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Lisa Miller a psychologist and scientist whose work focuses on the nexus of spirituality and mental health. She’s a professor at Columbia and the New York Times bestselling author of The Spiritual Child and The Awakened Brain, which I finally just read and loved so much.
Today, we talk about some of the latest research and clinical science showing how spirituality is incredibly protective against depression. And we’ll get into what we mean by spirituality. But, interestingly, as Lisa will explain, there is nothing that is a quarter as protective against suffering as spirituality. Beyond the statistics, though, Lisa tells a few really poignant stories of experiences she had with patients that changed the way she thought about mental health, and how we might make better sense of our lives.
We talk about different ways to open up to spiritual awareness, growth, and meaning. And we also talk about how to help our kids do this—and why this is particularly important.
Perhaps not surprisingly, we talk about synchronicity, and the power of small moments in our lives. Lisa outlines three steps you can take to become a more active participant in synchronicity—which she says is not merely a spectator sport.
Lisa takes me through something she calls the red-door, yellow-door practice. And she outlines three times in our lives where we tend to experience what she describes as developmental depression—or an invitation to awaken to the deeper meaning of life. This hits around college age, then midlife, and then as we ascend to become elders. I found Lisa’s framing of these life chapters so helpful and intuitive.
I hope you love this conversation, too.
MORE FROM LISA MILLER, PhD:
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Lisa Miller’s Website
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
ELISE:
How old are your kids?
LISA:
So they’re now in their early twenties.
ELISE:
Oh my God.
LISA:
22, 23, 24.
ELISE:
Amazing. Is that weird?
LISA:
It’s totally fascinating because you can draw back the line to who they were when they were very young, like two and see their souls come. They’re their own people. I think the best thing I did as a parent was I got out of the way. I let them be who they are and I just loved them. And I think most parenting experts would say bedtime structure, but I believe they are. Soul had a journey and we just let that roll.
ELISE:
Yeah, isn’t that wild? I mean, and just how they come in so intact and mutable, but also not, they just sort of are who they are.
LISA:
I think mainly not.
ELISE:
Yeah, mainly not. Right.
LISA:
I love that. So your boys, right? How old are your
ELISE:
Boys? I have two boys. They’re 12 and nine. Yeah, it’s really fun and just so they’re very intact at this point and hopefully they don’t fracture, but they just came in very, my oldest in particular is a wild creature. They’re both wild, very different, but he came sort of preloaded. I don’t know how else to explain it, but he just came in. What was he telling me about immortal octopus, but how lobsters don’t have a biological, do you know that lobsters don’t age biologically.
LISA:
Really? No, I didn’t know that. That’s fascinating. No,
ELISE:
They die from disease and obviously predators, and I think sometimes when they go to regenerate the exoskeleton, if they are too big, it requires, they only have a finite amount of energy and so that can make it really difficult for them to protect themselves at a certain age, but that they don’t actually have a biological age and I guess octopi don’t either. Anyway, this is what I was getting lectured on yesterday by my oldest.
LISA:
He reads, he’s a voracious reader and he read that
ELISE:
No, he is a voracious. Well, this is what I mean by preloaded. There’s some stuff where I’m like, how the hell did you know that? Or do you know that? But he watches a lot of science. YouTube,
LISA:
He’s a researcher.
ELISE:
He’s inquired. Yeah, he’s an Enneagram type five. Yeah. It’s very funny because, and this will guide us into our conversation today, but he loves science. This is his thing, his area of expertise. He was very proud. He told me yesterday that he’s in a learning lab. He has a DHD and this auditory processing disorder, but in their learning lab class where they work on some of these skills they were prepping for, they are all in life science class as seventh graders. And that the learning lab teacher asked Max to help the other students with their science. So sweet. And he was like, yeah, I mean, I was telling one of them actually the nerves don’t regenerate and this is why I was like, you’re wild. But he is obsessed with science. He’s in a Jewish day school,
LISA:
Which
ELISE:
Was a little bit of a curve fall and you’re
LISA:
Jewish,
ELISE:
I’m Jewish, my father’s Jewish and my mother’s not Jewish. So it has created a little bit of schism for me. And Max’s dad isn’t Jewish, but today on the drive to school, he said he goes to a bible summer camp that my husband went to and he was like, I’m excited to go next summer, be the Jew. He takes Jewish texts and tradition and he takes history of the Jewish people and
LISA:
He’s going to Christian bible camp. That is so wonderful. That is beautiful. Isn’t that perfect? You have New
ELISE:
Testament
LISA:
All windows. Well, I’ve never heard anyone argue for two sources of all life. There’s one source of all life and he’s coming to know through the lens of many traditions, this deep loving presence.
ELISE:
It’s wonderful. No, and it’s amazing because he thinks I’m a wacky spiritual person, but he was like, the class I’m really surprised I like so much is Jewish Texan tradition where they’re analyzing Genesis five and talking about what it means to be a blessing and faith. And anyway, in terms of our conversation today, I was like, this is really, I’m really proud of you Max, for grappling with some of these questions that you would’ve otherwise wanted to reject. And now after reading your book, I’m like, and this is so mentally protective for you, and the more you can lean into the questions of not knowing which are also core to the scientific discovery process, the better you might do mentally. So anyway, thank you. I was jazzed after I read your book to try to not push spirituality on max, but just to, I try and come at him from really here’s, you should read about these parapsychological conceptions. Let’s look at ions, let’s look at evidence of past lives, any window to try to peak his curiosity where I don’t hit his reject button.
LISA:
There’s so much I love about what you’re doing. The first thing that I have to say I love you’re doing is that you’re making him comfortable with knowing in many ways that science is this awesome rigorous splitting pursuit and your direct experience is a profound valid way of knowing, and Max gets to put them together, what is it to be a blessing and then argue about the concept of being a blessing and then study what the antecedents and quele are of being a blessing. He’s seen multiple levels of analysis, multiple lenses onto one reality that you comfortably as parent move between. The other thing I love about what you’re doing is that you’re welcoming him on a quest that he has a headlamp effectively going through life. And as a discoverer, he’s on a great adventure and he’s authorized to go, if he wants to climb Everest as ever, it’s kili, majaro, kili majaro. If it’s a deep, deep dive, it’s that you’re authorizing him to be the captain of his ship and then catch the wind. And that is completely antithetical to how most of education structured. So that’s fabulous.
ELISE:
Thank you. Yeah, no, there’s a resistance to a larger paradigm and even though we recognize, well, we need a larger paradigm to explain so many of the phenomenon that are happening, but I’ll even start there in the sense of your book came out in 2021, is that right?
LISA:
The Awakened Brain? Yes.
ELISE:
Yeah, the awakened brain. And I’ve had a copy, literally there’s still a space up there where it’s just been sitting on my bookshelf, and I remember when it came across my transom and I was like, huh. And then I had sort of this internal resistance of I don’t like my spirituality to be explained and I don’t want it to be reduced to science. I didn’t even really know what the book was about, but I think that that’s my initial sort of resistance was I don’t like these two things together, which I know is at the core of so much of your work is encountering that resistance in various forms. And then of course you write about synchronicity. And then in the span of three weeks, two child psychiatrists who are not friends who I love and are dear friends, both of them independently and not in the same context, were like, you must be friends with Lisa Miller.
Have you not had Lisa Miller on your podcast? What it was Robin Berman and Elisa Pressman. And I was like, okay, I need to move my butt and get on this. And then of course I read your book, the Awakened Brain, and I was like, oh my God, this is completely speaking my language. And then some, I learned so many fascinating things about the protective, the mental armor of spirituality in our daily lives. So here we are. Let’s talk about at the beginning that core resistance that you’ve encountered throughout your career, despite winning myriad massive grants and ACC claim from the giants in your field, this ongoing resistance to there must be another factor. Can you take us through what the research has found and then the wall that you encounter?
LISA:
I love the question. Spirituality had been treated in clinical science basically as a variable. What is your ethnicity? What is your SES? What is your family history and what is your religion? It had been treated for a very long time, like a variable, but spirituality is not one more variable. Spirituality is certainly not just increasingly we hear things like a life hack. It is absolutely not a life hack. Spirituality is a deep profound orientation to the deeper nature of life. It’s a completely game changing. Instead of rotating on one axis, we rotate on another. It is absolutely all encompassing. So when you put up data to smart, capable, well-published scientists that say, as compared to everything else we know round up the usual suspects, family history, SES, ethnicity, dual diagnosis, everything we know in clinical science, there is nothing that is a quarter as protective against suffering as spirituality.
Everybody says, what if that’s not the axis on which someone’s been spinning? It can feel very unfamiliar, it can feel off the map. It can feel suspect like, oh, what must really be the story under the hood? I can feel imposing, right? So I encountered in the late nineties when I gave grand rounds situations, I brighten the awaken brain, people would get up and walk out. And I then, despite it all managed to continue on through my career at Columbia, and I encountered senior people who would listen to stories of spirituality in my patients who were covered from profound suffering, addiction, trauma, depression through a spiritual path. The senior faculty would cry and then they’d say, you know what? I’m not spiritual. It was simply not the access on which I spin was the feedback I was getting, and therefore the field shouldn’t spin that way either.
And that said to me, okay, if 90%, let’s say that point, 95% of my colleagues don’t think the world spins this way, then that’s profoundly important proof that this research needs to be done. And we do now have three decades of strong peer review science that says, you know what? For many people actually most life unfolds in a much more healthy, flourishing way when we have a strong spiritual awareness, when we do spin on the axis, when we take the profound foundational orientation to life. So at least you were just sharing that synchronicity is something that sparked for your friends, Hey, you two should get together, put your heads together. Tell me, is synchronicity part of your path?
ELISE:
Oh yeah. Oh, absolutely. I mean, I’m besides being a diehard Carl Jung fan and loving the ying, and you write about research that suggests that the more open you are to synchronicity, the more likely these events are to occur. So I pay a huge amount of attention to synchronicity in my life and feeling like I’m in communion with the universe. And I think that that’s a really important distinction that your work also offers, which is that spirituality is distinct from religiosity, right? So it’s not about a fundamental set of beliefs or being Muslim or Jewish or Christian or Catholic or whatever it may be. This is about an opening to the universe, God, spirit, nature, the cosmos, energy, whatever name where you feel like there is some greater awareness that is in touch with you and that you can read sort of the tea leaves that are given to you.
And so I love that so many of the case studies in the book aren’t someone going to an evangelical church and finding God but are a depressed teenager, suddenly feeling like her father who has passed is sending her active signs. And that these small moments, that’s been my experience too, is those small moments of, oh wait, maybe this is not all this material reality isn’t all there is there’s something here that I can engage with and lean into just reframes everything that happens to you as a learning experience rather than where you’re just at the will of a meaningless, pointless universe to suddenly being an active participant in creating your own reality. And I think that’s just a much more empowered place to be, right?
LISA:
Synchronicity is the universe talking to us. It’s a symbolically expressed universe. I think what you’re saying is so wise because when people say to me, I think I had a synchronicity, but I’m not sure, the first step is to authorize ourselves to know that information is real. So it is quite remarkable that you haven’t seen your friend for 14 years. We’re just thinking of him and he turns the corner that day. That’s quite remarkable. In fact, way too probabilistic to have happened by chance. There’s no difference between internal and external when it comes to synchronicity that consciousness is in us through us and around us. So the fact that I’m thinking of my friend and then he shows up are two expressions of the same deeper truth, which is spiritual consciousness, and in this case the confluence of why he and I today should meet.
So authorizing yourself is something that doesn’t come easily to all people. We are educated out of authorizing ourselves. We’re told it’s only real. If you can point on the page and tell me where that is. It’s only real if you can cite the source direct knowing, authorizing intuition, a hunch mystical experience is the first step towards knowing, hey, that confluence accounts it’s real. The second step, which is very important, is to then take that reality to heart and start to reflect on what does it mean? Why are my friend and I being reunited? What’s going on in my life or his? How could I support him? Is there something that’s being revealed through both our lives right now? Maybe we both have a parent dying. Maybe we both are facing a challenge. Maybe there’s some way in which we’re to walk with each other through this passage discern. And then the third step, which you put so beautifully at least, is to act on the synchronicity, knowing it’s real, seeing its direction, and then be a collaborator in this miracle when we choose to act, we participate as collaborators in the miracle of synchronicity. That’s game changing on our life. Synchronicity is not a spectator sport. Synchronicity is not just a fascinating dalliance. Synchronicity is a porthole to your spiritual path, an invitation to participate in the miracle of your life.
ELISE:
Yeah, I think that’s beautiful. And it’s so fun, I think for a lot of people who listen, I’m a little bit of a gateway drug where they’re like, you’re so reasonable and grounded, but you like all of this stuff. And so it gives me permission to dibble dabble in this world too. And then I sometimes encounter the hardened quote realists or materialists who are like, you have no real proof that your brother-in-law is talking to you on the other side. Why are you giving people false hope or whatever it is? I’m not quite sure. I’m like, because I choose to live like this and it brings a tremendous amount of meaning to my life and it’s fun. And whether I’m imagining that Peter still guides me and gives me advice and helps me navigate the world or not, does it really matter whether this is real phenomena or a figment of my imagination and maybe you think I’m slightly mad? It adds a dimension to my life that is beautiful resonant and to me helpful. So let’s talk about, let’s go back to the beginning of your career actually when you were doing your residency or your rounds and a psych ward. This is in New York,
And you’re doing sort of traditional talk therapy and then you recognize actually these people are endlessly burdened. They’re carrying around their stories in their satchel, and then they’re unpacking them for us again and again, retreading the story of what’s happened to them in a way that from where you stood, you were like, this doesn’t seem very effective. And then can you tell us about the epiphany?
LISA:
I was working in the model of the time, which was somehow, if you can understand your past, you will be set free. But until that point, we are all simply effectively molded by the players in our childhood. So put another way for a very long time psychotherapy held, the view that we are molded by the primary figures in our childhood is our parents, our grandparents, our community, that thing that happened when you were seven, that somehow is a radical determinist model. We are stuck with the life that others gave us by how they impressed on us, their way of being or treatment or mistreatment of us. And that felt to me profoundly depressing. So it wasn’t surprising to me that the patients weren’t getting better when we used that model. In fact, I thought the patients were getting worse. I share in the awaken brain the story of a woman who’d been a hidden child during the Holocaust.
And the model as it was someone on the unit had been working with her, was to have her revisit that story again and again, which only led to her being inflicted with more pain, more sense of trauma. And that Yom Kippur, she took her life and that was confirmatory to me. It was a heartbreaking tragedy that confirmed for me that reliving trauma, being told that you’re nothing but the amalgam of the people who raised you, harmed you. That’s a very dead-end story. And it didn’t feel real to me. But what did was listening to the patients and starting to hear from the patients what in their darkest most painful moments was inspiring them. And there was in every single patient, no matter how bleak and how dark a will to connect to the higher power, the higher source. I’ll give you an example. I had a patient who was a devout Catholic woman and was profoundly psychiatrically ill, so much so she’d been in and out of the hospital probably 14 times.
It was going now to be what’s effectively the death sentence in mental health. You’re sent off, sent upstate, not going to see you again to a longstanding institution. And the day before she left, she pulled me aside and said, Dr. Miller, I need to talk to you. She walked me down the hall. So I thought, oh, we’ll talk here in the corner. No, no, not private enough. She walked me into the kitchen, still not private enough, whatever this patient’s suffering so deeply had to say was so private that she pulled me all the way into the pots and pan pantry, the pantry in the back of the kitchen and standing there in the pantry with a deeply pained bereaved patient on the inpatient unit. She leaned forward and said, Dr. Miller, will you pray with me? She knew I was Jewish, she was Catholic. She didn’t care whether my words matched the words of her heritage. She wanted to be in spiritual community. And so we prayed, and when we prayed, she said, you go first, Dr. Miller. And I said a prayer hoping that she be well as she go upstate, hoping that she feel the love of source for higher power, that she be guided. And then she said, no, I’ll pray. And she started to pray asking for protection as she goes upstate. And she ended her prayer with, and dear God, please protect Dr. Miller.
Okay, that defied every single thing I’d been taught about how you work with a patient. And it was precisely what in her most excruciating dead-ended, painful moment this patient wanted. And I decided I was going to listen to the patients. What I could hear was a soul and an unstoppable spirit in every patient and every one of us that is so much more than our past that has a telos, an arc and energy for our own spiritual path that is beyond anything anyone can do to us. No one can stop us. We are not the summation of our past. We are effectively the glorious arc of our soul’s code.
ELISE:
Yeah, so beautiful. And so after in your book, when other patients on the floor who some of whom you didn’t know were Jewish, were like, what are we doing for Yom Kippur? Right? And then you were like, I am not a rabbi, but I will lead this service. And you started to see things shift, right? Something started happening for these people who had previously been very stuck.
LISA:
Very stuck and only treated in a way that fed the ego, which was their very cage. The cage was being reinforced, not the spirit from within. Exactly. It was approaching the high holidays. This hospital served a very Jewish neighborhood and a fellow who struggled with a very explosive form of bipolar, raised his hand and said, what are we doing for the high holidays in our community meeting? And the well-intentioned unit chief said, there’s nothing planned. What? There’s nothing planned. How could nothing be planned? I’m sorry, the clergy are all away for the holidays. And he was so Bret and felt so cheated that there’d be no high holiday service that he had a huge explosion, marched out of the community meeting, and I looked over and there was Esther, a very depressed woman, hunched over shoulders rounded. And she said, profoundly dejected and sad that she’d been taken from, they’re hopeless.
So I approached the unit chief, I was a new intern, 27 years old, and I said, listen, I’m not a rabbi, but I do have my grandmother’s prayer book, and I’ve been to 27 years of Yom KIPP core services. Would you allow me to run one here? I’m a unit. They’re like, sure, if you want to come in on Yom Kippur, that’s your business. I show up on Yom Kippur. And there were a group of Jewish patients who ordinarily were deeply inward and wearing their gurneys, which I don’t know why is necessary on the psych ward that day, sat upright, proud, full of dignity, dressed up in beautiful clothes. They’d had people bring them beautiful clothes for our ceremony. And as we started then to move through the traditional Yom Kippur service, there was a rhythm established with the Jewish patients. And I looked over and realized that the person who was rhythmically tapping the table and holding us, holding the cadence of our collective prayer was actually the so-called chaotic bipolar man
When it came to holding spiritual communities, the flow and the oneness of our collective connection to God, who I call God. He was holding that He was effectively the rabbi. I was the young intern who showed up and held the space. He was effectively the rabbi after our prayers. I asked each person if they might share their experience of Yom Kippur here now. And the woman who was slumped and feeling very depressed said, Dr. Miller, I always knew on Yom Kippur, you could ask for forgiveness, but sitting here with all of you, I can feel that God will forgive us. You can be forgiven.
Three days past, I get a knock at my door and it’s the same woman, Dr. Miller, do you have a minute? I’m like, of course, come in. I just wanted to remind you that you could always be forgiven. There was an illumination that was not being found in psychotherapy. There was a brightness, a joy. It was the we plus. It was this bright illuminated, we and every patient presented in a way that was completely opposite to their symptoms. If they were depressed, they were illuminated. If they were chaotic, they were whole and rhythmic. The power of the soul was like the sunshine shining through the cage of their so-called ego limitations. The sunshine shining through the occlusion of their so-called illness. And I realized that mental health minus a spiritual core, made no sense, none at all. And that there needed to be the real illumination, the welcoming of spirit into the path of recovery and renewal had to be. Otherwise I thought it was actually iatrogenic harm. We were making patients worse.
ELISE:
Yeah, and it’s interesting too, because if you think about what you’re talking about, that soul or that higher self, the body is inherently self-healing, right? That’s the instinct is whether it’s homeostasis and maintaining balance in the systems. And even with psychotherapy, right? Theoretically, the self wants to self-heal. And yeah, it feels like so often the impetus is on keeping the self fragmented or isolating those parts of the story and then just hammering the wound over and over and over again.
LISA:
And to be beholden to the past is so limiting. I have to tell you, when I was a young person seeking psychotherapy, I fired probably half a dozen therapists because simply approaching the office gave me anxiety and depression. The model was so limiting and so damning. You’re stuck with your past that did not feel nourishing. And in fact, I think the best shift of the past 25 years in psychotherapy has been a shift from why did this happen to me? To how is this happening for me? How does the life force of which you speak, the spirit, the soul, guide me through these events so that I am made more, not less post-traumatic, spiritual growth, developmental depression that opens into a deeper existential knowing and awakening. Suffering is the gateway to transcendence.
ELISE:
Yeah. It’s so funny reading your book too, because similar to you, I think my first experience of seeking therapy was in New Haven, Connecticut, on the Yale campus, and I have seasonal affective disorder, which I had managed to keep at bay throughout my childhood because I was a skier. So I spent even short day winter, so much time outside being exposed to light. And it wasn’t until I went to the east coast that I really started to struggle. It took me a minute to figure that out and get my big SAD lamp, et cetera. But I was in the wrong relationship. And as an early twenties person, I was of course struggling with, what does this all mean? How am I going to find stability and structure in this world and still have a life of meaning, et cetera? And I just remember stumbling into some 27-year-old intern or whomever that was treating me, someone young, and she just partly it failed because I was like, I have no good valid reason for feeling so unhappy and subsisting on ice cream and candy, and I don’t know. Now you would be like, go see a functional medicine doctor because maybe you’re just not nourishing yourself. But she gave me some Wellbutrin, which I vaguely think I took, but I didn’t really ever go down that path. But mostly I just felt worse. I was like, I have no, there is no causation. There’s no clear causation, and how dare I feel like shit? I have no reason to feel bad. How old were you?
LISA:
19, 19, 20, 19, 20.
ELISE:
Probably 19 or 20. Yeah.
LISA:
So we now know that that is a emergence. It’s an existential, hardwired, spiritual emergence that every one of us now faces, every one of us as we cross from late adolescence to emerging adulthood. It is developmental depression. It is not psychopathology. Now we know that now we have the science, but just like you, when I was a sophomore at Yale, I went to the counseling center and I got more depressed, felt profoundly misunderstood, and was asked questions about the childhood that must have somehow derailed me. So what science now says is that when we hit late adolescence, emerging adulthood, there is a hardwired surge. What is my ultimate meaning and purpose? How will I walk the walk of this purpose in a way that’s sound and measured and sustainable? I’ve always felt God existed or wondered, and now I’m existentially really grappling the biggest questions in life, which are the most important. In fact set. The foundation for the rest of our lives are asked by the struggling, developmentally depressed 19-year-old,
ELISE:
Amazing.
LISA:
For the longest time the field didn’t know that, but now we do. And here’s how we know it. There is in every human being an innate spiritual capacity. We look through twin studies to determine the extent to which any human capacity, height, weight, propensity for any condition temperament IQ is inborn versus environmentally formed. Spirituality is innate. It is one third innate, two thirds cultivated. But there are, in our lives, there are three bridges where there’s rapid inborn acceleration of our capacity. And the first time is laid adolescents emerging adulthood. When we are 19 and sophomores at Yale. What is the purpose? What is the meaning? Okay, I’ll take philosophy. Wait a minute. Nietzsche says there’s no meaning. Oh, wait a minute. That’s really scary. The existentialists say there’s no point meanings only created imputed meanings phony. That’s depressing if you’re really having skin in the game and doing this profound developmental work.
But the good news, the great news is that we are hardwired that this existential search open into an awakening the brain of people who have a strong spiritual connection. The brain of people with a strong spiritual connection shows thick cortex across the regions of the awakened brain. Those people who by say 26, the other side of emerging adulthood say, spirituality is important to me. They have a thick cortex across the regions of the awakened brain are two and a half times more likely to have gotten gotten there over the decade of late adolescents and emerging adulthood, 16 to 26 through struggle, through despair, through a major depression. In other words, depression is normative in early adulthood, but it’s not to simply be drugged away. I’ve nothing against drugs, but drugs alone won’t do it. It is an invitation to opening to the deeper nature of life. It’s a sharpening of our natural capacity to perceive the nuanced guidance, the love written into the universe, the sense of oneness. We are born to see the deeper nature of life, but we must cultivate it. And the first major invitation is at 19.
ELISE:
That’s so beautiful. I love that idea that it is some sort of the prophylactic, it’s a protection or a building, a mechanism for, yeah, understanding the world through a different lens.
LISA:
It’s developmental imperative. It’s the emergence of adulthood to awaken to the deeper nature of life. This spiritual capacity as it boots up can feel like a half empty glass of spirituality, full of dread, full of anxiety, full of un ou. That’s an invitation we can say to the young adult that dread, that ou, that existential nagging, that boogeyman behind your back. That actually is a sign that you’re on the cusp of spiritual awakening, of spiritual growth. Gently say yes to that notice. Is the universe guiding you? Notice? Do you feel a love in your heart? Do you feel a sense of unity? Is there synchronicity? Invite the young adult as a scientist to notice if the universe actually has inherent meaning, a cohesion, a guidance, the love. Do you know the red door yellow door practice?
ELISE:
No.
LISA:
Do you want to do it?
ELISE:
Sure. Let’s do it.
LISA:
Okay, let’s do it. Okay. I invite you to locate a time, take a couple breaths to settle in. I invite you to locate a moment where you wanted something so badly, A plus B plus C. You did your homework, you researched it tactically, strategized that red door was yours. It could have been that job, that school for you or your kid. It could have been that internship, him or her or them to say, yes, you go for your red door, A plus B plus C, but if it’s stuck, you can’t believe it’s stuck because you’ve done everything right. A plus B plus C. You might be angry, shocked, even depressed. You did not get what you wanted, so you have no choice. You pivot, you pivot 60, 140 degrees. And over there, over there is a wide open yellow door, A splendid yellow door. You might’ve said yellow doors don’t exist.
What’s a yellow door? On the other side of the yellow door is a job where you see a skill, a capacity you didn’t even know you had is someone who adores you and makes you feel worthy. And alive is a community where you finally feel that you belong. That yellow door that has so much to do with who you are and where you are today. That splendid yellow door with a new landscape that was not what you had wanted. It was better and better for you. And as you sit back now, stuck red door, hairpin turn wide open, yellow door, was there anyone at that hairpin turn counselor, a grandparent, a friend who told you a story for the first time, gave you information, someone you met for two minutes at a coffee shop, a trail angel pointing a trail, angel pointing you to the wide open yellow door.
How are the most important parts of our lives found? Is it narrowly through research and radical control? We have to do our part, but are we less makers of our past and more discoverers of our journey? Where in your road of life is the great force? Your higher power God is the force in the open yellow door and the stuck red door is the source of life in the trail angel and your ability to be an open system awakened to the deeper nature of life in dialogue with the deeper force in life. Have you been on a spiritual path all along?
ELISE:
That’s beautiful. Yeah, I have a very clear red door, yellow door in my life that, and it’s funny, the trail angel, I feel like the trail angel was my own momentum because this all happened at a moment, which I would’ve, having gone on to work with Phil Stutz, I would’ve understood as starting to work with the universe and putting myself in motion in a way that I had been somewhat passive previously. I’ll be found, I’ll be seen, I’ll be picked. I just sit here. I’m here. And that’s my offering. And no, my red door was, I was an editor, a young editor at Conde Nast, which is at the time was very esteemed and highly sought after job. I had, I would call her an abusive coworker who was tormenting me, and I needed to move my butt. And it took me a minute to realize nobody’s going to save me here.
This is a known thing that’s happening. No one’s going to alleviate this for me. I need to take care of myself and move my butt and get myself in motion. And there was a job at New York Magazine for strategists for those who are familiar with New York Mag and at the time, another incredibly venerable institution. And I did my ideas memo, and I went in for my interviews and I nailed it. And I, not only did I not get the job, but they picked someone who I knew I would’ve been a better hire. And they used my ideas memo, which really fucking pissed me off. And I just felt hopeless at the time. I’d been trying to get myself out of this situation. I was like, oh, here’s this trap door. This is my avenue to something more respected, even, et cetera. And I didn’t get it.
I was shocked. I had not, at that point in my career, experienced a lot of rejection, if I’m being honest. And my friend who worked with me at Lucky had gone to Timeout New York, which is a much less venerable but longstanding magazine at the time, this scrappy listings based magazine. And she emailed me and was like, there’s a job coming up here that I really think you should take. And I had immediately like a, Ooh, no, I, that’s a step down. And then the editor in chief, Brian Farnam called me and he was so fun and charming. I just had an energetic yes. And I took the job, which was to develop this sort of 14 page in Magazine Magazine and went to timeout in New York. And it was so, such an important experience for me. One, I got myself out of a predicament. Two, I learned that instead of editing four pages a month, I could actually do 14 pages a week.
It was opening a creative spigot in which I was like, oh, this is when I thrive, is actually in creating a tremendous amount of really high quality work. It expanded my remit dramatically from fashion and shopping into all lifestyle. And I would say probably the biggest lesson was to feel my own momentum and my own creative capacity. And at that point, I’ve mentioned Trap Door, but it was a trap door from prestige. Everyone who had been all the publicists who were on me and kissing my butt all the time for coverage and sending me things, lost my number saved for one or two who became friends. But there was a disconnecting at that time in my life at 25 or 26 from a transactional level of engagement or relationship with the world where I was like, oh, it was such an important knowing for me at that stage of my life to be like, oh, I understand that inherent transaction that’s often dressed up as friendliness that’s happening here.
And I didn’t experience it as a rejection or I didn’t have any anger about everyone forgetting that I existed. I just realized, oh, platform relevance is a real thing, and these people don’t see me as relevant or powerful, and therefore they don’t have any need for me. So I carried that knowing with me. It’s been one of the most sole protective forces, I think, in a career in media to this day where I just don’t get confused anymore. And a lot of my friends who came up with me have experienced heartbreak at different times because they attach their identity to their relevance culturally. And that was, for me, I feel like a sole intervention, little bit of a vaccine against encountering that and getting hooked on that and getting really attached to it because I’ve had different forms of cultural power at different points in my career, the ability to really help people out and understanding that mechanism from that point of view when I was young, was the best yellow door ever to go through. That was a long answer, but yes, I mean, I needed that journey. Yeah,
LISA:
That is a big double door. That’s a double yellow door. Yes. And from here, it sounds creatively liberating.
ELISE:
Yeah, no, for sure. You mentioned there are three times in our lives when we have these developmental,
LISA:
Yes.
ELISE:
What are the other two?
LISA:
So just as in emerging adulthood, there’s extraordinary struggle and we can’t get around it. In fact, we’ve interviewed hundreds of young adults who say, if I don’t allow myself to ask these existential questions, I get even more depressed. It’s an imperative, hardwired body, mind, and soul, the developmental depression that leads to an awakening, the suffering that opens to transcendence in bridge number one, emerging adulthood. This comes back bridge number two in midlife. So late forties, fifties, and the shift in the expanded capacity for deeper spiritual awareness, the hardwired ability to see even more deeply into life, to love and embrace even more selflessly comes forward. And yet as this capacity boots up in midlife, it can feel again like a half empty glass of spirituality. This time. The narrative shifts from what is my ultimate meaning? What is the deep true purpose of my life? Is there any divinity written into life to now at midlife? Am I living my deep, authentic purpose? Am I really walking the walk of my spiritual call? What is the distance between the soul I know I am and who I want to be and how I’m actually landing in other people’s lives? I call that the blind spot
Midlife is mistaken as somehow a moment of midlife crisis, right? It’s resolved through. I don’t feel like enough. I don’t have a big enough job. I don’t at midlife have enough money. Oh, you know what? It’s not me. It’s my spouse. My spouse isn’t enough. But the not enough feeling is a deep internal feeling that has to do with yesterday’s way of being in the world is now not enough. We are being called to expand spiritually and to live with a hardcore lead strike heel that is on spiritual ground. So you like Yung Yung talked about this, the bridge at the second half of life through the lens of science, we see that the more spiritual we are going into midlife, the harder the hit of developmental depression as we enter the second half of life, the more sensitive, the more open, the more spiritually open we are, the more the struggle of midlife hits us. Am I really fulfilling my spiritual path? How am I truly walking the walk affecting my kids, my partner, those with whom I work? Am I really living a spiritual life? What’s my spiritual footprint? We can’t get around it. And when it gets displaced and misplaced onto adultery, Ferraris, volatility and decision making, we can upset the apple cart, but still haven’t answered the question of the soul, which is also the question of the brain, body, mind, and soul. How will I emerge? How will I ascend to my station in the second half of life spiritually?
So often I’ve found at midlife that our greatest fear of the ego, it’s acted out live action in front of us in a consciousness based reality where there’s no difference between internal and external. The thing I fear is the thing at midlife that the universe gives me as a gift to confront. So if I fear not being loved, it’s adultery. If I fear not having security, we lose our money. If I fear not being enoughness, there’s some sort of not enoughness in the currency of my fears laid out before me. That’s the opportunity of our lifetime. Once again, the suffering is an opening. The depression is an opening to transcendence to get past it, and there’s a deeper connection to who we really are. So not who am I as a professor, writer, business person, engineer, who am I as a soul on earth? And what’s my mark can’t get around it. The third bridge is the ascension to elderhood. What is my living legacy? And I don’t mean where’s my name on a building or what book did I write? I mean, what is my living legacy on earth? How have I really impacted people?
So really the bottom line was is our life. Our life is a spiritual journey. And I don’t mean that because it’s sort of a nice thought or it was in my tradition or someone else’s tradition. So it’s told, it’s simply the case through the lens of science, that with every developmental passage, there’s an augmenting of spiritual capacity that beckons us as in kicked hard, beckons us to look more deeply into life and expand our lens of spiritual awareness.
ELISE:
That
LISA:
Means more loving and more in dialogue with the source of life.
ELISE:
It’s so beautiful. We’ve sort of danced around it, but for all the people who are, if there are any materialists listening to pulling the thread right now, can we talk really quickly about the science and will you just take people quickly through the research and how incredibly protective having this awakened brain or being open to this idea that there is more is in terms of depression and anxiety?
LISA:
Yes. So there’s two sets of science, both of which are very relevant. The first is a human science, clinical science that shows us that we, one, are innately spiritual beings. We know this through twin studies. Two, there are circuits in the brain, universal circuits in every single one of us through which we experience a direct transcendent connection to the deeper nature of life. And that whether I am spiritual and not religious, atheist, agnostic, devoutly, Hindu, Catholic, Jewish, whatever, the same neuro correlates run in the MRI when there’s a deep transcendent connection. And the third piece of science is that when we strengthen this natural capacity, there is nothing as protective against the epidemic that we’re facing right now. A huge epidemic of the diseases of despair, addiction, depression, suicide, a strong personal spiritual life. I turn to my higher power for guidance, daily spiritual awareness.
I think nature has a divine spirit. I feel unity with all being daily spiritual awareness versus I don’t really know what you’re talking about. I don’t think about it is associated with an 80% decreased likelihood of addiction. When we go through the window of risk, which is laid. A adolescents emerging adulthood is associated with a 75% protected benefit against major depression. Everyone has developmental depression, college counselors, chief of chaplains, and head of behavioral health of the army. Everyone says all the young people, two thirds of what we look at is developmental depression, but the deep downward spiral into a major depression is 75% less likely when we cultivate our spiritual awareness, again, whether I’m Hindu, Catholic, spiritual, but not religious, nature is my cathedral. So 80% protective against addiction, 75% protective against depression, major depression. And that goes up to 90% protective if we are otherwise at high risk based on risk factors like living in a hailstorm of stress or family genetic risk.
And then the third target is that the number one cause of death, it’s heartbreak in high school right now, is suicide. Your child in high school is more likely to die of suicide than a car accident. Well, it turns out in a meta-analysis when there’s a strong spiritual life that’s shared. So not only do I feel connected to the universe or God, I see God in you, my sister. I see God in you this moment here. Synchronicity nature. We are 82% protective against completed suicide. Nothing else is a quarter as protective. There’s nothing else out there that’s more than 20, 25% preventive. We’re 82% protected against the number one killer of high school students. When spiritual life is shared, it can be shared in the minion, the sangha, the fellowship. It can be shared in a family, a classroom, a community service group. But when we feel connected to our higher power and feel that love and guidance towards one another, both are forms of relational spirituality. The hub of the wheel of thriving in youth is relational spirituality. We are protected against the diseases of despair and the epidemic of suicide. We have the antidote. It’s within us. It’s the cultivation of our natural spiritual core.
ELISE:
Thank you. Yeah. I thought the part at the end when you were talking about wealthy students and how often there’s less spirituality and more depression in part because of this sort of the achieving brain versus the awakened brain that hit kids talking about climbing into their mom’s car and hearing, how did you do on the math test versus how are you feeling? Or the dad who only goes to the soccer games but doesn’t make it home in time for family dinner. That is heartbreaking.
LISA:
You’re as good as your performance. You’re as good as you’re singing for your supper, right? And the child infers that. I get the light in your eye, mom. I get the pat on the back and the what looks like love Dad, when I did score a goal or when today was a hat trick, right?
That’s not love. That’s performance. That’s not love. That’s a transaction. To your point, a transactional relationship. How do we help our kids? It turns out that it is really we who walk the walk and talk the walk as parents, and we can do it in our families and communities, and we can do it by being part of communities of service and faith communities, the Sangha, the Mingan, the youth group, the Habitat for Humanity, and most of all, in walking the walk authentically and talking the walk of our own spiritual life, I was feeling really grumpy and irritated today. And I’m sorry, will you take a pause and meditate with me or pray because I know today is actually a gift. We don’t have infinite number of days, and I’m squandering it. I’d like to sanctify, renew today, or I share in my book the day I was at the coffee shop and I was so tired, I slipped and broke my elbow and was, I hesitate to say perhaps rude to the barista.
And this happened in front of my three young kids at the time. So halfway home, I said, you know what, guys? We have to turn around and go back. And I brought all three kids at that point, one, two, and three years old, out of the car seats back into the coffee shop, lined them up in front of me and apologized to the barista. Why? Well, one, the guy deserved an apology, but two, they saw that we could fix things, that we could heal, things that we can be in error and renew our relationships back in the SUV back in the three car seats, I crane around and say, okay, guys, you know what? I’m so glad we could apologize to that young guy because it wasn’t his fault. Mommy was grumpy and I hurt my elbow, but will you join me Now in our family, that’s a prayer.
It could be a meditation, an intention. I would like to ask for forgiveness and renewal. And then I said, the prayer, the way I do it, which is, dear God, please forgive me for being unkind to your child. Please renew my heart. May I feel your love and I serve you in love. So what did my three kids see? They saw that problems need to be fixed twice over. They need to be fixed relationally like at Yum Kippur to one another. And only then can we hand it over to our higher power and ask that it be fixed spiritually. Life throws huge left turns. There is betrayal and rupture, and all these things happen when we have a spiritual response ready. It’s not that the bad things won’t happen, it’s that we don’t dive into depression and despair and feel gypped. We say, oh, what is a spiritual response to this moment?
ELISE:
Thanks for sticking with us for an extra long episode. But her work is so important, and I feel a little silly that I hadn’t read The Awakened Brain yet. This is a part that I think is super relevant when she gets into the science around the power of the awakened brain. She writes, when we engage our awakened awareness, we make use of different parts of our brain, and we literally see more integrating information from multiple sources of perception. Instead of seeing ourselves as independent makers of our path, we perceive ourselves as seekers of our path. We look across a vast landscape and ask, what is life showing me now? This awakened awareness allows us to perceive more choices and opportunities available to us, feel more connected with others, understand the relationships between events in our lives, be more open to creative leaps and insights and feel more in tune with our life’s purpose and meaning.
She goes on to add that in depression, parts of the brain are dysregulated and disconnected. They aren’t functionally, optimally or working together. But in Quest, the brain is coherent and connected. Its regions and networks in harmony. Essentially, the questing brain integrates our achieving and awakened awareness. So I guess the question too is how do we keep that online in ourselves? My guess is if you like this podcast, you’re probably pretty in tune with your awakened brain. And if you’re a parent as I am, I think this is a little bit of fuel for the fire of connecting my kids. Not in a forceful way, but in a way to some of these deeper meaning based questions around why do you think this is happening to you? Or why do you think that that person is acting in that way towards you? Or what can you learn?
Or as she gave in that last example, modeling things like asking for forgiveness, or not even asking for forgiveness, but doing an apology, a full throated apology and making repair. And part of that in the Jewish tradition is that you apologize. You take full accountability for then you apologize with no expectation that it’s received, but you offer it anyway, and then you make an offer of repair. And I think modeling that for our children and modeling the sacredness of every single person is maybe the least we can do. We need more of that on our planet for sure. So thanks for hanging with us, and I will see you next time. If you got something out of today’s episode, I would so appreciate your help spreading the word. Please rate and review the episode, follow pulling the thread on your preferred podcast platform, and share this episode with a friend who would also enjoy it. That’s how we grow this thing. It’s so helpful. Thank you.