Episode Transcript
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0:02
Good morning, my friend. I hope you're doing well. I am Dr.
0:05
Lee Warren, and you are listening to the Dr. Lee Warren Podcast,
0:08
where we talk about the importance of something I call self-brain surgery.
0:13
Self-brain surgery is this idea that you can harness the way God made your brain,
0:18
and you can capture your thoughts and learn how to change your mind so you can
0:23
change your life. It involves neuroscience.
0:25
It involves faith. It involves how to handle these massive things,
0:29
traumas, and tragedies that come along in life. And it's about really learning how to capture the full design strategy of how
0:38
your brain is put together and how your mind and your brain work together with
0:41
God's Spirit to make your life work better.
0:44
And today, I'm going to give you back an episode that I released just before
0:47
my book came out on July 18th. I'm going to give you back this episode.
0:50
At the start of the episode, you're going to hear me talk about a playlist on
0:53
Spotify that I put together. we originally gave to the folks who pre-ordered
0:57
the book. And I think it's time to give it to you now.
0:59
If you read my book, Hope is the First Dose, and if you're spending some time,
1:03
your quiet time meditating and praying and doing Bible study,
1:07
and even I've got a five-day Bible study on YouVersion, by the way,
1:10
about the book. So you can go do a five-day,
1:12
Bible study to find biblical hope. If you're struggling with something,
1:16
go to YouVersion or the Bible app and type in Hope is the First Dose or my name,
1:20
Dr. Lee Warren, and you'll find that Bible study.
1:23
There's also one there from my previous book that over 25,000 people have completed.
1:27
So I'd love for Hope is the First Dose to create that many completions as well,
1:32
because I think it'll help you. So five days of great Bible study around these biblical concepts of hope and
1:37
the scientific implications of how you can make your brain behave in a more
1:40
more hopeful way that will change your mind and change your life.
1:43
So I'm going to give you that playlist again. I'm going to put a link in the
1:46
show notes to the Spotify playlist that you can have for free and go check it out.
1:51
It's two and a half, almost three hours of music, songs that Mitch loved,
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songs that were helpful to me and Lisa as we were grieving and recovering and
1:59
some just hopeful songs and even some fun stuff in there anchored and ended
2:04
by my man, Tommy Walker with his amazing song, I Have a Hope.
2:08
So I'm going to give you that episode, Happification, today.
2:11
You may hear me talk about it being Self-Brain Surgery Saturday because it originally
2:15
was launched on a Saturday. And if you're new around here to the podcast, if you're new,
2:19
every Saturday we give you this Self-Brain Surgery Saturday episode.
2:22
And this is where we talk really about neuroscience and different self-brain
2:26
surgery operations you can learn how to do to take captive your thoughts and
2:30
change your mind and change your life. And they're really helpful. So this episode was about how to find this verb
2:36
that I call hapification, which is how you can turn hopelessness into hope again
2:41
when you're facing something hard. I pray that it will be a blessing to you. And here's this episode of hapification
2:46
because, my friend, you can't change your life until you change your mind.
2:50
And the good news is you can start today.
2:53
Hey, are you ready to change your life? If the answer is yes, there's only one rule.
2:58
You have to change your mind first. And my friend, there's a place where the
3:02
neuroscience of how your mind works smashes together with faith and everything
3:06
starts to make sense. Are you ready to change your life? Well.
3:10
This is the place, Self-Brain Surgery School. I'm Dr.
3:13
Lee Warren, and this is where we go deep into how we're wired,
3:16
take control of our thinking, and find real hope.
3:18
This is where we learn to become healthier, feel better, and be happier.
3:22
This is where we leave the past behind and transform our minds.
3:26
This is where we start today. Are you ready? This is your podcast.
3:30
This is your place. This is your time, my friend. Let's get after it.
3:36
Music.
3:41
The whole mission of this show is to help us understand one important thing.
3:45
You can't change your life until you change your mind. And the process of how
3:49
we change our minds is what I call self-brain surgery.
3:52
It sounds silly. It sounds like one of those motivational speaker things.
3:54
But the truth is your brain actually controls how your body works,
3:59
how your genes perform and duplicate, how your cells replicate.
4:02
Even if you're still having children or haven't had children yet,
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your brain and your thoughts make changes to your DNA that are passed on to your kids.
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And we know now clearly from animal research and human research and Holocaust
4:13
survivors and PTSD victims that some of the things that your parents,
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grandparents, and great-grandparents experienced,
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felt, were afraid of or harmed by changed the genetic molecules in their body,
4:26
the DNA and RNA and everything. And those things are passed down to future generations, out to the fourth generation.
4:32
And we know now that some of the things that you're nervous about or scared
4:36
about or some of the baseline attitudes or feelings or thoughts or emotional
4:39
states that you have aren't because of things that happened to you.
4:43
They're not because of things that you're just inherently weak over or things
4:46
that you've been exposed to. They're things that your parents or grandparents or great-grandparents were harmed or hurt by.
4:53
That's a fascinating thing. And the truth is, friend, you don't have to be harmed
4:58
by things that happened several generations ago in your family.
5:01
You can change it. And we'll teach you how to sell brain surgery.
5:03
That's just one little piece of the puzzle. But the way our brains are put together are designed for God to be able to communicate
5:11
with us through the Holy Spirit. And the mind is the software, if you will, that operates the hardware of the brain.
5:18
That's how it's put together. together and we'll talk about that
5:21
kind of stuff neurogenetics neurobiology neurophysiology neuroscience
5:24
epigenetics and all that stuff we'll also
5:28
talk a lot about faith and doubt and what happens when
5:30
hard things happen in your life what do you do next that's what my new book
5:34
is about the treatment plan for recovering from trauma and tragedy and other
5:37
massive things and to understand the treatment plan and really engage in it
5:40
and learn how to do cell brain surgery for you and your life to make things
5:44
better so that you can change your mind and change your life you got to understand
5:48
some things about the science of how your mind works.
5:50
So we're going to do all that stuff in this show. So if you're new,
5:53
go back and check out some of the old episodes and I think you'll enjoy it.
5:56
It's going to be helpful. The book is Hope is the First Dose. And we've been talking for the last week
6:01
or two about things related to the book and topics and ideas and characters
6:07
and different things you're going to get if you read the book.
6:09
And I just want to tell you that the book is available now.
6:12
You can download a Spotify playlist that's two and a a half hours of music.
6:16
These are songs that helped me while I was writing it, helped me while I was grieving.
6:21
Mitch and I loved some music that Mitch really loved and just a whole bunch of different music.
6:26
That'll be helpful to you as you spend quiet time and thinking about the ideas in this book.
6:31
One of those songs was a song from a guitar player named Joe Satriani,
6:34
an album that I first discovered when I was in college.
6:37
I remember clearly I was listening to a cassette tape on a bus while we were
6:40
on our way for a tour for the jazz band in which I played electric guitar.
6:45
And I heard this album, Surfing with the Alien, by Joe Satriani.
6:49
And this song, Always With Me, Always With You, came on, and it blew me away
6:55
because it's so beautiful and so mysterious, and the music just captivated me.
6:59
And I use it now when I'm writing as a quiet time, a way to get my brain together
7:04
and think about things, and it gets a little hard in the middle.
7:06
Some of the songs on the album really rock really hard, so if you're not into
7:10
heavier music, this is the sort of lightest song on the album.
7:14
And Mitch loved it. We used to listen to it together when we were in the car.
7:17
And so this song is just a reminder to me of some music that Mitch and I love.
7:21
And I'm playing it now in the background, Always With Me, Always With You by
7:26
Joe Sartreani from the album Surfing With The Alien from 1987.
7:29
I'm playing it now because I want to give you just a moment to think about one
7:33
thing that we're going to talk about in today's episode. It's Self-Brain Surgery Saturday, okay?
7:38
And on Self-Brain Surgery Saturday, we like to learn a new technique or think
7:42
about something that can help us change our minds about something.
7:44
Music.
7:44
We'll be right back.
8:06
Music.
8:53
The thing that you thought was solid and you lost it? What did you do next?
8:57
Today, I want to give you a strategy, a set of tools for what you do and how
9:02
you can change your mind. And it involves something called hapification, which is a word that's made up.
9:07
I didn't really make it up. I ran across it somewhere, but it's a word that
9:11
refers to the fact that you have to do something to find hope and happiness.
9:14
You can't just hope that it shows up. Hope and happiness come through a repeatable
9:19
process that I call a verb. It's an action word. It's several components.
9:24
Memory and movement are the two most important ones. And today we're going to talk about that.
9:27
We're going to talk about the science of haplification and how we can make hope
9:31
happen when the ground underneath our feet seems to be shaky and not solid.
9:36
So what do we do next? Let's listen to Joe start surrounding for a minute,
9:38
and then Lisa's going to tell us that you can't change your life until you change your mind.
9:42
The good news is, friend, you can start today.
9:44
Music.
9:57
Hey are you ready to change your life if the answer is yes there's only one
10:03
rule you have to change your mind first and my friend there's a place where
10:07
the neuroscience of how your mind works smashes together with faith and everything
10:12
starts to make sense that place is called self brain surgery.
10:16
You can learn it and it will help you become healthier, feel better, and be happier.
10:20
And the good news is you can start today.
10:24
Thanks, Lisa. Hey, so glad to have you listening today. I'm Dr.
10:27
Lee Warren and I live in Nebraska in the United States of America with my incredible
10:31
wife, Lisa, my father-in-law, Tata, and the super pups, Harvey and Lewis.
10:35
I'm a neurosurgeon and an author and I'm here to help you harness neuroscience,
10:39
the power of your brain, faith, the power of your spirit and good old common
10:42
sense to help you lead a healthier, better, happier life.
10:45
Listen, friend, you can't change your life until you change your mind.
10:48
And I'm here to help you learn the art of self brain surgery to get it done.
10:51
If you'd like to show, please subscribe so you never miss an episode and tell
10:55
your friends about it. If you tell two or three friends this podcast was helpful to you.
10:59
Imagine how much good we can all do around the world together.
11:02
I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and I'm here to help you change your mind so you can change
11:05
your life. Let's get after it. Okay, here we go. I hope you enjoyed that Joe Satriani music.
11:12
That's a special album to this day. I have so much memory and emotion around when I first heard it.
11:18
And then all the times I listened to it with Mitch, and he loved it too.
11:21
And the song Satch Boogie and Surfing with the Alien, those two songs.
11:25
If you like to rock a little bit, those are some rocking songs.
11:28
Tommy Walker, I'm talking to you. Check it out if you don't know. Surfing with the Alien.
11:32
Yesterday, I had a long day yesterday. I had to make rounds. at 6, 6 a.m.
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I had a meeting at 7 that I had to be at, committee meeting.
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I had clinic at 8. And after clinic, I got home. I had five consecutive hours of interviews.
11:49
Five hours I was talking. So all day long from 6 a.m.
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So I got up at 3.30, did a podcast for you, went to the hospital,
11:57
rounded, went to a meeting, did clinic, saw a bunch of patients,
12:00
came home, and did five hours of interviews before I was finally done at about
12:04
6 o'clock last night, 6.30. And I was worn out and my voice, you can hear the fatigue in it this morning.
12:10
I hope it's not driving you nuts, but I spent a lot of time talking about Hope
12:15
is the First Dose yesterday, my new book. Spent a lot of time talking about grief and loss and pain and some things kind
12:21
of rattled around and I remembered and I wanna make sure I give this to you
12:25
because one of the questions that people are asking me in all these interviews
12:28
over and over again, so what do you do when the bottom drops out? What do you do?
12:32
You talk about a treatment plan. How do we get there where when the bottom drops
12:36
out, of our world, we know how to stand up again and try to find hope and happiness
12:40
and all that stuff again. Well, how do you do it?
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And the way you do it is something called hapification. That sounds silly.
12:47
Hapification. I, for me, when I lost that sense that I'd always had of positivity
12:53
and it's going to be okay. And this kind of undying spirit, I never lost it when I went to war.
12:59
I never lost it when I had PTSD. I never lost it when I went through a divorce. I always had this sense that
13:04
that somehow God was going to work it out. It was going to be okay.
13:07
They were going to find a way back to being okay again.
13:09
But for a while after we lost Mitch, after my son died.
13:13
I didn't really think it was going to be okay anymore. I had this sense that
13:18
something had happened that was going to change everything forever.
13:20
And that turns out to be true, by the way. But I had a sense that it was going to produce an inability to get back to an okay type state.
13:28
And for me, that was devastating because happiness had always been so important to me.
13:33
And I'd always understood that you need to have a positive attitude and you
13:36
need to have a belief and a faith that things can be okay and that God's going to take care of you.
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And for a little while, I didn't have that. that, and it's unanchored me.
13:44
It's like I was drifting and I didn't know, Lisa and I talked about it a lot,
13:48
like didn't really know. We kept going to church and we kept talking about the things we believed in
13:53
and we had other kids and we had to try to encourage them.
13:56
And really that's why I started writing and ultimately the writing to my kids
14:00
and all that turned into a newsletter that turned into a podcast and turned
14:03
into books and all that stuff. So ultimately I I wrote my way out of that and found my way again.
14:09
But what happened originally was that I needed to find my way back to happiness again.
14:15
And it became pretty clear that it wasn't just going to happen randomly.
14:20
It wasn't just going to happen. I was going to have to do something to make it happen.
14:24
And as it turned out, my friend, Pastor John, the chaplain, in a devastating
14:29
and pivotal conversation for me, gave me the thing that I needed to get back
14:33
to that place where I could start figuring it out again.
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And it happened in the chapel at our hospital in Alabama after I did my first surgery.
14:42
After Mitch died, I had to save a little boy's life and had this conundrum of
14:46
being, it was really hard for me.
14:48
I was able to do what I know how to do and save a little kid's life and give
14:52
him back to his parents, but I couldn't save my own son.
14:57
It was hard for me to know know that I could give another family a chance to
15:02
not go through what I was going through, but I couldn't give it to myself.
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I couldn't do it for my family. I couldn't save my son. I wasn't there.
15:09
I didn't have an opportunity. I couldn't prevent what happened to him.
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And it was hard. It was a devastating thing.
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And Pastor John, in this conversation that we had in the chapel,
15:19
I wrote about in the book, and I'm not going to give it to you now.
15:22
We've talked about it before, but he basically told me that you've got to go
15:26
to the book of Lamentations in the Bible, and you've got to see what that guy
15:30
did when he was at the lowest moment.
15:32
And if you can see what he did, then you'll be able to find your path forward.
15:36
And he basically just challenged me. When I was ready, he said,
15:39
you need to grieve, and you need to be sorry, and you need to be sad,
15:42
and you need to hurt, and you need to let this start to heal.
15:45
But when you're ready to understand how you can move forward,
15:49
you'll find it in Lamentations. Now that sounds crazy, right?
15:53
But I had a track record of trusting Pastor John and the things that he says.
15:57
And so I eventually found my way to the book of Lamentations to try to find
16:03
this solid ground that had been taken from me.
16:05
Because as I discovered in the writing of my book, I've seen the interview, you.
16:08
The thing that bothers most people the most when they go through hard things
16:12
is not actually that they lose all their faith or that they'd struggle with
16:16
doubt or any of those things. Those things we usually work through.
16:19
What kills people the most in terms of hopelessness and quality of life and
16:23
peace of mind and happiness and value and purpose and meaning and all that stuff that we can lose.
16:28
What bothers people the most is when they lose something that they thought they
16:31
knew, when they lose something they thought they were sure of,
16:33
when something that they they believed turns out not to be true.
16:37
And so we learn like when you think that your kids are going to outlive you
16:41
and one of them doesn't, it's devastating.
16:43
When you think that person's always going to be faithful to you and they're not, it's devastating.
16:48
When you're a great athlete and you define yourself by your performance on the
16:51
field and you hurt your knee and you can't go anymore, it can be devastating.
16:54
When you believe that you've trained and worked hard and done everything right
16:57
and you're going to get that promotion that's going to change your financial
17:00
future and you don't get it or you get passed over for it, it's not right.
17:05
So those things that you think you know when you lose them can be the hardest things to deal with.
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And so I was struggling with that, with this idea that I thought I was always
17:14
going to be able to find my way back to okay. I thought my son would outlive me and bury me someday. I thought all these things.
17:20
And when I lost that, when I lost Mitch, it called into question everything
17:26
else that I thought I believed. We struggled with that for a while.
17:29
And so we get to Lamentations, and I start reading.
17:33
Reading and I find this interesting thing we've talked
17:36
about it numerous times before if you haven't been listening to
17:39
the podcast you can go back and listen to episodes like hope is a verb
17:41
and you'll hear this but but that what happens in
17:44
limitations is the guy is in the middle of a
17:47
five chapter story right the first two chapters tell
17:50
the story of the fall and siege of Jerusalem how the Babylonians have come and
17:54
captive captured everybody and killed everybody and dragged the king off and
17:58
plundered the palace and burned everything down and the women have been pillaged
18:02
and the children are starving to death in the streets and all these horrible
18:05
things are happening in the first two chapters of the Lamentations.
18:08
And you get to chapter three and the guy who's writing it,
18:11
who's obviously not been pillaged and captured and burned up because he's sitting
18:15
somewhere safe enough to write by hand on a scroll after the fact that he's
18:22
in a relatively safe place. So he's writing this story and he says, I am the man who has tasted affliction.
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I am the man he says i'm the guy that all these terrible things have happened to really,
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you just described how all these other
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people have gone through all this stuff that everything's burned down and the
18:44
king's been murdered and you say i am the man who has seen affliction by the
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wrath of the lord's wrath so he's individualizing it mark vrogep who's been
18:51
on the show twice before wrote the best book i've ever read about the lament
18:55
prayer and learning how to pray through your pain and learning how to put God's,
18:58
put the words that you're feeling and the hurt that you're feeling in God's
19:01
hands and really trust him with your complaints. And, and that's a third of the Psalms, by the way, are lament prayers.
19:07
So we just don't learn that in church growing up, but it's okay.
19:10
And it's encouraged and it's biblical to pray when you're hurt and tell God
19:14
that you're hurt and that you're mad and you don't understand that it's a lament.
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And when I read that book by Mark Brogab, Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy,
19:21
and by the way, he endorsed my book and his words were so so encouraging to me.
19:25
And it's incredible that he took the time to read Hope is the First Dose and
19:29
he thinks it's valuable. So maybe you will too. But Mark wrote this book, Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy.
19:35
Which was the Christian book of the year in 2020. And he wrote it in 2019.
19:39
But if he had written it earlier, it would have helped me. And I might not have
19:42
had to even write Hope is the First Dose because he helped me learn some things about grief.
19:46
But he said our natural bias is to individualize suffering.
19:50
And that's exactly true. I realized I even felt guilty about it after I lost Mitch.
19:54
I would see somebody else go through something hard, like hear about a family
19:57
who lost a child to cancer, for example.
20:00
And in my mind, I would say, at least you got to know that it was coming.
20:04
At least you got to prepare for it. That's not as bad as what I went through.
20:08
I would see a person being wheeled out of the hospital after they passed away
20:12
and I would tell myself, well, it's probably an old person. At least they got
20:15
to live more than 19 years. At least their family had them more than 19 years. I would minimize their suffering
20:20
and maximize mine in my mind.
20:22
And I realized that when I read Mark Rogab's book and when I read Lamentations
20:26
and he said, I am the man who's tasted affliction, I realized Mark's exactly right.
20:30
We individualize suffering. We make it about us.
20:34
And the fact is, in that conversation that we had in the chapel that day,
20:37
Pastor John pointed out to me that my suffering was extraordinary,
20:41
but it was an ordinary part of the human experience.
20:44
That all of us go through these massive things, and all of us suffer in different ways.
20:48
And the fact is, your grief, friend, your pain, whatever it is that you've been
20:51
through, your story is individual to you.
20:54
But it's a part of a larger story of this long narrative arc since the fall
21:00
of man and before the redemption of how people suffer in this broken world.
21:04
And that's why Jesus told us plainly in John 16, 33, in this world,
21:08
you're going to have trouble. But he also told us plainly in John 10, 10, in John 10, 10, he says,
21:14
plainly, I have come that you might have life and have it abundantly.
21:19
I have come that you might have life and have it abundantly. You can have both.
21:25
And so I learned this, what I call Warren's Law of Suffering in the book,
21:28
it's a joke that grief isn't a competition.
21:32
It's a condition of being human. It's not a competition. It's a condition.
21:36
Everybody grieves. And so there's no sense in ratioing somebody else's grief
21:41
to make yours feel worse. Yours is already going to feel as bad as it can feel to you.
21:45
And making it relative to someone else's doesn't help the healing process. So don't try to do that.
21:50
So back to the story. I get to Lamentations and these first two chapters are
21:54
devastating and all these bad things are happening. And then in Lamentations 3, he makes it about himself.
22:00
And don't beat him up too bad because you do it too. And so do I.
22:03
All of us do. Our natural bias is to individualize suffering.
22:06
And he says these things... That I started resonating with. I realized what grief does to your body.
22:12
And here's some things he says in Lamentations 3.
22:15
God, he says, he has made my skin and my flesh grow old. He has broken my bones.
22:20
He has buried me in a dark place like those long dead. Though I cry and shout,
22:24
he has shut out my prayers. He is hidden like a bear or a lion waiting to attack me. He has made me chew on gravel.
22:30
And I read those things and I realized my bones weren't broken,
22:34
but I had shingles and and my shoulder hurts every day since I lost my son.
22:38
My hair turned gray. I was in a dark place.
22:41
It felt like the lights had gone out on the entire world, like those who are
22:44
long dead, he says in Lamentations 3.6.
22:47
And I felt, the lamenter says, though I cry and shout, he has shut out my prayers.
22:52
I felt like God wasn't hearing me. I couldn't even talk sometimes to him.
22:55
I couldn't even verbalize the prayers that I wanted to pray.
22:58
He's hidden like a bear or a lion waiting to attack me. This is what you feel.
23:02
Why, God, are you doing this to me? you want to know, right?
23:06
Why do you, why are you allowing these things to happen? And it feels like God
23:10
is attacking you or punishing you. And that's what it feels like to remember the cell brain surgery rule. Feelings are not facts.
23:17
Feelings are chemical events in your brain. So you will feel some things,
23:20
but don't make yourself believe that they're true.
23:23
But that's what I felt right after we lost Mitch. He's made me chew on gravel.
23:27
I literally woke up one morning, I had a filling in my mouth and I'd ground
23:30
one of my molars so bad that the filling popped out and the tooth cracked.
23:33
I ended up breaking two molars in the time after I lost my son.
23:38
So your body will break and hurt and ache, and it's terrible.
23:42
And so I saw what the lamenter was doing, and I attached it to myself because
23:47
I could feel exactly what he was feeling.
23:49
I saw the bodily ailments that I had, the bitter taste of acid reflux,
23:52
and my broken molar, and my lost feeling, and the pain in my shoulder from my
23:56
shingles, and the pain that still causes me 10 years later.
23:59
I felt so isolated. Nobody else could understand how much it hurts.
24:03
I was afraid of everything. I couldn't protect my kids or my grandkids. What can I be solid about?
24:09
And the world had seemed so dark. So here was the ground that I thought I could
24:13
stand on, that everything was always going to work out for me and everything
24:16
was going to be okay. It turned out to be shaky.
24:19
It turned out not to be solid. So then the question becomes, what do you do next?
24:24
And John said, Pastor John said, the answer is in lamentation.
24:29
So dig into it. So when I was ready, it took me years, but I finally got to
24:33
where I could go through it and look for it. And look what we found, okay?
24:37
Now, remember, this episode is about hapification, how to find happiness and
24:41
hope and peace and purpose and all those things again after you lose the thing
24:45
that you thought was solid enough for you to stand your life upon it.
24:48
And I was at the low point, okay?
24:51
But listen to what the writer says. Listen to what the writer says. Right after he tells us that his body's breaking down and God is attacking him
25:00
and all these things, it gets even worse. Okay. Here's what he says.
25:03
Peace has been stripped away and I have forgotten what prosperity is.
25:09
I cry out. My splendor is gone. Everything I had hoped for from the Lord is lost.
25:15
The thought of my suffering and homelessness is bitter beyond words.
25:19
Words, I will never forget this awful time as I grieve over my loss.
25:25
So he goes from describing what's happening to his city and his people to describing
25:30
what it's doing to his body and his mind.
25:33
And then he tells you how it feels.
25:36
It's making him feel like he's lost all of his peace and he's never going to
25:40
be prosperous and he's lost his splendor and all of his hopes have been dashed
25:44
and his suffering and homelessness is so bitter that he can't even find adequate words for it.
25:48
And he knows he's never going to forget this time and that he is grieving.
25:52
He has stated what he's feeling very well. And you should too.
25:58
Articulate it, what it is that you're feeling after you lose that solid ground.
26:02
And it summed up my situation, really everybody's situation after the massive thing, the TMT happens.
26:07
No peace, no prosperity to be had, and earthly accomplishments are well.
26:11
I could have cared less that I was an accomplished brain surgeon,
26:13
a two-time author, a U.S. patent holder, and all this. I could care less. I lost my son.
26:18
I would trade everything I had to have my family attacked.
26:22
I would. I'd do it right now. I'd give up this podcast. I'd give up everything
26:26
that's happened, the Christian Book Award, everything.
26:29
If I could have my whole family back, you'd never hear from Lee Warren again.
26:33
That's how I felt. It's true. I just felt like I had lost everything that mattered.
26:39
For a while. And here's the thing.
26:42
John said the answer was going to be in Lamentations. And after three and a
26:45
half chapters, I was finding it harder and harder to believe that there was
26:48
going to be anything good in there. And then I stumbled hard upon this verse.
26:54
So he's just finished saying, I will never forget this awful time as I grieve over my loss.
26:59
And look what happens right here. This guy changes his mind and it changes his life.
27:04
And he says, but this I call to mind. and therefore I have hope.
27:09
That he did something, call is a verb.
27:13
He decided to call to mind, to remember something that he knew to be true.
27:18
He's in the middle of this terrible thing. It's breaking his body.
27:22
It's devastated his city. His people are lost and plundered.
27:26
His temple has been pillaged. He thinks God has attacked him.
27:30
He thinks that his hope is all gone.
27:32
And then he does something remarkable. remarkable. He chooses to take action.
27:38
But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope.
27:42
He's faced with bitterness, physical affliction, utter despair,
27:45
and he's sitting on this bench of misery, crying out his problems,
27:48
but he does not give up, friend.
27:52
He does not give up. He uses a verb, an action word, and he calls hope to mind.
27:59
There's other translations besides the NIV that I just I just read,
28:03
he says, all of these translations use active verbs.
28:07
Recall New American Standard Bible. Think of New Century Version.
28:10
Turn to Young's Living. All of these are saying, I have got to do something
28:16
to call, to find hope, to take hope, to choose hope, to go for hope, to fight for hope.
28:23
It's not going to just show up on its own. There it was. The first time I'd noticed self-brain surgery in the Bible,
28:29
this guy changed his mind. And here's the most important thing.
28:34
The most important thing I'm going to tell you this morning is that he changed
28:38
his mind in chapter three of a five chapter story.
28:41
And the last two chapters are terrible and awful, and they don't even end well.
28:46
The book of limitations ends with a question, have you just left us,
28:49
God? Are you gone forever? Are you never coming back? That's where it ends. But he changed his mind and
28:55
decided to be hopeful in the middle of that story.
28:57
And that turns out to be the key element of finding solid ground again when
29:02
the bottom drops out, is that you decide you're going to do something to take
29:07
action to find hope, and that's how you become hapified.
29:11
That's the science of hapification, is engaging the muscle of memory and movement
29:15
to find hope again, whatever your TMT is, whatever your massive thing is.
29:21
And look what he happens. So he says, look what happens next.
29:24
But this I call to mind and therefore I have hope. And here's what he does.
29:27
I'm calling to mind the faithful love, the steadfast love of the Lord never
29:32
ends. His mercies never end.
29:34
Great is his faithfulness. His mercies begin fresh every morning.
29:38
They are new every morning. And I say to myself, the Lord is my inheritance. Therefore, I will hope in him.
29:44
He is good to those who depend on him, to those who search for him.
29:47
It is good to wait quietly for salvation from the Lord.
29:51
Remember the last two days we talked about the Hebrew word kavah.
29:54
This idea that we are waiting and wait produces hope and hope produces the ability to wait.
30:01
And the tension between the now and the not yet is this thing that can pull
30:04
us out of the pit and into hope. And that's what he uses here. That's the word. It is good to wait,
30:10
to hope quietly for salvation from the Lord.
30:12
He is daring to hope in the middle of his problem, not after he gets to see
30:18
how it works out and he decides to be hopeful because it worked out okay he
30:22
decides that he's going to do it now.
30:25
I have something I call gap theory. If I looked at all these people and how
30:28
they responded to trauma, and I realized that some people can go through the
30:31
hardest things and find their way back to hope, and some people can't.
30:34
And the difference between those people is what I call the gap.
30:37
And it's this idea that Paul talked about Abraham, who against all hope, he in hope believed.
30:43
Abraham said, it's hopeless. I'm gonna believe in hope anyway,
30:46
because God's always been faithful in the past. And that's where faith lies. It's in this gap between against and hope.
30:52
Hope. So the lamenter here, he had no reason to be hopeful because the situation was hopeless.
30:58
They were objectively terrible things that were happening, but he chose to hope anyway.
31:02
And that is the path back towards happiness is saying, God's done this before.
31:07
He's delivered other people. He's delivered me before. I've been through hard things before.
31:11
I'm going to remember those things. I'm going to call on those promises.
31:14
I'm going to hold onto them desperately. I'm going to remember that I am not in a one act play here.
31:19
This is a God that is writing a long story of the fall of man that ends in the
31:24
redemption of man in the afterlife where I get to see my son Mitch again.
31:28
And I'm gonna take hope that this piece of this puzzle is beyond my ability
31:32
to understand, but my God is still good and he's still God.
31:35
And he's got the power to get me through this and help me to find my way back
31:39
to okay and maybe even happiness again.
31:41
My God is not out of business.
31:44
He is a hopeful, helpful, loving God.
31:48
And my current situation and my current circumstance circumstance cannot define
31:52
my happiness and my hope and my meaning and purpose in my life.
31:56
And that my friend is how you find solid ground. Again, that my friend is how
32:00
you engage the hapification verb so that you can find your way back.
32:06
And it turns out that shows up over and over again in the Bible,
32:09
that same process of people in the middle of their problem who decide to remember.
32:14
What God can do and has done. And chapter 19 of my book is called Memory, Movement, and the Science of Happification.
32:21
It tells two more stories, David and Asaph in Psalms, who change their mind
32:26
in the middle of their problem and find hope because they decide to pursue it,
32:31
not because they gave up waiting for it.
32:34
That's the story for today. Memory and movement and the science of hapification
32:39
can produce hope and happiness again.
32:42
I'm going to play a song in a minute by Leanna Crawford called The Truth I'm Standing On.
32:47
Because sometimes the world is going to shake the ground under your feet.
32:52
It's going to crumble the things that you thought you knew.
32:54
And you better have some things in your heart that prehab.
32:57
You better put some stuff in there that you can stand on when life hurts.
33:01
Because friend, it's going to hurt. There is coming a time. There may have already been. you might be in the middle
33:06
of it now or there may be more than one thing for you but there's going to be
33:09
a massive thing and you need to prepare yourself we're going to do prehab to
33:14
put that stuff in there so we know what to stand on when the things that we
33:17
thought we knew fall away, we're going to do self brain surgery to learn a strategy to produce hope and
33:22
happiness again and healing again no matter what we go through because we're going to remember.
33:27
That feelings aren't facts that not every thought we have is true and that we
33:31
have to relentlessly refuse to participate in our own demise.
33:34
We're going to remember that self-brain surgery tactics.
33:37
And then we're going to get rehab for strengthening and resilience to carry
33:41
on and get better by community,
33:44
by work, by repeating the process, by
33:47
automating it and making new synapses and learning to use our brains the way
33:51
God designed them to operate that software hardware interface between mind and
33:56
brain to maximize our recovery and improve our neurotransmitter environment
34:00
and and make our feelings better by acting on them instead of reacting to them.
34:06
And my friend, we are gonna change our minds and we're gonna change our lives.
34:09
And hope is the first dose. It's gonna help you. And I'd love for you to order it because it's gonna help
34:14
you change your mind and change your life. And it's gonna help you find the truth that you can stand on when everything
34:19
hurts. And it's gonna help you most importantly to start a new life.
34:22
Music.
38:10
Hey, thanks for listening. The Dr. Lee Warren Podcast is brought to you by my
38:14
brand new book, Hope is the First Dose. It's a treatment plan for recovering
38:18
from trauma, tragedy, and other massive things.
38:21
It's available everywhere books are sold. And I narrated the audio books.
38:25
Hey, the theme music for the show is Get Up by my friend Tommy Walker,
38:29
available for free at TommyWalkerMinistries.org.
38:32
They are supplying worship resources for worshipers all over the world to worship
38:38
the Most High God. And if you're interested in learning more,
38:41
check out TommyWalkerMinistries.org.
38:43
If you need prayer, go to the prayer wall at WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer,
38:47
WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer.
38:50
And go to my website and sign up for the newsletter, Self-Brain Surgery,
38:55
every Sunday since 2014, helping people in all 50 states and 60-plus countries
39:00
around the world. I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and I'll talk to you soon. Remember, friend, you can't change your
39:05
life until you change your mind. And the good news is you can start today.
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