Dr. Lisa Miller: The Neuroscience of Spirituality - How To Heal Your Mind & Manifest More

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Speaker 1 Thank you so much for being here. I'm so grateful for you and I hope you are feeling blessed and abundant in your life right now.

Speaker 1 And did you know that if you're feeling not blessed, if you're feeling depressed or anxious or like something's off, that depression is your body and your mind screaming for a spiritual awakening.

Speaker 1 And that's something that we talk about today with Dr. Lisa Miller, who is a clinical psychologist who does something different.

Speaker 1 She likes to blend spirituality with science and apply both disciplines into individuals' lives. And with her work, she has seen incredible transformations.

Speaker 1 In this episode, we talk about the difference between a depressed brain and an awakened brain and how to transform your mind and brain from static depression into awakened abundance.

Speaker 1 It's an extremely powerful process that she walks me through: a visualization and meditation process, one like I've never done before, that I think will be extremely interesting and powerful for you if you're open to going through it with me.

Speaker 1 We talk about all these different points in transcending the parts of ourselves that hold us back.

Speaker 1 And she also mentions this divine hunger, how we're starving to feel the divine, to feel divinity within our lives. And yet we distract ourselves with so many things that keep us in a depressed brain.

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Speaker 1 So, send a link to someone where you feel like they could blend science and spirituality to serve their life in a better way. Without further ado, let's dive into this episode with Dr.
Lisa Miller.

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Speaker 1 Welcome back, everyone, to the School of Greatness. Very excited about our guest and the conversation we're about to have.
We have Dr. Elisa Miller in the house, and I am excited about this.

Speaker 1 I've got a quote I want to share from you first before we dive in.

Speaker 1 This quote you said is, what if the condition we pathologize and diagnose as depression is sometimes actually spiritual hunger, a normal and genetically

Speaker 1 derived part of human development that is unhealthy to muffle or deny. Now, Dr.

Speaker 1 Lisa, you have a bachelor's degree from Yale, a doctorate from UPenn, and you're a professor of psychology and education at Columbia University.

Speaker 1 You're also the first scientist to publish a peer-reviewed article on spirituality and mental health in the first two decades of human life. I'm so grateful you're here.

Speaker 1 And I think there is a massive dis-ease within society where depression and mental health is at an all-time high in terms of suffering, sadness, and in a weakened energetic state for a lot of people.

Speaker 1 I think specifically a big proportion of our youth.

Speaker 1 And you talk about a lot of the differences between the awakened brain versus more of a depressed brain. You've been studying this for a long time.

Speaker 1 You've got science, research, and spiritual practices blended together, which I think is so powerful. And I wanted to ask you first:

Speaker 1 What is the difference between an awakened brain and a depressed brain? And how can someone who feels the weight of the world, anxiety,

Speaker 1 depression, ADHD, any of these symptoms, how can they start to transform those symptoms or those feelings or that emotional weight into peace and awakened brain?

Speaker 2 Till is half the United States States and half of most of the post-industrial world is depressed.

Speaker 1 Really?

Speaker 2 We have unprecedented supply of food. We have unprecedented quality of medical care.
We are a very well-provided for society.

Speaker 1 And still, our inner life hurts.

Speaker 2 It hurts. And depression isn't just feeling sad.
Depression can be an edginess. You know, a lot of times people are grumpy or hostile.

Speaker 2 Depression can be the sense of dread creeping up on us and anxiety, like the boogeyman inside. Depression can be not wanting to eat, lying in bed, not having our game on at all.

Speaker 2 So, depression is not just sadness, it's really powering down.

Speaker 2 And for a very long time, there was most of the 20th century, people would say, depression, well, we can see that it has biological correlates. We can see that there's correlates in the brain.

Speaker 2 Depression, that's a medical illness, always and only, uniformly. But over here, you know, there's these people who are religious or they're spiritual and religious.

Speaker 2 That might be nice for them. But the view in the 20th century

Speaker 2 in much of mental health was that that's somehow a band-aid or a crutch.

Speaker 1 Religion or spirituality.

Speaker 2 It's somehow a crutch.

Speaker 2 That is now the outdated,

Speaker 2 very prevalent for a long time, point of view. What we now know from science is that just as depression has neurocorrelates, our spiritual awareness has neurocorrelates.

Speaker 2 We can track in the brain the circuits undergirding a transcendent relationship.

Speaker 2 And that's true no matter what religion you may be or if you're any religion at all.

Speaker 2 So whether I'm Hindu or Catholic or Christian or Muslim or Jewish and spiritual but not religious, the same circuits run as I perceive a deep, sacred, transcendent relationship.

Speaker 2 I can say I feel oneness with life.

Speaker 2 I can feel that nature is my sanctuary. I can say that God or Jesus or Hashem or Allah walks with me.
However, I understand the transcendent relationship, I'm using my awakened brain.

Speaker 2 There is one awakened brain. 7.2 billion people on earth have the same awakened brain.

Speaker 1 But why do we suppress our awakened brain?

Speaker 2 So very often depression is not always a medical illness. In fact, as we look two-thirds of the time, depression is not a medical illness.

Speaker 2 You can track its biological correlates as you can track the spiritual correlates, but that doesn't make it an illness. When you're lifting weights, you can track the biological correlates.

Speaker 2 That doesn't make it an illness.

Speaker 1 It's a strength, right?

Speaker 2 Well, it turns out that depression is actually a hunger for spiritual awakening, at least two-thirds of the time. Why is this happening to me? Why did she leave me? Why did I lose my money?

Speaker 2 I just feel horrible. Yesterday, Yesterday, everything was fine.

Speaker 2 That hunger, just like we're hungry for food, or thirsty, is the body, the mind, the soul, it's all one, body, mind, and soul, screaming for an expanded awareness.

Speaker 2 Life as I'm living it, life as I'm seeing it, has gotten too small.

Speaker 2 And just as I grow in height or weight or maturity, or my eyes change as I get older, our spiritual life changes.

Speaker 1 All of us. How has your spiritual life evolved from your youth to where you are now, specifically after studying the science of spirituality?

Speaker 2 So when I was maybe about 19,

Speaker 2 I fell in love for the first time. I mean, was flat in love.
I couldn't believe it. I'd never been in love before.
And he was perfect.

Speaker 2 He looked like a sculpture in a museum.

Speaker 1 Very.

Speaker 1 Very nice.

Speaker 2 He thought I was so interesting. I thought he was so interesting.
And he said, I love you.

Speaker 1 I said, you love me. I love you.

Speaker 2 And that was after three months.

Speaker 2 After five months, he broke up with me.

Speaker 1 Wow. Devastating.

Speaker 2 Devastated. And I couldn't understand it.
I really couldn't understand it at 19. You know, I thought, well, wait a minute.

Speaker 1 You said one thing. I felt it.
You felt it. And then you ended.
How could that be? Yeah.

Speaker 2 Right. So is love not real? Is love impermanent? And we'll poor the, call this poor guy Jason.

Speaker 2 Is Jason real? Like, do we change? Can we not count on each other?

Speaker 1 What do we account for? Was he lying to me? You know, why would this happen to me? All these things.

Speaker 2 So I think he was telling the truth and he thought he was telling the truth.

Speaker 1 He changed.

Speaker 2 And it gave me a shocking, really, it was sort of a drowning sense of impermanence. Wait a minute.
Wait a minute. The things I want so much in life, love is impermanent.

Speaker 2 And that sent me at 19 into a downward spiral and a search. Wait a minute.
Okay. Is love permanent? Are people permanent?

Speaker 2 What are we really about? And I became more and more concerned about the existential nature of life at 19. And it was very depressing.

Speaker 2 I started getting more and more upset, more and more depressed, sleepless, anxious. I'd stay up and sort of look out the window and wonder.
So I thought, you know, I really have to go to a therapist.

Speaker 2 And at 19, I went to a therapist, and the therapist said, you know, what brings you here?

Speaker 2 And I said, well, I don't, you know, all my life I felt connected to God and I felt connected to this deeper presence in life. And lately, I just don't feel it.

Speaker 2 And I, you know, was in love and love ended. And I just don't know, you know, what's real.

Speaker 1 What's the point of all this?

Speaker 2 What's the point of all this?

Speaker 2 And the therapist said, hmm,

Speaker 2 was your father there for you when you were little?

Speaker 1 And I thought, you know what?

Speaker 2 My dad actually was there for me when I was little. This isn't about that.
This isn't a story about my early childhood. This is a story about a hunt for what's true.

Speaker 2 And at least I had the gut instinct to say, new therapist, which is what you should always do if you don't feel at home with your therapist. Interesting.

Speaker 2 The therapist number two, from a psychodynamic to a cognitive therapist who works on your thoughts.

Speaker 2 And there we were, and I said, you know, I just don't know, you know, if there's meaning in life, if there's any value in life.

Speaker 2 And these at the time were viewed as nothing but symptoms, secondary symptoms to a deeper medical medical depression that a cognitive therapist thinks you can fix by changing your thoughts.

Speaker 2 And so I said, well, I just don't know if life has worth. I don't know what's real.
And she said, hmm, you don't know if life has worth. You have low self-esteem.

Speaker 2 I said, I'm embarrassed to admit, I feel just fine about myself.

Speaker 2 I don't know if life has meaning. It wasn't about myself.

Speaker 1 Interesting.

Speaker 2 And this went on and on, right? Because at that point, there had yet to be a science that showed that there is in emerging adulthood a hunt for what's true.

Speaker 2 And it is not easy. A hunt for, is there deeper meaning than life? And if there is, what is my walk?

Speaker 1 What is my purpose? What is my purpose?

Speaker 2 To your point.

Speaker 1 If someone is feeling completely depressed or the symptoms of depression, or just an emotional weight, they can't seem to get off their back.

Speaker 1 And they are thinking to themselves, you know, the relationship I'm in is just not working or I'm getting into relationships and getting out of them and they just don't seem to be working.

Speaker 1 The career I'm in, it's just like draining my energy.

Speaker 1 I'm just not, I don't feel healthy. I don't feel good.
I have a lot of negative thinking consistently and it's hard to get these thoughts out of my mind.

Speaker 1 How does someone start to find meaning and purpose when they have no clue where to start? Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, I do think therapy is valuable, but it's only a piece of the story. And if you're in terrible pain, medication can be helpful, but that's only a piece of the story.

Speaker 2 Because that hunger, that yearning for a deeper significance, a deeper connection is actually your innate, inborn spiritual hunger. And hunger is a divine hunger.
It propels us on a quest.

Speaker 2 And we all have it. Nobody's left out.
Nobody's not spiritual.

Speaker 2 One spiritual brain, we all have it. We can trace it in your genes.
This is yours. Really?

Speaker 2 But how do we discover it?

Speaker 2 People want to know, how do I get to that? Well, right where the pain is, is the portal of entry.

Speaker 1 Where was your pain?

Speaker 2 My pain was here.

Speaker 1 In your chest. My heart.

Speaker 2 I just feel it in my chest because I had a broken heart.

Speaker 2 And my

Speaker 2 question, which was held in my mind and my body and my soul, is, was love real?

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 because God is love, I wondered, is God real?

Speaker 2 And that is a pretty bitter question.

Speaker 2 Not only do we ask this at 19 or 20, we ask this again at midlife, and we ask this again as elders. There's three bridges and we can't get around it.

Speaker 1 Really?

Speaker 2 Because spirituality is inborn. And like any inborn quality, just like we change and look different at 19 and 45 and 85, our spirituality kicks in.
Interesting. We cannot get around these questions.

Speaker 2 And just as there's three bridges of beckoning that kicks off with sort of the ignition is actually part of the spiritual process. Wait a minute, yesterday everything was fine.

Speaker 2 And today I feel somehow caged in. I don't feel at home in my inner being.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 2 It's so easy when I don't feel at home in my inner being to say, I don't feel at home. My spouse must not be right for me anymore.
You know, I don't feel enough inside myself. My job isn't big enough.

Speaker 2 I'm not special enough. It's so easy to look outwardly.
And in a culture that's just knee-deep in measurement and obsessed with how big and good am I outwardly, sometimes the answer isn't outward.

Speaker 2 It's a deep seated being inside ourselves.

Speaker 1 What was your awakening? What did it look like? How long did it take for you to do the therapy, do the exercises, go inward to reflect during this first bridge in your life?

Speaker 2 For the first bridge, it was only about six months. Although at 19, that feels like you've very

Speaker 1 much time. Right.
Right.

Speaker 2 And I want to say that I see on social media, there's a lot of people in Gen Z

Speaker 2 who have a lot of pain.

Speaker 1 Yes. Right.

Speaker 2 And that pain is not against you. That pain is for you.
Yeah. The pain in your heart at 19, 20, 25, is a deep calling to seek the presence of the deeper nature of life.

Speaker 2 Meditation, prayer, walk in nature, join a service group, your sangha, your minging, your fellowship.

Speaker 2 You will awaken. You are built to awaken.
And the first step of awakening is actually the depression.

Speaker 1 Really? Yes. Needing to go through the depression and experiencing it.
Yes. Why do you need depression to have a spiritual awakening?

Speaker 2 Because it is not a pathological depression over two-thirds of the time being young people, young adults. It is a developmental depression.
It's a banging at the door. It's a calling.

Speaker 1 It's like, hey, wake up.

Speaker 2 Wake up.

Speaker 2 And it was just fine two years ago to be as you are, but to rise to the next mantle of your being, not your outward getting, they'll come, but of your being,

Speaker 2 you need to answer the call.

Speaker 1 I saw this video online of Jim Terry saying depression is something like

Speaker 1 deep rest. It's like your body needing deep rest from the character you've been playing.
Oh. And I really liked the way he interpreted it.

Speaker 1 He was like, I was depressed, but it was like I was playing a character that wasn't serving me or my spiritual abilities at the highest level anymore.

Speaker 1 And he was literally playing characters in movies, but he was probably playing a character in the world also.

Speaker 1 And he was like, depression is. deep rest.
It's your body saying you need deep rest from the character you've been playing. And I really like that perspective.

Speaker 1 It's like, what have we been trying to portray?

Speaker 1 What masks have we been wearing to fit in, to try to belong, to try to compare ourselves or be judgmental towards what we're seeing on social media or with our friends and how we can live up to some standard or something like that.

Speaker 1 And so you're, what is the science though that I love that deep rest.

Speaker 2 Because deep rest means that we go into the deepest sleep. We go to the dream world where we meet the infinite.

Speaker 2 And when we wake up from deep rest, we are replenished,

Speaker 2 bright. Yes.
And the same is true with awakening.

Speaker 2 That after and through depression, we don't solve it. We don't figure it out.
You don't have a pro and con list to get out of a depression.

Speaker 2 We don't churn what I call our achieving brain. I'm going to strategize my way out of depression.
I'm going to research my way out of depression.

Speaker 2 There's another side of our brain, which is our awakening. our awakened brain.

Speaker 2 And just as in the dream world, we receive

Speaker 2 great

Speaker 2 replenishment, great renewal, great direction in our dreams. We know that we're loved.
We know that we're guided.

Speaker 2 We awaken through in the daytime, a depression into an awakening. We come to see that in our darkest, most painful moment, we don't fall through a black hole.

Speaker 2 We don't backfall into an abyss, but we're buoyant. We're actually caught.

Speaker 1 We're held.

Speaker 2 Yes. And that's not something that you sort of figure out.
It's something that you experience. It's something that you feel in your heart and in your body.
It is perceived.

Speaker 2 So spirituality is not a belief. It is the capacity to perceive.

Speaker 1 If someone is feeling or someone is feeling this state of depression right now, and maybe they've been feeling a depression for years and they've been using

Speaker 1 substances to try to numb and remove the depression, alcohol, smoking, vaping, drugs, pornography, whatever the addiction is to try to depress depression.

Speaker 1 Will that ever get them out of depression using substances?

Speaker 2 So it will never get us out of depression, ever, to use substances. But the desire that's often behind substance use is to transcend.

Speaker 2 Very often, when we look at the data, transcendence, which is really only found through a spiritual process,

Speaker 2 is so desired, the heart so hungers for spiritual awakening that we can take the tricky kind of cheap backdoor. Okay, I'll just have a few more drinks.

Speaker 2 Okay, you know, I'm just going to do some form of as if I had transcended experience.

Speaker 2 And so we can note, hey, okay.

Speaker 2 I'm looking for transcendence. Is there a way that really has legs under it? How can I get there without the drugs?

Speaker 2 Because, you know, the impulse to go deeper is the hunger of the spiritual heart. Yes.
How do we honor that? And every tradition on earth shows us a way.

Speaker 2 It doesn't matter if I'm Hindu or Muslim or Jewish or Catholic or Christian. It doesn't matter if I'm someone who walks in the forest or along the beach.

Speaker 2 It can be through deep service that we realize, hey, we're not alone. Altruism, love of neighbor.

Speaker 2 And we wake up and say, okay, I shoveled my neighbor's driveway. Okay, I babysat for this couple that's like out of their wits.
And suddenly I'm not alone.

Speaker 2 And wait a minute, the world isn't fractured and lonely.

Speaker 2 The way we act

Speaker 2 brings into our inner being the nature of reality.

Speaker 2 If I am loving, love of neighbor. Okay, right now we just had an election.
I don't care if you voted red, blue, or purple. I love you.
I love you as a fellow parent on the soccer sidelines.

Speaker 2 I love you as someone at work with whom I've got to get this job done. I love you as my friend of 30 years.

Speaker 2 In fact, I'm not even going to ask you who you voted for, because it is not nearly as important as that we're souls on earth walking the earth at the same time, that we're sharing this journey.

Speaker 2 And in fact, in fact, it's radical love, it's civic love that is our responsibility. The government doesn't build civic love.
We build civic love, the civic bond, and everything goes from there.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Another quote you have is you said, right now we're not studying spirituality. We've been educated out of our awakened awareness.

Speaker 1 We've been educated out of our spiritual awareness.

Speaker 1 Who is educating us out of our spiritual awareness? Is it schools? Is this our parents? Is this teachers? Is it the government? What is getting us out of our awakened awareness?

Speaker 2 Every single person on earth is born with a capacity for spiritual awareness, but it is one-third innate,

Speaker 2 two-thirds environmentally formed.

Speaker 2 So our parents and grandparents, the 10,000 exchanges by the locker, if you're part of a faith community, the pastor, priest, Iman, rabbi, no matter who it is in the first two decades of life, all weigh into shape our natural spiritual awareness.

Speaker 2 And as we get older, we pick our environment. We pick if we meditate and awaken.
We pick if we pray and connect with our higher power.

Speaker 1 We choose. It's a choice, David.
It is a choice.

Speaker 2 Handing it over is the way out of addiction. Handing it over is the way out of trauma.
But we wait until we tank to hand it over.

Speaker 2 When in fact, we were built from the day we were born to be in a sustained relationship with our higher power.

Speaker 2 Why don't we realize that?

Speaker 2 Because the gift of the two-thirds of the environment being taught, being shown, praying, meditating by the side of a parent, hearing people talk about, you know what, I just lost my job, but I know that God has a plan for me.

Speaker 2 You know what?

Speaker 2 We were just robbed, but that's okay. I saw the whole community come around me, and I know that we're never alone.
And everyone in this neighborhood is an ambassador of our higher power.

Speaker 1 Why is it so hard for people to believe that life is happening for them instead of to them when they have so many bad things happening all at once? It seems like the world is against me.

Speaker 1 This person left me. This person robbed me.
This person lied to me. This person stole from me.
My parents abandoned me. This person cheated on me.
It's all happening all at once.

Speaker 1 How is this happening for me?

Speaker 1 How, God, is this happening for me? And the world's just not against me.

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Speaker 2 Right. So overload.
Yes. But you know who the one agent in this story is who is unflappable? It is you.

Speaker 2 And so you have every choice to be an agent of God. I don't care what is thrown at me.
I don't care how much it hurts. I don't care if I'm loved back.
I'm going to choose to love.

Speaker 1 Why?

Speaker 2 Why? Because it's the path to the deep, most buoyant love that we can feel.

Speaker 1 That's a choice. When you choose to love, even when everything's against you.
Yes.

Speaker 2 Oh, it's so important, Lewis. May I share with you, I had the really life-changing experience to visit His Holiness the Dalai Lama a couple months ago.

Speaker 2 And I asked him a very metaphysical question that his resident scientists like. He wasn't interested.
Not at all, Dr. Miller.

Speaker 1 Did you go with Arthur Brooks or did you? Going with Arthur Brooks? Yeah, yeah, I was meant to go on that trip, but we had other plans. So I'll be there.
Next time. Next time.

Speaker 2 Next time. Well, so we'll show this forward.

Speaker 2 The Dalai Lama was not interested in my abstruse metaphysical question.

Speaker 1 What was the question you asked the Dalai Lama?

Speaker 2 The question I asked the Dalai Lama was: Is it not the case that all living beings have a transcendent faculty through which they feel the unit of reality?

Speaker 2 So that the love that's transferred in the mother's milk to the human is the same love experienced by the baby goat or baby calf.

Speaker 2 And he looked at that and he said,

Speaker 2 You must love.

Speaker 1 Do it. Yeah, that's it.
That was it. Do it.

Speaker 2 One message. And then he went on to clarify his singular point, which is love is a practice.
Love is a choice. So love is not just a feeling.
Oh, it feels so nice to love.

Speaker 2 Okay, everyone's forsaken me. I don't feel love.
I don't feel God's love. It hurts.
That hurts real. We're not minimizing that, right? But that's not the story of love.

Speaker 2 Love is a choice. Love is a practice.
So I've been betrayed. I've been hurt so terribly.
And I'm going to choose to love more deeply.

Speaker 1 Really?

Speaker 1 Why? Why love deeper when people have hurt you so badly?

Speaker 2 Because it is the only way to feel the ultimate deep connection with the source of life, who I call God. Use your word.
The universe, Jesus, Hashem, your word.

Speaker 2 But this ultimate connection. is the core of who we are.
We are built, Lewis, as an open system. We are built, designed in our biology to be in a sustained connection with the deeper force in life.

Speaker 2 We are built in our biology to be in a lived daily transcendent relationship. You can call that anything you want, but it is essential to being whole, to guiding ourselves.

Speaker 2 We can't navigate this earth as

Speaker 2 command control, as if we're the agent of all choice and power, the anthropocentric view. That is the source of pain.
We don't control everything. How much do we control?

Speaker 2 When we do a good job and we research and strategize, somewhere between 2% and 5%. Wow.
95%, the most important things in our lives, how do they come?

Speaker 2 So to really have a bigger life, to really be successful, is to be in dialogue with the source of life. And Lewis, you live this way.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 2 How did you find the true love of your life? Did you do a pro and con list or did a dialogue with the universe bring her?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, I was telling her before, just being in a state of

Speaker 1 a journey of healing so that I could first become peace myself and become

Speaker 1 open to possibilities and synchronicities.

Speaker 1 And being committed to the journey of healing was what I think allowed me to see Martha in front of me and say, wow,

Speaker 1 this is something that is starting from a spiritual connection rather than a sexual connection.

Speaker 1 and i was like oh that's interesting that's different i've never like looked at this this way in a relationship starting a relationship and that and and making it a commitment to myself on a daily basis when i connected with her to say how can we make this spiritual and not sexual which was kind of the opposite of what i'd done in every relationship before which is like I'm sexually attracted.

Speaker 1 Let's have fun, whatever. And then think about the spirituality later.
And there was always some out of alignment. It was like a forced energy.
And this just felt more,

Speaker 1 it just felt aligned. It felt harmonious.
It felt more peaceful.

Speaker 1 And that space of

Speaker 1 being aware of past wounds and mending and being on the journey of mending those wounds

Speaker 1 gave me more clarity and more awareness to see what was in front of me and to see, okay, what's possible for us if we can sync up synchronistically

Speaker 1 from place of

Speaker 1 consciously creating a spiritual relationship first and seeing what's possible.

Speaker 1 It doesn't mean we're perfect for each other, we're going to work out or it's the right fit, but creating from that space has allowed for beauty in other ways that I never imagined.

Speaker 2 So the Dalai Lama was right. Love is a choice.

Speaker 1 It's a choice daily. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And it's a choice daily also when there's, you know, it doesn't mean I don't have like frustrations in life or people that upset me or things like that. Sure.
And it's learning how to

Speaker 1 also ask, what is this happening for me?

Speaker 1 And if this was happening for me, then I get to thank God that this is happening for me if it's designed that way, as opposed to why is this happening for me, but, or why is this happening to me, but this is happening for me.

Speaker 1 Let me trust and keep an open heart in terms of what's going to. come to me because of this happening, because of this experience, and what blessings are are to come my way because of this.

Speaker 1 Now, whether that's factual or true or not, I think having that mindset and believing something good will come from it gives me more peace.

Speaker 2 Well, the proof's in the pudding because there's a real Marta and a real relationship.

Speaker 1 Well, of course.

Speaker 2 You chose love. You sustained love.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I didn't block my heart again. You know, I didn't say, screw this or screw women or whatever it is from previous relationships.

Speaker 1 I was willing to heal that and keep healing and then create from that space.

Speaker 2 When you met Marto, was there some sort of thing in your heart that you'd met something significant in your path? Someone of significance in your path?

Speaker 1 I just remember in

Speaker 1 our first meeting, I was kind of like,

Speaker 1 my ego was getting in the way because I was kind of like, oh, shoot. I didn't think I would meet her right now.
I was like, I just wanted my ego to have fun for a while, you know?

Speaker 1 But I was like, that's not what God wants me to experience. You know, God wants me to live in the highest level of service and to experience the highest level of love possible.

Speaker 1 And if I lead with an ego mindset of like, oh, let me just be single and have fun,

Speaker 1 I knew it would

Speaker 1 limit me from my ability to serve and feel spiritual love.

Speaker 1 I would feel material love or lust or emotions, but I don't think it would feel

Speaker 1 pure, pure, like abundance, pure

Speaker 1 cautiousness love.

Speaker 1 And so I've never felt that in relationship with another.

Speaker 1 She creates the space. So she created a space in the first time of us meeting where I was like, oh, this is a spiritual connection.
I can't mess this up. I kind of had that thought right away.

Speaker 1 I go, shoot, there's something spiritual here. And so I made a conscious decision to make the the dating phase before we, you know, we dated for many months until we became committed, right?

Speaker 1 I made a conscious decision to make it a spiritual phase. Not that it's not spiritual anymore, but it was like...

Speaker 2 Celibate?

Speaker 1 Yes. Yes.
And that focused spiritual. And that was the greatest decision I think I've ever made because it didn't fog my mind or my body from what was possible.
It didn't confuse me chemically.

Speaker 1 And therefore, we could keep it spiritual.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 that's been a beautiful, and I recommend that for everyone.

Speaker 2 What a discipline.

Speaker 1 It was, yeah, it was an extreme discipline. And every man that I was telling after it happened,

Speaker 1 they were like, this is not even possible. How would you do this? You know, they're like, it's not in the realm of the reality.

Speaker 1 And I just knew that doing it the other way for the previous 20 years in multiple long-term relationships didn't work. Like, so I was like, I need to try everything differently.

Speaker 1 And maybe it doesn't work, or maybe it's not the right fit or whatever, but I need to lean into the spiritual synchronicities that I'm feeling in this moment.

Speaker 1 And I need to continue to lean into the healing journey of myself and create peace

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 wholeness within me,

Speaker 1 you know, irrelevant of her. You know, whether this works out or it doesn't, I need to keep developing the wholeness feeling, the healing journey.
And then I can see,

Speaker 1 based on our values, our shared vision, and our alignment and our lifestyle alignment, if it makes sense now, you know, it materially makes sense to create a relationship.

Speaker 1 And so kind of aligning the spiritual feeling, the energy with, okay, let's talk,

Speaker 1 you know, do we have the same values? If we're completely out of alignment, then all right, maybe it's, maybe we're just friends.

Speaker 1 You know, I want to make sure we have a harmonious relationship, entering a relationship harmoniously with our values, our vision, and our lifestyle. I don't want it to be constant friction.

Speaker 1 So then it was having those conversations, and I wasn't confused chemically.

Speaker 1 So I was able to speak the truth fully and see if she could accept it or not. And same for her.

Speaker 1 I think that was a beautiful practice.

Speaker 2 How did you realize? When was the awareness that not only are you spiritual friends, this is your spiritual life partner?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I think in the first day, I felt like something is different. I didn't think, I didn't was like, I wasn't like, oh, this is my person forever.
I also wanted to just

Speaker 1 not jump so quickly into something. I was like, let's just take time.
It doesn't have to be like figured out right away.

Speaker 1 It doesn't have to be like, I have this feeling and we're getting married tomorrow.

Speaker 1 I also wanted to give myself space and time to not rush something and really feel the experience of time a little bit.

Speaker 1 So I think in the first day, I felt something was different about our spiritual connection.

Speaker 2 And you listened to that.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 2 Can you describe that feeling?

Speaker 1 Peace.

Speaker 1 It just felt like peace. I felt full acceptance.

Speaker 2 Peace in your heart.

Speaker 1 Yeah, peace in my heart, full acceptance. I didn't feel fear.

Speaker 1 And I think it was, I wasn't afraid if it worked out or it didn't work out. It was just like, I felt free to be myself fully.

Speaker 1 No matter what her reaction to me was. I was like, I'll be fine when this works out or it doesn't work out.
I'll be okay.

Speaker 1 And I think before I had more of an anxious, like, I want it to work out because there's chemicals. There's like a connection.
So let's make it work.

Speaker 1 So I would abandon self or my connection to God in order to please someone, try to make them happy, as opposed to just let them go or say, okay, this doesn't, we're not alignment and that's okay.

Speaker 2 So is it fair to say that in your deep bond, there's God in your bond?

Speaker 1 100%. 100%.

Speaker 2 There's a godly bond.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. There's a relation, a spiritual relationship that we each have individually with God and then together.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And I don't think,

Speaker 1 I don't know, you tell me, like, the science of relationships and what you've studied for the past, I guess, how many, three decades now, as a clinical psychologist and professor of this and a researcher.

Speaker 1 Do you see people

Speaker 1 having a healthy, loving, peaceful relationship with a lack of spiritual connection, with a lack of God. Is that possible to have a long-term healthy relationship?

Speaker 1 As a psychologist, have you seen that?

Speaker 2 So, Lewis, we've even looked through the MRI and seen that when there's deep love, deep, deep spiritual love, godly love between two people,

Speaker 2 we are using the same circuits. as when we talk directly to God.

Speaker 2 So as I may turn to my higher power, who I call God,

Speaker 2 I I feel that same presence and love towards my husband.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 2 And that's after 30 years.

Speaker 1 Wow. So it lasts.
What do the MRIs say from a brain that is connected to God or has a spiritual practice versus a brain? that doesn't have a spiritual practice.

Speaker 2 We have charted this very precisely. And the first thing that everyone needs to know is that we are all capable of awakening.
Every brain, every brain is built to awaken. Nobody's left out.

Speaker 1 But it's a choice.

Speaker 2 It is a choice and it is a practice.

Speaker 1 And what are the brains that are spiritually connected versus a lack of spiritual connection?

Speaker 2 So a spiritually connected brain is compared to one that has yet to do the work

Speaker 2 has three components. The first is that just as we are loved and held as children in our parents' or grandparents' arms, the bonding network comes up online and we can feel that we are loved and held.

Speaker 2 So Lewis, that's not a belief. Our brain perceives.

Speaker 1 It feels it.

Speaker 2 It feels it because we are detecting something real. Interesting.
It's not a brain in the box that made up, isn't it nice to feel love? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 We are. It believes it is loved and held.

Speaker 2 The brain perceives

Speaker 2 transcendent love. Wow.

Speaker 2 So we're moving here from the 20th century view of the brain that makes thoughts, like the brain in the box, to the emerging view of the brain that is like an antenna that receives thoughts or inspiration or transcendent presence.

Speaker 2 So if we, when we receive God's presence

Speaker 2 as incarnate beings, the bonding network comes up online and we watch it through the fMRI that tracks blood flow. We watch the bonding network literally engage as we experience and receive God's love.

Speaker 1 And what happens when the bonding network engages in the brain? What happens to the body?

Speaker 2 Ah, it's, well,

Speaker 2 we are at peace we have less stress cortisol goes down

Speaker 2 there's a whole host of downstream problems from dysregulated cortisol dysregulated diurnal patterns of cortisol so when we sustain a relationship with god through practice through prayer through meditation through how we treat each other as you just described the choice of godly relationships yeah we literally host and welcome you know god chooses when god shows up that we can invite and welcome God.

Speaker 2 And when we feel God's presence, when God touches us, the bonding network comes up online as we are incarnate and shows that we are loved and held.

Speaker 2 The second circuit that we all have is that there's multiple forms of intelligence, of multiple forms of attention. There's the bowling alley attention, which is

Speaker 2 narrow focus. And there's times for that, right? We need that discipline.
But

Speaker 2 the bowling alley alone is insufficient. I've got to have it.
I've got to get that job. I'm going to do A plus B plus C to close that deal.

Speaker 2 That is not an accurate map onto the structure of reality because life is full of surprises and hard left turns. And we have another attention network.

Speaker 2 There's another system of awareness, which is not our dorsal attention, but our ventral attention, where the floodlights come on and the world becomes a lot bigger and brighter.

Speaker 2 And a new direction pops. And that allows us to receive guidance.

Speaker 1 What's that step called?

Speaker 2 So we are loved and held, as we all have a bonding network, and we are guided.

Speaker 2 We are built to receive divine guidance.

Speaker 2 We are built to perceive direction from the universe. Loved and held guided.
And the third circuit, the third component of the awakened brain that we're all built with ready to go is that

Speaker 2 you, Lewis, are in your chair and I'm over here in mine. And we also have friends in New York and Cincinnati and London and Des Moines, right?

Speaker 2 We are separate beings. And at the same time, we're part of this great oneness.
Yes. The brain is built to receive and perceive separateness and oneness.

Speaker 2 The parietal region puts in and out hard boundaries.

Speaker 2 As blood flows to the parietal region, we see that, okay, I have my zipped up bio body suit and we're all wonderfully diverse and we live in different chairs.

Speaker 2 And at the same time, we're part of one family of life. We're part of one unit of consciousness.

Speaker 2 That capacity allows us to know we're never alone.

Speaker 1 So is that oneness or what is that?

Speaker 2 That is the oneness.

Speaker 2 So if you add up all three circuits that run together, they don't run separately, we are loved and held,

Speaker 2 we are guided, and we are never allowed.

Speaker 2 That

Speaker 2 awakened brain is yours. It is there for everyone.

Speaker 1 So everyone has that in us, but we need to be practicing and believing it in order to experience it. Yes.

Speaker 1 What happens if we don't practice and believe that we are loved and held, we are guided. And we are all one.
We are never alone. What happens to us?

Speaker 2 We feel unloved.

Speaker 2 We feel lost. Wow.
And we feel completely, painfully lonely.

Speaker 2 And that

Speaker 2 excruciating pain is a big bang at the door. It's an invitation to start to practice awakening, to start to use your awakened brain.

Speaker 1 And as a clinical psychologist doing this research for a long time and doing all the MRI studies and working with individuals, who have experienced this, is there any other way to get out of pain and suffering than seeking a spiritual practice?

Speaker 2 There is no greater way. There is no profound and robust and enduring a way to move out of despair as to awaken spiritually.

Speaker 1 But you're, you know, you're a psychologist. Aren't there medicines that people can take that are going to fix them or solve them? Aren't there drugs that people should be doing?

Speaker 1 And isn't this clinically proven that if you're depressed and you have mental health diseases, that the medicine will set you free? Isn't that why we have medication?

Speaker 2 So medication, I'm not against medication. If you're in terrible pain and it's urgent and you need it now,

Speaker 2 do whatever it takes to keep yourself buoyant. Yes.
But that said, when we take away the medication, the majority of the time, the pain comes back.

Speaker 2 As does the deep existential feeling of unlovedness,

Speaker 2 isolation, of being lost. Why is that? Because we have yet to engage our awakened awareness.
We have yet to engage our spiritual capacity.

Speaker 2 We haven't donut size whole because we haven't deployed this gift we're all given.

Speaker 1 Wow.

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Speaker 1 What's the gift that we're all given that most of us never use?

Speaker 2 We have within every brain the neuro foundation for a relationship with God.

Speaker 2 We have within every human being the inborn capacity, actually the inborn imperative to be in in relationship with our higher power.

Speaker 1 But why do so many of us

Speaker 1 reject God or a relationship with a higher power?

Speaker 1 Well

Speaker 2 it's very easy to feel isolated, to feel lost, because the rich two-thirds embrace the socialization of our natural spirituality. Our environment, our culture is pretty silent.

Speaker 1 What we consume, what we're putting in our physical space, the people in our environment, the conversations that we're hearing, listening to, and having,

Speaker 1 all that stuff, right?

Speaker 2 And yet we can choose to cultivate every single thing you've said. So

Speaker 2 40 years ago in the United States, there was a decision made. It was made with a good intention to be inclusive, which was to throw all religion out of the public square.

Speaker 2 And you may remember, take down the Christmas tree, take down the homicide of the noise.

Speaker 1 We're not talking about offensive.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's all offensive. Someone's going to be left out.
And the intention was good, which was to be inclusive. But it actually was radically exclusive.
Everyone was left out.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 2 And we had an ice age, 40 years of an ice age where people don't talk about spiritual and religious life at work, at school, at a cocktail party, at a dinner party.

Speaker 1 To not be offensive or feeling exclusive if they don't have the similar belief. Is that right? Yes.

Speaker 1 Okay, if they have a different belief, we don't want to force something on them or talk about it if they feel uncomfortable or

Speaker 2 yes, right.

Speaker 2 But society now has grown up, and we've become much more pluralistic. We can comfortably talk about different genders and race and orientation as part of the fabric of our culture.

Speaker 2 It's time now to be pluralistic when it comes to our spiritual life. I want to know you.
I want to hear about Diwali or Ramadan or Hanukkah or Christmas. I want to hear about

Speaker 2 the crossing of your grandmother. And I want to hear about the baby that came into your life in the deepest, most important way.

Speaker 1 Something you said in

Speaker 1 one of your books called The Spiritual Child, I believe this one is.

Speaker 1 It talks about that you

Speaker 1 talk about the next big idea in psychology, which is the science and the power of spirituality.

Speaker 1 And you explain a clear scientific link between spirituality and health and shows that children who have a positive active relationship to spirituality are 40% less likely to use and abuse substances, are 60% less likely to be depressed as teenagers, are 80% less likely to have dangerous or unprotected sex, and have significantly more positive markers for thriving, including an increased sense of meaning and purpose and high levels of academic success.

Speaker 1 Why do kids lack spiritual connection in a spiritual relationship today?

Speaker 1 Why are

Speaker 1 the parents aren't willing to encourage their kids? Do the parents not have the spiritual relationship? Why do you think that is in kids today?

Speaker 2 The most important gift we give our children is a strong spiritual core.

Speaker 2 In fact, I would even go so far to say there is nothing that a parent needs to do more than strengthen their child's natural spiritual awareness. How do I do that? Every parent wants to know.

Speaker 2 Okay, look at those statistics. Your child will be less at risk for addiction, depression.
In this epidemic, 82% protected against suicide when spiritual life is shared.

Speaker 2 Suicide is tragically the number one killer of high school students. Really? It's come to rival auto accidents.
So it's not cancer or COVID by our own hand. And yet we have the antidote.

Speaker 2 I mean, Lewis, if I said, here's a pill, and you can give this pill to every high school student in the United States, and they are four-fifths protected against the epidemic of suicide.

Speaker 2 What school wouldn't give that out every day at lunch? What parent wouldn't give that to their child? And yet we have the antidote in us already.

Speaker 2 And it's the realization of how we are built to be in a sustained connection to God or higher power. Why is this not happening? Why is this not happening? Well, I think you hit the nail on the head.

Speaker 2 Parents don't know how, and they don't know if they're spiritual enough.

Speaker 2 So I went on the road. I thought it was going to be three weeks.
It was three years with my first book, The Spiritual Child.

Speaker 2 And parents would raise their hand and they'd ask questions, How do I help my child be more spiritual? What is spirituality?

Speaker 2 But when parents started to cry, it was when they said, said, am I spiritual?

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 2 people don't know if, you know, as a mother, as a father, I'm spiritual enough. And the answer is

Speaker 2 you don't need to be because your child is spiritual. And all you need to do is listen and be totally in awe of your child.

Speaker 1 Kids are like a portal. They're already a spiritual portal.
Yes.

Speaker 1 It's not, you know, it's your job not to throw on material animal magnetism types of thinking or thoughts or energy to diminish their spiritual power.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 1 And that's hard to do.

Speaker 2 But you know what? Parents are so in love with their child that if we can just hold our tongue and listen, your child is going to come up and say, you know, I saw grandma.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 2 Or your child is going to come up and say, does God love evil people too?

Speaker 2 You know, and those are incredible moments. We don't need the answer.
We can simply hold the moment and say, wow.

Speaker 2 Because often the child's actually not looking for an answer. They're looking to engage in the spiritual realm.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 2 And so they're really saying, can you walk with me here?

Speaker 1 When a child asks a question like, does God love bad people? Does God love evil people? Whatever, any question. And a parent says,

Speaker 1 man, I think I know the answer, but I really don't know the answer.

Speaker 1 What should a parent do in that moment when a child asks a difficult spiritual question that the parent doesn't know the answer to?

Speaker 2 The child's question

Speaker 2 is an opening for the child to learn to listen to their own heart.

Speaker 2 So we can say, you know, deep in your inner wisdom,

Speaker 2 what does your heart say? Or we can say, you know, do you want to sit with me now in meditation or prayer and see what comes to you as the answer to that? Interesting. Teach the child to receive.

Speaker 2 their own spiritual answers. I can tell you a story about that.
I adopted my son from an orphanage north of St. Petersburg, Russia.

Speaker 2 The most delicious little boy on earth, madly in love with this little boy.

Speaker 1 How was he?

Speaker 2 He was 10 months when he came.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 2 I knew right away that this sort of, you know, secular materialist culture was going to tell him a big story about not wanting, not having been wanted and why did that mother leave you.

Speaker 2 And so I was going to get ahead of this. And the way I was going to get ahead of this, my husband and I together was by talking about our authentic spiritual journey to finding Isaiah.

Speaker 2 So from day one, we said, you know, we had really been five years, Liz, we prayed hard for five years before we found Isaiah.

Speaker 2 And so from day one, Isaiah was a little 10-month voice,

Speaker 2 used to hearing Russian. And we said, Isaiah, mommy and daddy,

Speaker 2 we prayed for Isaiah.

Speaker 1 And grandma prayed for Isaiah.

Speaker 2 And grandpa prayed for Isaiah. And everybody prayed for Isaiah because mommy and daddy had been crying for you.

Speaker 2 And then one day we heard they'd found Isaiah and we took little baby, a plane, to a train, to an automobile, Kids Look Transportation,

Speaker 2 ran up the hill and there, there was Isaiah and we'd throw him in the air and we'd celebrate the finding Isaiah story. And that's, you know, when he was one, two, somewhere around four.

Speaker 2 He got a little older and they like symbolic stories. So here was little Isaiah.
He loved to play in our backyard by a little creek, a river. And we'd point at the river.
He'd squish his toes.

Speaker 2 And we'd say, Isaiah, you see this river here? You came down this river. You were our baby Moses.
Wow. And he'd say, I'm baby Moses.
Say, that's right, Isaiah. You came down.
God sent you to us.

Speaker 2 So this was the story of finding Isaiah for a four-year-old. And we always told Isaiah the spiritual story of finding Isaiah.
So sure enough, Lewis, now he's eight, driving my SUV.

Speaker 2 Everything in parenting happens from the second row.

Speaker 1 Shares here. Maria.

Speaker 2 His best friend Johnny's back there. Mommy, mommy, Johnny says, my name is not Miller.
You are not my mother. And I am not Jewish.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 2 And I took a big breath. The day had come.

Speaker 1 He knew

Speaker 1 the original story, the story before the story.

Speaker 2 Right. And sure enough, that's right.
He was prepared.

Speaker 2 And I held my tongue, prayed, and Isaiah whips around, turns to Johnny, and says, I'm baby Moses. And Johnny says, what? And he said, no, I'm baby Moses.

Speaker 2 And pretty soon, Isaiah realized that Johnny just didn't understand, but that he was baby Moses.

Speaker 2 Mommy, this time we're desperate, more agitated. Mommy, Johnny says, what about the woman who gave me up?

Speaker 2 The story I'd always knew was coming. Yes.
10 years before I expected it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 But there it was.

Speaker 2 Again, I held my breath,

Speaker 2 said a prayer, and from the second row, oh,

Speaker 2 I know.

Speaker 2 God whispered in her ear and said that you were crying for me.

Speaker 2 So if we support the natural spiritual knowing of the child, when the tough questions come, they're ready to receive and perceive a spiritual answer directly from God.

Speaker 2 He, like every child on earth, has an awakened brain. But if as parents, we build that day-in and day-out sense that just as you and your

Speaker 2 new wife have God in that bond,

Speaker 2 you and your new wife and God willing your children will have God in that bond. And our message to Isaiah from day one was that this is a family built by God.

Speaker 1 Wow, that's beautiful. It sounds like...
And it's true. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It sounds like you were practicing the first eight years, step one, which is,

Speaker 1 you know, show him that he is loved and held by you and also by God, right? You're loved and held by us. And the world is loving you and holding you high.

Speaker 1 It sounds like...

Speaker 2 And the river.

Speaker 1 And the river, right? It sounds like step two, you know, understanding we're all guided.

Speaker 1 It sounds like he was able to remember that he was loved and held and be guided into like having the answers within him for when his friend was telling him, no, that's not true, this is your adopted or whatever it is he was saying.

Speaker 1 And it sounds like he had the inner strength to feel guided in that moment. And I'm curious, what have you learned as a psychologist about the

Speaker 1 science and spirituality of synchronicities, of knowing that we are guided and how to really have our antenna up and awareness up so that we can receive signals, signs, and the synchronicities of life to know where to move our energy toward to create more opportunities, abundance with our purpose.

Speaker 2 When you met Marta, was that a synchronicity? 100%.

Speaker 1 Were you told that story?

Speaker 1 Well, I mean, I probably told it on here a few times already, but I mean,

Speaker 1 there was just too many synchronicities that were just like, oh, this is, it was weird. It was weird synchronicities.
I was like, okay, this is, let me keep exploring.

Speaker 1 And these synchronicities were so weird. I was like, I felt like I was on the right path.
I was like, let's keep, let's keep hanging out another few days. Let's keep hanging out.

Speaker 1 You know, I didn't want to not hang out with her, but I was like, I need to keep exploring these conversations with you to see what unfolds.

Speaker 1 But the first day, you know, within the first five minutes where I knew something was different,

Speaker 1 I went to pick her up. I was visiting a buddy of mine in Mexico and near Tulum, and she was actually in Tulum at that time.

Speaker 1 And we had never met, but we had connected online and I just happened to respond to something that she posted online, right? She was posting something in nature actually.

Speaker 1 And I replied to that and I said, it looks beautiful there. That was it.
I wasn't like hitting on her or anything. I just replied to what she was posting about.

Speaker 1 So nature was the first thing that I replied to within her

Speaker 1 connecting online. And then she replied, hello, my friend.
How are you? Are you ever in my country? And I don't think she knew I was in Mexico, but I was in Mexico at that time.

Speaker 1 And I was assuming she met Mexico. So I said, yeah, I'm actually here with a friend right now in Plato Carmen.
And it's like an hour from Tulum. She goes, oh, I'm in Tulum.

Speaker 1 Let's, let's hang out if you have time. So we ended up just getting together.

Speaker 1 When I picked her up, I had my buddy's Jeep and I had my phone, picked her up for dinner. I had my phone in the middle of the

Speaker 1 Jeep, you know, in the middle of the seats in the front.

Speaker 1 And it was dark out because I was getting picking up for dinner. And so my phone screen kind of turned on as I sat it down.
Like the screen turned on, you could see my screensaver.

Speaker 1 And it was a photo of a boy, a little boy. And I could see that she looked at the phone because the screen popped up.
And you see this image of a little boy.

Speaker 1 And so I kind of looked at her and go, oh, don't worry. I don't have a son or anything.
You know, it's our first time meeting. So I was like, oh, don't worry.
I don't have a kid or anything.

Speaker 1 And she goes, I know what that is. She goes, that's you.
And you're healing your inner child. And I was like, I get chills just thinking about it.
I was like, yeah.

Speaker 1 And she took her phone and she goes, here's a photo of me. I've been doing the same journey

Speaker 1 when she was five. I get chills thinking about it.
And I'm just like, oh, something's different right away. She understood the journey of healing that I was already on.

Speaker 1 And that had been up there for, I don't know, eight months on my phone, right?

Speaker 1 So it'd been a lot. I've had it for a while.
And she was like, yeah, this is something I was doing like in the last year.

Speaker 1 And I'd been healing and transforming and, you know, probably getting out of a depressed state that was like reawakening to seeing the world differently.

Speaker 1 And so even just in that moment, like that unlocked the conversation, the whole conversation was spiritual from the first moment. There's no, there was no surface.

Speaker 1 I can't do surface anyways with anyone. You know, we talk right away and I'm like, tell me about this, tell me about that, you know.
And so the whole conversation was spiritual.

Speaker 1 And the whole first few months was that, like every time.

Speaker 1 And some people might say, oh, that's that's too deep when you're like going on a date or you shouldn't be like going so deep so quickly or having spiritual conversations.

Speaker 1 But I think why wait to, why wait to have those conversations? Like, and they can be fun and lighthearted. They don't have to be deep and heavy.
It can be like, wow, fascinating.

Speaker 1 You know, you can get to learn about someone's soul sooner rather than six months down the line, have those conversations. So for me,

Speaker 1 That was a synchronicity that said, oh, hang out again.

Speaker 1 And every time we hung out, there were things like that that just kept happening. That was like, oh, there's

Speaker 1 some force that's more powerful pulling us to keep exploring.

Speaker 1 And I think

Speaker 1 I allowed myself to be open and stay in it without rushing to, this is the person I'm meant to be with forever because of one synchronicity.

Speaker 1 And I think I wanted to continue to not rush a lot of things, but just dive deeper spiritually, which created safety.

Speaker 1 It created a sense of safety and feeling at home within me and her feeling at home within her. So it made us feel more at home together.
Like that was a powerful, you know, again,

Speaker 1 I wish I would have learned this, you know, 20 years ago, but it happened at the right time. So, and I needed the painful moments, I think, to awaken to where I'm at today.

Speaker 2 It's a magnificent love story. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's beautiful. And the deep question is, what is life showing me now? What is God revealing to me now? What has my higher power just put in my path?

Speaker 1 Yeah, and understand if we believe that we are guided, that's what I was like doing. I go, okay, God, just show me the way.
Let me just explore this a little more.

Speaker 1 Let me, let's go hang out another day. Let's have more conversation.
Let's just be guided into the possibility.

Speaker 1 Whether it works out or not, I'm just going to lean into this without rushing to conclusions. So what did you then learn from the research of the science of synchronicities and spirituality together?

Speaker 2 The more we pay attention to synchronicity, the more we are able to perceive synchronicity.

Speaker 2 And on the one hand, it's because we strengthen our eye. We know, yes, this is real.

Speaker 2 We take it to heart. We think about and reflect on what it might mean, and then we act on it.

Speaker 2 You chose to go another day to both of you you to look at this more deeply, to walk a little further.

Speaker 2 But that only happened because you said, wow, this is way too unprobabilistic to have happened by chance. This touches my heart in a deeper way.

Speaker 2 This has that type of high pixel hip that has information that's yet to unfold before me.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's more 5D energy versus 3D energy. Yes.

Speaker 2 And you knew it.

Speaker 1 Of course.

Speaker 2 So say yes to it. And we all have this capacity.
Say yes to it. This is real.

Speaker 2 Reflect what it might mean and then act on it.

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Speaker 1 How does someone open their mind or their soul to synchronicities more frequently?

Speaker 2 It's a practice. So the first time I might sort of be a little curious, wait a minute, I was just thinking about this guy.
I haven't seen him in six years and he's right here.

Speaker 2 The same day I'm thinking of him. Or, you know, I have this question on my mind: do I want to go, you know, East or West this summer?

Speaker 2 And a guy sits down on the bus next to me and says, you got to go west this summer.

Speaker 2 So that might catch my attention and seem unlikely, but I'm not sold yet because I'm a skeptic and the skeptic's okay.

Speaker 2 The skeptic's welcome. The skeptic can even fuel the deepening of the journey, right?

Speaker 1 I don't believe you. Show me another sign.
Show me more. Yeah, show me another sign.
And if you show me another sign, then it's undoubtedly, okay, I got to explore this.

Speaker 2 And so when we actually allow ourselves to be curious, we start noticing how abundant the universe really is, how generous God is in laying synchronicities in our path to guide us.

Speaker 2 So the more we say, yes, this is real,

Speaker 2 the more we say, I'm going to reflect, I'm going to act on this, the more the next time we're quick to identify synchronicity. It's less likely to slip through our fingers.

Speaker 2 So when I started paying attention to synchronicities, I'd catch maybe one in three.

Speaker 2 And then it meant to... half.
And now I've lived this way for 30 years and I catch 90%. There's still, I miss balls, right? But even when we do, it comes around another day in another way.

Speaker 2 Interesting. Because we're on our path.
We don't have to be perfect

Speaker 1 to be on the path. What happens for you?

Speaker 1 What are you doing on a consistent basis, mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually, to where you just have a heightened sense of openness where synchronicities are just for like every day, it just seems like, of course, this is a synchronicity that's just guiding me here, introducing me to this person, unlocking this door.

Speaker 1 Of course, what are you creating energetically

Speaker 1 to be the highest frequency of synchronicities?

Speaker 2 So I open my day, and everyone has their own language and their own practice, but I can share with you mine. So I open each morning with a prayer.

Speaker 2 I go outdoors, and I mean, you know, it can be a sunny, bright day, or it can be freezing, cold, and snowing, and I go outdoors. And I open by saying, loving God, my word is God.

Speaker 2 Thank you for a new day. Thank you for sun and air and earth and water and trees and birds and for all living beings of the air, earth, water, and beyond.

Speaker 2 Please bless our family of life and please bless, as a parent, our family, and I name our family. And then I say, please may I be present to you.
Please use me as a vessel to serve you in love

Speaker 2 that I might be you, see you. and act you because all of us are emanations like rays of the sun of God.

Speaker 2 Lewis, you are God and the magnificent Marta is God and all your friends and family and trees and birds are God. So may I be you and realize our being.

Speaker 2 May I see you in Lewis and in Marta and all living beings and may I act you.

Speaker 2 And please at the end, I say, may I serve you in love

Speaker 2 and please bless you, God. I saw that when I've been to holy sites.
Please bless you, God, unto yourself.

Speaker 2 And then I've opened the day in service. So each day is an adventure.
It's a spiritual adventure. I don't know where I'm going.
I don't know who I get to meet.

Speaker 2 I don't know if it's going to hurt or feel good. It could be a day of tremendous loss.
It could be a day of great discovery. But it is always a sacred adventure.
So I don't need to have control.

Speaker 2 And in a world that's highly volatile, none of us have control. I mean, we have 2, 4% control.

Speaker 2 But to have a really big, magnificent life is not to have the whole thing tightly clenched between our hands, but to have a stance, a sure-footed stance in quest.

Speaker 2 What God do you reveal to me now? What universe do you ask of me now? How might I love more deeply? The quest is the sure-footedness.

Speaker 2 And anything that comes, whether it's wind or tornado or the love of my life, is part of this great spiritual adventure. It is the Star Wars of spiritual adventure.

Speaker 1 That's a beautiful way to start the day. Is there a practice you have at the end of the day to

Speaker 1 open up to more synchronicities? synchronicities?

Speaker 2 And in dream, dream life, yes. Because the very same symbol that guides us through synchronicity, that you both had the child on your phone, is the very same symbolic language in our dreams

Speaker 2 and in our mystical experiences. It's a symbolic universe.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 2 And we're being talked to all the time and we're built to listen.

Speaker 2 So we're whole and we're guided and we're not anxious and we have love and connection when we are an open system to God.

Speaker 2 And we are isolated and our heart hurts like hell when we're not connected.

Speaker 1 But what if someone's been hurt by the idea of God or someone that represents God or religion?

Speaker 2 That's very important. It's so important.

Speaker 1 If someone's been abused, abandoned, any type of way from a religious figure, either from maybe from their parent who says they're religious or spiritual, but then

Speaker 1 yells, screams, abuses in other ways.

Speaker 1 How do we sit beyond the hurt and pain that someone in our life who has a spiritual connection to God hurts us? Yes, maybe

Speaker 1 someone we know and shatters our faith in God, religion, the universe, spirituality. Yes.

Speaker 2 Yes. And that is exactly.

Speaker 2 How that happens. So here's the flame of truth, God's presence, the fire.
And here's the torch. And here's just me, the human torchbearer.

Speaker 2 And when we meet, particularly as children or adolescents, teenagers are exquisitely aware, when we meet a torchbearer who talks about the flame.

Speaker 1 The light.

Speaker 2 The light, the truth, but who does not walk the walks, when we see hypocrisy,

Speaker 2 there's a tendency to throw out the flame.

Speaker 2 Now, as a torchbearer, I could be a little foibled. I could be maybe hypocritical and judgmental or whatever, yeah.

Speaker 2 Say one thing and do another, or I could be quite egregiously foibled and transgress.

Speaker 2 And the more

Speaker 2 that the torchbearer has failed the message,

Speaker 2 the more pain in the child and the more likely the child is to throw out the flame.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 2 Now, the good news is that a spiritual injury can be healed.

Speaker 2 Spiritual injury can always be healed because because every one of us has the God-given, inborn, innate capacity to connect to the transcendent relationship,

Speaker 2 has the inborn capacity to renew the connection with our higher power.

Speaker 1 How?

Speaker 2 And there's two ways. One is we meet a torchbearer who does walk the walk.

Speaker 1 It restores our faith.

Speaker 2 Yes. Someone who embodied, is holding the flame and does walk in step, who is loving, who is unconditionally devoted, who speaks of God with the same love that they leave out towards us.

Speaker 2 And that could be a parent, it could be a counselor, it could be a coach, it could be anyone, right? The second way is that we can invite one another to have a direct connection to the flame.

Speaker 2 And in some faith traditions, that can be through prayer or fellowship, but there's also practices in the language of life. And in fact, Lewis, I had a very dear colleague, the late Dr.

Speaker 2 Gary Weaver, who for 36 years worked with boys who had been transgressed by torchbearers.

Speaker 2 And some of these boys had been so transgressed, they didn't want to hear about religion. They didn't want to hear about spirituality.
And they'd be so abused that they'd become abusers. Oh, man.

Speaker 2 And so the third time this young fellow would go before the judge,

Speaker 2 in came Dr. Weaver.
And the judge said, okay, he loved Dr. Weaver.
He said, you have a choice, young man, 15, 18 years old. You can go to prison.

Speaker 1 Who had been abused sexually and then done the same thing.

Speaker 2 And then done the same thing.

Speaker 2 And he said, no, you can go to jail or you can go out into the Moab Desert with Dr. Weaver.
And there he shared with them a practice that invited them right back to the flame. Wow.

Speaker 2 And I've done this practice, Lewis, with bankers in Midtown. I've done this practice with generals in the U.S.
Army. I've done this with kids sleeping under the Brooklyn Bridge.

Speaker 2 I've done this with everybody because there's one awakened brain and there's one source of all life, who I call God. You pick your term.
And we can all get back to the point. May we try it? Yeah.

Speaker 2 Okay. It's 90 seconds.
It's in the language of life.

Speaker 2 I'm going to invite you to close your eyes, clear out your inner space.

Speaker 2 In your inner chamber, I invite you

Speaker 2 to set before you a table. This is your table.

Speaker 2 And And to your table, you may invite anyone, living or deceased,

Speaker 2 who truly has your best interest in mind.

Speaker 2 Anyone living or deceased who truly has your best interest in mind.

Speaker 2 And with them all sitting there, ask them if they love you.

Speaker 2 And now you may invite your higher self-the part of you that's so much more than anything you may have or not have,

Speaker 2 anything you may have done or not done, your true eternal higher self,

Speaker 2 and ask you if you love you.

Speaker 2 Now finally, you may invite your higher power,

Speaker 2 whatever your word,

Speaker 2 however you know,

Speaker 2 your higher power

Speaker 2 and ask if they love you.

Speaker 2 And now with all of those people sitting there right now,

Speaker 2 what do they need to share?

Speaker 2 What do they need to show you now?

Speaker 2 What do you need to know?

Speaker 1 And when you're ready, I invite you back.

Speaker 1 It's a beautiful exercise.

Speaker 1 Very beautiful. I'm sure to write down the...

Speaker 1 position of everyone.

Speaker 1 So I had in my table, and I'd love for people if they did this exercise to comment below who was sitting at their table on YouTube or wherever you're watching this to comment below in the comments because I think it's actually a very powerful exercise

Speaker 1 of

Speaker 1 what will be revealed to you.

Speaker 1 For me, on the left, so I was imagining kind of a circular table.

Speaker 1 I was sitting here for me on the left with Jesus, my father, who is no longer in this world, my grandfather has passed, my mom, who is here, and then Martha, my fiancé.

Speaker 1 So it was a, you know, kind of a half circle, and they were all looking at me. And I asked them, what you said, you know,

Speaker 1 what do I need to,

Speaker 1 was it about love from each of them? Do they love me? Was that the question? Yeah. And they all just, I just felt like a big hug.

Speaker 1 I felt like this big kind of embrace from all of them, like a resounding yes.

Speaker 1 And then when my higher self spoke to me, it was just like, 100%, you are are loved and i love you right it was feeling that from everyone on the table and then my higher self and then when i asked god

Speaker 1 uh or what god and all of them were kind of like speaking to me what i needed to hear was forgive

Speaker 1 greater love deeper and serve more

Speaker 1 And so it was like, just keep forgiving yourself. And it was like more reflecting, like, forgive yourself from everything from the past where you feel ashamed, guilty, insecure.

Speaker 1 Forgive yourself and others.

Speaker 1 Love yourself deeper and love others deeper

Speaker 1 and continue to be of service more. Like just serve, serve, serve.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 going back to your question, like, how may I love more deeply? I think that's a beautiful thing that we should be asking ourselves.

Speaker 1 How may I love more deeply, which is what you mentioned a little bit ago?

Speaker 1 And I think it's really hard to love deeply if we don't forgive ourselves for decisions we've made from the past, or if we've lost trust within ourselves because we made poor decisions where we got hurt, we hurt others, they hurt us, we allowed things to happen, whatever it might be.

Speaker 1 If we've lost that

Speaker 1 trust of love and that the world is good,

Speaker 1 we haven't forgiven ourselves for it yet. And I don't think I forgave myself for a a long time until a few years ago.

Speaker 1 And I had to really learn how to accept all the parts of me that I thought were kind of bad or nasty or just that I didn't do at my highest level of consciousness.

Speaker 1 And learning to forgive and accept

Speaker 1 so that I had the capacity to love myself. Because I don't feel like I fully loved myself for 35 plus years.

Speaker 1 And I think when I have learned to love myself, I can authentically serve greater. I can serve from a better place.

Speaker 1 Now,

Speaker 1 I still get frustrated in the human world and things still bugged me, but I think

Speaker 1 I'm better at choosing back to how can I love and serve greater, as opposed to how can I hold on to

Speaker 1 frustration. Because I know that anger or frustration, although maybe it's good to release it, isn't good to stay in it for too long

Speaker 1 and to get back to love and service. So, yeah, it's a beautiful exercise.
What is that exercise you call?

Speaker 2 Hosting counsel.

Speaker 1 Hosting counsel.

Speaker 2 And everyone at the table is a sacred, transcendent relationship, whether they're embodied or not embodied, whether they're here on earth or they've crossed over. Yeah.
Every single person,

Speaker 2 those who truly have our best interest in mind, our higher selves, and our higher power. And we are built to be in that deep relationship.

Speaker 2 So hosting counsel is a way that we can reclaim our birthright.

Speaker 1 That's interesting because

Speaker 1 I talk about the importance of having mentors and kind of leaders in your life that can lead you financially and business and your health and your relationships, just people who have wisdom, you know, who have already been there and done that.

Speaker 1 And I think it's... powerful to have a spiritual council as well, not just a physical council of mentors, but spiritual mentors.

Speaker 1 And really tapping into that inner power, that inner wisdom, which may sound a little weird to do this exercise, but

Speaker 1 you feel something different. You feel more oneness, which is the third step that you talk about in the three circuits of an awakened brain.
And,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 whether it's

Speaker 1 real or not, if you believe it's real, it feels real. You know, it feels like it is.
For all I know, this could all be a simulation.

Speaker 1 I don't know if we're actually here in Earth or if it's a dream, but if we believe it to be true, we create the blame that is awakened.

Speaker 1 And the science proves based on the MRI scans, like, here's what's possible with an awakened blame.

Speaker 1 Here's what's possible with an awakened heart. And when you synchronize them together, man, life is abundant and powerful.
And it's just a better experience.

Speaker 1 Do you want to have a beautiful experience or a suffering experience?

Speaker 2 And the proof's in the pudding because who comes around the corner, but Marta.

Speaker 1 Uh-huh, exactly. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 2 the question ultimately is answered by our lived walk. When we actually awaken and we perceive that we're loved, held, guided, and part of the great oneness, never alone.

Speaker 2 And then we show up for one another. in service, as you said so beautifully, to be loving, holding, guiding, and never leave anyone alone.
Then we're living an awakened life.

Speaker 2 And that is the glorious life that is our birthright.

Speaker 1 How does someone then figure out, if they're just like, I don't know my directional life, I don't know what my purpose is, and I want to figure out my purpose.

Speaker 1 What does the science and spirituality tell us on how people can discover and live their purpose?

Speaker 2 So purpose is written in and through us and in and through our path. It's not something that we need to develop on a

Speaker 2 eight-point list, but it's something that we can discover.

Speaker 2 Lewis, may we do one more practice?

Speaker 1 Sure. Okay.

Speaker 2 This practice I call the road of life. Okay.

Speaker 1 I'm going to invite you to close your eyes and do four breaths.

Speaker 2 I invite you to locate a time where you wanted something so badly. That red door was yours.
You wanted that job, that school, that team. You wanted him or her or them to say yes.

Speaker 2 And you did everything

Speaker 2 right to get that red door. You researched it.
You were tactical. You strategized A plus B plus C.

Speaker 2 That red door was yours.

Speaker 2 You go for your red door, you grab the handle, but the handle stuck.

Speaker 2 And you can't believe it's stuck because you've done everything right. A plus B plus C.

Speaker 2 You might kick the door, you might rattle the handle, but only because it is stuck, you have to pivot. You pivot 40, 80, 120 degrees, and over there,

Speaker 2 over there is a wide open,

Speaker 2 sparkling yellow door. You might have said yellow doors don't exist.
You've never heard of yellow doors.

Speaker 2 On the other side of the yellow door is someone who makes you feel alive, is a job that's more right for you, is a mentor who sees in you beyond what you knew was in yourself, a community where you belong.

Speaker 2 That yellow door was not what you had wanted.

Speaker 2 It was better

Speaker 2 and better for you.

Speaker 2 And as you sit back now and you think of the 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,

Speaker 2 was there anyone at that hairpin turn

Speaker 2 who maybe told you a story you could have met them for two minutes at a party or the coffee shop?

Speaker 2 It could have been a counselor, a grandparent, who for the first time shared a story you'd never heard before, a trail angel pointing you to the wide open yellow door.

Speaker 2 And now finally, as you sit way back, stuck red door, hairpin turn, trail angel, and wide open yellow door,

Speaker 2 how really are the most important parts of our lives found? Is it narrowly through planning? Sure, we have to do our part.

Speaker 2 But are we less makers of our paths and more discoverers of our journey?

Speaker 2 And are some of the most profound and important parts of our lives gifts of being in a deep dialogue with the journey of life.

Speaker 2 And in fact, speck red door, hairpin, turn, trail angel, open yellow door.

Speaker 2 Where in your road of life is your higher power? Where is God?

Speaker 2 Is God in the wide open yellow door and the stuff red door?

Speaker 2 Is God in the trail angel and in your openness

Speaker 2 to be in dialogue with the deep sacred force

Speaker 1 in us, through us, and around us.

Speaker 2 Have you been on a spiritual path all along?

Speaker 2 When you're ready, I invite you back.

Speaker 1 That was beautiful. The road to life.

Speaker 2 The road of life.

Speaker 1 The road of life.

Speaker 2 Which is a spiritual path.

Speaker 1 We're never off the path.

Speaker 2 When we're depressed, we're on the path.

Speaker 1 When we're errand, we're on the path.

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Speaker 1 What's been the most challenging part of your past?

Speaker 2 Well, in the awakened brain, I write about what almost broke us, which was my husband and I for five years struggled with infertility. And it was

Speaker 2 brutal. Wow.
You know, Luz, people do not talk about infertility enough.

Speaker 2 And since sharing the awakened brain, men and women, but primarily men, have come up to me and said, you know, my wife and I struggled for three years. No one talked about it.

Speaker 2 There was no one, none of my buddies I could talk about this with.

Speaker 2 You know, the right child comes in the right way at the right time.

Speaker 2 Becoming a parent is part of the road of life. And whether it's because you carry...
a child or carry two or three children or through marriage or through adoption, your spiritual child comes.

Speaker 2 God makes families.

Speaker 1 So that was the hardest time for you.

Speaker 2 By far the hardest time for us was the struggle to find our children in all time and space.

Speaker 1 What was the biggest lesson for you during those five years of trying to have kids, but not being able to create it at that moment?

Speaker 2 I was deeply depressed that we weren't conceiving.

Speaker 1 How old were you at this time?

Speaker 2 So I was 30. My husband was 31.

Speaker 1 So you were 19-ish when you had your first kind of depressed season, right? Six-month range.

Speaker 2 Which was emergence, emerging adulthood. And it was what I now know to be a hardwired spiritual emergence that first boots up an existential struggle.

Speaker 2 When we expand our spiritual capacity, it at first feels like a half-empty glass of spirituality.

Speaker 2 But this was different because while there are three bridges of spiritual emergence, developmental depressions that open into awakening, if we say yes.

Speaker 2 There are also hailstorms and rainstorms and very unwanted life events, traumas. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And those are also a knock at the door for spiritual awakening, post-traumatic spiritual growth, a spiritual response to suffering.

Speaker 2 So, my greatest discovery through our struggle of five years to find our family

Speaker 2 was that depression

Speaker 2 was the prison house of my ego. Wow.
That I had made myself miserable. I wanted a family so badly.
I was so depressed we weren't conceiving. There are half a million children in foster care.

Speaker 2 There are 20 million children up for adoption around the world. I could have been a parent in three months and I made myself miserable

Speaker 2 because of my ego, my narrow view of what a parent was.

Speaker 2 And where the world opened up to me was when I realized in this very painful, long journey, that what a parent is, is profound love and ultimate commitment.

Speaker 2 And it does not matter if they have my nose or, you know.

Speaker 1 Their DNA. Yes, at all.

Speaker 2 It is God brings the soul on earth.

Speaker 1 It is your child. Yeah.
And if you can imprint a spiritual DNA into someone through your nurture, your guidance, your love.

Speaker 1 That's almost more important than a physical DNA without lack of that spiritual guidance.

Speaker 2 And that child is your spiritual child in the same way that you met Marta, your child comes, whether it's through Marta's body or four through Marta's body and two from

Speaker 2 another country on earth. Those are your spiritual children.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And through the road of life, God makes sure you find each other.

Speaker 2 And you know, in the same way that you knew Marta was your spiritual partner, that this is your spiritual child.

Speaker 1 If you had you

Speaker 1 at 30 or from 30 to 35 when you were in this depressed season of life and allowing your ego to trap you in this prison of depression and choosing that.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 What

Speaker 1 would you tell your younger self? Maybe you wouldn't have listened, but what would you have told your younger self on how to set you free from that prison of ego?

Speaker 2 Be up for this grand adventure.

Speaker 2 Open your eyes.

Speaker 2 to the guidance.

Speaker 2 Now, as it turns out, God is good and the universe is abundant and the synchronicities come back and the road of life rises up to meet us. So it took me five years.
It could have taken me 10.

Speaker 2 If I'd been a quicker study, I could have done it in two.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 It's a dialogue. It's not a race.
And this in the spiritual path is where we go from the measurement of the human to the witness. of the awesome dialogue.

Speaker 1 Were you a clinical psychologist at this point?

Speaker 2 Oh, I was, yes.

Speaker 1 So as a, you know, psychologist, scientist, researcher,

Speaker 1 were you not able to see the practices that were also able to support you at that time? Or were you just too much in your own way?

Speaker 2 Oh, so at the time that my husband and I were struggling with yearning for children and this sort of dogging unexplained infertility, which I now know is a spiritual impasse.

Speaker 2 There was nothing in mainstream psychotherapy that was remotely helpful to us.

Speaker 2 There was not one shred within mainstream psychotherapy, psychiatry, nothing was there because

Speaker 2 we were having an ego death.

Speaker 1 It would just be here, medicate yourself, right?

Speaker 2 Or talk about your feelings of longing for a child.

Speaker 1 But it wasn't going away. Yes, because...
The more you talked about it, you still had it.

Speaker 2 And there wasn't, you know, there wasn't an answer.

Speaker 1 There wasn't a solution. Right.
So what do we do when there's not a solution yet in the material world to our physical problems or pain?

Speaker 2 Because I was was stuck, Lewis, in asking over and over, why am I not getting what I want? How can I research this more assiduously to get what I want? What strategy, what tactic?

Speaker 2 I'm going to bang that red door till I knock it down.

Speaker 2 And finally, I got the picture. Wait a minute.
Maybe I could stop asking, what do I want and how am I going to get it? And instead say, what is life showing me now?

Speaker 2 What is life revealing to me now? Oh, man. Might there be a yellow door out there that's not what I wanted, but better.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 2 And as it turned out, we found the most beautiful boy on the other side of the world who awakened my spiritual heart.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 2 The second I saw his video, I became a parent. I had this soaring love like I'd never felt before.
I loved this little boy. And Louis, that night we conceived his sister naturally.

Speaker 1 Come on.

Speaker 2 After five years.

Speaker 1 No way. Really?

Speaker 2 Because I had become a spiritual parent.

Speaker 1 Gosh, that is a synchronicity. That's crazy.

Speaker 2 Isaiah awakened my heart. Wow.
And then I joined this infinite field of love and Leah entered.

Speaker 1 Oh, my gosh. So five years of trying.

Speaker 2 Five years of IVFs. We went to the team that

Speaker 2 invented IVFs. Oh, my gosh.
It was a non-biological problem. It was a spiritualist

Speaker 2 in our case. In our case.

Speaker 1 Because you tried everything. physically, medically.

Speaker 2 Oh, everything. The best things.

Speaker 1 Naturally, you know, injections, all of it.

Speaker 2 Oh, I mean, IVF and the whole bit. Over and over.
Five years. IVF, IVF, IVF.

Speaker 2 And Lewis, it was a spiritual environment.

Speaker 1 I believe it. I believe it.

Speaker 2 Because the day I fell in love with Isaiah,

Speaker 2 after five years, we conceived Leah.

Speaker 1 That is insane. I mean, I'm saying in a great way, but that's a powerful lesson.
What an amazing

Speaker 1 timing of it.

Speaker 2 They're spiritual twins.

Speaker 2 And they love each other.

Speaker 1 That's amazing.

Speaker 2 And I I share in the awakened brain there were some synchronicities of course there were also some mystical experiences I believe it I had you know one night I woke up out of the blue Lewis my husband was so depressed that he would lie on the floor oh man I mean he was so depressed so we had the jobs we wanted we had the house we wanted we loved our friends and there was the biggest hole in our heart oh and my husband you know 32 would lie on the ground literally I'd look over the bed wavy and he'd say our lives are hollow and meaningless like little children oh my gosh

Speaker 1 did you guys not have a spiritual practice then

Speaker 2 i had a spiritual practice but i had an impasse that i had limitation that i'd set before myself which was i still doggedly asked why am i not getting what i want you know there's this notion of manifestation of send it out and you'll get it

Speaker 2 and that's sort of like the amazon shopping list you know But the bigger view that you've shared in your story with Marta is not, you know, I'm going to go on this app and that.

Speaker 2 And I want someone who's, you know, over five, eight, and someone who plays sports and someone who, you know, wants to focus on family. You don't make a shopping list and go buy a Marta.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 2 It's not done that way. It's a shift from what do I want and how am I going to get it to, wow.

Speaker 2 What is life showing me now? What has God just laid in my path?

Speaker 2 And that dialogue with life is an awakened life. That is using your awakened brain.
And Marta, you knew

Speaker 2 in your deep register of spiritual awareness. That was an awakened heart.

Speaker 2 Wait a minute. High pixel hit.
This has meaning. This has profundity.
This has sacred.

Speaker 2 guidance that has yet to unfold before me. See, what do I want and how am I going to get it? I call it achieving awareness.
That only is built off of yesterday's information. information.

Speaker 2 You know, as a kid, I saw people, you know, and families look this way. As a kid, my parents always said, someday you'll be a mom, do it before you're 30.

Speaker 2 And, you know, all that's archival yesterday's information. But the hit in the heart, the awakened heart,

Speaker 2 receives that high pixel hit that has information that's yet to unfold before us in the future. The yellow door

Speaker 2 is better than what we want because we haven't even imagined what's on our spiritual adventure. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So, what would you say, as a clinical psychologist, is the science of manifestation then? With the process of manifesting your spiritual desires.

Speaker 2 I would say that it is the Lewis approach, which is

Speaker 2 walking with an open spiritual heart, doing our part,

Speaker 2 but then looking with great love and respect and appreciation

Speaker 2 when

Speaker 2 someone comes along, when a moment comes along, when a teacher, a lover comes along. You didn't expect it.
You didn't know it would be that.

Speaker 1 You didn't know it would be ever. No.

Speaker 2 But you knew this is real.

Speaker 2 I'm going to take it and reflect on this as a gift

Speaker 2 and I'm going to act on it.

Speaker 1 What was blocking you then? from manifesting a child, manifesting what you truly wanted, what you desired. What was blocking you from manifesting for five years.

Speaker 2 Yes, so I am, to the wisdom undergirding your point, I am convinced that we get just the impases we need,

Speaker 2 right? So, why was I not

Speaker 2 just the ones for our journey to inherit the next station of our lives so that we might grow and awaken and flourish spiritually to be prepared?

Speaker 2 So, I had yet to be prepared to really be a spiritual parent.

Speaker 1 If you think you would have had the child at 30 at the beginning, on day one, first trip to the Caribbean, right? Versus five years later, what would have happened, do you think?

Speaker 2 So on day one, you know, I mean, we thought we'd start with the best.

Speaker 1 It's a bit easier. Let's do this.

Speaker 2 Let's start a family, right? As if we hit all the buttons and control everything.

Speaker 2 Let's get pregnant as if humans decide when to get pregnant. Humans can create, if you will, the conditions.
Humans cannot decide when to get pregnant.

Speaker 2 So off we went to the Caribbean, right? Lovely trip, come back a few weeks later, what? Not pregnant. Oh, well, okay.
First shot. Who gets first shot?

Speaker 2 Off to Sedona, right? Great vacation, come back, what? No baby.

Speaker 2 And after about six months of this, it started to terrify me because I had this haunting, depressive feeling that we weren't going to get. what we wanted.

Speaker 2 That's door number one, achieving awareness. What do I want?

Speaker 1 We have this goal. We have this vision.
I want to go through the door and open it and receive the goal in mind. Yes.

Speaker 1 And it's not working. It's not working.

Speaker 1 So you started to feel anxious, scared, nervous. Terrified.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Terrified because no one sees this coming.

Speaker 1 And when you feel terrified, anxious, depressed, that you're not getting the thing you want to manifest, what happens?

Speaker 2 Existential meltdown.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Right? So it's not.

Speaker 1 Is it going to come quicker if you're really terrified and depressed and anxious about it not coming?

Speaker 2 The invitation to go more deep and start witnessing life.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's the thing we want to get to come quicker.

Speaker 2 Oh, no, the baby doesn't come more quickly just because I'm completely depressed and trying harder. No, no.
See, just that impasse was the impasse.

Speaker 2 I needed to start to do something parent or no parent, which was to start to look at the deeper nature of life, to stop thinking that I controlled things

Speaker 2 quite so absolutely, to stop being quite so career-ist. I love my work.
I'm passionate about my profession, but career-ist is a certain ego attachment to it going my way.

Speaker 2 It's different than being passionate about your calling or your contribution. So this sort of layer of ego, this layer of control,

Speaker 2 I was bringing it to parenthood.

Speaker 2 I'm ready, let's start, time for us to get pregnant. And what I realized in this journey was that synchronicity started showing up gently

Speaker 2 Sometimes not so gently

Speaker 2 that said, you know what this really hurts. You feel really alone,

Speaker 2 but

Speaker 2 you're not alone. You are not alone.
I'll give you some examples. So, you know, I came

Speaker 2 out of, you know, I mean, as a very healthy, fit, NCAA athlete. I was a fit, healthy person.
I couldn't believe my body was failing me. Wow.
Like, how could I not be getting pregnant?

Speaker 2 You know, you know, I'd been a triller. I'd been a field hockey player.
I'd been not a decathlete, but a burdler, one of your ten events. And I couldn't believe that my body was failing me.

Speaker 2 You know, mighty, powerful.

Speaker 2 How could this be? And my husband's a fit guy, good athlete. How could this be? So it really sort of was a ding.
I'd say it was more than a ding. It was more like a crash.

Speaker 2 We were a wrecked chassis and our identity was wrecked. And here we had this fabulous life that we thought is everything we wanted, and it was nothing without a child.

Speaker 2 Two, right when we thought, like, this is it, you know, I even, Lewis, I'll confess, I even

Speaker 2 reached a point where I thought,

Speaker 2 is my life worth living if I can't be a mother?

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 2 I was 31 years old. I was in love with my husband.
I had the work I loved. We had plenty of resources.
Is my life worth living if I can't be a mother? If I can't have the thing I want.

Speaker 2 And it's not a bad thing to want. It's not, is my life not worth living if I can't have $100 million?

Speaker 1 You know, it's like a baby, a God-given baby. The interesting thing is, like, now it seems like there are some women in society that their life is over if they have a child.

Speaker 1 Well, that's their journey. Their identity, their freedom, their ability to do what they want when they want is over if they have a child.

Speaker 1 That's kind of like, I see that sometimes now in some women in society. Well, everyone has their path.
It's a different way, yeah.

Speaker 2 I can only speak for myself. But in my path,

Speaker 2 the child was a spiritual awakening. The road to finding our child, our children, as the book tells you,

Speaker 2 was a spiritual awakening. And the child himself, the child herself, is this great, like a wellspring of God's presence.
You can even feel it at the other end of the house.

Speaker 1 It's magic.

Speaker 2 Yes, it is sacred presence. It's like

Speaker 1 how a child is born is

Speaker 1 unfathomable. The magic that is created from

Speaker 1 conception to building these cells into a being that comes out of a woman. It's unbelievable when you think about it.

Speaker 2 And the child comes out as pure spirit.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 2 So take your child's lead would be the one bit. You know, I don't like to give parenting advice because it's more important to awaken the parent's own inner spiritual.
awareness.

Speaker 2 But that said, watch your child closely because every time that my two-year-old made us late, we showed up at the right time. Right, right, right.

Speaker 2 And every time the right child told the story, it ended up being a harbinger of what we were about to experience.

Speaker 1 Interesting.

Speaker 2 Your child is a knower. Your child is born a knower with a direct connection to all the universe.

Speaker 1 When was the moment that you unlocked the ability to stop forcing what you wanted and get out of your own way to create the space for manifestation to happen? Yes.

Speaker 2 So, Lewis, there was a gentle process. It took us five years where gradually I started to release the choke of my demanding ego.
I've got to have it. I want it.
How is it that we can't get pregnant?

Speaker 2 I'm going to research the better doctors up in Boston.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 1 What's wrong with me? What's wrong with you? What's wrong with God? What's wrong with the doctor? Yeah, what's wrong with the doctor? We need a better doctor.

Speaker 2 Point, point, point.

Speaker 2 And I stopped saying, why am I not getting what I want? And I started listening to God. I started listening to the synchronicities before me.
I'll give you some beautiful examples.

Speaker 2 My shaman in my life is my sweet mother. And she called me one day, and you know, she'd been saying, when are you guys going to get pregnant? We didn't tell people we were going through.

Speaker 2 It was so excruciating. Listen, I remember going home to visit my parents,

Speaker 2 walked into the guest room, opened the closet, and my mother had all these baby clothes on.

Speaker 1 Devastating.

Speaker 2 And so she had been so disappointed.

Speaker 1 Dreaming about it, dreaming of your grandma.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 2 my awakening in this road of becoming a parent was very gentle and gradual. There were a trail of synchronicities, each of them actually jaw-droppingly unlikely to have happened by chance.

Speaker 2 My mother calls and she says, honey, I just want to tell you a story. You know, there's this woman down the way.
She couldn't be nicer. And she just adopted the cutest little boy.

Speaker 2 His name is Alan Jones from Russia. Bye, honey.

Speaker 2 And I thought, ooh, another synchronicity. I'm, you know, pretty bummed out, like very devastated.
I just had a failed in vitro and I had still to go to work. You know, I was a professor at Columbia.

Speaker 1 Energy. It's a lot of energy.

Speaker 2 The students are in their chairs waiting. Where's Dr.
Miller? Yeah. So I get on the bus, I go up Broadway and, you know, it's 11.
I'm late, right? I'm not there at eight. I'm not there at nine.

Speaker 2 It's 11.

Speaker 2 Who gets on the bus, but a quite unusual looking gentleman who is quite unusual. And I thought, oh no, the unusual gentleman's looking at me.

Speaker 1 I mean, I was depressed.

Speaker 2 I just, basically, every failed in vitro feels like a death. That's how I

Speaker 1 said.

Speaker 2 That's how, in my heart, it was felt, and my husband's too. So, this man keeps walking closer and closer to me.
And I thought, of all days, not to be.

Speaker 1 Don't talk to me, yeah.

Speaker 2 I mean, I like to be nice to folks on the bus, but I was not at my best. And closer and closer, Lewis, he sits down right next to me on the one linoleum chairs.

Speaker 2 He looks sober when he says, Lady, you seem like just that type of lady that would go all over the world adopting children.

Speaker 1 A big happy family. Wow.

Speaker 2 And Lewis, at the next stop, the gentleman gets off the bus. He goes, one stop.
Who sent him?

Speaker 2 Another synchronicity. So clearly, the message is starting to come through.
Then finally, you know, fellow living beings, all living beings, are part of the same symphony, the same.

Speaker 2 sacred path that we're on. So in our case, I'd come home.
Again, this is probably the fourth in vitro, and I just had this haunting feeling.

Speaker 2 This had been with the team in another city that invented in vitro. Wow.
I just had this haunting feeling that it wasn't going to take. I just, you know,

Speaker 2 just the knowing, the deep inner wisdom.

Speaker 2 So listen, I walk up to the front step of our home, and on the front step, right in front of the door, there's something like slimy and moist, and I don't know what it is, and I haven't seen it before.

Speaker 2 And I look,

Speaker 1 and it's a little dead embryo.

Speaker 2 It's a dead duck embryo on my front step. Oh my gosh.
We've lived there now for 30 years. Never before that day, never after that day was there a dead embryo on my front step.
So it was confirmation.

Speaker 2 Sure. Right.
This is now, does this mean the universe is against me? No.

Speaker 2 The dead duck embryo doesn't mean that the universe is against me just because I'm not getting what I want today.

Speaker 2 The dead duck embryo means that you are actually supported. You are on a buoyant path.

Speaker 2 There is meaning written into life itself. Your journey, your purpose is in you, through you, and in front of you, all around you.
But it was still depressing and not what I wanted.

Speaker 2 So I, I mean, I hit the hay. I go to bed.
It's in the middle of the day, not even in our bedroom. I can't bear to face Phil.
I go to my study and I hear

Speaker 2 on my study window, sliding door, and I look.

Speaker 2 It was the mom.

Speaker 1 It was the mom and duck. Wow.

Speaker 2 Who came to my office door.

Speaker 1 Sort of bang or the beat.

Speaker 2 And she brought me a worm.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 2 Her best gift. Okay, all living beings are connected.
She was a mom who'd lost her hopeful baby.

Speaker 2 I'm a mom who lost my hopeful baby. Oh, my gosh.
And we are in relationship. We are never alone.
We are loved.

Speaker 2 Loved, guided, oneness. Yes.
Loved, guided oneness. And fellow living beings are in this with us.
Wow.

Speaker 2 I'll tell you the most profoundly moving alignment.

Speaker 2 My husband and I were starting to get the picture, you know, that maybe there's a baby out there for us

Speaker 1 to adopt you, man. To adopt, yeah.
Stop trying and forcing this.

Speaker 2 Forcing.

Speaker 2 But I couldn't get my sticky controlling fingers off it. You know, achieving awareness is A plus B plus C.
How am I going to make this happen? How am I going to make this happen? So sticky fingers.

Speaker 1 You're in your analytical brain, not in your heart. Yes.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I thought you were in your heart. I want to give love.
I want to have a child. I want to start a family, but it was more like a controlling love, I guess.

Speaker 2 Yes. Versus a receptive dialogue with God's path, an alignment with God's past.

Speaker 2 The road of life.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 final story.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 2 We're lying in bed in solidarity, Phil by my side. I've just had an in vitro.

Speaker 2 Hopeful, hopeful, hopeful. We had gone to another city.
We'd gone to Philadelphia to meet the team who, using surgeons in Woodsville, had come up with in vitro.

Speaker 2 And they are excellent scientists and excellent doctors. But in our path for us, again, I had that sinking feeling.
So there we are lying in bed.

Speaker 2 And in this pretty overpriced hotel, it was only one night, so it was a splurge. The remote's broken.
I'm like, why are we in an overpriced hotel? And the remote's broken.

Speaker 1 This place doesn't work.

Speaker 1 My husband's hitting the remote. He's normally chair of the remote.

Speaker 2 But there's one channel. And in this hotel, we had no choice on bed rest but to watch four hours of a documentary.
And what is it?

Speaker 2 It's a story of a little boy

Speaker 2 who lives in a garbage dump

Speaker 2 in another country. 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 trash heap. But it hurts so much to not be loved

Speaker 2 that I sniff glue to make the pain go away. Wow.
And I thought, you know what? This little boy needed parents. We needed a child.

Speaker 2 And what has kept us from being a family is our narrow-mindedness, is the prison of our own ego. And it was the opening to what became the road to find as a.

Speaker 1 Wow. That's beautiful.

Speaker 2 And a synchronicity.

Speaker 1 That's incredible. So being open and listening to synchronicities and then acting on it.
Yes. Stop being like resisting them, you know.

Speaker 2 They're for you. Yeah.
And if you say yes, the yellow door is so beyond imagination. It is so full of promise and splendor.
It's not what you want. It is so much better.

Speaker 1 It's what you need. Yeah.
Man, this is powerful.

Speaker 1 I've got a couple of final questions for you, Lisa, but thanks for sharing this. And I want to acknowledge you for being a gift and being a beautiful, wise inspiration.

Speaker 1 for all of us and what's possible. And I do think there has been a

Speaker 1 spiritual disconnection, I think, in society, I think there are forces that try to pull us away from a connection to God,

Speaker 1 the materialism of the world that tries to have us judge, compare,

Speaker 1 tear down others and build us up over others, the competitiveness that's not a healthy competition, but an angry competition.

Speaker 1 And so I want to acknowledge you for bringing, you know, science and research and practical advice along with spiritual wisdom together so that we can reconnect to that part of our soul and our heart that yearns and has thirst and hunger for a spiritual connection.

Speaker 1 Even if we doubt it, even if we don't believe in it, even if we struggle to see the point of it all, I want to acknowledge you for being that voice and for constantly showing up for yourself, for your children, and for all of us.

Speaker 1 I'm really grateful for your time.

Speaker 2 Lewis, I'm deeply touched and honored. And I want to thank you for being a clear, profound voice, body, mind, and soul, right in the middle of our culture, fearless, answering only to one source.

Speaker 1 Absolutely. I appreciate it.
Thank you. Two final questions, Lisa.
But before I ask them, I want to send people to your site.

Speaker 1 Lisa Miller, PhD, I believe, is the main place where all your content and your books and all the things where people can get them.

Speaker 2 And I use Instagram, just dr. LisaMiller.

Speaker 1 dr.lisaMiller.

Speaker 1 If you guys want to follow Lisa over on Instagram, both of of those places we'll have them linked up and i'd love for people who are watching or listening to leave a comment over on youtube or over on instagram and share your biggest takeaway from this conversation oh i'd love to know how people resonate and it i i highly encourage people to do the um gosh what's it called hosting the counsel exercise powerful so do that and and share who is at your table and what was said to you from that exercise in the youtube comments below i think that's a really powerful exercise The Road to Life exercise as well, feel free to do that one, but definitely do the hosting counsel exercise.

Speaker 1 This question is a question I ask everyone towards the end of the show. It's called the three truths.
Imagine a hypothetical scenario.

Speaker 1 You get to live as long as you want in this earth, but it's your last day, far in the future. You get to create and experience what your heart desires physically and spiritually.

Speaker 1 But for whatever reason, all of the content you've created, your books, this this conversation, and anything you create until then, goes with you to the next place when you pass.

Speaker 1 So the people on earth don't have access to this conversation, your books, or any of your work, hypothetically.

Speaker 1 But on the last day, you get to leave behind three lessons, three things that you believe to be true, and that's all we would have of your content. What would those three truths be for you?

Speaker 2 Love your enemy.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 2 Love your lover.

Speaker 1 Love God.

Speaker 1 Why love your enemy?

Speaker 2 That doesn't mean expose yourself to your enemy.

Speaker 1 That doesn't mean be best friends with your enemy.

Speaker 2 Or that your enemy is right.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 2 But as you said, Lewis, the choice to forgive, to love them as a soul on earth, as flawed, as searching, is trapped within their own ego and illusions.

Speaker 1 It frees you to be part of the ultimate field of love.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Where anything's possible.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 2 And you're on the road to life.

Speaker 1 Final question, Dr. Lisa Miller.
What's your definition of greatness?

Speaker 2 To be in deep connection to God and live an abundant, godly life.

Speaker 1 There you go. Thanks so much for being here.
I appreciate it.

Speaker 2 Loved it.

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Speaker 1 Invest in your story with DIA, the only ETF that tracks the DAO from State Street. Getting there starts here.

Speaker 5 Before investing, consider the fund's investment objectives, risks, charges, and expenses. Visit state street.com/slash IM for prospectus containing this and other information.
Read it carefully.

Speaker 5 DIA is subject to risks similar to those of stocks. All ETFs are subject to risk, including possible loss of principal.
Alps Distributors Inc. Distributor.