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Neurosurgeon and award-winning author Dr. W. Lee Warren, MD delivers daily prescriptions from neuroscience, faith, and common sense on how to lead a healthier, better, happier life. You can’t change your life until you change your mind, and Dr. Warren will teach you the art of self brain surgery to get it done. His new book, Hope Is the First Dose, is available everywhere books are sold.
Good morning, my friend. Dr. Lee Warren here with you. It is Theology Thursday,
and we're going to do some self-brain surgery today.
This episode is about mastery.
We talk all the time on this show about learning how to master your mind,
to get your mind and your brain under control, to tame negative thinking,
to tame out-of-control emotions and feelings, and how do we get that 2 Corinthians
10 5 thing about taking all our thoughts captive so that we can finally find
hope and resilience and peace and purpose and all that stuff that happens when
you can stop ruminating and stop the fear, anxiety,
fight, flight, freeze cycle that we all get into.
How do we finally get to that place where it all clicks and it becomes this
surprising arrival of mastery?
Today, we're going to talk about how to master your mind, overcome negative
thinking, structurally improve your brain in the process of overcoming shame and doubt.
And when it all clicks, you'll realize that you become a master self-brain surgeon,
but that it didn't happen overnight.
And we're going to do all that, my friend, after you answer one question for me.
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. and let's get after it.
Music.
All right, my friend, let's get after it. Hey, I just want to take a second
to acknowledge, I just recently heard that Takanori Fukushima passed away back in March.
Takanori Fukushima was a legend in neurosurgery. And when I say that,
I mean, this guy was world famous.
People from all over the world would come to Pittsburgh. He was one of my professors.
I learned a lot of the principles of brain surgery from Dr. Fukushima.
And people from all over the world, literally, sometimes we would do surgery
And there would be five or 10 real neurosurgery professors from Sweden or Switzerland
or Germany or Austria or Japan or China or some other place that'd be crowded
into the operating room with little notebooks, writing down what they saw Dr.
Fukushima doing, asking him questions, watching him operate. great.
And for us, for the residents, it was like we were some sort of superstars because
we were training with Fukushima and these guys were so sort of almost jealous
of us getting to sit at the feet of this master of neurosurgery.
And Fukushima was a lot of things, but one thing he was, was an innovator,
a teacher, a... I said one thing.
Some of the things that he was, he was an innovator, a teacher,
just a notable figure in neurosurgery. He saw things that nobody else could see.
And he was a master at removing brain tumors and taking complex things and teaching
them to other surgeons in a way that they could take home and make part of their practice.
And I just want to say a shout out to Dr. Fukushima. I give thanks for the life
that he lived and the impact that he had on me and hundreds of thousands of
patients and colleagues and students and other neurosurgeons,
and he was just a legend. He was incredible.
And I love Dr. Fukushima.
And I haven't seen him in years, but I have a memory of right before I went
to Iraq, he somehow heard through the grapevine that I was going to the war.
Then I walked into my office at Wilford Hall Medical Center in San Antonio one
day in late 2004, shortly before I was to deploy.
And my office phone
light was blinking back in those days you know we all had cell phones it was
in the early cell phone era but most people called your office if they wanted
to talk to you and they would leave a voicemail and it would blink the little
light would blink to tell you that you had a message right you remember answering
machines that's updating myself obviously but.
And off his phone was blinking. I pushed the number. I pushed the button and
it was Fukushima. He had heard through the grapevine that I was going to the war and he called me.
And the voicemail was so amazing. He always referred to himself in the third person.
He called himself Fukushima. So if he was in a conversation with you,
he would say, Fukushima thinks, and if he invented an instrument,
he would say, Fukushima made, he would always call himself that.
Even with other neurosurgeons, he referred to himself as Fukushima, not me.
He would never say I or me. He would always say Fukushima.
I don't know why. But there are dozens, probably hundreds of instruments.
And even one of the tables that we use in the operating room,
he developed and invented.
And we use his approaches and his ideas and his instruments every day.
In my operating room in North Platte, there's an instrument called the number
one, the Ichiban, he called it, the little dissector that we use.
It's called the Fukushima right angle elevator.
And I use it all the time in my surgeries to this day. And everybody in my room
has heard all kinds of stories about Dr. Fukushima.
But that day, the light was blinking and he said, hey, Fukushima heard that you're going to the war.
Fukushima hopes you don't die. That was the extent of the message.
He took the time out of his busy schedule to acknowledge that I was going to
a dangerous place to practice things that he had taught me, and he didn't want
me to die. And that was so kind.
And it sounds funny, but he was kind of a man of few words in that regard.
So shout out to Takanori Fukushima.
And this episode is dedicated to him because it's about mastery.
And Fukushima taught me about mastery. And what I mean by that is when you first
learn how to do something, when you're first learning something complex,
whether it's playing the guitar or knitting or driving or brain surgery or anything,
whatever it is that you're putting your hand to, playing dominoes,
whatever it is, there's a learning curve where everything feels hard and everything
has to be very intentional.
And you have to think carefully about everything that you do so you don't make
mistakes or so that you make the
most of the opportunity that you have in front of you to do this thing.
But over time, if you keep at it, something kind of funny happens,
something kind of surprising happens.
You kind of wake up one day and you just know how to do it, right?
They used to say, you learn how to ice skate in the summer. And what they meant by that was this idea,
the way the brain works, neuroplasticity is when you work on something for a
while and then you go do something else for a little bit and you come back to
the task and then you find that your brain has somehow kind of rewired and you're
able to do a little bit better than you did the last time you worked on it.
And that's because you've made these synapses in your brain and by thinking
about it while you're not actually doing it, you're kind of rewiring those and
deepening them. And then you come back to the task after a brief pause and you're
better at it than you were.
So you learn how to ice skate in the summer, as the old saying.
But with any type of task, when you do it and do it and do it and try and try
and try, and then you go to sleep and you wake up the next day,
and you think about the thing that you're going to do and then you have another
opportunity to do it, you find that you've made a little progress.
And some days it's hard and some days it's a little bit easier. But there comes a day.
There comes a day. where you wake up and you
know how to do it and you go to the operating room
or you get out your knitting or you go do your thing you go to
the driving range if you're playing golf and all of a sudden it's
just easier and all of a sudden you just you don't have to think about it quite
as much you've got some automated processes you can reach out with without looking
at the keyboard and tap out the numbers that you need to input if you're an
accountant and all of a sudden you can do it without having to think about it
or look at it in the same way and that's what happens in surgical training.
And I just want to tell you that it's also what happens with self-brain surgery.
I get emails or voicemails almost every day,
probably every day, but certainly multiple every week in which somebody says
something to the effect of, I just can't do it. I can't think about my thoughts. I'm overwhelmed.
Negative thinking comes up and feelings come up. And before I know it,
it's been three weeks and I haven't thought about a thought a single time.
And I'm just, I'm not getting better at self-answered. I'm not getting better
at it. And I just don't know what to do. And I'm frustrated and I'm overwhelmed and I'm stuck.
And all that kind of stuff. There's people that just get wiped out by what seems
to be the impossibility of really mastering your mind, of taking every thought
captive, as the Bible says.
And I'm just here today to give you some encouragement that you can master this process.
And the guiding principle of that is our ninth commandment of self-brain surgery.
What you're doing, you're getting better at. You have to believe that.
And the truth is you're doing this self-brain surgery bit every second of every day.
You are, you're already doing it. So the decision point then,
if you really want to pursue mastery of renewing your mind and letting,
letting Lord have control of your mind, or if you're a doubter,
agnostic or an atheist, and you don't think God has anything to do with it, that's fine.
You, you can get better at this too. You can master this process too,
because the way your brain works, it is submissive to your mind if you allow
your mind to take control.
It will. You can allow your brain to come under the submission of your thinking.
If you learn to apply diligently better thought processes and better operations
on your thoughts, your brain will get better.
And because of the process of neuroplasticity, you will eventually sever those
six synapses and begin to make progress.
And before you know it, you'll start to have some mastery at this.
It'll become second nature.
Biopsying your thought and putting that little space in there will become part
of your daily, moment-by-moment manner in which you operate your mind.
It will. It'll happen that way.
I'm going to give you some scripture this morning. Since it's Theology Thursday,
I'm going to give you some scripture around this idea.
But before we do that, I want to give you kind of an approach to self-brain
surgery that sort of parallels neurosurgical training and the kinds of things
that I learned from Dr. Fukushima.
Let me give you some ideas about the difference between approach and technique
and how you think about setting up an operation makes all the difference in how the operation goes.
And we're going to do all that sort of as a memorial to Takanori Fukushima and
the tremendous impact he had on my life and my training, but also because I
want you to develop mastery at this process process of self-brain surgery.
But before we talk about surgery, let's talk about music for a second.
I don't know if I've ever told you this story, but Lisa and I met back in San
Antonio when we played, both of us were in the worship band at Oak Hill's church,
it's Max Lucado's church.
And we met and we're singing and she was singing and I was singing and playing
guitar in the worship band.
That's the first time we ever met each other, way back then.
And years later, we married.
So we were playing worship together.
There was a guy who was a bass player, and his name was Mike.
And I can't for the life of me remember Mike's last name.
We weren't friends outside of the event. He lived in a different part of San Antonio than I did.
And I was in the military and super busy and had young kids and all that.
So Mike and I never hung out or spent any time together outside of church,
but we played in the band together, and he was an incredible bass player.
In fact, he played sessions around San Antonio and got made part of his living
and playing in church bands and other bands all around the city. It was just tremendous.
You could tell this guy was classically trained. The guy could play anything.
He was just an amazing, effortless musician. He could play anything.
He must have seen something in me as a guitar player. I was a decent guitar
player, but I certainly wasn't anything.
I was no Tommy Walker, for example.
But Mike gave me a book, and it was called Effortless Mastery.
And this book was basically, the premise of the book was that you can apply
some techniques to anything, particularly music.
The book was particularly about music, but really it was about any sort of pursuit,
intellectual or habit pursuit.
And there's some techniques you can apply to become a master of that thing, and anybody can do it.
And his whole premise in the book was that if you take little steps every day
and you get out of your head about it, you get into that.
Kind of meditative state where you stop overthinking what it is that you're
doing, then you'll allow the other parts of your brain to begin to take in the
practice of this thing that you're trying to learn.
And all of a sudden it will become effortless.
Your pursuit of mastery will become effortless and you'll get to this place
where you can break through plateaus and places where you've been stuck and all that.
Because every musician, I'm certain every Every guitarist gets to this place
where it feels like, and I can do it right now.
I pick up my guitar. I'm going to play the same three or four things right off
the bat because I don't have time to practice every day.
I'm not at a place where I'm trying to grow and develop as a player.
I'm just sort of plateaued. And I'm comfortable with that at 55 years old that
I've got writing and podcasting and neurosurgery and grandkids and a wife that needs my time.
And it's not my role or my time in life right now to try to become more of a master of the guitar.
So I'm not spending time in these mastery modes where I'm trying to develop
and grow that part of my life. I wish I had time to do that again. I love to play.
But the point is, when you get to a place where you are trying to develop mastery
or something, you can't just pick up the guitar and play three or four chords
and put it back down and expect to make any progress.
There's got to be a discipline and a strategy of how you approach this idea
of trying to develop mastery or something.
And I know you can follow me here to see that we're going to this place where
we're going to say self-brain surgery also requires a discipline and a strategy
and a pursuit, but that it doesn't have to feel like hard work all the time.
Because there comes a point when all of a sudden the steps you're taking become more automated.
And that process of trying to develop mastery doesn't seem so onerous or difficult anymore.
And so this book, Effortless Mastery, kind of sat on my shelf for a long time.
I finally read it, kind of got the idea of developing this discipline and practice.
And then I realized, holy cow, this parallels really surgical training.
It really does. us. Fukushima would teach us you have a problem.
There's a brain tumor on the base of the skull, for example,
and you've got to figure out how to get that out without killing the patient.
One of the problems with surgery is we think about the first commandment,
first no harm. Don't make things worse for your patient.
Relentlessly refuse to participate in your own demise or your patient's demise.
You've got to make things better and not worse if you're going to do this work, right?
Well, Fukushima would say, okay, identify the problem, put the scan up, look at the tumor.
In our case here, it's going to be recurring negative thinking,
some trauma that happened in the past that we can't seem to make progress around.
Whatever it is in your life, it's breakthrough at work that you're trying to
have this moving up the ladder that you can't seem to get through.
Whatever it is, whether it's a hard negative thing or if it's just a frustrating
thing or someplace where you feel like you should be performing better than
you are, your relationship with the Lord or trying to become better at prayer
or whatever it is, okay? You got to identify the problem.
You can't know it until you name it, okay?
So one of the things that happens is we get through years of our life,
and we don't even realize that we have this habit of catastrophizing things
in our head or looking at the worst case scenario all the time.
We're spending two hours dreading something that's going to happen,
and then we get to the thing, and we brought all that dread into the room,
so we make it turn into what we anticipated it being instead of spending those
two hours praying or thinking of different ways that we could bless that event
or show up with some power and some juice and some light with us to try to bring
some fresh energy to the situation and turn the situation into what we anticipated it being.
I don't want to say manifest because that has so many weird connotations,
but the truth is most of the time you see what you're looking for.
Most of the time you get what you're after. And if you have anticipated something being a disaster,
sometimes it turns out to be a disaster, but not because it was fated to do
so, but because you brought that kind of energy to it and you made it happen
because you anticipated it happening that way.
And so you identify the problem and then you have to set the goal, okay?
So our breakdown sometimes occurs in the step between problem and goal because
we identify the problem and we begin to fixate on that problem.
And I've seen surgeons do this. I've seen good surgeons do it.
There was a guy that I was partners with in the Air Force. I don't want to say
his name because he's a tremendous surgeon.
He's an outstanding surgeon.
And he's a really wonderful guy. I love him.
He was just a tremendous partner. But this guy was trained at a major neurosurgery
institution in the United States.
The best people in the world trained him. And he had all the technical skills
to be an outstanding brain surgeon.
He knew everything to do. He knew every technique.
He had seen the masters do it. He had all the skills, but what he didn't have
was the right mindset because brain surgery terrified him.
He would do an aneurysm with them, and back in those days, we used to do cases together a lot.
We would do hard cases with two surgeons working together. We learned a lot from each other.
Guys like Jerry Grant, who's now the chief at Duke University,
was my partner, and we did tons of surgery together, wrote papers together.
Jerry and I were partners, and this other guy was a partner,
too, and we spent a ton of time together doing big cases.
And he was a master spine surgeon. In fact, that's what he does to this day.
All he does is spine surgery.
Brain surgery was too emotionally stressful for him.
And I'm not saying that in a negative way. We need people who just do spine surgery.
We need people who are masters of scoliosis and back problems and all that.
We do, and he's one of them.
But what was interesting is when I would be with him, when I would encourage him,
He knew everything to do at brain aneurysm or a skull-based tumor or acoustic
neuroma or something, a pediatric emergency.
He knew exactly what to do. He knew exactly how to identify the problem.
He knew exactly how to position the patient. He knew exactly where to make the
incision. He knew exactly how to make the craniotomy happen.
He knew exactly how much of the bone at the skull base to drill and how not
to over-retract the temporal lobe and all these things.
He knew exactly what to do. But when it came time to put the clip on the aneurysm
or to cauterize the artery that was feeding the tumor but not take the branch
that was feeding the brain next to it, he would freeze up and he would start sweating.
And he would sit there, literally, I watched him one time for almost an hour
with an aneurysm clip in his hand, poised around the neck of this aneurysm,
and he couldn't make himself fire the clip, put the clip on the aneurysm,
couldn't make himself do it.
And he would say, this thing's going to rupture.
It's going to blow. It's going to rupture. It's going to tear off right there.
I'm not going to be able to get the parent artery under control.
This patient's going to bleed. He would start catastrophizing what might happen
if he closed that clip on the aneurysm.
I never asked him if something had happened when he was training,
if there was some bad outcome or if he saw something occur, but he would get
to this place where he had done everything right and he just couldn't get to the goal.
And so sometimes the breakdown happens between a problem, we know what the problem
is, and the goal that we got to get this clip on this aneurysm.
We have to get to this place where
we can stop contemplating and start operating and get it done, right?
And so Fukushima would teach us you have a goal.
What's the goal? It's to get the aneurysm under control. It's to get the tumor
out. It's to drain this abscess but not kill the patient.
And then you have to choose the approach.
In my new book, the Cell Brain Surgery Handbook, there's going to be a whole section on approach.
And approach is, in surgical terms, approach doesn't mean the set of procedures
that you do to remove a tumor or to do the thing.
Approach means the way that you're going to get to the pathology,
the route that you're going to take to get to the tumor, to get to the trouble, to find the aneurysm.
And that has to do with how you put the patient on the table,
whether they're on their side or on their back or on their belly or sitting
up or what position they're in.
We talked about that a little bit the other day with lateral spine surgery that
I hated so much. It came in handy because I learned the approach.
But approach isn't just about positioning. It's also about how you angle the table.
It's about where you put the lights. It's about how you bring the microscope in.
It's about how much bone you drill, where you make the incision,
and whether you remove the muscle all the way or not.
There's all these little elements that go into approach.
And some surgeons make their entire career on refining or creating a new approach.
In fact, one of the biggest paper that I ever wrote, the most important scientific publication,
at least in neurosurgery that I've ever published, was a paper that I wrote
with Jerry Grant about what's called the transciliary approach for the subfrontal,
orbital frontal zygomatic approach to anterior fossa brain tumors and aneurysms.
That sounds super nerdy, but basically what that means is we made an incision in the eyebrow.
So we make a little tiny incision in the patient's eyebrow, and we can extend
that incision laterally to the temporal area,
and that way you wouldn't have a visible scar in the face, but you also can
have a very small incision and make a craniotomy that involved the frontal bone,
the roof of the orbital bone, so right over the top of the eye,
and then the edge of the zygoma bone, which if you put your finger on the outside,
say you take your right finger and touch the right side of your right eye,
that flat bone that you feel right there, that connects your frontal bone down
to your face, that's called the zygoma.
That bone traces all the way back to just in front of your ear.
So if you put your finger on your ear and open and close your jaw,
where you feel the mandible there, just above that, that flat bone that goes
right almost into your ear canal, that's the zygoma bone, okay?
So this approach that we developed is
removing a small amount of bone from the frontal orbital and
zygoma to expose tumors or aneurysms that are underneath the frontal lobe and
you can take an avenue of approach from underneath the frontal lobe back to
the anterior communicating artery or the carotid artery or tumors of the pituitary
gland or what's called the supercellar area.
I'm just saying all this nerdy neurosurgical stuff. The point is that I developed an approach.
Some surgeons make their whole
career of coming up with different ways to approach certain brain tumors.
And we learn techniques. The techniques are, are how do you use this instrument?
How do you use that instrument? How do you put retractors in?
How do you do all these things?
The technique is different than approach, okay?
Technique is different than approach. They're not the same thing.
Fukushima was world famous for some of the refinements that he made and some
of the innovations he made around surgical approaches.
And so when you choose your problem, identify your problem, you come up with
a goal, you have to decide on an approach. And in self-brain surgery,
there's basically four approaches.
We talked about these the other day, but there's pretty much four different approaches.
You can be cynical and you can be so broken and so hurt by the things you've
been through and by the times you've tried before to change your thinking and
have been unable to do so.
So people have let you down and you basically can come to this place where you
have an approach to life that says nothing can help me.
I'm just hosed. Nothing I do will ever get better. I'm just stuck.
This thing has been too hard. I'm too broken.
It's too dangerous. I can't do it. You're like my friend who's got the aneurysm
clip in his hand and you've gotten all the way down to identifying the issue
that you have an issue with your thinking.
You've learned that trauma is not what happened. and it's the response to what
happened and you've decided that you can't change your response.
And your approach then is nothing can help me.
Another approach might be, hey, something might be able to help me.
Maybe I can learn something that would be helpful to me. And that's where you
get into that 10% happier mode where you learn, hey, I really can just biopsy my thought.
I can just learn to put a little pause between the stimulus that life is bringing
me, this anxiety trigger, this feeling, this thought, this person cutting me
off in traffic, whatever it is.
I need to numb myself. I need to open a bottle. I need to look at pornography
to get this pressure off my mind or whatever it is. it's the trigger.
I can learn to put a space in there and say, wait a second, let me just think
down the road five minutes. What's it going to be like if I do that or don't do that?
What's it going to feel like tomorrow? Do I really want to pay a tomorrow tax here?
You can start putting a little space in there and you'll get a little happier.
And you can do that without any supernatural help. You can do it without believing
in God at all. You can become happier.
You can become more able to take control of your thoughts, a little bit happier
by learning how to put a little space in there.
So that's an approach that maybe something can help me approach.
And then the third approach is maybe science can help me. And you can become
significantly happier.
We talked about this just the other day. You can really make super great progress
in your life by applying the neuroscience of how your brain and your mind interact with one another.
And you can find a therapist who can help you do this.
You can learn it on your own. You can You can study the principles of 21st century
applied neuroplasticity, self-directed neuroplasticity, and you can learn to
take charge of your mind, and you can get happier.
You can become more healthy and feel better and be happier. You can do that.
You will become significantly better.
Another approach is you can decide that you believe God when He says that He
can renew your mind, that you have the mind of Christ, that if Jesus never hurt
His own brain with His thinking, and his brain must have become progressively
more optimized as he went through his life, that you can do that too,
then you can become almost infinitely happier.
And my contention, of course, is we're designed to get to that place where we're
able to communicate with our creator and he's a guiding, kind, wise.
Compassionate professor, surgeon who sits alongside us and helps us make decisions
and helps us perform these operations.
He's like having Fukushima in my head every time I do a case and I would hear
him say, no, don't do this, do that.
And the Bible says, hey, you'll hear a voice that says, don't turn to the left,
turn to the right. Don't do this.
I'm before you. I'm behind you. I'm with you. I'm guiding you.
I'm opening doors for you. I'm helping you.
That's the kind of level you can get to in that infinitely happier approach
of using your mind to communicate with your creator to manage your brain in
the most optimal way possible.
So those are four approaches that do work. So you have to identify the problem,
what the goal of the procedure is.
You have to choose an approach and then it's time to stop contemplating and start operating.
And if you start doing these, building these little moments where you take yourself
through that process, then what happens is all of a sudden...
You find yourself not having to stress so much.
I can't even define when it happened in my career,
but there came a point where I didn't have to spend the night before I went
to surgery thinking about what approaches I was going to take and fretting a
little bit about the upcoming cases and being a little worried about them when
I went to the operating room.
All of a sudden, it was just, I would look in an MRI and I would instantly see
in my mind what we were going to do.
I would instantly see what the tumor was going to feel like.
I would instantly be aware that there was going to be an artery behind it that
I needed to be careful about.
All of that pre-work was just sort of done.
It was like it fast-forwarded, and I was ready to go, and I could put mental
energy on other things that were pressing and important.
I didn't have to spend so much time thinking about the turns I needed to make to drive my car to work.
It just became effortless. It was kind of a surprising arrival of mastery,
like the guy who wrote the book about music.
And technique is different than approach.
Technique is what do I do once I decide, once I biopsy the thought,
once I identify the problem, once I recognize that I've been catastrophizing, what do I do?
That's technique. That's what we do on cell brain surgery Saturday, okay?
I've identified the problem. The problem is I have a lousy attitude.
I need to perform a lousy attitude lobotomy.
The problem is I have anxiety that's not based on something real that's happening.
It's based on some trauma that I've faced in the past, and I need to learn to
understand that my feelings aren't facts, that that anxiety of something that
happened in the past doesn't mean that I have to be anxious now,
and I can tell my brain to calm down, and I can learn some techniques to obliterate
that anxiety. I can learn an operation for that.
I can learn how to fenestrate fear. I can learn how to drain doubt.
I can learn all these operations that we can teach you, but technique is different than approach.
Once you get to the place where all that pre-stuff becomes more easily mastered,
becomes sort of part of your process without having to work on it so much,
then you can apply techniques without having to get stuck like my friend did
when he couldn't close the aneurysm clip.
But it's important, Fukushima taught me this too, it's important to be honest
about the pitfalls and the potential risks of the approach and the techniques
that you're going to choose, okay?
Let me give you one example on the self-brain surgery side. If you decide that
you've got to change your habits because you're tired of paying the tomorrow
tax and you love tomorrow more, you're going to keep that commandment of loving tomorrow more,
there may be some opposition in your life.
If you've got a partner, for example, and your habit together has been that
you have a glass of wine every night or a bottle of wine every night,
or you go to a certain place and do certain things that may not work with your
theology or with your ethics or with your morals anymore,
and you've decided that you can't do that anymore if you want to make progress in your life,
there may be some people who will not come alongside you, who won't agree with
you that that change needs to be made, and they won't be happy about it.
And you may have a potential pitfall or risk of losing some people in your life,
some friends, some colleagues, some workers, some bosses, a spouse maybe who says, you know what?
You can stop drinking if you want to. I'm not gonna do that.
Go on your own merry way. This is what I gotta do for my life.
And you may have some tension or some trouble in your life.
But once you know, that's what the Bible says, once you know what's right and
you don't do it, it's sin.
Once you know what's right and you do it anyway, what's wrong and you do it anyway, that's sin.
So when you get to the place where you know the path that God is calling you to.
There may be some opposition. You may have an unexpected pitfall or risk,
and you got to call that out up front.
One of the things about doing brain surgery, we have to be aware.
I remember doing a case with Fukushima one time. There's a vein called the greater
superficial petrosal vein, and he was absolutely adamant that you cannot sacrifice.
You can't lose that vein. You can't tear it. You can't cauterize it.
You got to stay away from that vein.
You got to leave it intact. And there was some controversy about that in neurosurgery.
But Fukushima, who was not a Christian, at least when I knew him,
he was an atheist as far as I know, he would say, five billion years of evolution to make that vein.
You can't cut it in five seconds. It's there for a purpose.
Five billion years. He would always say that. We'd be about to do something.
Some resident would be about to put a bipolar cautery on something.
And he would say, five billion years of evolution.
Don't do that. It took a long time for that to get there. And I don't believe
it was evolution. I believe God created it, of course, but I just remember him
saying that all the time.
His point is there's a pitfall or risk associated with taking that vein.
The patient might have a stroke. They might not be able to drain.
It might cause a tumor to swell.
There's a problem associated with that. You better be ready for the pitfall
or the risk or the complication if you do something.
You've got to think ahead of time and not stumble into it.
The difference between great surgeons and average or poor surgeons often has
nothing to do with their training.
Or their technical skills or any of that. Sometimes it has to do with their risk tolerance.
Sometimes it has to do with their lack of forethought about problems that they
might encounter or a high level of arrogance that says, it doesn't matter what
I encounter, I can handle it.
If I tear a vein, I can stop the bleeding. There are surgeons like that.
And other surgeons who are better don't tear the vein.
So they don't have to deal with the a consequence of it.
They're aware of it. They work around it. Fukushima was a master at not sacrificing
veins or arteries or overly retracting things.
He was a master at avoiding little footprints of the surgeon being left behind
that would hurt the patient.
So that's something we have to do. We have to think through problem,
goal, approach, technique, pitfalls, and risks.
And then we have to anticipate the expected outcome. We talk about this in our
biopractice, like anticipate the outcome.
If you do it right, you plan ahead, you think through all the issues,
you carry out the procedure in the right way, then you can expect a good outcome.
You can trust that God's put the processes in place.
To make it work out the right way. Now, does it always work out exactly the way you want?
No, of course not. There's always some issues, and we've talked about that a
million times, but there are consequences and rewards to every procedure if
carried out properly, okay?
Finally, you have to think through pros, cons, and alternatives.
There are other approaches you could take. There are other techniques you could apply.
There are other things you could do. You could choose not to operate.
You could choose to put the patient on comfort measures. You could choose to pull the tube.
You could choose not to put the aneurysm clip on. It's too dangerous and you
back out. I had to stop a case the other day.
It became clear that what I was there to do was going to be more dangerous than
not doing anything for that patient.
There was an anatomic problem that the patient had and I had to pull the trigger
on stopping an operation, which is one of the hardest things to do as a surgeon,
but it's actually sometimes the best thing you can do because if you proceed,
you're going to hurt this person and not get the thing that you came there to do.
So you can't let pride or arrogance push you to complete something if it turns
out not to be the right thing.
This patient's anatomy was not going to let them have this particular procedure.
The approach I chose, unbeknownst to me, was not going to work because of this
anatomical issue that they had.
And sometimes you have to pull the trigger and change your approach,
get it done a different way, because pressing on might be unacceptable and might lead to more trouble.
So yeah, sometimes we get to a place where we say, I've got to change my approach
here. And that has to do with mastery.
So let me just give you a few scriptures as we try to wrap this up, okay?
2 Peter 1.3 is a promise that you have within you already the tools that you
need to arrive at this surprising place of mastery in your life.
You can get there. 2 Peter 1.3 says, His divine power has bestowed on us,
this is Amplified Version, absolutely
everything necessary for a dynamic spiritual life and godliness.
He's given you everything you need. You already have the tools, okay?
And what are the tools? Well, the tools are the ability that the mind has to
communicate with the brain, maybe through light.
We've been talking about that lately, that the ability that the mind has to
influence the brain to make structural changes, to turn genes on and off and
do all that stuff that we talk about all the time. You have the tools.
Your creator has endowed you with the gifts to get this done,
and the processes are in place. They just have to be directed by you.
2 Corinthians 10.5, we demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself
up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought.
So how do you arrive at mastery? You have to make yourself start thinking through,
does this thought help me? Does it hurt me? Is it compassionate?
Is it helpful? Is it unharmful? Is it necessary?
I have to learn to think about every thought, because if you choose not to think
about a thought, guess what's going to happen? and that thought is still going
to perform surgery on your brain.
It just will perform it in an automated way that probably won't be helpful to you.
And so you can choose. Am I gonna practice this my whole life?
Am I gonna strive to use my mind of Christ to make my brain better?
Or am I gonna let these automated processes that really don't help me and sometimes
hurt me and cause me to pay tomorrow taxes and cause me to get worse instead
of better, am I gonna let that hurt me or am I gonna make it help me.
And I'm going to do it under his direction. Don't forget, you don't have to
do all this work yourself.
Philippians 2.13 says, It is God who works in you to will and to act in order
to fulfill his good purpose.
So it's self-brain surgery is not self-help. He's doing the work.
He's calling you to. He's equipping you, giving you the tools and everything that you need to do it.
In fact, 2 Corinthians 9.10 says this, He who supplies seed to the sower and
bread for food will also supply and increase your store of seed and enlarge
the harvest of your righteousness.
He gives you everything you need. He gives you the seed if you're a sower.
He gives you the bread if you're an eater.
He does the work. Like the farmer, I watched Jerry Deaver out in the field working this hay field.
They do tremendous work. But you know what? They put those seeds in the ground
and they know where to put them and when to put them there. but they don't have
anything to do with the biochemistry and the biology of what's going on in the soil.
God did that. God created those seeds that will germinate.
The farmers do the work on the outside and God does the work on the inside.
And that's what he says. I'm going to give you the tools that you need.
I'm going to call you to the work.
I'm going to equip you for the work and you're going to begin to practice this.
And what's going to happen, my friend, is there's going to come a day when you
say, you know what, I haven't struggled with negative thinking for a while.
I seem to be kind of on top of the thought process a little bit better now.
I'm not struggling as much with the same old things.
Now, will you struggle with other things? Of course you will.
But you will come to this place where you have achieved the surprising arrival
of mastery of self-brain surgery because the guiding principle here is the ninth
commandment. What I'm doing, I'm getting better at.
This has to do, by the way, with working out your own salvation.
I don't mean saved or lost. I mean, the way in which your salvation gets worked
out in your life is that you become progressively more and more in possession
of the things that Jesus said he wanted to give you.
Remember John 10.10, the thief comes to steal and kill and destroy,
but I've come that you may have life and have it abundantly.
It's not very abundant to be continually, perpetually perplexed by the traumas
and tragedies and dramas and massive things and shortcomings and strifes and
interpersonal issues that we have with each other.
It's not abundant to constantly be worried, to constantly be ruminating,
to constantly be re-feeling the things that our trauma response makes us feel.
That's not very abundant.
And what God says is, you, my friend, have the mind of Christ.
1 Corinthians 2.16, who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?
But we have the mind of Christ.
We have the mind of Christ. We just constantly forget it.
We're constantly told by society that it's all up to us to find our own truth,
to find our own way, to pursue what makes us happy, to strive after the things that we want.
And then we don't understand why nothing quite tastes right. Nothing feels good.
And God says, I've given you everything you need for life and godliness.
I've given you a mind that can interact with your brain,
that can change your body and turn genes on and off and help your kids start
in a better place and break generational curses and overcome habits that are
harmful to you and overcome traumas and dramas and tragedies and massive things.
I've given you the ability, as Fukushima would say to me, you have what you
need to become a master surgeon.
That guy beat the tar out of me for six years, intellectually,
mentally, constantly telling me I wasn't doing good enough.
I wasn't trying hard enough. I wasn't seeing it right.
And then the day I graduated, he said, you're one of the best residents I've ever trained.
Because he was playing the game of trying to extract out of me everything that
I could bring to that process.
And he saw in me something that I couldn't see in myself.
And friend, I see something in you that maybe you can't see in yourself.
And if you allow me to be your professor of self-brain surgery,
then I'll point you towards the good physician, the great physician who is saying,
hey, I've equipped you. I called you to this training program.
I've given you everything you need. I've called you to the work.
I've equipped you for it. I've established the processes in your brain and in
your mind and the connections between them.
I've established all of this. And all you have to do is decide that you want
the abundance that's available to you.
When you achieve the surprising arrival of mastery in your life,
you can change your mind and you can change your life and you can become healthier
and feel better and be happier. You just have to choose the right approach.
You got to get into a habit of identifying the problem and identifying the goal
and choosing the right approach and applying the right technique and stop contemplating
and start operating and being aware of the pitfalls and risks,
but also being confident of the expected outcome when you've done the thing
in the way that you've been called to do that thing.
And you've understood all the pros and cons and all the alternatives and when
it's time to choose a different approach, but you know that you have the mind
of Christ and you know that he's given you everything you need for life and godliness.
And you know that you can take every thought captive and you know that he's given you the tools.
And the best news of all, my friend, is that you can start today.
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Hey, thanks for listening. The Dr. Lee Warren Podcast is brought to you by my
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It's available everywhere books are sold, and I narrated the audio books.
Hey, the theme music for the show is Get Up by my friend Tommy Walker,
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And go to my website and sign up for the newsletter, Self-Brain Surgery,
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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.
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