Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 2

Columbia University psychologist Lisa Miller argues that people have two distinct mental capacities: the "achieving brain," which focuses on goals and conventional success, and the "awakened brain," oriented toward meaning, connection, and transcendence. Cultivating the awakened brain through spiritual practices can help provide love, guidance, and a sense of belonging, and has measurable effects on brain health and well-being.

Awakened and Achieving Brains Provide Love, Guidance, and Connection

The achieving brain drives ambition, productivity, and concrete accomplishment. In contrast, the awakened brain allows for a lived dialogue with life, focusing on meaning and spiritual connection. Miller explains that activating the awakened brain strengthens three neural networks responsible for the feeling of being loved, guided, and not alone. Decades of brain imaging and clinical research show that nurturing spiritual and transcendent thinking leads to measurable changes in the brain, supporting overall mental and physical health. The brain, she says, is built to widen its mental aperture in moments of despair, letting in more “light” and fostering spiritual awakening.

Spiritual Practices Build Neural Capacity and Integrate Into Perception

Spiritual practices—prayer, meditation, right action—can be religious or non-religious, but all help to “build the muscle” and strengthen the cortex connected to the awakened brain. Miller emphasizes that only regular, sustained spiritual engagement results in significant neural changes. Like going to the gym, it is daily spiritual practice over years that thickens and increases the processing power of the awakened brain’s regions. This commitment transforms perception, making attunement to deeper meaning and the sacred a “new normal” or default in life. Spiritual practice gradually makes perception of life’s sacred dimension more accessible and integrated into everyday awareness.

Viewing Depression as Growth Opportunities, Not Just Problems

Miller’s research, including a 40-year, three-generation longitudinal study with Myrna Weissman, shows that strong spiritual lives often emerge from moving through periods of depression. Those with robust spirituality today are 2.5 times more likely to have developed it by working through major depression or suffering. Thus, despair can catalyze a search for ultimate questions of meaning, purpose, and the sacred, inviting a spiritual response that sets the stage for a more inspired life. Depression is often not just a medical issue but a developmental process that potentiates spiritual growth. These patterns repeat at key stages—adolescence, midlife, elderhood—where biological and existential struggles can open the door to an expanded spiritual awareness. Medication can be helpful, but the deeper existential work of responding spiritually to suffering is essential for profound personal transformation and resilience.

Spiritual Practices Are More Powerful in Community Rituals Than in Isolation

While solitary prayer or meditation fosters transcendent connection, Miller cites research showing that collective spiritual practice amplifies the effect. When people gather in meditation or prayer, their ...

The search for meaning in life often clashes with a culture focused on measurable achievements, external validation, and rigid definitions of success. Personal stories and expert reflections illustrate how this fixation can obscure authentic living and the daily experience of fulfillment.

Achievement and Validation Can Trap Authentic Living and Self-Knowledge

Desire For Outcomes Vs. Living the Reality Leads To Hollow Victories

Jean Charles shares how he spent years aiming to become a successful entrepreneur, believing it would bring meaning to his life. Despite finally selling a FinTech company and achieving financial freedom, he found himself disengaged and purposeless, feeling as if he was watching his life from behind glass. The anticipated victory felt hollow because it didn’t address the deeper question of who he was or what truly gave his life meaning. Shankar Vedantam notes that the very pursuit that was supposed to deliver satisfaction left Jean Charles feeling lost.

Dave Evans explains that Jean Charles mistook achieving a goal—a successful exit from his business—for creating a meaningful life. When the driving project disappeared, so did his sense of purpose, highlighting the gap between achieving outcomes and truly living them. Evans recalls his own youthful desire to become student body president out of a need for validation, only to realize he didn’t want the work involved. There is a crucial difference between the desire for a title and the desire for the actual experience it brings.

The Brain's Fixation on Measurable Success and External Benchmarks Often Hinders Discovering True Aliveness and Intrinsic Satisfaction in Daily Life

Caller Sumaya expresses similar struggles, feeling that even with a loving family, health, and comfort, the lack of a clear, meaningful achievement leaves her adrift. The pressure to write a novel that is both creatively and financially successful further complicates her search for fulfillment. Vedantam and Evans point out that this is common: the brain’s focus on external benchmarks like published novels or career milestones traps people into equating success and life satisfaction with achievements, often to the detriment of intrinsic satisfaction.

Lisa Miller recounts a dinner party dominated by talk of jobs, residences, and professional achievements—a reflection of the "weighty culture of achieving awareness." She contrasts these superficial markers with the possibility for deeper, more heart-centered conversations rooted in personal experience and genuine connection. Vedantam observes that it can feel daunting to break away from achievement-focused measures of self-worth to pursue deeper meaning, especially after years of single-minded career pursuit.

Accepting Reality Fosters Authentic Life Design Over Fantasy Planning

Effective Life Design Starts With Honest Acceptance of Reality—Finances, Relationships, Health, Location—Rather Than Wishing For Change

Dave Evans offers that meaningful life design begins by honestly facing reality, including one’s finances, work situation, health, and relationships, instead of endlessly wishing things were different. For Sumaya, this means accepting the constraints of the writing profession’s financial realities and making peace with her circumstances. If financial contribution is necessary for fulfillment, Evans suggests she should find paid work and pursue her writing on the side, rather than layering impossible expectations onto a single achievement.

Constraints Provide Freedom By Focusing On Available Choices

Constraints, Evans notes, are not mere limitations but can become sources of freedom. When people face reality—including financial facts or the presence of a supportive partner—they open new fields of possible and practical choices. For Sumaya, accepting her husband’s support might mean confronting the challenge of receiving a gift and using that freedom to pursue what genuinely interests her.

Meaning Emerges From Curating Curiosity and Authentic Interests Over Imposed Definitions

Buried Assumptions About Success and Fulfillment

Evans observes that people often internalize unexamined rules or assumptions about what a meaningful or successful life should be. Jean Charles and Sumaya each hold ideas—about work, money, or creative output—that restrict them. These in ...

Crises, disruptions, and moments of profound change often act as catalysts for spiritual awakening. When viewed through a spiritual rather than a purely rational lens, synchronistic events and setbacks can reveal deeper meaning and pathways to transformation.

Synchronicities Gain Meaning When Viewed Through an Awakened, Not Purely Rational, Lens

Lisa Miller, experiencing infertility despite good health, describes being deeply depressed after another failed in vitro attempt. During this period, she began noticing a series of synchronistic moments that guided her toward adoption. One morning, traveling late on an unusually empty bus, she is approached by a stranger who sits next to her and remarks, "You look like just that type of awfully nice lady that would go all around the world adopting kids." The stranger exits at the next stop, leaving Lisa stunned by the peculiarity and pointedness of the encounter.

Shortly after, while staying in a hotel post-procedure, Lisa and her husband are only able to access a single television channel, which is airing a documentary about an orphaned boy in Central America. The boy speaks about his pain of not being loved, and Lisa and her husband feel a profound realization: "there's a child out there for us." This synchronicity feels undeniable for Lisa, and as she continues to recognize these moments, they become more abundant and vivid. Reinforcement from her mother, who calls with a story about a neighbor adopting from Russia, strengthens this sense of being guided.

Lisa also recounts a transformative spiritual encounter in which a sacred presence asks if she would adopt if she were pregnant at that moment. Initially, she admits she would not, and the presence withdraws. Only after further personal growth and increasing openness does the presence return with the same question, and Lisa finds herself closer to affirming it.

Shankar Vedantam highlights how the concept of synchronicity was illustrated by Carl Jung’s experience. While treating a woman describing a dream of a golden scarab beetle, Jung hears tapping at his window. He opens it to find a beetle, closely resembling the scarab, trying to enter. Skeptics might call this coincidence, but for Jung, it was synchronicity: a personal tap on the shoulder, an invitation to deeper realms of meaning beyond rational probability.

Disruptions Removing Identity Markers Can Catalyze Authentic Rebirth

Crisis often acts by stripping away elements of identity, clearing the ground for a more authentic self to emerge. Brian, formerly successful but inwardly restless and stuck, spirals into a period of loss—divorce, addiction, and ultimately a bribery conviction and 30 months in federal prison. What might seem like the nadir of his life becomes, paradoxically, a catalyst for rebirth. Prison strips away his title, ego, and identity, but in doing so, it forces him to rebuild himself step by step. The unwanted disruption becomes the permission and necessity to finally reconsider who he is at a fundamental level, prompting transformation that he could never have chosen for himself but deeply needed.

Prison and other major disruptions, by removing external markers of achievement and self-worth, open space for real self-exploration. Freed from the constraints of status and ego, individuals like Brian are afforded the opportunity for genuine growth and discovery.

Inflection Points Are More Transformative Than Comfortable Choices

The most transformative life changes often stem from external events—“outside in” inflection points—rather than comfortable, incremental decisions. Audrey, who had a successful career in IT, faced a layoff in 2024. Rather than consciously choosing to leave her profession to become a birth doula, t ...

The desire to make an impact, while noble, can create profound vulnerability when identity and self-worth hinge on external outcomes beyond one’s control. Dave Evans and Shankar Vedantam explore how achievement culture and reliance on measurable results limit fulfillment and distance people from life’s intrinsic rewards.

Relying On External Impact For Identity Creates Vulnerability When Outcomes Aren't Controllable or Sustainable

Pursuing impact is valuable, but Evans warns that when people, like Amy, invest their identity entirely in the changes they can elicit in the world, they become deeply vulnerable to disappointment. Impact-driven individuals face frequent failures, such as trying to save an animal only for it to die, or experiencing fleeting success that quickly fades. Even the most impressive achievements, like winning an Olympic medal, do not provide lasting satisfaction, as the sense of purpose quickly dissipates after the triumph.

Amy is described as a successful animal defender who made her sense of worth depend on outcomes she could not control: saving a certain number of animals or shifting public attitudes. Evans highlights how this mindset set Amy up to feel like a failure, regardless of her dedication or involvement, because she could never guarantee such results. This creates a “losing game”—even the most passionate efforts feel wasted if measured only by uncontrollable impacts.

Intrinsic Engagement vs. External Validation: Impact on Life Quality

Evans emphasizes that meaningful life quality arises from full engagement—being present and participating for the sake of engagement itself, not fixating on outcomes for validation. Engagement means channeling one’s attention, energy, and experience into the present moment, creating a sense of “aliveness.” Detachment, in this context, means letting go of worrying about future outcomes and simply doing the work for its own sake. Together, present engagement and outcome detachment create genuine aliveness and authenticity.

Kaushal, a caller from Sri Lanka now thriving in London, illustrates the tension. Despite a successful life marked by professional achievement and personal happiness, he feels stuck and questions how to genuinely stay present. Raised in Buddhist values emphasizing mindfulness, Kaushal recognizes that achievement culture has subtly shifted his motivations to external validation—wanting to do well in the moment to perform better, rather than fully savoring the act itself. Evans and Vedantam note that, over time, over-reliance on extrinsic motivation causes people to lose touch with their natural signals of love, compassion, and joy. A life spent “outside in”—seeking promotion, success, or even helping others always for recognition—erodes the ability to notice and appreciate intrinsic rewards.

True Fulfillment Arises From Sharing Genuine Gifts With the World and Staying Humble About One's Influence

True fulfillment is found in giving genuine gifts to the world and remaining humble about one’s influence. Brittany, a high school orchestra teacher, often wondered whether her efforts inspired her students or merely helped their college pro ...