Welcome to the Gathering Pod, the audio version of my weekly gathering room broadcast.

I'm Martha Beck.

If I'm looking extra haggard today, it's because I was up all night reading a book that I should have read years ago.

And it only came out in 2021.

In my defense, sometimes I'm writing about what I've read, and I don't have a chance to keep

up with my reading.

But last night, I finally started reading a book by Lisa Miller called, I want to get this exactly

right, the awakened brain, the new science of spirituality and our quest for an inspired life. So Lisa Miller is a very

well-reputed scientist, social scientist. I think she's a psychiatrist. Ivey League, Yale,

Columbia, the whole thing, like credibility out the wazoo.

And she, years ago, was working on a huge data set that had been pulled.

Like, there were people doing research on thousands and thousands of people on all these measures for a long time.

And different social scientists will all join together and work on one big data set.

And you can do things statistically.

Like if you have a question, you can go in and see, oh, what's going on with this question?

What do people, are people happier if they eat bacon? Are they happier if they, you know, kiss a dog or whatever?

They don't have those questions usually. So you can only use the questions you've got.

So Lisa Miller was working psychiatry at a mental health ward. And she noticed that some of the people

got together and did a religious ceremony, one of the Jewish

holidays.

And she noticed that all these people who were mentally ill and supposedly sort of broken

seemed to get exactly a little dose of exactly what they were needing from this ritual. And she was like,

...