Martha Beck:
Can I just introduce y’all? I mean, I think a lot of you already know. If you’ve heard me talk about her a million times, if you’ve read what I’ve written about her, Dr. Lisa Miller is one of the gutsiest people I have ever encountered in any way, shape, or form. Also, one of the smartest, deeply truthful, deeply integrous people. I know you went to Yale, I went to Harvard. We could argue about what was our first choice later, but I know what it’s like in a social science department in an Ivy League university. And I know what it was like to have, because my son with Down syndrome was born while I was getting my doctorate and I was having spiritual and even psychic experiences, I know what it’s like to be in that environment and be having a spiritual awakening and the crushing cynicism and just real negativity that you can encounter. You started finding spiritual data in your clinical work, in beautiful statistical work on large data sets. And by God, right in the heart of the Ivy League, you just said it and you stood by it, and I want to hear what that was like for you.

Lisa Miller:
You’re so kind, Martha. You’re so generous and beautiful of spirit. I’ll tell you, I think that we as women, of all times but certainly this season of life now as women, have an extraordinary power and gift in spiritual awareness. I think it is not just for the nice side of things or icing on the cake, but the spiritual awareness is the heart and the hub of who we are. And when women really feel free to express themselves, not whisper it by the water cooler, but say it, most women make the most important decisions of our lives from a deep seat of spiritual awareness. I mean, we could even, you know—

Martha Beck:
That’s so interesting. Way back when I did my PhD dissertation, I was doing it on women’s roles. I found all these miserable women who were trying to combine career and family, whatever, and they were just sort of in a terrible position. And my advisor said, “You have to go find the solution.” And I said, “There is no solution. The society gives them no solution.” So I went back to my data, and in the parts of my interviews that I hadn’t recorded, those were when I would turn off the camera, and the women would lean forward and say, “Let me tell you what really happened.” And they were having mystical experiences, right, left, and center. And that was the only way out for them. And this is what I love about your work because you just methodically— science, your science is so rock solid, nobody can shake it. And you just build this case for spirituality being at the center of our consciousness based on the science. So yes, I do think that being female has an additional effect, but we’re all spiritual beings.

Lisa Miller:
We’re all spiritual.

Martha Beck:
And you found that through, I don’t know which story I want you to tell most. Certainly the story of your clinical work with people, but also the story of your family, your children, and how that—you write so beautifully. Let me calm myself. The book is The Awakened Brain. The author is Dr. Lisa Miller. Run, don’t walk, to buy this book. It is a beautiful, beautiful, logical, scientific case for the idea that we are spiritual beings in our essence and that we’d be happier based on accepting that. So I feel like I’m proper.

Lisa Miller:
You’re wonderful. You’re wonderful. And it’s true. There is now a very rigorous peer-reviewed body of science. So as you know, when something’s peer reviewed, the article goes without the author’s name, blind, to two scientists who critique it, and then it goes back again. And in this way, science tries to focus on the heart, the meat and potatoes, of what’s really being ascertained. And we have, my lab has published 200 peer-reviewed articles on spirituality in the human life course. And what we see is just as you experienced when you interviewed many women, which is women and men, all people are naturally spiritual beings. So we are born, from day one, with an innate seat of spiritual awareness. There are neurocorrelates in the brain that perceive, not just believe, but see into life.

Martha Beck:
Could I just stop you for a tiny moment there? Because that rocked me when I read it in your book. “Spiritual experiences are not beliefs. They are perceptions.” And you also say that imagination is perception. And that shift, like think about it, y’all out there in the world, that shift from “I am making this happen in my brain” to “I am perceiving something real” is earth-shaking when you really take it in. Sorry, go on.

Lisa Miller:
Yes, yes. No, you’re so wise. And that’s the heart of it. Who we really are are born, innate, able to connect with Source who I call God, the spirit or force through life, use whatever word speaks to your heart, but who I call God. And every one of us is built to be able to be in a deep, transcendent relationship, which as you say is not a belief. It’s the ability to feel and know in the deepest inner wisdom to feel that in moments of distress, we don’t fall through in the vents. Somehow we’re caught. That I don’t need to know my next move because if I hand it over, stuck and confused, what will come is guidance, an image, a directive, something in my prayer life, a synchronicity. We are built to live in the dialogue every single day.

Martha Beck:
Yes, the dialogue with the deeper nature of life. I love that as well. You say it’s not that there’s some external force that can be, that is loving us and it’s affecting us, the way a lot of people feel sort of helpless in the face of the gods or whatever, if they do have any belief. But for you, it’s an active, co-creative conversation. I don’t want to put words on it that aren’t yours, but it’s the consciousness that is me in relationship to the consciousness that is all things. And we are having a conversation. This part of consciousness and the rest of the universe are making life the way I’m seeing it. How do you bring that in because you found it in your data brilliantly. And I know also from the stories in the book that you have developed methods. I know you’ve helped clients with it. What methodologies work best for you? I’m a real how-to person.

Lisa Miller:
I love how-to. I think what you said sums it up beautifully. And my view is like rays from the sun, we are all emanations of one source—consciousness. And we rays of consciousness are in dialogue with consciousness. It’s a living conversation. And conversation is the perfect word. And often the language is symbolic. A synchronicity or a dream that wakes us up or some deep, deep, deep imagination, as you say so wisely is not necessarily fabricated or constructed. The 20th century vision of the brain was that we somehow like a factory, create, produce thoughts. But the brain is what’s real because it’s material. It was radical materialism. But now we finally are breaking into an era where the brain is viewed much more like an antenna or conduit to consciousness so that we can then tap into the oneness, the universal field. Every one of us, every single one of us. Imagination then moves from concocted, like a rambling story of a child, “And then I went up the mountain and…” to an imagination not that constructs but that detects. And I know, Martha, you’ve spoken so beautifully recently on the imagination process, the notion that we are conduits for sacred consciousness, whether it’s the muse or an idea, but Divine presence reaches into conversation with us.

Martha Beck:
Wow. So was there a time—so for me, it was my pregnancy with my son—was there a time when you went from thinking, were you ever a materialist, or did you have this spirituality inherent in you? Were you aware of it always?

Lisa Miller:
So Martha, we’re all born spiritual children. And this was true for me as well. Every child, unless socialized out of it— science says this—is born perceiving continuity of consciousness or spirit after death unless told it isn’t real. And every child is born—science shows this too—believing, knowing, perceiving that we can know without being told we can be inspired. What I taught my children was direct knowing.

Martha Beck:
Oh, I love that phrase. Say more about that.

Lisa Miller:
Well, at school kids are told, “If you’re going to make that claim, point to the page. Where does it say that on the page? Back that up with references of other people’s work.” Historical backup. But historical knowing is one form of knowing. It’s helpful, it’s valuable. The stories of my family I love to hear, and I love to hear people’s stories. But when we have a mystical experience or a synchronicity or deep knowing in our prayer or meditation life, that beckons information that has yet to unfold before us. So if we were to ask people, “Hey, what was the most important decision of your life? Did you make that decision?” We could even do it. Should we invite people to think about the most—Beautiful. Okay, wonderful. So I invite you to take two breaths, just clear out your inner space if you’d like.

I invite you to think of the most important decision or one of the very, very most important decisions you’ve ever made in your life. It may have been whether to carry a child, whether to take a job or move, whether to partner. There was an enormously important decision. How, bottom line, did you know what course to take? Was it door number one, adding up the pros and cons, weighing out the research? Sure. I’m sure you did your background work. Or did you make the final choice, where the rubber hits the road, out of intuition, out of gut instinct, out of following a synchronicity or just simply deep knowing a dream? Was there something in your prayer life? In other words, was it an awakened—did you have an awakened form of knowing the true course? 90% of women say it was door number two: an awakened experience.

Martha Beck:
So interesting because we are not taught that. We are taught to make decisions based on everything else. What you’re saying is literally what we were taught to dismiss and even scorn.

Lisa Miller:
And Martha, we’re so good at this. We’re good at this. So women and men, everyone is spiritual, but women are 50% more spiritual. We’re so good at this. We are. And what the data shows is we’re the spiritual keepers for our families. That the torch is actually passed through the mother to both sons and daughters. And that for women, because we are so good at this, it is even more important that we honor as valid and real knowing our spiritual awareness. If we don’t, we are far more likely to get depressed than men.

Martha Beck:
Wow.

Lisa Miller:
So a man can pass on the spiritual and probably be okay-ish. We absolutely have no choice. Women are so profoundly spiritual, meaning it is the seat, the way we view the whole world, our lens of perception. And if we disconnect from the deepest level of life, if we disavow our deep knowing, we are lost.

Martha Beck:
Amazing. You talk about the role of suffering and how those who are depressed have a bigger protective effect if they’re spiritual even than those who weren’t depressed to begin with. People who go through depression and become spiritual are less likely to become depressed again by 90%, some insane statistic in there. And then you say it’s as if the depression, the initial depression was an invitation to the sacred, was an invitation to awakening, which made me think of Kierkegaard’s statement, “The poet comes early to the abyss.” And maybe all women have that capacity, too. But tell us a little bit, if you don’t mind being personal, about the abyss for you. I know you had the adolescent depression, but then you had this really difficult road trying to conceive and going through this infertility, which is just a God-awful experience. It is, like I’ve talked to women who’ve been through infertility treatments who are as traumatized as army veterans who’ve been in combat. It’s bad. Sorry. I’ll let you say it. I’d love you to talk about your experience of suffering and how it sort of led you to go deeper into this reality of spiritual presence that you were finding in your research.

Lisa Miller:
Martha, it is. Infertility is like attending a funeral every month that a baby’s not conceived. It is that devastating. Your little tiny little embryo of a baby is gone and all the hopes and dreams. So it is profoundly depressing. It was depressing for me. It was very depressing for my partner. So after many years of this, there was no reason biologically that could be identified as a couple. We seemed capable of conceiving. I attacked it like a researcher at first. So I got online and I found the infertility clinics with the highest rates of conception, and that didn’t work. And I went online and I found after many iterations, the team in Philly, the team in Boston, I found the team, the team, until I found the team that invented in vitro.

Martha Beck:
Wow.

Lisa Miller:
And yet all the while, I knew in my heart that I was in the wrong place for us for our journey. I just knew I was in the wrong office. Deep inner wisdom, inner knowing that again, we all have it, but women must count on it. We absolutely count on that. So I knew I wasn’t in the right place, but what to do? I just so wanted to be a parent, wanted to be a mom. I started noticing synchronicities, extraordinary synchronicities. The greatest shaman in my life has been my mother. She called and said, “I just want you to know our neighbors adopted the most adorable little boy, Joseph Paul. He’s from Russia. I’m just letting you know.” A little note. And a fellow, I had just gotten off a very depressing IVF that failed. Late to work because I was so depressed, taking the bus up Broadway to Columbia. And this fellow, who is a quite remarkable unusual fellow, got on the bus and he walked all the way down this empty bus to sit right near me, which when you’re depressed, I wasn’t very cheery. And he leans over and he says, “Lady, you look like just that type of awfully nice lady that would go all around the world adopting kids.”

Martha Beck:
Oh my goodness.

Lisa Miller:
Right. And then Martha, at the next stop, he got off. So who rides the bus one stop? O

Martha Beck:
Oh my gosh.

Lisa Miller:
I came to see what I now call Trail Angels. Trail Angels.

Martha Beck:
I love that phrase. It’s from what, the Appalachian Trail?

Lisa Miller:
Exactly. Exactly. That we can’t do it alone. We can’t bring enough food and water to hike for three months alone on the Appalachian Trail.

Martha Beck:
They’re hiking out there and these people called Trail Angels will bring food, water, shelter, and all these things. And Lisa talks in her book about the Trail Angels, this man on the bus being one. It reminds me of how I survived my first year at Harvard, which was the worst year of my life. I was 17 and I was very depressed, very isolated, but I walked into this art class, and I knew somehow this was going to save me. I just knew. And I went that day and I was sitting at a bus stop by Harvard Square and I was drawing in a sketchbook and a woman came and sat down by me and she looked at me and at the drawing and she said, “There’s an art class you should be taking.” And I turned to her and said, “I know, I’m already in it.” And she said, “Good.” And then she got up and left the bus stop. She didn’t catch a bus. Yeah. And Will Ryman, the teacher of that class, became my mentor. That’s why I lived through that year because of him. And he’s always been a Trail Angel in my life. And that woman just came, sat down, said it, and left. Amazing. So tell us how it worked out with the baby.

Lisa Miller:
Well, so Martha, I’m still with that woman. I mean, I think that’s extraordinary. I’ve often thought about Trail Angels because it seems to me that all of us, each and every one is beckoned at a moment to be a Trail Angel. You know the feeling when you see someone you may have never met before, something is laid upon your heart and you think, “Just say it.” You don’t know why, you don’t know them. Have you had that experience?

Martha Beck:
Oh, so often. And I’ll say things and people will come to me later. A woman came and told me that I had said to her when I met her, “When I see you again, you will be pregnant.” And I do not remember saying that, Lisa, I believe her. Why would she lie? And she was, I mean it worked out, but sometimes to the point where I don’t even hear what I’m saying. It’s that—I don’t know if I’m possessed or something—but it’s that strong. And you’ve had that too, huh?

Lisa Miller:
A positive, I think of us as a vessel or a conduit, or to use the 21st century view of the brain, an antenna. And when we listen, we listen to the landing pad, there’s a knowing, and I really can’t emphasize enough how much women are great at this, but we need to authorize ourselves. We absolutely need to be this type of— Oh, I mean, there’s four things that are available to all of us. The first, because you like practical actions, one: When something is laid upon your heart, direct knowing, like say something, you might be a Trail Angel, or synchronicity, go here, take that as real information. Because science says as much as your profound inner wisdom is sufficient, you don’t need science, science says that the brain is a conduit. You are receiving information. Two: Honor and then reflect, discern, what might that mean? Why is it that I was just thinking about my son and now I just got to hear about Martha’s child? Why is that confluence now? And then: Act. There’s no—synchronicity is not a spectator sport, right?

Martha Beck:
Oh, I love that.

Lisa Miller:
It’s an invitation to be in collaboration with the universe, the conversation, the divine conversation. Synchronicity allows you to enter and collaborate in the miracle.

Martha Beck:
Wow. Yeah. I think that was the biggest shift for me reading your book, is that it made my participation and it feels so urgent. First, there’s the materialism that says none of this is real at all. Then there’s sort of the religious position that I was raised with where we just are supposed to be obedient infants and God’s forces act upon us. But there’s no sense of us reaching out a hand to God and saying, “Hey, I’m in this with you. Let’s do it.” But that’s what your book did for me. It showed me that I need to be actively engaged in developing my spirituality and in the conversation between my spirit and the spirits of everything around me and the spirit of the universe writ large. And there are different modalities that people use: meditation, prayer, chanting. Are there any things that you’ve done that you personally have found help deepen that connection and make it more vivid so that you can see it more and more easily?

Lisa Miller:
Yes. Would you like to share a practice? May we do a practice?

Martha Beck:
Yes, please.

Lisa Miller:
Okay. Good. Lovely. Okay. I’m going to make an invitation for four breaths and then share a 90-second practice, if you wish, with our eyes closed.

Martha Beck:
Oh yeah.

Lisa Miller:
I invite you in your inner chamber. Here in your inner chamber to set before you a table. This is your table. And to your table, you may invite anyone, living or deceased, who truly has your best interest in mind. Anyone, living or deceased, who truly has your best interest in mind. And with them all sitting there, ask them if they love you. And now you may invite your Higher Self, the part of you that is so much more than anything you may have done or not done, anything you may have or not have, your true, true, eternal Higher Self, and ask you if you love you. And now finally, you may invite your higher power, whatever word is yours, however you know your higher power, and ask if they love you. And now, with all of these people sitting here right now, what do they need to tell you now? What do they need to share? What do you need to know right now? When you’re ready, I invite you back.

Martha Beck:
I love that the images that came in were so vivid. I mean, you are a medicine woman.

Lisa Miller:
Were you surprised by anyone who showed at your table?

Martha Beck:
I was. I was surprised by all of it. I was surprised immediately by how many creatures showed up at the table. Animals, people, from all through history. I mean, it was this huge, raucous party.

Lisa Miller:
Martha, what animals were there?

Martha Beck:
Oh my gosh. They were countless. There were beavers and elephants. I’ve interacted with animals my whole life very intensely, obsessed with them from childhood. And it was like some big party in Narnia.

Lisa Miller:
I love this. Oh, it’s beautiful, and they knew you truly loved them, and they loved you too back.

Martha Beck:
And before you even said the higher power, the higher power came in and just sat down and the whole universe started laughing. It was just, it was the best party I’ve ever been to.

Lisa Miller:
A joyful universe. The wink, the playfulness, the joy in the universe. Yes. Not the dour heaviness, the joy written into life.

Martha Beck:
Isn’t that amazing to start to—because we have such a heavy view of the society from our materialist culture, I know a lot of people out there are afraid to rejoice, afraid to—Oh, when you said the other people on this call, the message that came from me, and I’d love to hear, I’m not sure how people can communicate, but whatever yours was, I’d love to hear. But mine was, “We are all in this together.” Very clear. We’re all in this together. And it felt so safe to be connected in that way. And again, it was like me being, I have been so narcissistic in my life that I thought it was just me: I have to fix everything. But no, it was everyone in this together and there was so much joy.

Lisa Miller:
Okay, Martha, I’m going to push back on that because I think of you as having brought women together. I don’t think you’ve been a narcissist. I think you have created a powerful community of women. Women come up to me and when they speak of Martha Beck, they light up. They know, yes, their worth, but more than that, their spirit. And they are de facto walking each day down the sidewalk, at home, in their car, feeling part of your community. So it’s very powerful.

Martha Beck:
Wow. Thank you.

Lisa Miller:
Thrilling. Yeah. I’m so excited to be here. I finally get that. It’s amazing.

Martha Beck:
That makes me feel a feeling, a big feeling. Wow.

Lisa Miller:
Thank you for creating.

Martha Beck:
Oh, and this is so, every time I interact with your book or I find out something about you online, I always feel like I take a big step forward. You are just someone walking ahead of us through thick undergrowth, just cutting a trail for everybody.

Lisa Miller:
You’re very generous.

Martha Beck:
And doing it with science that the rest of society cannot dismiss. This is what I love. Could you talk though—I did want to get to this place where I think people are afraid to trust that things can be this good because fear is so deep in us.

Lisa Miller:
Yes. It’s so interesting. I share in The Awakened Brain that I adopted my son from an orphanage. And he just came— pure love—he is from north of St. Petersburg, Russia. Da, da, da, full of love. Loves the snow, used to peel off his snow pants and dance the February snow.

Martha Beck:
Wow, a Russian to the core.

Lisa Miller:
But it’s very interesting because he is so loved and so spiritually connected, he made a direct connection to God, the higher power when there was no one there. Usually the child connects to the loving parent or grandparents, and they are effectively a conduit as well as a direct connection to God. The child feels God’s love in the mother, feels God’s love in the grandparent. We’re ambassadors for our children. For a child in an orphanage where there’s no one there to hold and be the ambassador, sometimes the child will go directly to God. And that’s what Isaiah did. So he came home in this relationship directly to God.

And that said, and that’s totally the case, it’s also the case that he was left at six days by the woman who carried him, who did it out of love. Martha, she wrote two letters. The first letter she left moves me to this day, this woman who loved the little boy she carried. She said, “I will be back for you in six months. I have to go get money.” To this day, it moves my heart. She—Russia had had an economic collapse. “I’ll be back when I have enough money to feed you.” And then she left a second note, which Martha, to this day breaks my heart, for this woman, she said, oh, she said, “I terminate my parental rights, and this is done in love.”

Martha Beck:
Wow.

Lisa Miller:
Isn’t that moving? Which is why so many mothers who don’t keep a child, who choose to hand them to another mother, do it out of love, right? This woman did it entirely out of love. So in her case, she didn’t come back. They tried to find her. She couldn’t do it and wanted, in love, for him to find a mom, right? So he comes home in direct connection to God, full of life and spirit, and at the same time, aware of this deeply felt sense of abandonment at the level of visceral, nervous system, somatic sense. Aware of, you know, everything can fall apart. This was not stage-one model of many children who develop basic trust versus mistrust. He developed basic mistrust. He knows that. He knows that you can lose your mom. He knows you can lose everything. I’m a Jew, sort of like a Holocaust survivor understands. You know it.

So that said, he knows that things can fall apart. He knows that. He’s not blindly optimistic. And so whenever things went right, my son would say, “Oh, things are very bad.” We had a big birthday party, both sections of the second grade, grandparents were there, 40 gifts in the back of the SUV. This was not a good day. This was a very bad day. And I said to him, “Well, honey, I wonder if sometimes it just feels like too much, like it’s too good or too much, too good to take. I wonder if at that time we can just say, thank you, God?” And he relaxed.

Martha Beck:
Oh, that’s so meaningful.

Lisa Miller:
So whatever feeling of things can fall apart, or why did it happen today? Or will it happen tomorrow? Am I worthy or not? Just thank you, God, and then relax.

Martha Beck:
Oh, that switch into gratitude is so powerful and so simple. I love the way you illuminate for us what the brain is doing. But then the simplicity of the actions we can take to cause these shifts in the brain. The brain size is really fun and exciting and detailed. And then the actual behavioral suggestions you make are so simple. It’s so easy. Just take a step. I call it jumping the track sometimes. There’s a track that our culture wants us to be on where “life is a bitch and then you die,” end of story. And when my son was born with Down syndrome, his life made no sense on that set of tracks. He just wasn’t on the Harvard trail. And so I just jumped to a different set of tracks where what was important was not what you achieve in this life or what you do as a human, but your experience of the mystery and your interplay with consciousness. Because I could feel that in him. And can I just tell, it’s not mine to tell, but I wanted to tell people the story of you trying and trying, trying to conceive. And then the presence that came to you.

Lisa Miller:
Yes. Yes.

Martha Beck:
It said, “If you could get pregnant, would you adopt?” And you said, “No, I wouldn’t. I want my own baby.”

Lisa Miller:
And then a very sacred presence. Very powerful presence. So there was a sense that time and space opened. This was many years down, so thank you. Do want me to, should I pick up the track?

Martha Beck:
Yeah, tell the end. Tell the second part.

Lisa Miller:
I left us on the bus with the Trail Angel. Yes. So the synchronicity really did guide us to get the picture: “There’s a child out there for you to adopt. There is a beautiful, your spiritual child is out there to adopt.” We got the picture. But I had still a tug-of-war within myself, researching doctors. And finally one night this presence came, as you said, a beautiful profound presence. I sat up in bed, time and space opened. There was a numinous, I wouldn’t call it hole, I’d say opening into a numinous space.

Martha Beck:
Wow.

Lisa Miller:
And in the numinous space was a powerful, very sacred—it felt profoundly divine presence saying, “If you were pregnant now, would you adopt?” And in front of such a powerful presence, one would never dream to fib. I said, “No, no, I wouldn’t.” And I went further down the path, more synchronicities, the presence came back again as we were getting closer to adoption and said, “If you were pregnant now, would you adopt?” And I said, “I’m getting closer. I can feel the ego wearing out, the sort of control, the radical sort of got to have it my way, baby looks like me,” you know like that type of control, ego living. I could feel it. But you know that feeling where you’re going somewhere, you can feel the path and the trajectory, but I’m not there yet. The presence goes away. Well, I—you’ll love this—I messaged Jane, and you know this because you did your work at Harvard. You can talk a lot for a living in academia. Yes, you can. But here I found myself at the invitation of my elder cousin, big Jane, sitting with the Lakota community in a healing ceremony. She said, “Listen, little cuz, you’re not getting pregnant. It’s been five years. Why don’t you come to a healing ceremony? I think you need to look in another direction.” So I fly out to South Dakota, cancel all my meetings at Columbia.

Martha Beck:
At Columbia. This is what I love, that you said, “Ivy League, bite me. I’m going out to Lakota ceremony.” It’s great.

Lisa Miller:
Yes. And this is exactly what we as women have deep knowing. The inner compass. This is far too synchronistic. This is too important. So sitting in the inipi, to go around the inipi, and the first woman, all women, the medicine man’s wife is how she’d introduced herself, our leader, facilitator, spoke why she had come. And the first woman said, “I’ve come because my son, he’s been using drugs and I’m worried about him coming home.” The next woman said, “My son, he’s 14. He started hanging out with bad kids.” Round and round. We were praying for sons. And then we got to Big Jane. And Big Jane said, “This is my cousin, Little Jane. And for the first time I had no words, and I was so grateful she would speak for me.

Martha Beck:
Wow.

Lisa Miller:
Little Jane. Little Jane. Right. Dr. Miller is Little Jane, and said “She has been looking for her child and I’m wondering if we can help her.” And all the women looked me right in the eye, and Martha, for the first time I knew I was in the right place to find a child. So we prayed in the inipi together, and sent it up, the prayer, through the top of the inipi, both in spirit, but in consubstantiation. There was a numinous visible form that went up.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lisa Miller:
You could see. Yes.

Martha Beck:
Amazing.

Lisa Miller:
And then that night, after five years of infertility and hunting and searching, that night, while I was in South Dakota, a call came to my phone in New York: “We’ve found the Millers’ child. There are many beautiful children. We know Mr. Miller had requested a daughter, but this is a son and this is the Millers’ child.”

Martha Beck:
And then you saw his picture.

Lisa Miller:
Then I was so excited I raced home. I tore open the video, popped it in, and there was this bright soul, “Da, da, da,” so full of joy, so—he glowed. And I loved, in that instant of seeing him on the other side of the world, my spiritual son. I loved in a way I’d never loved before. It was a soaring, euphoric love. And I became a parent because that’s how a parent loves. And I didn’t know anything about all the functional things that we hear ad nauseum about kids. What I knew is that this soul and my soul were meant to be mother and child. I go to bed, having just seen this video back in New York, that very night, the presence comes, third time. Time and space open, the numinous presence: “If you were pregnant now, would you adopt?” Absolutely. This is my spiritual child. Of course. And that night, we conceived naturally.

Martha Beck:
Isn’t that amazing?

Lisa Miller:
Spiritual twins, right?

Martha Beck:
Spiritual twins, yeah. It’s just phenomenal. I am sitting here thinking, this is an Ivy League person. This is a really, really reputable scientist with—you have the stamina, the brains, the guts that—really, you are an exceptional human being. And so to have you just in this relaxed way saying, “Yeah, and then there was a numinous space and the presence came in.” It’s like allowing the medicine woman to step into the seat of authority in the society that raised me to be brutally depressive. And having you just say, “Now this is how it is.” Have you read about shared death experiences?

Lisa Miller:
Tell me.

Martha Beck:
It’s where someone has a death, they’re with a person who’s dying and they go through part of a near-death experience when their loved one dies. And one thing they say that nobody says about near-death experiences, this is only about the shared ones, is at the moment the person was about to die, the geometry of the room changed. And people say this consistently. And so when you say that this space opened up and you could see the wishes going up, it really is as though you’ve brought in, and I think that your studies and your way of disciplining yourself and using your brain research and everything, I think you may have been developing this ability to perceive these things. I don’t know. Were you always this way, or do you think you’ve actually gotten more able to see them as you’ve gotten to your wise-woman stage?

Lisa Miller:
Oh, I think that when we authorize our knowing, it builds a hundred fold for every one of us. The more we take as real, the more we can see. The lens widens, lens deepens. That’s why saying yes is so important. We literally augment our capacity. And I mean, yes, that’s interesting. But to your point, it allows us to love. It allows us to dialogue, have the conversation with the universe. It allows us to participate in the extraordinary, non-probabilistic miracles around us, we get to be part of this. We’re co-creators. And as women, I did three of my four cores: listen, reflect, act on synchronicity. But the fourth is what you’ve already been doing, which is use our voice as we speak to one another, to speak at the deepest spiritual level. If we’re really going to renew our society, if we’re really going to elevate the spirit of our families, then it’s only at the deepest spiritual level. Use your own language, whatever that is, that describes your spiritual walk. But let others know it’s real. We talk about that here. There’s a way in. Do you want to pray or meditate by my side? Do you want to come with me on a retreat or into the forest? Open up the door for other men and women. But really women.

Martha Beck:
Authorize our knowing. You said that a minute ago. And that phrase, I’m going to type it up and put it all around, authorize your knowing. Give authority to the voice that is deepest inside you. And then speak it. To be an author is to speak it and to give it authority is to authorize it. And that, again, that’s a concept that you’ve just boosted in my brain that I hadn’t really seen it before. Not that way. You have that capacity of opening things more and more and more for the person who is learning in your presence.

Lisa Miller:
Martha, we need to go collaborate and do things together.

Martha Beck:
That would be fun. I’d love to do that. Oh, this would be exciting, wouldn’t it?

Lisa Miller:
Really fun, really exciting for men and women, but really for women—and women at this point in life, because science is very clear here in a woman’s life course, there are several times where we expand our capacity for greater spiritual knowing. The first is with onset of puberty, literally biological puberty. We have an expanded spiritual capacity, but it boots up feeling like a half-empty glass of spirituality. There can be struggling, ennui. Think about adolescence and being so unhappy as a freshman or a sophomore, most women are. That is not a medical illness. That is developmental depression beckoning us. What life are you showing me now? It comes back at midlife. It comes back in the transition of menopause. The capacity expands. And once again, wait a minute, am I living my ultimate purpose? What is it? And oftentimes, because consciousness is in us, through us, and around us, oftentimes in midlife, the thing I have feared all my life materializes right in front of me. And I don’t think I made it. I don’t believe in that. I think my view is that there’s no difference between inner or outer. And if I’m worried about losing my money, I lose a bunch of money. If I’m worried about not being loved, my husband goes AWOL. It always is out there, the thing I fear. That hurts, but it’s actually a gift. It’s an ego death, and it liberates us. Absolutely. Absolutely. An expansion, then, of spiritual awareness at midlife allows us to cultivate a deeply loving spiritual response to the so-called greatest fear, the boogeyman.

Martha Beck:
Right. And once you see past that, once you see past the spectre of death as it comes into the sort of nihilistic western viewpoint, once you’ve seen past that, they can’t really stop you.

Lisa Miller:
Yes. No, you’re unstoppable. Nothing can break you. Nothing can break you. And in fact, it’s all, from here on out, a spiritual adventure. It’s all this extraordinary riding with the river, where are we going to go? And then the third ascension is, of course elderhood, where we have even more expanded capacity. Like the medicine man’s wife in the inipi. Our elders in all of our communities where there’s—I often speak at communities of elders and there’s such a depth where, you know, this is what I read about and thought about all day. And I’ve read from Thomas Merton and I’ve read from Hindu tradition, I will hear from elders. There’s such a depth that comes in ascending to elderhood. So men and women, but for women, if we don’t listen to it, if we sidestep it, it is left willy-nilly, emptiness, fracturedness. It’s a devolving into depression.

Martha Beck:
Deep suffering. Yeah.

Lisa Miller:
So there’s not really that much of an option. You can follow your nature or suffer.

Martha Beck:
Speaking of follow, there are two things before we have to end at the hour. And I wish we could go over, but I have—

Lisa Miller:
And you have such a glorious nature. Our nature’s extraordinary. We are the spiritual keepers of our family. That’s what the data says.

Martha Beck:
So two things I want to get in before we finish. First thing is how can people follow you and your work?

Lisa Miller:
Oh, thank you. So Martha, I’m on Instagram like you, so Dr. Lisa Miller, and thank you for sharing The Awakened Brain. I am so grateful to share The Awakened Brain with this community.

Martha Beck:
I wish I had a copy. I’ve read it, I think, four times. I mean there are portions that I’ve committed to memory and it’s all on my Kindle, so I can’t show them the cover. But remember: The Awakened Brain. The Awakened Brain. So that’s one thing. How can they follow you?

The other thing is I have always had this strange, maybe it is a deep knowing, this strange belief that I would see a shift in the way humanity thinks and behaves on the planet. And as I got older, it began to seem to me that this actually would be the only possibility for us to save ourselves as a species on this planet for anything for the long term. And that shift, which I didn’t give a name for decades, finally, I found in Eastern philosophies, the words enlightenment and awakening. You talk about the awakened brain, and I want to know what you think about our awakening and the future of humanity. Just a little question.

Lisa Miller:
Profound, and I so agree. Just as individuals go through a journey of developmental depression to an awakening through the suffering, through the loss, through the struggle and existential ennui, we start to perceive more deeply and feel, learn to hand it over: What, God, higher power, are you revealing to me now? Feel the buoyant love. As a collective society, as a global community, we are going through a mass ego death, just like I did with not conceiving children, a mass developmental depression that I have empirically driven hope, not wistful hope, data-based hope, research-driven hope that leads now to a glorious awakening. And our brain is different. There’s one awakened brain and everyone on earth has it. Everyone has been built since the day we were born, our birthright is a brain capable of perceiving into the spiritual reality. And now’s our time.

Martha Beck:
So we are all fractals of the whole species and fractals of the universe. And the fractal is awakening. So as you awaken—

Lisa Miller:
Through us.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Well, it’s by necessity. Each piece of the fractal shifts and the fractal as a whole shifts. Just before we finish, I just have to say it again—

Lisa Miller:
And we hold presence for each other. Right. As you awaken, you hold presence and help me to awaken. The brain is an antenna, holds presence, and we awaken those around us. Science has shown that as you hold consciousness, I more quickly move into that as measured by the rapidity with which mirror neurons come online.

Martha Beck:
Wow. So there are many people who are giving spiritual opinions, spiritual lessons, spiritual presence in the world. And a lot of them, like me, are lay readers of the sciences and can say there’s research that shows this to be true. But when Lisa Miller says it, y’all, when she says it, she’s talking about the wisdom of women and the deeper knowing. And somebody might come along and say, “Yeah, little lady? Let’s show me some empirical evidence.” And Lisa Miller would be like, “You want me to do that, do you? Ba-bing!” Because she is an absolutely consummate scientist. She is, I think, one of the great torch bearers for hope for us individually, for happiness in our lives, and for all of us together. Lisa, it is just such an honor for me to meet you. And I hope we can do this again sometime soon.

Lisa Miller:
I would love to love and much love and blessings.

Martha Beck:
The Awakened Brain. Lisa Miller. Love you all. Talk again soon. Thanks. Bye-Bye.