Centering the Soul: A Conversation With Dr. Lisa Miller

Geoff Mitelman: I’m Rabbi Geoff Mitelman. I’m the Founding Director of Sinai and Synapses. And while I am here in New York, sitting in Miami is Dr. Lisa Miller, who I got to meet a few years ago. She is a best-selling author, PhD, and a professor in the clinical psychology program at Teachers’ College of Columbia University. She’s the founder and director of the Spirituality Mind Body Institute, which is the first Ivy League graduate program and research institute on spirituality and psychology. And she is the author of the book The Spiritual Child and her brand-new book, The Awakened Brain: The New Science of Spirituality and Our Quest for an Inspired Life. Lisa, it’s wonderful to be talking with you here this afternoon.

Lisa Miller: Well, I’m delighted to be joining you, Rabbi. And shall I call you Rabbi Geoff or Rabbi Mitelman?

Geoff Mitelman: Yeah, totally. Geoff is fine for this conversation here.

Lisa Miller: Well, I’m really excited to dig in with you, and I so appreciate your leadership in shifting the conversation so that we can convene and know each other in a much deeper, more spiritually founded.

Geoff Mitelman: You know, that’s where I’d love to start, because I think that’s such an important conversation that we’re having. You really focus a lot on what spirituality might mean, and spirituality can mean a lot of different things to a lot of people – so, I’d love for you to start and share a little bit about: How do you define spirituality, and how does that link with questions of the science of psychology, for example?

Lisa Miller: Good. I think that, just to frame this crystal-clear, if we think about two overlapping circles, a Venn diagram – R for religion and s for spirituality – and indeed, they are overlapping – for 70% of people in the United States, we hear them say, “I am spiritual and I am religious. My deepest spiritual experience is held in the prayers, the practice, the community, the sacred text of my religious tradition.” About 30% of millennials, and fewer with each older generation, say, “I am spiritual, but I am not religious. I feel spiritual when I am in nature, with family and friends, when I hear music.”

Whether or not our spirituality is embraced by a faith tradition, every single one of us is a naturally spiritual being. We are born, on day one, physical beings, emotional and cognitive beings – and we are spiritual beings. It is in our brains, it is in our birthright, to be people whose whole lives, when we are whole and integrated, are led through a spiritual understanding of life itself.

Geoff Mitelman: You know, when you talk about oneness, in Judaism – I would say the most famous, or arguably most important, prayer in Judaism is called the Shema, which says, “Hear, o Israel, Adonai is our God. Adonai is one.” And usually – and I think this is actually historically accurate – it’s taken to mean “there is only one God.” And that’s because the Israelites were living in a polytheistic society – so, “Nope, there’s one God.”

But now, one way that I’ve come to interpret it – and there are several teachers who have taught me this – which is this idea of God is unified, God is integrated, that there is a oneness to us all. That doesn’t mean that we’re all the same, but there is a commonality. There’s an integrated nature. I love this idea of being an integrated being – of what happens when we are integrated versus what happens when we’re disintegrated, as we go about our day to day lives.

Lisa Miller: As you put so wisely, we have disintegrated the spiritual core from the whole child – in schools, in society. And in fact, in the very good attempt to be inclusive, we threw religion out of the public square wholesale 40-plus years ago – and with that, the spiritual baby with the bathwater. And instead of vying for something like you were describing – a place where each person, in their own voice, speaks from their own first person, authentic spiritual experience – we got radio silence in the public square. And we now have a spiritually non-conversant society, such that all of the deep relationships that could inform and strengthen the spiritual core – our parents, our community, our rabbi, priest, imam, minister – all of the places we go, if we could use our voice and express our spiritual experience, and see each other as souls on Earth, and speak of moral dilemmas from a spiritual perspective, and answer business questions not from a zero-sum-game, your-win-is-my-– but from a spiritual view, which is win-win – kerosene on the fire, we all burn bright – society would change. We could absolutely have an awakened spiritual society, and it would not take that much but for a choice to realize our birthright and authentically speak from the spiritual core.

Geoff Mitelman: So, when you talk about the spiritual core, what does that look like? How would you – I would say “define,” although spirituality, almost by definition, cannot be defined – but when you use the word “spiritual,” what are the associations that you’re trying to evoke here?

Lisa Miller: Right. So, when I have looked through a host of different scientific methods – we’ve used genotyping methods, we’ve used MRI studies, we’ve learned in long-term clinical course studies – no matter what lens of science I use, when I turn that lens on to the impact of spirituality in the human life, as a scientist, I can describe what our brain is doing and what that yields for the rest of our lives when our brain is indeed engaged for its spiritual capacities. And that I can describe to you.

The spiritually-engaged brain with which you – certainly as a rabbi, but every one of us, every listener, every child, every man, woman on earth has – has four major components.  The first of the four is the ability to quiet the racket and get present. That is one, and only one, that is shared with the intentional practice of mindfulness – to simply be here, right? Not, “Did the check clear? Why did he say that to me?” But, that is step one.

And once we are mindful and present, we are at the threshold of a doorway, and we can then cross forward into what I might say, mindfulness plus spiritual awareness, what I call “awakened awareness.” And that involves three components. The first, just as we were loved and held as children in our parents’ arms, we are aware that life itself – God, the universe, our higher power, – holds us. We’re not going to fall through existence. We’re not going to crumble overnight, but we are loved and held. The second is that we go from a very top-down, “I’ve got to have it, I planned, my kid wanted to go to that school. They had to get into NYU. They had to go to UCLA. The red door is where my kid was going, and we were going as a family through that red door.” That’s the top-down, dorsal attention network. Well, when the red door is stuck, as was the case with COVID in the past 18 months, and A + B + C did not add up, and we cannot control all things. That top-down attention needs to be able to yield to awakened attention, which is the bottom-up ventral attention network. And we have a broad host of information. Many people say the right answer suddenly “pops.” There’s, Rabbi Geoff, the right answer. So, we move from being makers of our path to discoverers of our path.

So, in summary, we’re loved and held, we are guided… and finally, to your point of just a moment ago, we realize that we are never alone. As our parietal puts in and out hard boundaries, we realize that there is Rabbi Mitelman sitting in New York, and here’s Dr. Miller in Miami, and you may be male and I may be female, and he might be Black and she might be Asian. And everyone has their own unique, magnificent, unique being and glorious diversity. And, at the same time, there’s one deep, common seat of human experience, one common human heart.

So that is the parietal, putting in and out hard boundaries, letting us know that we have absolute time and space differences and material uniqueness – and, at the level of deep spirit, at the level of soul, at the level of the field of life, we are one. We are loved, we are held and guided, and we are never alone. Locked in my house on lockdown, I am not alone. I’m part of the family of life.

Geoff Mitelman: You know, when you’re talking about the level of being awake and being open, and particularly with mindfulness… I have become a big fan of mindfulness. And I think that one thing that’s often misunderstood about mindfulness or meditation is that it’s designed to calm our mind, it’s supposed to help us be more centered. And having done some of the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn, of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction clinic – that being aware, being awake, is not necessarily going to calm you down; it’s being able to feel whatever you happen to be feeling, and being able to acknowledge that, and not say, “Oh, my God, why am I so tense? Why am I not yet calm?” Because then it becomes even more of a treadmill. But being able to sort of calm down.

Lisa Miller: Be present. And it is the precondition for building a deep dialogue with life, to be really here and say, “What is life showing me now?” It was the opposite of, “I’m going to sit in air traffic control and control all the planes,” right? Instead, “I’m a pilot and I’m going on this grand journey. I’m going to travel the whole earth.” And some days it’s sunny and clear, and other days it’s pouring rain and even lightning. So I go from controlling the traffic to going on the journey of a lifetime, in which I am in dialogue with the skies. I have said, “What is the weather doing now? And how do I get above it or around it or wait?”

But to be in deep relationship with life requires first showing up wholly – and then to be not in a position of, “I want life to not be this way. I want it to be that way” – well, that’s not the human journey. If you did that, you could stay home alone and do the whole thing in your head. This is a deep journey – our sacred journey – that involves other people, and winds, and tides. And to be awake and aware is to have a far more vivid and robust life. It’s also much more full of surprises. And surprises aren’t scary – they don’t just upset the apple cart of my plan, they are the opening that’s going to show me my path.

Geoff Mitelman: And I’m curious as to what prevents people from being awake and aware. It’s what we should be; as you said, it’s our birthright to be able to do that, and something that we are able to do. And yet, very often, we’re sleepwalking. I fall into that trap all the time. Why is it that it can be so hard for us to be able to be open and awake to whatever reality is showing us right now?

Lisa Miller: Well, I think you put it so beautifully. It’s not that we’re not awake, and it’s not because we’re so relaxed – it’s because we’re terrified. And that the plans I have, that my mortal being, that my children’s mortal being, somehow is going to be destroyed or disrupted – it has to do with being totally cut off from our birthright, which is the felt sense, the deep knowing that God holds us, that our higher power guides us. You know, we wait till people crash, and then when they’re sitting in AA, we say, “Oh, you bottomed out. Do you know that you’re built to be awakened? Do you know that you are built to be loved and held, and we will even show up for you in a community? AA is a spiritual community where we love and hold each other. Do you know that you are guided by your higher power, and we will show up as your sponsor to guide you. Do you know that you’re never alone?”

So why do we wait? Why don’t we do it earlier?  And in faith communities, it very often is done earlier. I mean, those children – the data says that, particularly in well-resourced communities, a child with a family who participates in a faith community, whether Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist – whatever the tradition may be – is inured from the otherwise elevated rates of addiction and depression and suicide that otherwise plague highly-resourced American communities. So, the national rate at which a young adult says, “For me, speaking for myself, I am a highly spiritual person” – 70%. There are a lot of spiritual young people in our country. But you go to Marin [County], or you go to some of the suburbs outside New York City – highly-resourced communities – and it’s 15%, less than a quarter of the national rate. So, busily running on the treadmill, implicitly being taught – and these are beautiful kids, born into this ecology – implicitly being taught that life is about going after and getting what you want. It is about building your capacity for control and execution. It is about tactical sophistication, and being as high up on the food chain as you can be.

All of that is a narrow piece of even outward success, because life isn’t a game where you can like, cheat and stack the deck. When I was little, I always wanted to beat my dad in Candyland. So I took the good, juicy cards. Candyland has a bunch of yellow squares or double blue squares, but the juicy cards are a candy cane or a marshmallow. And I used to take the get-ahead cards, and I’d stack the deck. I’d calculate. That’s not how life works, right? (Laughs)

Geoff Mitelman: And I think that’s an interesting question, of the link of affluence. And there’s also geography. There’s geography that happens as well.

Lisa Miller: And history control to the point that it is pathogenic. We are making kids sick by giving them one arrow in the quiver, which is to go after what you want and think that the more you control things, and the more tooled-up you are, the more likely you’re to get what you, a priori, want, and therefore will hit the jackpot and be happy.

None of those steps are valid in terms of the deeper dynamic of life. Life is flux. It is not by controlling, but “What is life asking me now? And what does God say in my heart about this? What is my spiritual response to this hairpin turn in the curve, whether it’s joy or suffering or confusion? What is God? What is my higher power showing me now?”

That is a dialogue. It is not command, control. And that leads to a big, vast life full of sacred people who show up, and big surprises, and a calling. Did I think I’d be a spiritual psychologist when I was 17? I didn’t know people could be a spiritual psychologist. It’s a dialogue – it’s a dialogue.

Geoff Mitelman: Well, you drew the distinction very nicely between religion and spirituality. There are a couple of different things that are going in my head here. One is the idea of religion as it’s defined – of the Latin, of religio, to bind together, that there are people, certainly in the Jewish community and also in Christian communities and Muslim communities, that even if you don’t necessarily like someone or [feel] connected with them, you’ve got to show up for them. Right? If somebody’s sick, you’ve got to visit them in the hospital. If somebody has a baby, deliver the food for them. There’s a level of people who are religious but not spiritual. And I think, also, religion has sometimes become itself so focused on the religiosity that it’s lost a sense of spirituality.

Lisa Miller: Can I take your first point, which is so important in the view of our MRI studies? Rabbi, you’ll love this. The same loop in our brain that grows strong and practiced when we talk to God or our higher power, whether we say God, Hashem, Jesus, Allah, the universe – wherever we are in deep dialogue with this great source — and through all life, I turn to God for guidance. I ask my higher power, “What now to do?” That capacity is used identically when we see God in one another. When I see you as a child of God, as just like a ray from the sun, an emanation of the divine. When I see spirit in and through you, Rabbi, I’m using the same part of my brain that I use to connect directly and talk to God. That is love of neighbor. And the picture you just painted of a faith community, of any tradition where we show up for each other, and it’s not because of any instrumental reason – it’s because you are God’s child, you are a member of my faith community – that builds our capacity for spiritual awareness, for transcendent awareness, love of service, tikkun olam, altruism. It’s beautiful.

Geoff Mitelman: Yeah.

Lisa Miller: If we’re just good to people, we’ll start to be able to feel the spirit.

Geoff Mitelman: And being able to have a language for that – as you’ve mentioned, I think we’ve lost that, both because of the affluence and because spirituality sometimes gets a negative valence, where it’s not grounded in actual science or it’s become such a broad, catch-all conversation that some people say, like, well, “Wait a second. I don’t want to have any part of that if that’s what spirituality is.” So we’ve lost a lot of the ways to be able to talk about this in a meaningful kind of way.

Lisa Miller: And I would say that’s because we’ve disintegrated the forms of human knowing. So, at the table of human knowing is the empiricist and logician, alongside the mystic and the intuitive. And when we realize all of our forms of human knowing, and get speaking across the table, my intuition throws it to my head, and I discern the implications or the significance of that mystical experience. Or I have a nagging question, and I throw it to my heart. What does my deep inner wisdom, through inspiration, perceive?

When we are in dialogue, we actually myelinate tracks between regions of the brain. We pave the highways to become what, in the eyes of science is – we have a better brain. We are knowers, and we avail ourselves of multiple forms of knowing. We’re more innovative. We are, in my work with the army, more situationally aware to “What is life showing us now?” And we live inspired lives, whether we’re deciding where we’re going to invest our money, or we’re deciding “What is my deep purpose in life?” Everything is a creative, inspired act.

Geoff Mitelman: Well, I have two young children. They’re eight and six, so they’re still young, but they’re not as little as they used to be. But you’ve done a lot of work on spirituality and children, and how to inculcate that. And there are some questions of “What can we do as individuals, as parents, or as human beings?” And there’s also “What can we do as a community?” Because I think that’s also been – when you were talking about the people who are saying, like, here’s my quiver of being able to do this, because there’s a belief that if you should do everything by yourself, this American exceptionalism of “I’m going to lift myself up by my bootstraps and I’m going to do it here” – we miss the role of the community and the larger worldview. What’s the relationship between what parents can do for children and what can we do as part of a larger community, to be able to help children become flourishing, meaningful, wonderful adults?

Lisa Miller: And you know, I spoke at a Jewish school in Dallas a few years ago, and a parent raised her hand and said, “What’s more important, what happens in the home or what happens at school?” And the head of the school stood up and said, “It’s all working together.” The goal is to align it in one great mission. And so, at home, these lessons also apply, whether within a religious or a non-religious school, to a teacher-student relationship, which is foremost walking the walk of spiritual values.

In The Spiritual Child, and then again in The Awakened Britain – this story was such a big deal in my life, I think I told it in both books. I’m sitting on the subway in New York, going to work on a Sunday, BC (before children) one August in New York. One subway after the next passes as it gets hotter and hotter. And finally, I hop on a subway that has a big open space, I can’t believe it, in this packed car. And I quickly realize it’s because there’s a homeless man, who with each stop, 86th Street, 96th street, people look at him and race to the other end of the car. And he’s starting to feel more rejected and more unseen and more debased, right? And then he gets really agitated. He’s like, “Do you want some of my lunch?” 103rd Street, 110. “Hey, you, come sit near me.” And in his heart, you can just feel him crying out, “Do I matter? Am I anything? Why am I an untouchable?”

So we get to 125th, 145th, and a grandma and her granddaughter get on the car, and they are exquisite. The grandma has a white pillbox hat. They both have white gloves – pink pastel for the little girl, green pastel for grandma. And everyone – they look so lovely. Everyone’s cringing because they know what’s coming. This guy’s throwing lunch and, yeah – “Hey.” And he points at the royal couple. “Will you sit with me?” They look at each other. Not a word is said. They nod. They walk right over and sit down right beside him – touching, touching hips. And he can’t believe it. And he tests it. He’s like, “Do you want some of my lunch?” “No, thank you.” Not a word is said. Where were they going? It was Sunday. They were going to their house of worship. They were going to church. And what went through my ears was, “What you do to the least of these, you do to me.”

How had the spiritual values been passed from l’dor vador, grandmother to granddaughter? Through walking the walk – lived spiritual values. And I would venture that the second piece along walking the walk – talking the walk, “what you do to the least of these, you do to me” – had been said at some point between grandmother and granddaughter. Because in the nod, we knew who he is. We knew who we are to each other here on earth – souls on earth. And we’re sitting by our brother. Everyone is your brother. Everyone is your sister. To me, The best thing we can do as parents is live out spiritual values and then narrate, talk through – if I have tears in my eyes, as my mother often did at sunset, “Thank you, God, for the glory of today and the beautiful sunset, thank you for this gift” – if I say that out loud, then my kid, in the back of the car, at the dining room table, knows that life is a gift – that is a gift from God, as I understand the universe, and that it deserves our thanks, and that prayer is a way to connect to God. And that we do this and we talk about this and that, our relationship goes to this depth – narrating transparency of our own spiritual path and living it out.

Geoff Mitelman: And I think about this with our kids – of trying to try to do that as much as we’re able to do, of living these values and sharing them. And what’s interesting, and what’s hard, is that our kids are young. And so sometimes they find the services boring, and sometimes they’re running around. And our feeling is that even there’s value in the ritual, right? Not just, like, sitting off the side, but there’s some work that’s being done through osmosis, and also modeling of, “This is something that’s important.” And so, even if on one given Shabbat, they’re not totally paying attention, the next week, there’s another opportunity. And I think that’s something that we’ve lost a lot of, which is an ability to have a ritual, have a regularity of practice – but also, mindfulness requires that work.

Lisa Miller: You know, Rabbi, I want to go to your first point. Now they’re a little older, I asked permission before I wrote about them in The Awakened Brain. The Awakened Brain has stories about our becoming parents from a deeply spiritual perspective, and searching the world for our spiritual child. And before I wrote about my spiritual son, I wanted him to be 18 and ask him – and when the book came out, he was 21, so I wanted him to have a say. But I remember when he was two, and underneath the benches in the synagogue. And my feeling was that the feel of the carpet, and the sound of the prayers, and the smell of the synagogue – that was all part of him being at home in a synagogue.

So when I think back to my own childhood, there was a temple in Des Moines, Iowa, where both my parents grew up. And during services, I was allowed to run around and leave and go through the halls. And as I looked up on the walls with great interest, I could find my mother in her confirmation class in the 1950s. And then the year before, I could find my father. And there were my aunt and my uncle. And there’s this deep sense of being at home, in Temple B’nai Jeshrun in Des Moines, Iowa. That feeling transfers to any synagogue. I can be in Krakow, in a dilapidated, defamed synagogue, and I still know there was someone’s aunt and someone’s uncle on the wall, and that that is my home. So I think it all counts.

Geoff Mitelman: Yeah. As you’re talking, too, of a rootedness, of feeling loved. There is value in who we are simply by the fact of being who we are as human beings. And I think that there’s so much of “What can someone do for me?” as an instrumental aspect, of “this person can do this for me, and they’re valuable only to the extent that they can do this for me,” as opposed to, “they’re valuable because they are a human being.”

Lisa Miller: Rabbi, can we do a brief, literally a 60-second, practice together?

Geoff Mitelman: Absolutely.

Lisa Miller: Okay. Because you’ve really hit the nail on the head – bullseye – in seeing each other convene as souls on earth. I could come to – whether it’s a church, a synagogue, a community of service, like Habitat for Humanity – and it doesn’t matter if I was on the front page for winning $50 million or robbing a bank, or coming up with a great invention or a terrible crime. I show up, and I am seen as a soul on earth, because I have come out of love, to be renewed, right?

And that holds true in this extreme case, of course, in the synagogue, or in the church, or in the community of contribution. But it’s also true in every tiny little exchange. How do we see each other? Are we adding each other up? How smart are you? “Boy, you’re smart, rabbi. Oh, wow. You’ve done really well, rabbi,” like measure-measure? Or am I trying to be on a journey with you and walk side-by-side? Okay, so that’s what this practice is about. May we do it?

Geoff Mitelman: Absolutely.

Lisa Miller: Okay. I’m going to invite you to close your eyes and take five to seven breaths, just to clear out your inner space.

I invite you to think of a time where you were being held by a flat-out A-plus simply for being. It might have been a grandma, a grandpa, a teacher. Someone looked at you as absolutely marvelous, whether you’d done something great or failed, whether you’d been good or so-called “bad” – no matter what you’d done, they looked at you as magnificent, unconditional love beyond. Where were you?

Geoff Mitelman: I’m thinking about my father’s mother, who I didn’t see all that often, but was the greatest champion of all of her grandchildren. And again, it didn’t matter if you wrote an article in the school newspaper, she would tell all of her friends from synagogue. That’s who came to mind right there.

Lisa Miller: Beautiful. And how did that feel?

Geoff Mitelman: Wonderful. I mean, I felt loved.

Lisa Miller: And when you knew you were going to see her, how did it feel?

Geoff Mitelman: A little wistful. It’s been 20-plus years since she’s died, but I can imagine her smile, and I can imagine her smile. I grew up in New York, but my dad grew up in Texas, so she had a very thick Texas drawl, which always made me laugh when I would hear it. And it brought me back to her home, even though I was not there as often as I was with other family members.

Lisa Miller: And in her presence, how did you become? What did you step into? How did you fill out? What were you capable of?

Geoff Mitelman: It’s interesting, that – because I feel torn about this as a parent also, which is that really, I always felt, and I still believe in, for lack of better words, striving for excellence. That’s something that I really felt that wasn’t necessarily tied to my identity – although maybe it was – of trying to be able to really stretch myself. There was a wonderful sense of support, no matter what. But I would also think about her when I hadn’t done something quite as well and needed a cheerleader. She was somebody that I would want to talk to if something wasn’t quite as good. “Well, Grandma Ida would love that.”

Lisa Miller: One hundred percent for you. Wonderful, wonderful. So no matter what happened for you – and you brought her with you in a sense. What a blessing. Grandma Ida. Grandma Ida. And my mother’s name is Ida Margot.

Okay, now, may I invite you, Rabbi, to just close your eyes for two breaths. And we’re going to do the follow-up piece to this.

I now invite you to envision a time where you have looked at someone beyond unconditional love, as magnificent, as an A-plus for being, no matter what they did or didn’t happen to do, succeed or fail – magnificent, unconditional love plus. And in your glow, and in your warmth and sunshine, how do they become, how do they fill out, how do they come forward?

Geoff Mitelman: Of somebody that I’ve unconditionally supported?

Lisa Miller: Someone who you looked at the way Grandma Ida looked at you.

Geoff Mitelman: … who I looked at in the way that she looked at me.

Lisa Miller: Your own children, or anyone else.

Geoff Mitelman: That’s what I’m thinking of: my kids. And there is a level of pride and thinking of both the moments when they shine, and also when there’s a little bit of difficulty or tension or something like, what’s the reparation that happens afterwards, and the closeness that happens, even as there are meltdowns and challenges?

Lisa Miller: Right. So it’s a move from transactional relationships to deeply holding and even transforming one another – transformational relationship. And your loving fatherhood, and you’re being so loved as the grandson. That’s a deep knowing of how we can see each other and love each other into whole being as souls on earth, as God’s children. And it’s possible to basically –  as you know – look at people that way while having, even in very transactional moments, someone’s being hired or fired – you did it right, you did it wrong – but that’s someone’s precious child, and to behold them, and they’re all God’s precious children.

So to behold in that way, I call it an “awakened relationship.” But we can run anything – whether it’s a synagogue, a school, a hospital, an organization – from an awakened perspective. And in my work with the Army and my work with businesses, they need that, because young people now come into the workforce, come to the Army, come to schools and higher ed, and the spiritual core has not been built the way it was 40 years ago. You’d break them down in basic training, and traditionally you then build them back up. Well, now you break them down and there’s no core, and they fall apart. Or at my own institution of Columbia University, we tragically – Rabbi, we had nine suicides in one year. That just wasn’t the case before. And it’s not just Columbia, it’s other schools as well.

So young people have not been seen that way, and don’t know themselves that way. They don’t know that they’re magnificent whether they got a 96 or a 46 on their chem test – “you are magnificent.” That is something that any place of work, of learning, any family, can do. It’s a deliberate choice to see each other, love of neighbor. And it uses the awakened brain – again, the same seat of perception through which we talk to God.

Geoff Mitelman: You know, as you’re talking, I’m thinking about Martin Buber and his theology of I-thou and I-it, of when are you fully in relationship with somebody, where there’s no instrumental need, and when is it an I-it relationship?

And I think, by the way, I-it relationships get a bad rap. I think I-it relationships sometimes are very, very necessary. When I go to the dry cleaner, I’m expecting to pay and I’ll get my clothes cleaned. And yet, I think, as you’re saying, the whole world has become too much of an I-it. There aren’t enough places where there is an I-thou, because I think…

Lisa Miller: Let’s say you go to the dry cleaner and “I’m sorry, sir, it was due today. It’s not going to be ready till next Friday.” That’s very annoying, but [your] choice, right, in that moment. Is it both I-it and I-thou, right? Only I-it. And I think that’s where, as a society, we need to start building some muscle again. We’ve let it lay fallow. We’re a little atrophied there. And that’s a form of relational spirituality. I can’t go anywhere without being upsold. If I greet someone warmly and I’m trying to connect and then, “Do you want fries with that?” I’d like more space for I-thou.

Geoff Mitelman: Right. And I’m thinking also, and linking with a very interesting book, and I’m curious as to your take on it. If you’ve read of The Coddling of the American Mind, which is by John Haidt and, I think, Greg Lukianoff. And one of the things that they talk about is that there are elements of cognitive-behavioral therapy that need to be taught for young children, that what you’re thinking is not necessarily reality, and that actually we can deal with unpleasant feelings, unpleasant emotions – they’re not going to break you. But to be able to have the tools, to be able to know, “I can come into a place where I’m going to feel uncomfortable, where I am going to be challenged, and I’m still going to be okay. I’m not a bad person for not getting a trophy,” right? It’s okay.

Lisa Miller: I would say that’s a very important square one – to know that I’m loved and held, even when I feel bad or I didn’t get what I want, right – to have an awakened sense. And then, I’d even say step two, from a spiritual perspective, sort of beyond the CBT model to the spiritual perspective, is that struggle is the catalyst of growth – not getting what I want. And even depression – this is in the data, clear as a bell. Depression is an invitation for spiritual growth. It is literally a knock at the door so that we can go to the next level, the next stage of what we might become. And if we can’t bear it because we think we’re a loser for suffering, or we dope it away with drugs and alcohol, or even the misuse of SSRIs – two-thirds of depressions are growing pains. They’re existential. So, what is life showing me now? Feeling trapped, feeling anxious – that’s because my soul is outgrowing the cage of my body. What is the next iteration, the next phase? What is life showing me now? And if we engage depression as an invitation to open our heart – prayer, meditation – and see what comes forward in this dialogue…

People right now are very depressed. “I don’t know my next move. I’m anxious. I don’t want to go back to the way things were before. I’m so isolated. I’m down on my game.”  It’s not about controlling your life. You don’t need to know your next step. And it doesn’t seem to be about wanting what was before. But what is life opening now? And can we sort of take God’s guidance: Who comes to you now? And what do they say? And stay curious and stay interested in life’s path. And what does your spiritual heart say about what closed and what opened. In order for something to open that had to shut – well, maybe God shut that door and opened that one. Or maybe life did, or maybe your brother, sister, or father – but no matter how it happened, to be in dialogue with life is a possibility that is not just buoyant; it is far more magnificent and shining than sitting here outgrowing my body, my life.

Now I could be in the same house with the same family and have the same job, and feel that I need to grow, and keep all that while I grow inside. And I treat people more lovingly, and I treat friendship as more of an adventure and spend more time with people in a curious way. And I treat my job as a place where I grow. We don’t need to destroy yesterday’s world to renew. We need to renew our inside way of being, and then treat life with more interest and curiosity and direction opens.

Geoff Mitelman: There’s a phrase that you’ve used a couple of times that I particularly like, which is of being “in dialogue” – being in dialogue with life, being in dialogue with God. I think that’s a really important framing, because sometimes it’s so much of “I’m going to try to control this, and if it’s not exactly the way that I want, I’m going to be frustrated,” or “I am just a passive recipient. The universe is going to tell me whatever it’s going to be, and it’s all fait accompli.” And neither of those are healthy ways of looking at the world and being able to say, “What’s the information that’s coming into me, what’s the data, and what am I experiencing, and how am I going to respond to that?” And I love this idea of being in dialogue with what our emotions are saying, what our spiritual life is saying, what the universe is saying.

Lisa Miller: And we are built to be able to do that. We are built to perceive in multiple forms of knowing. People are built to be able to ask driving questions that could have 18 logical answers, but know through inspiration in their heart which one is true of their path. We are built to be able to be intuitive and connect truth, and at the same time discern and weigh and implement truth. We’ve got it all. We need to draw it into dialogue and let the heart as an instrument, the heart as an instrument of knowing what’s true and inspired and right, throw direction to the head that is great at chess and can implement and strategize. We have it backwards a lot of the time, certainly in K-12 education in a lot of organizations, where the head says what we want – narrowly, monolithically – and then the heart comes forward with yearnings and desires and appetites and jealousies. But when the heart comes first, then the head is really the strategist.

This is how I think of it when it comes to the scientific world. You know, people will say, “I am deeply spiritual. I don’t care what the science says,” or they will say, “I am very scientific, and this spirituality stuff is too woo-woo for me.” Well, spirituality and science – as you know so well, Rabbi – can go hand-in-hand. Science is a method. It’s a lens. And whether it’s a microscope or a telescope or an MRI study, we can take that lens and point it at a broad host of things, including the impact of spirituality in the human life. If we haven’t done that, that’s only because of limitations in scientists – what people call scientism, the vogues, the appetites, the trends in what questions scientists ask.

And that is why, for most of the 20th century, scientists were just like a tea bag infused in radical materialism. They learned it in K-12. They learned it in college – radical materialism. “If it’s real, you can touch it. If it’s real, we can all see it.” In fact, there’s inter-rater reliability. “We all have to have seen this blue cap if it’s there, right?” Well, scientists only had half the table of human knowers on the case, and they needed the mystics and the intuitives to be able to have a more inspired set of questions.

And now, in the 21st century, there are hundreds of peer review articles on the impact of spirituality in the human life. We are less depressed. We are more able to come back from difficulty. Trauma isn’t just about showing resilience; it’s about renewal, growing, becoming more inside through it.

In fact, in my work with the Army, one of the major points of implementation is that trauma, just like depression, is a 52-card pickup, but it is also an invitation for a deepening of our awareness of the true, deep, deep nature of life. And we grow spiritually. That work has been done by Currier. That work’s been done by Tsai and Tedeschi. A lot of scientists have shown that post-traumatic spiritual growth – we’re built for that. Which means, right now, as the pandemic drags, we’re actually built, as a collective, to become wiser and kinder and deeper and more aligned with “What is life showing me now?”, not more depressed and more isolated and cranky and destructive and bitter towards one another, but to feel, through our awakened awareness, the common being. This is an invitation, a collective mass invitation, to awaken as a society.

Geoff Mitelman: Well, I mean, that’s why the work that you’re doing is so important. And so, thank you so much, Lisa, for sharing your wisdom with us here this afternoon. And if people want to find your book, they can find – it’s The Awakened Brain – and can also find The Spiritual Child. And if people want to find you on Twitter, is it @LisaMillerPhD?

Lisa Miller: I think it might be @TheAwakenedBrain. I think my Twitter is The Awakened brain, the name of the book.

Geoff Mitelman: Okay.

Lisa Miller: But Lisa Miller, Dr. Lisa Miller on Facebook. And if you do “Lisa Miller Awakened Brain,” you’ll find the work, and I’d love to share it with you.

Geoff Mitelman: So I encourage people to be able to go find her and find her work. She’s given some wonderful talks and terrific books. So, Lisa, thank you so much for helping us think about science and spirituality in a more meaningful kind of way, and helping give us awesome tools to be able to be more awake and be more spiritual and be more fully alive. So, thank you.

Lisa Miller: Rabbi, it’s such a joy to connect with you and share these deep considerations. And thank you for sharing The Awakened Brain.

Geoff Mitelman: Absolutely. And I hope people can continue this conversation. We have these conversations at JewishLive.org/SacredScience. You can find me on Twitter, I’m at @RabbiMitelman, or @SinaiSynapses, at all the different social media handles and sites there as well. We hope you join us for future conversations. And Lisa, thank you again so much for a great conversation.