The Science of Spirituality: How Your Mind Is Creating Your Reality | Dr. Lisa Miller

She says MRI studies across 10 years identify three brain circuits that collectively support feeling loved/held, receiving guidance, and sensing both individuality and oneness. She frames spiritual awareness as a built-in human capacity to perceive a loving, guiding creator, using whatever sacred word fits the person.

She says the awakened brain is "one-third innate, two-thirds cultivated," framing spirituality like fitness: you can strengthen it through repeated practices such as prayer, meditation, reflective reading, introspection, or connecting to the divine through nature. If someone doesn’t feel God’s presence, she attributes it to a need to "build the muscle," not a lack of wiring.

She guides a visualization in which you imagine a table, invite supportive living/deceased figures, your higher self, and your higher power, then ask what you need to know. Lewis reports feeling forgiveness and love from the exercise and describes it as a "higher council" that reduces loneliness and restores peace.

She claims the modern mental health crisis is fundamentally “an ailment of perception” in which people perceive separateness and aloneness, calling it an “atrophy of the awakened brain.” She emphasizes that people can “flip the switch” in the present moment to re-engage awakened perception.

She says pain and suffering can prime the brain to “widen the lens” and become closer to God, describing suffering as a possible accelerant or precondition for awakening (while clarifying it’s not the only path). Lewis connects this to being “out of alignment,” and she reinforces the idea of aligning by becoming an open system to the “force of life.”