Lisa Miller

From “The Awakened Brain: The New Science of Spirituality and Our Quest for an Inspired Life” by Lisa Miller, PhD “Can you show me now?” I asked quietly. “How do you teach spiritual awareness?” “It’s not through a particular religion,” Gary said. “Most of these boys we work with have had bad scrapes with the […]

From “The Awakened Brain: The New Science of Spirituality and Our Quest for an Inspired Life” by Lisa Miller, PhD In another innovative study, Dr. Jeanne Achterberg showed that love’s healing power might be transmitted not only through touch or physical proximity but also remotely. At the North Hawaii Community Hospital in Waimea, Achterberg used

From “The Awakened Brain: The New Science of Spirituality and Our Quest for an Inspired Life” by Lisa Miller, PhD Goldstein and his team found that there were two significant outcomes of handholding during the pain condition: interpersonal touch increased the comforter’s empathic accuracy and decreased the target’s experience of pain. In other words, healing

From “The Awakened Brain: The New Science of Spirituality and Our Quest for an Inspired Life” by Lisa Miller, PhD Beginning in 1987, Dr. Jacobo Grinberg, a neuropsychologist at the University of Mexico, ran a series of experiments that began the same way: Two people would sit in a room together and meditate for twenty

I felt the same way about the inipi. My ability to explain what had happened didn’t obscure my absolute joy and wonder in the imminent arrival of two children. Dr. Dossey’s words ran through my mind. The nonlocality of consciousness. Paired with what we understood about quantum entanglement, nonlocal consciousness suggested that just as tiny

I also thought of a continuing education symposium I’d attend at Harvard Medical School a year or two before Isaiah came. Dr. Larry Dossey, a longtime medical doctor in Dallas – a strapping, commanding man in his sixties who looked like he’d once played quarterback on his high school football team – had given a

When I think of awakened awareness, I think of the iconic painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel of God giving life to Adam. So are we given life, by consciousness. Through awakened attention, we’re available for surprise, for new information that turns our head. When new awareness comes, it’s like the hand of

The twentieth-century views of the mind describe imagination as something we construct. Imagination is invention. Make-believe. But in awakened awareness, imagination is not an act of creation so much as an act of perception – a way of detecting information. Just as we detect heat from a burner when our hand gets too close to

To engage our innate capacity for awakened attention, we first quiet the “little me,” turning down our achieving awareness so that our awakened awareness can emerge. There are many conscious ways to do this – through chanting, prayer, creative expression, meditation, and more. One way into awakened attention is to start through mindfulness practice, and

Even obstacles often appear at just the right time to teach us something important. I created this exercise called Three Doors to help show that when we’re using the lens of achieving awareness alone, we see boulders blocking our path, but when we engage our awakened attention, the boulders are actually stepping-stones that show us