onto that very memory, onto that very experience. All this means is that we are loved and held. We are guided and we are never alone … and our brain, our awakened brain, is built to be able to perceive this truth.”
Kim asked why, if it’s our nature to be in an ongoing dynamic relationship with our higher power, we hold onto the stress and anxiety—why we can’t let things go or give them over to God.
“That’s really the heartbeat of our journey,” Lisa said, “which is, this is a choice. It’s not an easy choice because … the tough stuff we get in life is often just the tough stuff for us to super evolve. It doesn’t mean we deserve it … it means it is just the thing for us to super evolve. So it’s a little harder perhaps to tangle through it.”
When we encounter tough obstacles, or experience our worst fears, rather than asking, “Why is this happening to me?” we may want to ask ourselves, “What is it that I might move through where I can love so much more deeply? What, God, are you asking of me now? What life are you revealing to me now? How can I have what you might call an ego death, shed all that illusion of control? I’m only as good as what I’ve got or what I’ve done or how can I really get down to the heart of being a soul on earth?”
Even as we strive to hear the messages of God or our higher power, Kim said, how does a person spiritually renew when you’re working hard to live God’s call on your life?
In your own words, you ask God or your higher power to guide you so that you might do His/her/its will. Lisa suggested something like, “Please work through me that I see God is in and through all life.”
It’s common for those in their 50s to cross over a sort of spiritual bridge, a reawakening.
“As we cross this bridge,” Lisa said, “the more spiritually oriented we are, [we’re ever more] expanded. And that can feel at times like a real struggle.”
“There can even be a dark night of the soul. There can even be an existential struggle.”
Those experiencing such a struggle might ask God or their higher power questions like:
- How much do you ask of me?
- Am I really on my spiritual path?
- Have I lived out my deep spiritual values?
- What’s my spiritual footprint?
- How authentic am I?
“This sense of the more spiritually engaged we are as we expand at midlife and cross this bridge, it’s really an ascension,” Lisa said.
“Midlife is treated far too superficially,” Lisa said. “Midlife has been talked about in terms of Ferraris and am I promoted enough and big enough at my company. It’s talked about externally, which is far too shallow because really what’s going on is this profound hunger for ultimate connection to God and to live that out lovingly towards those around us.”
Lisa mentioned there are two other bridges we cross over, and she likened these to spiritual growth spurts: the first is when we experience puberty or the physical coming of age, the second is the midlife bridge, and the third is when we’re approaching the end of our life.
The end-of-life bridge is an awakening, Lisa said, “and this time you are really a spiritual ambassador. There is no love in the world like the love of a grandparent for the grandchild. That is a sacred love. That is one and the same with the divine love, because the grandparent is the torchbearer.”
“We don’t make the fire,” she added. “The fire is divine. But we can carry the torch. Sometimes the torch is passed from grandparent to parent to child, and that is the deepest form of spiritual formation.”
Lisa recalled interviewing hundreds of adolescents and emerging adults who said it was their grandparents who’d welcome them home after school, sit down with a snack, and teach them to pray … so when they think about God, they think about their grandparents—they’re all in one.
Lisa said that each of us is on a path. When we falter, that doesn’t mean we’ve failed or are off the spiritual path; it simply means we may need to deepen or reconnect. You’re never banished from the path, and you never miss it.
The struggles and the pain don’t mean you’ve missed the path—they’re part of the path.
Lisa also shared the difference between awareness and awakening.
Awareness is our mainstream culture: comparing ourselves to others, considering what we’ve learned or built (or not learned our built). This includes tactical thinking, strategy, planning, and research. We need awareness to get through life—drive, go to the store, pay the rent.
But that form of achieving awareness will never fill that deep existential need to connect with a higher power.
Thinking about what we want—a certain job, a raise, a spouse, an apartment—is based on today’s information, backwards. It’s based on what we’ve experienced before.
Awakening, on the other hand, is when we receive high-pixel guidance leading us to information that is yet to unfold. It enables us to look spiritually towards the future and what God has coming up next.
An awakened awareness can feel like a tug at the heart, or an intuitive sense that it’s time to do something differently. It can be a deep knowing or a mystical experience. It’s a connection.
“When we awaken,” Lisa said, “when we use our awakened brain, when we look into the deeper nature of life, we realize, like rays from the sun, we are all set forth from God. So we are messengers to one another.”
The Kim Gravel Show is a top women’s lifestyle podcast where Kim shares her message of confidence and encouragement with a side of laughter and fun. The show features inspiring, topical conversations with thought leaders, CEOs, and celebrities tailored to give listeners the insight they need to help them discover their purpose, find their confidence, and love who they are. On each episode Kim tackles the topics that women care about in a way that will make you laugh, make you think, and help you see your life in a new, more positive way.
The Kim Gravel Show is a celebration of the stories that shape us. It's about laughing together and not taking ourselves too seriously. It's about the wisdom we've gathered and the hardships we've overcome. It's about looking at the woman you see in the mirror and remembering that she is beautiful inside and out. This is a show about remembering that no matter what you’ve been through you can love who you are right now.
Y’all, life is hard, but we can do it together.
