Turn Your Deepest Pain Into Your Greatest Breakthrough | Dr. Lisa Miller

Oct 31, 2025

In this engaging discussion, Dr. Lisa Miller, a clinical psychologist and researcher specializing in spirituality and mental health, shares her transformative journey from despair to discovery. She emphasizes that deep emotional pain can be a spiritual awakening, urging listeners to see their struggles as invitations to deeper self-exploration. Lisa reveals how common feelings of restlessness signal a call to go inward rather than outward for solutions. This conversation encourages embracing depression as a pathway to a richer, more meaningful life.

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INSIGHT

Innate Spiritual Hunger Drives Quest

Spiritual hunger is an innate, genetic capacity present in everyone and drives a quest for deeper meaning.
This hunger is a divine force that propels people toward connection and significance.

INSIGHT

Pain Is The Portal To Discovery

The doorway to spiritual discovery is found right at the place of your deepest pain.
Asking raw questions like "Is love real?" can open a path to deeper truth and meaning.

ANECDOTE

A Broken Heart Sparked Her Quest

Lisa Miller describes feeling a physical heart pain after a broken heart at age 19 that sparked existential questions.
Her question "Was love real?" led her to wonder whether God was real and initiated her spiritual search.

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Check out the full episode: https://greatness.lnk.to/1841

"Right where the pain is, is the portal of entry." - Dr. Lisa Miller

Dr. Lisa Miller knows what it feels like to have your heart completely shattered. At 19, sitting with a pain so heavy in her chest she could barely breathe, she asked the most dangerous question someone in despair can ask: Is love even real? And if love isn't real, is God? That brutal honesty—that willingness to sit in the wreckage of a broken heart and question everything—became the doorway to understanding something revolutionary about human suffering. Through decades of research in neuroscience and psychology, she discovered what her own pain had been trying to tell her: depression isn't always the enemy we think it is. For over two-thirds of young adults, that crushing weight isn't a chemical malfunction to be medicated away—it's a spiritual alarm clock, banging on the door of your soul, demanding you wake up to a deeper way of living.

This conversation will shift how you see your own struggles. Lisa reveals why that restlessness you feel—the sense that your relationship, your career, your entire life just doesn't fit anymore—might not mean you need to blow everything up and start over. Sometimes the answer isn't out there in a bigger job or different partner. It's an invitation to go inward, to discover the spiritual dimension of yourself that's been hungry for something more meaningful all along. She walks through the three unavoidable bridges we all cross (early adulthood, midlife, and our elder years) where these questions become impossible to ignore, and shares exactly how to recognize when your pain is actually propelling you toward awakening rather than destruction.

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