Attention and Perspective: This is War (Frontal Lobe Friday)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

frontal lobe and what it has to

do with attention and what attention and perspective have to do on life.

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

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

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

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

neuroscience of how your mind

works smashes us together with faith and everything starts to make sense.

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

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

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

healthier, feel better, and be happier.

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

This is where we start today. Are you ready?

This is your podcast. This This is your place.

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

Music.

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

It's one of my favorite days of the week.

Been a long week. We went to Florida and spoke at First Presbyterian Church

and all the wonderful people down there on Monday.

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

to join us on the live stream.

And we had an incredible spiritual brain surgery podcast with Christopher Cook

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

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

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

and Mary Beth from Blue Hill, Maine,

will be receiving free copies of Christopher's book from Brett and the wonderful

people over at Waterbrook.

And it's going to be a game-changing book.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and scheduled a lot of surgery.

And then today we'll be in the operating room doing some brain surgery.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's a good point Jennifer made.

We're not all going through trauma or tragedy or massive things all the time.

In fact, I hope that you're not.

But we still need strategies and tools and tips for how to navigate the normal

days and the days when things are hard.

And the truth is we're always in the

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

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

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

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

people around you and for your generations.

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

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

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

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

impulses of the neurons in between your ears,

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

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

a constant battle to maintain focus,

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

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

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

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

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

and energy that you place on dealing with your thoughts.

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

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

gotten from your podcast on this topic.

My husband and I are avid hikers, and right now is the best time in Arizona

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

on what we're dealing with and how we,

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

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

Perspective is somewhat different than attention.

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

and encounter that we have in our life.

So perspective has to do with worldview, with our past, with our family,

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

with our belief systems.

All that stuff, perspective has to do with all those things, okay?

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

And we talk on the Spiritual Brain Surgery Podcast sometimes.

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

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

brain surgery is the way that we read scripture.

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

extract everything from it that you can learn something from,

everything out of the text that the text offers.

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

it or believe it or not believe it.

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

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

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

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

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

And eisegesis is when we read something, particularly scripture,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

not simply the way we look at the world.

Worldviews create worlds.

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

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

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

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

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

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

worldview, the problem in front of us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

anyway. What am I doing here?

She didn't say that. I'm using the example of somebody who's hiking.

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

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

way through this problem.

My dad and I, when we used to, when I was a boy and he would take me hunting,

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

wheels, you get more stuck.

If you're hiking and you see an obstacle and you just go ahead and step right

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Famous video where they did some experiments, psychological experiments,

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

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

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

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

well, what did you notice?

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

15 times or whatever it was.

And you'll say, well, did you notice anything else? And you'll say,

no, I just saw the basketball players passing.

And then he says, well, let me just play the tape again. And this time,

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

And what happens is nobody ever notices it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

almost everything else that's out there.

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

evolutionary biologists, by

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

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

because you need both of them.

But your left side says, I need to find something to eat.

I need to find some way to survive this situation.

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

I need to go get that food.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and all that stuff that we talk about all the time.

Now, attention is not just another cognitive function, as Ian McGilchrist says.

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

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

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

that are blatantly obvious right in front of you.

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

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

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

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

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

them, kind of bust them up.

And the person who asked for directions will move with the plywood.

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

And the stranger, more than half the time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

and not notice things that are so obvious?

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

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

to is the direct task at hand.

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

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

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

that we found ourselves in now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that takes both halves of your brain.

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

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

eviscerate emotion, and render the living inanimate.

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

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

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

obvious, like kids who need your attention,

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

who needs your affection.

And that's why some marriages break up after loss, by the way,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We were getting mortared every day and rockets were landing.

It was always somewhat dangerous.

We were going to have a bunch of casualties. We had to see horrible things and

go through difficult things.

We were thousands of miles away from our home and our family.

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

just uncomfortable environment.

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

and scared and operating out

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

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

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

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

hey, we've got a holy task here.

We're here to care for the wounded, to try to save the dying,

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

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.

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

but we're gonna try to save you.

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

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

for you. And we can shift our perspective.

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

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

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

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.

And maybe you're not in the middle of one of them right now,

but there's still a war going on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

or whatever's happened in the past,

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

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

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

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

than God's ability to heal.

Or again, if you're not a spiritual person, you've made it bigger than your

ability to learn how to move past. Okay.

You can recover. You can overcome.

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

The entire goal of our lives.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

around you are so lovely.

And there's still good things in the world, even though you're navigating a

difficult spot on the trail in front of you.

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

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

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

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

the person who needs you to pay attention to them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

of their brain gives them.

People who have right brain strokes, on the other hand, they can still talk

and move, but they're emotionally devastated.

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

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.

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

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

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

the contemplation standpoint.

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

so good at using our left brain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the right side can come alive to you.

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

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

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

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

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

just try to get your brain to relax.

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

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

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

And then I'm going to depend on

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

The Lord is close to Joel.

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

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

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

Let me experience you and the healing that you offer.

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

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

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

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

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

believe that he can do something about it.

We believe that there's a path to making this better.

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

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

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

things that we talk about, all

these little operations that I give you on Self-Brain Surgery Saturday.

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

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

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

that we're going to have a good outcome.

And so we're going to expect the healing to come.

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

a path out of that boggy pit on the trail.

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

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

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

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

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

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

through something hard.

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

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

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

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

every childhood trauma that you've ever been through.

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

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

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

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

on in you that you need help with.

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

childhood repressed memory and all that stuff.

In fact, Bessel van der Kolk has made millions of dollars talking about how

the body keeps the score.

And he's also one of the culprits in the horrible memory repression lawsuits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

your problems, they're going to become bigger.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and I can let it bleed a little bit.

I can experience it. In fact, you should.

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

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

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

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

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

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

shape your life going forward.

There's a document that you sign called an informed consent,

and the same thing's true here.

Here, if I'm going to say, hey, I intend to heal,

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

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

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

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

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

wound that's been happening.

And I can just sign an informed consent that says, yes, that means that I'm

going to have to be willing to change my perspective.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

but it's always for the benefit of healing.

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

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

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

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

We're excising our relationship.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

person you're hiking with.

Okay? And you need to remember, c'est la guerre.

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

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

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

your life and you can do it starting today.

Music.

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

new book Hope is the First Dose.

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

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

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

available for free at TommyWalkerMinistries.org.

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

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

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

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

Self-Brain Surgery, every Sunday since 2014,

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

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

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

Music.