Is it Okay to be Sad? (Self-Brain Surgery Saturday)

Good morning my friend, I hope you're doing well. It's Dr. Lee Warren here with

you on Self Brain Surgery Saturday.

Brand new episode for you today. I know it's been a couple of days since we

had brand new content and I've been hearing from you.

I heard from somebody in my office the other day that was happy with their health

care but mad that I hadn't had a new podcast out in a day or two.

So I see you and I hear you. We have been working through some incredible technological

upgrades and some challenges and of course, whenever you upgrade something,

there's always some sort of software problem.

So we're working on it, we're coming. I'm glad that you're with us today and

we're gonna talk about sadness today.

I wanna just give you a little insight into something that the holidays are

a natural time for, especially if you've been through some kind of massive thing.

It's a natural time for there to be a lot of emotion, a lot of things to remember.

A lot of looking back, a lot of loneliness, all those things.

And I just wanna talk a little bit about the fact that we're always talking

about how important it is to become healthier and feel better and be happier and all that stuff.

I'm always telling you to change your mind and change your life,

but I don't want you to forget that even Jesus wept and it's okay to feel what you feel.

You just have to remember that feelings aren't facts. So sometimes you have

to get above what you're feeling, examine it, be careful with it,

not just respond or react to it all the time.

But it is normal and part of the human experience to be sad and to deal with hard things.

And then there's a healthy way to do that. So we're gonna talk a little bit

today on Sadness Saturday,

just to be aware and be mindful of the fact that there are some people around

us at the holidays that are struggling and having some things to think and feel

and if you're one of those people, I just wanna encourage you today.

We're gonna look at Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's Stages of Grief.

We're gonna talk about some lyrics from an old U2 song. We're gonna talk about

some things from the Renevari newsletter that I get every week and and we're

gonna cover a lot of ground in just a few minutes but before we do any of that

my friend I have one 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.

Alright, let's get after it.

I get a newsletter every week from an organization called Renovare and Renovare is,

Was started by Richard Foster who's been on the podcast before and he has written

some of my favorite spiritual discipline books Celebration of discipline is

his most famous one But his organization is just a spiritual formation organization

and their newsletter is great.

You can sign up for it at renovare That's r-e-n-o-v-a-r-e,

renovare.

Renovare.org, renovare.org.

So Renovare has this newsletter that comes out every week, often written by

Brian Morican, who's the director of communications there.

And today he just hit it on the head with some things I was already thinking

about related to Advent and this time of year and just how things feel.

And so we talk a lot about on this podcast and in my newsletter and in my books

about how feelings aren't facts.

There's a lot of things that your brain throws at you and you feel something

and the problem with feelings is there's a limited palette of human emotional

triggers, neurotransmitters that make you feel certain things.

And whenever a particular neurotransmitter event happens in your brain,

you attach a lot of meaning to it, but the meaning is attached based on past

experiences and memories and so you feel something like fear,

for example, we've talked about this a million times,

but you feel something that feels like fear.

And it could be because there's actually a bear in your house,

or a murderer, an axe murderer, a scary clown wielding an axe or something,

whatever you're scared of, it could be that there's really a threat.

Or it could be that you're just perceiving a threat based on an experience or

an irrational fear that you had in the past.

Or you could just be worried about something that you know you're going to have

to deal with in the future, or that you might have to deal with in the future,

or something that somebody said or may have said.

But all those feelings feel the same. So I just try to make the point that fear

feels like fear because it's a chemical event in your brain, okay?

And it doesn't matter whether the fear that you're feeling is because of a real

threat or an irrational worry Something from the past that's been brought up

to you or triggered by a memory that's been triggered fear feels like fear, right?

But the problem is sometimes Those feelings actually aren't what they seem to be C.s,

lewis famously said the very first line of his book a grief observed after his

wife died Nobody ever told me that grief feels so much like fear Nobody ever

told me grief feels like fear. It feels like fear.

Now, what does that mean? It means that sometimes the emotional experience that

you're having chemically is similar to another experience, but they're not the same thing.

They just feel the same. And that's why I make the point all the time. Feelings aren't facts.

What they require is self brain surgery. They require you to biopsy them and

understand why you're feeling what you're feeling and make the right diagnosis.

So we don't wanna make a bad operation based on a bad diagnosis, right?

So one of the ways of becoming healthier and feeling better and being happier

and managing our lives is not to deny that we feel things, but to be careful

diagnosticians just like a good surgeon would be.

If you're one of the Society of Cell Brain Surgery members, then this is something

we're going to drill into with the paid content.

And by the way, you can become a paid member of the podcast to help support

and promote and help us buy all this new gear that we need to do video and all

the things that we're doing.

If you want to join us and become a paid member, or you can get the membership at wlewarrenmd.com.

Slash join, J-O-I-N, W-L-E-W-A-R-R-E-N-D dot com slash join.

There's gonna be all kinds of great things for the paid subscribers as you help

me write the next book for self brain surgery.

So if you're one of those people, you're gonna get some extra content.

We're gonna go a little deeper on this, W-L-E-W-A-R-R-E-N-D dot com slash join.

Nevertheless, we teach this procedure called the bad thought biopsy,

or just the thought biopsy procedure. We talk a lot about it in my new book, Hope is the First Dose.

And as a further aside, I just found out this morning, I can't believe I didn't

already know this, but if you are a member, if you're a paid member of Spotify,

if you listen to music or podcasts or whatever on Spotify, if you happen to

be a premium member of Spotify,

you can get all my books, audio books for free as part of your membership to Spotify.

Just randomly on Spotify this morning, listening, doing some worship,

listening to my friend Tommy Walker's song, a couple of his songs this morning.

And I noticed a little pop-up for audio books and I checked on it and I found

Beth Moore's new memoirs on there for free and I thought, I wonder if my book's

available and I typed it in and sure enough, you can listen to my book with

no additional charge if you're a Spotify premium member.

So if you haven't read Hope is the First Dose or I've seen The Interview or

any of my books and you are a member of Spotify already, you don't have to buy

it through Amazon or anywhere else, you can go right to Spotify and find that

book. so I thought that was really cool.

Nevertheless, as I said in my book, Hope is the First Dose, we can learn how to biopsy our thoughts.

And sometimes they're true, okay? Sometimes the thought that you're having that's

prevailing in your mind and giving you difficulty concentrating or dealing with

something, sometimes that thought is actually true.

An example of mine happened yesterday.

I'm just gonna be real vulnerable and real honest with you for a few minutes here.

I woke up yesterday and I was sad and I didn't know why.

I was literally had tears coming out of my eyes when I woke up yesterday morning,

three o'clock in the morning.

And I got up and began to do my Bible study and my worship time, and I was weeping.

And I looked at Mitch's picture, I talked to Jesus about it,

I didn't really understand.

I know this is, we're getting close to the 11th Christmas since we lost him, and I was just sad.

And then I started biopsying my thinking, why am I sad?

Nothing happened today to make me sad. And then I remembered the day before,

I received an email from a family, but don't have their permission to share

the story, so I hope to get that out, I actually would love to share this story

with you sometime, but they had a little child, young child,

brilliant kid, doing well in school, doing well in sports,

and one day playing sports and the next day collapses and goes to the ICU and

ends up passing away from a really rare disease that just showed up and in one

day took this child's life.

And they sent a link to a video where the child had done some singing and was

an amazing, beautiful, talented young child, and then a link to the memorial

service, and Lisa and I watched that stuff when y'all sent it to us.

And we listened to this memorial service and people talking about this young

child's life, and the big question was just, why? Like, why,

God? Why does this happen?

Why do these things occur? We don't know, and we don't understand,

and we just can't make sense of it. And so I recognized that I had that empathy,

and that another family is going through that recent loss of a child.

And so I understand that right before I went to sleep on Friday,

I had those kinds of thoughts in my head.

So obviously emotionally, my brain linked up my feeling of having lost my son,

Mitch, with the loss of this child from this other family. And I had this empathy and all that.

So I wake up and I'm tearful and I don't know why. And here's what happens, okay?

What happens is when you feel an emotion and your brain says,

oh, when that chemical event occurs, it means I'm sad, right?

It means I'm sad. It means I'm anxious. It means I'm depressed.

It means I'm afraid, whatever the trigger is.

And you have to then be careful because if you've had a past experience of when

you're sad, you do a certain thing, okay?

When you're sad, you open a bottle. When you're sad, you take a pill.

When you're sad you turn on Netflix, when you're sad you go to Amazon and shop,

when you're sad you send a text message to that person who comforts you but

ought not to be, when you're sad you do this thing, right?

Or when you're sad you go down a thought process, you go down a staircase.

Granger Smith and I talked about that. He has a slideshow.

When his little boy River drowned in the backyard. And he has this slideshow that happens.

It flashes all these images, doing CPR on River and calling the medics and finding

his body in the pool and all the things that happened with the devastating loss of their little boy.

And the problem for Granger is that that slideshow became uncontrollable.

He started following it down this stream of thought and he was seeing all the

social media posts and terrible people out there saying, you know,

oh, he was neglectful and his child died and if he hadn't been a star,

he would have been in prison for,

you know, manslaughter and all these horrible things that people said on the

internet because Granger was a celebrity and he and his family,

you know, had people attacking them when they didn't even know them.

And so that slideshow with Granger ended up on a tour bus with him drinking

alcohol and having a gun in his hand and almost taking his own life.

Because he let the slideshow and the feelings get away from him, okay?

He didn't learn for a long time to biopsy that thought and say,

wait a minute, yes, my son died.

Yes, I'm terribly sad. Yes, it was devastating, but I'm still alive and God has a plan.

I've got a wife and three other kids and I've got a purpose and all that stuff

that you can hope yourself out of that hole if you're careful and diligent with your thinking, okay?

Well, for me, the same thing happens, except for me, instead of a slideshow,

it always felt like a staircase.

It felt like there was this dark staircase that I went down to and there was

a door at the bottom and I had this sense in my heart that if I could just open

that door I could get to Mitch and maybe be with him in his dying moments and

help him, maybe save him, maybe take his place.

I had this clear mental image that I was supposed to go down there.

And I realized over time that he wasn't there.

I mean, the Holy Spirit rescued me from that line of thinking.

When I learned how to biopsy my thinking and change my mind about the fact that

I can't go to someplace in the past where my son is because he isn't there, he's with his creator.

I can't go back in the past and make any of that different. I can't change it.

But what happens still is something triggers the sadness.

And if I'm unaware of it, if I'm not sort of introspective about it,

I'll go down that staircase again.

And then I'll spend a day being kind of grumpy or sad or unable to make good

decisions or not moving forward in my life now, or irritable with Lisa or something

because I'm not paying attention to what's triggering the feelings that I have.

And today I just wanna give you some perspective on that because I don't want

you to think when we talk about changing your mind and changing your life and

trying to become healthier and happier and more hopeful and all that stuff,

I don't want you to think that that means you won't ever feel sad,

that there's gonna come a time when you stop being sad about the things that

happened, because that's not true.

You and I live in this crazy mixed up reality where we've been through hard

things and we have a beautiful, purposeful life.

Also, at the same time, they're both and, not either or.

We've talked about that a lot and I wrote about it a lot.

The and or but, the massive thing can't be the only thing, it has to be a thing,

and learning how to switch that and learning how to be careful not to go back

into it is one of the keys of navigating even hard times of the year like this one.

Now before we go any further I want to remind you about our sponsors for this

episode, Pique, P-I-Q-U-E, and Armra,

A-R-M-R-A.

These are two products that Lisa and I use every day. I mix them up in my athletic

greens, it's a nutrient probiotic, prebiotic vitamin mineral substance that I drink every day.

I'm not a paid affiliate of athletic greens, but I do drink it every day.

And I'll just remind you if you're going to add a supplement to your diet or

any kind of major change in your health, especially if you have chronic health

issues or take medications or if you're older, talk to your doctor before you add something.

But PEAK and Armra help with immune system support. They support gut and the

gut brain interface, which is so important, because I've told you before that

your gut is like a USB port and you stick a thumb drive in there and your brain

gets everything that goes into your gut.

If you're gonna build new synapses and change the way you think and become more

resilient, you gotta have good building blocks.

Because if you build a house out of terrible materials, then you're going to

have a terrible house that's not very strong.

And the same thing happens, the nutrients that you put into your gut become

antigens that you create disease around or they become building blocks for the

things, the proteins and the molecules in your brain that you need.

And so put good stuff in there, Pecan Armor help us. And if you buy them through

our links that you'll see in

the show notes, then it helps us to grow the podcast and all that stuff.

So check out the links in the show notes for Pecan Armor, especially this time

of year when we're gathering with people who have viruses and we're sneezing

and coughing and all that stuff.

So Peak and Armor helping us get the podcast out there even farther and then

help you become healthier and feel better and be happier.

Okay, I wanna talk for a minute about something that sort of I was feeling all

this sadness yesterday and weeping and realized that I was attached to somebody

else's acute pain syndrome and I was sort of letting that slide me back down

that staircase and that's what happens, okay?

And I was taking a shower and I realized that we talk a lot about the stages of grief, right?

We talk about Elizabeth Kubler-Ross' stages of grief all the time in every psychology

101 class and every podcast and every website talks about when you've gone through

something hard, how there are stages of grief, and it's true.

But you've heard me say before probably, if you've watched me interviewed on

CBN or The 700 Club or on somebody's podcast, Theology in the Raw or wherever

else, you've probably heard me say this.

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's research was never intended to describe the type of

grief that you have when you lose a child, or your husband gets a brain tumor,

or you get fired from your job, or you don't make it to the NFL,

or whatever the other massive thing is that you've been through.

The stages of grief that she described were very specifically based on her research

of what people do when they find out that they are dying.

She was specifically looking at people with terminal illnesses and the way that

they process that information as they address the fact that they're dying and

go through the process of losing their life from a disease.

And they pretty predictably fall through this pathway of denial and anger and

bitterness and depression or sadness and then finally come to accept it and

making the ability to have their life not just be defined about the fact that they're dying.

The problem is that model has been widely discredited when you try to apply

it to any other type of grief or loss that you've gone through,

especially doesn't work in trauma, okay?

It just doesn't work. The model isn't exactly right.

And so unfortunately, society and the media and our psychology classes and everybody have picked up,

every blogger out there have picked up on this idea that you're supposed to

navigate in a relatively orderly way through the stages of grief and we start

putting clocks on other people because we think we know how long it should take

them to reach acceptance.

Or we think we can put our finger on what stage they're in by observing their behavior.

And I'm just here to tell you, it's not true. There is not a stage, my friend.

This is why I came here this morning to tell you this. There's not a stage after

something devastating happens to you in which you will stop being sad.

There's not. So if you think that sadness being the third stage of the stages

of grief is something that you move past, you are sadly mistaken.

And it's gonna hit you hard, and you're gonna start to feel like there's something

wrong with you when you can't move past that stage. The problem is quantum physics

describes this world in which multiple things can be true at the same time.

And for me, that's a breakthrough. So as a scientist, as a nerd,

I was more of a math lead than an athlete.

And as a nerd who thinks about such things, it made perfect sense to me that

when I understood that Jesus said,

in this world, you will have trouble, and he also said that I came to this earth

so you could have an abundant life, when he said those things,

and then Hebrews tells us, God, that it's impossible for God to lie,

and his gifts and his promises are irrevocable.

But when I saw that all those things, if it's impossible for God to lie,

if he never breaks a promise, then those two things have to be true at the same

time, that you can have a hard life and an abundant life at the very same time.

And so what I'm here to tell you is, if you think that there's a stage that

you get to graduate from where sadness is in the past over what happened,

you're gonna be really confused.

Because if you don't have cognitive, if you don't have some way to turn off

your brain and stop thinking about it, you'll have to square up at some point

that you have cognitive dissonance around this idea that you're supposed to

not be sad anymore, but you know you are.

And when cognitive dissonance rises up, we treat that.

We become unable to avoid treating it with something to try to make it numb.

So it stops driving us crazy.

And unfortunately, that's when people turn to the hydrocodone or to the alcohol

or to the pornography or to the gambling or to the shopping or to the whatever.

They turn to something to try to numb their brain from the fact that they know

something that they say is true is not true.

I've moved past this, I'm healing from it, but I know I'm not.

Or they finally acknowledge, I just can't stop being sad and that means there's

something wrong with me and I'm stuck.

And the fact is, there's nothing wrong with you. My son died 10 years ago in August.

This is our 11th Christmas coming up without him. And I am as sad about that

right now as I was the day it happened. But you know what's weird?

At the same time...

He's created, the Lord has created purpose and meaning out of that pain.

And he's allowed us to find a life where we still have this incredible family

and our granddaughter Scarlett and her grandsons, George and Jace and Riker

and her other four children, Josh

and Katie and Kimber and Kalen and their spouses, now all of them married.

And I'm just telling you that there's a life that has come alive.

And in some ways, none of that would have been possible if we hadn't gone through what we went through.

Go back and listen to me and Granger talk, and he talks about how they had another

child and how he came to know Christ, and all these things that happened after

he lost River that would not have happened if he hadn't lost River.

And the quantum physics duality that's weird about all that is it doesn't make

it less sad, it doesn't make you wish that you'd be glad that it happened, it doesn't make that.

It just means that it's both and, that these things are true,

and you can live this life where you have some true things happening in spite of the hard thing.

So, as it's sad that there's no stage where there's no sadness,

and there's no stage equally true, this is equally true, there's no stage of

grief where the thing that happened didn't happen.

It always happened, remember Gabbermonte said, trauma is not what happened,

because what happened is out there.

And it is true that it happened. I lost my son, your husband got glioblastoma,

your wife left you, your father abused you, whatever it was,

that thing happened, okay?

You went to war, you got bombed, you saw babies blown up and burned and all

those things that I have in my brain.

I have a memory of a guy that came off the helicopter where a bomb had gone off and it blew a guy up.

And the guy that got blown up, of his lower leg impaled this other guy in the

chest, the broken shard of his tibia went through this guy's chest.

And so I saw with my eyes this guy, my son-in-law Nate was with me.

He wasn't my son-in-law then, he was my scrub tech in Iraq. And that's a story

I told in no place to hide how my son-in-law came from my scrub tech in Iraq.

Anyway, we saw this guy, we helped this guy coming off the helicopter who had

the lower leg, including the pants and the boot of another human sticking out

of his chest. I can't stop seeing that, okay?

That's part of the trauma that wraps up my brain that I've got in my head and my heart.

And once in a while, that image pops back up and I can't make that not have

happened, okay? It did happen.

But what Gabbermonte said is trauma's not what happened, it's your response to what happened.

And the good news is you can change your response to what happened.

You can learn how your brain triggers certain chemicals and certain feelings

and you can learn that those things are not happening in real time.

You can observe them as an observer of something that happened in the past,

and you can understand based on all that you've learned and all the growth and

change that you've done, you can learn to observe them and interact with them

in a different way to say, yes, that horrible thing happened.

Yes, I will never stop being sad about that. Yes, that traumatized me.

Yes, I miss my son, but I also have a great life now.

I've got an ability to move forward. I've got an understanding that that thing

that happened doesn't have to be the thing that happened in my life.

That massive thing doesn't have to be the thing.

But what happens is, and this is where I'm going to circle back to Renovare

as we started this episode, what happens here is sometimes you get sad and something

devastating happens and you just say, why God?

Why does all this stuff have to happen? Why?

And U2 wrote a song a long time ago called Peace on Earth and there's a quote,

a verse where he says, Jesus in the song you wrote, The words are sticking in

my throat peace on earth here at every Christmastime, but hope and history won't rhyme,

Hope and history won't rhyme.

What's he saying?

He's saying the world's got all kinds of bad stuff happening in it And it doesn't

feel very hopeful and history just keeps showing us over and over that hard

things occur And we've been through these massive things and it doesn't feel

very hopeful sometimes And so this guy that writes for,

that's the director of communications for Renovare, Brian Morican,

wrote this great post yesterday that was titled, A Fast and Slow Rescue.

And here's what he's talking about. We cry out to God and we want him to rescue us.

We want him to grab us and pull us up out of this problem and rip us out of

this painful world or make all our problems go away.

And somehow because of the secular theology around us in the world,

we somehow believe that God doesn't care about us unless he makes things stop

hurting or unless he makes stuff stop happening that's hurtful to us.

And somehow we convince ourselves that because there's suffering that God can't

be real, or He can't love us, or He can't be faithful, or any of those things.

But the truth is, you got to look at the fact that there is a long narrative

arc to the story of God's rescuing you.

And if you read the Bible, in fact, if you're reading the Bible project,

one story that leads to Jesus with us that you started in January,

and a number of listeners are reading that with us every day,

that we're almost at the end of this long story that started on January 1st

that tells the whole story of human history.

And we're gonna get to Revelation, and I don't wanna spoil it for you if you've

never read it, but we win.

God keeps his promises. He is going to rescue you. And friend, the rescue is certain.

There will come a time when Psalm 103 comes true.

You can wake up and pray that every morning like I do, and you can pray it over

Tommy Walker music, and you can look at Jesus and say, Bless the Lord,

O my soul, let all that is within me, bless His holy name, bless the Lord,

O my soul, and forget not all His benefits.

And then he lists five benefits of blessing the Lord that you get from being

a person who loves the Lord, and here's what they are. He forgives all your sin.

He heals all your diseases. He redeems your life from the pit.

He crowns you with love and compassion. He satisfies your desire for good things

so that your youth is restored like the eagles, okay? Those are five things

he is going to do because he keeps his promises.

And so when you say, wait a minute, he doesn't heal all my diseases because

my husband died of glioblastoma.

He doesn't redeem my life from the pit because my son got stabbed to death.

Yes, but you got to look at the long narrative arc, okay?

There's a fast and a slow rescue happening here.

Jesus was born in a manger. He was God's answer to the problem of suffering,

but that baby didn't show up and go solve all the problems that day that he

showed up in the manger, right?

He came as a baby. He didn't have any power. He came as an infant.

And what happened is he grew up and he started showing people the love of God

with his hands and feet and showing up, like Drew Dix said, just show up and

get out there and get involved and find your faith with your feet.

And he did it. He walked around and solved problems and interacted with people

and came alongside them.

And he gave us a model of how he interacts with us and our suffering now.

The suffering, Brian Dworkin wrote, Brian Morgan writes, the suffering that

surrounded Jesus throughout his life and the suffering he experienced firsthand did not suffocate him.

Humanity's hurt moved him. It did not overwhelm him.

Sin broke his heart, but it did not break his joy. The birth and life of Jesus did change everything.

It changed everything, but not in the way or on the timetable we had hoped.

And listen to this, Brian wrote this beautiful piece.

In the incarnation, God is saying this, life on earth matters,

people matter, pain matters. God's paying attention.

He says this, when I made all, God says, when I made all, I made in the way

I made it, I knew what I was doing.

I understood the cost of free will, which I know may seem hard to believe.

So I'll take on your frame.

I'll experience all you feel and more. I'll show you how to live at peace in

a troubled world, how to be an unhurried and healing presence.

I'll come in the flesh to be an example to you.

Then I'll come in the spirit to be life in you. My rescue will be fast.

Your adoption will be quick as a hammer swing. My rescue will be slow.

Millennia will pass before the fullness of the kingdom comes.

My slowness is not cruelty or lack of care. On the contrary,

I'm birthing a people of everlasting joy, and that takes time.

And sometimes hope and history don't seem to rhyme, and sometimes you wonder,

why is God taking so long to help me in my pain here?

But the truth is, he's not.

God, as my friend Dale Margaret says, God is never late, but he is seldom early.

I love that line. Listen, God's got a purpose for the pain that you're experiencing, okay?

He's answering it. He's coming inside your story and walking alongside you,

and he is going to redeem you and rescue you from it. He's gonna keep those promises.

But it's gonna come on his timetable. And the reason is, he says in Isaiah,

my ways are not your ways, my thoughts are not your thoughts.

I'm doing something you wouldn't even believe, he told Habakkuk,

even if I told you, you wouldn't believe it.

And I'm just here to tell you, Lee Warren, your friend, who's a fellow suffering

person, a bereaved parent, PTSD survivor, been divorced, been wrecked in a variety

of ways, and God has come alongside me and rescued me in that pain.

He sent Lisa into my heart and life at just the right time.

He's helped me develop a relationship with my children and with you and with

all these people all around the world who read my books that have helped me

navigate the loss of my son and find purpose for my life going forward.

And it took me 54 years to figure out what my actual specific calling was.

I thought it was doctor and it turns out it is doctor, but it's not because

I can do something with my hands.

It's because I can help you understand what's hurting you and help find the

best prescription to help it stop hurting as much so you can see things more

clearly and move forward in your life and become healthier and feel better and

be happier. That's my purpose.

And I can do that. I love it. I love that I can go to the operating room and

physically remove a ruptured disc and take that pressure off your side of the

nerve and make your leg stop hurting.

I love that I can remove a brain tumor from your head and save your life and

give you back your strength and help you stop having seizures.

I love it, okay, but I also have a purpose.

It's about understanding why we hurt and how we hurt and help you understand

it and navigate it, process it and find purpose and help you end your suffering

some because you start to understand purpose inside it, okay?

You've got a calling too. It's not just to swing a hammer or to file a brief

or to close the books at tax time, okay?

It's not just that, not just to change diapers and drive your kids around.

It's not your unique calling.

You have a unique calling that can transcend the particular moment in time,

and it will last your whole life,

and it may look different over time in different ways, but you have it.

And one of the things we're called to do is to live a life in which God's two

promises are true at the same time without letting either one of them overwhelm us, okay?

He came to give us an abundant life so we don't become hedonists and go after

everything that feels good because woo-hoo, God gave us an abundant life.

We don't do that. We also don't, however, understand that God says in this world you will have trouble.

And we don't drink ourselves to death. We don't throw ourselves in a hole and

say, please take me out of this world and put a gun in our mouth because we're

so sick of how hard everything is.

We don't do either of those two things because we understand that the story

we're in is one that ends in our rescue.

But that rescue doesn't play out on the timetable that we can see.

And we understand that our job is to reach back and let somebody else grab our

hand and pull them forward to where they can find a little hope to stand on. And that's our job.

And having meaning and purpose and understanding your unique calling will help

you deal with even the sad days, even on Sadness Saturday, when you recognize

that your tears are real because that trauma happened. That thing really did happen.

And you can learn to observe and biopsy the thoughts and you don't have to go

down those rabbit trails of secondary and tertiary thoughts that aren't true,

or they're not helpful, or they're actually hurtful or harmful to other people.

And you can learn to biopsy your thinking with self-brain surgery.

Find a way to navigate and handle your brain in a healthier way and understand

that thoughts become things and they turn into epigenetic switches that turn

into how your children start their lives and the baseline that you give them.

And so in the coming months on this podcast, we are going to go deep and understanding

how we're wired so we can handle our brains with our minds in a healthier way,

so our brains help our bodies become healthier,

and we can handle our minds in a way that keeps them open and sensitive to the

leading of the Spirit because that's how we're connected to the internet of

all that God has possible for us, okay?

We're not just trying to become a little bit happier. We're not just even trying

to become significantly happier.

We're trying to connect to the infinite source There's all that there is,

our God and our Creator, because we are created in His image.

When we start firing on the cylinder that He has for us and the full capacity

of the life that He has for us, that's when we begin to navigate this duality

of hard and abundant at the same time in a way that helps us and inspires others.

And the good news about all that, my friend, here on Self-Brain Surgery Saturday,

is that you can start today. you.

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.