Lisa Miller asserts that we are suffering epidemic levels of loneliness, but humans are inherently connected through shared consciousness and spirituality.

In a personal story about her cousin, she details the transformative power of collective spiritual practices.

Scientific research underscores the tangible impact of spirituality on our lives, revealing our deep interconnectedness with all life and reinforcing the idea that we are never truly alone.

Lisa Miller: We are facing epidemic levels of isolation, of loneliness — and that is an artifact of perception. In truth, we are never alone. And we are hardwired with these neuro-circuits to be able to see that we are part of a profound unit of consciousness. Whatever our faith tradition may be, and if we are spiritual, but not religious, we all share one awakened brain. When we come into a spiritual awareness, this process leads us to give off a very specific wavelength off the back of our head, and it's that of high-amplitude Alpha.

Together with my colleagues at the Columbia University Medical School, we looked at people who are now our grandparents' age and parents' age and they gave off Alpha. But for the first time, we're now seeing people who are 16, 18, 20 years old who are not giving off Alpha. Why is this troubling? As a culture we have left a rising generation of adults who are deprived of their birthright: their deepest anchor to the spiritual nature of life.

Because Alpha goes by another name in another field: Alpha is the same wavelength as Schumann's resonance, it is the wavelength of nature, of all life. All the way around the Earth, From the Earth's crust, up one mile, we can see Schumann's resonance. And Schumann's resonance is reset by lightning, held by the ionosphere in this band of life. Lightning, breaking through the heavens, has been understood through time as the presence of God. There are about 2,000 lightnings within each day that maintains Schumann's resonance, sacred consciousness, all the way around the world.

So the spiritually-engaged brain vibrates at the same wavelength as nature, which means that felt sense of oneness that we feel in a mystical experience, in prayer, or meditation is indeed real. In my own path, right as I was coming onto these findings, I was living proof at other levels of knowing, at the level of intuition, at the level of a mystical journey. For my husband and I, we were in hot pursuit of a family — we wanted kids. And despite our deep despair when nobody came and no doctor could fix this, there was recurrent reassurance that we knew there was a child out there for us.

I have an older cousin, "Big Jane," and she called from Vermilion, South Dakota. "Hey, Little Jane, I know you've been hoping to become a family. I've gotten permission from the Lakota that you might join their healing ceremony." So I hopped on a plane and sitting there in the inipi, the medicine man's wife asked, "Why have you come?" And as we went around the inipi, each woman told of her struggle and her hopes for her son, until we got to Big Jane, and Big Jane said, "This is my cousin. She has been looking for her child now for five years. I'm wondering if we could help her." And every woman in the inipi looked me in the eye and said, "Yes." And for the first time, I was sure that I was in the right place.

We then prayed for us, we, the collective, the superordinate, and sent our prayers up with the smoke through the top of the inipi. And that night, after five years, a call came. "We have found you a son." And so our child is named Isaiah for "one world," Lakota for the people who helped us find him. We all live in a world of miracles, and they come our way when we use our awakened brain to follow the guidance, to say yes.

Scientists cannot define spirituality, but what science can do very well is point our lens at the impact of spirituality on the rest of our lives. For example, one scientist had two MRIs. She put a traditional healer in one MRI and then at a great distance, in another building, the patient to be healed, in the second MRI. As the healer started to do his or her traditional work, a predictable pattern came up on the fMRI, tracking blood flow, the healing pattern. But what is remarkable is that within an instant, in another building, the patient showed the same pattern in their fMRI, suggesting one thing: Sacred healing consciousness represented in two places.

So just like the healer and patient, we are deeply interconnected through the field of life. And through our awakened brain, we can all engage and tap in to this ultimate sacred consciousness; a consciousness that encircles the Earth and includes all fellow beings; a consciousness through which all human beings are connected. We are part of a magnificent kingdom of life. We are part of a very full world of animals, of people, of earth, and air. We are never alone. But when it feels that way, that's only because we have shut our perception down. It is a narrowing of our field of perception, and it is within an instance reach to reopen our awakened brain and perceive that at every moment, we have very grand company. We are loved and we are held, and we are never alone.