The Awakened Brain by Lisa Miller, PhD explores Lisa’s work around the neuroscience and psychology of spiritual awakenings, how spirituality can help us cultivate healing and resilience, and the sometimes surprising results of her research into how spirituality relates to depression and human development. This book radically changed the way I think about depression and is a must-read for anyone who works with or has adolescent children, or if you’re like me and you’re just interested in the neuroscience of spirituality and personal/spiritual development.
Lisa Miller is a leading generational psychologist on the benefits of spirituality, she is a graduate of Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned her doctorate in psychology. She is currently a professor of psychology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and is the Founder and Director of the Spirituality Mind Body Institute, the first Ivy League graduate program and research institute in spirituality and psychology.
Dr. Miller is widely published in leading academic journals, and has appeared on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and Weekend Today as an expert.
In The Awakened Brain, Lisa shares some incredible stories from her own life and her own spiritual journey including her struggles with infertility and her eventual miraculous conception (It’s a tale that is sometimes heartbreaking but eventually absolutely beautiful. I definitely cried.). She expertly blends her own story with lessons learned from her years of research into the many benefits of spirituality, and tips and practices so that we can cultivate our own awakened spirituality.
According to Lisa:
“My scientific career began as a journey to understand the protective benefits of spirituality–to discover how spirituality buffers us against depression, anxiety, and substance abuse, and how spirituality lives in the brain. When we lifted the hood, we discovered three key ways to bring the wisdom of our awakened brain into our daily lives: through awakened attention, awakened connection, and awakened heart.“
In her incredible book she discusses all of this, from these specific benefits, to ways we can cultivate those three cores dimensions of spirituality in our own lives. It’s an excellent blend of personal memoir, explanation of current psychological and neuroscientific research, and road map to greater health and wellness through spirituality.
She reveals some surprising and potentially controversial discoveries including:
- The power of intergenerational spirituality–“when mother and child were both high in spirituality, the child was 80% protected against depression“
- The fact that some amount of our spirituality is innate–“a significant degree of our capacity to experience the sacred and transcendent–one third— is inscribed in our genetic code, as innate as our eye color or fingerprints”
- The protective benefits of spirituality against substance abuse and suicide–“adolescents with a strong personal spirituality were 40 to 80 percent less likely to develop substance dependence or abuse“, “There was no single variable that tells us who will or won’t show suicidality–except for one. Strong personal spirituality was the only variable inversely associated with suicide.“
- The relationship between depression and spiritual development–“…the elevated rates of addiction and depression we saw in teens were because young people were struggling to form spirituality and we weren’t supporting them”
- The biological correlates of spirituality–which she was told by her peers didn’t exist and for which she won both the William T. Grant Faculty Scholars Award and a career development award from the National Institute of Mental Health
It’s not an overstatement to say that Lisa’s work has radically transformed multiple fields and that she is largely responsible for the recent scientific inquiry into spirituality and its benefits for mental health. And The Awakened Brain is a beautiful culmination of her decades of work in this field. It is an elegant and persuasive argument for cultivating personal spirituality, especially in adolescents, which I personally resonated with since my work on this blog and elsewhere is centered around helping people cultivate their own personal spirituality and spiritual practice.
In my opinion, this should be required reading for child psychologists and all parents. It seems apparent upon reading the book that, for at least the last few generations, parents have done a poor job of transmitting their spirituality intergenerationally and this has resulted in increasing rates of depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and suicide. Now, a lot of this had to do with cultural momentum as the pendulum swung away from religion and spirituality and towards science and industrialism over the last couple of centuries, but that trend is changing and we are entering a new era, one in which both science and spirituality are respected and have their place within an integrated human culture.
Humanity has been through the polarities of religion>science, and science>religion and now it is up to us to reconcile and integrate these polarities or face an ever worsening meaning crisis in which young people find themselves in a world so bereft of meaning that they kill themselves rather than endure it. I cannot think of anything more tragic.
Thankfully we have bold pioneers like Lisa Miller to pave the way and incredible books like this one to help guide us through this unique moment in human history.
If that sounds interesting to you and you’re interested in picking up a copy of The Awakened Brain yourself, you can use the affiliate link below to purchase a copy and small portion of the money will go to me to help with the costs of hosting my website. Thanks for reading and thank you for your support.
Love,
Justin
☀️🙏❤️
Link to purchase: The Awakened Brain