Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
If you want to go on a journey. If you're skeptical,
don't worry. Now here to preach. I'm gonna keep it
clean and talk to me.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
And recall where faith needs, files of nature, get in
touch with your creator with a bacon, love and je.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
She even speaks Hebrew. What's that gonza too? What's that?
Well sabobation? You should talking transformation? What's that donato? Hey? Hey,
(00:45):
and welcome back to What's God got to do with it?
We are here for episode three of the Self Brain
Surgery series with doctor Lee Warren, and today we're gonna
go into the Ten Commandments of Self Brain Surgery, which
is an actual framework to put all of these pieces together.
If you missed episode one and episode two, definitely go
back and listen to those. It's going to connect a
(01:06):
lot of dots. But I'm just going to dive right
in and turn it over to you. So, first of all,
how did these ten commandments come to be? Was it
through science? Faith, experience, a culmination of the of the
three all of those things.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
So I was practicing neurosurgery for close to twenty years.
I went to the Iraq War and the Air Force
and went to a lot of trauma. We lost a child,
as we talked about in the previous two episodes, and
all these life experiences kind of smashed together with my
learning as a neurosurder and neuroscientist and my belief system
as a Christian that I've realized that people need some
(01:41):
framework to understand how their mind and brain are designed
to work, and some rules or some guidelines to help
them kind of stay out of the ditches on either
side of this. And so I basically summarized the ten
most important things I've learned over the course of my
career and in all this life experience and try to
encapsulate them in a way that would be easy for
(02:02):
people to remember. So I kind of use that ten
commandment idea from the Bible to say, here are the
ten commandments of self brain surgery that'll help you transform
your live.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Getting into some of the specifics you talk about how
feelings are not facts, right, and it's a powerful statement
that has probably so many layers to it, but can
you start unpacking that for us.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
Yeah, especially in this moment in our culture, people are
almost commanded by their social groups to follow your heart,
live your truth, believe what you feel like, and people
are keying in on their emotions and turning them into
their identities. But the neuroscience is crystal clear, and scripture
has been crystal clear for thousands of years that most
(02:42):
of what you feel is never real. Your brain, in fact,
has no ability to discern between something that's actually happening
and something you're just worrying about or thinking about. And
so you think about feelings then as chemical events that
are happening in your brain that are designed to be
sort of like barometers or sort of to let you
know that something's going on emotionally or real. And then
(03:06):
your job is to get your front loaves engaged and
figure out what that real thing is that's happening or
not happening, and then make a decision of how you
respond to it. The worst thing you can do is
make a gut level or emotion led decision to react
to a feeling without getting curious about it and investigating
it first, because again, feelings are not facts, they're chemical events,
(03:27):
and so that's not negative. If you've had a past
history of being kind of reactive to your feelings, it's
just to say, there's a way that leads to freedom
and not to more pain.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
Absolutely, the emotions are real, but oftentimes it's not true.
And that's the thing too. When we get the ability
to separate, like what's actually happening from what we're experiencing
about it, that gives us power, that gives us the
agency that you're talking about and allows us to be
a self brain surgeon. So for you know, you talk
about participating or sorry, not participating in your own demise right,
(04:01):
which I love because that again is an awareness that wow,
I actually have been doing that or I have had
the potential to do that. So what are some ways
that people unintentionally do that?
Speaker 2 (04:10):
Well? I thought of that because as a physician, like
the oath that you take as a doctor is first
no harm, like don't commit malpractice against your patient, don't
do the wrong thing on your patient's behalf. And if
we're going to make this patient to doctor switch this
idea that before you thought you needed somebody else to
come along and fix your brain or change your life
(04:30):
in some way, and now I'm teaching you that you
have all that power inside you that you actually can
become your own self brain surgeon. Then if you're going
to accept that mantle of Okay, I'm going to be
a brain surgeon, a self brain surgeon. Then you have
to take that oath for yourself. I am not going
to commit malpractice against my patient who is me, So
I'm not going to participate in my own demise anymore.
So what are some of the things that we do
(04:52):
that lead us into our own demise? Well, we we
use substances or numbing behaviors like netflix or spending or
shopping or sex or alcohol or anything else to cover
up what we're feeling so we don't have to deal
with it the next day, and that always hurts us
in the long run, So that's committing self malpractice. We
lash out at others when we feel things, even if
(05:13):
what we felt didn't turn out to be true, and
that harms our relationships, which then is committing self malpractice.
We just hurt ourselves in a variety of ways because
we fail to be curious enough about what we're thinking
of feeling.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Absolutely, and that includes self rejection and self abandonment and
self You know, this is self harm and not to
shame anyone, but something that we should look at because again,
if we are committing this against ourselves, that is self malpractice.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
Yeah, So this idea of thoughts becoming things, what is
the science behind that?
Speaker 2 (05:46):
It's fascinating. It goes all the way from quantum physics
to neuroscience to psychology, and again aligns with scriptures, so
that the idea is that everything that's real in your life,
every relationship, every possession that you have, reoccupation, every accomplishment
started with something that you thought about. Every gold medal
Olympics started with a thought in somebody's head. Every marriage,
(06:09):
every childbirth, everything that's real in the world started with
a thought. And if you just want to zoom out
and look at the science of what that looks like.
If you understand that the mind is different than your
physical brain, the mind is something non material that's outside
that that's outside of our bodies, then when you have
a thought that you then instruct your brain to act on,
(06:29):
you're basically turning mental energy into electrical activity in your brain,
and the neuron fires, and then when that neuron fires,
it synapses and goes to release a neurotransmitter, a chemical event.
So now you've had a mental event that became an
electrical event that became a chemical event, and that neurotransmitter
stimulates a gland like your pituitary gland or your adrenal
(06:50):
gland and releases a hormone. Then now you've had a
chemical event becoming a biological event, and that hormone affects
the physiology of your body. It causes you to change
your reproductive organs, or it causes your blood pressure to
go up, or does something physical to your body. And
so now that biological event has become a physiological event.
(07:12):
And then you make epigenetic switches in response to those
physiological events that change your genetic code and how your
offspringer bunce, and how you've made a chemical and biological
event into a historical event when your next generation is different,
all of which started with a thought. So thoughts literally
physically become things in the world.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
And that's how And it works in every direction, right,
like this thought turning into a neurochemical, biological, biochemical event.
It can be an upward spiral, it can be a
downward spiral. You can create this positive trajectory within your
physiology from what you're thinking, or it can go the opposite.
And again that's why it's so important. How you're sharing
about like it's a self brain surgery conversation that we
(07:53):
have the ability to take the scalpel and change the direction.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
So we talked about commandment number one, feelings are not facts,
and we just talked about you can't change your life
until you change your mind, and how transformation begins at
the thought level, not at the behavior level, which I
think is a mind blow for a lot of people.
They think they are their habits, they think they are
their behaviors, and as we know of the thought and
the belief have to come before the behavior or else
(08:18):
it's going to be a force willpower, white knuckle game
that we're going to eventually lose because it doesn't transform
us at the root level. So let's talk about number
ten because I think this one is probably the most
important in a way because if you don't believe it,
you're kind of going to be left as a victim
to your brain. Right. But this idea that happiness is
(08:39):
a decision not a condition, where I think a lot
of us have been conditioned that happiness and success and
all of these things are conditional. So let's dive into
that one.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
Yeah, so happiness is a set of decisions that you
make that arise from your intention of separating your circumstances
from your peace of mind. If you believe that other
people have to do certain things or certain events have
to occur in your life in order for you to
be happy, you are in great danger because you can't
(09:12):
control circumstances and you can't always predict or control what
other people do. And on another level with other people,
if you feel like other people have to change in
some way for you to be happy, you're in danger
there too, because as soon as they change, your target
will change, because then something else will happen that makes
you unhappy, and you'll think the solution to that is
another person changing something, and you'll never achieve real happiness.
(09:36):
So what real happiness is, then, is the ability to
know that you and yourself have the tools available to
you to be resilient and robust in response to anything
that comes along in your life, that you become almost untouchable,
that whatever the circumstances are, you're going to be able
to navigate them because you have been given by your
(09:57):
creator the ability to navigate how you think and feel
and react and behave in response to those things. That's
where true happiness comes from That's what Jesus calls it
abundance in the Bible, and what he means by that
is not millions of dollars and unlimited stuff and no problems.
He means you have this well of resilience and peace
(10:19):
and knowing that it's going to be okay even when
the circumstances are not okay. That's what real happiness is.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
Yeah, amen, And that's the thing too. We as humans,
we're allowed to care about these things. We're allowed to
want to achieve more and have more and do more
in all those things. But when who you are in
the sense of knowingness of who you are at an
identity level, at a self image level, when it's so
contingent and conditional on these external things are quantifiables, that's
when we're lost, you know. So it's got to be
(10:47):
rooted in something more, so so cool. There's so much
more we could obviously dive into, but we need to
save it for episode four, which is coming up next week,
where we're going to take all of this. You know,
we've been talking a lot about the science and the
theory about behind it. How do you actually become your
own surgeon? So before we do that just want to
remind you all that if you go to doctor Lee
Warren dot com slash preorder, you guys can get a
(11:09):
bunch of cool bonuses and gifts that come alongside the
pre order of his book. Do you want to just
give us a quick little mention about what the book
is and how they can get a hold of you
other than that as well.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
Yeah, So, The Life Changing Art of Self Brain Surgery
is my compendium of all these things that I've learned
that can help you transform your life by changing how
you think and what your brain does structurally. I did
a thirty minute video and there's a playlist, and there's
a bunch of documentation you can download that you can
get for free if you pre order before February third,
And you can learn more about self brain surgery every
day on the Doctor Lee Warren podcast and our website
(11:42):
Doctor Leiwarren dot com.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
And we will link all of that in the show
notes in addition to where you can find him on Instagram.
And we will be back next week for episode four. Bye,
We'll be back with more What's God got to do
with It? But in the meantime, I would definitely love
to hear from you, So just tell me where you
are in your story or maybe what questions you have,
(12:04):
like where do you feel you need clarity or support
or wisdom in your own journey. I definitely want to
hear from you, So head on over to What's God
Got to Do with It? Dot com and scroll down
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(12:25):
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(12:48):
With It? Is an iHeartRadio podcast on the Amy Brown
Podcast Network. It's written and hosted by me Leanne Ellington,
executive produced by Elizabeth Fozzio, post production and editing by
Houston Tilly, and original music written by Cheryl Stark and
produced by Adam Stark