From Anxiety to Love: A Radical New Approach for Letting Go of Fear and Finding Lasting Peace

by Corinne Zupko

Overview

Get Ready for Unstoppable Inner Peace

Author Corinne Zupko undertook her study of psychology out of necessity when debilitating anxiety threatened to derail her life. Seeking ways to do more than temporarily alleviate her symptoms, Corinne began to study A Course in Miracles (ACIM), mindfulness meditation, and the latest therapeutic approaches for treating anxiety. In From Anxiety to Love, she shares what she learned and gently guides you through the process, helping you undo anxiety-based thinking and fostering mindful shifts in your thoughts and actions. Whether struggling with everyday stress or near-crippling discomfort, you will find that Corinne’s approach offers a new way of healing from — rather than just coping with — fear and anxiety.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781608685066
Publisher:	New World Library
Publication date:	01/18/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Corinne Zupko, EdS, LPC, has coached, counseled, and educated thousands of individuals at national conferences, in the classroom, in workshops, and in the therapy chair. She teaches weekly meditation classes for corporate clients and cohosts the largest virtual conference of ACIM in the world through the organization Miracle Share International, which she cofounded.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

A New Way of Seeing the World

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Be still, and lay aside all thoughts of what you are and what God is; all concepts you have learned about the world; all images you hold about yourself.

A Course in Miracles, W-pI.189.7:1

We hold many false perceptions in our mind. These false perceptions are purposeful blocks to our peace of mind. Paradoxical though it may seem, we hold on to mistaken ways of seeing because they make us unhappy. We're all addicted, to some degree, to being afraid and miserable. But we're not usually aware of this addiction, and that's what can make the world seem cruel or scary. We think our problems or enemies are "out there" in the world, but in fact they're mostly within our own habitual, unproductive ways of seeing. And they are hard to undo without extraordinary help.

Fortunately, you have an effective way to change your ways of seeing, and that is through your Inner Therapist. What I call the Inner Therapist is also known as the Holy Spirit, your Higher Mind, or your Inner Teacher. You can call it whatever you like. Icapitalize terms like these when I am referring to concepts beyond this world of form. Your Inner Therapist is not separate from or external to you, but it is outside fear.

Our Inner Therapist holds the key to inner peace because it knows what really makes us happy. It is that small, quiet Voice inside that always tells us that we are loved, that we are safe, and that we have done nothing wrong. It does not analyze or judge us: it simply sees our inner light. You won't hear this Voice if you are regretting the past or worrying about the future; your Inner Therapist is always heard in the present moment. The feeling of connection with your Inner Therapist is deeply gratifying and enormously comforting. It engenders pure joy. It is like coming home. But this happy, carefree childhood feeling can be easily drowned out by busyness, worry, and all the distractions of the world. When you learn to stay consistently in touch with your Inner Therapist, however, you can literally be a miracle worker.

My perspective on healing anxiety through the Inner Therapist is chiefly inspired by A Course in Miracles, which is a unique psychospiritual system for changing the way we look at the world. Diving into the Course completely and wholeheartedly was my way out of an internal hell. For me, accepting its radical view of our existence was the key to overcoming chronic anxiety. I needed an explanation of a crazy world that made no sense to me. I needed another way to look at everything, because the way I was seeing constantly frightened me. A Course in Miracles turned everything in my world on its head — and then answered every big question I'd ever had in a completely new way.

Who Are We Really?

You are not who you think you are — and this is glorious news. You are not your fear, your anxiety, or your worry. You may feelthat these things define you, because they are really good at capturing and overpowering your attention. That is their purpose. But the fearful, freaked-out, anxious you is not the true you, despite how compellingly real that fear and anxiety seem. What you really are is way more awesome. I promise.

If, like me, you have struggled with deep anxiety about death, sickness, and suffering, I've got good news for you. What you really are is love, and love only. Your true nature actually exists in an eternal state, a creative state in which you are entirely happy and at peace. You cannot die; you cannot become sick; you exist forever; and you will know yourself even after this body is laid aside. You've probably heard teachings like this before. But we're going to work toward experiencing the truth of these words, for it's the experience of these teachings that provides relief from anxiety.

You have forgotten the eternal love that you are made of because right now you believe you are confined in a body, in a particular time and place. But, in fact, you are a pure, Loving Mind. This Loving Mind exists independently of your ego personality and also of the "mind" generated by your brain. Your reality is actually abstract, not physical. You are not your body. Yes, you do seem to have a body right now, just like you have clothes — but everyone knows that their clothes aren't their real selves. The clothes are just something useful to keep us warm and protected, and perhaps to express our personalities.

The idea of existing beyond your body may be hard to grasp or even imagine at first, because we are literally asleep to it most of the time. We have forgotten our existence in eternity and mistakenly think that the world we see is our home. I've always gained comfort from this Course quote, which helps me begin to understand a world that is very different from the one we see:

Sit quietly and look upon the world you see, and tell yourself: "The real world is not like this. It has no buildings and there are no streets where people walk alone and separate. There are no stores where people buy an endless list of things they do not need. It is not lit with artificial light, and night comes not upon it. There is no day that brightens and grows dim. There is no loss. Nothing is there but shines, and shines forever." (ACIM T13.VII.1:1–6)

So in truth, we're perfectly at peace. We are eternal, united in joy, equally loved and loving; we shine forever.

Does eternal bliss sound good to you? Or does it sound like cosmic oatmeal, bland and boring? I can certainly understand if you're thinking, "Eternal bliss sounds lovely, but too lofty. Get real! I feel anything but peaceful, happy, or loving. And also, I have a cold." Before we can see the world in a new way that promotes peace, we need to explore the nature of this seemingly real, pessimistic, fearful voice in our minds, which we are going to call the ego.

Down the Ego Rabbit Hole

Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end? "I wonder how many miles I've fallen by this time?" she said aloud. "I must be getting somewhere near the centre of the earth. ... I wonder if I shall fall right through the earth! How funny it'll seem to come out among the people that walk with their heads downward!"

Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

The ego is a belief in your mind that you are a body with a personality instead of an eternal being. It is a belief or idea that you are separate from God. The ego turns our perception upside down because it is a thought system that expresses traits that are the opposite of God. If God is eternal life, the ego believes in death. If God is unconditional love, the ego is an expert at judgment and giving love only to those it deems worthy. If God is perfect harmlessness, the ego calls forth pain. If God sees only what is true, the ego sees only what is false.

The ego may seem like a big deal, but it's just a "tiny, mad idea" that we have accepted into our minds (ACIM T-27.VIII.6:2). It's a fearful, false voice that wants to keep us identified with a small sense of self.

Do you ever get a really silly idea that you just can't let go of? Even if you suspect it's all wrong, you might take it seriously for a long time. For example, my family once lived in a rental house that had an inground pool, which was freezing cold. Obsessed with the desire to get his kids swimming, my dad got the idea that he could boil four pots of water at a time on our electric kitchen stove and dump the boiling water into the forty-thousand-gallon pool to raise the temperature. Even at the age of ten, I knew this wouldn't work. But he believed it would, and raced to boil his next batch of water after dumping one batch into the pool. Only after repeated failures to raise the water temperature did he finally look for another way. He discovered solar panels on the roof of the house that could be rigged to warm the pool water.

The ego is a silly thought that we have chosen to take seriously. Believing in it plays a huge role in contributing to anxiety. Until we see how the belief in ego actually causes unhappiness, we won't be inclined to let go of it. In my quest to find freedom from the ego, I sought answers to some big existential questions that had plagued me for years. One big question is, Why did I accept the ego into my mind in the first place? The answer is specialness.

Our Loving Source doesn't know specialness. Everything inLove's eyes is equally special. This means that no one is special — an idea that is almost incomprehensible on this earthly plane, where our specialness is literally equal to our survival.

While we (the Children of God) are really still at home in Love, some of us decide that we want to call the shots, be cooler than the bunch, different from the rest — and we certainly want to write our own script of life, rather than just exist in the perfection that was given to us. Love, being One and only knowing Oneness, cannot give us the specialness we so vehemently desire. You could say that, being children, we have a special case of the "terrible twos": oneness, unity, and infinite love just aren't good enough for us because we want to experience two-ness, also called duality. This duality sounds like our own personal, delightful Disneyland.

So, to get the specialness that Love can't give us, we decide to blow off Love. By turning our back on our Loving Source of Oneness, we believe we can find, maintain, and enhance our specialness. We grab onto our "tiny, mad idea" of specialness and take it so seriously that we end up getting lost in it and can no longer remember being in constant, loving communication with our Source. We are mesmerized by our dream of duality and individuality, but that dream is often a nightmare. This is an error we make not just once but perpetually, as we choose to keep dreaming of a substitute for Oneness. Because this initial choice was not made on a conscious individual level, we have no memory of it. However, we can easily see evidence of our desire for specialness in our lives.

Next, let's look at another of my big questions: How did we end up in this world? The answer here is likely different from anything you've heard (so keep your mind open), but it explains a core source of anxiety: guilt.

When we chose to turn away from Love to claim specialness, that choice had some nasty side effects. Just as a puppy curls its tail between its legs when it perceives it has done something wrong, we feel massive guilt for turning our back on our Loving Source. Right on the heels of this extreme guilt, we become fearful that our Loving Source will get angry and punish us for turning away. This cannot actually happen, because God is Love, and Love only. God is incapable of being anything other than loving. But we accept the idea of guilt into part of our Loving Mind.

Can you think of an example from your childhood where you did something that ended up hurting your parents' feelings? I sure can. When I was thirteen years old, I was once so angry with my mother that I hid in my bedroom closet and didn't answer her calls for over thirty minutes. Frantic to find me, she went outside to check if I was on my dad's boat or had fallen into the river. Asshe stepped onto the boat, she slipped and severely bruised her leg. I felt guilty not only for causing her emotional distress but also for causing her to get physically hurt. I cried for days and never did anything like that again.

If you can connect with my sense of guilt for hurting my mom, imagine increasing this guilt exponentially by thinking that we have deeply hurt God by choosing to turn our backs on our Source and that God is mad at us for it. Sounds like a great reason to be anxious, right? Unconscious guilt from our belief that we have cut ourselves off from God is a huge source of anxiety. But instead of getting caught forever in this unconscious guilt, we can learn to see it differently and allow it to be healed. We'll explore how to do that in part 2 of this book. For now, let's do a simple experiment in seeing differently.

This chapter has explored some new ways of seeing yourself, the fearful voice in your mind (ego), its quest for specialness, and the rise of guilt, and it has touched on the idea that this world may not be our true home. I give you full permission to not buy any of it! But just as you are willing to release your perceptions of yourself, can you also be willing to be open to a new way of seeing the world — not through the ego but through the eyes of our loving Inner Therapist? You don't have to believe a thing I say. Just try out some of the practices and let the results speak for themselves.

Questions for Reflection

1. Have you ever realized that you were stuck in unproductive or mistaken perceptions about yourself? What were the most important ones, and how did life change when you were able to let them go?

2. Have you ever felt that there is something really off about your idea of yourself — that you might have your "self" all wrong?

3. Do you sometimes feel guilty or afraid for no apparent reason?

CHAPTER 2

Awakening from a Not-So-Sweet Dream

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The Bible says that a deep sleep fell upon Adam, and nowhere is there reference to his waking up. The world has not yet experienced any comprehensive reawakening or rebirth.

A Course in Miracles, T-2.I.3:6–7

I have been anxious most of my life. When I was around one year old, my mom went through a trauma and was whisked away for a weeklong stay in the hospital. On her return, I rejected her, angry that she had left me. After we rebonded, she was "blessed" with a child with severe separation anxiety; I screamed at the top of my lungs whenever she left my sight.

Although a lot of my later childhood anxiety was rooted in normal childhood fears — worry that I might lose my parents, shame about being made fun of in school — I also fixated on weird things that I never told anyone about. When I was in kindergarten, I obsessively worried that I was pregnant because I liked a boy. In the second grade, I had a phobia about flushing the toilet because I was afraid it would overflow. Not long after that, I developed a fear of going to restaurants because I was afraid of overeating and then becoming nauseated. I felt panicky if left alone with my grandfather because I was afraid he would die in front of me. In middle school, I thought every belly pain meant I had appendicitis. Because of our family's financial stresses, I also worried intensely that we might lose our house. By the age of twelve, I had an ulcer.

Although I had been to counseling as a child, my mother knew that eventually I would have to come face to face with the terror and fears of loss I carried into adulthood. She wanted any decision about medication to be mine; she understood that she could not fix my problems for me. I needed to find coping tools and answers for myself.

So when I found myself on the bathroom floor that night in college, fearing my own death, I realized I was coming face to face with the terror within. The anxiety was like a leech, sucking any semblance of inner peace out of me, swelling into a monster. I felt powerless to control it, and it seemed that it would never leave me.

About forty million Americans suffer from anxiety disorders. I knew I was among them, but it would be a while before I recognized that membership in this club was a profound existential issue. I was really in a nightmare club that everyone has joined.

How do we wake up from this nightmare of anxiety? First, we have to recognize that it is a nightmare. And I'm speaking literally, not figuratively. One of the most helpful things I've learned from A Course in Miracles is to look at the world as if it is all a dream. This dream is playing out in an unconscious part of our mind, which I call the Child Mind, for we're Children in the Mind of God. Think of it this way: The Mind of God created a Child Mind, which comprises many Children. Although the Child Mind remains at home in the Love of God, part of it has fallen asleep and is dreaming of a world of separate bodies. These sleeping Children are you and me.

If your head is spinning, take a deep breath and keep reading!

Think for a moment about how real your dreams feel when you're sleeping. I used to have a recurring dream of being at college, suddenly realizing I was sitting on a toilet in the middle of the cafeteria with my pants around my ankles, and everyone could see me. I can still recall how mortified I felt, only to wake up and realize with a huge sigh of relief that it was only a dream. It turned out I had been safe in my bed the whole time.

The sleeping part of our Child Mind is still safe in bed. It has not left its home in Love, and it still has the power of God in it. But it chooses to believe in the ego, and thus it dreams a dream of bodies, of a material world of time and space, a realm of separation and of death. These are the "witnesses" of the ego, the evidence it gives you to convince you that this world is your reality (ACIM W-pI.161.10:4). These are also our "waking dreams" (ACIM T-18.II.5:13). According to this perspective, the world we all see is a manifestation, a vivid dream, of a powerful mind that is asleep. Just as our sleeping dreams feel real, so does this waking dream of the world. This is because we have misused the power of God to make ourselves forget that we are the Children of God.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "From Anxiety to Love"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Corinne Zupko.
Excerpted by permission of New World Library.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Part I: The Descent Into Anxiety

Chapter 1: Internal Earthquakes

Chapter 2: Down the Rabbit Hole

Introducing your Inner Therapist

Who am I and why the heck am I here? How the world arose according to the mythology of ACIM

(Not so) Sweet Dreams

Chapter 3: Two Voices, Two Choices

Chapter 4: Mental Illness and Mental Health According to ACIM

Wrong-mindedness and right-mindedness

The function of our Inner Therapist

Where does anxiety come from?

Do you want to heal your anxiety? Or do you just want to fix it?


Part II: The Ascent Into Peace

Chapter 5: Onions, Fear, and the Recipe for Healing

Chapter 6: Peace-Inducing Action Steps

Chapter 7: Peace-Inducing Perception Shifts


Part III: Putting it all Together: Where the Rubber Meets the Road

Chapter 8: Miracles in Action: Stories of Working Through Anxiety

Hypochondria

In the midst of panic

Anxiety based on something that *really* happens

Self-consciousness in social situations

Worrying about another person

Facing fears of medical testing and undoing the fear of sickness

Chapter 9: Peace That is Not Dependent Upon External Circumstances (Conclusion: These are all the same stories)

Appendix A: From Anxiety to Love Meditations
Appendix B: Quick Q&A Guide
Appendix C: ACIM Resources

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Corinne Zupko brings a fresh point of view to understanding how to deal with debilitating anxiety in this exceptional book. The wisdom she has gained through her own experience will be invaluable to anyone struggling with chronic worry, panic attacks, and everything in between. Corinne’s is a wise, humble, trustworthy voice.”
— Amy Torres, author of Sweet Dreams of Awakening

“A brilliantly courageous book! Finally, a spiritual book that isn’t scared to reach into the dark corners of the mind and fill them with hope and love. Corinne Zupko tells the story candidly yet never digresses from a message of hope. I am a huge fan.”
— Sean Patrick, MSc, BPS, founder of That Guy’s House and author of That Guy Who Loves the Universe

“From Anxiety to Love is not just about managing symptoms of anxiety. It is about undoing anxiety at its source. In a world that needs more love, it is essential that we free our minds of fear as quickly as possible so we can extend love to others. This book will help you do exactly that.”
— Jordan Bach, life coach

“Corinne Zupko exposes humanity’s single greatest addiction — fear. But unlike most Band-Aid remedies prescribed for this epidemic, she reveals the rarely recognized source of all fear so it can finally be seen and healed. From Anxiety to Love skillfully demystifies anxiety. It offers a wealth of practical lessons, insights, and exercises that guide us out of the debilitating darkness of self-doubt and into the radiant light of self-love.”
— Nouk Sanchez, author of The End of Death

“I’m so thrilled A Course in Miracles has transformed Corinne Zupko’s anxiety into deep inner peace — and I’m equally thrilled she’s sharing this extraordinary path with you.”
— Emily Bennington, author of Miracles at Work

“Corinne Zupko has written an important book. Her words are gentle yet powerful and will help so many people, including me!”
— Katie Dalebout, author of Let It Out and host of the Let It Out podcast

“Profoundly insightful, Corrine Zupko’s book will help you heal anxiety and other stressors by learning new ways of perceiving yourself and the world. I highly recommend this book for anyone who sincerely wants to walk the healing path of awakening to their true nature as Spirit.”
— Cindy Lora-Renard, spiritual counselor and author of A Course in Health and Well-Being

“With her wonderful book, Corinne Zupko gives us a masterly outline of the best way to dissolve fear from our lives and allow into our awareness the glowing love it was hiding.”
— Gary Renard, bestselling author of The Disappearance of the Universe

“From Anxiety to Love is a well-written, easy, and thoroughly enjoyable read. Corinne Zupko has a clear, deep understanding of the teachings of A Course in Miracles. The Course is all about being responsible, facing our fears, realizing their nonreality, and remembering God’s Love. Corinne’s book is a demonstration of how that can be done.”
— Jon Mundy, PhD, author of Living A Course in Miracles and publisher of Miracles magazine

“A fresh, clean, clear, insightful, and astute journey to the heart of A Course in Miracles. Corinne Zupko’s sincere sharing of her experiences is compelling, perfectly mapping for all of us the all-important journey from fear to love. Corinne is a masterful teacher!”
— Alan Cohen, author of A Course in Miracles Made Easy

“Corinne Zupko’s beautiful book offers a clear and direct pathway through the complex issues of anxiety disorders. She intertwines her own personal experiences with her path to healing through the practical application of A Course in Miracles. Make contact with your Inner Therapist with Corinne’s loving help.”
— David Hoffmeister, author of Unwind Your Mind Back to God

“I absolutely love this book. Corinne Zupko’s story of healing and transformation is a powerful reminder of your natural ability to let go of limiting negative emotions and remember the truth of who you really are.”
— Lisa Natoli, bestselling author of Gorgeous for God