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Depression and spiritual awakening -- two sides of one door | Lisa Miller |
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This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED
Conferences. Is depression, as most of us experience it, meaningless suffering? Dr.
Lisa Miller presents research that lends meaning to the experience of depression
and to our experience on planet Earth.

Dr. Lisa Miller is perhaps the world’s foremost expert in the relative study of
psychology and spirituality. Dr. Miller is Professor and Director of Clinical
Psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she founded and
currently directs the Spirituality and Mind-Body Institute, to innovate,
disseminate, and train healers in foundationally spiritual treatments. Dr. Miller
solo-edited the Oxford University Handbook of Psychology and Spirituality (2012)
and has published over seventy articles and chapters on spirituality in mental
health and wellness. She has acted as Principle Investigator on several million
dollars-worth of grants from corporate and family foundations as well as the
National Institutes of Mental Health. Dr. Miller is Co-Founder and Co-Editor-in-
Chief of the new APA publication, Spirituality in Clinical Practice, and also
serves as associate editor of Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, the official
journal of APA Division 36, Society for the Psychology of Religion and
Spirituality, for which Dr. Miller has served as President and is now APA Council
Representative. Dr. Miller has been elected to Fellow of the American Psychological
Association and awarded the Virginia Sexton Mentoring Award. She is a graduate of
Yale University, Columbia University, and University of Pennsylvania, where she
studied under Martin Seligman, Ph. D.

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Transcript
00:00
Transcriber: Katelyn Nicholson Reviewer: Nadine Hennig
00:06
In the dark of the night, 4 a.m.,
00:11
I look over and my husband's not there.
00:17
I look further, and I find him
00:21
flat on his back, looking at the ceiling, arms out.
00:28
"Our lives are hollow and meaningless without children."
00:33
It had been two-and-a-half years
00:36
of hopes and prayers and failed fertility treatments.
00:41
No one had come.
00:45
And the despair that ripped through our hearts woke us night after night -
00:51
to the point where friends and family called just to see how we were doing.
00:56
Because we so clearly were depressed.
01:00
As a clinical psychologist and scientist,
01:03
I had been trained to see that depression is a disease.
01:08
Much like cancer or diabetes, depression as a disease had symptoms
01:13
of despair and isolation.
01:17
And yet that simply did not explain the road we were traveling,
01:23
nor did it explain the depression that follows loss of a spouse,
01:28
miscarriage, trauma,
01:31
or the natural transitions sophomore slump, mid-life crisis,
01:35
portholes in passages - chapter breaks that seemed core to who we are -
01:41
were not aberrant illnesses.
01:45
They were not diseases.
01:48
And so my husband and I continued
01:51
with each cycle ending in a disappointment that felt like a funeral.
01:56
And as we continued down our road of trials,
02:01
we started ever so gradually, over months and years
02:08
to open our eyes from a dark and isolated place, quite alone,
02:16
to a place where we started to hear the guidance of helpers and healers:
02:23
the folks who, on the Appalachian Trail, through hikers called "trail angels"
02:30
for bringing food and water when they need it most.
02:35
Our trail angels brought what we needed most:
02:39
wisdom and guidance.
02:41
So one day I came home after yet another in vitro
02:45
with the haunting feeling as I drove my car
02:48
that this too was a failure.
02:51
And sure enough, as I stepped to the door,
02:55
the evidence was incontrovertible.
02:59
A tiny dead duck embryo lay on my threshold.
03:05
And I knew it was not possible the embryo in me was alive.
03:09
And so I went to bed and had a long depressing nap
03:14
to awake - (Imitating knocking sound) to a duck -
03:20
the mama duck,
03:21
who had lost her aspirational baby.
03:25
And the mama duck was persistent.
03:27
I thought what would the duck want with me. (Imitating knocking sound)
03:30
She wanted to come towards me.
03:32
And as I opened the door, I saw she had brought me a gift -
03:36
the most precious thing in the world to her.
03:38
She had brought me a plump, juicy worm.
03:42
Mama duck and I, there we were, two aspirational mothers, not alone.
03:47
Not alone because duck and I were side by side,
03:50
and not alone because of the great force that brought duck.
03:55
And so, too, through that force came the guy on the bus.
03:59
And the guy on the bus winked, leaned over, and said,
04:02
"You seem like just type of mother that would go all around the world
04:06
adopting all types of kids," opening up that new possibility.
04:13
Listening to the helpers and healers opened my awareness,
04:18
so that the next time I was woken in the night
04:21
was not by the rip of depression,
04:24
but by a great and clearly sacred presence -
04:30
a presence with a love so great and a gravitas that I sat up.
04:36
And the presence said, "If you were pregnant, would you adopt?"
04:41
And I said something so awesome and great: the truth, which was, "No".
04:47
But I also knew that this journey
04:52
was more than a disease,
04:55
and that this depression was opening the door
04:59
on a path of "becoming" - a spiritual path.
05:10
Continuing down this path,
05:15
I wanted that baby.
05:18
It was great that I was on a spiritual path, but I wanted that baby.
05:22
And so we didn't quit.
05:24
Up and down the East Coast to the best IVF labs in the country.
05:28
We went so far as to find the team that invented IVF,
05:33
and sitting there in solidarity on bed rest with my spouse,
05:39
we found that the remote was stuck in our hotel room on one channel -
05:46
one interminable documentary, four hours
05:50
(Laughter)
05:53
of a little boy -
05:57
a little boy who stood in a garbage dump alone,
06:04
and said, "I don't care that I'm poor. I don't care that I can't go to school.
06:10
But it hurts so much to not be loved
06:13
that I sniff glue to make the pain go away."
06:19
And lying there in our multiple rounds of IVF,
06:22
my husband and I looked at each other.
06:24
And he said it first.
06:26
We knew there was a child out there for us.
06:31
We made our way
06:34
to a wise woman and hovered around her table,
06:38
the daughter of a once clergyman.
06:40
She looked at us and said,
06:42
"Frankly, what is it that you are looking for in your child?"
06:46
And I leaned in and said,
06:48
"Well, I don't care if this is a boy or a girl.
06:52
I don't care what race this child is. Just please, a child who can love."
06:57
And my husband jumped in and he said, "Well yes, all that, but kind of a girl."
07:02
(Laughter)
07:05
What we knew in common was that the voice that said
07:10
you will never be parents, the voice that came from being alone in darkness
07:16
was now a voice that said parenting is love.
07:20
It hurts so much to not be loved.
07:23
All he wanted was a mom, all I wanted was a child.
07:26
What would have made us family was love.
07:29
Parenting was love.
07:34
This was depression as a portal to a world of connection, a world of love,
07:42
a world in which we walk a spiritual path.
07:46
This was depression as only one side of the door.
07:51
And on the other [side of the] door was illumination, warmth, light,
07:58
and spiritual path, a spiritual passage.
08:01
Now, as a clinical scientist, it was clear to me
08:05
that anything true
08:09
through yet another human lense of knowing can be again shown.
08:14
The certainty I had
08:16
that depression and spirituality are two sides of one door
08:20
seemed well within reach of science.
08:24
And so my lab, together with that of Myrna Weissman and Brad Peterson
08:29
and Rafi Bancell, did the science:
08:33
two sides of one door - where is it in the brain?
08:36
Where is depression as the portal of the spiritual path, not the disease.
08:42
And we found it.
08:44
And we found it in broad and pervasive regions of the cortex.
08:49
We welcomed into our lab
08:50
deeply depressed people from families loaded up with generations of depression,
08:56
and similar people with families loaded up with generations of depression
09:00
who through their journey of suffering
09:03
had reached a foundationally spiritual path.
09:07
People whose lead foot was now depression for having traveled the darkness.
09:13
And what we found
09:15
was that in precisely those regions of the brain
09:19
which atrophied and withered in lifelong depression.
09:23
For those people with a strong personal spirituality,
09:26
there was a thickening of those very same regions.
09:30
The cortex was thick
09:32
as if you were looking at a tree in the Amazon
09:35
versus a tree whithering under the cold and drought.
09:40
Two sides of one door is in us. Depression is not always an illness.
09:44
It can be.
09:45
We can need to be rebooted or recalibrated or medicated.
09:49
It can be.
09:50
But very often, depression as everyone will face it
09:56
is core to our endowment, and core to our development.
10:04
My husband and I continued now with this knowledge:
10:07
that we were on the spiritual path in search of our child.
10:11
It was clear that our suffering was not for naught,
10:14
it was not an empty symptom,
10:16
and with the awareness that we were "becoming,"
10:21
the presence came back.
10:24
The presence asked the same question in a deep and profound way.
10:30
And my answer was honest, which is I am getting there.
10:33
I can feel we're down the road.
10:36
There is the possibility
10:37
of spiritually evolving into the person who would answer yes.
10:40
But no, I'm not quite there
10:42
where I would still adopt a child if I were pregnant.
10:45
My love has grown, but is my love that great?
10:48
Not yet.
10:50
And so we continued, and I found myself
10:52
in the community of those who for generations have known
10:56
that depression is but one side of the door,
10:59
and spiritual awakening the other.
11:01
Seated on the floor of the "Inipi", the sweat lodge,
11:04
among the Lakota in South Dakota, I joined the circle of women.
11:09
And here, each woman talked about the suffering which had brought her
11:12
to our collective prayer.
11:14
'My son, he's 40. He has not come home to his family.'
11:18
'My son, he's 14, and he's starting to use substance.'
11:21
I, in turn, shared that I was searching for my spiritual child.
11:27
Together, we prayed and we sent it up.
11:29
We sent our prayer both for one another, ourselves and the collective, up
11:35
to Great Spirit, "Wananchi."
11:42
That night, a call came.
11:45
They had found him, that very night on the other side of the earth.
11:51
We have found the Miller's child was the message.
11:54
There are great girls and we can sure find you a girl,
11:58
but this is the Millers child, and this is a son.
12:05
This time, clinical science
12:08
had something to say to the spiritual path.
12:11
When we looked at the women who, through suffering,
12:14
had come to a spiritual path, with nice thick cortexes,
12:18
they also had another quality:
12:20
the back to their head gave off a certain wave length of energy
12:23
that we call "Alpha."
12:25
And it's also found on the back of the head of a meditating monk.
12:30
Alpha has another name, it's Shuman's constant.
12:34
It's the wave length of the earth's crust.
12:37
The spiritually engaged brain vibrates at the frequency at the earth's crust.
12:43
From the Inipi across the globe was found Isaiah, in through this matrix
12:49
of consciousness, love, this sacred field that is in us, through us, around us
12:54
and covers all living earth.
12:59
This is the world in which we live - a world in which we're never alone
13:05
and in which there is guidance, trail angels, helpers and healers.
13:09
And through the field of love comes just the person,
13:13
the guy on the bus, the medicine woman, just that living being, the duck,
13:20
the wise, generous animals, our sisters and brothers.
13:24
In fact, we can no longer begin to think that we are actors on an inert stage,
13:29
but that the world is alive
13:31
and infused with that sacred field we might measure as high amplitude alpha.
13:38
Knowing this, we live into an inspired life -
13:42
a life of meaning that is not one that we create
13:46
but meaning that is truly in the fabric of the world.
13:51
We live in an inspired life.
13:56
Isaiah, my son, had been found, named Isaiah,
14:00
for "one world" in Lakota for those who helped find him.
14:05
And yet, we still, although far less depressed
14:08
and much more full of love and connection,
14:11
had the anxiety of actually meeting him, finding him,
14:15
bringing him home.
14:17
And then one day, the FedEx came and we peeled it open
14:21
and there was the video.
14:23
We popped it in
14:24
and the most joyous little boy, full of happiness, arm around the nurse -
14:32
a love like I had never felt lifted me up,
14:37
and any remnant of depression were shards on the ground.
14:41
And together, my husband and I went to bed as parents.
14:47
That night, the presence came back -
14:51
the great sacred presence for the third time.
14:54
"If you were pregnant now, would you adopt?"
14:58
"Yes, I found my spiritual son, yes."
15:03
And that night, we conceived naturally -
15:09
his sister.
15:12
We had spiritual twins.
15:16
So when you hear the knock,
15:20
consider the invitation.
15:24
What sounds shocking, and as if the hand that takes from inside the darkness
15:31
when we walk through the door is the hand that invites
15:34
that guides and ultimately gives.
15:39
On the other side of the door is the inspired life
15:44
brought to us by the presence.
15:49
Thanks.
15:50
(Applause)

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