The Scary TRUTH about Depression Diagnoses & How All of Our Brains Are Neurologically Wired For Spiritual Awakening

The Medical Establishment is getting 2/3 of Depression Diagnoses Wrong & Science is PROVING We're ALL Hardwired for Spiritual Awakening Dr. Lisa Miller (Columbia University Clinical Psychology Professor, Founder & Director of Spirituality Mind Body Institute) reveals surprising scientific proof that we’re ALL born with the capacity to awaken spiritually—and how you can tap into it TODAY! She shares mind-blowing research on how your brain is wired for spiritual awareness, how depression can actually be a doorway to spiritual awakening, and how mindfulness can lead to deeper inner peace, connection to a higher power, and even an increase in intuitive abilities. Dr. Miller dives into the shocking truth about why medicine is failing us in treating depression & anxiety—and what you can do about it without relying on SSRIs—how serving others can be the key to lifting yourself up, and what structured religion is missing when it comes to fostering true spiritual awareness. Dr. Lisa Miller also breaks down: - 4 powerful steps to living a fully integrated spiritual life (no need for psychedelics or one-off altered states!) - Purpose of suffering in your spiritual path & how it can lead to growth - Spiritual solution to depression - 3 simple techniques to quiet your mind enough to hear messages from the universe - Why loving your enemy is a game-changer for spiritual growth - Practical tips to cultivate a deeper connection to our higher selves and the divine If you're ready to break free from the conventional and tap into a higher consciousness, you NEED to TUNE IN to MBB today! Dr. Lisa Miller's book, THE AWAKENED BRAIN: https://a.co/d/iaBHLXU BialikBreakdown.com https://www.bialikbreakdown.com/ YouTube.com/mayimbialik https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTOocPnDh2YQZZwh86K2OxA Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Speaker 00

  We have made people sick in our society by silencing spiritual life. We threw religion, spirituality out of the public square and people became religiously and spiritually non-conversant. People stopped talking about the deep spiritual significance of the birth of their child or the crossing of their ancestor. They stopped talking about Diwali or Ramadan or Hanukkah or Christmas. They just went silent, whether it was in the boardroom or the classroom or in the public square. That's why you are so important, the two of you, for reviving the vitality and authenticity of pluralistic spiritual life. By going silent, we laid atrophy, our birthright, the natural spiritual core atrophy.

• 0:46Speaker 00

  Forty years is long enough for someone to grow up, have a child, grow up, who is Gen Z. Half of our beautiful, soulful Gen Z suffers a pain in the heart, a disease of despair. Depression, addiction. The rate of death by suicide rivals the rate of death by auto accident, is the number one killer of high school students. Statistically, the ascension of the diseases of despair in Gen Z goes hand in hand with the decline in personal spiritual life, family religious observance. Gen Z is built with an awakened brain. There's a hunger, there's a quest, but we have given them a very poor, empty bucket. And that is why they are depressed. This is like some sort of dystopic horror film.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  It's Myan Bialik's Breakdown. She's gonna break it down for you, because you know she knows a thing or two. So now she's gonna break down, so break down, she's gonna break it down.

• 1:42Mayim Bialik?

  Hey, I just found out something astounding. Approximately 63% of those of you listening to or watching Myan Bialik's Breakdown are not subscribed. We know you're listening and we know you're watching because of all of the awesome comments you leave telling us how Myan Bialik's Breakdown is helping you lead a happier and healthier life. We love that, but the best way to support our show is to subscribe. It's also the only way to get latest updates and to know when new episodes drop. So anywhere that you listen to podcasts and on YouTube, please subscribe, hit the bell icon so that you know when a new episode drops. Thank you so much and on to the episode. Hi, I'm Myan Bialik.

• 2:17Jonathan Cohen?

  I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 2:18Mayim Bialik?

  And welcome to our breakdown. This is the place we break things down, so you don't have to.

• 2:24Jonathan Cohen?

  So you can be lifted up, is why we break things down?

• 2:27Mayim Bialik?

  Maybe you're listening to this episode and you find yourself in a place where you feel like you've tried a lot of things to get better, and you don't feel like you're getting better. Or you can't seem to shake a nagging depression or cloud over you.

• 2:45Jonathan Cohen?

  Maybe you feel a little listless, a little empty inside, a little agitated, aggravated, lost.

• 2:52Mayim Bialik?

  Maybe you're feeling exhausted by the amount of money and effort that you've put into your well-being. Maybe you feel like you don't want to hear one more piece of advice about ways to feel enlightened, or awakened, or just feel better.

• 3:10Jonathan Cohen?

  We're going to cover some shocking statistics today about how a very simple and free practice can be more effective than some of the most diagnosed and prescribed medication today.

• 3:25Mayim Bialik?

  We're going to be speaking to Dr. Lisa Miller. She's a professor in clinical psychology at Columbia University. For the past 25 years, she's been dedicating her life to the neuroscience of spirituality. She's also the founder and director of the Spirituality Mind Body Institute, the first Ivy League graduate program and research institute in spirituality and psychology at Columbia. She also is on the staff of Columbia University Medical School. She's the real deal. She's been published in all of the grown-up science journals that you can think of, and she has decades and decades of research and data, because we want it,

• 4:08Mayim Bialik?

  about the neural correlates of a spiritual experience, the neurochemical significance of what it means to tap into spirituality. And we'll talk a lot about how we define that. But Lisa has dedicated her life to trying to communicate to people that we are wired for a spiritual experience and a spiritual experience can be yours in order to improve your physical well-being, your emotional well-being, and have you live a life that she refers to as one with an awakened brain. We all have the capacity for an awakened brain and it's completely free and easy. It doesn't involve you all of a sudden believing in God. It doesn't

• 4:53Mayim Bialik?

  have you all of a sudden believing in auras. That's not the requirement for having an awakened brain. You already have it. You've got the wiring and she's going to literally talk us through and do some exercises with how to tap into it and how to grow it. And this is a really, really spectacular episode for anyone who's been skeptical on either end. Meaning if you're a spiritual person who feels like, "Science can't prove this. This is never going to happen," or if you're a scientific, logical, rational person who's like, "This spiritual stuff is nonsense." Guess what? Those things actually meet in the middle. You're having the same conversation on either side of the spectrum and Dr. Lisa Miller is going to join us on the Breakdown to explain it all and break it down for you. So, Dr. Miller, welcome to the Breakdown.

• 5:35Speaker 00

  Break it down. I am so happy to be here. I have so been looking forward to connecting with you too.

• 5:42Mayim Bialik?

  As I was talking to you before we started recording, you know, Jonathan and I get to do a lot of interesting things here. We get to talk about chemicals in our brains and we get to talk about auras and astrology. We really get to talk about a full range of things, but the Awakened Brain, the new science of spirituality on our quest for an inspired life, something that really strikes a chord with us and we feel is kind of, you know, right in the sweet spot of a lot of what our podcast, you know, seems to be touching on, no matter what we talk about. So, we're just so happy to have you here.

• 6:15Speaker 00

  So, I love that you are both so comfortable with multiple ways of knowing, multiple epistemologies, that you are incredibly rigorous scientists and you are equally intuitive. And to wed together multiple forms of knowing is really how we're built. So, there's no reason that everybody's... So, of course, everyone loves your podcast because you hold who we really are.

• 6:38Mayim Bialik?

  Well, please get us started. We'd love to give you the opportunity to kind of explain, for people who may not know who Lisa Miller is, what is your, your mission with the Awakened Brain and the work that you've been doing for decades?

• 6:53Speaker 00

  Mayim, I have for 25 years had one mission and one mission alone, which is to seed a more spiritually aware society through the lens of science. Science is a fabulous witness. You know, I am a religious person, I'm a Jew, and I am a rigorous scientist, like someone else I know. And to put these together is a way of really realizing who we are as human beings, whether I am Jewish, Hindu, Christian, Catholic, spiritual, but not religious. We are all built, every single one of us on earth, to be naturally spiritual people. It is innate. It is who we are. It is in our genome. We can track spiritual awareness through MRI studies. This is who we are.

• 7:38Speaker 00

  And yet, to put into the center of the public square, a foundationally spiritual understanding to speak and connect with one another and look at today's challenges and opportunities through our deep spiritual seat of perception will be the way forward for us.

• 7:55Mayim Bialik?

  I want to sort of have you break this down even a little more. You're not speaking from the perspective of someone who loves God, feels touched by God, and thinks everyone should feel touched by God, and that's the way to solve all your problems and the problems of the world. You're speaking from a completely clinical, scientific perspective. Can you talk a little bit about what we know about the brain's capacity for having what we humans call a spiritual experience?

• 8:25Speaker 00

  Yes, so Mayim and Jonathan, for 25 years, I have been a clinical scientist and professor at Columbia University. And during this time, I have had one mission, which is to use every rigorous lens of science that we have. MRI studies, genotyping studies, long-term clinical course studies. My Institute, the Spirituality Mind Body Institute, and I've also been on the faculty at Columbia Medical School. I partner with my colleagues there, as well as my colleagues at Yale Medical School. And together as a team, we have tracked

• 9:02Speaker 00

  Effectively, the neural correlates of universal spiritual awareness in all human beings, in every human being, 7.2 billion spiritual brains on Earth. Why? Because whether we are religious or not, whether our religion might be Jewish, Hindu, Catholic, Christian, whatever we may be, there is one seat of transcendent awareness. And we are now able to invite anyone into an MRI scanner, the functional MRI, which, as you know, Mayim, is the movie camera, MRI, tracking blood flow, and identify what are

• 9:42Speaker 00

  the neural correlates that run during a moment of deep relationship with the transcendent. And whether I call that transcendent God, or Hashem, or Allah, or Jesus, or universe, or force of life, the same neural correlates run. So let's quickly say the best thing science could possibly do is make outdated, this instant, religious war, right? There's no reason to have religious... There is one spiritual brain, and we all have it. But science also can be very helpful in understanding our human journey. You know, one of the most common things that people turn to clinical scientists for is

• 10:22Speaker 00

  to struggle with feeling unhappy, at odds, depressed. And science is quite clear that when we look through the MRI study, the same neural correlates that are thick and strong when we sustain a spiritual life, again, within or without a faith tradition, those neural correlates across the regions of the awakened brain that grow thick and strong, from prayer, meditation, service, to kuna lam, right action, well, those are the same neural correlates that are not thick but thin in people with sustained... Depression, which means spiritual life may be neuroprotective against recurrent depression.

• 11:04Speaker 00

  Suffering and spiritual growth go hand in hand. And that is a moment for us right now collectively to say, okay, mass collective distortion. Do I turn right, left, or center? People are feeling at odds. There is an answer, and it is written into the realization that we are an open system to be in dialogue with the deeper transcendent nature of life. We are built not to be a brain in the box that turns and runs on the habit trail till we find the answer, ruminating and calculating and looking at pros and cons. But our brain is built to ask questions and receive guidance and answers.

• 11:44Speaker 00

  We are built in moments of quaking despair and pain and isolation to awaken our heart to feeling actually loved and held. But we've got to realize we are an open system. The brain is a conduit for connection with the sacred and the transcendent.

• 12:03Jonathan Cohen?

  Can we slow down for one second and explain, both these neuroscientists, for a minute, explain what the neural correlates are for people? And then I have one other follow-up question. But just so that people understand what we're talking about, what part of the anatomy of the brain, what does this do for us on a daily basis that we're trying to strengthen and you've seen strengthened?

• 12:24Speaker 00

  Jonathan, thank you. So every one of us on earth is built with the capacity to awaken. Our brain is all set and ready to go. And yet it's incumbent upon us to engage and choose, to engage our awakened brain. What are the neural correlates? Again, whether I am religious or not, inside the MRI machine, when we are asked about a very painful time, a time where things did not go our way, when we were in great despair, when we were at our wit's end, we didn't know right, left, or center what to do. Every single person we've ever asked says, ah, and then, suddenly, I felt the presence of my higher power.

• 13:07Speaker 00

  And then, suddenly, there was clarity and direction. I'll give you examples. I'm walking down the street, said one of our contributors, and I'm feeling incredibly frustrated. You know, my... Efforts of four years were not paying off. I'd studied and studied and studied. I was gonna go to law school. I didn't get into a single law school. I'm walking down the street. I'm feeling like such a loser. And then I see light in the leaves. And I know that God has a plan for me, and I will fight for justice in the way I am intended. Or, you know, we'd gone out for three years. I had a promise ring. We were gonna get married. This was a young woman. She said, and then the week before graduation, he called it off.

• 13:51Speaker 00

  I was so humiliated. We'd met all our families, parents, grandparents. I felt like so unattractive and unworthy. But then I went home and sitting in the pews of my childhood house of worship by my parents and grandparents, I felt their great love. And then I felt God's love. And I knew, yes, I will love again. That is a profound rearrangement of meaning that speaks to a deeper, wiser part of ourselves. That deep wisdom does not come through chipping away at it and spinning in my head, but in receiving a deep divine sacred guidance. And I don't care whether someone's word

• 14:36Speaker 00

  is the force of nature or the universe or whatever sacred term their tradition may offer. Hashem Allah.

• 14:44Jonathan Cohen?

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• 14:47Mayim Bialik?

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• 15:30Mayim Bialik?

  Wireless crossover bra design plus built in molded light foam pads for extra support and a contoured shape. Honeylove's now offering a crossover triple bra bundle. So if you want a refresh on your top drawer, you can get huge savings by buying three at once. Treat yourself to the most advanced bras and shapewear on the market. Use our exclusive link to save 20% off Honeylove at honeylove.com/breaker. That's honeylove.com/breaker. After you check out, they'll ask where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them we sent you.

• 15:58Jonathan Cohen?

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• 16:03Mayim Bialik?

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• 16:45Mayim Bialik?

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• 17:30Mayim Bialik?

  Starting my day with this easy, health-focused task reminds me to continue to make healthy choices the rest of the day. For a limited time, visit drinkag1.com/breakdown and get a free immune support bundle, including omega-3 fish oil and vitamin D3 plus K2 with your first subscription of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro. That's drinkag1.com/breakdown. And after checkout, be sure to let them know that Myambea Alex Breakdown sent you.

• 17:57Speaker 00

  There is a radical rearrangement of meaning. In that moment, a spiritual response to despair, a foundationally transcendent response to pain and depression. There are four systems that play in our brain. One, the default mode network quiets down, and this is one of the four and the only one that is shared in common with the very helpful attentional practice of mindfulness. I stop thinking, why did this happen? What should I have said differently? Was it the way I talked to him? Round and round and round. And instead, I quiet and get present.

• 18:38Speaker 00

  Mindfulness quiets us down enough so that we are then at the threshold to cross into an awakening, an awakened awareness. And there are three more circuits prepared, ready to go in all of us. One, I might feel totally despairing, unlovable. I didn't get into law school. This guy I loved for three years just broke my heart. But I don't fall through the black hole abyss to nowhere. I am caught. There is buoyancy. I am held and loved. And in that moment where we know, in our deep inner wisdom, we are loved and held, the bonding network comes up online, the same bonding network that was up online when we were babies in our parents' or grandparents' arms.

• 19:23Speaker 00

  The next network is that suddenly there's a shift. Listen to those stories. And then I saw I would fight for justice in the way I'm intended. And then I knew I would love again. That shift of direction and guidance and sudden aha is a shift in the attention network. We go from that narrow bowling alley dorsal, I've got to have it, why didn't I not get it? What did I say to him? Why did he break up with me? To ah, the floodlights go on and our attention is pulled to the truth, the new direction. And then I knew that is the ventral attention network. So, we realize that suddenly we are loved and held, we are guided.

• 20:05Speaker 00

  And Jonathan, the fourth component is that the parietal puts in and out hard boundaries so that you know that you are Jonathan and you are Maya and we are each in our specific chairs and all around the world, we have magnificent diversity, exquisite diversity in our bio body suit. We are distinct, we are a point, and we are also a wave, interbeing. We are part of the oneness, the consciousness field, the family of life. The parietal puts in and out hard boundaries so that we know we are loved, held, guided, and never alone. Never alone. Listen to those stories. And then I saw my parents and grandparents by my side, and then I saw light in the leaves, all of nature. We are part of one, like raised

• 20:49Speaker 00

  from the sun, emanations of one source. Those circuits are in everybody's brain. Those circuits, plink a second, are there for us. But it is a choice to prepare ourselves, to engage ourselves, whether it's meditation, or prayer, or paying attention to synchronicity, those moments that I just described, that allow us to awaken.

• 21:12Mayim Bialik?

  So, these studies, obviously, like the examples that you're giving, these are people that have some sort of framework for being able to sort of have these moments. And the power of an fMRI study like this, and like a lot of the studies that you have done, is to gather the most information about what the brain is doing so that we can reliably be able to say, these are the structures that subserve this experience, right? So, like, the point is not to put a bunch of, like, random brains, atheists, and see if you can, like, draw out God. That's not what this study is supposed to do. When you think

• 21:51Mayim Bialik?

  about what the heightened states of connection feel like, that many people get from religion, some people who don't believe in God might get from meditation, people who have psychedelic or transcendental experiences outside of a God structure can feel these same things. It's all called different things. But the idea with this kind of study is to be able to say if we can reliably show these structures being activated, having blood flow, when we are recreating these states, even by recall, it gives us an idea of what those structures in the brain are essentially,

• 22:33Mayim Bialik?

  not necessarily wired to do, in some cases, yes, but capable of holding. And I wonder if you can talk a little bit about, you know, is this genetic? Do some people just genetically have a better ability to believe in God? You know, a lot of people have told me, as a person of faith, like, oh, well, there's a part of your brain that's just gullible. There's a part of your brain that can just put aside reason. And I wish I had that, but I'm too rational. I'm too logical. What's the answer when we're trying to parse out, you know, are we born religious? Are we born with a capacity for spirituality that's only specific to certain religions? How does that work?

• 23:11Speaker 00

  We are all born with an awakened brain. We are all born more specifically with the capacity to be in a transcendent relationship through which we know we are loved and held, we are guided, and we are never alone. That capacity is in all of us, as well, right alongside empiricism, logic, drilling intellect. Mayim, you have the whole nine yards. Well, we are born with all of these capacities. And ever more importantly, as you've done and just shared right here, we are born, built so that these multiple ways of knowing, empiricism, logic, intuition, mystical awareness, the

• 23:55Speaker 00

  skeptic, all can work together. Inside is a table of knowers, every one of us. And when we ask a drilling question of our head and then receive... And knowing of the heart and intuition. When we might have an awakening, many people say, I suddenly realized I looked at a single blade of grass and all the universe is in one blade of grass. Or suddenly I knew we were all one, a deep awakening. No matter spontaneously, through prayer, meditation, psilocybin, it doesn't matter how you have an awakening. To then throw that deep awareness to logic, discernment. What does this then mean about the nature of reality? And how I might walk my path in this universe?

• 24:38Speaker 00

  So pulling together all forms of knowing, literally paves the highway. It myelines the tracks between regions of the brain. So that an integrated brain, as you know, is a more innovative brain, a more creative brain. Yes, we knock it out of the park more at work, but most importantly, in our lives, we become creative and innovative. So your point, your question is one of tremendous significance to every single one of your listeners, which is, yes, you are spiritual. You were born spiritual. And in fact, when we look at genetic studies, in particular twin studies, we can determine that every single person is born spiritual, but one-third of its realization is innate

• 25:22Speaker 00

  and two-thirds of our spiritual realization comes from the cultivation of our birthright. So that's up to us.

• 25:31Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about what that looks like? You know, sometimes you'll, you know, you'll, you'll think about who are these people who have that environment? And the first thing that many of us think of is, you know, people in like, you know, religiously cloistered communities, right? And you think of, I mean, we've, we've talked to a lot of former Mormons here. You know, I have a lot of experience with Orthodox Judaism and we've spoken to many religious Christians. You know, a lot of times, our assumptions about those communities are much more about the religious strictures, the rules, you know, how people want to break out of that. It's restrictive, it's oppressive.

• 26:09Mayim Bialik?

  What is missing from kind of the classic, traditional, you know, Judeo-Christian structure of religion that is not getting at this?

• 26:21Speaker 00

  So every single one of your listeners has an awakened brain, fit and ready to go. We are all born with a natural seat of transcendent awareness to know that we are loved, held, guided, and never alone. And it is that same seat of transcendent awareness through which we feel that we should love, hold, guide, and never leave anyone alone. Both are forms of relational spirituality. In fact, the same part of the brain with 85% overlap through which I speak to who I call God, the higher power, is the same seat of awareness through which I feel God's presence in my Amman Jonathan and my family and those all around us. That is our natural awakened brain.

• 27:06Speaker 00

  Religion, as well as other practices of spiritual growth, meditation, walks in nature, poetry, art, can cultivate our natural spiritual awareness. We know through the lens of twin studies that this capacity for awakening is one-third innate, two-thirds environmentally formed, which means that our parents and grandparents, our pastor priest of mon rabbi, the 10,000 exchanges by the locker, sweet or unsweet, our general culture, the pedagogical culture of our school, all way into shape the spiritual core, including our faith community.

• 27:46Speaker 00

  Faith community can be a way that the rich two-thirds embrace strengthens transcendent awareness. When faith community is a place where we are guided in our own journey to connect directly of the heart, directly of the spirit, directly through our own awakened brain to the higher power. When in faith community a teenager is encouraged to struggle with what is in every single teenager, which is the quest to connect directly to God. When a birth or a death is embraced as a connection to the transcendent or the source of life. All of these moments of the human journey, all of these moments of transcendent practice

• 28:29Speaker 00

  can be authorized by a faith tradition, can be authorized by a faith tradition as bringing us closer to a direct connection, an awakened connection.

• 28:41Speaker 00

  So when we looked at nationally representative studies in the United States, we found that for many people, religion cultivated spiritual awareness. But when we peel back the hood and look even more closely, we found that religion cultivated direct spiritual awareness when people were authorized in their own direct connection to God or their higher power.

• 29:07Speaker 00

  There are moments where, in a faith tradition, people can feel deauthorized. And sometimes, when we feel deauthorized, what we've seen in large national samples is when there is a rigid adherence to creed minus the authorization of a direct connection to the higher power. So when there's a rigid authorization, when there's rigid adherence to creed and the authorization, there are many, if you will, textualists, Orthodox Jews, who are textualists and have a deep connection to God. There is a profound spirituality. There is a profound awakening. So as long as there's a direct authorization, the rich two-thirds embrace cultivates the spiritual heart.

• 29:51Jonathan Cohen?

  Is it a form of mental sickness that so much of society feels isolated, alone, not connected to something else? You know, you mentioned that we have this awakened brain. We're all capable of it. But that isn't how most people are living.

• 30:10Speaker 00

  Jonathan, we have made people sick in our society by silencing spiritual life. Forty years ago, in the good attempt, I think, well-intentioned to be inclusive, we threw religion, spirituality out of the public square, and people became religiously and spiritually non-conversant. People stopped talking about the deep spiritual significance of the birth of their child or the crossing of their ancestor. They stopped talking about Diwali or Ramadan or Hanukkah or Christmas. They just went silent, whether it was in the boardroom or the classroom or in the public square. That's why you are so important, the two of you, for reviving the vitality and authenticity of pluralistic spiritual life.

• 30:54Speaker 00

  By going silent, we laid atrophy, our birthright, the natural spiritual core atrophy. Forty years ago, it's a long time. Forty years is long enough for someone to grow up, have a child, grow up, who is Gen Z. Gen Z, half of our beautiful, soulful Gen Z, I have three in my own house, half suffers a pain in the heart, a disease of despair, depression, addiction.

• 31:24Speaker 00

  Jonathan and Maya, you probably know the rate of death by suicide rivals the rate of death by auto accident, is the number one killer of high school students. Okay, if you told me, I'm in my 50s, you told me as a teen, this is like some sort of dystopic horror film. And statistically, the ascension of the diseases of despair in Gen Z goes hand in hand with the decline in personal spiritual life, family religious observance. Now, Gen Z is built with an awakened brain. There's a hunger, there's a quest, but we have given them a very poor, empty bucket to cultivate the two thirds in base. And that is why they are depressed.

• 32:04Jonathan Cohen?

  I'm gonna just play the devil's advocate for a second.

• 32:07Speaker 00

  Please.

• 32:09Jonathan Cohen?

  People growing up now say, my parents were so religious and they got sucked into this institution and they neglected us and they were all about other people.

• 32:19Mayim Bialik?

  Or they were nice at church or synagogue, but mean at home.

• 32:23Jonathan Cohen?

  Exactly. And they also say, wait a second, we know so much more about our neuroanatomy now than ever before. And, you know, I'll just make my gratitude list and I don't need all these stories about, you know, Hanukkah and who believes in Santa Claus and all these other, you know, fictitious narratives that have been passed down for generations. We're too smart for that now. And yet, the practices that they hope will bring them

• 32:54Jonathan Cohen?

  Some sort of piece haven't really caught up to the stuff that they're rejecting. And they're, and we find ourselves in this almost black hole where people are still looking for, you know, the meaning that they didn't find in their parents' generation's version of spirituality.

• 33:09Mayim Bialik?

  Well, and also, if I can just add to that, you know, what we really have is, you know, an epidemic of people blaming God for humanity's misinterpretation of the purpose of a religious experience, which is to try and get you in touch with a spiritual awakened brain, I would say.

• 33:29Speaker 00

  So here's the truth, the light, the flame, the burning fire of true divinity, of the source of all life, whatever one's concept may be, there is a source of life, very few people would debate that. There's the source of life, the burning fire, and here's the long stick of the torch, and down here at the bottom, it's just me, the torchbearer. And I could have been your parents or grandparents, I could have been your pastor, priest, aman rabbi, I could have been your coach or teacher, I am the messenger of spiritual or spiritual and religious life. Now, to the extent that, as the torchbearer, I might walk in step with that great flame

• 34:08Speaker 00

  of truth, it is very likely that the child, the teen, the young adult will say, wow, there's really something to that truth, you know, you are the most kind, generous person I know, you listen to me like nobody listens to me, you always stop for the homeless guy, you are the one who, when the dog was on the side of the road, missed the concert to save the dog's life. I trust what you have to say about the flame. But if instead, I'm the torchbearer who didn't walk the walk, and I might have been a little foible, as in a hypocrite, you know, I said, it's very important to listen to God's message, and then I was really quick to lose my temper or swat my kids, you know, there was some way in which I was foible.

• 34:52Speaker 00

  Or, as a torchbearer, I might have been quite transgressing and crossed, not just not walked in step with the flame, but transgressed. Then, it's, you know, reasonable that the child or teen or emerging adult would say, what's with that flame, because you're just a big hypocrite.

• 35:13Speaker 00

  When we start claiming spiritual life as our own is when we realize that, you know what? That torchbearer, that was just a person. That was just a foible human person. They may have deeply understood the message. They may have kind of understood the message. They may have gotten it completely backwards. Our opportunity in being adults coming into spirituality on our own terms after this long journey, and it could be after in our 20s or 30s or 40s or 50s, any point in our life, is to open our heart to have a direct experience of the flame.

• 35:51Speaker 00

  That is spiritual awakening. And it's all of ours.

• 35:56Jonathan Cohen?

  Having a direct experience of the flame is not just an esoteric idea. There are very specific, very practical benefits. 40% less likely to use and abuse substances. 60% less likely to get depressed as teenagers. 80% less likely to have dangerous or unprotected sex. And have significant positive markers for thriving, including a sense of meaning, purpose, and higher academic achievement.

• 36:27Speaker 00

  All true. Statistic, peer-reviewed fact.

• 36:32Mayim Bialik?

  You know, a lot of people might say, this sounds all fine and good.

• 36:38Mayim Bialik?

  But what I'm most concerned with is my mental health, and I don't have time, you know, for this. I wonder if you can talk a bit specifically, specifically. I know you touched on it a little bit already. What is the medical establishment getting wrong about people who are anxious and depressed? Because I think a lot of people, a lot of women in particular, just speaking from the sample size that I most frequently interact with, a lot of people are feeling a sense of despair, lethargy, exhaustion, sadness. And some of it is hormonal shifts. And I think a lot of it is the environment,

• 37:23Mayim Bialik?

  both the social environment and the toxic environment that we, you know, immerse ourselves in as, you know, part of the culture we live in. But I wonder if you can talk a little bit about... The way the medical establishment has been viewing depression, and what would it mean to have a spiritual solution to depression?

• 37:44Speaker 00

  Mayim, as you suggest, SSRIs are given out as effectively happy pills, particularly to women. So, a study published in a very, you know, top peer-reviewed journal, showed that over half of people to receive SSRIs do not meet a criteria for depression. They're just given out over ennui and emptiness and my third year in therapy. And over 35% of people meet no diagnostic criteria at all. No anxiety disorder, nothing.

• 38:29Speaker 00

  So, when there is a pain in the heart, a grope for a purpose and direction, a horrible sort of cloud of meaninglessness, a sense of sluggishness, we often call it dysphymia, life just feels two-thirds empty, there's a tendency to drug it away, drug it away. Well, why is that a problem? The first thing is that depression is not always a medical illness. Despair, ennui, sluggishness, emptiness, existential hollow, yucky gut feeling, is not necessarily a medical illness. And in fact, when we looked at large samples, two-thirds of the time, when people present for psychotherapy,

• 39:14Speaker 00

  they do not meet criteria for a piece is broken in the brain and should be fixed. They do not meet criteria for a medical intervention. Actually, two-thirds of the time, we have what is actually an emergence. It's a developmental depression. It is a hunger of the heart. It is a yearning for meaning. And I don't mean, you know, do I become a... Doctor or a teacher, I don't mean, do I marry this person or not? I mean, what is my purpose in my short blast on earth? As a soul on earth, what is my purpose? I don't mean, okay, I've just gotten divorced. What's my next move? I mean, who am I in this world?

• 39:58Speaker 00

  Deep, deep existential experiences that are triggered by the road of life. They're triggered by our gains and losses and divorces and pains. And this is all part of the gift of living. So what does this mean? My, to your question, when we have a pain in the heart, two out of three times, there is a banging at the door to grow. There is literally, at the level of the brain, the potentiating effect of depression, like ignition in a car, to awaken. Pain, bad things, suffering are a knock at the door for awakening. How do we know this? Well, there's three ways we know this.

• 40:42Speaker 00

  The first way is that when we look at brains of people with a sustained spiritual life, they show thickness across the regions of the brain that are not thick but thin with recurrent depression. And ever more, thickness across the regions of the awakened brain predicts lower levels of depression down the road. The second way we know this is that the very same people who today say, "My spiritual life is incredibly important. I see life on spiritual terms." Those are the folks who are two and a half times more likely to have gotten to this great spiritual place through a road of suffering, through the gauntlet of trials.

• 41:25Speaker 00

  That means that if I look back, you know, 10 years ago, and I say, "Who was suffering 10 years ago?" Those are the people who today tend to be more spiritually aware. Or put another way, more immediately, if you are suffering and in pain today, that is an invitation. Hardwired in your brain to awaken to the deeper nature of life. That suffering is not wasted time or a pothole in your way. That suffering is literally part of the spiritual path beckoning you to a deeper reflection and awakening. A connection to your higher power, the deeper transcendent nature in life. That means that if you hurt now, you can say, yes, this is the most painful moment of my life. What is life showing me now?

• 42:10Speaker 00

  What am I being asked? I'm going to meditate. I'm going to walk in nature. I'm going to pray to God, my higher power, and say, what are you revealing to me? What do I need to know? Do I need to love even more deeply? What is it that I need to see? A spiritual awakening is often birthed from despair. If we drug it away without psychotherapy, we have short-ended that person's life. We have cut short what is one of the most profound and precious growth spurts, hardwired into every human being, which is the spiritual awakening to prepare us to inherit the next mantle of our life.

• 42:48Mayim Bialik?

  So beautiful. It reminds me of Johann Hari and connections. And, you know, what he talks about is, you know, we've been taught that these feelings, and I mean, I've never heard so many, you know, perfect euphemisms for what gets just called depression, you know, by your HMO, right? Like, oh, we're going to stamp it with this and we're going to prescribe it with that. But, you know, I heard Martha Beck say, if there's a thorn in your foot, the most logical thing to do is not to take enough opium so that you don't feel it. The idea is to remove the thorn from your foot. Meaning, a lot of people that I know, and this is just objectively, this is just like armchair amateur Mayim therapist.

• 43:33Mayim Bialik?

  A lot of people that I speak to that say that they're depressed, they're in unhealthy relationships, they're participating in unhealthy activities, they're drinking, they're like smoking weed every day, like whatever it is they're doing, they think that that's going to fix it. But what's really going on is, God, Gosh, maybe you don't need SSRIs. Maybe you need to look at the life you're living and say, is this the life that is potentating for me the best spiritual, emotional, and psychiatric outcome? And I feel like, gosh, how many people are just like taking drugs when they really just are miserable in their lives? Or the city they live in is too expensive, and so everything is a grind, you know?

• 44:14Mayim Bialik?

  Everything's hard, or they're interacting in ways that are hurting them. You know, the spiritual solution is the least expensive option to actually get to the root of your depression, your anxiety, and your dis-ease with being a human.

• 44:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, if I put my finger on a hot stove, ouch, I feel something. That is an index of reality. It is an index of my relationship to life. Depression is an ouch. It is an index of reality, my relationship to life. Our emotions are telling us how we're squaring with life. And even more deeply, our emotions reveal our alignment with our spiritual calling and path. When I hurt, when I'm in despair, that is not against me. That is for me. That is my deep inner wisdom. That is my awakened brain. That is my body, mind, and soul monoist being saying, ooh, you are not squaring with your spiritual path yet.

• 45:17Speaker 00

  Or yesterday you were, and it was all fine. But in your growth, in the deep, if you will, the DNA of your soul, your arc of growth, you have just outgrown the life of yesterday. And it is time, ouch, today it hurts. It's too small, it's too off-kilter for how you need to grow. And whether that is because you're going to become an activist or a voice in our culture, or you're going to love this child more deeply than you've ever loved anyone, whatever your calling is, you're up to bat, and you're not ready yet. So the ouch is to prepare you, to pull you, to call you. You don't have a choice. You can't avoid depression. It hurts too much. We've all been depressed. We know it is absolutely unavoidable when we are depressed

• 46:01Speaker 00

  to ignore the pain, the anxiety, the feeling that life is so beautiful. Boy, I wish I could go join it because I feel horrible in there. That feeling is not against us. That is for us. It is an invitation to figure out what growth is before us. And We don't need to know, we don't need to, you know, add it up on a, on a list and figure out how we have to grow. We can start to listen gently. You know, maybe there's synchronicities in people before our path. Maybe there's something that spontaneously comes to us as we're looking out over the ocean or walking in the forest. Maybe there's a messenger who for two minutes comes up and says something that we needed to hear.

• 46:42Speaker 00

  Maybe it's in our prayer life, but this deep receptive function of awakening allows us to expand and grow so that we can rise up for the next stage of our lives.

• 46:54Mayim Bialik?

  For those of you out there who have major depressive disorder, for those of you who are experiencing thoughts of suicide, plans of suicide, this is not a call to like, drop everything, go off your meds and just try and believe in something greater than you.

• 47:09Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 47:10Mayim Bialik?

  Dr. Miller is not suggesting to throw off everything that you've been told about your depression. We're talking about what is an alarming, alarming increase in people who otherwise would not be diagnosed or meet, even if you don't like the DSM system. We're talking about people who in many cases are simply unhappy or they're experiencing grief or they're having a normal set of depressive feelings that don't have to potentiate into a diagnosis of major depressive disorder. So for, for the people that we're talking about, who, you know, are, are experiencing what you're describing, right?

• 47:51Mayim Bialik?

  Where there might be an opening for a spiritual solution, I want you to be really specific because a lot of people who are walking around, especially those of us who are in shitty moods, right? Like, I'm not necessarily like able to just be like, oh, coincidence, oh, serendipity. You know, your book, which is really beautiful and kind of, you know, straddles the personal and the professional, you know, so beautifully. You point out a lot of opportunities where you were able to seize upon serendipity, synchronicity. But for people who are not in that zone and for people who are like, I don't want to fucking think about a tree, like, I don't want, I don't want to get there. What does a spiritual solution look like for those people?

• 48:36Mayim Bialik?

  How do you start?

• 48:38Speaker 00

  First of all, I want to applaud what you're saying. In large data sets, two thirds of people are having growth, are having awakening that kicks off with struggle and despair and depression. One third of people have a genuine clinical MDD, major depression. And if there is a little piece broken, by all means, fix it. Everybody has a little piece broken in something, and we've got to fix it.

• 49:04Mayim Bialik?

  Some have all the pieces broken, or most.

• 49:06Speaker 00

  Yeah. We all do. And how wonderful that we can't. I just had my back fixed. They fixed my back, right? We need things fixed. This is a call to acknowledge when, you know, any innate human capacity has seasons, right? We have seasons. We look different at seven versus seventeen versus forty-seven. And so too spiritually, we are different at seven versus seventeen versus forty-seven. There's a natural growth. Just physically, we look different. We know that. Every time physically we appear different, we are growing spiritually. That's simply how we're built. And there's three bridges. Emerging adulthood, so being twenty, twenty-five. Midlife, being forty-five, fifty, fifty-five.

• 49:51Speaker 00

  And the ascension to elderhood. And at every bridge, each of the three bridges, there is a struggle, hunger. What is my next direction? Oh, my gosh, yesterday, everything was fine. We misname these things. We call them sophomore slump. We call them midlife crisis. And we think the resolution is Ferraris or understanding that you shouldn't have a Ferrari. That that is not the solution. These are calls to spiritual growth. We are simply built that way. So there is nothing wrong with us. Two thirds of the time, we are banging and hungering to grow. Now, some people, to your point, will say, you know what? That all sounds nice, but I don't know what you're talking about, and I don't really relate to this. And I don't want to talk to trees. I love talking to trees.

• 50:36Speaker 00

  They don't want to talk to trees. That's fine. You don't need to talk to trees. We looked through the lens of our MRI studies at many ways of living out a spiritual life. We looked at prayer and meditation. We looked at perceptions of unit of reality. We looked at following religious creed. We looked at following prayer and meditation. We looked at everything. And of all the ways that we can pursue and live out spiritual life, the one that most leads to a thick, strong awakened brain was love of neighbor.

• 51:14Speaker 00

  When we're good to one another, service, altruism. When we really care for the guy down the street who needs help. He needs us to get his groceries. He needs us to shovel out his driveway. When we really care for that totally strung out, exhausted couple and offer to babysit their kids. When we take in animals or serve, the love we experience awakens in us the perception that actually love is written into writ large life. The care that we show for someone in the other house or in the other neighborhood actually awakens our clarity that we're part of one unit of reality, one family of life. When we serve, when we love one another,

• 51:57Speaker 00

  we strengthen the seat of our awakened brain to see and know that we're part of a loving unit of reality. They go hand in hand.

• 52:05Mayim Bialik?

  So I want to take these one at a time. So this is the first one. So what that might look like is getting outside of yourself. It might look like, gosh, maybe the reason that churches and synagogues are always asking people to volunteer is because you get outside of yourself. Or maybe it's something small, like not walking past the homeless person, saying, can I buy you a sandwich if you see someone outside of a convenience store? So just small ways to, you're kind of forcing yourself to get out of, you know, what I describe for me as the very, very self-centered obsession that is depression. Because all I have to think about when I'm depressed is myself. And like, how did I sleep? And how am I feeling? And is it bad? And do I need this pill? Right?

• 52:49Mayim Bialik?

  So getting outside of yourself. So that's sort of number one, this love of other.

• 52:55Speaker 00

  But bam, because that is exactly, the root of depression is being locked within ourselves, being a closed system. And the awakening is when we realize that we're actually an open system, in constant relationship with one another and all life, all of nature, and of course, God, who I call God, the higher power, the Spirit. So, suffering is when we live as a hermetic, closed, splintered system. And joy and awakening is the antidote to depression, because it brings us into alignment with how we're really built, which is to be in sustained, ongoing connection to one another and in ongoing connection to who I call God.

• 53:36Mayim Bialik?

  Okay, so that's number one. What was number two?

• 53:39Speaker 00

  The second is to pay attention to what is life showing me now. Very often when we're depressed, we get angry because there's this latent sense of radical control that we're supposed to control our lot. And if I don't get what I want, somehow I've done something wrong or someone's done something wrong to me. It's actually a radical anthropocentric view. Humans are pulling the strings. And do we really control everything? Maya and Jonathan, can we do a practice?

• 54:09Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, and I was just thinking, the way I've heard this is, is this happening to me or is it happening for me? No matter what the it is.

• 54:18Speaker 00

  Precisely. Is this happening to me or is this happening for me? Which is a shift from, what do I want?

• 54:26Mayim Bialik?

  And why didn't I get it?

• 54:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. What do I want? How am I going to get it? Why didn't I get it? To, wait a minute, what is life showing me now? What is the deeper force in life revealing? Perhaps even demanding or asking of me now? That is a dialogue and a shift in awakening. I'm going to invite you to take five breaths and clear out your inner space. Just open up your inner chamber.

• 54:53Speaker 00

  I invite you to think of a time where you wanted something so badly, that red door was yours. And so you did everything right. A plus B plus C. You researched it. You were tactical and strategic. You wanted him or her or them to say yes. You wanted that job, that internship, that school, that apartment. That was yours. A plus B plus C, that red door. You go for it. Grab the handle. But it stuck. And you can't believe it stuck because A plus B plus C. You've done everything right. You might kick the door. You might be shocked, angry, and time depressed

• 55:33Speaker 00

  because you didn't get what you had wanted and earned. But only because that red door is stuck. You have no choice. You turn 60, you turn 70, 100 degrees. And over there is a shining, sparkling, wide-open, yellow door. You might have said, "Yellow doors don't exist. What's a yellow door?" On the other side, wide open, is someone who makes you feel alive. Is a job where you realize you had gifts completely unknown to you before. Or a mentor who saw you beyond what you knew in yourself. Was the school where you met your partner? Was the community where you finally felt you belonged?

• 56:18Speaker 00

  That yellow door, it was not what you had wanted. It was not the red door. It was better. And better for you. And as you sit back now and you think of that 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 there at the hairpin turn who pointed you, gave you information or a story to the yellow door? It might have been a synchronicity, a someone you met for two minutes at the coffee shop or a party. It could have been someone who shared a story.

• 57:01Speaker 00

  A parent, a grandparent, a therapist that you had never heard before. A trail angel pointing you to the wide-open, yellow door.

• 57:13Speaker 00

  And finally, sitting way back, stuck red door, hairpin turned trail angel, and wide open yellow door that has everything to do with who you are today.

• 57:25Speaker 00

  How really are the most important parts of our lives derived? Is it narrowly through planning and strategy? We've got to do our part, but are the most important parts of our lives not because we are narrowly makers of our path, but rather discoverers of our journey?

• 57:48Speaker 00

  Are we really an open system in dialogue with a deeper force in us, through us, than among us?

• 57:56Speaker 00

  And if you sit really far back, stuck red door, hairpin turned, trail angel, open yellow door, where in your road of life is the force? God, the higher power, spirit, the universe? Is this force of life in the open yellow door and the stuck red door? Is this great force of life, your higher power, in the trail angel and your openness to be in dialogue?

• 58:27Speaker 00

  Have you been on a spiritual path all along?

• 58:34Speaker 00

  And when you're ready, I invite you back.

• 58:37Mayim Bialik?

  That's beautiful. I mean, it, it kind of, you know, that's a meditation, right? That you can do, think about, there's probably a million examples in everybody's life. And what I really liked was this notion of, you know, people who are spiritually inclined will say, "That person who told me to leave that relationship," or "That person who told me there's something better for me." You can then see that person as an extension of something bigger than you.

• 59:12Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And sometimes you are that person. You are the trail angel. Actually, could we take a moment, if you might both consider sharing a time? You know, we've got to get the elephant of modesty out of the room to do this important work. So I've just opened the double door and pushed out the elephant of modesty.

• 59:31Speaker 00

  Would you consider sharing a time, Mayim, Jonathan, where you were the Trail Angel?

• 59:36Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, I think Jonathan's been my Trail Angel for a lot of my healing journey,

• 59:42Mayim Bialik?

  often in ways that I pushed back or really resisted. But he had a, you know, he's had an intuition about my health and that I was really working myself to death. And my body was really suffering because of the way that I was running in a way that, you know, when he first brought it up, I thought he was absolutely crazy. I thought there was like, nothing wrong. Like, what do you mean? Everything's fine. And yeah, I consider that a huge, you know, it wasn't always pleasant. Like, it hasn't been a pleasant, you know, kind of unwinding of trying to understand, you know, my health and my work. But yeah, I definitely see Jonathan as that.

• 1:00:19Jonathan Cohen?

  That's very sweet.

• 1:00:20Speaker 00

  That's beautiful.

• 1:00:22Jonathan Cohen?

  A lot of people don't always like to hear the messages of the Trail Angel when they arrive. Sometimes the saying, "Don't shoot the messenger", can be the case in these situations. Not that Mayim, I'm just saying in general. I think people who maybe see things slightly ahead of the curve, you know, there's the risk of, you know, does someone want to hear? Because as you described, sometimes the crisis that someone is in is the catalyst for change. But that can be a, you know, people can be flailing their arms in the crisis, holding on to whatever reality they have so tightly that it can be very challenging to change.

• 1:01:08Speaker 00

  When you get tapped as a Trail Angel, that is what might be called a divine appointment, that in all time and all space, you were put in each other's path, here and now, at this precious moment. And if you feel that spirit puts something on your heart to say, or God compels you to speak those words, say them. Because you may just save someone's life, certainly change the course.

• 1:01:34Mayim Bialik?

  He saved my life, but also maybe he's gonna kill me with stress. But, you know.

• 1:01:38Jonathan Cohen?

  I actually have, I had a friend when I was 22 years old. I got super into lifting weights and bodybuilding. I'd gone to university late and I came back that summer and I was just like, all about lifting weights. And I had a friend, who I'd grown up with forever, who... Just was really struggling. And that summer, I started working out with him and we started working out together, spending time together. We had been away for a couple of years and it was a great way to reconnect. And he tells me all the time that that summer put him on a course of physical health and wellbeing that for 25 years, he has not changed.

• 1:02:23Jonathan Cohen?

  And it wasn't, you know, it feels a little bit less trail angel-y than, you know, what Mayim said, which was a little bit more like, hey, I, you know, I'm seeing something that I think you, but it was just almost selfishly, me wanting to hang out with him, have a buddy. But he says, yeah, he went and has never felt better, has been in the best shape of his life for, I haven't kept it up as much as him.

• 1:02:49Speaker 00

  Well, so Jonathan, divine appointment could be a message that we deliver in words. It could be walking with someone through a chapter or season in life. Mayim, I promised you three. Do you want the third?

• 1:03:02Mayim Bialik?

  Yes, I do.

• 1:03:03Speaker 00

  Okay. So number one, right, was walk with your feet out the door and serve love of neighbor. Number two was engage the road of life, not why is this happening to me, but why is this happening for me? Where are the open yellow doors? Where are the trail angels? And how can we show up as trail angels? Number three is cultivating a direct transcendent relationship.

• 1:03:28Mayim Bialik?

  This is it. This is the big one.

• 1:03:32Speaker 00

  Yes, but they're all related. They're all related. Every one of us is built, body, mind and soul. Certainly we can trace through our published MRI studies, the seat, the neuro seat of transcendent relationship with which each and every one of us is built, every single one of us. And whether or not I am religious or non-religious, no matter who I am, it is right there, a quarter inch under the surface, right there, a quarter inch under the surface is your transcendent neuro seat of awakening, right there, it's yours.

• 1:04:10Speaker 00

  People say, "How do I do that?" Well, for some people, long ago, their parent or grandparent taught them a prayer that they can, maybe it's a little rusty, start to repeat, and it starts to feel more at home, and they might even kind of remember saying this prayer alongside their parent or grandparent. For some people, it's a practice of deep meditation, practiced over and over. For others, it is being in the deep, felt connection, the oneness, with all life in nature. It doesn't matter how we get there. We are all using a universal neuroseed of perception,

• 1:04:52Speaker 00

  and that which we perceive is real. I invite you to take five breaths, clear out your inner space. I invite you to set before you a table. This is your table. To your table, you may invite anybody, living or deceased, who truly has your best interest in mind. Anyone living or deceased who truly has your best interest in mind. And with them all sitting there, ask them if they love you.

• 1:05:37Speaker 00

  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 that you might have or not have, anything you may have done or not done, your true eternal higher self, and ask you if you love you.

• 1:06:10Speaker 00

  And now finally, you may invite your higher power, God, whatever word is yours, however you know your higher power, and ask 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? What do you need to know?

• 1:06:47Jonathan Cohen?

  Before we get into potentially answering this, I'm gonna play the role of someone listening to the podcast that's like, "Come on, this again? This is so out there. We're just making things up. You're closing your eyes, you're inviting this level of imagination. How do you explain, from a neuroatomical standpoint, or from the science of the brain, why is this helpful? How is this not creative imagination? Or if it is, why is that a helpful exercise?

• 1:07:23Speaker 00

  Oh, Jonathan, thank you. So important. So for most of the 20th century, we thought of the brain as creating thought, as making thought, like packages, or toaster ovens, or cars in a factory. We had an industrial view of the brain. And that permeated the air and water of our culture, so much so that it's really kind of still out there. Most people, quite sincerely and honestly, have only come in contact with an idea of the brain as making thoughts. But actually, at the forefront of science, increasingly, we're understanding the brain as receiving and perceiving thought. The brain is less like a factory and more like an antenna,

• 1:08:07Speaker 00

  or a conduit to consciousness, or spirit, or the deep essence in life. A receptive perceptive faculty. So in truth, the brain can be both. The brain can create and generate and the brain can receive and perceive. When we receive an aha experience, whether we call it a muse amongst creatives or a profound sacred realization, an insight, a gut instinct, an intuition, a mystical experience, we are in our receptive mode, an awakened mode. Both forms of perceiving and knowing are all of ours. We need both forms.

• 1:08:48Speaker 00

  What has happened is the outdated view of the 20th century brain as only functionary, creating thoughts, has left thought to be nothing more than, oh, you made that up. And in fact, the very word imagination, which means to image, has fallen alongside the 20th century view, is somehow constructed, phony. I mean, it could be a nice phony, but it's phony. But in truth, to image only means to hold at the level of the brain a perception, whether it's a visual image, or an auditory image, or a kinesthetic image. An image can be given to us through reception.

• 1:09:30Speaker 00

  Like when I touch the hot stove, I perceive, I image, I receive something real. And this is a dream. This is a synchronicity. This is a spiritual visualization, like that which we just invited. It is an invitation to engage our brain in its receptive, transcendent perceptual capacities, to be a conduit to the consciousness field.

• 1:09:58Jonathan Cohen?

  So if it's a conduit to the consciousness field, we're going through this exercise, we're imagining, each one of us with our brain as an antennae, we're going out and trying to pull information. So what we're suggesting is that there is a vast amount of information in the universe or around us, we can make it less, you know, Sedona qualities than the universe collectively. And In that practice, we're basically exercising our antennae to see what comes in.

• 1:10:33Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:10:35Jonathan Cohen?

  And this is helpful apart from just only receiving news sources because?

• 1:10:41Speaker 00

  Because that which comes is aligned with your next step. It's not random noise. It's not like you picked one cherry versus one peach or one orange. You are given just that beautiful piece of fruit that you need. This is your gift for where you need to heal, strike next. And in fact, when we think about dream life, or that which just came through your, what we call hosting council in the spiritual practice, that which comes is precisely right for you in your journey as to where you need to next turn. And that could be an outward decision, or that could be an expansion of your inner seat of awareness,

• 1:11:23Speaker 00

  your depth of inner being, the chair in which inside of you you sit.

• 1:11:28Jonathan Cohen?

  I'm again playing the role here because I have gone through, some of the questions I'm asking have gone through this process. And I do have a practice of asking and using antennae, and I believe in the antennae analogy. But how is someone going through this process if they're maybe new at it, or even if they're practiced? How do you know what's signal and what's noise?

• 1:11:51Speaker 00

  So in part, the proof is in the pudding. As life gently unfolds before you, you'll remember that which just came to you in a synchronicity or a dream. Or if you invite the experience, as we just did here, of hosting council, your higher power, your higher self, those who truly have your best interest in mind. Those are real relationships. And that which is revealed to you, you are loved, held, guided, and never alone, may in the next day, or week, or year unfold. With very sure-footed, again, the proof is in the pudding, guidance, far too unprobabilistic to have happened by chance. In fact, I would say that the things that we chew and churn about,

• 1:12:35Speaker 00

  the red doors we kick and fret about, are all things that we think we want so badly, based on all information today, backwards. It has to do with where we've been and what we think we want. But what counsel brings you, what your higher power, those who love you, what the yellow door opens to reveal, has information that's yet to unfold before us. That's why it's not what we wanted. It's better.

• 1:13:03Jonathan Cohen?

  I like the idea of the proof being in the pudding and it being almost what I want to call is practical and tangible spirituality. Because the argument against many who are meditators and connect with the universe is that, oh, they all want to open the next center and have everyone around the world come and get healed. And they all have these massive aspirations and there's like this divide between people who have a spiritual life and people who have a practical life who can get shit done.

• 1:13:34Speaker 00

  Well, that is magnificent. And I would say, first and foremost, spirituality is free. You're already built with a porthole and there is one source of life from which we all emanate. Spirituality is free. It is already yours. And in fact, you know, caveat emptor, buyer beware. It's not the flame. It's not the truth. It's not the spirituality. Beware of messengers. The second piece to your point is that spirituality is highly practical. A lived spiritual life guides us and tells us, you know, wow, I really feel awful. What did I say to someone that doesn't align with my deeper purpose in life? Wow, I really feel short-changed.

• 1:14:16Speaker 00

  Is there a way that this relationship doesn't honor my soul? Wow, I feel lonely. Is there a sense in which maybe if I gave more to others, I'd feel much more part of the symphony, the majesty of life? Our emotions are an index of our good commerce with the spiritual reality, and the whole thing's free.

• 1:14:36Mayim Bialik?

  So, speaking of things that are not free, one of the fast tracks that many people are taking, especially in coastal cities, especially among a certain demographic, is psychedelic journeys, ayahuasca journeys. You know, the kind of newest thing that I've been reading about, which is really, you know, taking large swaths of predominantly, you know, white, white wealthy women by a storm, is microdosing, that we should always be having some sort of experience that is different than the one that we're having. I know that microdosing is one of these kind of solutions that people are being given when, you know,

• 1:15:19Mayim Bialik?

  standard practices to SSRIs, standard reactions to, you know, these other drugs that quote "aren't working." People are being told, "Well, microdosing is the answer." But for many, it's sort of a gateway to this conversation about like, "Do a psilocybin journey," and like, "This is the answer." Are we allowed to sort of have, I don't want to say judgment, but are we allowed to sort of, you know, piece out what is a healthy path to a transcendental experience? Or are these shortcut paths also good? Is that what everybody should be doing? If you want to kind of get to spirituality by having one of these like enormous transcendental experiences?

• 1:16:00Speaker 00

  Walking through life with an awakened brain, seeing the spiritual presence and significance in daily life is a fully integrated spiritual life. So there is a world of difference between an altered experience, an altered state, and a fully integrated spiritual life. Now, there may be some people, I have met some people who say that, "I was really caught in this sort of materialist paradigm. I wasn't breaking through. I wasn't opening my heart. And I had an altered experience, a shamanic experience, once. And then I asked the question, 'How can I get back there on my own?'" How can I deepen a meditation practice?

• 1:16:42Speaker 00

  How can I be part of a sangha, a minyan, a fellowship that sustains the transcendent practice? What would be my lived code of ethics through which I am in alignment, through which my emotions do index a transcendent alignment? So, there's such a difference between glimpsing and then a sustained way of being, the devotion, the rigor, the commitment to maintain an awakened heart, an awakened brain, day in and day out. There's a shortcut. I often offer this to people. How do I know if I can pursue? How do I start to pursue a fully integrated spiritual life? Well, there's four pillars.

• 1:17:25Speaker 00

  One is a practice that you develop, whether it's prayer or meditation, a way that you can reconnect to the deeper sacred presence in life, to God, the higher power, a practice. The second is your people, your sangha, your minyan, your fellowship. It could be your circle of three best friends that meet every Saturday and sit down and share of the heart. Your practice, your people, a path that when things happen, we take the time to open up and bring an awakened response to disappointment, loss, suffering, awakened opportunity to meeting new friends and colleagues. Treat life, every bit of it, as a sacred road of life. Who am I on earth and what is my relationship to the greater reality?

• 1:18:10Speaker 00

  Your practice, your people, your path, and finally, your purpose, your highest purpose. This is a very short life we live, and what is it that will be your spiritual footprint? Those are pillars, four legs of a table, through which we can build our own deeply integrated spiritual life. So, if you've had a glimpse, the question is how, instead of going back to touch the stone or amp the wattage, right, and follow some so great teacher off the side of the earth, how instead you go home and build a table? With the four legs of a fully integrated spiritual life.

• 1:18:50Mayim Bialik?

  I love that answer because, you know, we're constantly being sold ideas, both literally and figuratively. And we're kind of constantly being directed towards, you know, this medication or that medication or this practice. And certain practices, you know, once I started understanding that, for example, yoga was not just a way to wear cute clothes and stay skinny, you know, and I started realizing, oh, this is a ancient moving meditation. And there are certain classes where like they blast the music and you power it up and you feel great. But when you've had a teacher that literally gets to the spiritual

• 1:19:35Mayim Bialik?

  and somatic core of the ancient practice of yoga, it's like you've never been in a yoga class before. It's a very different experience. And when you go into shavasana, it's not just like, woo, that was exhausting. You go into another plane of reality. And like I've had experiences after intense classes like that, where I was able to stay focused for the entire time, where you have an experience that is not of this planet. And this is why yogis, mystics, you know, ancient leaders for thousands and thousands of years have had a practice to get there.

• 1:20:16Mayim Bialik?

  It's not like the first time you try meditating with your guided app on your phone, you're going to get there. You cannot lift a 50 pound weight with your bicep the first time you try.

• 1:20:29Speaker 00

  And to bring it home, to bring it home and integrate it. So I've seen people who have an initial awakening through a psilocybin experience and then say, oh, what do I do with it now?

• 1:20:42Speaker 00

  All of that care of integration and all of the care for many people in building up to the type of transcendent experience you found in yoga, deeply spiritual practice of yoga.

• 1:20:55Speaker 00

  Is how the human is really built. We're not built for one offs, you know? We're built to be able to have moments where we see profound unity of sacred, deeper reality and then see it in your annoying boss and see that same deep reality in the morning traffic and in the opportunity to love your kid when they're screaming and telling you you're the worst thing ever. So bring it home. And, and I have seen the tragedy of when it's not integrated. I've seen people go off and do psilocybin trips and come back and say, you know, my partner is just way too domesticated for me. That's a narcissistic response that wouldn't be there if there was a deep integration before and after.

• 1:21:39Speaker 00

  So I also want to highlight, Mayim, your beautiful point that profound mystical experiences can come through gently and consistently practicing spiritual life through yoga, through prayer, through any form of deep, consistent, lived spiritual life. Moments of profound awakening may come. We don't order up the universe. The universe comes to us and we are prepared and ready through this gentle, consistent, disciplined and devoted way of being.

• 1:22:11Jonathan Cohen?

  Can our antenna work without slowing down? Most of us are extremely busy. I look at my child and he's like, I'm like, you cannot fill every waking moment with a YouTube video.

• 1:22:25Speaker 00

  Yes, he can.

• 1:22:28Jonathan Cohen?

  He's tried, although he's on the tennis court a lot. So he's not watching YouTube there, which he points out. But for people who are like, how do I start to incorporate this into my life? Is it required that you need to pause for a moment? A lot of people have a very difficult time pausing. They feel uncomfortable.

• 1:22:47Speaker 00

  So there's three ways that we can quiet ourselves long enough to start to receive versus actively be front footed at every moment. And the simplest one is as you drive to work, put your phone in the glove compartment and don't touch it till you get to work. And suddenly Whoa. You're in dialogue with the beautiful world, the road of life in front of you.

• 1:23:08Jonathan Cohen?

  What about the radio? Cars still have those. You have to turn that off?

• 1:23:11Speaker 00

  I'd turn the whole thing off. And if you can, crack the window. Because in air is a great presence. You can feel the numinousness in there. Open, open up, be part of the flow.

• 1:23:22Mayim Bialik?

  I've experimented with this for periods of time on and off. And the most startling thing that I have observed is exactly the same thing that happens when you try to meditate for the first time, or the seventh time, or sometimes the 700th time, depending on your learning curve for meditation. There's a, there's a chasm. There's like a space that opens up. And what the ego does is it will fill it. It will fill it with words, questions, you know, worries, usually anxieties. And it will just fill it in. But the purpose of meditation, obviously, I'm not encouraging people to try and meditate while driving, unless it's a driving meditation where they know you won't fall asleep.

• 1:24:05Mayim Bialik?

  But the notion is, what's, what's the you underneath all of those thoughts? All of the things that get filled when you don't have your phone or the radio on?

• 1:24:16Speaker 00

  Many people say that when I got in a car wreck, suddenly everything slowed down and I was the observing eye, watching the whole thing, really slowly. That observing eye is there all the time. And it's your opportunity to open and ascend into that seat, that escalated seat, elevated seat of perception.

• 1:24:37Mayim Bialik?

  Okay, we're ready for number two.

• 1:24:39Speaker 00

  Love thy enemy. Very important. It doesn't mean expose yourself to the enemy. It doesn't mean put your head on the chopping block for your enemy. But of all time and place, your enemy was put in your path. So what is your opportunity in your deep seat of being? Love is not a tit for tat. You know, Mayim and Jonathan, I was very grateful. I had the opportunity to meet the Dalai Lama a couple of months ago. And I asked him a very metaphysical question. And he looked at me, and his scientist doctor loved it. He's like, you've got to act and practice love.

• 1:25:21Speaker 00

  Love is not a feeling. Love is not this great euphoria. Love is a disciplined practice. We can choose to love. Whether or not we are loved back, I can choose to love whether someone completely despises me. Again, I don't expose myself to violence. I don't expose myself or re-encounter a dangerous situation, but I can choose in my deep heart to love. It releases me from the entanglement, really the conscious entanglement of tit for tat. It releases me from sucking in the venality and the toxin of whatever the transgression might have been. Choosing to love is to open ourselves

• 1:26:04Speaker 00

  as a porthole into the field of consciousness, with spirit, which is pure love. And then all things are possible. Where do you want to live? How do you want to locate yourself? And the choice to love locates us in the infinity.

• 1:26:18Mayim Bialik?

  And that's true even for our deepest, deepest global enemies. What's true is that hurt people hurt. What's true is that we were all born innocent. What's true is that we all come from the same source. God does not play favorites. God does not take sides. We're all in a giant human mess of trying to understand navigating this planet. But on an individual level, we are all born pure innocent elements of something greater than all of us.

• 1:26:51Speaker 00

  That's capital T truth, Mayim. I just said. And for those in the States, God loves Democrats and Republicans equally. God loves all people. And we can love Democrats and Republicans equally. We don't have to agree. And in fact, we need radical civic love. We need to love each other as fellow Americans, as fellow souls on earth. We need to radically love each other as fellow sojourners. At this brief moment in history, we walked the earth together.

• 1:27:26Speaker 00

  What you think is just a tiny little piece of who you are.

• 1:27:31Mayim Bialik?

  Hmm, and the third?

• 1:27:33Speaker 00

  Every day, we are a conduit of source. Every day, we are a conduit of who I call God, a higher power. And if, would you all consider sharing how you open your days?

• 1:27:46Mayim Bialik?

  It depends. I'm not very consistent, but I do tend to do a gratitude list with a group of women. And some days, it's really profound. And other days, if I'm in a really bad place, it's like the roof over my head. I don't live in a war zone just for today, you know, things like that. I try and do a gratitude list. I often wake up early and have trouble sleeping. And so I'll often also do like a meditation to specifically try and lower my heart rate and get out of my own head. And I have to have a protein smoothie to feed my body.

• 1:28:23Speaker 00

  What a beautiful, intentional, caring way to open, unravel the gift, right? Right? You've been given this gift and you're opening the gift of today.

• 1:28:33Jonathan Cohen?

  First thing I do is I get out of bed and I go greet my now almost eight-month golden retriever, who is extremely happy all the time. And he's wildly excited to see me, which is a lovely way to be greeted in the morning. And he's, jumps on me and wants to be cuddled. And then we go outside. That's the morning, every morning.

• 1:28:58Speaker 00

  Jonathan, that actually brings me to what is a fourth axiom of truth. All living beings, all living beings are in connection with the same sacred source of life. They have the same deep heart and feeling. They have the same deep awareness. And I mean, everyone from our beloved dog, my little dog is Penny Arizona, to a magnificent firefly on the screen. All living beings are in direct connection, like an antenna. With sacred consciousness. And we're all in this together. In fact, everybody else, except humans, is very good at being aligned with the path, with the yellow doors and the council. Everybody else is naturally at a set point of alignment with the conscious universe.

• 1:29:42Speaker 00

  And we, the humans, need to maintain practice to stay in alignment for our spiritual journey.

• 1:29:49Mayim Bialik?

  Lisa Miller, we are so grateful for the work that you do and for the path that your career has taken. And thank you so much for sharing, you know, what are some of the simplest things and also some of the most complicated things. And I really appreciate the practical instruction you've been able to give us and our listeners. And I really hope people will check out and learn more about The Awakened Brain. The book is full of all of the science you want, all of the studies, all of the numbers, all of the stats. So it's also full of a lot of heart and a lot of this sort of intersection that we believe so strongly in sharing with people and that we're just so grateful to get to talk to people like you about who are literally living it.

• 1:30:34Speaker 00

  Maya and Jonathan, I have loved coming together here and now. And I want to say that for so many people, you are the Trail Angels.

• 1:30:47Mayim Bialik?

  There were so many aspects of the way she laid things out which appealed to me because she thinks like a neuroscientist. I really appreciate it. I'm very moved by all of the evidence that significantly shows the neural correlates of our capacity for a spiritual experience and the inevitable necessity of living with an awakened brain and having access to a spiritual experience. That really appealed to me, but I'm also a person who's kind of already there. I'm on that journey. That's part of what I know I'm heading towards and I want. I was especially...

• 1:31:29Mayim Bialik?

  Appreciative of your questions about what about people who don't want to have access to that? People who think that it's not for them? People who think that it's poppycock? I'm just gonna be honest, a lot of what she's saying, I've heard from many healers and shamans sitting on the side of the road in Sedona. Meaning, all sorts of people hold these beliefs, but for most people, if we don't hear it from someone who's got the science, who's got the degree, who has the evidence that we can believe, people aren't gonna go for it. And this is what John Kabat-Zinn realized. There's a wisdom for thousands of years that people have known about, but if you don't give people the facts, deliver it in the right way, have Andrew Huberman give it the thumbs up, people aren't gonna go for it.

• 1:32:12Mayim Bialik?

  And I don't mean to say that there aren't things that spiritual healers, you know, who kind of set up a shingle are possibly pulling the wool over our eyes in other arenas. But, guess what, people? Where those kinds of healers and hippies and mystics and whatever get it right, is exactly what Dr. Lisa Miller is talking about and we know the science of. Our brains are literally wired to feel connected to something that is not just us, to be altruistic, and to walk on a path that is consistent with believing that goodness can happen because we all come from goodness.

• 1:32:57Jonathan Cohen?

  How would you summarize what spirituality is?

• 1:33:01Mayim Bialik?

  I go to the dictionary, because that's what I do. Spirituality is the quality of being concerned with the human spirit or soul, as opposed to material or physical things. So, for me, in that context, and knowing what the actual definition is, I would say that spirituality is an awareness and an application of my human ability to have access with something that I may not be able to quantify, but I can absolutely qualify it with a somatic, lived experience of something bigger than myself.

• 1:33:44Mayim Bialik?

  And that can be nature. That can literally be a tree, the sunset. I didn't make the ocean, something else did. You know, all those things can be a spiritual connection if they are in the context of this has meaning beyond my eyeballs are perceiving the ocean and my ears are hearing the waves. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about that feeling in your soul that's like, oh, my goodness, this exists and I didn't make it and I can't control it. And it creates a sensation that is beyond description. That's spirituality.

• 1:34:24Jonathan Cohen?

  And you're a part of it. You are a part of something greater than yourself, that we have a role to play, that we are loved, accepted. You know, so much of our strife, our angst comes from this feeling of separation. But first, being able to acknowledge that there is something greater than ourselves, doesn't have to be God, but some people call it that. Some people call it a higher power. Some people call it nature. But the fact that there is a living organism of this planet that we are a part of and that we're connected to that in some way and an extension of that begins to combat the ailments that we feel.

• 1:35:02Mayim Bialik?

  I think an extended definition would be that there is more to this life than what I can perceive with my five senses and what I can describe with a formula or data.

• 1:35:15Jonathan Cohen?

  And she's actually gathering the data to prove that that is true.

• 1:35:19Mayim Bialik?

  She has gathered the data. She's figured it out for us, folks. We don't need to spend most of our waking hours fighting what is clearly true. And I don't need it to be true just so I can be like, I was right or the hippies were right. This is the way to get out of many cycles that we find ourselves in. Medication cycles, therapy cycles, bad relationship cycles, trauma cycles, narcissism cycles. She's giving us the free, free, available to everyone. We have the template already. She's giving us the free opportunity

• 1:36:02Mayim Bialik?

  to see if our health can improve. And guess what? It will, but you have to be consistent and you have to be specific. It's not just like, oh, I tried it and it's not for me. That's not how it works. Sorry. I tried that for many years.

• 1:36:17Jonathan Cohen?

  It's like going to the gym once and being like, I don't have the muscles that I want and so I'm not going.

• 1:36:22Mayim Bialik?

  That is a hundred thousand percent what it is. It's going to the gym and saying, I couldn't lift the weight that I wanted to. This doesn't work or going to the gym once and then spending your entire life comparing yourself to all of the people that you've seen in the gym who have already been there. And who are doing consistent things.

• 1:36:46Jonathan Cohen?

  Let's go to the spiritual gym.

• 1:36:48Mayim Bialik?

  Spiritual gym is right here. It's like you don't need to buy a book. You don't need to pay somebody. You don't need to follow a guru. It's literally available to you and all you have to do is look up. Or look down, or look inside.

• 1:37:04Jonathan Cohen?

  Look that way. It's my golden retriever.

• 1:37:08Mayim Bialik?

  From our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time.