Read an Excerpt
Introduction
If you have ever had a panic attack, you know how hard the feeling is to describe to someone who has never had one. It is pure inner hell. On the high end of the anxiety spectrum, where I spent a large part of my life, are panic attacks, debilitating fear, and free-floating anxiety. On the low end of the spectrum are the normal fears and anxieties that occasionally visit all of us. This book is about how to work with your anxiety, regardless of where it falls along this spectrum.
My anxiety journey was one of the worst, most terrifying experiences of my life. Yet once I allowed it to become my greatest teacher, it also became one of the best. My anxiety brought me to greater inner peace than I ever thought I could experience, and for that, I’m incredibly grateful. I hope this book will help you be grateful for your anxiety, too, because anxiety is a call to awakening and can start you on a pathway toward love and inner peace.
Every experience you have can serve one of two purposes — and you get to choose which. It can help you awaken to the peace that is already in you, or it can help you stay unaware of this peace. In this world, we are conditioned to choose the latter. This book will help you choose to wake up to peace.
In these pages, I describe the process I used to work myself out of terror and into an anxiety-free life. And by working that process, I’m now doing things I never thought I would be capable of: taking plane trips fearlessly, and without medications, by myself; speaking confidently in front of large audiences; traveling into New York City by myself without feeling completely overwhelmed; sleeping like a baby instead of having horrible insomnia; and awakening without early-morning anxiety. If I can experience such radical changes in my life, so can you.
The spiritual practice that helped me out of anxiety is called A Course in Miracles. The Course is a system of loosening our fixed, fearful perceptions so we can rediscover the peace that is already within us. At first you may find this new system of thought hard to follow, but don’t worry about it. If the Course is your path to healing, it will gradually begin to make sense as you become willing to understand it. You do not have to believe in it, but if you test its concepts, the results will speak for themselves. My approach in this book is just one way of exploring the deep teachings of the Course and is based on my interpretation and experience of its principles. I hope it will help you learn to listen directly to your Inner Therapist, which is the part of your mind that helps you to heal. For consistency, I use the term Inner Therapist throughout this book, but feel free to call it whatever you’d like: Inner Teacher, Inner Guide, Holy Spirit, and Higher Mind are common ways of referring to the part of your mind that recognizes your eternal reality.
Together we’ll discover new ways to look at the world and practical strategies to restore your awareness of peace. In part 1, we explore our collective descent into anxiety. In part 2, we work through the healing steps and perception shifts that can help us ascend out of anxiety. In part 3, we put it all together and examine practical techniques for dealing with the many ways that anxiety shows up in life.
In this book I talk about God. We have a lot of baggage attached to this word, because human beings have used God to justify many unloving and atrocious acts. When I use the word God, please know that I am not referring to a dude with a white beard who sits upstairs and orchestrates things down here. God has no gender. I am referring to an all-encompassing Divine Love that is only loving and is incapable of causing pain. It is part of us and not outside ourselves. I also refer to it as our Source, Oneness, and Love. These words are capitalized as a reminder that I am referring to God. I also capitalize additional terms when I am referring to concepts beyond this world of form.
In addition, miracles aren’t big, magical events; rather, they can occur at any moment in the day if we allow them to. Miracles can be defined in two different but interrelated ways. According to A Course in Miracles, “miracles are expressions of love” (ACIM T-1.I.35); but they are also shifts in perception. This book emphasizes the latter definition, because when we are caught in fear, we must learn to shift our perception. These shifts were essential to me in finding relief from debilitating anxiety. This new definition of miracles may seem less exciting, but there is nothing more satisfying than coming to recognize your eternal nature, which cannot change, grow old, or experience anxiety.
If you use this book with an open mind and adopt an attitude of “I don’t know” rather than clinging to what you think you already know, you will create space for new insights to come to you. Willingness to learn new ideas is key, and any voice that tells you you’ll never succeed is not your real voice. And if this message resonates with you, I highly recommend getting a copy of A Course in Miracles and diving in. It’s a life-changing pathway that continues to deepen my awareness of peace in ways I could not previously comprehend.
Inner peace is not an event: it’s a process. It’s not something we attain once and keep forever, but rather an experience that continues to deepen to the degree to which you’re willing to get out of the way and allow peace to move through you. I promise that you are worth the effort. I’m imagining that we ’re holding hands in our shared commitment to undoing anxiety. Let’s do this.
