Spirituality as the Antidote to a Divided World

In a world marked by division, polarization, and rising despair, could spirituality be the missing piece we need to heal — not just individually, but collectively?

In this episode of Integrated Wisdom, Tatiana explores why materialism has left us fragmented and hopeless, and how reconnecting with our spiritual essence offers an antidote. Drawing on research from psychology, neuroscience, psychiatry, and even reincarnation studies, she makes the case that spirituality is not just personal comfort — it’s a public health resource and a cultural healing force.

You’ll learn:

• Why over-identification with labels (political, social, cultural) deepens division and despair.
• How spirituality protects against suicide and mental health struggles (including Dr. Lisa Miller’s brain-imaging research at Columbia).
• Evidence from recent reviews (2024, 2025) linking spirituality and awe to resilience, compassion, and prosocial behaviour.
• The surprising lessons from reincarnation research that challenge our attachment to identity.
• Practical ways to strengthen your own spiritual connection and apply these insights in daily life and community.

✨ This episode is both a vision and a roadmap: showing how evidence-based spirituality can become medicine for our fractured world, and how small personal choices ripple outward into collective change.

Resources & References

• Miller, L. et al., JAMA Psychiatry: Cortical thickness and spirituality.
• Frontiers in Psychiatry (2024): Spirituality and improved coping, lower suicide risk.
• SpringerLink (2025): Awe and self-compassion.
• World Health Organization: Global mental health statistics.
• University of Virginia: Reincarnation research database.

Special Invitation for Therapists

The doors to The Conscious Therapist reopen on 29 September.  If this conversation resonates and you're curious to explore more, join the waitlist and be one of the first to know when enrolment opens:

https://www.integratedwisdom.com.au/theconscioustherapist 

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Intro and Outro music: Inspiring Morning by Playsound

Disclaimer: This podcast is intended for educational purposes only. It is not intended to be treated as psychological treatment or to replace the need for psychological treatment.

Transcript

Tatiana: 0:00

Welcome to the Integrated Wisdom Podcast. I am your host, Tatiana Ola, psychologist, spiritual educator, and founder of a body of work. Devote to lead others to remembering what we never truly forgot, that science and spirit were never separate. They are H in their RY. Expressions of the same sacred architecture. This podcast is for the quiet revolutionaries, the therapists, the seekers, the spiritually discerning and scientifically curious who know that we are being called into a new paradigm for personal and collective transformation. Together we explore what it means to live a coherent. Soul led life drawing from psychology, neuroscience, epigenetics, energy medicine, and spiritual remembrance. These aren't just conversations. They are transmissions for those ready to return to what's true, to what's whole, and to what's quietly waiting beneath it. Hello and welcome back to the Integrated Wisdom Podcast. I'm Tatiana. If you joined me last week we looked at spirituality and suicide prevention and how the science and lived experience point to spiritual connection as a protective factor. And today I want to widen that lens. If spirituality guards individuals against despair, what might it offer to our communities, our institutions, and the problems we collectively face at the moment from loneliness and polarization to even climate grief. But before we dive in, I want to quickly share something with you later this month. I'm reopening the doors to the Conscious Therapist, my signature program for mental health professionals who wants to safely and ethically integrate spirituality into their practice. If this conversation resonates with you and you'd like to be the first to know when it opens, you can join the wait list. You'll find the link to join in the show notes. Right now we're living in a world where despair, division, and disconnection are everywhere you look. Materialism. The worldview that we're only our bodies, our brains, our bank accounts, and our social positions is one of the root causes of our current global crisis. It teaches us that what we have or what we've done defines our worth. It tells us that once life ends, so does everything. But when people believe that two things tend to happen. They cling tightly to the identities and labels that they've been given in this one lifetime, or they fall into despair because if suffering is meaningless, then why keep going? And what has this materialist worldview led to? A global mental health crisis with skyrocketing rates of anxiety, depression, suicide, and loneliness. Political polarization where people can't talk across differences anymore. Endless identity wars and the divisions of race, gender, wealth, and religion. We're dividing ourselves into smaller and smaller boxes and forgetting the only label that truly matters: HUMAN. And here's the truth, this fragmentation is not an accident. It is the shadow of materialism. If we believe that we are only flesh and blood, then it's easy to believe that we are fundamentally separate from one another, that my group is different from your group. That my suffering is separate from your suffering. We also reduce our capacity for connection, empathy, and collective healing. But what if these identities aren't the truth of who we are at all? What if they're just temporary costumes and the real story is much bigger than that? Let's start with scale. Mental health needs are enormous right now. The World Health Organization's Recent reports note that over 1 billion people are living with a mental health condition that's approximately one in eight. And global systems remain under-resourced, which creates urgency for prevention approaches that go beyond clinic walls. That urgency is one reason I believe that we must broaden our prevention tools to include spiritual resources, not as a replacement for clinical care, but as a complimentary evidence-based dimension. A growing body of research shows that spiritual life and spiritual practices are associated with better mental health outcomes across populations. Research in neuroscience, psychology, and even near death experiences is showing us that we are interconnected, that consciousness extends beyond the brain, and that awe, compassion and transcendence are part of our design. A 2024 review in Frontiers in Psychiatry summarizes evidence linking spirituality to improved coping, higher quality of life, and lower rates of addiction and suicidal behavior. Neuroscience adds another layer. Longitudinal brain imaging studies, including studies led from Columbia University by Dr. Lisa Miller, has found associations between sustained spiritual engagement and increased cortical thickness in regions involved in emotion regulation and stress resilience, actual physiological changes that plausibly underpin increased psychological resilience. At the same time, multidisciplinary clinic panels are recommending that spiritual care be integrated more systematically into mental health services. A 2024 Delphi study reviewing hundreds of articles concluded that spiritual determinants of health warrant structured integration into public mental health practices. That's a major shift for mainstream clinical systems, and it's an exciting one. And finally, research on awe the small self transcendent emotional state shows measurable downstream effects on self-compassion, humility, and pro-social behavior. Very recent 2025 work found that awe experiences can increase self-compassion, which is directly relevant to both individual wellbeing and how people relate in communities. So if we accept those data points, that spirituality can strengthen individuals biologically and psychologically, and that awe and transcendent experiences promote prosociality. The conceptual leap is this: what builds resilient individuals also builds resilient communities. Awe states reduce self focus and increase care for others. Rituals and shared practices bind group identity and meaning, meaning making reduces hopelessness and encourages civic engagement. That's the foundation for a vision where spirituality helps heal collective wounds. It restores purpose, increases empathy and creates practices that bring people into relationship across differences. This isn't just philosophy. The body of evidence that supports this viewpoint is only growing. And some of the most intriguing research comes from studies of children who remember past lives. At the University of Virginia, they've documented over 2,500 objectively verified cases worldwide where children describe with incredible accuracy, details of lives that they couldn't possibly have known lending support for the possibility or incarnation. What's fascinating is that in some instances, a male child may recall being a woman in a previous life, or vice versa. In one, they might be wealthy in another, poor in one, they might be white in another, black or indigenous or Asian. Collectively, the documented cases suggest that across lifetimes we inhabit every kind of role. In every kind of social category. Now, if that's true and the evidence is mounting that something is happening here that we can't just dismiss, then no single label we wear in this lifetime defines us. They're all just perspectives, roles that we have stepped into temporarily. The deeper truth is that we are evolving essences, shaped by experiences designed to move us closer to becoming unconditional love and wisdom. Imagine what could shift if we held this perspective as a culture. If instead of clinging to our divisions, we remembered that in another lifetime we might have been born into the very group that we're opposing today. That would dissolve the illusion of separateness and remind us that we are all at the core one Human family. Spirituality then becomes more than personal comfort. It becomes the medicine for our fractured world. It redefines identity, reorients us towards compassion. And lifts us out of despair by showing us that suffering isn't meaningless. It's a part of our growth as souls. And that is why spirituality, The grounded evidence-informed spirituality that I'm describing has the potential to be the antidote that we desperately need. So here's the vision and my invitation. What if we stopped seeing each other as fragments, as opposing categories or enemies locked in ideological battle and started seeing each other as spiritual beings first? What if the antidote to polarization, consumerism, and despair isn't another political platform, but a return to the wisdom that science is finally beginning to validate: that we are interconnected, purposeful, and part of something much, much larger. What if we stopped clinging to temporary identities and began living from the awareness of one shared spiritual essence. What if we stopped clinging to temporary identities and began living from the awareness of our shared spiritual essence? What if spirituality wasn't a fringe idea, but the foundation of how we saw ourselves and each other. We don't need to wait for the world to change around us. We can start living this today. Each time we step back from a label and choose to see the essence in ourselves and others, each time that we turn to practices that strengthen our spiritual core instead of numbing our pain. Each time we choose compassion over division, we are already shifting the story. And that's how the antidote begins. Not with one grand movement, but with thousands of daily choices rooted in the remembrance of who we really are. And over time those choices ripple outwards into systems, communities, and cultures. That's how we begin to rewrite the world story. Now, I will keep exploring this in future episodes, showing you not just why this matters, but how spirituality can transform areas like mental health, education, and leadership. But for now, I want to leave you with this reminder. You are not your labels. You are not your suffering. You are not your bank account, your politics, or your past. You are spirit. And remembering that truth is the beginning of healing for you and for all of us. Thank you so much for joining me for today's episode, and I hope that it has resonated and awakened something in you. I would love to hear from you about any insights or perspectives that have been sparked in you as a result of this episode. So please feel free to reach out to me either by email at hello@integratedwisdom.com au or on Instagram@wisdomwithtatiana. Let's start these conversations and normalize them. After today, we'll go back to our fortnightly schedule, and so the next episode will be published on Wednesday, the 1st of October. I look forward to speaking more to you then. Remember, we were never disconnected. Only waiting to remember. Thanks. Bye. Thank you for tuning into this episode of Integrated Wisdom. It is my sincere wish that this episode may have intrigued and inspired you to reclaim your power and step into becoming more fully integrated spiritual beings. New episodes are published every second Wednesday, and I hope that you'll continue to join us as we dive deeper into what it means to live an integrated life. If this space has stirred something in you, I invite you to subscribe, share it with those attuned to this path, and explore the full body of work at integratedwisdom.com au. You can also find me on Instagram at Wisdom with Tatiana, where the conversation continues. Until next time, stay discerning, stay curious, and let this be your reminder. You were never disconnected. Only waiting to remember.