For millennia, the religions of the world have played a fundamental role in providing comfort and emotional well being through rituals and practices - song, service and prayer. Modernity has and continues to push faith aside, and in an increasingly secular culture attitudes have shifted the way many people think about a spiritual practice.
While faith and spirituality go hand in hand for some of us, feeling spiritually alive can also be prompted by acts of service, mediation, a hike in the woods or simply sitting around the Thanksgiving table.
Exploring spirituality has been a central focus of neuroscientist and psychologist Dr. Lisa Miller, professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University. She has good news for people of many beliefs.
“Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, Catholic, Christian, spiritual but not religious, we all engage the same neural correlates, as we perceive a transcendent relationship,” says Miller. In other words, our capacity to experience a spiritual life is hardwired: “We are all natural spiritual beings.”
Miller, who is also founder of the Spirituality Mind Body Institute at Columbia University, Teachers College, argues that a regular spiritual practice can lead to less depression and anxiety.
Dr Miller shares a profound experience which prompted her research into the connection between spirituality, an “awakened brain” and mental illness. At the beginning of her career while working in an “inpatient unit with people who were in tremendous pain and recurrent major depression,” she led an impromptu Yom Kippur service.
“As we start to say the prayers, we become very quickly one community. And we sing their prayers and there's a rhythm...There was a sense that whatever the diagnosis of the individual patient might be, in this moment on Yom Kippur, their light shined bright, and their ways were equal and opposite,” Miller recalls. “They were free of the cage of the limitations of their ego, they were free from the small ‘s’ self, and they had joined the larger capital ‘S’ self, the field of life, the sacred connection.”
The effects on her patients were remarkable, but Miller also explains that the effects wore off after about four days and observes that “there needed to be a sustained engagement of spiritual awareness.”
“The awakened brain,” says Miller, “allows us to know that we are never alone and that in our toughest moment, no matter how despairing and unloved and unworthy I might feel, I'm actually part of this extraordinary life presence.”
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In “The Awakened Brain; The New Science of Spirituality and Our Quest for an Inspired Life,” author Lisa Miller says that, “our innate awakened brain, our inborn spiritual, natural spirituality allows us to be loved and held and guided every one of us and never be alone. This is who we are.”