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When life gets hard, does what we think we believe hold us up, or does it crumble under the weight of doubt? I'm your host, Dr. Lee Warren- I'm a brain surgeon, author, and a person who's seen some stuff and wondered where God is in all this mess. This is The Spiritual Brain Surgery podcast, where we'll take a hard look at what we believe, why we believe it, and the neuroscience behind how our minds and our brains can smash together with faith to help us become healthier, feel better, and be happier so we can find the hope to withstand anything life throws at us. You've got questions, and we're going to do the hard work to find the answers, but you can't change your life until you change your mind, and it's gonna take some spiritual-brain surgery to get it done. So let's get after it.
Good morning, my friend. I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and it is time for some spiritual brain surgery.
I'm going to give you the 10 commandments of self-brain surgery.
We've done all of these episodes on the Dr. Lee Warren podcast.
But if you are a spiritual brain surgery podcast person and you haven't been around the other show,
I want to give you this in an accessible, handy place so you can come back here
and find these commandments
so that as we start to build a case for why we need to use our minds and our
brains to know what we believe,
why we believe it, and how to defend it, share it, live it, and put science
and faith on it to help us live our lives and lead other people to do so in a more hopeful.
Faithful posture, no matter what happens.
If we're going to do that, we need some parameters, need some guidelines,
and the Ten Commandments will do that for us. They're based in neuroscience, science.
They're based in scripture and they're very helpful. And today,
the first one is the first commandment that we take when we take the oath to practice medicine.
It's first, no harm, primum non nocere.
As my patient, Mr. Green put it, that I wrote about it in Hope is the First
Dose, I will relentlessly refuse to participate in my own demise.
Listen, friend, it's hard enough. Life's got enough troubles without us perpetually
doing things that make it harder for ourselves. selves.
And so today we're going to take a look at what it looks like when you practice
to avoid the issue of harming yourself, to avoid self-malpractice.
After all, Jesus said, the greatest commandment is to love God with all your
heart, and the second is to love your neighbor as yourself, which implies you're
supposed to love yourself. You're supposed to take care of yourself.
And this episode is going to give you some guidelines to learn the founding
principle of self-brain surgery.
I will relentlessly refuse to participate in my own demise.
I'll be bringing you these other nine commandments as time goes on.
I'm working on a formulation of them for the new book, The Handbook of Self-Brain Surgery.
And so they could bury or change a little bit before we finally publish that
book. Once the book is published, they're going to be set in stone.
And so the podcast is the place where we're working these ideas out.
And here's the current formulation of the 10 commandments of self-brain surgery
for you. Let's get after it.
Welcome to the Spiritual Brain Surgery Podcast. I'm Dr.
Lee Warren, your host, as we examine what we believe, why we believe it,
how we can defend it, live it, and share it with others.
We use faith and science to smash together to release the incredible power of
learning how we're designed, operate our brains, manage our minds,
communicate with our creator, and help other people find hope. Let's get after it.
Hey, we're going to start the first in a series. It's not going to be 10 episodes
in a row, but it's going to be 10 episodes in total of breaking down the 10
commandments of self-brain surgery.
So today we're going to cover the first commandment, which is primum non nocere, first no harm.
The first day of medical school, the thing they teach you is don't make things worse for your patient.
And as self-brain surgeons, of course, we say it in a little bit but different
way we say that I will relentlessly refuse to participate in my own demise.
Too much of our own time, of our own life, of our own thinking involves doing
things that are shooting ourselves in the foot, harming ourselves,
keeping ourselves stuck and unable to make progress in our lives.
Today, we're going to start to unlock that process by making a commitment to
each other, to our families, to our future generations, and to God that we are
going to relentlessly refused to participate in her own demise.
We're going to talk today, my friend, about the first of the Ten Commandments of self-brain surgery.
Now, we did an episode earlier this week, and I gave you the whole list in one
place, but I told you there was a caveat.
As I'm writing the manuscript, inevitably, there's going to be some shuffling
of these Ten Commandments and some reframing of a couple of them,
and maybe even restating a couple of of them is I try to put these ideas into
book form and try to put the best version of my concepts out there that are
going to be, once you put it in a book, it's out there.
So you can't modify it or change it anymore.
You got to tell, you got to put it out there and stick with it.
So I'm evolving these ideas as I get them ready to make sure they hit the reader,
you, in the best possible way to make the biggest possible impact in your life.
And so I've reframed them already a couple of times and the last two,
which I think are gonna be the way.
They show up in the book, but the last two have changed a little bit,
even from earlier this week.
So let me just run the list with you real quick in list form with no further ado.
And then we're going to get deeper into the first commandment today.
So the 10 commandments of self-brain surgery updated on today,
3-8-20-24, for today's purposes are going to be stated this way.
And each of them are going to have some corollaries and some ways to think broadly
about them and to unpack them.
And those will be coming soon. We're going to do an episode on each one of these 10 commandments.
And then as I flush out the book and write the book, I'm sure we'll have more
to say about them as time goes on. But these are the basic 10 ideas.
Don't confuse the 10 commandments of the Bible of God for this.
It's a common thing to do to say here's 10 commandments about this or that or
how to do plumbing or 10 commandments of finance or whatever.
So I'm just giving you 10 ideas that if you follow them, you will be able to
change your mind and change your life. You'll be able to apply the lessons of
self-brain surgery, faith smashing into cognitive neuroscience and applied neuroplasticity.
And we're going to change our minds and change our brains structurally,
literally performing self-brain surgery.
It's not cognitive behavioral therapy. It's actual structural change in your brain.
Not just changing your behavior, changing the way you think,
changing the way your brain is wired, changing the way your genes turn on and
off, changing the way you influence other people, changing the epigenetics around
the things you pass on to your family, and literally changing your whole life.
I must relentlessly refuse to participate in my own demise.
We're not going to commit self-malpractice.
Number two, I must recognize that feelings are not facts.
They are chemical events in my brain. Number three, I must recognize that most
of my thoughts are untrue.
Number four, I must love tomorrow more than I hate how I feel right now.
Number five, I must not treat bad feelings with bad operations.
Number six, I must stop making an operation out of everything.
Number seven, I must not perpetuate generational thought or behavioral issues
in my family or start any new ones.
Number eight, I must love my brain and live in such a way as to improve it.
Number nine, I must believe that what I'm doing, I'm getting better at.
Number 10, I must understand that thoughts become things.
There's the list. This is going to become the core values of how we build a
life of being better and better at self-brain surgery,
because what we're doing, we're getting better at, and we want to get better
and better at living in the way that God has created us so we can use our minds
to communicate with our creator and our great physician,
and we can work with him to engage in the process of self-brain surgery to make
our brains structurally better so that we can live
more functionally well, become healthier, feel better, and be happier,
and make a bigger impact on the world around us to break chains,
be free, cast off things that are hindering and holding us back,
and finally live in the way that we're designed to live, okay?
We want that blessed, abundant life that Jesus promises is available to us in
spite of the fact that we have a lot of hard things in this life.
So we want the both. We want the quantum dual reality and not just to be able
able to only see one or the other, right?
That's the idea. So today we're going to talk about first, no harm.
The first day of medical school, literally the first thing they teach you is the oath.
It used to be called the Hippocratic Oath. It's generally been revised a little
bit now, but it's an oath that we take as medical students that we are not going
to harm our patients intentionally.
We try with all of our might not to do anything to make the patient worse.
First, no harm. In Latin, it's primum non no serius. The first thing,
the prime thing is not to harm your patient.
So if we come into self-brain surgery and we're recognizing that the way that
we think literally changes our brain, and that happens either passively or actively.
Then we have a choice to make.
Now we know, we know the truth. Jesus said, the truth will set you free.
James said, if you know what to do and you don't do it, it's sin.
And the corollary to To that is if you know what not to do and you do it anyway, it's sin.
Sin being defined as anything that separates you from God, anything that harms
you, takes you off of His plan for your life, would be harmful to you,
separate you from Him, or hurt other people.
We don't want to do that. We want to find ways to honor the design of our minds,
the design of our brains, and sort of maximize that for the benefit of our own
lives and the people around us, right?
And the people we're responsible for. So once you know, then you're responsible
for it. It's no longer accidental if something happens.
I've told you this story before. If I get a phone call from the hospital and
they tell me that you're in the ER and you've got a brain hemorrhage and I know
how to fix that and I choose not to go, that's malpractice.
Because I know how to help you. I'm aware of your problem.
And if I choose not to take care of it, that's on me. But if you fall at home
and hit your head and you have a brain hemorrhage and nobody knows about it
and nobody calls 911 and I'm never aware of it and you die from that brain hemorrhage,
it's not my responsibility because I didn't have any knowledge or awareness of the problem.
And so I couldn't help you and I wasn't responsible for helping you.
So I just want you to frame that in the context of self-brain surgery,
that once you know, now you have a responsibility.
Now you have to apply the commandment to yourself.
Once you know that something that you're doing or or a thought pattern,
or a habit, or a behavioral issue is harming you, then you're harming your patient.
If you're a compassionate physician and you understand that the treatment that
you've defined and you've decided to apply is actually going to harm your patient,
then you change your strategy.
Then you decide, hey, I took an oath not to harm my patient.
Now, from a scriptural standpoint, Mark 12, 30, and 31, what did Jesus say?
The great commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart,
soul, mind, and strength.
But the next commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself.
This is the one that we miss often. We're all about loving our neighbor and
loving the Lord our God, but we don't love ourselves enough sometimes.
And Jesus said, love your neighbor as yourself, which implies that you can't
really love your neighbor if you don't love yourself first. You,
my friend, need to remember something.
You're fearfully and wonderfully made. You're made in the image of the Creator.
And when he made you, he said, it is very good.
He has a plan for you, a plan to prosper you, not to harm you,
a plan to give you hope and a future.
You have the power, his divine power to give you everything you need for life and godliness.
And you're not stuck. You don't have to be. You don't have to live that way anymore.
And so relentlessly refuse to participate in your own demise.
If God is on your side, Paul says, who can be against us? If God is for you,
who can be against you? Well, it's a rhetorical question because you can be against yourself.
And if you're against yourself, if you're not making decisions,
treatment plans, and implementing proper procedures, you will not have good
outcomes in your own life.
And we talk about this abide practice of getting our minds and our hearts sort
of in resonance and coherence with one another and learning how to listen and
hear and experience God with that right half of our brain so we can really know
Him in that knowledge, that deep knowledge sense,
and not just fact-based lists of things that we think we know about Him.
That's no way to have a relationship, right?
And we need to know ourselves. And if you begin to try to understand who you
are and how you think and what your baseline proclivities are and what your
habits and experiences have led you to,
then you can start critically examining the decisions that you make about what
you're going to do, what you're going to think, how you're going to react,
how you're going to respond,
the kinds of habits and patterns that you're going to build around your life.
You're going to decide that starting your day
with some quiet time and some abide practice and some self-brain surgery and
getting a discipline of biopsying your thoughts and getting a discipline of
not reacting anymore out of feelings or out of fear or out of anxiety or out
of being stuck from your massive thing or the trauma that you've been through is not helping you.
Once you decide that, then you can start putting together a treatment plan that
will no longer result in harm to yourself, to the most important patient that you have.
There's a reason why when the oxygen masks drop in the airplane,
they tell you to put it on you first because if you can't breathe,
you can't help anybody else.
So it's not selfish to take care of yourself. It's not selfish to apply these
principles to yourself first before you start trying to help anybody else.
Make sure you're not bleeding to death on your own surgery table.
With the things that you feel and think. Remember what you're doing,
you're getting better at.
So think about it for a second. What are three ways that you commonly harm yourself with your thinking?
And before you say, wait a minute, I don't ever harm myself with my thinking. I would say,
take careful attention and recognize how many nights have you spent awake all
night because you were obsessed with worrying about something that might happen the next day.
And you didn't get any sleep and you were grumpy or you were short with your
kids or you're irritable with your spouse or you jumped on somebody at work
because you spent all night worrying and not sleeping and something that never
even actually came to pass. How many times has that happened to you?
How many times have you been stuck and ruminating about this massive thing that
you went through and you can't bear to feel it anymore?
So tonight, even though you said you weren't going to, tonight,
one more time, you open that bottle, you numb yourself, you turn the television
on, you do the thing, you make the online purchase that you shouldn't make,
or you visit that website that helps you not think about it for a little while.
And how many times have you done that? And the next day you find yourself paying a tomorrow tax.
You find that you didn't love tomorrow more and you treated a bad feeling with a bad operation.
And now you've got the same problem that you had yesterday and some new trouble
because your spouse saw that website you went to and now you have a trust issue
or your kids saw that bottle in the trash can after you You promised them not
one more time. I won't do this one more time.
And now you got another issue to deal with because you didn't love tomorrow more.
That's harming yourself. All these things flow downhill from relentlessly refusing
to participate in their own demise.
So ask yourself honest questions, friend, today on Frontal Lobe Friday.
What are the top three ways that you harm yourself? Be honest with yourself.
You can't make progress if you're not willing to look under the hood.
Ask yourself tough questions, ask God to reveal to you the answers.
Remember Psalm 1914 tells us that it's not just about the things we say,
it's about the things we think.
He says, may the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart.
Meditation of my heart, what is that?
That's what you're thinking about. about that's the stuff that
you spend time ruminating about he's saying
david is saying here god help me not just
control my tongue help me control my mind help
me meditate on the right stuff help me think about the
right things this is an active decision that we
get to make what we choose to think about is frontal lobe friday and the first
commandment of self-brain surgery is to use your frontal lobes to not harm yourself
with how you think or synapses that you make or hormonal or neurotransmitter
worsenings that you create with bad thinking.
And bad thinking can be passive because you're not taking the discipline to
control it, to not do that 2 Corinthians 10 5 thing of taking every thought captive.
That can be a passive type of negligence where you don't pay attention.
That's if I order a CAT scan on you because I'm worried about some symptom them
and then I don't bother to look at it.
And so I don't find out that you have a brain tumor and I don't call you and
months go by before you find out that you have cancer that we could have done something about.
That's an act of negligence because I didn't pursue something.
Okay. And you can do the same thing in your thought life where you can just
not pay attention to what you're thinking about.
And before you know it, you spent a whole day mad about something.
Are you worried about the tone that somebody had in a text message instead of
clearing it up and calling them and hearing their tone of voice.
You just spend all day angry about it.
I remember this story of the two monks that were traveling, an older one and
a younger one, and they got to a riverbank.
And there was a woman who was unable to cross the river.
She was too short, and it was going to be overwhelming for her,
and she didn't know how to swim, and she was stuck.
She needed to get to the other side, but she didn't know what to do.
And the old monk said, well, okay, climb onto my back, and I'll carry you across the river.
And they got across the river, and she went on her way, and the two monks continued on their journey.
And the younger monk didn't say a word all day. He was just fuming.
And they finally got back to the monastery and the old monk said,
hey, by the way, you've been acting all day like something was wrong.
What's going on with you?
And the young monk said, well, you broke our vow.
You carried that woman. You're not supposed to touch a woman.
You carried that woman across the river and you're not supposed to do that.
And the old monk said, son, I put her down hours ago, but you've been carrying her all day.
And you see that? Like the monk did an act of service that he made a decision
that the spirit of the law wasn't as important, that the letter of the law wasn't
as important as the spirit there. And he did a good deed for another person.
And then he went on his way. He put the burden down, put the woman down and went on his way.
But the younger monk let that get in his mind and he spent all day dealing with it.
And we do that too, right? Sometimes we spend a whole day or a whole night or
a whole week or a whole month or a whole year or a whole lifetime committing
self-malpractice because we're beating ourselves up with thoughts that we haven't
taken the initiative to do self-brain surgery on and get rid of.
We haven't taken that brain surgery course of Philippians 4 of thinking about
better things if we want to have a better life and learning how to be anxious
for nothing by prayer and gratitude instead of worry.
And my friend, I'm just telling you, if you want to have a healthier,
better, happier life, if you want to change your mind and change your life,
it starts with cell brain surgery.
It starts with a thought biopsy, and it starts with a commitment to relentlessly
refuse to participate in your own demise.
Primum non nocere means first, no harm. And you can't make any progress until
you commit in front of God and everybody else that you're going to try your
best to be a good surgeon to your most important patient,
to be kind and compassionate and attentive and careful to never participate
in your own demise so that you're not committing malpractice against yourself
so that you can then begin to move the needle on real life change for you and
your family and your generations and for the people around you.
You wanna live the abundant life
and stop feeling like everything's being stolen or killed or destroyed.
You wanna live in the overcome the world, half of John 16, 33,
instead of this life is gonna be so hard that Jesus told us?
Do you wanna live in the abundance that Jesus promised that he came here?
And it starts by resisting the urge to harm yourself with your own thinking.
To stop committing self-malpractice.
So think about those three ways that you most commonly harm yourself.
Write them down, put them in your phone.
Write down three common issues that you have with your thinking.
You can email them to me, lee at drleewarren.com or leave a voicemail and say,
hey, these are the three things I struggle with. And then we'll start to unpack
how we can overcome those three things.
In fact, that might be some good episodes. If you send me some different ways
that you harm yourself, maybe we can start to unpack some of these things and
get better together by relentlessly refusing to participate in their own demise.
It's Frontal Lobe Friday.
We're unpacking the Ten Commandments. And the very first one is no self-malpractice.
Friend, do you want to change your mind and change your life?
Do you want to get better instead of getting worse? Worse, you got to stop committing
self-malpractice. And the good news is you can 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.