What if the reason so many of us are struggling right now isn’t a lack of success… but a lack of connection to something deeper?
On today’s episode, Dr. Lisa Miller — clinical psychologist, professor at Columbia University, and author of The Awakened Brain — joins Mike for her first conversation on Finding Mastery. Lisa’s journey began at 26, on an inpatient psychiatric unit, where she watched the best available treatments fall short for people in their darkest moments. When the unit had no clergy for the holiest day of the year, she showed up with her grandmother’s prayer book and led a Yom Kippur service in the back hall… and watched patients who had been struggling for months sit up, brighten, and reconnect to something healing. That moment set her on a 30-year scientific quest to understand what she’d witnessed.
In this conversation, Lisa shares what that quest revealed. What she has found is that spirituality, through the lens of science, is not a belief… it’s an inborn capacity for perception, one-third innate and two-thirds shaped by how we choose to live. A strong personal spirituality turns out to be one of the strongest protective factors for mental health known to the clinical sciences, and a sustained spiritual life literally strengthens the structure of the brain.
A big part of this conversation is about the two forms of awareness we all carry: the achieving mind that gets things done, and the awakened mind that asks what life is showing us now. Mike also opens up about his own pendulum swing between a spiritual path and an achievement path… and why he’s now working to find a more integrated middle ground between the two.
In this conversation, we explore:
- Why spirituality is an inborn capacity, not a belief
- The research finding that reframes how we think about mental health
- The difference between the achieving brain and the awakened brain
- The three neural circuits behind feeling loved, guided, and never alone
- How parents can support a child’s natural spiritual awareness
- How intuition, gut instinct, and receptive knowing shape meaningful decisions
- How to heal from spiritual injury and reconnect to the flame
If you’ve ever felt successful on paper but disconnected in your life, this conversation offers a great place to begin reconnecting.
“A strong, high personal spirituality with or without religion turned out to be 80% protective against addiction. We now know 82% protective against completed suicide.” — Dr. Lisa Miller
“Spirituality is not a belief. It is an inborn capacity for perception to be able to feel and know the presence of the deeper nature of life.” — Dr. Lisa Miller
“Three decades of science tells me the most important thing I can do as a parent is to support my children’s natural spiritual awareness.” — Dr. Lisa Miller
“…we come to see the brain not as a factory that makes consciousness, but as an antenna that receives consciousness.” — Dr. Lisa Miller
Resources + Links
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