00:00 

Hey, welcome to Intentional Living with Tanya Hale. This is episode number 58, "The Brain and the Mind." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:21 

Well, hello, my friends. So nice to be with you today. Thanks for joining me. I appreciate you taking the time out of your busy and amazing lives to spend a few minutes here. I hope that what I have to show with you today is going to help inspire you and guide you and direct you in a way that you can create more of the life that you want to create in your life. I hope that the ideas I've prepared will help to enlighten your mind and help you see a better way to move forward and a better way to create the kind of life that you want to create. This is an idea that has kind of been percolating for a bit and I actually heard a comment in church yesterday that just kind of put all the pieces together for me of what's been going on and what I've been thinking. So I decided this morning to sit down and to write this idea out into a podcast and to share it with you today. 

01:12 

So we're going to be talking today about the brain and the mind. Okay, we're going to be talking about the difference between these two because many of us may not have had put much thought into this idea. But understanding the difference between these two things I think can be huge in understanding how we really grow and progress. So many of us have the belief that we're sent here to earth from a pre-earth life for the purpose of learning and growing. We are to learn to make choices based on faith in God's Plan of Salvation and we're here to get a physical body and to learn how to manage this body, to learn how to manage the human appetites and desires that come with this body. The underlying concept here is that we have a spirit, a spirit body if you will, that comes to earth from the presence of God and inhabits a physical body. 

02:03 

So our purpose is to marry up these two bodies, the spiritual and the physical, and to bring them into harmony with each other. So part of what makes this union so tricky is that our physical body has some pretty strong desires and really just wants to settle into comfort and safety. But our spirit body, the real us, the thing that makes us a living, breathing person, has a drive and a desire to grow and to develop. But as our spirit body learns over the years to manage the physical appetites and desires of our physical body, it grows stronger. I believe it grows stronger in its understanding of why we have been sent here to earth. I believe it grows stronger in character and in its ability to understand right from wrong. And I believe it grows stronger in its understanding of how to return to Heavenly Father. But this process of the spirit body learning to commune with the physical body is a lifelong journey of growth and development. 

03:04 

And I know for me, for most of my life, I have thought about this process as just learning to curb my physical appetites like hunger or sleep or sexual urges, reading the scriptures instead of just watching TV, having a focused, intense prayer rather than something where my brain just goes off, right? But as I've really started to dig into this work that I do of helping myself and helping others to really manage their lives in the way they best see fit, I've started understanding something that I hadn't really grasped hold of before. I was aware that our brains are part of our bodies, but I always kind of thought that our brains were more part of our spirit body because this is where the thinking occurs. But over the last few weeks or so, I've come to really lay hold on a very different concept. 

03:53 

There's this part of our brain that we refer to as our primitive brain. If you recall from previous podcasts, this part of our brain really kind of runs everything. Our primitive brain loves to put things on autopilot and then just sit back and relax. And this primitive part of our brain is always seeking to put us in the best situation that it knows how. But this is the thing about this primitive brain: they can't look to the future to problem solve. All it can do is look to the past for answers to our current problems. It can only do what it already knows. Our primitive brain is part of our human body. And just like our heart has a  specific responsibility to pump blood through our entire body, so does our brain. And that is to keep us alive in the best way that it knows how. 

04:42 

So being part of our human body, our brain then is something that our spirit body needs to learn how to manage. Because our mind and our physical brain are two different things. The brain is part of our physical body, the mind is our spirit body, and it takes a lot of work for this to happen because our primitive brain, only going off at what already knows, can be a pretty amazing and also a pretty dangerous place. So again, our primitive brain puts things into auto mode, which we're very very thankful for. For example, remember when you first learned how to have a car and how exhausting it was? You had to think about every movement from the turning on your blinkers to what to do with the clutch, like how slowly or quickly to let out or push in the clutch. How hard do I push on the gas or the brake pedal? Constantly having to check the mirrors, being aware of other cars, being aware of the distance. Every action in the driver's seat required conscious thought, and it was exhausting. But now, because we've created these thought paths in our brain, because we've done this for so many years, the primitive brain has turned all of these actions into habits, into things we can do without a second thought. It requires very little mental energy for us to drive a car, because our brain has turned it into a habit. 

06:07 

Now, I know that when I went to England, where they drive on the left side of the road, as opposed to the United States, where I live, where we drive on the right, I was a pretty dangerous driver, because so many things were switched backwards, and it required constant energy to be doing what I needed to be doing the right way. At one point, we took a wrong turn, and I needed to do a U-turn, and my primitive brain just took over. And so I'm driving on the left side of the road, I swerve over to the right side of the road, turn left to do a U -turn, and so then I'm coming into oncoming traffic. And it terrified me, not to mention everybody else in the car. But my primitive brain was thinking, "do a U-turn, do a -turn," and the only connection I had had with U-turns was from the right side of the road. And so I just, without even thinking about it, swerved to the right, flipped a U-turn into oncoming traffic. Now, luckily I didn't cause an accident, but this is a great example of how our primitive brain just habitualizes everything we do, right? I couldn't even, in that quick of a time span, wrap my head around doing a U-turn from the left side of the road, turning right, okay? 

07:21 

So the other thing this part of our brain does is it puts forth ideas. So this challenging part is that the ideas from this part of the brain only come from the past. If a communication problem has responded to in the past by giving the silent treatment, that is what our primitive brain will put forth as a solution to the problem. It tells us to give the silent treatment, and that's what it knows. And this primitive brain can only offer what it knows. It can't come up with new ideas or create new ideas. So if you grew up being told or telling yourself that you were stupid or incompetent or incapable and that you were and always would be a failure, that is what your primitive brain has to work with. That is where it draws its solutions to problems from. This is our physical brain, part of our physical body that our spirit body needs to learn how to manage. Our spirit or our mind needs to learn to separate out its thoughts and desires from the thoughts and desires of our physical brain. 

08:27 

So our physical brain is doing what God created it to do, keep our body alive. And it does that by conserving energy, knowing when it's time to eat or sleep, protecting us from what it perceives as danger. But the thing is our physical brain doesn't have the reasoning power to always know how to really do those things. Our physical brain will want to conserve energy thinking that sitting in front of the TV for five hours binge watching our favorite TV show is going to be helpful. Our physical brain just understands that it's not moving and therefore it's conserving energy. But our spirit or our mind can see into the future and it understands that we also need to create energy and we do that by engaging in activities that help us to grow and develop by getting involved with something we're passionate about. Right? Our spirit or our mind understands that sitting for five hours can actually drain more energy than it is conserving. Our physical brain may feel that sleeping is so good but too much sleep as our mind or our spirit understands can be as detrimental as too little sleep. 

09:35 

The same with food. Our primitive brain knows that food is necessary for our survival, but our mind can understand in a way that our brain often can't that too much food is dangerous for our survival. And what about danger? Our physical brain perceives many things as dangerous because of past experiences. If we were to go back 5,000 years our primitive brains were wired to be afraid of lions and encountering one in the wilderness when we were out hunting could have been dangerous to our actual existence. And so our brain would have told us to avoid or defend to run like crazy to get out of there, right? Our brains are still hardwired for this kind of protection. Also 5,000 years ago just not being part of the community would have put us in grave mortal danger. We needed other people around just for our survival. So this part of our brain is still connected to those ideas and it really seeks to protect us. 

10:34 

But since most of us are not encountering lions when we're going grocery shopping for our food our brain is looking for other things that have caused us to feel some fear or danger in the past and it wants to protect us. So if somewhere along our life path we have told our brain that we don't like change or that change scares us, then our brain is going to see situations of change as a danger to our existence and it will put all sorts of thoughts forward in an attempt to protect us from the danger of change. Our brain will tell us it's not a good idea. All sorts of what-if scenarios will start popping up and these thoughts will start causing feelings of fear. Remember those thoughts create the feelings. When we want to try something new, whether it be a new activity or taking a class or anything we haven't done before, our primitive brain will seek to protect us from uncomfortable feelings that it perceives as danger and to support that idea so that we'll do what it says it will draw from our past ideas to seek to protect us from this danger. 

11:34 

Our brain will start saying things like "you're really not smart enough to take that class" or "you don't know what you're doing" or "maybe they might think you're stupid if you say that." And these thoughts create a feeling of fear, but it's all perceived fear based on our thoughts from our primitive brain. And when real danger presents itself, our primitive brain is amazing. If we're in a parking lot late at night and we see some scary people heading toward us, our brain will tell us to go somewhere else, to run or to scream, and we're so thankful for that. 

12:05 

But our primitive brain can't always distinguish between real and perceived danger, so it will create more intense feelings of danger when there really isn't any danger. It will take a situation where in the past we may have had an uncomfortable feeling, maybe nervous or scared or intimidated, and it will tell us that we're in danger and that we need to move away from that situation. But these perceived danger situations are the ones where our mind or our spiritual body needs to learn how to manage our physical brain. This is where it is so important that we learn to override those impulse thoughts that our brain puts out. We do this by intentionally thinking different, more positive thoughts with our mind. 

12:54 

And this brings us back to the part of our purpose for being here on the earth, okay, to have a physical body and to learn how to manage the desires, the passions, the impulses of our brain and our body, right? So because our body is part of our brain. So when our mind can start learning to be aware of what our brain is thinking and doing, our mind can start making decisions regarding what the brain is thinking. Our mind can recognize destructive thoughts or demeaning thoughts. And when our mind can choose to insert another thought that will exert control over the brain and move us to where our spirit knows we need to be. Having our spirit learn to take control of our physical body also has to do with learning to control the rampant thoughts of our brain, learning to recognize thoughts as just that...they're thoughts. Thoughts that may or may not be true or helpful for the particular situation. 

13:51 

And the estimates are all over the place, but the most accepted is probably 60 to 8 ,000 thoughts a day. Obviously not all of those are conscious thoughts, but our brain is constantly putting forth ideas. And I know that you've had experiences where your brain puts something out there and you're just like, "what? What is that?" I'll be in a store and I'll have a thought like, "you know, you could just take that and stick it in your pocket." And and my mind says, "what the heck is that? I would never do that," right? But my brain is just constantly putting all kinds of thoughts out there. So many of these thoughts that our brain puts out may have worked when we were 18, but they aren't serving us now that we're a 50 year old woman. 

14:35 

Through practice and desire, our mind will learn to be more aware of thoughts that are aren't moving us in the direction we really want to go. And over time, with consistent practice, we can learn to separate our brain's thoughts from our mind's thoughts. Our brain is always just recycling old thoughts and seeking to protect us the best way it knows how. Our mind though, is wanting us to move to greater heights, to tap into our potential, to grow into a stronger and a more capable person. Our mind sees possibilities. Our mind creates. Our mind seeks growth. Our brain just wants what it's always had. So if we really want to tap into our potential and grow into the person God created us to be, it is imperative that we learn to start using our mind to think and not just relying upon our brain. 

15:29 

The brain is part of this mortal physical body that we need to learn to manage with our spirit or our mind. The brain is acting on impulse, on a natural instinct to do what it was created to do: keep us alive, protect us from danger and conserve energy, right? But our mind or our spirit can move beyond these basic impulses into a far greater existence for us here on earth. And over time, the new thoughts that our mind creates and implements into our lives become the past thoughts that our brain starts to recycle and bring forward as solutions to our problems. And then we find that our brain is aligning with our mind to create what we ultimately want to create in life. When our mind can start managing our brain, we can really begin to grow and develop into our God-given potential. 

16:23 

Okay, isn't growing up amazing? This thought has just kind of blown my mind a little bit this last couple of weeks. And I love that yesterday the piece just all kind of came together for me with the comment that I heard somebody make in Sunday school. And so I love it. It's great to start putting pieces together and start making, for me, a separation between the brain, which is part of my physical body that I need to learn to manage, and my mind, which is part of my spiritual body, which is part of the intelligence behind learning to manage that physical body. So there we go, that's what I've got for you today. 

17:02 

Alright, if you would love some personal help from me, get on my website. I have taken off the calendar, so what I'm just gonna have you do now, if you need to get in touch with me, there's just a "contact me" button, just write me a quick email. I just found that a lot of the times that I would put up were not working for those of you who were trying to find a time to work with me. So just contact me and we will work something out between us, where we can have a Zoom call and have a free consult to talk about life coaching and how it can help you to move forward. 

17:31 

Also, thanks for listening to the podcast. If it's helping you, it will help somebody else. Go ahead and share it if you will, please. I would love that. And hopefully the person that you share it with will listen and will love it as well. Alright, my friends, you have an awesome day. Enjoy, and I hope I've given you some food for thought today. Talk to you next time, bye. 

17:52 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya.