We are wired for spirituality.

There's something emerging in psychology and neuroscience that many of us have felt in our bodies before any research confirmed it: healing involves more than just the mind. It's also spiritual.

I don't mean this in a dogmatic way or something that requires belief or ritual. I mean it in the way your body softens when you realize it's part of something bigger than the story of your pain.

This is what Dr. Lisa Miller's work explores. Her research puts language and science behind what so many of us already sense: the brain awakens when the spirit awakens. When both happen together, healing becomes not just possible but sustainable.

What the research actually shows

Miller followed a group of adults over ten years. Her findings were striking. People with a strong personal spirituality saw a 75% reduction in depression relapse over that decade.

For those with a family history of depression, people considered high-risk, the protective effect jumped to nearly 90%.

MRI imaging showed something interesting too: people with an active spiritual life had thicker cortical regions responsible for emotional regulation, resilience, and meaning-making. These are areas that typically thin out with chronic depression.

Adolescents who saw spirituality as an inner resource were 35 to 75% less likely to experience major depressive episodes.

She calls this "The Awakened Brain." A brain in relationship with something greater than itself. A brain that knows it's not alone.

And beneath all the data, something older shows up: the body's own knowing. That soft part of you that's always turned toward meaning, toward connection, toward anything that reminds you that you belong.

Why this actually matters for your healing

Talk therapy can help you understand your patterns. It names the dynamics, offers insight, sheds light on your history.

But understanding alone doesn't heal the places that were hurt before you had words for them.

Your body needs something else. Something that touches the sacred. Something that breaks the feeling of aloneness. Something that shifts your nervous system away from constant alert and toward actually feeling safe and connected.

What I see in my own work reflects what Miller's research shows: when spiritual awareness is there, the brain reorganizes. When the brain reorganizes, the body remembers safety.

This is why people experience shifts not just from talking but from praying, making art, singing, sitting near trees, or breathing with the ocean. Not because these things are "spiritual" in some trendy way, but because they create a relational field between you and the world. A field your body recognizes as home.

Nature-based spirituality: accessible and real

Spirituality is really just the experience of being connected. It doesn't need a doctrine. It doesn't need to be perfect. It doesn't even need certainty.

I use these nature-based approaches often in my work with clients navigating real transitions and big questions:

Sit with a tree. Put your back against the trunk and feel the age in its steadiness. Your nervous system learns regulation from that kind of steady presence.

Walk beside water, whether it's a river, a lake, or rain against a window. Water reminds your body about flow and the possibility of change without pushing.

Hold a stone. Something that took millions of years to form. Let it anchor you in deep time, where the urgent stuff loses its grip and your body softens.

Watch the sky at dusk. Let the changing light teach you that nothing in nature rushes from one state to another. Your healing doesn't need to rush either.

These aren't rituals based on belief. They're reminders. They reawaken the pathways Miller describes, the ones that carry resilience, grounding, and meaning.

Something to sit with

Where do you feel most connected to something larger than yourself? Is it in the forest, in art, in prayer, in silence, in movement, in your breath, or in someone else's presence?

What happens in your body when you let yourself have even one moment of that connection?

Let that be your starting point. Not a task to complete. Not a performance. Just a remembrance of what you already know.

In closing

You're not broken. You're not falling behind. Your body isn't failing you, it's guiding you toward the deeper parts of your healing.

Therapy can open the door. Spirituality, your version of it, can help you walk through.