Prayer and Your Brain (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. I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and I'm so excited to be here with you today.

It's Frontal Lobe Friday, as Lisa just told us, my favorite day of the week.

And we are going to get after it yesterday on the Spiritual Brain Surgery Podcast.

And if you haven't heard that yet, please go and check out Spiritual Brain Surgery.

It's about to crack into the top 100 in Apple.

It's had a great first launch week. People are buying in because we're talking

and taking a hard look at what we believe, why we believe it,

how to defend it to other people, and how to understand how our faith,

our mind, and our brain smash together,

to help us find hope and healing when life gets hard. That's what it's about.

And we take a deeper look at some of the spiritual things than we do on this podcast.

And I think it will help you. And yesterday I started kind of a one-two punch

where we talked about the word abide and how that word shows up 10 times in

the first 10 verses of John 15.

So it's obviously an important word. And what does it mean to abide in Christ?

And we took a look at that. And today we're going to go deeper and take a look

at what happens when you develop a practice of prayer and meditation and what

happens in your brain and how it can change your life.

It can actually even protect your memory, maybe prevent dementia.

Learning to pray and meditate and focus your mind and developing a habit of

doing that has been shown conclusively now to have incredibly positive effects

on length of life, overall stress,

cardiovascular health, memory, focus, tremendous number of things.

We're going to take a good look at that today.

But before we get into it, 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.

All right, let's get after it. Hey, there's a book called How God Changes Your

Brain by Andrew Newberg.

Andrew Newberg probably has the most published research on brain imaging and

what happens when people meditate and pray.

Now, I warn you, please don't write me.

I get emails almost every time I mention a book, somebody reads it,

and they write in and say, hey, that guy's not a Christian, or that guy talks

about evolution, or that guy is an Eastern meditator.

I know that. I'm not going to be surprised by you telling me that Andrew Newberg is not a Christian.

Here's why I think the book is valid and important.

He takes a hard look at brain science and has done incredible research on what

structurally is happening inside the brain of people who pray and meditate.

Now, does he draw all the right conclusions from that research?

I don't think so, and I'll show you why I don't think so in a minute. it.

But it's fascinating to me how somebody can be so intelligent and somebody can

do such great work and come to stunningly different conclusions than another

intelligent person looking at the same set of data.

I'm telling you about the book because I want to show you some things in it

that can be helpful to your life.

And I think that you can draw some different conclusions than Newberg does from

his own work. This is incredibly helpful.

So we're going to take a look at some Some of the things that Andrew Newberg

talks about in a couple of chapters of how God changes your brain,

he and I have been in contact.

I may have him on the podcast at some point. He's a fascinating guy,

and he's done some incredible work.

And just like with Dawson Church, there's some amazing things that we can learn

from his work, even if we draw different conclusions.

Here's an example. He talks about having faith and reaching your goals.

And he talks about how the steps of setting a goal and using your brain to achieve

it is achievable for anybody at any age.

And he talks about how that happens. And he says, it's not magic.

It's not something that quantum physics validates as some self-help books like to claim.

Rather, it is simply the brain doing what millions of years of evolution have

led it to do, accomplish goals that we set our minds to.

So he comes to this conclusion that our brain, as we've talked about recently

with Sharon Diericks in several episodes, Am I Just My Brain?

He comes to the conclusion that your ability to change your life by learning

to meditate and pray has something to do with what millions of years of evolution

have done in creating this brain and mind that can change based on the things that we think about.

To him, it's just a process that's led to this chemical and biological thing.

For you and I, or at least for me, I have a different interpretation of that data.

So we're going to talk about that later on. It kind of reminds me of,

I've seen it on TV before where there's like a drug dog in the airport and they're looking for heroin.

They've gotten a tip that there's supposed to be a suitcase full of heroin, right?

And there's a pile of suitcases and the drug dog is working and he's getting

excited and he's getting closer and closer to finding the drugs and stopping

the drug traffickers and all that. And he gets right to the suitcase that's full of heroin.

And right before he signals that this is the one, he makes a left turn and goes

to a suitcase full of something else, coffee or jelly beans or something.

And he finds the wrong bag. So he's like almost to the finish line,

almost to where he was supposed to go. And he makes the wrong conclusion.

He lands on the wrong place. And so I want to show you that sometimes in science,

scientists can discover something or explain something or find something and

then draw completely different conclusions from that data than another person would draw.

Okay, so I'm going to show you some of Andrew Newberg's work today and draw

a conclusion for you that I think will be helpful to you. Now, understand this too.

When we talk about prayer and meditation, I don't want you to get the idea. Yeah.

It's all a Christian process because it is clearly not.

You clearly can gain neurological benefits and life benefits,

cardiovascular benefits, health and welfare benefits from learning to get your

mind under control, whether or not you approach it in a spiritual way.

Now, there's several ways to explain that. One is there's a neurological system

at play here, and if you learn how to operate it more efficiently,

you'll have a better life because of it. that you're operating your machinery of your body better.

Just like if you work out and stay in shape, you're using your physical body

better than if you sit on the couch and eat Cheetos and drink beer all the time.

You're gonna have a different outcome with your body than if you use it to try

to stay in shape and be healthy, right? You have a different outcome.

The same thing is true with your mental health. If you spend your time learning

techniques that work to improve your mental function, then you're gonna have

a better life than if you don't.

If you let your thoughts push you around, If you follow your feelings all the

time, if you don't practice self-brain surgery, then you're likely to have some

trouble with your thinking that you might not have if you learn to operate it more efficiently.

So this idea that Dan Harris has written about of 10% happier,

you and I have talked about that many times.

And if you're one of the new listeners, you can go back in the archives and listen to episodes.

We've done a lot of work to talk about how there's really three paths to operating

your brain effectively. And one is this 10% happier idea where Dan Harris said,

hey, clearly meditation helps people. I'm going to strip all the spiritual stuff out of it.

I'm going to develop a practice of learning how to meditate,

and that's going to help me calm my anxiety, and I'll be a little bit happier.

He says that the whole title of his book that has sold millions of copies is 10% Happier.

And for some people, that's enough. If you're kind of stressed out or a little

anxious, 10% might be enough for you.

My assertion is and we've talked about it many times on

this show my assertion is if your son is stabbed to

death if your husband has a glioblastoma if your

wife leaves you for the mailman if you have a

devastating event in your life if you're facing some massive trauma or massive

thing or some horrible tragedy you're going to be more than 10% worse off than

you were before and 10% happier isn't going to move the needle enough to get

you back to anything that could be considered a valid,

purposeful, meaningful life. You need more than 10%.

But there clearly are a group of people who are not affiliated with any type

of spiritual practice that learn how to operate their brains on a very high

level, and those people can become significantly happier.

You actually can change your mind

and change your life without any type of spiritual practice in your life.

You can't. So it's silly and disingenuous to say, as a reader wrote in to me

not long ago, that said, hey, nobody can be happy without Jesus.

That's true on one level. It's true on the spiritual level that if you really want to,

and I'm telling you, if you want to find some water that doesn't leave you thirsty

and find some food that doesn't leave you hungry and find a happiness that's

not dependent on your circumstances and that doesn't change over time,

I believe you have to have a spiritual relationship with Jesus.

I think that's the best way to do it. I think it's the only way to really do

it because he says, I am the way and the truth and the life. And so my testimony.

Open, no secret about it. I believe that Jesus Christ is the way to a life that really is happy.

But that being said, there are lots of people who are agnostics or atheists

or don't have any sort of spiritual feeling who are happy people that enjoy

this life and find a way to manage themselves.

In this life in a good way.

One of my best friends is not a faithful person. He doesn't have any sort sort

of religious affiliation or belief.

He would probably call himself an agnostic. He might be an atheist.

Doesn't actually land on atheism. But he has zero spiritual connection in his life.

And he's the happiest, nicest, most pleasant, honorable guy you've ever met.

So he is living a life that is happy.

You can do that. You can be significantly happier if you learn how to get your

thinking under control.

So don't fall into the trap of thinking that you have to convince people that

your way is the only way that their life can be a little happier because it can.

And so I think we hurt ourselves and we hurt our message when we say that we

have the only keys to any sort of joy in our lives because we just don't.

If you learn how to use your brain more effectively and use your mind more effectively

to control your response to the circumstances and situations and feelings that

you have, you will become happier,

you'll become healthier, you can live longer and have less dementia,

and all these things do work,

without any sort of spiritual connotation, okay? That's a long preamble to say this.

In this book, How God Changes Your Brain by Andrew Newberg,

he talks about this guy named Gus, and they did some incredible studies on taking normal people,

that means people who weren't lifetime devotees to Buddhist meditation or praying

the rosary or nuns or monks or any of those people,

just people off the street who were having memory problems or cognitive challenges

and they wanted to try to find a way to get healthier and improve their memory and all of that.

And so Newberg's group at Penn developed a series of a program to teach people

how to meditate using this ancient meditation technique called satanama,

which is basically a mantra that people in yoga and Eastern meditation have

used for a year, for centuries,

to basically say this phrase over and over and learn for a 12-minute practice

each day using repetitive meditation to basically get into the meditation.

A state where they can calm down and improve their daily mental hygiene,

and they looked at those people over a period of eight weeks,

and they found remarkable, remarkable changes in their cognitive abilities and

the structural behavior,

functional behavior of their brains.

This particular patient, Gus, that he talks about a lot in this chapter,

had a 50% in and cognitive improvement in a standardized testing model that

his performance went from 107 seconds to finish the puzzle when he first started down to 68.

So almost 50% improvement in eight weeks of doing a daily meditation practice.

He improved significantly.

The average improvement in the group was 10% to 20%. Gus had almost 50% improvement.

So if you learn how to focus your mind and get into a regular prayer pattern,

a regular meditation pattern, then you can significantly improve the function

of your brain. And that's really important.

It's really important. So if we're talking about how do we get ourselves in

a better situation to enjoy our lives more, to have better function,

to live longer, to be able to handle stress and be more resilient.

How do we do that? Well, there's some evidence from science here that meditation

and prayer have some impact there.

So what specifically happened in Gus's brain?

What specifically happens when you practice a meditation and prayer technique

for 8 weeks, 12 minutes a day? What happens?

Well, several areas of the brain improve in their function and increase their activity.

The prefrontal cortex, which here on Frontal Lobe Friday, we're always talking

about the frontal lobes. What does the frontal lobe do for you?

The frontal lobe of your brain gives you the ability, unlike anything else in

all of creation, the ability to engage the gift of selective attention.

You can decide to think about this thing and not that thing.

And when you're stressed, when you're worried, when you're grieving,

when you're suffering, and you're starting to feel like you're never going to

be able to feel anything or think think about anything else,

you actually can learn to let your frontal lobe do what it's designed to do,

not what it evolved over millions of years to do, but what it's designed to do.

You can engage the design of your frontal lobe to engage selective attention and change your mind.

And so what they found with Gus and these other patients that they studied after

eight weeks of 12 minutes a day of meditation is that they had increased activity

in their prefrontal cortex.

What does What does that mean? The prefrontal cortex is the place where selective

attention comes from, was healthier and functioning more robustly.

The prefrontal cortex is involved in maintaining clear, focused attention on a task.

Also, increased activity in the anterior cingulate.

You and I have talked about the cingulate a lot. It's the gear shift that switches

from one thing to another.

It's involved in emotional regulation, learning, and memory,

and it is very vulnerable to aging.

People with Alzheimer's and other types of age-related dementias have decreased

activity in the cingulate and the prefrontal cortex.

And here we're seeing that people who meditate and pray for 12 minutes a day

improve the the activity of their prefrontal cortex and their cingulate.

And Gus's memory improved by almost 50% in only eight weeks of developing a

regular meditation practice, okay?

So also, the cingulate is involved in lowering anxiety and irritability.

If you're stressed out and anxious, it would be helpful to you to improve the

activity of your cingulate. Meditation and prayer does that.

Also, Also, it's involved in social awareness, which gets worse as we get older,

which is worse when we're demented.

We have less ability to properly and efficiently and acceptably interact with other people, right?

So now, this is even more fascinating.

Activation of the prefrontal cortex and the anterior cingulate improve memory

and cognition. We just covered that.

Counters the effects of depression, which is also a common symptom in age-related

disorders like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. people get depressed because they

have reduced metabolic activity in the anterior cingulate and prefrontal cortex.

So meditation and prayer then seem to have a counterbalancing effect to the

decreased activity in the prefrontal

cortex and cingulate that we see in Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

So what am I saying? I'm saying that developing a prayer and meditation habit

can help reduce the risk or reduce the effect of some of these age-related cognitive

decline situations that seemed to be untreatable before.

We're now seeing, Newberg's shown it in structural brain and functional brain

imaging, has shown clearly that meditation and prayer improves the activity

of these areas of your brain.

Personal religious practices, he says, and higher levels of spirituality are

associated with a slower progression of Alzheimer's disease.

This has has been shown in numerous peer-reviewed studies.

This is interesting. It's shown in several studies that people who only pray

briefly or people who pray in a self-directed way can actually increase their

stress, increase their cortisol levels,

and not improve their memory and their overall cognitive function.

So that means that the idea is not that you just whisper a quick prayer or you

pray only, hey, God, help me do this or forgive me for that or do this for me,

make the girl come back, take this tumor away, if you have just a transactional

prayer practice, and we talked about that yesterday,

this idea of abiding, of abiding on the vine, that prayer is not about transaction.

It's about relationship. It's about staying. It's about persisting in a relationship

and in a place with a person who's created you, that this transactional brief

prayer doesn't help with this cognitive stuff that we're talking about.

So it appears from the research that that there's a right type of prayer and

a wrong type of prayer in terms of the prayer that actually structurally changes your brain.

Now, don't hear me wrong. God tells us clearly to present our requests to Him.

So He does want us to tell Him what we need and tell Him what we want and communicate

with Him about our fears and our anxieties and all that.

Clearly, we are supposed to do that, okay? But when we're talking about developing

a practice of abiding in Him,

That process is not about ruminating on the things that are hurting us or ruminating

on the things that we want or begging and staying in a place of just thinking

about ourselves and our needs.

It's more of a getting close to Him, finding out what His will is in the process,

understanding how to communicate with Him and beginning to hear His voice.

That starts to activate these circuits in our brain that improve our memory

and our function and all of that.

There's a circuit between the thalamus, the basal ganglia, the cingulate gyrus,

and the prefrontal cortex that's been shown clearly now through Newberg's work

and others with functional brain imaging like SPECT and functional MRI that

this practice of focused meditation,

whether, and again, it works in Eastern meditation with that satana mantra repetition that you hear.

Sorry, I'm having a little trouble with my voice today, and I'm also having

a massive dental problem.

I've got another appointment with the dentist today, so my voice and my mouth

are probably not sounding normal because I'm struggling with pain in my jaw,

and I'm really congested. So forgive me if I don't sound quite normal today,

but I want you to focus in with me for a minute.

This circuit in your brain, prefrontal cortex to cingulate gyrus to basal ganglia

to thalamus and back to the prefrontal cortex, that is activated when we develop

a meditative prayer practice, okay?

And again, it doesn't matter if it's Eastern meditation, completely a spiritual

meditation, or Christian meditation using rosary or other types of liturgical prayer.

This has been shown to strengthen and increase the activity in the prefrontal cortex.

So you become more focused and alert because your prefrontal cortex comes online.

You become more empathetic and socially aware.

That's the cingulate gyrus. You become better in control of your body movements

and emotions. That's basal ganglia.

You become better aware of your sensory perception of the world and less self-focused.

That's thalamus. We talked about the default mode network a few weeks ago on Mind Change Monday.

And we learned that the default mode intensely focuses us on ourself.

Well, when you develop a prayer and meditation habit, you decrease the activity

of your default mode, and you decrease your parietal lobe and your thalamus'

self-focus, and you become more aware of the needs and problems of the outside

world and the things that other people need.

And that might be part of what God is trying to get after because He wants us

to sort of engage in prayer for other people. And when we do, our brains get better.

Our brains get healthier when we focus less on ourself and more on others.

Isn't that interesting?

Newberg's brain scan study showed that the meditation practice that Gus and

the other people were performing strengthens the circuit between the prefrontal

and orbital frontal lobe, the anterior cingulate,

basal ganglia, and thalamus that always gets worse with age and people that

don't develop that practice.

So I'm telling you, if you're getting older and you want to say,

what's a practical thing that I could do to improve my memory and help me?

There's all kinds of things. Talk to your doctor, have a healthier diet,

make sure you're hydrated, make sure you're getting plenty of sleep, don't use alcohol.

All that stuff is true, but we've shown now, not we, but it has been now shown

clearly with functional brain imaging that prayer and meditation also help prevent

memory loss and improve memory function,

and all these other areas of the brain get better when you develop this daily practice.

I'm not trying to beat a dead horse here, but I'm trying to make you aware that

this is solid neuroscience,

that learning to spend some time in quiet, reflective meditation and prayer,

and again, if you're not spiritual,

this works if you just learn how to calm your mind and just stop letting the

crazy train of thoughts flow and learn how to respond rather than react react

to the things that pop into your head.

This helps you have a healthier, better, and happier life.

But if you add the spiritual element, I'm going to show you in a minute why

that works and why it's so much better, okay?

So when this circuit, again, it's prefrontal and orbital frontal cortex,

anterior cingulate, basal ganglia, thalamus, and back. And when that circuit.

Works properly. It governs a wide variety of things like consciousness,

clarity of mind, reality formation, error detection, empathy,

compassion, emotional balance, suppression of anger and fear.

And when it's not working, it leads to depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive

behavior, schizophrenia, dementia, and all of those things.

So this is one of those circuits It's in the brain. It's so important,

and you can control, at least influence,

the functioning of it by your choice to think about certain things and not other

things, and you choosing to develop a habit of improving your mental hygiene.

It's incredible. If you want to improve, if you want to use the fact that you have a plastic,

neuroplastic brain that can change and grow new cells and grow new connections

and that you can take charge of that process and let the Lord direct you to make your brain better.

Again, you have the mind of Christ, and if you want to have the brain like Christ,

then you learn how to think like he did, learn how to develop a practice of meditation and prayer.

Gus did it with 12 minutes a day of an Eastern practice with no spiritual implications

whatsoever and improved his memory by almost 50%, his performance on memory

testing by almost 50% in eight weeks.

So imagine what a lifetime, what years of morning dedicated prayer and meditation

for just a few minutes a day, of developing a lifetime of praying without ceasing,

of trying to stay in this every moment holy attitude.

Imagine what that would do to your brain, my friend.

And Gus was shown in imaging studies to have decreased activity in the parietal

lobe at the end of that 12-week, I'm sorry, 8-week circuit of practicing 12 minutes a day.

Parietal lobe is self-focus. It's what is in it for me? What am I going to get?

Why is my life so hard? Why is everything so tough for me? I mean,

our sense of everything being about us is a parietal lobe default mode network

issue, and that gets better when we spend time praying and meditating.

And guess what that leads to?

Increased sense of happiness and peace and purpose.

Okay, isn't that interesting? That's been shown also in brain scan studies in

nuns and Buddhists who found after they develop a habit of meditation and prayer,

they get decreased activity in the parietal lobe,

lowering of a sense of self, more unified feeling

with other people and the things that they are contemplating or

setting their intention on like god and their prayer practice or

the universe for the buddhists and that sort

of thing and this is interesting it's another one of those places where newberg

makes a left turn right when he seems to be finally like he's sniffing right

on what i would think is going to say god did this he makes this big left turn

he says you know what we don't fully understand the reason for why a loss of

self-consciousness enhances one's intention to reach specific specific goals.

I'll tell you why. It's because when you focus less on yourself,

you can hear God's voice telling you the things that he wants for you.

And the Bible says it clearly, delight yourself in the Lord and he'll give you

the desires of your heart.

Like you get what you want by finding out what he wants and lining your heart up with him.

And his will for your life always turns out to be better than you could even

ask or imagine, as Paul said.

The things you think you want aren't as good as the things he wants for you.

And so that's why losing this self-focused ideology that we all have,

decreasing that self-focus is incredibly helpful in learning to be healthier

and feel better and become happier.

It takes less than two months of this practice to develop this improvement.

So what happens if we start today and we get after it?

Wouldn't that be fascinating? Wouldn't it be amazing to see your brain get better,

to have less self-doubt, less trouble concentrating,

more success at remembering the things you need to be thinking about,

more success at interrelation with other people, interacting with people at

work, interacting with your family, improving your relationships?

Wouldn't it be something if just learning to spend some time in the morning

abiding could do that for you?

Now this could go on and become a very long episode and I don't want to do that

because you got stuff to do we're going to do another episode about this and

get way more specific on the brain imaging side but there's a couple things

I want to share with you why does it work.

Why does it work for people who are not spiritual to develop a meditative practice?

Well, as I said earlier, learning how to operate your brain properly will allow

you to operate it more efficiently.

But there's this general grace idea. God made us with a specific way that our brains function.

And if you learn how to operate it the way He designed it, it will work better

for you than if you don't.

And there's all this scripture that gives us clues to how this is how God thinks about everyone. one.

And I think the whole point of it is to bring us into some place where we can

be receptive to wanting to know more from Him, wanting to know Him more closely,

and eventually developing relationship with Him and finding ourselves in that saved state.

There's this scripture where Matthew 5, where he says, God sends the sun on the just and the unjust.

He sends the rain on the wicked and the good.

God gives general grace to everyone.

2 Corinthians 9.10, He supplies seed for the sower and bread for the eater.

God gives us what we need for everybody.

He provides the world and the sun and the moon and the stars and sunlight and

rain and biology of how seeds develop and grow. He provides that for everyone.

Well, guess what? He also provided a way that you can operate your brain and

become healthier and feel better and be happier, even if you don't acknowledge

that the ability to do that came from Him.

He gave you selective attention. Even if you don't understand or acknowledge

that that is a gift that you can use from your Creator, it still works to learn how to use it.

Acts 17.27, I think, is the bottom line. Paul said,

hey, God set out before the creation of the world, He set out the exact time

and place where you would live and move and have your being,

and He did that so that you would seek Him and perhaps find Him,

though He is not far from any one of us.

I think that when people finally get to that place, and I got there after I

lost my son, and you'll get there too when you go through your massive thing

if you haven't already. I got to this place.

Where I said, I can't do this. I can't carry this.

I can't bear this grief. I can't manage it. I need help. I don't know what to

do. I've got to have help.

And at that moment, that's when the only possible help, the only possible path

to hope is to reach out for the hand of somebody stronger than you,

to reach for the mind of somebody who can think about this problem problem in

a different way than you can.

And I think then learning how to operate our minds more effectively will lead

us to a place where we say, I want more of that. I'm thirsty.

I want a drink that doesn't leave me to continue to be thirsty.

And I think that's why all of these processes work so that people will find

some way to land on something that looks and feels like hope and they're going to want more of it.

I agree with Andrew Newberg. It's not magic.

It's not some quantum physics trick. It's not, though, in my opinion,

the result of millions of years of evolution that just led the brain to be able to do this thing.

It's a designed, purposeful, general

grace disposition that God gave

us by creating our neuronal system in a way that our mind and our spirit and

our brain and our body can communicate with Him and come to know Him more efficiently

and maybe reach for him and perhaps find him and then help other people find

him too. That's what I think.

I think when we get into that place where we develop this meditative practice,

and I told you I was going to tell you what it is in a minute,

and I will, that's when we get to this Isaiah 30, 21.

Isaiah 30, 21 says you're going to start to be able to hear this voice.

That says, hey, don't turn that way. Turn this way. This is the way.

Walk in this way. When you get this relationship, when

you get in this place where you can begin to have a desire in your mind and

focus your selective attention on what you need and what you feel like you need

and regulate your body and your breathing and your thinking and your feeling

to decide how to respond to what you feel and what happens in your life rather than react to it,

to get your frontal lobes involved and make a selective attention choice and

begin to practice this type of thinking and this type of submission of yourself

to a higher plane of thinking and feeling that comes from your father,

then you can begin to hear that voice.

You've got to calm the outside noise, learn to biopsy and think about your thinking,

learn to recognize that feelings aren't facts, learn to recognize that thoughts become things,

and start then to practice this self-brain surgery ideology where you can develop

a practice of never giving in to the crazy thought,

never giving in to the negative voice, never running with the wild thought that

leads you down into something that's going to hinder you or hurt you,

but rather taking captive every thought,

2 Corinthians 10, 5, and beginning to be in control of that process rather than

at the mercy of it. Does that make sense?

Now, Newberg writes about this satanama type of meditative mantra,

and Catholics use the rosary and all of that.

I want to go back to yesterday when we talked on spiritual brain surgery about abide, the word abide.

In future episodes, we're going to go deeper in the brain imaging.

We're going to talk about the dendrites of your neurons and how they're important

in aging and memory and all that stuff.

But we're out of time here. here. And so rather than continuing down this long

and incredibly interesting talk about Newberg's work in brain imaging,

I just want to give you a little spiritual practice today that will help you,

move forward in developing this practice.

If you're willing to commit, I'm going to do this at least 10 or 12 minutes every morning.

It's part of my quiet time. I'm going to do this. I haven't perfected it yet,

but it's just something I think that will be helpful.

And if you want to to do it with me, it would be fascinating eight weeks from

now, so the first part of April, we'll do February and March,

and the first part of April, we'll have another episode.

And you can send me some voicemails or some emails and tell me if adopting this

practice has made any type of tangible, observable difference in your life, okay?

So let's use the word abide, and let's just talk for a moment about how we could

begin to develop a 10 or 12-minute practice of meditative prayer. prayer.

So what if we used the ABIDE as an acronym and the A could stand for approach?

And let's just get in a quiet place. Remember, Jesus had a habit of going to a quiet place to pray.

It says it several times in Luke. For example, Luke 22, 38, he went out to the

quiet place as was his habit.

Jesus had a habit of going out to a quiet place by himself to pray to his Father.

And if he did that, even though he made his brain, even though he created the

brain-mind interface, even though he created the whole system that we're talking

about, he still needed it.

He still needed that quiet meditative place because he knew how to operate his

own neuroscience more efficiently than other people did.

And to do that, he needed to be in a quiet place. And so he went out to the

quiet place, as was his habit.

So let's do that in the mornings, every day, for the next eight weeks.

I'd love to hear from you if you're in. Just send me an email,

lee at drleewarren.com, and say, hey, I'm in. I'm going to do this with you.

So the first one is approach. approach let's just calm ourselves and approach

this place in your mind you can see it as a dark room you can see it as a quiet

place a babbling brook or whatever whatever makes you feel good you can play

some quiet music that doesn't have words to just get your mind in this quiet

place and you can approach just just approach this moment.

And calm yourself and approach. And the B could stand for breathe.

Just take some deep breaths in. Let your heart rate come down.

Let your anxiety kind of begin to flow away. Scan your body and just start releasing

tension and just saying, I'm going to approach this moment.

I'm inviting God in here. I'm going to breathe.

And the I could be for invite. So I'm approaching you. I'm calming myself.

I'm breathing and regulating myself. And I'm just inviting you, God.

I'm going to invite you here because I don't really know how to communicate

with you. I don't know how to hear your voice. I want to.

I'm not really sure what to do, so I'm just here.

I'm just submitting myself in these few minutes to you. I'm going to breathe

with you. I'm going to be quiet.

I'm going to invite you into this place, and I would love to turn down the noise.

I'm going to see that volume knob on my left-hand side. I'm going to turn down

the noise of my own thinking.

I'm going to calm my own anxious thoughts down, the things that make me afraid,

the things that have hurt me.

The losses I've felt, the stress I'm under. I'm just going to turn that down,

and I'm going to turn the knob up on your voice, God, and I'm just inviting

you to speak into this because the D, the A-B-I-D, could stand for depend.

I'm depending on you because I don't understand.

I don't know. I don't have the power. I can't get over losing my son by myself.

I can't fix those things that I've done wrong. I can't repair all the mistakes

I've made. I can't stop feeling shame for that label that my family put on me,

that generational trauma that's been part of my family, this issue.

I can't. I'm depending on you to heal this because I can't heal it.

I can spend a few minutes there just inviting him in to show me the places that

I need to be more dependent on him.

And then the E could be experience. Like, God, I want to experience a life that's

better than the one that I've managed myself.

I want to experience you. If you've got more for me, if you've got water that

won't leave me thirsty, if you've got medicine that will heal my wounds,

if you've got food that won't leave me hungry, if those promises in Psalm 103

are really true, that you'll forgive my sins and heal my diseases and crown

me with righteousness and redeem me from the pit and restore my youth,

if you'll do those things, if you'll improve my memory,

if you'll give me a better experience than the one I've had on my own, I want that.

And so I want to be more empathetic to other people. I want to be able to see

other people's needs and know what you want for my life to look like and how

I'm supposed to interact with others and how I can be helpful to other people. I want that.

So let me just call myself and approach you and breathe with you and invite

you in and depend on you and experience you.

I want you to show me over the next few weeks what my life could look like if

I submit my brain and my mind and my life and my body to you as an essential act of worship.

And then because I'm ready to experience you, I want to feel your healing.

I want to experience relationship with you and what that looks like in context

of the church and other people around me and my family and my relationships.

And I want to find hope.

I want to find hope because you tell me if I remember what you've done and I

move towards your promises that you'll build hope in my life.

And so I want to learn how to calm the noise and experience you and depend on you and find hope.

That's what I want. And so what if we did that for 10 or 12 minutes every morning and we just abide?

We abide. We approach.

And we breathe. And we invite. And we depend. Then we experience Him.

What will happen? We can't know unless we try.

I think Gus and Andrew Newberg have shown us that anybody who spends time quieting

their mind and focusing their intention and trying to get their brain under

better control can have good results.

And I believe God's gonna keep his promises.

And I believe if we learn to abide, go back and read John 15,

the first 10 verses, he told us 10 times, abide in me, and you'll see some dramatic

things happen in your life. And that's what I want for you, friend.

Here on Frontal Lobe Friday, let's start to abide and let's see what happens in our brains when we do.

And let's see what happens when we start today.

Music.

Hey thanks for listening the dr lee warren podcast

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They are supplying worship resources for worshipers all over the world to worship the most high God.

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Self-Brain Surgery, every Sunday since 2014, helping people in all 50 states

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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.