I Will Not Pass it On (The 7th Commandment of Self-Brain Surgery)

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

Lee Warren here, and we are on Self-Brain Surgery Saturday.

We're going to do a little self-brain surgery today, and we're going to get

back into our Ten Commandments of Self-Brain Surgery.

We've done six episodes so far, cover the first six commandments of self-brain surgery.

If you've missed those, then you can go back to recent episodes and find those prior episodes.

The Ten Commandments of Self-Brain Surgery, let's run through them real quick.

Say them with me. I must relentlessly refuse to participate in my own demise.

I must believe that feelings are not facts. They are chemical events in my brain.

I must believe that most of my automatic thoughts are untrue.

I must believe that my brain is designed to heal. I must love tomorrow more

than I hate how I feel right now.

I must stop making an operation out of everything.

And the one we're going to cover today, number seven, I must not perpetuate

generational thought or behavioral issues in my family or start any new ones.

The eighth commandment, I must love my brain and live in such a way as to improve it.

The ninth commandment, I must believe that I'm getting better at what I'm doing.

What I'm doing, I'm getting better at.

And number 10, I must understand that thoughts become things.

Those are the 10 commandments of self-brain surgery.

Now, understand I'm not being sacrilegious when I say this. I'm saying these

are principles that if you operate your mind and your brain in accordance with

them, you will become healthier and feel better and be happier.

They will help you. They're based in scripture.

They're based in 21st century neuroscience, and they will help you.

Whether you believe in God or not, these 10 principles will help you become

healthier, feel better, and be happier.

They'll help you manage your mind. They'll help you overcome being sad, sick, stressed, stuck.

They'll help you if you're dealing with trauma, drama, tragedy,

or other massive things. They will help you.

And so, let's practice self-brain surgery in accordance with these good principles.

And today, we're going to talk about the seventh one. I must not perpetuate

generational thought or behavioral issues in my family or start new ones.

We're going to talk about how that works. That's going to bring up a whole lot

of things like epigenetics, generational curses, all this stuff that we talk

about in theology and science, and we're going to get after it,

smashing those two things together to help us become healthier,

feel better, and be happier.

Before we get started here on Self-Brain Surgery Saturday, 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 for 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? Here we go. So, we've talked a lot on

this show about something called epigenetics.

Epigenetics is not, and I'm going to make sure I say this clearly,

because I think sometimes we say that the way you think or the way you live

can change your genes, and that's not exactly true.

Your DNA doesn't change, okay?

That can be affected by different things, but your DNA doesn't change in response

to your thinking. What changes is the decision in your body to up or down-regulate

the expression of those genes. And what does that mean?

Gene expression is the process by which DNA is read by RNA and encoded into

proteins that turn into the things that run the cells and processes in your body.

So DNA is information, and the transcription of that DNA is how proteins are

constructed and built, And that's what turns into the molecules,

hormones, neurotransmitters, cells.

Everything else that happens inside your body is a result of the information

in DNA being read and turned into proteins.

Okay, that's how it works. So epigenetics is the relatively shocking discovery

that was made 20 or 30 years ago now that some things in our environment and

some things that we think about,

some things that we experience like traumas, can actually place little markers,

epigenetic switches, if you will, little markers on DNA that turns on or off

or up or down regulates, making it more or less likely to occur,

more or less powerfully occurring.

The expression of those genes, not the information that the genes contain.

You've inherited a particular set of genetic information from your mom and dad,

and that doesn't change.

What changes is the baseline level of expression of those genes when you're

born, whether those genes are whispering or shouting.

And what we know now, this is a little bit terrifying if you think about it,

but we know that there are things like transgenerational expression of memory.

Like you can sort of remember something in your spirit that your parents experienced

but you didn't experience.

You can be born with a baseline level of cortisol expression,

for example, in responses to certain traumatic events because your parents or

your grandparents or your great-grandparents experienced something difficult,

even though you haven't experienced it.

There's this great study in mice. It's kind of famous now where male mice were

exposed to the smell of cherry blossoms, and when they reacted to it,

they gave them a little shock to cause them some pain.

And what they learned is that they could train those mice to

be afraid of the smell of cherry blossoms and then

they checked and recognized that in the sperm of those

mice there were epigenetic changes in the

dna that resulted in the offspring of those mice being afraid of the smell of

cherry blossoms even though they had never been shocked when they experienced

it and that change went down three or four generations the good news is they

were able to train the offspring the pups of those those mice not to be afraid anymore.

And then their offspring didn't have those epigenetic switches.

So what that means is our environment and the things we go through can make

these epigenetic changes in how our genes are up and down regulated.

And we can actually inherit the effects of trauma on prior generations,

but we can also sort of de-inherit that.

We can learn, we can be trained not to be afraid of those things.

We can re-learn how to switch those genes on and off in a way that helps our offspring.

So what it means is you're not

stuck with the brain or even the genetic expression that you're born with.

You have power. You have creative and restorative power. Your brain and your

body are designed to heal.

Now, on the theology side, we have all these scriptures that reference the idea

that it is possible to inherit problems from your parents.

Now, we know that now from genetics and epigenetics.

But way back in the Bible, thousands of years ago, Ezekiel 20 said this,

I, the Lord, your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers

on the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate me.

Now, that sounds like God's a big bully. It sounds like, hey,

if you screw up, I'm going to punish your kids.

But what if we flip that around? And what if God's not actually threatening here?

What if he's saying, hey, the way you live has implications to what happens

to your kids. The things that you do and the things that you decide and the

things that you experience and the things that you go through are going to change

the way that your kids experience their life.

And lo and behold, neuroscience comes along in the 20th century,

21st century, and says, you know what?

When your parents drink too much, when your parents practice certain behaviors,

the kids are born with different levels of gene expression that predispose them

to certain repetition of patterns.

When you're an abusive person, when you've got the kind of psychology to be

abusive and mean and vile, guess what?

Your kids have a baseline inheritance level that might push them towards those types of behaviors.

There's also, obviously, the way we live influences people influentially.

So our kids grow up in an environment, so there's some nature and some nurture aspects to this.

But it wasn't until epigenetics was discovered that they understood that we

began to understand that there's actually a real genetic correlation to this

idea of generational sin as well, generational curses as well.

What we didn't know, and this is an important point, the Bible does talk about

the results of the parents' sin being passed on to the kids.

There's no doubt that's what Exodus

25 is saying, that sins and their consequences are passed to children.

But what we know is that the guilt of the sin is not passed on,

because Romans tells us plainly that everybody's responsible for their own behavior.

Ezekiel and Jeremiah, both places say, Don't say, hey, my father ate sour grapes

and my teeth are set on edge.

You're not responsible for the guilt of what your parents did,

but you are sometimes burdened with the result of that.

And we know now the good news is that that can be changed by thinking differently,

by living differently, by allowing God to renew our mind, by making different choices for ourselves.

We don't have to be cursed with the result and the guilt of what happened with

our parents. So those generational issues can be rewired and changed.

So make sure you separate the idea that it's consequence that we inherit, not guilt.

So that means that you don't have to hang your head.

If you came from a long line of criminals or drug addicts or people that were

not so saintly, that doesn't mean that you're born with a predisposition to

be or a destiny to be one of those people.

In fact, you have a responsibility to make it different for you and your offspring.

The beautiful thing is the Bible also says not only do children have three or

four generations where they might struggle with what happened with their parents,

but God's favor and His love, He says, lasts to a thousand generations.

So that means healthy epigenetics, which is, last a lot longer and persist much

more heavily into our generations than bad ones do.

That's exciting to me. That's good news. But today, I just want to give you a little thought.

About how we can keep the seventh commandment.

I will not perpetuate generational thought or behavioral issues in my family

or create any new ones. So what's the deal with that?

Well, we can make a decision that if we know that the way we think and the way

we live leaves a mark on the genetic expression of our children,

then we have to be careful with the decisions about how we're going to think, feel,

believe, and act in regards to the people around us, right?

And this, I think, is really what Ephesians chapter 5 is talking about.

So Ephesians 5 is this interesting sort of self-brain surgery chapter that talks

about the consequences of how we live.

And here's the verse. Verse 14 says, This is why it is said,

Wake, sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.

If you've been living like you're dead, you're bearing burdens,

you're carrying heavy guilt, you're dealing with things that you've inherited,

You're struggling with trauma and tragedy and drama and massive things,

and you just can't shake it. Christ says, hey, wake up.

You can change these things. You can make a decision for it to be different.

And verse 15 says, why and what to do about it.

Be very careful then, my friend, how you live, not as unwise,

but as wise, making the most of every opportunity because the days are evil.

Be very careful then how you live. Why would he give you that warning? Okay.

If it's all grace all the time and all your sins are forgiven and you don't

have anything to worry about, why would you need to be careful with how you live?

And I'll tell you why. Because how you live is programming how your kids are going to start out.

It's programming how their genes are going to be expressed.

We know now there's all kinds of amazing research that what we do in our lives

affects the not only mental state and the habits and behaviors that our kids

are born with a tendency to,

but also some serious impact into their physiology and their overall health.

So we need to be very careful how we live.

There's all kinds of things. Like in humans, we know that grandchildren of grandparents

who ate too much die earlier than normal, have shorter lifespans. Why?

Because they tend to inherit up and down regulated genes that are not as healthy.

They tend to have behavioral patterns in their family that produce bad eating

habits that are not as healthy, and those kids don't live as long.

So if your grandparents were significantly obese, you have a baseline predisposition

to having a shorter lifespan.

So you can change that, right? We know that baby lotions that contain peanut

oil can create peanut allergies in the offspring of those people.

Why? Because we've put something on our skin that up and down regulated a gene

that makes us sensitive to something that we can pass on to our kid.

That's not a sinful thing, but it's definitely a signal that how we live changes

the outcome and the starting point of our kids. smoking predisposes your children

to earlier disease and death.

Why? Because you've made some epigenetic changes in the way your cardiovascular

genes are firing and up and down regulating and the proteins they're transcribing

and your kids are born with a worse starting point vascularly than they should be.

Anxiety during pregnancy can lead to asthma in offspring.

Why? Because you've up and down regulated genes that produce higher stress hormone levels.

And those kids are born with a higher baseline cortisol level,

and they have more trouble with asthma, breathing problems, all those things. It's amazing.

There's hundreds of these epigenetic ideas that have been discovered now.

And that's why, again, 2,000 years ago, the Bible says, hey,

be careful how you live. It leaves a mark.

And guess what? It leaves a mark on your genes.

So if we're thinking about how we want to live our life, life,

not only is it about looking back and saying, hey, what can I unlearn from my parents?

What can I reset in my life? What can I go maybe figure out that I was baseline

predisposed to do and predisposed to think?

And I grew up seeing these habits and behaviors and attitudes happening in my

home that might not have been so healthy.

And I want to renew my mind and I want to change that and get my own life under

control as good as I can to try to become healthier and feel better and be happier

and honor God and enjoy Him forever and all that stuff, right?

But also thinking about the future, thinking about the next generation.

If I want to recognize that some of my troubles came from my parents and my

grandparents and my great-grandparents,

if I'm able to recognize that, then a wise and compassionate person would then

turn downstream and say, okay, not only am I aware that these things are hurting

me, but I'm also potentially going to hurt my children with them.

And the wise person would say, you know what? The buck's going to stop here.

Like to the ocean, like God said in the ocean, this far and no farther.

You can make a decision today.

If you want to be a good self brain surgeon and also practicing surgeon on behalf of somebody else.

If you want to be compassionate and wise towards yourself and towards your offspring

and those around you and the people that you love, you're going to say,

hey, I know that my behavior affects those around me, that if I stress people

out, they can make some genetic switches that could affect their children.

If I'm living in a way that's harmful, if I'm making bad decisions,

if I'm overeating, if I'm drinking, if I'm smoking, if I don't control my blood

pressure, if I don't get my mind under control and I stay in a high cortisol state too often,

I'm going to teach my future children and their children and their children

to be born with a predisposition to those same behaviors and attitudes.

So one of the commandments then is I will not perpetuate thought or behavioral

issues in my generations or start new ones.

Okay. And that's one thing we don't recognize sometimes. We spend a lot of time

thinking about how bad our parents screwed us up or how bad their parents screwed them up.

And we never start to think about what we might be doing to the people behind

us in line, the next people down.

Because guess what? Not only are you the recipient of epigenetic changes,

but you definitely will be the passer-on of epigenetic changes.

And some of those might be ones that you started yourself.

And just a little nod to philosophy here.

I was raised with a very strong belief that heaven, the afterlife, was external to earth.

And the idea, the metaphor, I don't know if anybody ever actually said it,

but the idea was that our souls are separate from our bodies and that heaven's

a place where all these souls are floating around in this sort of ethereal,

detached, mystical place.

And the idea was basically heaven is somewhere out there, some metaphysical

somewhere, but it's not here.

And that our bodies are dead in the ground and buried, and we're some kind of soul floating around.

And you get these clouds and these metaphors of angels and people floating around

in space with harps and clouds and all that stuff.

That's kind of the Hallmark card heaven metaphor, the cartoon character heaven.

But what the Bible clearly says, if you read the Word, is that God is going

to make a new heaven and a new earth, and we are going to have bodies.

We are going to be embodied people, not floating around souls.

That idea actually came from Aristotle.

It's mysticism. It's philosophy. It's not scriptural.

So here's the mind-blowing switch for today, okay?

If you're going to have a body, that means you're still going to have genes and cells and DNA.

And that means that some of the ways in which God is going to renew and restore

our bodies will involve undoing some of the epigenetic things that have been

done to us through the generations.

Now, if you remember, when the Bible first starts out, people were designed,

Adam and Eve and the people around them were supposed to be there forever in

the garden and enjoying joy in the earth, being fruitful and multiplying and

subduing and creating with God and all that stuff that Genesis talks about.

But when they sinned, God said, okay, well, guess what? Now you're going to

have trouble in childbirth. Now you're going to have a limited lifespan.

Now you're not going to live forever anymore. Well, what was the result of that?

How did that actually happen?

It wasn't magic. God must have made epigenetic switches in their DNA that limited

their lifespan, that up and down regulated oncogenes and turned on the idea,

the possibility of DNA mutations that could create tumors and those kinds of things.

There had to be a physical connection between what God said and the result of

our bodies then becoming limited in lifespan and aging and all those things.

I want you to recognize that the science of neuroplasticity and the science

of genetics and epigenetics recognizes that everything that we think about and

everything that happens in our bodies,

it has a physical mechanism underneath it, okay?

William James, in his psychology, talked about the idea that everything has

a physical attachment, has a physical principle.

He says, the philosophy of habit is thus in the first instant a chapter in physics

rather than physiology or psychology, that it is at bottom a physical principle

is It's admitted by all good writers on this subject, what James is talking

about. And this is in the 1800s.

James is saying, when your mind does something, it turns on something in your

brain that turns into a physical thing.

There's a physical correlation to what happens in your mind.

And when Jesus created, when God said, let there be life, fiat lus,

that means that Jesus did something.

The gospel of John tells us that Jesus made everything that was made.

It wasn't magic. He did it with his hands.

When God said, make light, he made light. When God says, make Adam,

he made Adam. He made the person. He made your brain, okay?

And so he's the creator. He's the designer. He's the great physician.

And there's a physical process by which he used the stuff that he turned into

DNA to change how your body works.

So if you went from being able to live in Garden of Eden forever to now having

a 70-year lifespan, there had to be some physical changes to the way that our DNA was controlled.

And the long-term effect of that is if we're going to have new bodies that are

going to be eternal, that means those epigenetic markers are going to be turned

back to the way they were supposed to be in the first place.

And that's kind of exciting to me. It's sort of weird to think about.

But if you just rationally think, okay, God said that we're going to have new

bodies that are going to last forever, and they're going to be like the ones

he designed in the first place, that means that the cells in our body are going

to operate the way they were designed to.

They're going to be released from all the things that cause cell death and apoptosis

and mutations and cancers and tumors and all that stuff.

The design is going to be restored back to how it used to be.

And what that means literally is he's going to take the epigenetic markers off

that our sin and the result of our lifestyle choices have created.

Things are going to be set right in the way that they were supposed to be.

So, your job as a practicing self-brain surgeon and somebody living a life that's

trying to honor God and enjoy Him forever and affect the people around you positively

and help people find hope when they're hurting, your job, my friend,

is to not perpetuate generational thought or behavioral issues for yourself

or create any new ones for your family.

That's the seventh commandment. That's how you change your mind.

That's how you change your life. It's such good news that you're not stuck with

the things that you inherited.

You're not stuck with the brain you have. You're not stuck with the gene expression that you have.

You're not stuck being afraid of things that your parents were afraid of.

You're not stuck with something that happened to you when you were young because

you can change the response to it. You can take control.

You can take the high ground of your physiology by learning how to change your

mind. Renew your mind, Romans 12, 2.

The Bible says it plainly. When you use your mind and your body appropriately,

that's essential worship.

You're giving your creator back the honor and glory of using your body and your

mind in the way he wants you to, so that you affect those coming behind you positively,

which lasts for thousands of generations, instead of negatively perpetuating

those things that you may have inherited or created yourself.

So we are not going to create or perpetuate generational thought or behavioral

issues for our family. That's the seventh commandment.

That's how we change our mind here on Self-Brain Surgery Saturday.

That's how you change your life. And the good news is, my friend, 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,

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

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

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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.