by Bruce Kasanoff
Every few years, I encounter a book or concept that truly excites me. This week, it happened again, when I read Dr. Lisa Miller’s book, The Awakened Brain: The New Science of Spirituality and Our Quest for an Inspired Life.
In a sentence—my sentence, not hers—spirituality changes your brain for the better. Happiness comes from asking “what is life showing me now?”
I offered a one-minute summary of Dr. Miller’s book in my Mountain Minute newsletter. Here are portions of my subsequent conversation with Lisa:
BK: On Rich Roll’s podcast, you said that much suffering in life is the result of being out of alignment with deep truth.
LM: Yes, we are hardwired to be able to see into what I might call the consciousness field or the implicit order; we are hardwired to be able to see into the transcendent reality. Maybe we don't know all the details and we can't hit every point, but we can have a certain sense of whether we should go left or right at any given moment before we see what's around the corner.
Capacity is at the level of consciousness: a loving, guiding consciousness level. I say God. Some people say Universe or Allah or whatever word they use. That connection into the loving guiding consciousness is our birthright. We're born with this, and when we engage in that form of dialogue, you know, asking a question, “Do I go left or right?” we can receive the answer in the form of a gut instinct, a mystical experience or a certain knowing. That is a dialogue. It’s a dialogue with with life, with spirit, with God.
BK: In your book, you write about spirituality being protective against depression…
LM: When people heal and come up out of depression it is because we have taken a breath, whether it's for meditation or reflection or prayer or being in nature. We have re-engaged and reinvigorated our dynamic relationship with our transcendent relationship.
When we are cut off from that dialogue…
BK: As many people are.
LM: Yes. We (go through life) wanting things. When we get them, we are high as a kite. Or maybe we don’t get them and it's very disappointing. But really, what's depressing is the attachment to needing to have something, whether you get it or not. I run the Spirituality Mind Body Institute at Columbia and I partnered up with colleagues at Yale Medical School, and we designed a study to look at the functional MRI, how the brain functions, what are the circuits at play?
We studied three different groups of people: awakened, relaxed and stressed. In the stress group, people described the thing that dogged them and made them anxious and upset or depressed. It sounded something like this… I've got to get that promotion. I've got to get into UCLA Medical. I need to get married. I gotta gotta. The ‘gotta’ was two inches out of reach.
BK: They were chasing the next thing.
LM: Yes! I got the job, now I need the red sports car. My promotion didn’t work out so great, I need a different job. In the fMRI, we saw the addiction regions of the brain light up. The same portions of the brain that are involved in behavioral addictions, gambling disorders, internet disorders, pornography addiction. You can replace ‘I gotta have {blank} with any form of addiction: the promotion, more money, a bigger house, a better that. It’s the chronic condition of our culture that's in the air and water.
BK: You’re saying we are taught to seek things, and that this does not serve us well.
LM: Exactly. We should be discovers instead of seekers of things. We should be asking students to consider how the shape of the letter R is so beautiful. What does it remind you of? Why do you think it’s shaped that way? Why on Earth would R be both round and straight? Of all people on Earth, why do I get to meet you? That's a stance that can be cultivated by parents, teachers or leaders. It can be cultivated at any stage in our lives.
I find that after midlife, people are particularly good at cultivating this mindset: we're not makers of our paths; we are discoverers in our journey. We become more clear through the porthole of midlife and its emergence that we're on a journey and it's a gift. We transition out of an hardcore, singular achieving awareness into what I'm calling awakened awareness. We shift into a dialogue with a living universe—of which are a part—and that is a real gift. But it's way, way, way pedaled down. We call it a midlife crisis.
BK: We put a negative connotation on it.
LM: Exactly. But this is an opening. It's the red curtains pulling back. It is an invitation to go much deeper. It’s going to fulfill us.
Emotions are an index of how are we squaring with the spirit in life. If I'm feeling edgy and depressed, I'm not squaring. I'm not aligned in this dialogue, this learning discovery, because I'm frustrated. I didn't get what I want.
A much healthier reaction is to ask: what say you, life? Where are you pointing me? What do you have in store for me?
BK: So if you are in an awakened state and you still feel jittery… you notice that your hands are clenched or your stomach is twisted into a knot, what is the appropriate response? Like, I love to hike to the top of the mountain and I feel better next to huge trees, and so I get that part of it. But sometimes I still wonder: why am I tense? I don't even know why I'm tense. So what's the more enlightened response that you think people should adopt?
LM: Sometimes we feel anxious or depressed because we're picking up something true, which is that the old way of being is about to die off. So, I can feel tense or sad to know that everything's going to change… or I'm going to change.
And on some level, I can know that my attachment to my old way of being is not safe. But it's all for our better. That's the good news. This is a process made by God, guided by God, written into the spirit of life. We are inherently evolving. Just like we go through phases physically, we are spiritually growing, too. But we are more used to taking care of ourselves physically rather than spiritually. We need at least as much work spiritually to keep growing, to keep evolving.
BK: I don't know if you saw what David Brooks wrote today in the New York Times… he basically said America is incredibly messed up and I don't have the faintest idea what to do about it. So, is it fair to say that your work has special value at this moment because there's a lot of predominantly negative aspects to our culture now, and you're presenting an alternative? Or am I completely overstating that?
LM: We are on the exact same page. We made our culture this way, and we can make it different. And we can be so stuck in achieving awareness that (we obsess over) ‘COVID put me behind and now my kid isn't reading as well as s/he should.’ Or I can look at the markers of my life and worry.
But at this moment, we could also say, ‘Hey, this was a forced retreat.’ Look at things from the perspective that we are in dialogue with a loving guiding universe. Life is a quest. What did we start to discover in these past two years? That’s an entirely different question. And how can we keep that discovery mindset?
One discovery is that as a culture, we were psychologically way overly attached to outward things. ‘I want my kids to go to an A-level school, but they got accepted into a B school.’ It's just the greatest thing that all our institutions shut down (for a while). Your institutions are not going to save you and they're not going to pick you up and carry you through life.
But in the darkest hour, when things made by man crumble, life is still loving and buoyant. We don't free fall to existential annihilation. We are held. In The Awakened Brain I talk about how life itself holds us. A bonding network is engaged in a state of spiritual awareness, raising awareness. The bonding network comes online and we perceive that we are held by life.
(Note from Bruce… in another interview, Dr. Miller explained that there are a number of components to the awakened brain, including one known as the bonding network. This is the brain pattern active in young children being held in their parents’ arms, and is associated with feeling loved and supported. In adults in a state of awakened awareness, this same neural network is active. Whether we interpret the feeling as being held by God or by life itself, we can experience it as a deep sense of clarity and connection.)
And what else comes on? The shift in attention network as we perceive that we are guided… suddenly, the right answer pops out of the green door, and we didn’t even know there was a green door. We shift to being held by life instead of obsessing on that next golden ring.
BK: Do you think that it will be a vast uphill battle to spread this knowledge and insight into our culture?
LM: It's like the Berlin Wall, which felt like it would be so hard to tear down, perhaps take 50 or 100 more years, then it came down in a couple of months. I think that we're at an inflection point. People are getting this. I'm working for the Pentagon and they get it. The four stars get it. Vice Chief, the Chief, they get it. Everyone gets it.
***
As is my habit, before going to bed last night, I turned out all the lights and stood in our living room, looking at the town and mountains that surround us. If we are held and guided, I thought, it’s not necessarily to the results we think we want. (That would just be a clever way to get things without wishing for things.) Instead, I suspect, this is a mechanism for us to feel connected. It’s all too easy to feel entirely separate from everything and everyone, to accept that illusion. In reality, we are connected in so many ways.
Even with two separate posts, I have barely scratched the surface of Lisa’s book and the research that underlies it. I strongly encourage you to read The Awakened Brain and in particular to try her simple (but profound) exercise for opening yourself to guidance from the Universe.
I am Bruce Kasanoff, an executive coach who can help you get what you want. Book a one-hour call with me and I’ll prove it.