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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. I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and I am so excited to be with.
You today for some self-brain surgery. It's Theology Thursday.
This is the day of the week on the Dr. Lee Warren podcast here where we take
a little deep dive into some of the things that we believe.
And if you're not a believer, I just want to encourage you.
You're obviously listening to this podcast because you're interested in neuroscience
or you're interested in changing your mind or you've been through something
really hard or maybe you just stumbled upon us, but what we're about here is
figuring out how to take science,
which is the way, a set of tools that we can use to solve problems and look
at the world and understand and explain things, and also take faith,
which is the stuff we can't quite get our hands around,
the things that we believe or the things that we hope for.
And sometimes science doesn't provide all the answers.
Sometimes we have to take a leap of faith to really get to where we want to
go. And so if you've been through something hard, part of you.
Gone through some kind of trauma and tragedy.
That's a new word. I just made up a new word. Trauma and tragedy.
These hard things that we go through.
Trauma and tragedy and what we call massive things. Maybe you haven't lost a child.
Maybe your spouse hasn't developed brain cancer. Maybe you haven't lost your parents.
Maybe something devastating on the medical side like that hasn't happened.
But maybe you've lost a dream that you've been chasing for a long time.
It's just not going to happen.
Maybe she said no, or maybe he left, or maybe it's something less medical and
less physical and more emotional, but it's just as real and you're hurting.
Or maybe you're like Tom Wright, the theologian says, maybe you're the least
bereaved person you know, but you just feel like there's something more,
like the life just quite isn't where you thought it would be.
Maybe you're just tired of things feeling so hard, or maybe things are actually
going going pretty well for you,
but you have this sense that things could even be different or better.
There's something missing. There's something that doesn't quite taste right.
Well, all those things are in play.
And so one day a week, we take a day to look at the spiritual side of things,
what we call Theology Thursday.
And I'm just going to give you some stuff today about how to multiply the miracles in your life.
I'm going to cover a couple of emails that we got from listeners.
I'm really proud of one of our listeners, one of our readers named June Chapman,
who has published her first book.
And I want to tell you a little story about that. But we're going to get into
an email from Gina Berkmeyer, who's an incredible therapist and has also written
an incredible book called Generations Deep, which is about breaking these generational
traumas and generational curses.
We're going to talk a little bit about that. I'm going to tell you a story from
John chapter 5. We're going to have a little music from Tommy Walker.
And I'm going to give you a little bit of neuroscience as we wrap up this abide
practice we've been doing for a couple of months.
And we're going to become people who live out the practice of self-brain surgery.
As Gina calls it, we're going to become abiders.
And we'll talk about what that means in just a minute. But before we do any
of that stuff here on Theology Thursday, my friend, I have a question for you.
Hey, are you ready to change your life? If the answer is yes, there's only one rule.
You have to change your mind first. And my friend, there's a place 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, way back in 2020, I got an email from a
lady named Michelle June Chapman who asked me if I could give her some advice about writing.
Now, let me just say this very clearly.
The podcast and the newsletter have grown so much that I get this email probably
once a month, and I always reply with pretty much the same advice about how
I started writing and the experience that I had as a writer.
But I need to make it clear a couple of things.
Number one, I don't have time to read your 100,000-word manuscript that you
send to me and ask if I can read it and help you get it published, okay?
I'm a full-time practicing neurosurgeon. I've got kids, grandkids,
a wife, a podcast that keeps me busy. I'm writing a new book, all that stuff.
So please don't mail me your book or ask me to read your book because it's hard
for me to say no to people.
But I will say no to that because I don't have time. And I'm not an editor and
I'm not an agent. So I can't get your book published for you.
But here's what I do frequently do for people.
When somebody writes in like Michelle did back in August of 2020 and says,
Hey, I just want some advice on how to get started.
I think I have some ideas that need to become a book. It's really a process
that's on my heart and I've been praying about it.
And I love your work and maybe you could give me some advice.
I have a set of advice that I give people and I get that email frequently.
And I send the same email out to people. And I'm going to turn that into a document
that'll be one of the things on Substack that you can download because as the work has grown now,
I'm starting to be unable to reply personally to every email that we get.
So rather than you emailing me and asking me for that, the reply is going to
be a link to a document that we put on Substack that's the same advice I give
everybody, including Michelle.
And here's why that's valuable. It's not because I don't want to individually
help people anymore. more. I do. I really do.
But I just can't. And you understand that because I got to do this and bring
you this work and I got to go operate on people. Okay.
But Michelle wrote in in August of 2017, asked me for that advice.
I wrote back the next day, gave her the advice I give to everybody and said,
here's how I did it. Here's what I do.
Here's the pathway and the process that I work.
And a long time later, so that was August of 2020. I'm.
And in October of 2023, I got an email from her saying, hey,
thanks for all your advice.
I followed it. I did it. I worked hard. I wrote the book. I got it edited. I did the thing.
It's getting published by David C. Cook. And that's the first time I've heard
from somebody who said, hey, I followed your advice and I actually got a book
contract and I got my book published and it really helped. Would you be willing to endorse it?
I've been honored now, incredibly honored when somebody gets a book published
and they ask for your endorsement. And so I read her book, and it was beautiful.
It's called Peace in the Waiting, When You Love People Who Don't Love God.
And it's a story of a dear friend of hers that's not a believer,
and her relationship with that
person, and how she's praying for her and trying to bring her to the Lord.
And it's really the first time I've ever seen a book on that topic.
How do you love somebody and try to steward them into a relationship with the Lord?
And what do you do over time, and how do you do that? and how do you live that
life of waiting for God to reach out to somebody.
It's just a beautiful book. She's done a great job. David C.
Cook published it this last month.
It's just out. June Chapman lives in Washington, D.C., and I'm so proud of her.
And she actually acknowledged me in the book, so it's really cool.
So not only did I get to endorse it, but she mentioned in the acknowledgement
that, hey, I reached out to this guy and he helped me, and that's great.
So I'm so proud of you, June, for getting that done.
I'm just telling you that story, my friend, to say, hey, sometimes you work
hard on something and you need to reach out to another person to get that little
bit of extra thing to move where you are to a different place.
Sometimes you need help. That's the third part of the treatment plan,
Hope is the First Dose, is this community idea that we need to surround ourselves with other people.
And that's why this community is so important and so powerful.
For. It's just important in the kingdom and in life in general to be willing
to reach out to others and say, hey, I need a hand up.
We're always a little too proud a lot of times to reach up and ask for a hand.
And sometimes you need it.
And this is a good example. Somebody reached out.
Somebody else, me, said, hey, here's what I do. Just a little tiny,
it didn't, it took me five minutes because I've got that email basically templated.
People ask me all the time. I send it back. I was, you know,
gave her some advice and she followed it and it helped her.
And she obviously did the work. She did the writing. She did the research.
She crafted her skills. She worked hard. She found an agent.
She did the whole thing that I can't do for somebody.
And my help for her was just a tiny little part that gave her enough confidence
to move forward. And I'm so proud of that.
And I just wanted you to hear that story to say, you know what?
Sometimes you really do need a hand from somebody else, but you really can do
something extraordinary.
You can. You don't have to be stuck in the label or the spot that you think you're stuck in.
You can actually get this done. You can do something remarkable.
You can. So proud of you, June. And I'm proud of you, my friend,
for whatever it is that you're willing to reach out and ask somebody for help
with. And the prayer wall is a good example of that.
We've got a community of people from all over the world who are willing to say,
hey, this is going on in my life.
Would you pray for me? Would you carry this burden with me? Would you help me?
And you know what? Most of the time in the kingdom when we ask people for help,
they say yes, and we can help them.
And we can be helped. So don't be afraid to reach out and ask for help.
And check out June's book, Peace in the Waiting. It's available everywhere books are sold.
Beautiful book. I think it'll be helpful to you. If you love somebody who doesn't
know the Lord, this would be a great book for you. Now, another email.
Gina Berkmeyer is a therapist. We've talked about her a few times on the podcast recently.
And Gina has written an amazing book called Generations Deep.
And it's about the idea that we have these generational issues in our family
and they can be fixed. They can be changed.
You don't have to be stuck with them. You can pass on your healing or you can
pass on your hurting, as Gina says.
She wrote an email the other day about the Abide practice that we've been talking
about now for two months.
We're almost done with Abide. It wraps up on Easter.
She said, greetings and blessed Palm Sunday to you and Lisa. This is on March 24th.
She said, as I was listening to your podcast this week, Frontal Lobe Friday
and Cell Brain Surgery Saturday, I was thinking about how you've been guiding
us through the Abide practice.
In one of the episodes, you said something that hit and connected some dots for me.
It was about how you and Lisa are doing this work first and foremost,
of course, to be close to God and to glorify Him, and also to help you better
reflect the tenets of Abide and live it out in your relationship with your family,
friends, patients, etc.
It occurred to me that what you're really encouraging all of us to do and what
you are practicing for yourself within the abide practice is to take what we
learn and live it out relationally.
Because ideally, this practice impacts our relationship with God,
with ourselves, and with others.
We have the R for relationships.
We become an abider, not just abiding, but abiders.
We become people who are known as abiders. This is just a thought that Gina
wanted to share on Palm Sunday.
That's amazing because it was already in line with what I was going to do for today for.
For Theology Thursday. And here's what we're going to do today.
We're going to go to John 5.
This is all amazing how it all corresponded or correlated and came together.
Last Sunday, our pastor, we went to church online last week because Tata wasn't feeling well.
So we went to church online and watched the Church of the Highlands service
from Alabama where we used to worship.
And they had a guest speaker who's a pastor in Columbus, Georgia.
And he talked about John 5, which
I was already going to talk to you about today. So reinforce the idea.
When Gina's email came, it was like, okay, this is exactly what my friends need
to hear today on Theology Thursday, which is also Maundy Thursday in the Holy Week.
We're getting ready for Good Friday tomorrow, the greatest day in human history
when Jesus laid down his life for us. And then on Sunday, he's going to be resurrected.
And we're going to remember the great thing that's been done for us and the
great power and hope that we have.
We don't serve a guy who just died for us. We serve a guy who had the power
to overcome death and lives for us as our advocate, as our intercessor, as our friend and king.
And we're excited to know that we get to be reunited with him,
with all the ones who've gone before us and the great cloud of witnesses someday.
So that gives us the peace and the power and the purpose that we can go through
this life. That's why we're abiders, right?
Because we know that there's truth. We're not just wishing. We're hoping in someone who's alive.
Hope is a person and his name is Jesus.
Okay, so in John 5, we have this story of the guy who's been sitting for 38 years paralyzed.
He's an invalid. It says, sometime later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for one
of the Jewish festivals.
Now, there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which is an Aramaic called
Bethesda, and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades.
Here, a great number of disabled people used to lie, the blind,
the lame, the paralyzed. One who was there had been an invalid for 38 years.
When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition
for a long time, he asked him, do you want to get well?
Sir, the invalid replied, I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred.
While I'm trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me.
And Jesus said to him, get up, pick up your mat and walk.
At once, the man was cured. He picked up his mat and walked.
Now, this is an interesting story for a number of reasons. One,
people believed that they had to get in this pool to be healed,
and they had to wait for the angel to come and stir up the water and get down in the water.
And this guy was so paralyzed. He was so alone and so broken and so by himself
and so stuck that he couldn't ever be the one that got in the water to get the healing.
So when Jesus came, he said, do you want to get well?
And I have a question for you, my friend, today. Do you want to get well?
Are you sad? Are you sick? Are you stuck? Are you stressed?
Are you just maybe subpar for
yourself? You feel like there's got to be more. Do you want to get well?
Do you want something to change? And if so, guess what? You don't have to get in the water.
You can just do what Jesus said. You can get up, pick up your mat and walk.
You got to change your mind. You got to change your perspective from the position
of being stuck on the mat to being willing to get up and walk.
And we talk all the time on this show about self-brain surgery techniques to
get that done. But it's not really self-brain surgery because you're connecting
your mind to your spirit, to this great physician who says, I'm here to help you get up and walk.
And then we're going to change your brain structurally by directing that neuroplastic
stuff that you've got the ability to do and you're already doing.
We're going to change your mind about that. This morning, I wrote a chapter
in my new book, Self-Brain Surgery.
And I think without hyperbole, I think this is the most important bit of writing
I've ever done in my entire life.
And I cannot wait. I'm completely geeking out to present this book to you because
it's going to be the handbook, the toolbook of all this stuff we've been talking
about on the podcast for 11 years now.
All in one place where you can go to it and learn how to do these operations
to change your mind and change your life.
But the first piece, the most important piece, is understanding the difference
between perception and perspective. perspective.
The perception is the left brain thing where you sort of distill your entire life into one thing.
You see things in one way. You see people in one way. You see something as a
binary this or that thing.
And this is what this guy in John 5 is doing. He sees his life as being stuck
on the mat and he can't get help and he can't get in the water.
And that's how it's going to be for him.
Why is my life always this way? Why does it always work out for me?
This is just how I am. Now, this is my life now. I'm just stuck here.
And friend, if that's you, if you're seeing your life from that perception,
then I want to tell you, perception is not reality.
Perception is just how the left side of your brain is presenting your world to you.
But you can engage perspective instead, and you can use the right half of your
brain to give you some balance and nuance and context. And you can say, wait a minute.
Yes, I'm on this, Matt. And yes, nobody's helping me. But the Savior is right
there. The great physician is standing next to me, and he's saying,
do you want to get well? And I can say, you know what?
Yeah, my legs haven't moved in a long time, but I still have legs,
and he's going to give them the power to stand up. And he was cured.
Now, here's the funny part of the story. This is the piece I got from the pastor.
Jesus told him to take his mat with him. Now, why?
Wouldn't you just jump up and run off and go tell your parents and go tell your
spouse or go tell your friends that you've been healed? you'll know.
He says, take your mat. But the mat was the symbol of the fact that this guy
had been stuck for a long time.
The mat was the shame.
The mat was the stigma. The mat was the empty bottle in the trash can when you
said there wouldn't be one anymore.
The mat was the brokenness. The mat was the prescription that you can't stop refilling.
The mat was the the gambling debt that you can't pay off. The mat was the problem.
And Jesus wanted him to take it with him. Why? Well, here's why.
Because your story isn't just about you.
Your perspective needs to be larger than just you were paralyzed and now you're not.
You're stuck and now you're not. You're addicted and now you're not.
My story needs to be about letting other people see that scar so they can ask you what's up.
Wait, I know who you are. You're that guy that used to be down on the mat.
You're that lady that used to be doing this thing.
You're that lady whose story was about abuse and about despair,
but now you look so much different.
What's going on with you? Why are you different?
And that gives you an opportunity to do what June did, reach out and ask for
help. and I was able to reach out and help her.
Because when somebody sees the math that you're carrying, they ask you what's
going on and they see the change and the difference, that's when you have an
opportunity to multiply the miracle.
See, you got a miracle, but it wasn't just for you.
You have the ability to change your brain and change your life.
But Gina would say, that's also about changing your generations.
Multiply that miracle, pass it on. Don't just have abided, become an abider. durer.
Don't just have somebody transform your life. Be willing to transform others.
Christopher Cook said that on the Spiritual Brain Surgery podcast last week
about his new book, Healing What You Can't Erase.
He said, if you're transformed, it's not just for you.
It's so that you can transform others and help others get introduced to the
idea that they can be transformed too.
So multiply the miracle. That's what Theology Thursday is today.
Tommy Walker did a song, get up all about this and you should watch the video
i'll put a link in the show notes the video is just i cry every time i watch
it because it's not just about getting up off the mat it's about multiplying
that miracle and about what happens after jesus says do you want to get well.
And the power and the peace and the transformation and the community building
and the rehab and just the joy that happens when you're willing to share your
scar and your story with other people, that's when real change happens.
And we talk about this abide process right at the end of it now,
down at the end of two months of doing this work.
And we started with the first contemplation with this idea of thinking about
getting to know Him in a different way,
to calm down that language center on our left side and let Him communicate with
us with that perception and 3D kind of nuanced right half of our brain.
And we said, let's approach him and let's breathe and invite him into the experience
and depend on him and to experience him in a new way. And then we moved from
contemplation to operation.
And we start the abide practice of operating to say, assess the situation and
believe that it can be different.
And that's where we are here in John 5. You have to believe that you can get
up before you can actually get up. And then we have to make an decision.
We have to get after it. We have to stand up on those wobbly legs and do something
new. and then we have to deepen that exposure like I did in the operating room all day yesterday.
You go deeper, you press in, you're willing to pick up the mat,
you're willing to share that story and walk around in those new legs and let
other people see it and then you expect a good outcome.
He didn't wake up every day and expect to be back on the mat.
He woke up every day and expected to continue to live in that multiplied miracle
that Jesus gave him and then the last one is we are going to recover.
Recover, we're going to continue to live in that recovered state.
And that requires a different form of a bye. We have to acknowledge the problem.
We have to say, yeah, I'm on this mat.
Yeah, I'm down here. I really am. This is the situation as it is.
No perception. This is reality.
This is where I am, but I don't want to stay here. And then we have to be willing
to bleed Bleed a little bit. Like, yeah, let's sit with it for a minute. Name that trauma.
Be trauma-informed to yourself, but don't be trauma-focused.
Don't say, I'm just going to sit here and bleed to death. Don't say that.
Sign an informed consent and say, okay, I'm going to get up and it's going to hurt.
Because guess what? Those legs that had been paralyzed for 38 years,
they probably didn't feel very good when he started using them.
Those muscles probably had a lot of atrophy and it took some time for him to get strong again.
I don't know if Jesus gave him brand new legs like a sprinter or if he just
empowered him to move and let him experience the healing on a day-to-day basis.
But he had to sign an informed consent and say, I know I'm going to be stigmatized.
The Pharisees are going to give me a hard time. I'm going to have to deal with
some repercussions of this miracle, but I'm going to step forward into it because
I want the outcome that you're promising.
And we're going to decide on a direction and we're going to take it and move forward.
And that's going to require us to excise, to make an incision and cut the cord with the past.
That guy didn't start going back to the pool every day and sitting there and
dipping his toes in, hoping for another miracle.
He moved on with his life and he left that thing behind.
He burned the boats. he pressed in and had
a new life because he was not just somebody who
was once cured and now he's sick again he was an
abider i guarantee you that that
changed his focus and his direction for the rest of
his life because he could move his legs now he
didn't go sit back by the pool he became an abider he multiplied the miracle
he was willing to pick up his mat and walk and you hear me play this song at
the end of every episode the music that you hear as we go out is tommy walker's
song get up because i want you to remember that you can get up and when jesus
says do you want to get well.
The only question that matters is are you willing to change your mind so you
can change your life and my friend are you willing to start today.
Music.
Hey, thanks for listening. The Dr. Lee Warren Podcast is brought to you by my
brand new book, Hope is the First Dose. It's a treatment plan for recovering
from trauma, tragedy, and other massive things.
It's available everywhere books are sold. And I narrated the audio books.
Hey, the theme music for the show is Get Up by my friend Tommy Walker,
available for free at TommyWalkerMinistries.org.
They are supplying worship resources for worshipers all over the world to worship
the Most High God. And if you're interested in learning more,
check out TommyWalkerMinistries.org.
If you need prayer, go to the prayer wall at WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer,
WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer.
And go to my website and sign up for the newsletter, Self-Brain Surgery,
every Sunday since 2014, helping people in all 50 states and 60-plus countries
around the world. I'm Dr.
Lee Warren, and I'll talk to you soon. Remember, friend, you can't change your
life until you change your mind. And the good news is you can start today.
Music.