0:02

Hey, Lisa. Hey, Lee. It's good to see you today.

0:06

It's good to see you too. Will you help me with something? Of course.

0:09

I can't remember what day it is. It's Frontal Lobe Friday.

0:13

Good morning, my friend. Dr. Lee Warren here with you. It's Frontal Lobe Friday.

0:17

We're going to do a little self-brain surgery today. We're going to have a talk

0:20

about attention and perspective about life and war and how we heal.

0:26

And we're going to have a good talk about all that stuff. We're going to talk

0:29

a little bit about the difference between your left frontal lobe and your right

0:32

frontal lobe and what it has to do with attention and what attention and perspective have to do on life.

0:38

And we might even get into a little bit about war and peace and life in general.

0:43

But before we do any of that, I have a question for you.

0:47

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

0:52

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

0:56

neuroscience of how your mind works smashes us together with faith and everything starts to make sense.

1:02

Are you ready to change your life? Well, this is the place, Self-Brain Surgery School.

1:06

I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and this is where we go deep into how we're wired.

1:10

Take control of our thinking and find real hope. This is where we learn to become

1:14

healthier, feel better, and be happier. This is where we leave the past behind and transform our minds.

1:20

This is where we start today. Are you ready?

1:23

This is your podcast. This This is your place.

1:26

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

1:30

Music.

1:35

All right, are you ready to get after it? It's Frontal Lobe Friday.

1:38

It's one of my favorite days of the week. Been a long week. We went to Florida and spoke at First Presbyterian Church

1:44

and all the wonderful people down there on Monday.

1:46

And I'll have a video to share with you soon to see that if you weren't able

1:50

to join us on the live stream. And we had an incredible spiritual brain surgery podcast with Christopher Cook

1:56

about his beautiful new book, Healing What You Can't Erase.

1:59

And congratulations, we have chosen the three winners of that book,

2:03

Hope from Madison, Georgia, Georgia, Linda from Cleveland, Wisconsin,

2:06

and Mary Beth from Blue Hill, Maine, will be receiving free copies of Christopher's book from Brett and the wonderful

2:13

people over at Waterbrook. And it's going to be a game-changing book.

2:18

So I encourage you to read it. If you haven't heard that episode,

2:20

go over to Spiritual Brain Surgery and check out the episode I had on Tuesday with Christopher Cook.

2:25

And then we had a good day on Wednesday. We did a lot of manual labor outside

2:30

and with our friends, Kristen and Al, and their son, Vince, came over and helped us.

2:34

We had 10 pallets of mulch to distribute around this property.

2:38

So we did a lot of tractor driving and mulch spreading and a lot of that sort

2:42

of manual stuff that you do in the springtime. And then we had a day in the office yesterday and met a lot of incredible patients

2:49

and scheduled a lot of surgery. And then today we'll be in the operating room doing some brain surgery.

2:54

So pray for us about that and about our patient, for our patient.

2:57

And right now, we have a moment to sit and talk about life.

3:01

We're going to talk about your frontal lobe and the type of attention and perspective

3:05

that you get from your left and your right side of your frontal lobe.

3:09

Or I should say the left and the right frontal lobes, the two separate lobes of your brain.

3:14

And they're different. So we've got one more email I want to share with you

3:18

before we get into it. And it's going to help us kind of frame the conversation for today.

3:22

We've got an incredible email from a listener named Jennifer.

3:25

Jennifer said this, I'm so very thankful for your podcast and tell everyone

3:29

about the things I'm learning. I'm a bit of a nerd when it comes to how the brain works, and I love hearing

3:34

all your insights into science, brain function, and how all that comes together in the scriptures.

3:39

It is fascinating, and although I'm not dealing with a difficult time right

3:42

now, I feel much more equipped to handle things when it happens.

3:46

That's a good point Jennifer made. We're not all going through trauma or tragedy or massive things all the time.

3:52

In fact, I hope that you're not. But we still need strategies and tools and tips for how to navigate the normal

3:58

days and the days when things are hard.

4:01

And the truth is we're always in the

4:04

middle of a war you may not feel that you may not be aware of it and that's

4:08

one of the i think one of the enemy's tricks is to get us to not be aware of

4:11

it but you are constantly in a war for your mind for your mindset for your heart

4:17

for the attention that you pay to your life and the things that happen and the

4:20

people around you and for your generations.

4:23

There's a constant spiritual war that's being fought and if you don't believe

4:26

that stuff if If you're not into spiritual things or you're not sure what you

4:30

believe or if you're not really convinced that there's much more to life than

4:34

just the vast emptiness of space and there's not much more to you than the electrical

4:39

impulses of the neurons in between your ears,

4:42

then you may not appreciate that this is a spiritual war.

4:45

But I think you will at least agree that you have a constant voice in your head,

4:51

a constant battle to maintain focus,

4:54

to find a way to be resilient when things are hard, to overcome and combat that

4:59

negative, nagging voice that we all hear that's criticizing or blaming or reminding

5:03

us of someplace we've been or someplace we wish we were.

5:07

And if that's the case, then yeah, maybe you're not actually going through something

5:11

hard right now, but there's a constant battle for the attention and the effort

5:16

and energy that you place on dealing with your thoughts.

5:19

And that is why we need to learn self-brain surgery. Here's the rest of Jennifer's email.

5:23

My word for the year is perspective. And it's amazing how much insight I have

5:28

gotten from your podcast on this topic. My husband and I are avid hikers, and right now is the best time in Arizona

5:34

to hike. The other day, I was noticing that there are times when I'm hiking,

5:38

specifically going across the water, when I get scared to take the next step.

5:43

It's mainly because I'm focused right in front of me and cannot see a good place to put my foot.

5:49

Many times, my husband graciously comes over to give me a shoulder to hold onto to get me across.

5:54

However, I have found that when I look ahead on the trail a few feet,

5:58

I can see a way to get through and I don't get stuck, but simply can go across without hesitation.

6:05

This is a really good point that Jennifer makes. Sometimes we're so focused

6:10

on the one step in front of us, the one problem, the one hole,

6:14

the one stream, the one mud pit, the one IED in the path that we can't see a way around it because all we can

6:23

see is the thing in front of us, the thing that's happened, the thing we're

6:27

about to step on, the object or obstacle that's in our way.

6:31

And I want you to remember that attention is the way that we focus our minds

6:38

on what we're dealing with and how we,

6:41

the set of tools that we use to bring to bear on applying our mental energy

6:45

to navigating that path. That's attention. Okay.

6:50

Perspective is somewhat different than attention.

6:53

Perspective is a set of biases and things that we bring to every experience

6:59

and encounter that we have in our life. So perspective has to do with worldview, with our past, with our family,

7:06

with our genetics, with our culture, with our race, with our religion,

7:09

with our belief systems. All that stuff, perspective has to do with all those things, okay?

7:15

So perspective and attention are related, obviously, but they're not the same thing.

7:21

And we talk on the Spiritual Brain Surgery Podcast sometimes.

7:23

We talk about what we believe and why we believe it and how to defend it and

7:28

use science and faith to do so. So, and one of the things we talk about in spiritual

7:32

brain surgery is the way that we read scripture.

7:35

And there's a thing called exegesis, which is where you read a text to try to

7:40

extract everything from it that you can learn something from,

7:42

everything out of the text that the text offers.

7:45

And then you can apply that to your own life or agree with it or disagree with

7:49

it or believe it or not believe it.

7:52

But you actually try to see what the text says, not just scripture,

7:56

but anything that you read. You actually want to just read it for what the author

7:59

put there to see what it actually says and then decide how to apply it.

8:05

That's exegesis, and that's a great way to study scripture. But there's another

8:09

thing called eisegesis, E-I-S, eisegesis.

8:12

And eisegesis is when we read something, particularly scripture,

8:17

but anything, and we have a filter, a set of lenses through which we see that

8:21

text, and we interpret it and apply it based on our own biases and our own ideas.

8:27

And the problem is you can make anything say anything if you read it from a

8:32

particular perspective. So again, perspective has to do with our past,

8:36

our biases, our belief systems, our experiences, all that stuff.

8:40

So if you approach a situation, a text, a scripture,

8:44

a problem in your life from a particular point of view, and you look at it from

8:48

a particular point of view, and you apply your own set of filters to it,

8:52

you're going to always see it in the same way.

8:55

There's a really interesting quote from Richard Tarnas. us, our worldview is

9:01

not simply the way we look at the world. Worldviews create worlds.

9:07

So the way that you look at the world turns the world into what it is that you intend to see.

9:13

Henry David Thoreau said, the question is not what you look at, but what you see.

9:17

Erwin Schrodinger, the famous quantum physicist of Schrodinger's equation fame,

9:21

said the task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen,

9:25

but to think what nobody has yet thought about that which everybody Everybody Sees.

9:31

And so in other words, we look at life, we see with our own eyes and our own

9:36

worldview, the problem in front of us.

9:38

And the idea of attention is to be able to shift our brain around,

9:43

to use right and left sides of our brain to try to see what's actually there

9:47

rather than seeing what we perceive to be there, rather than what our biases are telling us.

9:54

So you see a problem in front of you, Jennifer's hiking and she sees a problem in front of her.

9:59

She could fearfully approach that and say, I better not step there.

10:01

I'm going to fall. I'm going to get stuck. I need to turn around and go home. I need to stop this. I shouldn't be here

10:06

anyway. What am I doing here? She didn't say that. I'm using the example of somebody who's hiking.

10:11

Okay. Or you can zoom out a little bit. Look past that problem.

10:16

Look past that hole and say, well, if I step over there, then I could see a

10:20

way through this problem. My dad and I, when we used to, when I was a boy and he would take me hunting,

10:25

we'd be be in the woods in the Jeep and we'd get into a place where the road

10:29

was real boggy or there was a mud hole. My dad would always put the car in reverse, put the Jeep in reverse and back up a little bit.

10:36

And then he would be able to see, oh, if we go that way, we can,

10:39

this tire will get up on that log and we'll get some traction and we can pull

10:42

through there and we'll make it through. Or I need to put it in lower gear and go to the right instead of to the left.

10:48

But if you just, if you start to feel stuck and you just press on,

10:52

what usually happens, you get more stuck, right? If you just keep spinning your

10:56

wheels, you get more stuck. If you're hiking and you see an obstacle and you just go ahead and step right

11:00

into it, well, you're going to turn an ankle. Or if something's going to happen, you're going to step on the snake.

11:05

You've got to be willing and able to attend to the problem from a different perspective.

11:10

So let me back up. Let me think about it. Let me change my look at this.

11:13

And you have to remember that the left side of your brain is constantly trying

11:18

to present a picture to you of a two-dimensional flat object.

11:23

This thing is this thing. That's an impossible situation.

11:25

That's a hole I can't step in. There's no path forward for me, or I need to grab that.

11:30

That's the only thing I need right now. The whole world doesn't matter except

11:33

that one thing I need to grab. That's what your left side of your brain does.

11:36

And there's that famous video. I don't know if you've ever seen it.

11:39

Famous video where they did some experiments, psychological experiments,

11:43

where they have some players on a basketball court passing the ball back and forth.

11:47

And they say, I want you to count how many times they pass the ball.

11:51

And then you start focusing on that task of counting the passes.

11:55

And at the end, after you've counted, the person running the test says,

12:00

well, what did you notice? On the video. And you'll say, well, I noticed him pass the ball 10 times or

12:06

15 times or whatever it was. And you'll say, well, did you notice anything else? And you'll say,

12:11

no, I just saw the basketball players passing. And then he says, well, let me just play the tape again. And this time,

12:15

instead of counting, I want you just to see what else might be on that video.

12:19

And what happens is nobody ever notices it.

12:23

But in the middle of the task of these guys passing the basketball around.

12:27

Somebody came out from the left side of the screen wearing a gorilla suit,

12:31

came right up in front of the camera, dancing, beating his chest,

12:35

dancing a little jig, and then walks off the stage to the right.

12:38

And when you're focused on the task of counting the basketball passes,

12:42

you never see the gorilla. Like this is almost universal.

12:45

Your left brain focuses so attentively on the task at hand that it can exclude

12:51

almost everything else that's out there.

12:55

And if you remember the way we're designed, the reason that we're designed,

12:58

evolutionary biologists, by the way, They think this just evolved this way or just showed up this way.

13:03

God designed your brain for a purpose, and he gave you two halves of your brain

13:07

because you need both of them. But your left side says, I need to find something to eat.

13:12

I need to find some way to survive this situation.

13:16

And your brain, your left brain will focus on, there's some food over there.

13:19

I need to go get that food. The right side of your brain says, wait a minute. I also need to be aware that

13:24

I'm in a big environment full of potential threats. And there might be a bear.

13:27

There might be a snake. There might be an enemy. me, waiting to attack me.

13:31

So I need to kind of be scanning the environment at the same time that I'm going to get that food.

13:36

And so animals have this two side of their brain all the way down to worms that

13:41

the nervous system is divided into two halves because God knew that creatures

13:46

need to be able to find something to eat, but also not get eaten.

13:50

And you've got that too. The problem is the left side is so focused on this

13:55

two-dimensional, it is or it is not, this binary system of operating,

14:00

that it operates more powerfully than the right because the right is much more subtle.

14:04

The right's not out there going, wait a minute, hold on a second, hang on.

14:08

The right side is much more subtle. It's much more sort of in the background,

14:12

scanning and adding nuance and context and all of that. So the way that you

14:17

pay attention then needs to be very careful and very diligent.

14:22

You need to decide to engage that right frontal lobe, to engage that right parietal lobe.

14:28

You need to learn a strategy for engaging both sides of your brain so that you

14:32

can operate in a healthy way to become healthier and feel better and be happier

14:37

and all that stuff that we talk about all the time. Now, attention is not just another cognitive function, as Ian McGilchrist says.

14:43

It's how our world comes into being for us.

14:47

And the altered nature of attention can appear to abolish parts of the world.

14:51

So when you focus too much with one side of your brain, you can miss other things

14:55

that are blatantly obvious right in front of you.

14:58

There's another experiment where somebody comes up to a stranger on the street

15:01

and they're holding a map. And they say, hey, excuse me, I'm lost. Can you help me?

15:05

Can you look at this map with me and help me find where I'm supposed to go?

15:09

And the person, the stranger, will start to look at the map.

15:12

And then some guys carrying a big sheet of plywood will walk right in between

15:16

them, kind of bust them up. And the person who asked for directions will move with the plywood.

15:22

And the other person who was carrying the plywood will then reach for the map.

15:26

And the stranger, more than half the time.

15:29

Doesn't notice that the person asking for directions has changed.

15:33

This has been repeated in numerous places. You can go find it on YouTube.

15:37

Type in door and stranger map experiment on YouTube and you'll find videos of this.

15:43

Where more than half the time, people don't notice that the guy who just asked

15:49

them for directions is a different person than the one standing in front of them right now.

15:53

How is that possible, you say? How can smart people make such glaring mistakes

15:58

and not notice things that are so obvious?

16:00

Well, it's because when you allow your left frontal lobe to be the only thing

16:04

that you're paying attention with, then the only thing you can pay attention

16:08

to is the direct task at hand.

16:11

Now, this applies to us. If we've been through trauma or tragedy or massive

16:14

things, we can start to pay attention to the thing that's happened to us or

16:19

the ways in which we're broken or the pain that we're feeling or the situation

16:23

that we found ourselves in now. And we can miss other things that are dramatically important to the life that we actually have now.

16:30

This is relevant if you've lost a child, if you've lost a spouse,

16:34

the other people in your life who are also grieving, by the way, who are also hurting.

16:40

You can ignore them or you can change your relationship with them.

16:43

You can neglect them or fail to notice that they're still there with a beautiful

16:47

life and they need you and they're right in front of you. and you've got to

16:52

attend to them as well as attend to the things that you've been through.

16:56

And that takes both halves of your brain.

16:58

So I'm just saying, as McGilchrist says, the altered nature of attention can

17:03

appear to abolish parts of the world, collapse time and space,

17:06

eviscerate emotion, and render the living inanimate.

17:10

If you focus in with the left side of your brain on the problem at hand or the

17:14

thing that you've been through or the issue that you're dealing with,

17:17

then you can step right in that hole and you can miss things that are glaringly

17:21

obvious, like kids who need your attention,

17:24

like a spouse who's crying out, who's also desperately hurting,

17:27

who needs your affection. And that's why some marriages break up after loss, by the way,

17:32

because if one party focuses entirely on the problem and not on the residual

17:37

relationship, then the relationship's going to collapse, as McGilchrist says,

17:42

and attention, deciding how to pay attention is a profoundly more.

17:49

Act tata this morning we were talking and he said something about c'est la vie

17:54

like this is life we were talking about something we've been going through and

17:58

he said c'est la vie that's a french phrase for this is life and he said you

18:02

know the french also have a phrase c'est la guerre, and i've forgotten that c'est la guerre is a french saying this is war it is

18:10

what it is war it can't be helped c'est la guerre and i want you to remember

18:14

today here on frontal lobe friday you're in a war.

18:18

One thing about being in a war, when I was in Iraq, for example,

18:22

I saw people who every day got up and they were super grumpy and super scared and super unhappy.

18:29

We were getting mortared every day and rockets were landing.

18:32

It was always somewhat dangerous. We were going to have a bunch of casualties. We had to see horrible things and

18:36

go through difficult things. We were thousands of miles away from our home and our family.

18:40

We're in a difficult, bloody, brown environment with sandstorms and tents and

18:46

just uncomfortable environment.

18:48

And some people would wake up every day and be just furious and grumpy and miserable

18:52

and scared and operating out of this perspective that this is terrible and I can't stand this place.

18:58

And you have to remember, okay, you're at war.

19:01

Of course, it's going to be hard, but let's find a way to be positive anyway.

19:06

But some people were able to shift their perspective and say,

19:09

hey, we've got a holy task here. We're here to care for the wounded, to try to save the dying,

19:14

to rescue the injured, even apply some grace and some compassion to the enemy

19:19

when they bring them in and they're hurt. We can maybe show them that what they think about Christians and Americans isn't correct.

19:25

We can use this sort of missionally to say, hey, you may try to blow us up,

19:29

but we're gonna try to save you. We're gonna try to, we've been forgiven much.

19:34

We're gonna try to help you and show you that we have grace and love and compassion

19:39

for you. And we can shift our perspective.

19:41

And we can say, c'est la guerre. This is war. It is what it is.

19:44

It can't be helped. So we might as well try to make something good out of it.

19:48

Right? And that's where I want you to land on today, my friend.

19:51

I want you to say, hey, you know what? This is war. We're in a difficult life. There's going to be traumas and tragedies and massive things.

19:57

And maybe you're not in the middle of one of them right now, but there's still a war going on.

20:01

And you need to pay attention to the world around you So you don't miss some

20:05

things that are glaringly obvious because you're too focused on the hole in

20:09

front of you or the path that you're trying to take or the problem that's behind you.

20:14

And I want you to just ask yourself a question. Have I been living as if the

20:19

problem in front of me, as if the thing I've been through, as if the issue that

20:22

I'm afraid of, as if the situation that I've experienced is the only thing that there is?

20:28

Have I been living like that? Because if you have, that's called idolatry.

20:31

If you make the problem or the issue or the pain or the failure or the shame

20:37

or whatever's happened in the past,

20:39

the thing that Uncle Joe said to you about how your legs looked when you were

20:42

five and you can't move past that in your life now that you're 58.

20:45

If that's the thing that's the biggest thing in your mind, the only thing you

20:49

can pay attention to, that's become an idol for you because you've made it bigger

20:53

than God's ability to heal. Or again, if you're not a spiritual person, you've made it bigger than your

20:57

ability to learn how to move past. Okay.

21:00

You can recover. You can overcome.

21:04

You can change. You can grow. You're not stuck, but you need to shift your mind.

21:10

The entire goal of our lives.

21:14

If you're a Christian, it's to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.

21:18

That's the general calling that we all have. If you're not a person of faith,

21:22

then you would say, what's the goal of my life? Be the best person I can be, right?

21:26

And I would say the other goal of all of our lives is to try to become healthier

21:31

and feel better and be happier, to try to find a way to navigate the troubles

21:36

of this life with the acknowledgement that two things can be true at the same time.

21:40

There can be a big hole in front of you. that can be a big problem to navigate,

21:44

but you can also be outside on a beautiful sunny day and the trail and the nature

21:49

around you are so lovely. And there's still good things in the world, even though you're navigating a

21:54

difficult spot on the trail in front of you.

21:56

Does that make sense? Two things can be true at the same time.

22:00

And I would say you need to pay attention to the way that you pay attention.

22:05

If you're hyper-focused on the issue at hand and you're making that the the entire issue.

22:09

You're going to miss the gorilla walking right by you. You're going to miss

22:13

the person who needs you to pay attention to them.

22:15

You're going to miss the beautiful sunrise that's right in front of you.

22:19

Your life will become very two-dimensional because that's what your left frontal lobe does.

22:23

It's there for a purpose and you need it, but you can live without it if people

22:28

who have left frontal lobe strokes actually, they lose some language,

22:31

they lose some ability to use their right side, but they still have all the

22:34

nuance and all the perspective and all the other the things that the right side

22:37

of their brain gives them. People who have right brain strokes, on the other hand, they can still talk

22:41

and move, but they're emotionally devastated.

22:44

They lose the perspective and nuance and the ability to contextualize things,

22:50

and they become much more flat people. And it's devastating because they lose a lot of what it means to be a human being.

22:56

You need both of your frontal lobes operating, and you need to learn how to tap into them.

23:02

And that's why I think the Abide meditation practice is so helpful.

23:06

And I want to give you just one more little tool. We've talked about Abide from

23:09

the contemplation standpoint. It's this idea that you try to get your left brain to calm down because we're

23:16

so good at using our left brain. We've become so convinced that the left brain is the way to operate our world.

23:22

We need to get our right brain involved. To do that, you've got to spend a little

23:25

time, which is why the Bible says, Be still and know that I'm God.

23:29

The Bible says to taste and see that I'm good, to spend some time praying and

23:33

meditating and contemplating Him and getting to know Him and abiding in Him.

23:37

And that Lectio 365 app is so good about just focusing your mind,

23:42

calming things down, letting that language and left side stuff calm down so

23:47

the right side can come alive to you.

23:50

And so we talked about the contemplation type of a Bible where we approach Him. Him.

23:54

Just breathe and calm down and give yourself enough time and space in the midst

24:00

of this busy day to just approach Him and breathe and invite Him into the experience

24:05

to say, hey, I want to know you. I want you to come and join me here.

24:09

I want you to be part of this. And if you're not a spiritual person,

24:12

just try to get your brain to relax.

24:14

So you stop hearing that crazy voice in your head. Okay.

24:17

So I'm just approaching, I'm breathing, I'm inviting this moment to where where

24:23

life is not going to stress me out and things are going to calm down a little bit.

24:26

And then I'm going to depend on

24:29

him. I'm going to depend on the fact that there's more to my life than me.

24:34

There's more to my story than me and the problems I'm facing.

24:37

And I'm going to depend on that, this fact that there's help out there available.

24:41

For me, I know that the Holy Spirit wants to come alongside me.

24:45

He wants to keep his promises. He has a plan for me. And those plans are good. They're to prosper me and not to harm me.

24:51

Make it personal. when you read a scriptural promise that said,

24:54

the Lord is close to the brokenhearted. Put your name in there.

24:57

The Lord is close to Lola. The Lord is close to Jennifer.

25:00

The Lord is close to Joel.

25:03

The Lord is close to me when I'm brokenhearted. And then I want to experience

25:08

him. I want to say, Lord, just come in here and let me see you in action.

25:11

Let me see the ways that you want to communicate and help me.

25:14

Let me experience you and the healing that you offer.

25:17

But once you've contemplated, once you get that down, you get into a habit of

25:20

being able to do that and calming your spirit and getting your mind right.

25:26

Then it's time to operate. And the second type of abide method that I taught

25:30

you, and we're almost at the end of March, so we're almost done with this,

25:33

but the second type is the operate phase where we assess the situation and we

25:38

believe that he can do something about it. We believe that there's a path to making this better.

25:43

And then we pick up the knife and we make an incision. We start the procedure.

25:47

We're going to learn this self-brain surgery techniques. We're going to learn how to biopsy our thoughts. We're going to learn how to

25:52

lobotomize lousy attitudes and sever six synapses and drain doubts and all those

25:57

things that we talk about, all these little operations that I give you on Self-Brain Surgery Saturday.

26:01

And we're going to make a decision. We're going to deepen that exposure,

26:05

and we're going to get at the heart of what it is that's really going on in our lives.

26:08

Then we're going to expect that if we've applied good practices in a good way,

26:14

that we're going to have a good outcome. And so we're going to expect the healing to come.

26:19

We're going to expect the hope to arise. eyes. We're going to expect to find

26:23

a path out of that boggy pit on the trail.

26:25

We're going to expect that the shoulder will come that we can lean on,

26:29

that we can use to step across the hole. We're going to expect that to happen.

26:33

But today I want to give you one more because after we've contemplated and after

26:37

we've operated, it's time to begin to recover.

26:41

And to do that, we have to learn to attend and change our perspective in a different way.

26:47

Here's what that looks like. First, it's okay to acknowledge that you've been

26:52

through something hard. When I say don't focus on it, don't spend your time dwelling on the past,

26:57

don't spend your time letting that thing become an idol, I'm not saying don't acknowledge it.

27:01

In fact, before when I told you about the chief complaint and I said you've

27:05

got to name it to know it, what I meant was you don't have to go and unearth

27:10

every childhood trauma that you've ever been through.

27:12

You don't have to specifically name and go make everybody accountable and demand

27:15

justice and all that stuff. You don't have to spend time breathing life into

27:19

those old wounds, but you do have to acknowledge where you are now and the path that got you here.

27:26

And just kind of generally acknowledge the fact that there are some things going

27:30

on in you that you need help with.

27:32

And that's not the same as saying you've got to go back and dredge up every

27:37

childhood repressed memory and all that stuff. In fact, Bessel van der Kolk has made millions of dollars talking about how

27:42

the body keeps the score. And he's also one of the culprits in the horrible memory repression lawsuits

27:49

and trials that put parents in prison for things that never happened in the 80s and 90s.

27:56

So psychology can go off the rails if it comes from a reductionist,

28:00

materialist standpoint, and if it doesn't acknowledge that God's got some structure

28:04

that we need to be putting on how we use our minds and how we learn to heal them. them, okay?

28:10

Gabor Mate and Bessel van der Kolk have said some wonderful things that I've

28:14

quoted to you before that I've learned a lot from, but both of those guys,

28:17

the trauma kings as they were, have also done some great harm to families and

28:22

to individuals because if you focus all on your past and on your hurts and on

28:27

your problems, they're going to become bigger.

28:30

Remember the rule of quantum physics, the quantum Zeno effect.

28:33

The more you attend to something, the more you look at it, The more you observe

28:36

it, the more it becomes inevitable and big and unchangeable in your life.

28:41

And that's not what a spirit-led, spirit-mind-brain approach from a Christian

28:48

perspective would have you do with your therapy and with your healing.

28:53

The Lord would say is, take your mind, bring it to me. Let me change it because you have my mind.

28:59

You can have the mind that I have. You can learn to think about these things

29:03

in a way that brings healing and hope, but doesn't keep you focused on the past.

29:08

And so this idea, the recovery phase of abide, here it is.

29:14

Acknowledge it. Yes, I've been through something hard. Yes, I lost my son. That's true.

29:18

And it's devastating. And then the B, bleed a little bit. It's okay to acknowledge

29:23

this really hurts, and it's not ever going to stop hurting.

29:27

So I can acknowledge my trauma, my pain, my issue, my problem,

29:31

and I can let it bleed a little bit.

29:33

I can experience it. In fact, you should.

29:37

You shouldn't try to repress it, but you should be willing to experience it.

29:42

But then once you do that, once you say, yes, this happened,

29:46

yes, it hurts, yes, I'm still bleeding over it, yes, I'm still wounded,

29:50

then I need to sign an informed consent. In medicine, before I do a procedure on you, you've got to sign a piece of paper

29:57

that says you acknowledge the risks and the benefits and the potential goals

30:00

of the procedure and the things that could go wrong and the ways that could

30:03

shape your life going forward. There's a document that you sign called an informed consent,

30:09

and the same thing's true here. Here, if I'm going to say, hey, I intend to heal,

30:13

I intend to acknowledge the fact that my body is designed to heal and I can

30:18

learn to operate my brain differently than I have and I can let the Holy Spirit

30:22

teach me because he is a good physician. He's a great physician.

30:26

He can teach me how to do self-brain surgery and change the way my brain works

30:30

and change the way my mind works and change my generations and stop this generational

30:34

wound that's been happening. And I can just sign an informed consent that says, yes, that means that I'm

30:40

going to have to be willing to change my perspective.

30:43

I'm going to have to stop worshiping the massive thing that has happened to

30:46

me. And I'm going to have to start anticipating the healing that's going to come.

30:51

And then I'm going to, the D, I'm going to decide on the direction that my life

30:56

will go from now because I can't go backwards anymore.

30:59

It's time to go forward. It's time to burn the ships.

31:03

It's time to get out of the boat that brought me to this place because you have

31:07

to remember the rule that what got me here won't get me there.

31:11

So if you want to go forward in your life, my friend, you've got to decide on

31:14

a direction and you've got to commit to moving forward.

31:17

And there's things about that that are going to hurt.

31:20

Surgery does create some scars and surgery does create some pain,

31:24

but it's always for the benefit of healing.

31:27

And then finally, the excise, the E, is we're making it in an incision.

31:31

And then when we remove something, we call that an excision.

31:34

If you cut a mole off your skin and remove a tumor, you're excising something. E-X-C-I-S-E.

31:40

And what we're excising here is our former commitment to continually looking to the past.

31:46

We're excising our relationship.

31:50

With the way that things have always been or felt. We're excising our idolatry

31:55

of having the massive thing be the biggest thing that we can attend to.

31:59

And we're going to commit to opening up the right side of our brain to say there's

32:04

more going on here. There's a gorilla in my midst.

32:07

There's a guy switching out the holder of the map.

32:10

There's stuff that I wasn't seeing before because I was so focused on the massive

32:15

thing, on my trauma, my tragedy, on the hole that I'm about to step in.

32:18

And I want to see everything. And so it's time to abide. It's time to stop contemplating and start operating and start recovering.

32:28

It's time to move forward. And attention and perception are parts of the ways that we do that.

32:33

And your frontal lobe is beautifully designed, but you need both of them.

32:37

You need to survive, but you also need to be able to find something to eat.

32:42

Okay? You need to focus on the task at hand, but also see the gorilla dancing

32:46

around you. You need to see the hole in front of you so you don't step in it,

32:51

but you also need to see the fact that you're, why are you here?

32:54

To enjoy nature and to see the path and the trail and enjoy the time with the

32:58

person you're hiking with. Okay? And you need to remember, c'est la guerre.

33:05

It's war. There's going to be some things that are hard, but there's also life.

33:09

Life there's also beauty there's also hope and there's also healing and it's

33:14

frontal lobe friday and my friend you can change your mind and you can change

33:18

your life and you can do it starting today.

33:23

Music.

33:28

Hey thanks for listening the dr lee warren podcast is brought to you by my brand

33:33

new book Hope is the First Dose.

33:35

It's a treatment plan for recovering from trauma, tragedy, and other massive things.

33:40

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

33:44

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

33:48

available for free at TommyWalkerMinistries.org.

33:51

They are supplying worship resources for worshipers all over the world to worship the Most High God.

33:57

And if you're interested in learning more, check out TommyWalkerMinistries.org.

34:02

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

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wleewarrenmd.com slash prayer, and go to my website and sign up for the newsletter,

34:12

Self-Brain Surgery, every Sunday since 2014,

34:16

helping people in all 50 states and 60-plus countries around the world. I'm Dr.

34:21

Lee Warren, and I'll talk to you soon. Remember, friend, you can't change your

34:24

life until you change your mind, and the good news is you can start today. Okay.