Why We Feel Lost (And What Changes When We Look At Life in a Broader Context)

After a period of stepping away, this episode marks the beginning of a new direction for the Integrated Wisdom Podcast.

At the centre of this shift is a single question:

What changes when we explore human life through a spiritual lens?

Not spirituality as religion or ideology—but as a broader context for understanding meaning, consciousness, and the nature of our experience.

In this episode, I introduce the deeper inquiry that will guide all future conversations, and why this lens matters now more than ever.

We are living in a time of uncertainty—where many of the structures, beliefs, and assumptions we have relied on are beginning to collapse. While destabilising, this also creates an opening: a chance to rethink how we understand ourselves, each other, and the world we are shaping.

Up until now, most of us have interpreted life through a combination of:

• psychological conditioning
• cultural influence
• biological processes

But there is another lens—one that has largely been overlooked in mainstream discourse:

The spiritual lens.

When we include this perspective, something shifts.

Emerging research is beginning to show that experiences of connection, transcendence, and meaning are not abstract or separate from our biology—they have measurable effects on the brain, the body, and how we relate to ourselves and others.

This matters, because it changes what becomes possible.

This episode is an invitation.

A starting point for a deeper exploration into what it means to be human when we no longer separate science, psychology, and spirituality—but begin to see them as different expressions of the same underlying reality.

What This Episode Explores

• Why uncertainty is creating an opportunity for deeper reflection
• The hidden “lenses” shaping how we interpret our lives
• What is meant by a spiritual lens (beyond religion or belief)
• The emerging science of spiritual experience and its biological impact
• How modern life drives disconnection—and why that matters
• The limitations of individualism and what may be emerging in its place
• How expanding our perspective can transform how we live and relate

A New Direction for the Podcast

Moving forward, each episode will explore different aspects of human life through this expanded lens—drawing from:

• science
• psychology
• lived human experience
• and the deeper dimensions of meaning and consciousness

Invitation to Go Deeper

Upcoming live session:

Rethinking Mental Health Through a Spiritual Lens
📅 Wednesday, 29 April

This session will explore how our understanding of mental health shifts when we include a broader context of meaning, consciousness, and human experience.

You can find the details and register via the link: https://www.integratedwisdom.com.au/rethinking-mental-health

Contact Tatiana:

You can now send me your comments or questions, to hello@integratedwisdom.com.au or you can also find me on Instagram  https://www.instagram.com/wisdomwithtatiana/

Be sure to SHARE this episode to anyone you feel may be interested or benefit from this content.

And please don't forget to hit SUBSCRIBE to keep up to date with our episodes and give us a RATING below. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

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 Da Silva, psychologist, spiritual educator, and founder of a body of work devoted to lead others to remembering what we never truly forgot, that science and spirit were never separate. They are each in their own way, 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 to the Integrated Wisdom Podcast. I'm so glad to have you with me today, and this is a very long time coming. some of you may have noticed that I had to step away from the podcast for the last few months, mainly for personal reasons, just dealing with these challenges that life will throw at us from time to time. But this period where I've been able to take a step back has also given me the opportunity and the space to think more deeply about the work that I'm doing, the focus of the work, and really reflect on what I want the future of this work to be. Particularly given everything that's going on in the world right now. All the question marks that are hanging around in terms of not just what is happening currently and how it's all going to unfold, but I think even, if we look for further ahead, just trying to figure out what we can expect from the future, I think we're all having a lot of trouble thinking about what that's all going to look like, and there's a lot of uncertainty and, you know, as human beings, we don't do well with uncertainty. So I've been really thinking about how at the moment there is a real kind of opportunity to rethink so many things. That's the one positive that comes out of, open-ended questions. It gives us the opportunity to, to really think more broadly, think outside the square and see beyond the obvious, if we're willing. So this time away has given me the opportunity to really think about that and what it helped me do is refine the central question that I believe underpins all of my work. And that is what changes when we place human life in a broader context or when we look at human life through a spiritual lens. That's really what's at the heart of the work that I do. I think currently up until now, we all have different ways in which we interpret our individual lives and our lives more broadly, the way that we interpret social events, historical events, worldwide events, and many of these perspectives are influenced by a variety of things. Some of those lenses, if you like, that we use to make sense of our lives and what we experience and witness are shaped or informed by, you know, psychological factors. Some of our upbringing experiences, in some ways our traumas, our personalities. There's many psychological elements that will shape how we see the world, but there are also cultural elements that influence the lens that we use or the interpretations that we make about what we experience and what we witness and. Lastly, there's also the biological lens. there are processes, biochemical processes that happen in our bodies that also, whether we are aware of them or not, are having an influence in the way that we perceive our experiences, both on an individual and on a broader context. But a lot of these lenses, whilst we know we can take a step back and we can think about, okay, yes, of course. Uh, as a person with certain types of experiences, I will, I will have a particular lens through which I see the world in, or I see myself in the world through. But I don't think that we are all very conscious of those lenses. A lot of the time we, we take them for granted a little bit because it's just, it's what we know. So, you know, they're all operating in the background a little bit, and so I think. a lot of the turmoil that we've been witnessing, not just currently, but I think even in the years leading up to now, has really been starting to ask people to think about what are the lenses that we're using to interpret our experiences, to make assumptions about others, and how many of those are conscious and how many of those are unconscious or implicit? You know, what are the things that we're carrying the beliefs that we might be holding or. Interpretive lenses that we might be holding that we're not even aware of. Right. There's been a big social movement, I think across the world really in the last, oh, probably 10 years, maybe a little bit, maybe a little bit longer, but it's been really ramping up more recently that's been consistently asking people to think about these things. But one lens that hasn't really been looked at, and I think is very, very pertinent. And a lot of the advances in neuroscientific research are starting to really demonstrate just how pertinent it really is, is the spiritual lens. So what do I mean by spiritual? What I don't mean, let's start with that, is I don't mean religion, and I don't mean ideology, right. Some of those lenses actually come under the umbrella of those other lenses that I mentioned. Culture, our psychology. What I'm really talking about when I refer to a spiritual lens is, I guess contexts that are all about meaning, um, the role of our consciousness and, you know, where our consciousness needs to sit at the center. Instead of the periphery, which is often where it sits when we talk about these things. And I guess just a deeper context for our experiences themselves. And this is one of the things that I'm finding fascinating with the science, is that it's really helping us to understand that a lot of experiences that have that sort of transcendent element that help us, um. Feel connected to something higher than ourselves, which is, you know, almost the, the agreed definition of what a spiritual experience is. They have biological implications. There are things that happen in our body, you know, in our brains that correlate directly in and are influenced directly by those experiences. And those in turn then have impacts on how we feel about ourselves, how we feel about our lives, how we feel about others around us. and so I think it's very important that we include this broader lens because when we do that, it shifts everything about our perceptions, about our experiences. It allows us to be able to reach different interpretations about our experiences i n a way that might alleviate suffering, for example. And that's just one way. There are many other, other ways which I, you know, I'm really excited to be exploring moving forward. But it may also lead us to learn to be more comfortable with uncertainty or find complexity in life that is unavoidable to be more tolerable. You know, that is one of the things that's really standing out in the research that's being done with spiritual experiences of the neurobiological imprint of that. It's, it's been really exciting and interesting to see how many processes in our brains that are involved in managing and tolerating uncertainty and sitting in ambiguity are impacted by these spiritual experiences in a positive way. But I think also more importantly is that having the addition of this spiritual lens allows us to feel more empowered in our lives generally. I think it allows us to start taking back our connection to ourselves, our connection to others, which really, when you think about how currently our social structure has been set up, we're feeling very disconnected, very disconnected from each other. Definitely. There's so much conflict in the world right now. But we're so disconnected from ourselves and everything in our modern society is currently working to do that, right? All the ways in which we're overstimulated, all the ways in which our attention is constantly being hijacked. All the ways our nervous system is flooded with, stress hormones and the demands that are too much for us to carry on a day-to-day level. And that lead us to just numbing out, right? And when we numb out, we disconnect from our essence. And when we disconnect from our essence, we're no longer driving the vehicle of our lives. We're being led right in autopilot. So I think when we are all given the opportunity to, to take a step back, to have this broader perspective. It gives us the opportunity. It doesn't guarantee you, but it certainly gives us the opportunity to start to be more intentional with how we, how we engage with our lives, what we prioritize, what we feel we're able to to let go of. It doesn't serve us as we become more able to see this broader content. It allows us to be more intentional with what we pay attention to, with how we show up in our lives, with what we decide matters. But I think also, and this is probably one of the most important things right now, is that it will allow us, to see through the illusions they're being perpetrated to divide us. So this additional lens can help us to rethink virtually all aspects of our lives, our relationships to ourselves, our relationships to others, our communities, our work, even to the planet. You know, for me personally, I guess one example that really stands out is I can't help but but notice that we seem to be going through a period of transition in the world. Where so many of the things that we have held to be true, that we have believed to be true for very long periods of time are collapsing. And of course, in the, in that collapse, there is a lot of uncertainty, a lot of questions about like, what does that mean? If those things weren't true, what actually is true? And, you know, what does this mean for me as a person, but what does it mean for the world, for my community, for my family? For the future generations. All these questions are being asked Right now, We're just floating in this sea of uncertainty and we can't see. It's very foggy because everything that we had relied on to hold us upright, to keep us afloat is slowly being stripped from us. But for me, I believe that now this also gives us the opportunity to create something completely new, something that will better sustain us, that will help us to come together and to work cohesively. And I will be exploring this more, more deeply as we move forward. But I think one thing that's starting to become really clear is this culture of individualism isn't serving us right? We've been led down this. This, this dead end street that's only caused more suffering, more inequality, more confusion, and more loss of meaning. And we have no way, it's an existential threat now to continue down this path. We have no way to keep going this way. In fact, everything that's happening right now is happening to truly collapse those viewpoints. But we haven't yet been shown what replaces it. And I think this is where it, it's exciting to have a broader perspective about what's possible because then we can start to look at, okay, what do we know is true? That's where we need to begin. What do we know to be true? And one thing that we know to be true is that when we have, or when we engage with spiritual experiences. And again, just to emphasize here, you, I'm not talking about religion or ideology, though, of course, on an individual level, they have a place, I'm not trying to denigrate that at all, but the broader spiritual experiences that we think of when we think about transcendence, when we think about being in nature, when we think about feeling connected to something higher than ourselves, that's independent from a religious or an ideological context. Next. Those experiences have a measurable, objective positive impact on our biology and in the way that we interact with others. So that is something we know to be true. If we start from that premise, then we can start to build on, okay, then what does that mean if we create structures and systems and institutions that work with what we know to be true, with what we know to help us thrive, that support us, that become sustainable in the long term. How does that allow us to reconstruct or redefine the society that we live in? that's one thing that I see as exciting and it's what I want my work to be exploring moving forward through writing through these conversations that we have here, and in future sessions that I will host. So this first episode for 2026 is really an invitation to you, the listener, to join me in this exploration, in this visioning of what's possible. Moving forward. Each episode will explore different elements of human life through this broader spiritual lens. But of course, I'm still going to be drawing on science and psychology. And really what I'm interested in is these three lenses and how when we pull them all together, what they allow us to see what becomes possible in terms of helping us resignify what it means to be human and also to help us explore how we might want to redefine our lives in a way that both empowers and serves all of us. And so just before I go, one of the areas that these questions become particularly interesting is the element of mental health. if you'd like to explore that more deeply. I'm hosting a live session called Rethinking Mental Health through a spiritual lens. And it's going to be held on Wednesday, the 29th of April. So I will add the link and some further details to the show notes. And if you're curious about exploring that more deeply, I would love to have you join me. But that is all I have for you today. Thank you so much for joining me. I hope you all have a lovely week and I'll see you soon. 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@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.