Video: Spirituality, Mental Health, and Science
Full transcript:
SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.
SPEAKER 2: The 2022 Ministry Colloquium, Spirituality, Mental Health, and Science, November 9, 2022.
LAURA TUACH: Hi, everyone. Welcome. Welcome, Lisa. Dr. Lisa Miller. We're so thrilled to have you here tonight for this.
LISA MILLER: Thrilled to be here.
LAURA TUACH: Yeah. For this ministry colloquium. My name is Laura Tuach. And I am in the Office of Ministry Studies. And periodically, we gather students and friends of the school to have a conversation about an interesting topic and what are the implications for ministry. So we're going to be doing that tonight with Dr. Lisa Miller's work.
She is the founder and director of the Spirituality, Mind, Body Institute at Columbia University, a professor at Teachers College of Psychology at Columbia, but mostly this really fascinating person who I'm so excited to meet. I met Lisa when I was listening to a podcast and she was interviewed by a guy named Rich Roll.
He has a podcast where he is really interested in science, and spirituality, and health. And it's one of my go to podcasts. But I've listened to that three or four times, which says a lot because I don't usually listen to podcast episodes more than once. So thank you for all that you're doing and for being with us here at the Divinity School.
And I want to introduce our two students who are here who are going to be helping with the conversation tonight. Joe Archer is in his second year of the Master of Divinity program and Sophia Doescher, who's in her third year Master of Divinity program. And they're going to be helping us with the conversation. And I'll periodically pop in as well.
But we're going to turn it over to Lisa to get us started. She's going to do a little bit of a presentation. There's food arriving so if you find yourself just absolutely hungry and you cannot wait, I hope you'll just get up and get some pizza because it looks really good.
And we're grateful to Leslie, and Clarissa, and Jonathan Makransky and Dawn Sorensen from our office who have helped to make it possible as well as the Initiative on Health, Spirituality, and Religion. So we've got some faculty members, core leadership folks here, Howard Koh from the School of Public Health, Xavier Simmons from the Initiative itself and the Human Flourishing Project, and Dr. David Rosmarin, who is here from the med school, and from McLean Hospital, and also the Initiative on Health, Spirituality, and Religion, which we are partnering with. All right. Thank you. Over to you.
LISA MILLER: Hello. I am grateful to be here. And you know the moment you walk into a building if it feels as if you're in a spiritual place. And here in the Harvard Divinity School when you walk in the door, you feel the brightness, the love. Your eyes sparkle. It feels so wonderful to be here. So you walk the walk.
I'm coming to you as a clinical scientist and clinical psychologist. And when I was asked to make this body of science relevant to ministry, my mind leapt to perhaps one of the greatest wounds in our culture right now, which is never in the history of our country have there been as elevated rates in young adults and teens of addiction, depression, and suicide. The rate of suicide now rivals the rate of death by auto accident in high school. And this is pushing down into middle. So it's not by cancer or COVID. It is by our own hand that in high school we are at greatest risk.
So this you will see in the data is a spiritual crisis. And there's no one in the world better equipped than the type of deep spiritual work you do, perhaps in times in tandem with mental health, but never without you-- never without you to address this crisis.
So let me share with you the data. You know this but just by way of clarity. There are many beautiful faith traditions. And I've been so touched that many of you have engaged more than one in your journey. Whether we are Hindu, or Catholic, or Sikh, or Jewish, there are many faith traditions. And many people say that it is through my deep faith tradition that I feel spiritually connected. It is through the prayers, the texts, the ceremonies.
70% of people in our country are at the intersection. 30% of millennials and fewer with each older generation and more with each younger generation say I am spiritual but not religious. And for me, spirituality is felt in nature with my family. What the science shows us, why I belabor this point, is that whether or not we are religious, we are all spiritual beings.
[INAUDIBLE] this thing moving. This is the docking station. This is the neural docking station of our innate transcendent capacity with which we are all endowed. Every one of us on earth is born a spiritual being. We published this in JAMA Psychiatry in 2014. These huge regions in red, very big regions in red-- normally an MRI study is concerning a tiny speck or two.
These are regions of processing power, cortical thickness in the parietal, percutaneous, and occipital, which means regions of perception, reflection, and orientation, in people like yourselves with a sustained spiritual life over eight years. Day in and day out the go to place. We don't have to bat 100%, but whether it's through prayer, or meditation, or right action, or relationship, walking through life with daily spiritual awareness and sustaining that over time is associated with looking into life through the red brain lens. Life, as you know through your journey, starts to be lived on spiritual bedrock.
Why is that relevant? Because with what I've described as the elevated rates and the diseases of despair has been a sharp decline in the traditional containers, the ways in which young adults have come into spiritual awareness. The two go hand in hand, statistically.
Now generally in mental health, we locate diagnosis in the individual. We say he has major depression. She has a dual diagnosis. But when 46%-- that's not a COVID statistic. That's today. It was a September statistic. 46% of young adults in our country have a diagnosis of a disease of despair, half our country. That cannot in any form of sense and reason be located at the level of the individual. That's in the ecology, the air and water of our culture.
So what's the tidal wave about? What's the tidal wave about? Well, one thing is it touches every corner of this country. And it touches most of post-industrial global culture. But we have through the roadmap of science reason for hope, not aspirational hope.
Written into the nature of who we are grounded hope. And it's this. It is that. It is this, which is [LAUGHING] right is that, although I will tell you that has all the references in what I'm going to share now. So I'm going to move through hundreds of peer review articles. The references are there. This is the bird's eye view.
How do we know we're all spiritual beings? I can point, as we just did, to the neural correlates of transcendent awareness. That's one way. How else? We can use a twin study. We can look at twins raised together, twins raised apart, and factor out commonality as a function of genes and environment.
So by way of example, think of young babies you've known, particularly if you've met more than one. Temperament is half hardwired and half environmentally formed. So I'm a mother of three. When my middle child, who goes by center child, was a young baby, we woke up four times a night for 18 months. You remember that little sound? Eh.
And we'd walk across the house and soothe the baby. That was the environment. So she's 20. She sleeps through the night. She has allowed me to share. She's a bit anxious, half innate, half environmental. IQ is 60% innate, 40% environmental. The capacity through which we experience the transcendent relationship, with or without it's embraced by a faith tradition, the capacity through which we talk to God and feel and answer, feel oneness in the first person. In the third person, see spirit through Crow.
It doesn't matter if it's in the first, second, or third person. In the Wilber sense is the same seed, neural seed of transcendent relationship. That is one third innate. It is our birthright. And yet 2/3 environmentally formed means that our parents and grandparents, our school, the 10,000 exchanges by the locker, our coach, our pastor, priest, imam, rabbi all weigh in to shape the spiritual core as we've come to call it in my collaboration with the Pentagon, which is relevant because they have a lot of young people.
OK. Where's the hope? The hope in the midst of this tidal wave is that young adulthood, adolescence, marks a surge from the inside out. There's a biological clock, a hunger that you've seen in your work I'm sure, a hunger for connection, the numinous, the transcendent, the yes function in William James Ward, the nagging of the head. What is my meaning? What is my purpose?
Actually, the purpose. And everything you ever told me, mom, dad, pastor, priest, imam, rabbi, it is all up for grabs against the resonance of my heart that drives the questioning whereas others may want to deepen their faith. But whatever the way in, it is a quest. This is a time enormously sensitive to your impact. The relevance of ministry to our national epidemic of despair is that there's no one in the world who can make more impact than you in this period of time. This is a time of highly sensitive spiritual formation. Every tradition knows this whether it starts with bar mitzvah, the imipi, the sweat lodge, confirmation.
It is a time of formation mirrored now in longitudinal twin studies through which we see over middle to late adolescence a 50% increase in the heritable contribution spring from the inside out whether or not anyone tells us it's coming. How nice if we were to tell them it's coming. And when this surge is supported and the spiritual course strengthened, we know through 20 years of peer-reviewed science in top journals-- American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, JAMA, AJP-- there's nothing as protective against the diseases of despair. A teen a standard deviation above as compared to below and the tendency to say I turn to God for guidance in times of difficulty.
When I have a tough decision to make, I ask what really does my higher power. Remember, the embrace of many faith traditions or the language of the universe or of nature but the transcendent relationship in times of difficulty as a source of guidance, as a source of renewal, is associated with an 80% decreased risk of addiction going through the window of risk. Right when in our whole lives we're most at risk with the trailhead, we have a choice. 60% less likely to have major depression. In a study of studies, a meta analysis over 2,000 tragically completed suicides and 5,000 matched controls, 82% decreased relative risk, 4/5 less likely to take our lives in this epidemic, when spiritual life is shared. Shared. Shared in the saga, shared in the minion, shared in fellowship.
This is who we are. When you see protective effects of this magnitude through all the gritty mess of the lens of science, it seems to me that we're looking at two sides of one coin. And what we have in the tidal wave is a dearth of spiritual life in our public square. So 40 years ago in the attempt, the good attempt to be inclusive, we threw all religion out of the public square. And with that went the spiritual baby with the bathwater. And with that went the vibrant beauty of pluralism where you tell me about Christmas, and I tell you about Hanukkah, and your friend just told me about Diwali. We are knowing [INAUDIBLE] way. And it's a way that is not the closed system. It is the open system, the connection with spirit, with all life.
So that was in our public square. And we can put it back in. It's our choice in a way that is inclusive, and constitutional, and embracing of pluralism, knowing now through a peer-reviewed science that we are all hardwired innately as spiritual beings. And when we strengthen our natural inheritance, when it is not disintegrated, which is, of course, unhealth, but integrated into how we know one another, how we speak to one another, there's nothing in the clinical or social sciences as profoundly protective against our epidemic.
Here's where the rubber meets the road. This is coming out of COVID. I'm sure you've worked with many people who are struggling with the dual struggle of, of course, COVID and the mental health crisis. This is a beautiful, beautiful-- this is perhaps the most beautiful things I've ever seen. This is witness of over 3,000 people. Everyone here meets criteria for PTSD.
And as you go out the x-axis, they struggle more. There's more sleeplessness. There's more anxiety, more, more, and more. As you go up the y-axis, those are units of growth. More struggle, more growth. More struggle, more growth. Struggle is the gateway of growth. This is a study by Tsai. T-S-A-I. Tadashi and colleagues looked at the four predictors of ending up on that curve.
Access to the experience of putting it in words, sharing it in a group, and then shining the light of spiritual awareness on it through which is a profound rearrangement of meaning. And then I knew we both could be forgiven. And then I knew that God was with me all along. And then I saw that I was not to blame. The deep, profound-- come on in. The deep, profound rearrangement of meaning that speaks to a wise resonant part of ourselves.
That's how we're built. This is our birthright. We can build the ark before it rains when we support spiritual formation in children and young adults. Through struggle, we strengthen the spiritual core. And yet all that a child brings into the situation is there.
I will share with you in working with a mother from Newtown where the massacre was-- the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, I sat at her kitchen table as her little son played in the woods. And he was talking to his friend who'd been killed. And he would come and he'd say, friend, we're in choir together. They used to sit up in the nest in choir together.
And the mother looked at me. And she looked at her little boy. And she said, he is in deep relationship with God. And he is in relationship with the spirit of his friend. And she was the one who gave me the words, build your ark before it rains.
So we live in a very dynamic and unpredictable world. I have three kids, as I shared with you. I don't care at all that they missed prom. And I don't care at all that they missed AP US history. What I care about is they learned a stance of living into the deeper nature of life, that struggle was indeed a doorway for a deepening of their spiritual awareness because we don't know what's coming. But if we can build in our children a deep connection to God, Hashem, Allah, spirit, the force in and through life, they're equipped to have the type of real guidance, and problem solving, and endurance for whatever comes.
We invited 18 to 25-year-olds from the other place in New Haven to come in and tell us a story, a story, a time when they were stressed, and a time when they felt a deep connection to spirit, God, their higher power. No one was confused. They were not Divinity students and they still were not confused. But half of them said, wow, no one's ever asked. All we have to do is ask.
And the stories were very clear. Stress. So stress. I was waiting to hear about organic chemistry, and then we all went out one summer to scale Kilimanjaro, and then there was a triathlon. Not one stress story was about challenge, not one. Stress stories sounded like this. I have got to get the job at JPMorgan, into Harvard Medical School, her to say yes. I have got to. And if I have it, then I've got to get the next thing. I've got to got to on the habit trail. Right. I've got a habit.
My dear colleague Mark Potenza in the behavioral addictions unit said, I know that. The insulin, the striatum in our fMRI, that's the addicted brain. A public square minus the spiritual core has in the air and water a stance of addiction. I've got to have it. I've got to have it. I've got to have her. I've got to have him. Transactional relationships. The antithesis of the public square silent on the spiritual core is one in which we know each other as in an eye that way, is walking on the spiritual path.
When we ask those very same 18 to 25-year-olds from your near peer institution to tell us about another conversation with life-- let's put our hands on the gearshift and can we get out of the I've got to have it story, the stress story? Goodbye, insulin striatum.
And the story sounded like this. I'm walking down the sidewalk. I'm feeling like such a loser. I've just gotten turned down at six medical schools. I'm never going to be a doctor like my mother and father. But then I see light in the leaves. And I realize God has a plan for me. And I will be a healer in the way I am intended.
Or we've gone out for three years. I had a promise ring. We were going to get married. In the week before graduation, he called it off. I felt so ugly. I felt like such a loser but then, sitting by my grandparents in my childhood house of worship, I felt this great love that, they loved me, that God loved me, and, of course, I would love again.
That profound reshuffling of meaning through struggle is our birthright. Goodbye, insulin striatum. And what we saw in the fMRI was the awakened brain, was the awakening of our innate capacity for spiritual awareness. What did it look like? Well, first of all, we realized that we're loved and held. The bonding network comes up online, the same one that came online when we were held by our parents or grandparents.
We move from I've got to have it, I've got to have it, top down dorsal to bottom up ventral attention. We have far more information and many people say a whole new horizon pops there. Loved and held, guided. And the parietal that puts in and out hard boundaries so that you're sitting there and I'm sitting over here and someone is sitting in Seattle, different GPS coordinates, different zipped up by a bodysuit.
We are a point and we are a wave. We are white caps on one ocean. The parietal lets us know that we are part of this oneness, the sea of life, the consciousness field, and, of course, distinct, loved, held, guided, and never alone. This is our birthright, every one of us. And when we realize this birthright, we grow closer to the people around us. We grow closer to the deeper spirit in and through life, whatever our word or concept may be for second or third person.
This is what our brain looks like. These are essentially highlighted areas of connection between regions of the brain. When we ask a question of the head and answer it with the heart-- intuition, mystical awareness, gut instinct-- we start to connect the regions of the brain. The table of human knowing, as you know from multiple epistemologies, we have our own mystic and intuitive. We have our own empiricist and logician. We have our own skeptic who can sit at the table but is not the bouncer at the door.
And when we can bring our forms of knowing, our innate epistemologies, into dialogue, we strengthen the highways. We've basically myelinated the tracks between the brain. And we have a more creative, innovative brain. You may recognize this. It's sort of a self-portrait of the group here from the inside. This is who we are. And we strengthen this in young adulthood. While this applies to every decade of life, it is a setup for the rest of our lives.
Why is this so urgent? Because Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, warning. And I've spoken to him on the phone for an hour. He warned us in December that we were facing this epidemic. Well, it's not just an epidemic of now because this is the formative seed of being for the rest of their lives. No one can take your place. No one is more important.
I'm going to close by sharing with you a practice. Oftentimes, people say that's nice but what do you mean by spirituality? I have no idea. I don't feel it. So I want to offer you this that you may find a time when you want to offer it to someone. The person I always thank, my teacher, the person who taught me this practice, was Dr. Gary Weaver, who's now passed. I'll share with you this gift. Invite you to close your eyes and take seven breaths.
I invite you to set before you a table. This is your table. And in your inner chamber, you may invite to your table anyone 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.
And now you may invite your higher self, the part of you that is so much more than anything you've done or not done, or anything you have or don't have, your true, eternal higher self, and ask you if you love you. And now finally, you may invite your higher power, however you know, whatever your word, your higher power, and ask them if they love you. And now with all of those people sitting there right now, what do they need to share? What do they need to let you know now?
When you're ready, I invite you back. This is your birthright. This is your innate inborn gift, a transcendent relationship. It's all of ours. And it's a 1/4 inch under the surface. When we go there, it becomes a go to place. And we pave the highways. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
JOE ARCHER: Hi, Dr. Miller.
LISA MILLER: Hi, Joe.
JOE ARCHER: Thanks so much for meeting us tonight.
LISA MILLER: I'm so happy to be here.
JOE ARCHER: So in your book, you discuss the cultivation of this awakened awareness. And one that seems to have a lot of personal resonance with you is this idea of synchronicity. If you don't mind, to open up, could you tell us about an early experience of synchronicity that you had?
LISA MILLER: Sure. First of all, who here has experienced synchronicity? All the time. Yeah. That's over half. So synchronicity is when two mechanistically unrelated events reveal a deeper common unit of purpose, meaning, direction, foundation, source, two things that are perhaps physically separate. It could be a thought and phone machine. It could be thinking of your friend and seeing him after 20 years. [INAUDIBLE]. Right. Anyone? I'll ask again. Who's had synchronicity? About everybody, right?
And so the notion of synchronicity-- Jung talked about it a great deal-- calls on us to be present to what is actually happening here now and look with fresh eyes, eyes of the mind, eyes of the heart, about what really might be going on here. And in this way, we can start to find guidance, a deeper connection with life, and we become less what I call achieving awareness, less command, control, makers of our path and more discoverers of our journey. And it's so exciting. And sometimes it hurts. And sometimes it feels great, but it's a very sacred journey because we're in dialogue with a source, who I call God.
JOE ARCHER: Can you tell us about an early experience where you started to become aware of this in your life?
LISA MILLER: So I'm going to ask another question. Who knew this as a child? Who saw synchronicity as a child? You. Yeah. So I remember this from my childhood, although it didn't get into the book. I remember seeing this as the way that life was actually built. And as a child, I remember actually seeing the numinous, and feeling this love of God, and knowing that I could connect with trees, and that everyone else was built this way, too.
And so I couldn't wait to go to kindergarten and talk about this, this symphony, this tremendous symphony. And I got there. And we didn't talk about the symphony. So I thought, well, it must be for first grade when you're older because it's important. And so I waited a while until now we talk about the symphony in graduate school. It was a long wait.
But I think that synchronicity is so strong that if all we do is just give it a little bit of attention, the volume is turned up. And then we give it a little more attention and the volume's turned up even more.
In the book, I talk about synchronicities guiding us out of an extraordinary deep depression. So my husband and I had been married for five years. And we thought, oh, we are ready now-- achieving awareness. We have the careers we want. We have the life we want. Now we want to be parents. We've got to have it. I've got to have it. Right. And so I researched that. I said, oh, well, it's a good time.
So we went on a vacation. And we couldn't wait to become a family. And we came back and there was no baby. So we said, well, who gets one for one? We go on another vacation and came back. No baby. And after about a year of this, this terrible, dreadful feeling started sinking in. What if there's really no baby?
And so being a scientist, I thought I'd use my achieving side of my brain as opposed to the awakened side. I said, OK, let's find the infertility doctor with the best rates in the whole city. So I found that doctor and we went there. And after a few rounds, no baby. I said, well, that's just the city. Let's find the infertility doctor that invented in vitro. So we found that team.
And every bit of the way, I had this feeling deep in my heart, and my deep inner wisdom at the level of intuition, and, increasingly, through synchronicities, that for us in our path, not someone else's, but for us we were in the wrong office. I knew that in my heart. And yet I couldn't let go of that driving sense. I've got to have it.
And I mean it's not a selfish thing to want a baby. It's not like I want $5 million. I want a baby. But there was this illusion of control. And what we found in our journey was increasingly synchronicities that were guiding us that say no matter how depressing this is-- and it was depressing.
Every failed in vitro felt like a funeral, like that tiny little embryo was dead now. And it was very depressing. And my husband, who really wanted to be a father, was lying on the ground. He would just lie there and say our lives are hollow and meaningless without children. I mean it was depressing. And you'll minister to people. Yeah. It's a tough journey. It is a tough journey.
So what we started to see was the type of synchronicity that just, if nothing else, said you are not alone in this. You are buoyed up. I don't know where we're going. And I don't know what it will look like, but we knew we were buoyed up. I'll give you an example.
I had another terribly disappointing failed in vitro. And I'm sitting on the bus on the way up Broadway to work. And the bus is empty. And I'm feeling completely miserable, really depressed. And the gentleman who had just got on the bus started walking towards me. And I said, oh no, not today. I don't have it in me today. And there's all these empty orange vinyl seats. Wouldn't you want one of those?
And he's getting closer and closer. And out of the whole empty bus, the gentleman sits down right beside me. And he leans over and he says, you know what, miss, you look like just that type of mom that would go all around the world adopting kids. So I've taken that bus for at least 15 years before that day and plenty of years after. No one has ever said that. Far too improbabilistic to have happened by chance. It's a synchronicity.
And more and more beautiful helpers and healers came along until one night, in the middle of the night-- my husband's out cold-- I wake up. And I sit up. And space opens. And it's numinous. And it's bright. And you can feel the ecstasy of that. And a presence comes and says, if you were pregnant, would you adopt?
And this was a very powerful, sacred presence. And you would never fib to a presence like this. And I said no. No. I am aware that I'm on a path but no. And then very gently, space and time closed. And I looked around, it was, of course, 3:00 something in the morning. He's out cold. And we knew we were supported.
So we go further down this path. And there's more synchronicities. And one of the greatest trail angels in our journey was my mother. I get this call. Hi, honey. It's mom. I just want you to know our adopted the most beautiful little boy from Russia. His name is Allen Joseph. And I just wanted you to know.
A trail angel. So again, achieving awareness, awakening awareness. I could feel the call. I could feel that there was something more, that we were to become parents in a way that we were not yet prepared to inherit.
So we go to the top of the top of the top, the best in-vitro people in the whole country. We're lying in bed side by side, solidarity, my husband by my side. We turn on-- we'd splurge at the nice hotel. And the TV is stuck. Like how could the TV be stuck? And he sort of hits it. And what we're watching for four hours is a documentary of a street child at our overpriced hotel on solidarity with an IVF RNR.
And the little boy through the translator says, I don't care that I can't go to school. I don't care that I live in this garbage dump. And he points to the garbage dump. But it hurts so much to not be loved that I sniff glue to make the pain go away.
And it was my husband who said at first, he's like there's a child out there for us. So we were entrapped by our own ego. Oh, this child needs to have my nose and his brains. We had made ourselves miserable. And then things opened up even more.
And the presence came back. And same thing. I sat up. Space and time opened. You can feel it coming. There's a very rhythmic presence. This space and time opens. And the question's asked. And I say, I'm getting closer, but no. I was aware of the transition. I was aware of the growth. This was a spiritual path. We were still not yet ready to inherit the mantle of parenthood.
So I get the picture from my trail angels that there's a child out there for us. We find a clergyman's daughter who brings little babies from around the world to parents and makes families. We go see her. She happened to be in Pittsburgh. And her walls were lined with beautiful children and complete families from all over the world.
And she said, what kind of child do you want? And I said, oh, I certainly don't care if this is a boy or a girl, I certainly don't care what race this child is, but, please, a child who can love. And my husband said, yes, all that, but kind of a girl. And then I leaned in and I said, but really a child who can love is most important. And we leave.
Shortly thereafter, my name is Lisa Jane Miller. I have an older cousin big Jane. We're both named for the same great aunt. Big Jane calls and speaks to me in only the way that the big Jane in your life, OK, miss Columbia professor, you think you're so smart but really you study spirituality. Why don't you actually come out here to a healing ceremony? That was with that little twist.
And I said yes. Yes. OK. So I drop everything. I cancel all my meetings. I get on a plane. I go to South Dakota. And there standing up before the community is the chief. He stands tall and he says, I want to tell you about my son-- and he gets tears in his eyes and holds his heart-- my son who I adopted.
We had a beautiful healing ceremony for about eight hours and then we went to the sweat lodge the women in [INAUDIBLE], another. And the [INAUDIBLE] wife is how she introduces herself. Said I want each of you to tell us why you've come. And so the first woman in this very hot sweat lodge-- I mean I was in the corners. They were fine but I was getting air.
I have come because my son is not coming home. He's 40. And I worry for the family. And I worry for his kids. And the next woman says, I have come because my son is 14. And he's starting to use alcohol and drugs. And I worry he'll be addicted. And we go around and every woman has come to pray for her son.
And then it's big Jane. And I'm speechless. And Jane knows that. And she says this is my cousin little Jane. And she's come looking for her child. I'm wondering if we could help her. And they all knew exactly what was meant. They said, mm-hm. And for the first time, I knew I was in the right room.
And we prayed together. And the prayer was for each other as I was familiar with. And it was something new and wonderful. We prayed for the superordinate, the oneness of us that was instantiated, the sacred consciousness. And it went up through the top. And again, in my mind's eye, I could see it.
So after five years, that night a call came. It was on our machine. I called in back home. We have found the Millers' child from the other side of the world. We have many wonderful girls. We know Mr. Miller had wanted a girl. But this is the Millers' child and this is a son. Praying for sons.
And so I named him Isaiah Lakota, Isaiah for one world and Lakota for the people who helped bring him. And it showed me that all the achieving in the world couldn't have brought us the greatest jewel in our lives. There was a way of being in deep dialogue, an open system awakening our natural transcendent awareness like we just did that takes us on a journey that is not what we wanted. It is so much better than what we wanted.
The video came. There's this beautiful little boy from an orphanage north of Saint Petersburg, Russia. Da, da, da. Arm around the nurse, pure joy, smacking of spirit. You just feel the radiance of his spirit. We were so grateful.
We turned in, went to bed, and that night the presence came. And space and time opened. And I knew it was coming. And I knew I was ready finally. Finally, I was ready. If you were pregnant, would you still adopt? Yes. Absolutely. This is my spiritual son.
And that night we conceived his spiritual twin, who's kind of a girl, who's all of a girl. And they know themselves as spiritual twins. So that's all of ours. That's all of ours. That's life lived in dialogue, synchronicity of which we are all a part, helping each other, guiding each other. When anything comes to you, say it, because you're someone's trail angel. We're emanations like rays from one sun. And when we're in dialogue, the more living an awakened life.
JOE ARCHER: It's beautiful. Thank you.
LISA MILLER: It's all of ours. It's all of ours.
SOPHIA DOESCHER: Wow. Thank you for sharing that. I mean in all spaces, even that of a Divinity School, vulnerability can feel hesitant to bring to. And I think that a lot of times we try to do work to make this space one that is invited into. But I'm just thinking about the world you live in that is not the Divinity School, that is such a-- the clinical psychology side of it, and how you have found ways of this bravery to bring this into spaces where it feels like where you are paving the way into that conversation, or is that how it has felt?
LISA MILLER: So you're all torchbearers. And I'm sure you've had these experiences of holding the torch and lighting the room. We don't make the fire. We hold the torch. But I'm sure you've had this experience.
My greatest fear is not speaking up. Look at where we are, a public square minus a spiritual core, a public square in which we are spiritually nonconversant. Someone said, we don't talk about that here. Well, we can easily say we do. We do because our lives depend on it, and our health and wellness, and our ethics, our ability to love and to walk our own spiritual path. It all depends on being spiritually conversant and honest with each other.
So when I was just starting out, I was on an inpatient unit as a young intern. And the patients would come up to me and they'd say, Dr. Miller, could you come here, because they knew I wanted to hear what they had to say. And come here was not sitting in your office come here. Come here was could you walk down the linoleum floor to the kitchen, to the pots and pans closet, and sitting in the corner, will you pray with me? So it didn't feel OK to ask to pray.
And here at Harvard, you have done a lot to make it OK to pray. You are putting spirituality back into the public square. You are putting spirituality into healing. You are at the crest of the wave. It is essential [INAUDIBLE] us, saving us.
The other thing that happened when I was new was that I was co-running a group. And a woman with severe schizophrenia was trying to say I try to pray. I try to feel God's presence. And when it comes, I'm having-- and I said, I wanted to hold space for her. And perfectly good person, well intentioned, my co-intern cut her off because we don't talk about that here.
And so I reopened the space. And I said, but you were saying that it's hard for you to pray. And he cut me off again and I quit. And I've always regretted that. So I'm afraid of not speaking up. And I'm not afraid of speaking up.
SOPHIA DOESCHER: Thank you. And also, I really love how you're talking about the public sphere-- the public square rather-- and thinking about the fact that this, as you spoke about that the younger generations are moving towards spirituality over religion. And I was curious if you have any thoughts about what spirituality in the public square looks like, and the value of community as part of that, and how to bring that about in the kind of increasing individualism that might be connected to spirituality with it. I mean I want to believe it is innately going to come about with spiritual awakened brain.
LISA MILLER: We are all endowed with a capacity to not just believe but perceive, that we are loved and held, that we're guided, and that we're never alone. We just shared that practice. And so too we are endowed with the ability to show up for one another so that no one should ever feel anything but to be loved and held, guided, and not left alone.
When we look at a strong awakened brain, when we look at the thickening of the cortex across the regions of the awakened brain, and say, how do we get there, and if this is universal, what does it look like? We looked all around the world. We looked in India. We looked in China. We looked in the US.
And we found that if there is an innate capacity for spiritual life, there must be common phenotypes around the world. I mean, yes, there's beautiful richness of diversity around faith tradition, and symbol, and language, and practice. And we strengthen the spiritual brain in different ways in different places and still there is one spiritual brain and we all have it.
So there must be common phenotypes. And there were. There is, and you'll know this here well, there's an on ramp to transcendant awareness whether it's prayer, meditation, mind/body, nature, one, an on ramp. Two, the capacity to perceive this parietal putting in and out hard boundaries, unity and separateness.
We're all one and we're all distinct, and that love is a mutative force. Love is not just an emotion like happiness. It is a force like magnetism or gravity. It is a transformative force in the universe. So an on ramp to transcendent awareness, that being of unitive love, and the off ramp being a moral code that is derived from a relationship to ultimate reality, not just cherry picked driven by hedonics.
So those four phenotypes were seen all around the world-- China, India, the US. They go by different names. There's human distribution and variance everywhere. We all have it. The fifth phenotype is the one of all the phenotypes that most correlates with a strong spiritual brain, with an awakened brain.
They all correlate with an awakened brain but the one that most strengthens the brain is altruism, love of neighbor. When we show up so that, for one another, we are loving, holding, and never leave anyone alone, we strengthen and awaken our natural spirituality. So if someone's stuck, all we have to do is walk by their side and help them serve.
I'll also share with you-- this applies to all of us but it is actually quite surprising that it is in highly resourced communities that people are suffering the most. So I had a good colleague, very good colleague, Dr. Sonia Luther, who for many years looked at children in poverty and thought, you know, I've got to get a control group. So she went to highly resourced communities on both coasts and found in highly resourced high schools higher rates of the diseases of despair, more addiction, more depression, more anxiety.
And so she looked under the hood. She did an ecological. She wanted to see the tidal wave. What's in the air and water? What is in the unwritten curriculum to which we're indoctrinating our children? And so she said, hey, you all come here. Tell me who here is really popular to determine social esteem. Where do you get ding ding in the eye? And everyone knew who was popular. Oh, these boys are extremely popular. And that girl, she's very popular.
Dr. Luther came back two weeks later, rounded up new students, and said, tell me about that group of boys and that girl and in this way determined the actual behavioral correlates of esteem. What moves the tidal wave? So in highly resourced communities in the United States on the coasts, what might you imagine is the number one predictor of popularity in-- do you want to do boys or girls first? Boys.
Number one predictor of popularity in our highly resourced high schools? So [INAUDIBLE] is there but it didn't differentiate the highly popular boys. Everyone says that. Everyone always says that. It was use of substance. Substance use. Highly popular boys use drugs right. 80% decreased relative risk of addiction going through the window of risk when there's a strong spiritual core. Popular boys used. And the second predictor was not intimacy but conquest, so notches on the belt.
So those are beautiful souls, indoctrinated, formed in a public square minus a spiritual core, a transactional public square where we are exchanged as parts and pieces. The opposite of that is a transformational, loving public square where we know each other as souls on Earth. So for girls, the number one predictor, weight, in parts and pieces transactional. And the number two predictor for girls was mean girls, interpersonal aggression.
So I teamed up with Dr. Luther. I said these are beautiful people being indoctrinated in a way that would lead to an epidemic of depression, of addiction, of anxiety. This is a really rough road. And so I said, what's spirituality like in these schools in these highly resourced communities? So the national rate at which we say in high school are 17, 18, 19, my spirituality is important to me. It is about 70%.
In highly resourced communities, what might you imagine is the rate at which-- exactly. It's 15, less than a quarter of the national rate. And indeed, the 15%, that small percentage of high school students who still had a strong personal spirituality were indeed protected. They were inured from the otherwise tidal wave of addiction, and depression, and suicidality. But 15%. So how do I get my three kids in that 15%?
Almost without exception, their families were part of a faith community or a community of contribution. So there was somewhere else to go where instead of being looked at as parts and pieces, they were looked at as souls on earth, as children of God, as beings of infinite worth. When you walk into a faith community, it doesn't matter if I just won the marathon or I'm going to jail. It doesn't matter. I'm so glad to see you. Welcome.
We are souls on Earth. We've come to be renewed and walk with each other. We know each other's souls on Earth. Those people, those 15%, were doing well. We have poisoned our culture. And we can change it. And we can change it right now this second. But it's to your point to know each other and treat each other as souls on Earth.
LAURA TUACH: Thank you so much, Dr. Miller, and Joe, and Sophia. I'm wondering what you all are thinking, feeling out there and if you have any questions or comments that we might be talking amongst ourselves.
AUDIENCE: Thank you so much. Is this on? Can you hear me? Thanks so much for the presentation, just sharing your heart, Dr. Miller, and for the facilitation. I'm feeling a lot of things as you're sharing, which I really appreciate. And one of them is that I'm curious. You strike me as somebody who's kind of standing in places and speaking out about these-- let's call them like more subtle, more refined aspects of our humanity and what we're able to perceive, and experience, and respond to. I'm so curious about the kind of resistance you feel in the different settings you move through. And I'm sure you've developed an intuition around how to help facilitate the conversation and its spread better. Does that make sense?
LISA MILLER: So thank you. Thank you. Like I said, you're all torchbearers so let's put our heads together. I will share with you that oftentimes people are so grateful to be free to speak and share of their spiritual heart. They are so grateful.
Within the past two weeks, I spoke at a business school. And they said, thank you. Thank you. We want to be able to talk about this. So wherever you go, everyone has a hunger and cannot wait to connect when they know it's OK, that we talk about that here. And so when you do, authentically, they feel free to do the same. And what comes very often is tears because it's been held up inside. And they're so grateful.
Now science I find useful for institutional transformation. So for instance in working with a school or I've worked a lot with the US Army, deeply spiritual people who, because there's a science that says we are naturally spiritual beings, and when we strengthen our innate spirituality, it is the hub of the wheel. It stabilizes moral development, mental health, relational ethics. So the Army's been magnificently innovative in using the science as a blueprint to get upstream of mental health, of relational ethics.
When I spoke at the business school, I shared that I'm having conversations at times that I never dreamed I'd have with people around ethics. I mean you did what? I mean I can't believe it. And I've had conversations like when you lie to me, it makes it harder to give you leadership responsibility. I used to get frustrated and angry at all these breaches of relational ethics. And now I say, you know what, I'm a teacher. It's my job to teach. I'm going to teach. And so I say not being forthright feels bad. And I think that it's helpful to people that when we get upstream--
AUDIENCE: Yeah. Go ahead. Thanks for owning it. Yeah. I mean you're a beautiful example. I really appreciate it. Thank you.
LISA MILLER: Likewise. But what I'll share is that at the business school, everybody went yeah, so they wanted an answer, too, everywhere you go. Everywhere you go.
AUDIENCE: I'm really intimidated by microphones but it's for the best. Yeah. You talked a lot about adolescence. And we have this we can't talk about church in schools. But I wonder-- and I think there's an education piece of the Mind, Body, Spirit Institute. Is there a role in the public schools for spirituality if we can't have it be faith?
LISA MILLER: Natural spirituality, innate transcendent awareness through which we are not a closed system but an open system in dialogue with life is our birthright and essential to whole child development. So we run Awakened School Institute in which we talk about the spiritual core in whole child education.
And we have public schools and we have religious schools all working together because there's one spiritual core. We all have it. And it's done, of course, in a way that's inclusive, and constitutional, and appropriate. Yes. Yeah. And we just had a conference so you can all come next time, I hope. We had 500 educators come, the spiritual core in the whole child, awakened schools. All of our country, spirituality and education is alive and well. It's just only now that people are coming together, and bringing voice, and sharing their practices, and feeling authorized. We talk about that here. Yeah.
AUDIENCE: Thank you for a phenomenal presentation. I just feel overwhelmed by just the amazing content and everything you have shared. I'm very much interested in the interfaith space. And you did touch a lot on that. Could you please speak a little bit more because, from my experience, when it's not our Indigenous, default experience, because we have discouraged people from more intentionally constructing those spaces in the public square, it might be really difficult to find common language. And it might be difficult to communicate that spirituality, that language of spirituality from one human being to another human being.
And I wondered if you have any recommendations in how we should be able to-- I know it's so unique to everyone and perhaps all of it, or a big portion of it, might not be communicable. But it's a very powerful statement in order to be able to build that public square for us to be able to communicate in succinct or understandable language.
LISA MILLER: Embrace pluralism. Yes. I'm so glad you raised this. Absolutely. So we do this in my class at Columbia. And the one rule is that we speak in the first person. And so we'll have a circle of say there's four students, four graduate students.
And the first one will say, when I came of age, my grandma, she tattooed me. And it linked me to my mother, and my mother's mother, my grandma, and my great-grandma all through time. And someone else says, yeah, I get that because my grandma, I used to come home from school. It was my grandma who met me. And we'd sit at the table. And she'd listen to me. And my grandma, she taught me to pray. And so now when I think of God, it's kind of God and my grandma all rolled up into one.
And someone else says, yeah, I got that, because my grandma, she's passed, but she walks with me. And when my back's against the wall, I can hear her in my mind's eye. And someone else says, I got that. I don't know about my own family faith tradition but I know energy can never be destroyed so, yeah, that's your grandma.
There's the deepest bond. There's the deepest bond because it's at the level of the spiritual core. So class ends. It's time to go home. And they're still sitting there. And then the semester ends and they don't want to get up. And they go to coffee shops because that's who we really are. We want to love and know each other that deeply. I want to know you in that deeper way, that deeper bond.
So we've come quite a distance on and we keep working on inclusivity around race, and gender, and orientation. But we are only starting. And you can be the leaders in spiritual inclusivity, diversity and inclusion on the many ways that we express our spiritual heart. The red brain is universal.
We have the same docking station. And then we tell this. And it is strengthened in many different beautiful ways-- different languages, different customs, different meanings. But at the level of the universal spiritual heart, yeah, I got that. I know what you mean. So whether it's the birth of our children, or the crossing of our ancestor, or the renewal of spring, or the solstice, yeah, I got that. That's who we can be in our public square. And I think it's our nature. I think it's hard, and alienating, and lonely until we do that. Yes. Hi.
AUDIENCE: Thanks for a very excellent talk, of course, about spiritual science. And so we now [INAUDIBLE] five when I was [INAUDIBLE], which is basically to say science cannot talk about spirituality, update your guards, et cetera. Do you think eventually you will be science aware we continue to prove spirituality is a scientifically plausible concept and eventually those will be overturned?
LISA MILLER: Thank you. Thank you. So I often heard when I was starting out two very strong camps. Some people would say I am a deeply spiritual person. I don't care what science can and cannot do. I know it in my heart to be true, which is, of course hard line. That's hard data, intuition, mystical awareness. Other people would say, I am a scientist. I only take as true that which can be shown by science. So they were radical empiricists. Right. Strong split.
Well, it turns out that spirituality and science can of course go hand in hand. And while scientists do not define spirituality, a clinical scientist can use our lens to look at the impact of lived spirituality on the rest of our lives and, in particular, more precisely, identify threads of lived human spirituality that have an enormous impact that reverse the tidal wave. So I think that clinical science can look at lived human spiritual life. And it turns out that we know ourselves and our inner life quite honestly because when we look at the biological correlates, the MRI studies or the heart studies, you see that people know if they're in a spiritual state of connection or if they're not.
I was surprised and I'm feeling that I should share this. On the Columbia campus, we put an awakened awareness group, which was a spiritual mind/body wellness group. And people signed up. They were very eager to sign up, young undergraduates. 40% of the people who signed up for a spiritual mind/body group had meaningful trauma. 40% had meaningful trauma. And they were very well therapized. They'd all been to therapy.
And when we looked under the hood, what we saw was that despite the fact there had been gains at the level of therapy, at the level of spiritual life, there was still spiritual injury, which means there was a time in my life where I felt the presence of god, or the spirit, or my higher power. Life used to feel on, numinous. And I feel cut off. And it was only through direct spiritual engagement that that shifted. And it did. It did. So who are you? Are the ones who can help guide and move through spiritual injury. Any treatment for trauma has a foundational spiritual core.
So in the Army, what they're doing, they're using the science and they're making teams, like Dr. Rosmarin has gotten McLane doing, teams, teams where the input of the chaplain is every bit as important as the input of the therapist. Together they're working. And some recovery is a foundationally spiritual axis.
AUDIENCE: Thank you so much. It's just such a privilege to be here and just be part of the conversation. I'm curious with what you said in the last part in thinking of the dark night of the soul experience. And maybe you can just say more about that and how that's related to the trauma of that, [INAUDIBLE] spiritual healing so the [INAUDIBLE].
LISA MILLER: Yes. I'm so glad you raised that. So the red brains were people who strengthened their spiritual life through struggle and despair. Science mirrors dark night of the soul. When we look at people with a strong spiritual core who say my personal spirituality is highly important to me, they are two and 1/2 times more likely to have gotten there in the past 10 years through depression. And yet once it's formed, a strong spiritual core is protected against the total downward spiral for the next leg of life until there's a new chapter break.
So throughout our lives-- and I go into it here, the intertwining of real pain and despair-- I shared my own journey and then the breakthrough to a greater spiritual awareness. And a stronger core is built. We move forward. And then there's a new chapter. And there's two ways that we grow, as you suggest.
One is these hardwired times of deep formative developmental depression, the first of which is in the booting up the spiritual emergence with puberty into adolescence. What is going on right now? I'm so glad you raised this. Every young person, every 15, 17, 20, 23-year-old, goes through a developmental depression with the booting up, the surge of spiritual awakening marked by the 50% increase in the heritable contribution.
From the inside out, there's a surge. It can feel like a half empty glass of spirituality, the existential striving. What is my purpose? What is my meaning? What is love really? What, you broke up with me? Well, yesterday you loved me and today you don't. My mom loved me and she still loves me. So is love real? And are you real? And are we real? Are we just disappearing waves? I mean deep existential questions. So that is the work.
That is the most important work we do, coming of age. And it is almost silent on most university campuses. It is the hub of our development. And you have a unique opportunity to help young adults form in this most essential way that they are hardwired to grow. College counselors tell me 2/3 of my caseload is not really classic DSM depression. It is this developmental depression, the emergence of the existential quest. And this quest is essential to our formation.
Now what's happening in our country now is that right at this phase of quest, there's a 52 card pickup in the larger culture. So right when this cohort of young adults is going through the quest, and the surge, and what is real, and what is good, and what is loving, and what's true, there's mayhem around them. And it's really been very difficult for them to do the work that they're hardwired to do.
LAURA TUACH: I know there are more questions. But I feel like we told folks we'd be wrapping up at 6:15 with the formal part of the program and hopefully can stick around for a few minutes before we head out for something to eat. There's food at the back. I hope you'll stay, and chat with your neighbor, and chat with Dr. Miller.
You've charged us here. I don't know if you realize that, but these kinds of conversations don't flow so freely at Harvard Divinity School. All right.
JOE ARCHER: Yes.
LISA MILLER: You conducted it.
LAURA TUACH: So you have charged us to move more into that part of the brain that's connected, and open, and vulnerable. And I will help you do this because I feel the urgency. I feel the urgency, not just for young people, which I feel really acutely having young nephews, but really for all of us. I feel it acutely now coming into this phase of the pandemic where people are returning to a sense of normalcy that just wasn't normal before the pandemic. So I feel the urgency. So thank you very much for coming. Thank you, Sophia and Joe, for your excellent questions and your open hearts. And I hope you'll come again.
SPEAKER 2: Sponsors HDS Office of Ministry Studies and the Initiative on Health, Spirituality, and Religion at Harvard.
SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2022, the president and fellows of Harvard College.