Reader,

Dr. Caroline Leaf, a South African neuroscientist, says that the human mind is the most beautiful, most powerful, and most mysterious thing in the universe, second only to God.

Let that sink in for a moment.

Leaf goes on to say that the mind's power and ability is the primary evidence that we are made in the image of God. As a neuroscientist, she has spent decades studying the brain, along with many other researchers who have been learning just how incredible the human mind is. In her perspective, science is finally catching up to the Bible. She says that neuroscience is now helping us understand verses like Proverbs 23:7, which says, "For as [a person] thinks within himself, so he is" (NASB).

Christians have long taught and believed that the way we think matters. What scientists have begun to discover is that we literally become our thoughts: proteins form in our brains, neuropathways connect, and we form our identity based on how we choose to think about ourselves. We create the worlds we live in by how we choose to perceive and process what happens around us.

It is any wonder, then, that Paul instructs us to take every thought captive and make it obedient to Christ (2 Corinthians 10:5b)? Or that he exhorts the Romans to be transformed by the renewing of their mind? (Romans 12:2) These verses (and others) insinuate that God deliberately gave us agency over our minds. We control what we think about. We control what we don't think about. We control the meanings we assign to things and what we decide to move past.

This is where our spiritual anatomy comes in. Your mind is the part of your spiritual makeup that thinks, that assigns meaning to things, and that ultimately decide how you'll react, behave, and show up to your life. In that sense your mind is different than your brain, the physical organ in your skull. Which means that you need to learn how to evaluate the thoughts your brain produces.

That said, thoughts are a lot like feelings. We don't choose what to feel or what thoughts pop into our heads. Just like we are not our feelings, so also are we not our thoughts. Both feelings and thoughts have to be evaluated as things that we experience.

This is how it works: our brains interpret signals outside of our bodies. We observe someone's facial expression or tone of voice, and immediately, those signal blow through the memory trees in our brain. (Some neuroscientists call those memory trees the brain's "interpreter.") Those memory trees are going to decide what that expression or tone of voice means. Are we safe or are we in danger? Does that person love us or hate us? Do we like or dislike them?

Whatever that interpreter decides is communicate to the hypothalamus, the armory of the brain. Its job is to equip us to deal with our circumstances, based on what the brain decides. In response, it dumps a bunch of chemicals into our bloodstream, which leads us to react and behave according to whatever our memory trees thought was necessary to survive our immediate reality.

To have agency of mind, then, is to learn how to capture our thoughts. That's critical work. It's also incredibly hard work because 95% of the brain's activity happens in our subconscious. We're not aware of the thoughts behind our behaviors, our feelings, our anxiety, our stress, our depression, our grief, our loneliness.

If we want to do what Paul said and take every thought captive, we have to learn how to use the remaining 5% of our conscious brain to reach into our subconscious and put words to the thoughts that are back there. When we do that, we get to the heart of what's driving our behaviors and feelings and reactions. This allows us to bring them then into our conscious mind and evaluate them. We can actually choosing to accept or reject a thought instead of being directed by our subconscious.

This is very powerful mind work. It's what a healthy mind has the ability to do. And it has nothing to do with your IQ or how long you went to school. It's all about how present you are and what ability you have to identify your thoughts.

A helpful place to start is by looking at common mind traps (what cognitive behavioral therapy calls "cognitive distortions"). In the following weeks I'll introduce a number of them to you. You'll begin to see how you can take your thoughts captive and be transformed by the renewal of your mind. Because you weren't created to be at the mercy of your thoughts.

You are loved.

I am for you.

You've got this.

Jake