Get In the Fight: The Battle of Self-Brain Surgery

Good morning, my friend. Dr. Lee Warren here with you, and I am so excited and

grateful to be with you here on Theology Thursday.

We're going to do a little self-brain surgery in just a moment,

and I have one idea for you.

There is a concept that has been kind of bouncing around in my mind for a long time.

I've done a podcast episode about it in the past, and today I want to give you

just a vision for what self-brain surgery is.

And what it will mean in your life if you commit to it. And what it will mean

in your life if you choose not to commit to it.

And the fight that all of us are in, whether we recognize it or not.

And today we're going to take a look at the view from the hilltop.

We're going to be having to ask ourselves a serious question.

Are we ready for the coming fight?

Or are we going to pretend like there isn't one? Or are we going to give up and not even try? eye.

If you want to become healthier and feel better and be happier,

I would submit to you that you've got to get in the game.

You've got to engage in the battle because the battle is for your mind.

The battle is for your life.

And you can't change your life until you change your mind.

So today we're going to get up on the hilltop and take a look at the battlefield

and make some decisions about what self-brain surgery is and what it is not.

And before we get started, 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 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 is your place. This is your time, my friend. Let's get after it.

Music.

All right, you ready to get after it? There's a story from the Civil War about

a Union general named Buford.

And the story goes that Buford was in the town of Gettysburg in the days before

the coming fight, and he was surveying the ground. He was a cavalry general.

General. And Buford stood up on the hilltop outside of this little town of Gettysburg,

Pennsylvania. He knew that Lee's army was coming.

He knew that the fight was going to happen on this ground. And he could see

the whole battlefield from his vantage point up on the top of the hill.

And there's a story that he went into this almost trance-like state and he had

a vision of the coming fight.

And he could see exactly where Lee's army was going to come.

And he could see the high ground and he could see the low ground and he could

see the field where Pickett's charge would ultimately happen.

And he could see it as if it were really happening in front of him and that

it was as if the battle that was going to take place was inevitable and that

nothing could be done to stop what was going to happen on that field.

He could see it clearly in his mind. He knew what was coming.

And I just want to submit to you today that if General Buford had been on that

hill thinking about neuroscience and faith and the things that we attempt to

smash together here, if he knew about the things that were coming in the coming centuries,

then he would have stood on that hill, looked out over that valley,

and he would have been able to see the coming fight that all of us are fighting.

And the fight is really the destruction of this idea of materialism,

that you're built from the ground up by the function of a bunch of neurons and

that your destiny is set in place by the electrical activity inside your brain.

And that sort of meaninglessness and purposelessness has led to a society that's

so focused on feelings and so focused on circumstances and everybody's kind

of in it for what they can get out of their life because nothing really matters anyway in the long term.

There's a whole group of our society that are fixated on finding their answers

in the past and how they can blame the past or other people on the ways that

they feel and staying stuck in a loop.

And sometimes that involves endless therapy.

Therapy obviously has an important purpose and role, and there are some amazing

therapists who are helping people break through and do great things.

But there's also a side to therapy where the idea is to continue to revisit

the trauma, to continue to diagnose yourself, to continue to add labels and

identities to the things that you feel,

and to believe that you can't really change, that you're broken,

and that people need to accommodate your brokenness in different ways.

And I'm just here to tell you that I'm not a therapist, and cell brain surgery is not therapy.

Some of these techniques are being used by therapists to good end,

and I'm so grateful for that.

And we're actually working on a course, we're working on some certifications,

and some ability for therapists to learn how to teach people self-brain surgery.

But let me tell you the important difference.

Surgical training is not about staying in school forever.

Surgical training is about arming yourself with a set of approaches.

Baseline set of knowledge, and the ability to discern when the appropriate,

when a particular technique and approach is appropriate for a particular problem

and learning how to practice yourself. self.

And so self-brain surgery then is the idea that you can learn the things that

you need to know about how to identify faulty thinking,

identify feelings and thoughts that are not helpful to you, and to develop a

skill set with the internal professor that you have,

the Holy Spirit guiding you to develop a life where you can manage your mind

in a way that helps your brain become structurally more and more optimized for

living this life that you have,

that you can learn over time how not to need so much external help because the

internal systems that you put in place are able to help you navigate and deal

with the issues and problems that you're facing and therefore how to be able

to help other people more effectively.

So self-brain surgery is a skill set.

It's an approach to life. It's an approach to learning how to navigate the fact

that your thoughts aren't always true, that your feelings aren't facts,

that they're chemical events,

that you don't have to make an operation out of everything and all the other

10 commandments we talk about.

And most importantly, the idea that we don't commit self-malpractice.

So think about General Buford up on the hill and he could see coming in the future,

this battle between this materialism idea that we're reduced to the function

of neurons and that that determines everything.

Or that we actually now see through science, the fact is through quantum physics

and modern neuroscience, that the mind is separate from the brain. You are not your brain.

You can't be reduced to neural activity in your brain.

And you're not stuck with the brain that you have. That your brain is constantly

growing new cells, constantly rewiring itself, constantly making itself new.

But the problem is that that battle of whether your brain is going to change,

whether you're going to become healthier and feel better and be happier or not

over time, that battle's happening automatically if you don't input your own control systems.

That battle is happening and you will continue to rewire and deepen the grooves

of the same old, same old.

And what got you here won't get you there if there is a place that's more hopeful

and more purpose-filled and more faith-filled than where you've been in the past.

If you're struggling with things that don't seem to ever get better,

then the techniques and tools that you've been using to try to make them better haven't worked.

And that means it's time to change your mind. So

Buford could look out over that hill and he would see that there's going to

come a time for all of us where we have to take charge and believe that we have

inside ourselves the physical and physics abilities to change the structural behavior of our brain,

which will then change the structural behavior of the rest of our bodies and

our synapses and our hormones and our neurotransmitters, and our epigenetics,

which is in our generations and the people around us.

That's the fight. And so Buford would say, there's going to be some people who

hear this information and decide they don't believe it, that they really can't

change. They're going to be deceived by the enemy.

They're going to be defeated on this battlefield, and they're going to stay

stuck in that prison of sameness, the long failure of staying put,

or they're going to become addicted to the idea that

they've got to revisit their trauma and spend time in the past

and they're going to not remember the number one thing that

the road to a healthy future does not often detour back

to the past over and over to make progress and heading towards a healthy future

you have to stop going backwards that you can't safely drive forward while looking

in the rear view mirror that the problems in the past cannot any longer define

us but rather the process of learning to grow and thrive during suffering can refine us.

Now, if you want to take the next step in how to find that battle and successfully

fight it that Buford may have seen from his vantage point up on the hilltop,

if you don't believe in God, maybe it's time to start opening your mind to the

idea that multiple studies have now shown that prayer and meditation and a belief

in a loving God makes a difference in your mental health and your physical body,

that there's a measurable, statistically significant benefit to believing and

having faith in a creator God who loves you.

Your hippocampus gets bigger when you learn to pray and meditate.

You become more resilient.

You become more able to handle hard things. And that is a scientifically validated

finding, which means if it works, there must be something to it.

Now, you may not actually believe that it's real.

Maybe you just think that's an approach from neuroscience. science,

but I'm telling you, the closer you get to it, the more you nuzzle up to it,

you'll start seeing some evidence.

If you pay attention to the evidence and you follow it like a good scientist

and you ask the right questions and you revise your hypotheses,

when you encounter something that continues to be true, at some point you have

to revise the statement and say, maybe there really is something to this.

Maybe there is a God who loves me.

And then you can do what the Bible says, taste and see that the Lord is good.

You might find yourself surprisingly armed with some new tools in the fight.

Listen, you don't have to believe in God to benefit from the fight that we're

talking about of overcoming materialism and reductionism and determinism and

replacing it with purpose and meaning and that your mind is non-local to the

brain and you're not stuck with the brain that you have.

You're not even stuck with the genetic switches on and off that you have, that you were born with.

Because it's the fight between believing your life is a random accident with

no choice and no meaning, or believing that you were designed with a specific purpose in mind.

And the thing is, as science advances,

it's becoming more and more obvious that there is only one truth.

And science never invalidates scripture, ever.

If you apply it fairly, and if you read scripture without eisegesis,

just bringing your own filters into it, if you read it for what it says,

it always validates things that we are proving.

Over time with science. Now, let me give you some guiding principles.

I told you self-brain surgery is not therapy. Self-brain surgery is theology

meets science and applied together to allow you to change your mind and change

your life by learning skills that you can apply yourself and over time not require

other people to help you change the way that you think.

Because the truth is, ultimately, nobody can change your mind for you.

And the Holy Spirit will internally help you, remind you, teach you, guide you, counsel you.

And you don't have to do it all yourself. but another person can never change

your mind. They can give you insights.

They can help you arm you with tools. They can direct you.

And sometimes you need that. Okay. But at the same time, if you don't develop

the internal structure to make these changes,

then your therapy or your medication or your doctor or your spouse or your pastor

or your chaplain or your friend or your counselor will never be able to help

you until you change inside.

You have to change your mind. Here's the guiding principle.

The Bible says, may the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing to you.

What does that mean? It means that God doesn't just want your behavior to change.

He doesn't just want you to do certain things. He wants to change the way you

think, because the things you meditate on become how your life plays out.

The things you spend time thinking about turn into the things in your life.

That's why we always say thoughts become things.

Another guiding principle, love the Lord your God with all your heart,

soul, mind, and strength.

He wants your heart. He wants your soul. He wants your mind.

He doesn't just want your behavior. He wants your thoughts. Why?

Because thinking changes the outcome of your life.

He wants you to take every thought captive. He wants you to learn how to biopsy

your thoughts. 2 Corinthians 10.5, make every thought your captive.

And what does that mean? It means you don't have internal conversations where

you behave internally in ways that are inconsistent with the way that the Lord

wants you to live your life,

ways that are inconsistent with the neuroscience of how you reduce cortisol

and increase your resilience and decrease your stress.

If you want to really practice this and live it out, you have to get your internal

thought systems in control.

You don't have these long conversations about what you're going to say to that

jerk when you finally get to the office or how you're going to tell off your

kid or what you're going to do if that person says this one more thing.

I'm really going to let them have it. You don't go down those rabbit trails

of thought because you take those thoughts captive.

And instead of rehearsing in your mind how you're going to blow somebody up,

you pray for them. You change your thought towards them. Why?

Because internal conversations have external consequences. Internal pre-dread

instead of prehab has consequences.

It will change your field. It'll change your state. It will change how you behave

towards other people because we know from neuroscience that our attention,

how we pay attention to something affects the reality.

How we anticipate an experience will change our behavior to make that feared

consequence more likely. That's a fact from quantum physics,

and it's a fact from your experience.

And on the quantum level, people feed off of your energy field.

If you dread something or dread someone, you go into that environment or that

encounter with this dread instead of a prayerful mindset.

You're going to create the very thing that you're afraid of.

Synapses are happening all the time. Neurogenesis and neuroplasticity are constant.

And that's why William James in the late 1800s said, the great thing then is

to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.

And that, my friend, is the battle that Buford could have seen from the hill.

Are we going to make this neurogenesis and neuroplasticity that we have available

to us, Are we going to make the changes that are possible and happening,

whether we direct them for good or for evil?

Are we going to make them work for us or are we going to make them work against us?

That's the fight that all of us are in. That's the call to self-brain surgery.

That's the time that we got to get on the battlefield and fight it out.

Buford could see it from his point of view. And I want you to get up on that

hill today and look out over the coming battle and say, do I want to change my mind?

Do I want to change my life? Do I want to get in the fight for my own benefit

and for those around me and the generations coming after me?

Do I want, as William James said, to make my nervous system my ally instead of my enemy?

We have guiding principles, Romans 12.2. We operate out of a renewed mind,

not my brain, not my thoughts, not my ideas.

I want to give those to God and let Him refine them and help me to worship Him,

as Romans 12.1 says. in an essential act of worship, giving my mind to Him.

And the contrary part of that is the flip side of it. It means that hurting

my brain with bad thinking is an act of anti-worship.

I'm using a consecrated holy thing that He gave me, an ability to change the world with my thinking.

I'm going to use it for an unholy purpose if I'm not careful and discerning

about how I choose to use my thinking and therefore how I choose to wire my

brain, how I choose to change my state, how I choose to affect other people.

Attention affects reality. Remember that. How we anticipate things,

how we view things, how we pay attention to them changes the outcome.

So let's get up on the hill and let's view ourselves taking that ground in a

way that works for us instead of against us.

We can change our minds. We can become healthier and feel better and be happier.

We're not stuck with the brains we have. We are not just a bunch of electrical

impulses. is you, my friend, are fearfully and wonderfully made and you can

change and you can win this coming fight.

And the good news is you can start 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.

Music.