Full Capacity Living…
Where the Conversation Begins…
There’s a question I ask every client in our first meeting together. I ask about spirituality. And I ask it as wide open as I know how, because the word means something different to almost everyone who hears it.
For some people, spirituality is the feeling of standing at the edge of the ocean or under a canopy of old trees and sensing, unmistakably, that they are part of something larger than themselves. For others, it’s the rhythm and belonging of organized religion, the church pew, the prayer they’ve said since childhood. Both of those answers are welcome. Neither is more “right” than the other. What I’m listening for isn’t a religion. It’s whether a person has any felt sense that they are held, supported, and accompanied by something beyond themselves.
It turns out that felt sense is one of the most quietly powerful forces in human health, and we have the neuroscience to show it.
The Distinction That Changes Everything
The researcher who has done the most to bring this into focus is Dr. Lisa Miller, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College and the author of The Awakened Brain. For decades, Miller and her colleagues have studied what actually protects and heals us, and along the way she drew a line that I think is essential.
She distinguishes between religiosity and spirituality. Religiosity, in her framing, is the outward practice: attending services, following doctrine, the beliefs and rituals of an institution. Spirituality is something different and deeper. Miller defines it as a personal, direct relationship with a higher power, a transcendent source, or life itself, the lived sense that you are loved, guided, and never alone. She calls this relational spirituality, and her central finding is striking: “Deep relational spirituality lives in all of us and it’s free.”
This matters enormously, because it means the healing effects she has documented are not reserved for the religiously observant. You do not have to believe the “right” things or attend the “right” building. You can find this in a synagogue or in a garden. What matters, her research suggests, is the inner relationship, not the outer form.
What the Brain Reveals
Here’s where Miller’s work becomes hard to dismiss. Using anatomical MRI scans, her team found that people with a strong, sustained spiritual life had a measurably thicker cortex, particularly across the parietal, precuneus, and occipital regions of the brain. This wasn’t a matter of belief or self-report alone. It showed up in the physical structure of the brain.
And that thickening appears to be protective. In adults with a family history of depression, a high level of personal spirituality was associated with up to 75 to 80 percent lower risk of recurring major depression. Let that land for a moment. In people at the highest genetic risk, spirituality tracked with a dramatically lower likelihood of the illness returning. Miller’s team found that cortical thickening across these regions predicted fewer depressive symptoms a year later, offering some of the first evidence that a sustained spiritual life may be genuinely neuroprotective.
Miller describes two modes of awareness we all move between. There’s what she calls achieving awareness, the focused, goal-driven mode that asks “How do I get and keep what I want?” It’s useful and necessary. We use it to meet a deadline, pass an exam, get where we need to go. But when we live there exclusively, we narrow. Then there’s awakened awareness, a broader mode that asks a different question: “What is life showing me now?” In this mode, the brain integrates more sources of information, and notably, the default mode network, what Miller playfully calls the “rumination box,” the circuitry that churns out anxious, self-focused looping thought, quiets down.
That’s not a small thing. That rumination network is the same circuitry that runs hot in depression and anxiety. Awakened awareness gives us a way to step out of the loop.
It Reaches All the Way Into the Body
If this were only about brain structure and mood, it would already be worth our attention. But the effects reach into our physiology, into the very markers of inflammation that drive so much chronic illness.
A large study drawing on more than two thousand midlife and older adults in the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study found that greater spirituality, more frequent daily spiritual experiences, and spiritually grounded coping were associated with lower levels of interleukin-6 (IL-6) and C-reactive protein, two of the body’s key inflammatory markers. This is significant because elevated IL-6 and CRP predict higher risk of type 2 diabetes, depression, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, cognitive decline, and frailty as we age. Chronic inflammation is one of the great common denominators of modern disease, and spirituality appears to turn the dial down.
The stress hormone cortisol tells a similar story. Research following adults over a decade found that religious and spiritual participation was linked to healthier daily cortisol rhythms, largely by reducing what researchers call “religious struggle,” the inner conflict and distress. Interestingly, that same body of work shows the flip side: when spirituality becomes a source of struggle and guilt rather than connection and support, inflammatory markers like IL-6 can actually rise. The nourishing kind of spirituality, the sense of being held rather than judged, is the kind that heals.
Transcendent Thinking and the Synchronicities We Choose to Notice
Part of what Miller and other researchers describe is a capacity for what’s been called transcendent thinking, the mind’s ability to reach beyond the immediate and literal toward meaning, ethics, and the bigger picture. In a remarkable five-year study led by neuroscientist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang at USC, adolescents who grappled with the deeper, systems-level, and personal meaning of the world showed greater growth in the coordination between brain networks over time, which in turn predicted stronger identity, self-liking, and relationship satisfaction as young adults. Reaching for meaning, it turns out, literally helps the brain grow.
And then there are synchronicities, those small, uncanny moments of alignment, the phone call from the person you were just thinking of, the book that falls open to exactly the page you needed. Miller’s point is not that we should chase the mystical. It’s that awakened awareness is partly a matter of paying attention, of being the kind of person who notices these moments and lets them mean something, rather than dismissing them. The signal is often there. Awakened awareness is the willingness to receive it.
Bringing It Into an Ordinary Life
None of this requires a conversion, a retreat, or a single dogma. Here are some of the everyday doorways my clients have found into a sense of spirituality, and any one of them is a legitimate path:
- Spending unhurried time in nature and letting yourself feel small in a good way, part of something vast.
- A daily practice of prayer, meditation, or simply sitting in stillness and listening.
- Expressing gratitude, out loud or on paper, for what is holding you up.
- Acts of love and service toward others. Miller found that “love of neighbor” is among the strongest strengtheners of the awakened brain.
- Noticing and honoring synchronicities and moments of awe instead of explaining them away.
- Belonging to a community of shared meaning, which may be a faith congregation or may be a circle of people who gather around any deeper purpose.
- Creative practice, music, art, movement, or ritual that lifts you out of the grind and into something larger.
The Simple Takeaway
You do not have to belong to a religion to be spiritual, and you do not have to abandon your religion either. What the science points to is quieter and more available than that: the felt sense that you are held and supported by something larger than yourself is good for your brain, calms your inflammation, steadies your stress, and protects your mental health. It is, in Lisa Miller’s words, something that “lives in all of us and it’s free.”
So this week, my invitation is small. Once a day, step out of achieving mode and into awakened mode. Pause and ask, “What is life showing me now?” Notice what’s holding you up. That single shift in attention is where healing begins.
If You Want to Go Deeper
If any of this resonates, I can’t recommend Dr. Miller’s own voice enough. Here’s where to hear her explore exactly these ideas…I highlight the conversation from Rich Roll as it was the first time I heard her speak on this work back in 2022.
- The Rich Roll Podcast — “The Awakened Brain: Lisa Miller, PhD On The Neuroscience Of Spirituality” (January 10, 2022). This is an excellent, in-depth listen and where I first encountered her work.
- Hidden Brain — a recent two-part series: “Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1” (June 29, 2026) and “Part 2” (July 6, 2026).
- Her book — The Awakened Brain: The New Science of Spirituality and Our Quest for an Inspired Life, which lays out the full body of research.
With care, Karen
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