Chapter 1—Neuroscience: A Window into the Mind
1. Describe a time when you, like Cara, wondered why disciplines like prayer and Scripture reading seemed so ineffectual in making you the person you long to become.
2. In what ways have you considered how your mind is working and the effects of your feelings and thoughts—either positive or negative—on your life?
3. What do you think of the author’s invitation to, as you read this book, trust in the impressions, feelings, and sensations that your mind is communicating to you?

Chapter 2—As We Are Known
1. Take some time to reflect on how much you depend on knowing things. Now compare this to your experience of being known. Can you identify anyone with whom you have had this experience? To what degree would you say that, as you were growing up, you had the experience of being known by your parents? Explain.
2. Consider sharing your thoughts about question 1 with a trusted friend and then asking him or her to do the same with you. Sharing your stories is a way in and of itself of being known. When you’re finished, notice what you begin to feel and think that is perhaps different from how you were feeling before you shared your story with your friend. How would you describe the differences?

Chapter 3—Love the Lord Your God with All Your . . . Mind
1. Which of the elements of the mind that we have just explored were novel to you? What insights surprised you?
2. What attributes of the mind would you say represent your strengths (such as, awareness of nonverbal cues, logical thinking, etc.)? Which ones do you find more challenging to be aware of or to employ?
3. In what ways are your relationships either helped or hindered by the relative strengths or weaknesses of the various aspects of your mind/brain matrix?

Chapter 4—Are You Paying Attention?
1. How well do you pay attention to what you are paying attention to? Dan Siegel has suggested that it is important to pay attention to our intention, or what we are intending to do. How well do you do that?
2. For one day keep a pencil and pad of paper handy and monitor what you are paying attention to. Every hour or so, simply jot down what you have been paying attention to over the last hour. At the end of the day, review the course your mind has taken. Have you been paying attention to those things that promote within you, and between you and others, the qualities you long to emerge in your life? Has your attention been more or less likely to facilitate the growth of love, joy, peace, courage, kindness, and gentleness?

Chapter 5—Remembering the Future
Now that you have considered the importance of memory in your life, you may have many questions:

How can I become more aware of my implicit memory, especially if it is mostly unconscious?
Is there any way I can begin to remember more of my childhood?
How can I begin to have a different remembrance of God if my memories keep getting in the way?
If I know I have helped create some hurtful memories for my children, is there any way to change them?
How can I tell my story in a way that changes my memory?

These may be only a smattering of the questions you may be asking. To help you answer them, reflect on some of the following questions.
1. How well do you remember the story of your life?
2. Are there stages of your life that you do not recall as easily as others do?
3. To whom do you regularly tell the story of your life, not just the facts, but also what you felt during those events and what you think they mean?
4. How easily do you sense (that is, experience, not merely as a fact, but as a felt reality) that God remembers you? Can you describe that sensation to someone?
5. In what ways do you, like Elijah, experience moments in which your implicit memory tends to overtake your explicit memory?
If you haven’t completed the exercise “Writing Your Autobiography” on pages 79–80, now might be a good time to consider doing so.

Chapter 6—Emotion: The Experience of God
1. What emotion is evoked in you when you are with someone you are close to? This question is not seeking what you think, or what your analysis is, but rather your emotion, so consider words such as delighted, peaceful, anxious, distressed, nervous, irritable, happy, sad, etc.
2. What is your level of awareness of what you sense in your body when you experience emotion?
3. On a regular basis, what do you feel God feeling?
4. Do you easily have the experience of “feeling felt”?
5. What is your level of awareness of the “contingency” of your emotional states upon others?
6. How does telling your story begin to change the way you experience the emotion of it?

Chapter 7—Attachment: The Connections of Life
Here we return to the handwritten autobiography that we explored in chapter 5. It can also serve as a vehicle for better understanding your attachment. After reviewing it, consider the following questions.
1. What was it like growing up in your family? Who was present in your home?
2. What was your relationship like with each of your primary caregivers? How was your relationship with each of them similar or different? Do you have a general idea of what your attachment pattern may be in respect to each of them?
3. How did people in your family or home approach emotion? Did you talk about what you felt, not just what you “thought”? Did either or both of your parents seem genuinely interested in your emotional states?
4. If you had siblings, did you ever sense that either of your parents behaved differently toward them than they did toward you?
5. In what manner did your parents apply discipline in your home? When there was conflict, did family members talk directly about it, or did they find ways to avoid it?

6. How is the way you remember (or what you remember) and how you experience emotion connected to your particular pattern of attachment?
7. If you do not recall much of your early history, is there someone who would have known you well enough to inform you of your early years? Consider asking that person to tell you what he or she remembers of your life.
8. Is it difficult to make sense of what you have written? Do you gather a deep sense of well-being or increased discomfort when you recount what your narrative reveals?
9. Was there anyone else in your life, such as a teacher, coach, youth group leader, or friend’s parent, who created within you the sense that you were cared for and important?
10. How is your attachment pattern reflected in how you relate to God? Or, how does the way you relate to God and the stories of Scripture reveal something to you about your attachment?
11. How do you mentalize God, and how do you imagine him mentalizing you?

Chapter 8—Earned Secure Attachment: Pointing to the New Creation
1. Can you recall a time when someone listened to your story with such interest and compassion that you were able to see your experience in a different light? Explain.
2. How does Romans 12:2 (see page 138) speak to the issue of earned secure attachment?
3. Describe your reaction to the author’s suggestion that the way we approach and react to God’s story as told in the Bible is itself affected by our own stories.
4. What clues do we find in David’s psalms that suggest he felt known by God?

Chapter 9—The Prefrontal Cortex and the Mind of Christ
1. Reflect on the features of an integrated life (FACES): flexible, adaptive, coherent, energized, and stable. Consider the ways you might do what is necessary to deepen the presence of these characteristics in your life. Take some time to reflect on how your early relationships and attachment posture have enhanced or limited the development of these qualities in your life. How do your present relationships do the same?
2. Identify a recent time in which you found yourself on the low road. Reflect on the trigger(s), the transition, the level of immersion in which you found yourself, and the recovery from that episode.
3. How was this journey onto the low road a response to implicit memory and primary emotion, not simply a response to the circumstances of the present moment?
4. Consider the effect that meditating on the words found in Luke 3:22 (“You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased”) could have on this kind of event.
5. Review the nine functions of the middle prefrontal cortex on pages 161–162. Which of these do you consciously engage well? Which are challenges for you?
6. Reflect on how often you ask questions, and how you ask them. Where might you ask who, what, where, when, and how, instead of why?
7. Which of the spiritual disciplines might you be willing to undertake, even in a small way to facilitate the emergence of the mind of Christ within you? Consider doing this also with a group of people who can support each other’s efforts.

Chapter 10—Neuroscience: Sin and Redemption
1. Reflect for a moment on how ruptures occurred in your family growing up. What usually triggered them? Did your parents demonstrate the ability to repair them? If so, how? If not, what did you do to cope with an unrepaired rupture?
2. How quickly do you become aware of ruptures when they occur? What are the internal or external signals that alert you to a rupture?
3. What is your general response to ruptures in their various forms (oscillating disengagement; benign ruptures; limit setting; toxic ruptures)? What emotions emerge in you? What do you notice physically? What thoughts go through your mind?
4. How do your responses to ruptures affect your intimate relationships?
5. To what degree are you aware of the role that shame plays in your life? What triggers activate shame in your mind/body matrix? What do you typically do to address the problem of shame?
6. What aspects of repair do you find to be challenging?
7. If you have children, in what ways do ruptures most often occur in your relationships? How do you engage in the process of repair with them?

Chapter 11—The Rupture of Sin
1. Describe a time when you viewed God from a distorted perspective and either (a) created God in your own image through the lens of your attachment pattern; (b) formed your own god out of a coping mechanism; or (c) went ahead and did what you pleased.
2. In what ways do doubt and fear play a role in your story?
3. Think of a time when you were overcome with distress, anxiety, and fear. How did that affect your emotional state? How did these feelings affect your perception of God and your memory of his past dealings with you?
4. In what area of life might God be asking you, “Where are you?”

Chapter 12—The Repair of Resurrection
1. In what ways did Jesus experience rupture? What does his response to these breaches have to teach us?
2. How did Jesus mend the rupture between himself and Peter?
3. Explain the connection between Hebb’s axiom (neurons that fire together wire together) and confession.
4. Why is it important to confess, not only to God, but to other people?

Chapter 13—The Mind and Community: The Brain and Love, Mercy, and Justice
1. Think of one of your most important relationships. How do the characteristics of a complex system (see list on pages 237–238) apply to that relationship?
2. How does your church body (or the Christian church as a whole) act in ways that seem mindful? mindless?
3. Explain why a mind that is flexible, adaptive, coherent, energized, and stable seeks to advance mercy and justice.
4. As you conclude this book, what discoveries from neuroscience and attachment research would you say have impacted your reading of Scripture?
5. If you are discussing this book in a group setting, how might you continue to encourage one another in your pursuit of living in a mindful, integrated way?