The Gift in You: Discovering New Life Through Gifts Hidden in Your Mind (14 page)

CHAPTER FOURTEEN:
DISCOMFORT ZONES}

In the last chapter, we learned about the importance of recognizing discomfort when we are not operating in love. Now, let's explore this discomfort a little more deeply because it can grow into a toxic gift- blocker if it is not caught early.

There are two zones, where discomfort can indicate a possible gift-blocker:

• The "just aware" level
  

• The "adrenalin-pounding, heart-pumping" level
  

Both of these levels can easily be felt because of the discomfort caused by the interruption in the regular, consistent and comfortable level of our body's millions and millions of minute and complex electrical chemical reactions and transactions taking place at any one time.
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If we can train ourselves to identify these discomfort zones, we are on the way to dealing with gift-blocker(s) and being freed from the chains of toxicity and the fear attitudes they produce.

The easiest way to visualize this will be to reference the Inside the Brain diagram on page 69 which will show you these parts of the brain as I describe them.

We get input from the environment, our body and our thoughts. This information is then transmitted via a structure called the thalamus to the outer cortex of your brain where memories (thoughts) are stored.

This area of the brain looks like a big forest, because these thoughts look like trees.

The information flies through these "trees" - your memories/thoughts - alerting them to the new incoming information, much like the preview of a movie does. This is the first place where attitude is activated; it is literally "switched on" as the information sweeps through the memory trees like a breeze - "the breeze through the trees."

This is how your brain makes sense of new information; it references connections with previous experiences and memories. It may land on a memory that is similar, and if it's a good memory, you will experience a subtle warm and happy feeling, just outside of your conscious mind.

If, however, the memory is negative, feelings of turbulence will start and your peace will be disturbed. This is the first point where your attitude will start developing on a
nonconscious
level. You can't quite place it yet, but something is starting to happen in your brain. This is the "just-aware" level, the first zone.

What do we do at this zone to either deal with the toxic thought cluster, the gift-blocker, or prevent a gift-block from happening? We need to respond to this "just-aware" quickening. Never ignore it because it's alive, real and dynamic and will produce either healthy fruit or toxic fruit. Analyze this "quickening," this witness in you, and bring it into your conscious awareness. This is an anticipation built into you that is responding to knowledge. It is a fear or love anticipation building up in you.

This is important because it is the epigenetic (over and above the genetic expression of something) level, meaning there is an environment developing outside of the new memory about to be built that is going to influence exactly what and how the memory is going to look and feel - healthy or toxic. Our minds affect which genes in our neurons are expressed.
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Genetic expression happens when a memory is built. Our brains are designed to respond to knowledge, and you need to detect whether this information is good or bad for you. This "just-aware preview" of the information will influence how you feel about the information, but it's very subtle, not quite a conscious thought yet.

The "just-aware" zone has the purpose of protecting and guarding your mind because, quite simply, "toxic in, toxic out." What does this mean for us? It means that if the incoming knowledge and thoughts are good and based on love, your gift and wisdom will be further developed. But if information is negative and fear- based, chemicals that disrupt thinking are released into the brain, producing stress, and manifest in some way - through worry or another gift-blocker.

We need to remember that every thought has an emotional component attached to it, a "chemical signature." These peptides, chemicals that are released, come from part of the brain I call the chemical factory - the hypothalamus found deep in the middle of your brain.

The hypothalamus has a host of "recipes" for attitude made up of the "chemical signature" of the thoughts and the attached emotion. It uses the peptides (small proteins that are chemical messengers made in the hypothalamus and released by the pituitary) to make a chemical signature for each attitude.
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The hypothalamus translates the attitude into a physical reality in the body via the
neurochemicals
. If the attitude is love-based this is great; but if it is toxic it will cascade the body into chemical chaos.

So "catching" the possible growth of a toxic thought is the best way to prevent a gift-blocker from being planted and taking hold.

The "Adrenalin-Pumping, Heart-Pounding" Level

What happens when a toxic thought takes root and does grow? After the "just aware" zone and the chemicals start flowing, your attitude is about to develop into the "adrenalin-
pumpin
, heart-pound-
ing
" level.

These little chemicals are called "molecules of emotion and information," and they carry the emotions you are feeling, all the way into another part of your brain, just below the chemical factory.

This is the library of the brain holding emotional perceptions. Its "brain" name is the
amygdala
(don't worry, you don't have to remember these names), and it's about the size of an almond. The
amygdala
works very closely with the hypothalamus, which monitors the flow of chemicals and attitudes.

Even here we see uniqueness in each one of us because we each have our own balance; our own individual internal chemistry is affected by nature, nurture and most importantly, our own unique way of thinking, our gift. We can enhance or upset our own balanced state just by our thoughts. Isn't that amazing?

Once the electrochemical signature that is activated by a thought in the outer part of the brain hits this library of emotional perceptions, you may feel a strong physical reaction: stress chemicals start flowing, which makes your heart pump faster; adrenalin flows and you feel that rush that almost jerks you off your feet;
cortisol
flows blocking your memory for a few moments; your muscles tense; your breathing be- comes shallow and rapid.

It is almost unbelievable, but you will have more than 1400 known physical and chemical reactions and more than 30 different neurotransmitters and hormones activated - this is stress. If you stay in this state of stress for too long, nerve cells and memory will die off. These chemicals can set off a cascade of destructive reactions inside a nerve cell, sometimes even causing "cell suicide." These will manifest as gift-blockers like anxiety, depression or illness (see an image of the Fear Tree on page 145).
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But remember, God has given provision in everything. He has given us a way to handle this "adrenalin-pumping, heart-pounding" level.

When you feel stress that does not dissolve quickly, it is strong evidence that you have a gift-blocker - or maybe several - in action. This emotional perceptual library (the
amygdala
) does not always provide the truth, because it works on perceptions, and perceptions are sometimes false. In fact a lot of the time the emotions in this
amygdala
library are quite dangerous if you follow them or allow them to control you.

So, what should you do to move out of this state of stress?

You can take advantage of a circuit God has built into your brain that runs between the
amygdala
and the front part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex (PFC), which is situated more or less behind your eyebrows.

Operating much like a scale, this circuit helps to balance reason and emotion. This is because the frontal lobe, of which the PFC is a part, is directly connected to all the other parts of the brain and therefore holds the power. The PFC also has at its command the basal forebrain that activates all the processing loops through the brain.
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It manages and coordinates and integrates all other brain regions.

The PFC, helps us reason and understand our own thoughts about ourselves. We use this PFC-
amygdala
circuit to control the raging emotion and stress response in our body. This is part of the love circuit described earlier. We do this by reasoning out the situation facing us in our minds or out loud - almost as though we are standing outside of ourselves thinking about our thinking. Our frontal lobe is really great at this. If we don't do this we will fall prey to the fear circuit described earlier. If we do control the fear, the corpus striatum is activated (discussed earlier) which makes us feel calm, peaceful and confident.

Acknowledging feelings is of paramount importance because the emotions, as I have explained, are dynamic chemicals that flow in the bloodstream between cells depositing information about the memory into cells! If you suppress an emotion - it will explode somewhere.

You can restore balance by observing your own thinking and making decisions about your thoughts and emotions. You can acknowledge any toxic feelings and then make a decision whether you will live in them or release them. Toxic feelings don't have to be a permanent part of your thoughts.

Emotions Do not Have Control

As we reviewed earlier, you do not have to let emotions control you.

Even the painful toxic ones - or any toxic feelings for that matter, toxic feelings you have been nursing for so long and are so familiar to you that you think they are "normal." You can analyze them and because of the
neuroplasticity
of the brain, rewire them.

For example, you may have been abused as a child and find that emotions are awakened each time you move into a new relationship, affecting the new relationship negatively. Another example is you may have been scared of math for years, and as soon as you walk into the math class, emotions of anxiety and fear well up in you, resulting in a negative attitude. This will block your ability to take in any information during the lesson.

It is really important that you deal with the emotion activated or it will control you. Therefore dealing with this "adrenalin-pumping, heart- pounding" level of attitude, acknowledge and analyze the strong emotion you are feeling. God has given you a very powerful frontal lobe to do this.

Don't react to it; think first and if possible, put it "back on the shelf" and tell yourself something positive like, "I don't like math because I think I am not so good at it, but I am going to conquer this fear, face it and ask questions till I do understand." And if it doesn't work the first time, do it again and again and again.

Science tells us that you need to practice using something or studying something at least seven times in repeated intervals over time before you are going to be able to use the information or perform the skill.
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Getting your attitudes under control normally takes about 21 days, and the first four are the hardest, so don't give up! Like anything that is a process, the results are well worth the effort. Eventually you will be able to use this amazing circuit that is built into the love cir-
cuit
of the brain to balance reason and emotion. When you do that, you have taken a giant leap in the direction of bringing all your thoughts into captivity (2 Corinthians 10:5) and renewing your mind (Romans 12:2).

It may sound daunting to try capturing all of your thoughts. But when you understand how you can scientifically choose what becomes part of who you are, you will also understand that you have an amazing opportunity. We all have the opportunity to choose to walk in the gift God has given us - despite circumstances.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN:
{YOU CAN CHOOSE - THE SCIENTIFIC PROOF}

It is remarkable that the information we grow onto nerve cells in our brains, the trees of our mind will bring healing or destruction. We understand the importance of the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge and of good and evil from the Bible. Well, in science, we can look at nerve cells, which also have roots and are much the same structurally.

Have a look at the tree images in chapter 13 to see what I am talking about, and as you do, think about this Scripture, one of my favorites (I even put it on my business card)" . . . down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations" (Revelation 22:2 NIV).

Although the parallels between science and Scripture are remarkable, the most amazing thing is, you can choose whether you would like to grow healthy "love attitude" tree that brings health and life into your brain or a toxic thorny "fear attitude" tree that will bring death into your brain (see Love Tree and Fear Tree on pages 144-145).

It all has to do with your gift and the I-factor.

I am going to show you this truth from a scientific perspective in this chapter, so you can confidently know that with God's help, you have the ability to make good decisions and reject the world's philosophy of the gene myth that tells us human freedom is but a delusion and genes control all. Your genes are not an unalterable blueprint or a life sentence. DNA is not your destiny.
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We are not victims of our biology; rather God has designed us in such a way that biology works for us. He has endowed us with the ability to be self-reflective, and the self-conscious mind is extremely powerful. We have the incredible capacity to override conscious and
nonconscious
memories - both toxic and non-toxic - and actively choose how to respond or not respond to environmental signals and internal signals from your thought life.

God calls us daily to make use of this gift of choice He has given us, "I call Heaven and Earth to witness against you today: I place before you Life and Death, Blessing and Curse. Choose life so that you and your children will live" (Deuteronomy 30:19 The Message).

In my practice, I always made a point of focusing on the gift of my patients as I mostly saw children and teenagers and adults who had given up all hope in their ability to learn and achieve anything in life. My greatest joy was seeing a patient walk out of my practice with hope in their eyes and the message in their hearts that it is a scientific fact that they have an amazing brain they can develop and that they are gifted.

Some of my favorite experiences were receiving text messages from formerly-rebellious teenagers who originally only came to see me because their parents were at their wits' end when it came to dealing with them, but at the end of our time together, considered me a friend. I remember one young man who sent me a text, "Dr. Leaf, you have changed my life; I have hope again."

Probably one of my favorite stories of hope comes out of my time working in South Africa among the poorest of schools and my goal was to try to help 12th graders pass their exams. The conditions were abysmal with no decent facilities - one textbook among 100 children and a chalkboard that didn't work. And many of these children hadn't eaten for days at a time.

One particular young man always stands out in mind, because when I arrived in his classroom he was angry with life, hungry and tired and weighed down with the burdens of having sickness in his home, living in extreme poverty and a whole host of other toxic things in his life that I didn't know about.

I remember him glaring at me as I got up to teach him and his classmates how to learn. I remember thinking that this young man had no hope, just pain, and I asked God to help me touch his heart.

Well, at the end of a long six-hour day, the teachers asked who wanted to thank me. Holding up a pen, this young man rushed to the front, tears pouring from his eyes, and said to me, "Dr. Leaf, thank you, thank you. Now I know what to do with my pen."

This was one of those defining moments in my life, and I vowed to get this message of hope to as many hopeless people as I could, because the message of the brain is a message about our Creator. That young man found God that day, and his face will always be in my mind.

I treasure these memories and am blessed to have many. The change I see in the people in these memories inspired me to study more about the brain so I can have a deeper understanding of how great God has made us.

This message of the gift and healing of toxic thoughts and "gift- blockers," that the brain can change and anyone can learn, is so liberating and filled with hope. It will always be the mission of my heart to build this hope into people because it is truth. 

As Scripture says, "Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life" (Proverbs 13:12 NIV).

I want to stimulate a hope and longing in you to find and develop and use your gift. I want you to be so filled with hope and love that you will pour this into someone else who, in turn, will pour into someone else. I want this gift message of hope to go viral!

Now, let me show you from a scientific perspective that choice has mental "real-estate" and that we can choose between the tree of life and the tree of death. We also need to see the consequences or fruit of these choices.

If you recall, in the previous chapter I told you about the "adrenalin- pumping, heart-pounding" level where you can identify a gift- blocker; now I am going to tell you about what comes after this. I love to call it the "about-to-make-a-decision" level. This is where we deal with choice, and it all happens around the front of the brain, the frontal lobe.

I think God's grace was lavish when He made this part of the brain because it does so much and gives us so much independence that we can almost become proud at our own intellectual capacity. But having said this, we must always remember, it is only in the voluntary self-surrender to God that we will truly release that gifts inside of us. If not, God says, "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and discard the intelligence of the intelligent" (1Corinthians 1:19 LAB).

The frontal lobe (also call the prefrontal cortex) is capable of an impressive display of functions, is connected to all other parts of the brain, and is where all the neural connections converge. It also houses the brain's most sophisticated circuits. This enables the frontal lobe to integrate and manage all the activities of all other parts of the brain.

When the frontal lobes move into high gear, they understand and observe our own thoughts about ourselves and make decisions about those thoughts. Your ability to choose and all the skills required to prepare for decision-making are situated behind your eyes to about halfway across your head.
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The frontal lobe moves into extreme high activity when something is novel and when a decision to build a thought or new memory is about to happen. This ability to think about what you are thinking about is necessary to make a decision.
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Information swirls through the middle of the brain in a tube called the hippocampus around an area called the corpus
callosum
. As the information moves toward the frontal lobe, it becomes amplified and highly active, and expectancy (hope) builds, which is expressed through various neurotransmitters. This active "thinking- about-thinking" is sharpened when we are operating in our gift. Neurotransmitters (chemicals that carry the messages) are released into the area where the memory is going to be built, creating a healthy love environment within which the memory is built.

The neurotransmitters activate proteins to be released inside the cell, turning on a "switch" gene, the
creb
gene, which acts like a light switch that we choose to switch on by our thoughts. The
creb
gene then activates genetic expression and proteins to build the memory are made.

When we choose to switch on the
creb
gene because of the thoughts we allow to permeate our brain, protein synthesis happens and a branch grows making a new synaptic connection between the axon (long part like a tree trunk) of one nerve cell and the dendrites (branched part, looks like the top of a tree) of the adjacent cell (see diagram on page 32).
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A temporary memory is born. Then we have to think about that information repeatedly over time to cause another permanent type of building protein to form, which will change the temporary memory into a permanent memory (thought).

But if we don't focus on it, the temporary memory will disappear after about 48 hours.
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So it's pretty much up to us whether we will build memory which will become part of us or not.

God has given us the frontal lobe to evaluate the information we want to build into permanent memory. Still, nothing happens until we think hard enough about the information to cause the cascade of proteins and chemicals to do their work, and even then, once this has happened, we have to switch that gene on to actually grow the memory. All the way through the thought process we have a choice.

Science and Scripture make us look in the mirror of personal responsibility.

In fact, God has designed the brain in such a way that as a memory is brought out of the
nonconscious
mind into the conscious mind it becomes unstable and has to change - either in a more toxic or less toxic direction: it never stays the same. That's great news for us because we can fix - rewire - toxic memories. Your amazing ability to use your frontal lobes to stand outside of yourself and observe your own thinking provides the fuel for this change.
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This is great news and is basically the scientific way of saying we can renew our minds (Romans 12:2). Once again, we have a scientific principle catching up with a biblical principle.

What this means is that once a memory has moved from the
nonconscious
into the conscious, it never goes back the same way - it will either go back worse (more toxic) or it will go back better (less toxic or toxic-free). The point being, the memory, once conscious, will never be the same again. It will change in some way. This is the confirmation we can change toxic thoughts that are gift-blockers. For instance, this is how people who have suffered trauma can alter the unpleasant memory.

Old memories or existing thoughts will be dealt with in pretty much the same way: They get awakened from the
nonconscious
and brought into consciousness, evaluated by the frontal lobe and then changed in some way. And you are the epigenetic force in this whole equation. It's your thoughts that get this whole thing going. If you have gift- blockers activated, then you can lose information because it won't be built into your thought clusters properly.

Gift-blockers will also affect the clarity of your thought and your ability to use the frontal lobe in the way it should be working in this self-evaluative, decision-making, choice function. As toxic levels rise, meaning the gift-blockers are increasing, all the chemicals needed to build the memory, as well as the electrical chemical feedback loops that run the brain and body, will become distorted.

For example, earlier on I spoke about how toxic thoughts can increase the level of glutamate, which, in the right quantities, is very important to memory building, but in the wrong quantities, it acts like battery acid, causing damage in the brain. Where there is damage, there will be inflammation, and all this combined starts affecting the function of nerve cells in that particular area. This may manifest in various problems, such as depression or anxiety or learning problems or physical health issues and so on (see Fear Tree on page 145).

Let's look a little closer at the trees we can choose between in the next chapter.