TUESDAY, OCTOBER 14, 2025, 11 AM – 12 PM
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Two decades of peer reviewed science reveal that every human being is a foundationally spiritual being. But this endowment is 1/3 innate, leaving 2/3 to be cultivated through our environment across the course of development. When natural spirituality is strengthened, research shows profound protective benefits against the epidemic of the diseases of despair that currently plague the United States. Indeed hard-wired passages of spiritual development can involve emotional struggle, a developmental depression, that opens into spiritual awakening if we honor the journey. Spirituality also impacts positive psychology. In a study of nearly 300,000 youth, character strengths such as grit, optimism and forgiveness were found to go hand in hand with youths’ level of spiritual awareness. Over several hundred peer reviewed articles, the findings are remarkably consistent, radiantly clear when it comes to answering the question: who are we really?
Bio: Lisa Miller, Ph.D., is the New York Times bestselling author of The Spiritual Child and a professor in the Clinical Psychology Program at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is the Founder and Director of the Spirituality Mind Body Institute, the first Ivy League graduate program and research institute in spirituality and psychology, and has held over a decade of joint appointments in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University Medical School. Her innovative research has been published in more than one hundred peer-reviewed articles in leading journals, including Cerebral Cortex, The American Journal of Psychiatry, and the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.
Dr. Miller is Editor of the Oxford University Press Handbook of Psychology and Spirituality, Founding Co-Editor-in-Chief of the APA journal Spirituality in Clinical Practice, an elected Fellow of The American Psychological Association (APA) and the two-time President of the APA Society for Psychology and Spirituality. A graduate of Yale University and University of Pennsylvania, where she earned her doctorate under the founder of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, she has served as Principal Investigator on multiple grant funded research studies. Dr. Miller speaks and consults around The Awakened Brain and The Spiritual Child for the US Military, businesses (including tech, finance, HR and sales), personal development, faith based organizations, schools and universities, and for mental health and wellness initiatives.