Awe is a core spiritual experience. When we experience awe, we are deeply moved, often to a place beyond thought. It feels good and important at the same time. And moments of awe and wonder can change a life.
Awe is the focus of this fascinating piece in the NYT, from which I have excerpted a few paragraphs:
“In his book, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life, Dr. Dacha Keltner writes that awe is critical to our well-being — just like joy, contentment and love. His research suggests it has tremendous health benefits that include calming down our nervous system and triggering the release of oxytocin, the “love” hormone that promotes trust and bonding.”
“Awe is on the cutting edge” of emotion research, said Judith T. Moskowitz, a professor of medical social sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. Dr. Moskowitz, who has studied how positive emotions help people cope with stress, wrote in an email that “intentional awe experiences, like walks in nature, collective movement, like dance or ceremony, even use of psychedelics improve psychological well-being.”
… Awe wasn’t one of the six basic emotions — anger, surprise, disgust, enjoyment, fear and sadness — identified back in 1972, Dr. Keltner said. But new research shows that awe “is its own thing,” he said. Our bodies respond differently when we are experiencing awe than when we are feeling joy, contentment or fear. We make a different sound, show a different facial expression. Dr. Keltner found that awe activates the vagal nerves, clusters of neurons in the spinal cord that regulate various bodily functions, and slows our heart rate, relieves digestion and deepens breathing.
It also has psychological benefits. Many of us have a critical voice in our head, telling us we’re not smart, beautiful or rich enough. Awe seems to quiet this negative self-talk, Dr. Keltner said, by deactivating the default mode network, the part of the cortex involved in how we perceive ourselves.
But, Dr. Keltner said, even his own lab experiments underestimate the impact of awe on our health and well-being. If we can see these biological responses in experiments, he said, “just imagine what happens when you are watching a baby being born, or you encounter the Dalai Lama.”