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

I'm Martha Beck. Let's get to it.

I have been rereading a book that I really love. It's called The Awakened Brain by Lisa Miller.

I'm obsessed with her. You may have heard me talking about her before.

And one of the things that amazes me so much is that she is a very well-regarded Columbia professor,

so very Ivy League has degrees from all the most hoity-to-a-ty institutions. And yet her body of work is all about what she calls a spiritual docking station in the human brain.

And what she found, and let me tell you this, when she was doing her original research,

people were not pleased with her. They did not

want to be reading about spiritual docking centers in the brain. When I was at Harvard, I literally

never met another student who was a mother. And I, I, there were, like, I think I knew one professor who was a mother,

and that was it. But Alice Miller writes in her book, The Awakening Brain, not only, what, Lisa

Miller, sorry, not Alice Miller. She wrote, she wrote a whole bunch of things called, like,

the drama of the gifted child. She's a beautiful, brilliant psychologist as well. But Lisa Miller

is the Columbia professor who wrote about the research she did that showed that when people are open to a spiritual reality, they have access to much more physical and mental health, that being open to spiritual realities makes us resilient and more resistant to anxiety, depression, all these other things.

And I wanted to talk about the personal story that Lisa Miller puts into this book.

Because that, too, I mean, when I was in school and graduate school and being an assistant professor, you did not talk about your personal life.

You didn't have a spiritual belief and you did not talk about anything in your personal life.

You were just a professional and there was a split down the middle between anything you did at home and anything you did emotionally and then the stuff you brought to work.

But Lisa Miller writes about her struggles to have a child while she was getting her degrees

and becoming a full professor and the rest of that. And it was one of the things that opened her up to the idea that she

herself might have a spiritual docking station. Now, as I talk about this, what I want for all of us

is that we can start to identify times in our lives when this kind of phenomenon has happened to us. One of the things she did in her

...