0:02

Good morning, my friend. I hope you're doing well. Dr.

0:05

Lee Warren here with you, and it is Mind Change Monday, one of my favorite days of the week.

0:10

We're going to change your mind about one thing. We're going to talk about attention today.

0:15

Attention. It sounds so simple. What are you paying attention to, right?

0:19

But I'm telling you, I'm going to blow your mind because I've been bending my

0:23

brain this morning on a number of different things about the science of attention

0:26

and the types of of attention that we pay and what it does to our understanding

0:31

of and encounter with the world around us, with the people around us,

0:34

and even with God, how we pay attention.

0:38

Changes everything. I have a couple of shout-outs this morning. I have a couple of exciting things

0:43

to tell you. We're going to get all that done. But just this morning, I'm going to give you a little idea that's going to be

0:48

the seed of something that we're going to go deeper and deeper and deeper into,

0:51

because we're understanding that you can't change your life until you change your mind.

0:55

And when we say that, there's way more to it than just deciding to think about

0:59

one thing and not another thing. I'm going to change your mind today, and I'm going to give you a tool to think

1:04

about how we pay attention and why it matters.

1:07

And it might change everything for you. I've shed some tears this morning as

1:10

I prepared my thoughts on this, and I'm all over the place because I'm so excited and so humbled to be able

1:17

to share something with you about how our Creator designed our brains and what

1:21

we can do with that information and how it can be used to really change everything.

1:25

And before we can use any of that to our benefit, I have a question for you.

1:31

Hey, are you ready to change your life? If the answer is yes, there's only one rule.

1:36

You have to change your mind first. And my friend, there's a place where the

1:40

neuroscience of how your mind works smashes together with faith and everything

1:44

starts to make sense. Are you ready to change your life?

1:47

Well, this is the place, Self-Brain Surgery School. I'm Dr.

1:51

Lee Warren, and this is where we go deep into how we're wired,

1:53

take control of our thinking, and find real hope.

1:56

This is where we learn to become healthier, feel better, and be happier.

2:00

This is where we leave the past behind and transform our minds.

2:04

This is where we start today. Are you ready? This is your podcast.

2:08

This is your place. This is your time, my friend. Let's get after it.

2:14

Music.

2:19

All right, let's get after it. Hey, I've been reading this incredible book.

2:24

So when I talked to John Lennox the other day, Dr. John Lennox,

2:27

the Oxford mathematician, I hope you heard that episode that we released with,

2:31

I think it was on Thursday. Yeah, Thursday of last week.

2:34

John Lennox is a mathematician from Oxford and a famous apologist for the Christian

2:39

faith and writes a lot of books about science and faith and how they aren't

2:43

enemies. They're actually friends.

2:45

They're actually necessary. If you want to really understand who God is,

2:48

you need to understand science because it's so helpful.

2:51

But John and I, when we were talking off the air, he told me about this book

2:55

from Ian McGilchrist called The Matter With Things.

2:59

Now, don't go by the book. It's several thousand pages long.

3:03

It has 300 pages of references. This is an incredible magnum opus type of book. But it's about the brain and

3:09

the mind and how we see things and how his whole premise really,

3:13

going back to his previous book, The Master and His Emissary,

3:16

It's really about how we spend too much time thinking about the left side of

3:19

the brain and not enough time understanding what the right side of the brain does.

3:24

And once you understand what the two sides of the brain do, then you really

3:28

start to see the world in a different way, and you start understanding that

3:32

the things that we see and think about aren't all that there is.

3:36

And in fact, many times they're not a good representation of what really is.

3:40

And so McGilchrist's book, I'm reading it now and it's really sort of.

3:47

Overwhelming to start a book of that magnitude.

3:50

It's just ridiculously long. It has 50,500 locations in Kindle,

3:57

which correlates to several thousand pages.

3:59

So like I said, don't go read it yet. I'm just getting into it.

4:02

But every page so far, I've been like, what in the world?

4:06

It's changing my whole thought process about just everything.

4:11

And the first thing that I want to to tell you about. Well, first of all,

4:14

let's do a couple of shout outs. Today is my mother's birthday.

4:18

My mom, 81 years old today. Happy birthday, mom.

4:20

Sue Warren is a godly woman.

4:23

She is the woman that basically taught me where to look for answers.

4:27

Her and my dad gave me this deep, powerful grounding in the word.

4:31

And my mom is a very unique individual. She's had some incredible experiences.

4:36

She learned to fly a plane. She was the first woman to be licensed to fly an

4:39

airplane in McCurtain County, Oklahoma, way back in the day.

4:42

And she's had an incredible diverse set of experiences in

4:45

her life and i'm so proud of her and proud to be her son

4:48

so happy birthday mom i love you and shout out

4:51

to sue warren she's a great human being and has a lot to do

4:54

with dr lee warren that you hear every day on this podcast so happy birthday

4:57

secondly once in a while we live out way outside the city limits here in north

5:01

platte and not very many places will deliver food to us our pizza place though

5:06

pizza hut delivers to us we're We're so grateful that we can get a pizza when we need one.

5:11

So Tata and I both love pepperoni pizza. He likes black olives on his.

5:15

Lisa and I like regular pepperoni pizza. And the other day, the delivery came. It's a young lady that's delivered to

5:21

us several times before. And she's always very friendly, and we always say hello.

5:26

But when she delivered to us this week, she said, hey, by the way,

5:29

we were talking about you down at the Pizza Hut, and I looked you up,

5:33

and I started listening to your podcast. So she's been listening to Spiritual Brain Surgery and to the Dr.

5:38

Lee Warren Podcast, and she's getting a lot out of it.

5:41

So shout out to Alyssa and all the great folks down at the North Platte Pizza Hut.

5:44

We're so grateful that you deliver out here and the great work that you do,

5:48

and glad that you're listening. So a little shout out to y'all, fist bump from the whole crew out here,

5:53

Tata and Lisa and me, and we're grateful for you. So, isn't it great that we

5:57

live in a society where we can have food delivered to us?

6:00

It's really one of those creature comforts that's so great, especially when

6:05

you work hard and you live outside of town and it's not real easy to just jump

6:10

in the car and go grab something. Wonderful to have pizza delivered to your house. It's a great blessing.

6:15

So, we're thankful for that. Shout out to you, Alyssa. Okay, I'm back to this idea. I told you I shed some tears this morning and I did.

6:22

And here's why. line. The left half of your brain and the right half of your

6:27

brain, we all kind of understand that we'd have this pop culture idea that they

6:31

do different things, right? We always talk about, am I left-brained or am I right-brained?

6:35

Am I more mathematical? Am I more artistic? Am I more practical? Am I more whimsical? And we have these ideas.

6:42

And what's happened is the society has sort of taken a very complex thing and

6:49

tried to make it palatable and understandable in an easy way.

6:52

And as most things, when we try to simplify something, we turn it into something

6:56

that's just a taste of what it really is, right?

6:59

And I just want to point out to you that when you think you know something,

7:04

your ability to communicate what you know with other people sort of dumbs down

7:12

what it is that you actually know. That's not the same thing as math. You get get on a chalkboard and you write

7:18

out an equation and you can communicate almost perfectly what that means,

7:22

two plus two equals four, and the student can see on the chalkboard and you

7:26

can both be saying and completely knowing what that means, that the two plus two equals four, right?

7:33

But try to describe, let me give you an example.

7:36

Saturday morning, when the sun started coming up, the migration of multiple

7:41

bird species is in full effect here in western Nebraska.

7:45

We have an incredible viewpoint out here on Moon River Ranch.

7:48

We got the river, we got cornfields nearby, we got hay fields,

7:51

and all the birds come and land in our river, in our backyard,

7:55

and literally in the front yard on every tree branch,

7:58

every piece of ground around

8:01

us was covered with some type of bird the robins

8:05

are here they get here skinny they leave here fat the starlings

8:09

and the red-winged blackbirds and the canadian geese thousands and thousands

8:14

and thousands of canadian geese and then we saw the snow geese coming in and

8:19

then we saw in our right off the back porch two great horned owls these are

8:23

birds with five five-foot wingspans,

8:25

you know, 20 feet away from our back door.

8:28

We saw two bald eagles that morning. We saw two golden eagles that morning.

8:32

We found the nest from our spotting scope where the golden eagles have put up a nest.

8:37

We saw all of this in the span of about 30 minutes. And then the starlings started coming by.

8:42

And there's a black cloud of starlings so thick that you can't see the sunrise

8:48

behind them that goes on for about 40 minutes.

8:51

Okay. Just on and on and on. And then the sun's rising in a big red ball.

8:57

And it was a full moon the night before. And as I shared with the newsletter

9:01

subscribers, and if you're not getting the newsletter, by the way,

9:03

you're missing out. We do some good work on the newsletter.

9:06

It's read everywhere in the world every Sunday.

9:08

And I've been writing that every Sunday since 2014.

9:12

And you can sign up for free at at drleewarren.substack.com,

9:16

drleewarren.substack.com. There's also paid options. The paid subscribers get extra stuff,

9:21

more newsletters, more podcasts, archived content that's older than 60 days.

9:26

All of that stuff is for the paid subscribers because they help us pay for this,

9:29

the software and the microphones and the mixers and the website hosting and

9:32

all the stuff that it takes. It's cost me a couple of thousand dollars a month to do this work.

9:38

Not counting my time. So the paid subscribers have said, hey,

9:41

we want to help you share this to the world. We want to help you get it out

9:43

there. And there's options for those folks. But if you're not getting the newsletter, yesterday I posted a picture of the

9:48

full moon that I took through. I've got a camera that can zoom way up on the moon. You can see the craters

9:53

and everything on the detail on the moon. And right as I snapped it, a goose flew by.

9:58

So you've got this incredible picture of the shadow of a goose in front of the

10:02

full moon. And that's the the kind of thing that we get to see out here on Moon River.

10:07

And I said all that to say this, imagine if I tried to describe to you what

10:12

it felt like to see all of those birds,

10:16

the owls and the eagles and the hawks and starlings and the sound that they

10:21

make when they fly by and a whole group of starlings switches directions all at the same time.

10:27

They have some kind of electromagnetic signaling that they do this thing called

10:31

murmuration and they move like one of those balls of fish in the ocean that

10:35

you've seen on Blue Planet. It's incredible. Imagine if I try to describe that to you, like I've been doing

10:41

for the last few minutes. Whatever words that I choose using the left hemisphere of my brain to describe

10:49

something that I saw with my eyes and took in with all of my senses,

10:54

when I try to describe that to you, you're going to see a picture of it in your

10:58

your mind, a slice of it, right?

11:01

But that picture that you see will never be exactly what it was that I saw.

11:07

Or even Lisa standing a few feet to my left and Tata standing a few feet to

11:11

my right, we all saw the same set of information, but we all perceived it in

11:16

somewhat different ways. And so if we even try to describe it to each other, we're narrowing down the

11:23

experience of what we talked about, what we saw by the words that we choose

11:29

to communicate them, right? So when I tell you what it's like to see two golden eagles building a nest and

11:36

one of them carrying a mouse into the nest,

11:38

and I can see that through the scope, and I can tell you what that looked like

11:41

to me and what it felt like to me and what the sunlight on the feathers of the

11:46

golden eagle as it flew by, what that was like,

11:49

but you're going to get a picture of it that's just a little bit of information.

11:55

That allows you to sort of picture that in your mind and be,

11:58

wow, wow, that's cool. That'd be really neat to see that, right?

12:01

But you don't have the same type of emotional reaction that I have to it because you did not see it.

12:07

So, I'm just teeing this up for you. In the coming months, we're going to go

12:11

deeper and deeper. I'm writing this book on self-brain surgery.

12:13

I'm trying to use all this information to help you understand the power and

12:17

the necessity of changing your mind so you can change your life and you can really live.

12:22

So, we got an email last week from a woman who listened to my episode on the

12:27

neurobiology of suffering. suffering. She wrote in and talked about how her husband had committed suicide because

12:32

of chronic back pain and the hopelessness that he felt because nobody could

12:36

solve the problem for him. And she said, if my husband had been able to hear that episode and understand how.

12:44

Neuroplasticity can actually create pain in your spinal cord that goes to your

12:48

brain to tell you that you're hurting when you're actually not hurting,

12:50

you can understand that cognitive behavioral therapy can help unwind some of

12:54

that neuroplastic change and help you deal with chronic If my husband had heard

12:59

that, I think he might still be alive. And that's devastating to know that a little bit of information might have changed

13:05

the arc of someone's life, might have even saved their life.

13:08

That's why I'm doing this work, okay? Because I want you to know that how you attend to things,

13:14

the attention that you pay to things on a quantum level, at the level of the

13:20

molecules in that thing, how you attend to something influences and changes

13:26

what that thing becomes. Now, that sounds crazy, right? Because you say, well, I look down on my desk

13:33

at the cup of coffee there, and it's just a cup of coffee. Well, that's true, okay?

13:38

It's just a cup of coffee. But I'm telling you, if you pay attention to that

13:41

cup of coffee in a particular way, it can become more than just a cup of coffee. Let me explain.

13:48

And here's the neuroscience rule that we're going to have.

13:51

I'm trying to figure out how to lay this out because we have the Ten Commandments

13:54

of Soap Brain Surgery, and we're going to evolve those a little bit.

13:57

I got an email yesterday. Somebody asked, again, where are these all in one place? Well,

14:00

there's several episodes where we did all of them. There's one of the newsletters where we did all of them, and I'll give you an

14:05

episode this week with a re-presentation of the Ten Commandments.

14:09

We'll try to do that every few months, and as they evolve, we'll eventually

14:12

get them where they're unchanging and they're laid out and they're going to

14:15

be in the book. So once I put them in the book, I can't modify them anymore.

14:19

So I'm trying to just really put them down in a way that you will be able to benefit from.

14:25

But one of the corollaries out of making the Ten Commandments is there's a bunch

14:29

of facts that I've distilled and learned from neuroscience and from scripture

14:33

and the smashing together of them.

14:37

Things that just are and they are clearly true, but they're not commandments.

14:41

They're just things that you need to know. And one of those is we always talk

14:44

about what you're doing, you're getting better at, okay?

14:47

And what that means is when you do something, you look at the cup of coffee,

14:51

your brain starts to make synapses of all the things that you think about and

14:54

all the things that you do when you see that cup of coffee become more automated

14:58

so they become less consciously draining on your resources.

15:02

So, as I'm talking to you, I'll sometimes reach out and get my cup of coffee

15:06

and take a sip and put it back down and never actually think about the fact that I did that, right?

15:11

When you're driving to work, after you learn the route, then before long,

15:14

you're adjusting your radio, you're thinking about what you're going to talk about at work.

15:19

You're not thinking about the turns and the navigation and the movements that

15:22

you make, the stoplights and all the things that you do.

15:25

You got to slow down for the school zone and all that. that.

15:27

You don't think about that actively after you've automated the process of driving

15:31

to work because your brain needs to use that energy for something else, right?

15:36

So you're looking out for kids in the crosswalk, but you're not thinking about

15:39

the right turn that you gotta make because you just don't have to think about

15:42

it anymore because what you're doing, you're getting better at.

15:44

That's one of those facts. Well, here's another one. What you observe or how you attend,

15:50

let's use the word attend. And when I say paying attention, the attention, the process of paying attention is called attending.

15:58

So attending to something is giving it your mental energy and paying attention to it, okay?

16:04

So what you observe or attend, becomes more real or true over time depending

16:10

on your perspective on it. We call that the quantum Zeno effect.

16:15

And in quantum physics, it means when you observe a system, the system becomes

16:19

more and more true of how you observe it over time.

16:23

And that's a deep, weird sounding thing, but it's just true.

16:26

Just take it from me right now as a truth. And we've talked about it before

16:30

and we'll talk about it again. And if you want to go deeper into it, read The Mind and the Brain by Jeffrey Schwartz.

16:36

And you'll understand it on a deeper level, but from a quantum perspective,

16:39

what you attend, how you attend to something makes it more true over time.

16:45

So what you observe or attend becomes more real or true over time,

16:50

okay? So let's talk about the cup of coffee again.

16:53

I look at this, it's a cup of coffee. It's in a white Yeti that Lisa got me. It keeps it warm.

16:59

And it's just a cup of coffee. But okay, that's one way to pay attention to it, right?

17:03

Here's another way. this is a cup of black silk from Folgers Coffee Company.

17:09

It's dark roast. It's got a lot of caffeine. It's warm.

17:13

It warms me up. It makes me, helps me wake up in the morning. It calms me down.

17:19

It gives me some energy and it helps me start my day.

17:24

So now I've given you two ways to attend to this cup of coffee.

17:27

It's one kind of generic way. It's a cup of coffee, right?

17:32

Another more specific way. It's a white Yeti filled with black silk from Folgers.

17:37

Okay, now let's look at another one. Let's say that I'm an employee of the Folgers Coffee Company.

17:45

Well, now that coffee is a product that I have sold that has helped me make

17:51

my living and feed my family, right? So now I'm paying attention to that product in a very different way.

17:55

Now I've got some gratitude that I have been able to sell you this cup of coffee.

18:01

I'm an employee at Starbucks and that cup of coffee now is the way that I earn

18:06

my living or I'm a shareholder of Folgers.

18:09

And now that cup of coffee is value in return for an investment that I worked hard and made.

18:16

It's something that I'm using for my retirement, and I'm holding on to this

18:21

idea that the more people that drink that cup of coffee, the better and more

18:24

comfortable my retirement might be someday. See, I'm paying attention to the same thing in a variety of different ways.

18:30

Now, I'm a farmer in Columbia, and that cup of coffee represents my life's work and my family's land.

18:36

And when I see it, I think about my grandfather on his knees,

18:39

and he's planting and harvesting and pruning and doing that hard work of growing

18:44

those coffee beans up in the mountains. And that company has come along and purchased our beans and renewed their lease

18:51

for our land, and they're feeding our children. And that produces the income that we're used to build the school and build the clinic in our village.

18:57

And this cup of coffee represents livelihood, and it represents family,

19:02

and it represents memory, and it represents history for me.

19:06

And so now what I'm doing is I'm paying attention in different ways.

19:10

And in every one of those different ways that I pay attention to this cup of

19:13

coffee, it has an entirely different reality.

19:16

And the more I think about it along that particular line, the more real and

19:21

true that thing becomes in my life. Does that make sense to you?

19:26

Okay, now just put that aside for a second. Let's talk about a different kind of attention.

19:31

There's sort of two ideas with intention. First is the brain is asymmetrical.

19:37

There's two halves of the brain. They're connected by a white matter bundle

19:40

in the middle called the corpus callosum. And the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere have different roles and different jobs.

19:47

So McGilchrist says the brain is asymmetrical in almost everything that could

19:51

be measured at many levels in both its structure and function.

19:55

The two sides of the brain are not the same. Why?

19:58

We'll get to that. that the power of the brain exists only through making connections

20:01

between neurons. So we talk about synapses all the time.

20:05

And the whole game with neuroplasticity is that your brain can create new synapses

20:10

between neurons and new networks between neurons influenced by the things that

20:15

you think about, feel, experience, navigate.

20:19

And overcome, okay? Those synapses are the whole game with the brain.

20:24

If you didn't have synaptic connections, it would basically be only as good

20:27

as the neurons and initial connections that were in it when it was created or

20:33

evolved, if you want to say it that way, if you're one of those folks that thinks

20:37

we came from the cosmic goo, okay? So if your brain didn't have the ability to change its connections,

20:43

it would be like one of those old handheld video games that can't be programmed.

20:47

It's just, it is what it is. It's got the program in it. You can't change it. And it's only good for what

20:52

it was initially made, how it was initially made for one purpose.

20:57

But your brain has the ability to make connections and that's what makes it special.

21:02

And you can change those connections by changing how you think.

21:05

Think and that's why it's so important to learn

21:08

how to change your mind under your control because it

21:11

will change outside of your control if you

21:14

don't direct that process right if you don't shape your brain it'll be

21:16

shaped for you because that process of neuroplasticity is happening all the

21:20

time whether you attend to it or not and the principal connection between the

21:24

left and the right is the corpus callosum and that has a mostly inhibitory function

21:30

in other words the corpus is close and mostly calms down crosstalk between the two hemispheres.

21:36

We'll get to more about that in coming months. So let's talk about attention for just a second.

21:43

McGilchrist gives this example, and it's a good one. If you're a bird, you've got a problem.

21:48

You've got to eat and survive without being eaten.

21:51

We see it out here on the river all the time. The bald eagle will jump down

21:54

and kill a duck or snipe, swoop down and take out a goose.

21:59

And the goose was just trying to survive, and the eagle got him because he wasn't

22:03

paying enough attention. So the goose, the bird, has a job all the time of surviving without being killed, okay?

22:12

So there's sort of two ways it has to pay attention, and you do too.

22:16

There's one that's this narrow beam, precisely focused type of attention.

22:21

And a good example McGilchrist gives us is the bird has to be able to look down

22:25

at the ground and see one seed amidst all these rocks and pebbles and grass blades on the ground.

22:32

The bird has to be able to focus in and see that seed and swoop down and fly

22:37

precisely to it and grab that seed and fly away and eat and survive without being killed. Okay?

22:44

So it has to be able to use a narrow laser focus and see something clearly amidst

22:49

all this other information that's there. But at the same time, it has to have a very different type of attention,

22:56

and that's this broad, open, sustained, vigilant attention to everything around it.

23:02

So it's got to be able to focus on that seed, but also be able to see threats

23:07

coming, not fly into the window, not get itself killed by something in the neighborhood.

23:12

Right? So at the very same time, two types of attention happening,

23:17

one very precise and focused, one very open and broad and vigilant,

23:21

and that's what's happening with the two sides of your brain.

23:24

The Germans have two words for knowledge.

23:32

There's two words for knowledge. One is kennen, K-E-N-N-E-N,

23:37

and the other one is wissen, W-I-S-S-E-N, kennen and wissen.

23:42

And they're different and they're important. It's important to know the difference.

23:45

English, unfortunately, we use the word know, and we have a bunch of different

23:51

things that that can mean, and there's a lot of nuance in it.

23:54

But when we say know, we could either mean that we know a particular fact or

24:00

that we can know the experience of something or have a relationship with someone or have a big,

24:08

large set of things that we are familiar with about that thing or that person.

24:14

And this is going to come into play again. We're going to have an episode about

24:17

this knowledge, this type of knowledge you get from left and right brain.

24:21

And it's about how we know God.

24:24

And how we know truth, and how we know and experience other people.

24:28

So when the German says kennen, it means that I know, I'm familiar with,

24:34

I understand the ways of, I'm aware of and around this person or this thing enough that I have a working

24:42

knowledge of the nuances and the depth of it.

24:46

And wissen is this, I know a fact. The bird says there's a seed on the ground

24:51

down there, I know that, that's wissen. But the bird also can say...

24:56

I'm in a big, wide world, and there's a lot of things out here,

24:59

and there's all kinds of different experiences and sights and sounds,

25:03

and I need to be aware of all of them at the same time if I want to stay alive. That's Kenan.

25:07

That's this I know, I'm familiar with, I understand.

25:11

There's a lot more happening here than just that seed on the ground down there,

25:15

the fact that there's a thing I can particularly focus on, okay?

25:18

So set that knowledge deal aside for a minute, and let's get back to attention.

25:23

We're going to wrap this up today. day. I'm telling you, this is tip of the iceberg kind of stuff, but it's incredibly important.

25:29

And I told you a while ago that I shed some tears this morning,

25:32

and here's what it is, okay? Understanding that there is more than one way to attend to something,

25:39

and that understanding that the way that you attend to something on a quantum

25:45

level makes it more and more true.

25:47

How you perceive it becomes more and more true about what it is over time, okay?

25:53

If you think think, let's bring it down to brass tacks, Brent.

25:57

If you think that the trauma or the tragedy or the massive thing or the hardship

26:03

or the why is my whole life so hard thing is all that it is,

26:08

that your whole experience is about the thing that happened to you or that that

26:13

thing that happened is only one thing. It's only tragedy. It's only trauma.

26:18

It's only this massive wound wound in my heart. It seems like it'll never get

26:21

better. That's what's going to become true in your life, okay?

26:26

And what I want to give you today is just this little idea, okay?

26:31

This little idea that's actually a nuclear bomb's worth of energy to transform

26:36

your thinking and transform your life and redeem your hope and plant your feet

26:41

solidly back on the ground again of a life that can look look like something

26:46

that might even involve joy and abundance again is this.

26:51

Even if you can't shift your attention right now.

26:56

To a different reality, okay? Your son's been stabbed to death.

27:01

Your husband has glioblastoma. Your boy drowned in the lake.

27:04

Your husband committed suicide. Even if that's all you can see right now, it's critically important for you

27:11

to be able to acknowledge, at least to yourself, that there's more than one

27:15

level of attention that could be paid to that thing.

27:19

And that sometime, as you progress through grief,

27:23

sometime in the future, if it's not right now, Now, there will come a time when

27:28

you're able to contemplate some of those other ways in which you could pay attention to this thing.

27:34

The difference between, we talk about the crashers and the climbers and the

27:37

dippers and the untouchables in my book, Hope is the First Dose,

27:40

the different ways that people respond to trauma and the different ways that

27:44

we progress through our life after we face these massive things.

27:47

And I think, I'm just starting to sort of be able to articulate this idea,

27:51

but I think that what might separate those different responses is the ability

27:56

that we have to attend differently to things at different times, okay?

28:01

This cup of coffee right now is a cup of coffee that's waking me up.

28:05

But it could also be all those other things that we talked about.

28:09

And all of those things are equally true about this cup of coffee at the very

28:13

same time. The seed on the ground is food for the bird to help it survive.

28:17

But if it only uses that narrow beam of attention, it won't see the eagle coming that will kill him.

28:23

You've got to be able to shift and be aware of more than one type of attention

28:28

at the same time. And here's what I want to give you today as we part.

28:33

If you can see that this shattered world that you have after this massive thing

28:40

has happened could also be, at the same time and equally true,

28:45

could also be God tilling up the soil of your heart to plant something there

28:52

that at some point in the future, through the watering of your tears,

28:56

will grow a crop that will change the world for you or your family.

29:01

If you can see that, even if you can't feel it or process it or know it,

29:05

if you can just trust God enough to know that when He says, I am with you and

29:09

I'm close to you when you're brokenhearted and I'm doing things on your behalf

29:13

and I'm working things out for your good, if you can find that all those promises,

29:17

if you can just acknowledge that, yes, God's promises are true,

29:20

I can't feel them right now, I can't think about them right now.

29:22

I can't pay attention to them right now. But I know they're there.

29:25

And I know that there's a crack in the door with a little light down there.

29:29

And someday I'm going to be able to shift my attention and think about the fact

29:32

that maybe there's something being planted in me right now that will result in something good.

29:36

I can tell you from my experience 11 years later, I wasn't thinking about starting

29:41

a podcast and writing books and helping somebody I've never met before maybe

29:46

not commit suicide when my son died.

29:48

I was thinking about how painful it was that my son died and how hard that was

29:52

and where was God in that moment. And that's what I was thinking of.

29:57

But at some point, through the prehab that I had put in my heart before and

30:02

the self-brain surgery that I learned how to do,

30:04

Lisa and I shifting our focus and our attention to other things and the community

30:09

we built and the rehab that we went through and the hard work of wellness that

30:13

we have put on for 11 years now and the coming alongside us of our great physician to help try to heal us.

30:19

We've been able to shift our focus and see, yes, when our hearts were ripped

30:23

open, he was in fact planting some things there.

30:27

Yes, in fact, that loss was more than one thing. Yes, Mitch's life didn't end

30:32

that day. Actually, it helps today. It's serving and helping people and providing. His story is helping people in

30:41

real time throughout the world 11 years later.

30:46

I can shift my attention and I can see that God was faithful and he was there.

30:51

And so if you can then learn to, instead of having to wait 11 years to see that

30:56

other things can be true. If you can just learn this little toolkit, this little bit of self-brain surgery,

31:02

this little mind shift that all the time I'm engaging more than one type of attention.

31:09

And you can start to then just allow some hope to be planted there in that moment.

31:15

And you can shift from this listen where I know a fact and I'm in suffering

31:19

right now to this canon idea that I know that my Redeemer lives.

31:24

And even in this moment when things are hurting and even when I can't pay enough

31:27

attention to it, I know that there's more to this story than I'm able to articulate right now.

31:33

And that little bit of mind shift will give you the hope to keep moving forward

31:38

or to at least know that you'll be able to move forward again at some point, my friend.

31:43

We have to shift our attention. There's two halves of your brain.

31:46

And we've told one story in our society for a long time that the left side is

31:51

the one that we need to be paying attention to. But I'm telling you the right side has its role

31:55

and its place and it's paying attention so you don't get killed by everything

32:00

that comes along and every massive thing that happens because you can shift

32:04

your attention to a broader perspective and you can see that there's more to

32:08

this story than just the pain that you're feeling right now and the good news

32:11

of all of that my friend is that you can start today.

32:15

Music.

32:21

Hey, thanks for listening. The Dr. Lee Warren Podcast is brought to you by my

32:25

brand new book, Hope is the First Dose. It's a treatment plan for recovering

32:30

from trauma, tragedy, and other massive things.

32:33

It's available everywhere books are sold. And I narrated the audio books.

32:37

Hey, the theme music for the show is Get Up by my friend Tommy Walker,

32:41

available for free at TommyWalkerMinistries.org.

32:44

They are supplying worship resources for worshipers all over the world to worship

32:49

the Most High God. And if you're interested in learning more,

32:52

check out TommyWalkerMinistries.org.

32:55

If you need prayer, go to the prayer wall at WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer,

32:59

WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer.

33:02

And go to my website and sign up for the newsletter, Self-Brain Surgery,

33:06

every Sunday since 2014, helping people in all 50 states and 60-plus countries

33:12

around the world. I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and I'll talk to you soon. Remember, friend, you can't change your

33:16

life until you change your mind. And the good news is you can start today.