High Functioning: Feeling Stuck? This Neuroscience Backed Recipe for Creating Your Own Spiritual Experiences Will Change Your LifeHigh Functioning: Feeling Stuck? This Neuroscience Backed Recipe for Creating Your Own Spiritual Experiences Will Change Your Life
Chasing Heroine: Addiction Recovery Podcast
Jeannine shares how a seemingly ordinary burrito in rehab became a spiritual turning point and connects it to Dr Andrew Newberg’s neuroscience-based framework for spiritual experiences. She explains how anyone in recovery can use the five elements of these experiences to shift shame, find gratitude, and move past feeling stuck.
22:13•18 May 2026
How a California Burrito Sparked a Brain-Based Spiritual Breakthrough
Episode Overview
- Spiritual experiences can be linked to measurable brain changes, including increased frontal lobe activity and quieter parietal lobes.
- Dr Andrew Newberg identifies five recurring elements of spiritual experiences: unity, intensity, clarity, surrender, and transformation.
- A simple, ordinary moment – eating a burrito after homelessness – can become life-changing when those five elements are present.
- By spotting unity, intensity, clarity, surrender, and transformation in past experiences, you can intentionally create new spiritual moments to get unstuck.
- Stressful situations, such as work challenges or pandemic pressures, can be reframed as spiritual opportunities by consciously seeking connection and meaning.
“Did my period of homelessness and drug addiction allow me to see something that was already there for really what it is? It's gratitude.”
What drives someone to seek a life without alcohol? For Jeannine, it started with a California burrito, a rehab store run, and a brain that finally stopped fighting reality for a few precious minutes. This short "High Functioning" episode of Chasing Heroine blends raw recovery storytelling with neuroscience. Jeannine walks through a vivid moment in early sobriety: sitting in a rehab van, starving, ashamed, and then suddenly overwhelmed by the taste of a simple burrito and root beer.
That small scene becomes a turning point where she starts to question whether being an addict is entirely terrible, and whether her darkest experiences might actually sharpen her sense of gratitude. She brings in the work of neuroscientist Dr Andrew Newberg, who studies neurotheology and has identified five shared elements of spiritual experiences: unity, intensity, clarity, surrender, and transformation.
Jeannine maps each of these onto her burrito moment, showing how connection with food, people, and the present moment rewired how she viewed herself and her addiction. From there, she talks about how anyone in recovery, or even just feeling stuck, can consciously seek out these five elements in everyday life – through spin classes, hikes, friendships, work, or even stressful seasons like Covid-era business closures.
Rather than chasing some grand mystical event, she suggests creating small, repeatable spiritual moments that help shift shame, unlock gratitude, and move life forward. If you’ve ever felt trapped in old stories about who you are as an addict, or worried your life is "over" because of your past, this episode offers a surprisingly practical framework for reshaping those beliefs.
It asks a simple but powerful question: what if the very experiences that broke you are the same ones that can make your life richer than you ever imagined?
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