13: How Stress Can Help You Heal

This is From Anxiety to Love Radio,

The show about undoing anxiety through a course in miracles and other pathways of love.

Gain insights and tools to deepen your awareness of the peace that already exists within you.

I'm your host Corinne Zupko,

Author of the award-winning and best-selling book From Anxiety to Love.

Hey friends,

Welcome to this episode of From Anxiety to Love Radio.

I have a solo episode for you today,

So it's just me.

I have probably presented a thousand workshops about today's topic,

But I'm going to approach it from a totally different angle today,

And our topic is stress.

Now to be completely honest with you,

What inspired this podcast on this topic is that not too long ago I was under some super intense stress because we were actually undergoing professional mold remediation in our home.

We had a mold problem in our basement.

And to me,

The experience of stress and anxiety are very different.

Anxiety to me is more like stress completely spiraled out of control.

And what I was feeling wasn't anxiety,

But it was more along the lines of feeling overwhelmed to the thousandth degree.

Can intense stress spill over into the realm of anxiety for some people?

Absolutely.

So this was a signal to me that I needed to get to work.

Feeling that level of stress was a signal to me that I was misperceiving.

So I knew I needed that big shift.

I knew that something had to change within my perception because I was allowing those external circumstances to completely dictate what was happening in my mind.

I want to emphasize that point again.

If you're feeling stressed or anxious or whatever feeling that's associated with a lack of peace,

It's a sign that you're misperceiving.

So in other words,

You're not perceiving with spirit's vision.

You're perceiving through the ego's eyes because spirit would only see the truth.

Spirit would only look straight past what's false to the truth beyond it,

Which is always love and joy and peace.

So let me list out my stressors for a moment because I want to paint a picture as to how intense this was.

First of all,

There was the cost of the mold remediation,

Which was not cheap.

We had to empty the contents of our entire basement.

Every single thing had to come out.

It had to be cleaned and wiped down to get any mold spores off.

The third thing was that we had planned to move everything into a storage pod,

Like those pods that almost look like the back of a truck,

But our town wouldn't let us get one because the town's rule was that it had to go in our driveway,

But our driveway is too narrow and the company didn't have enough clearance to actually put the pod in the driveway.

So we could have gotten into a fight with the town,

But rather than do that,

We just sort of gave up and were like,

Okay,

There's got to be another way.

And the answer that came forward was to get a tent,

Literally a huge tent that my husband and I had to assemble in our backyard in November.

And it can snow in New Jersey in November.

There's no guarantees about weather.

So we moved all of our belongings into this tent.

I was petrified that the tent was going to blow away or rip and everything would get wet and even more moldy.

And then there was the remediation process itself.

We had a lot of noise for a few days,

Those lovely chemical smelling odors,

Not feeling home in my own house and feeling completely displaced.

I was trying to stay out of the house as much as possible,

So I moved into my car pretty much and the biggest sort of icing on the cake though was that the workers knocked out our internet and our service provider couldn't get to my house for three whole days to fix it.

So I literally couldn't do anything that I even wanted to do from my car in terms of work.

It was just intensely stressful.

Now,

Even if you haven't had to deal with something like this,

I know that you know the level of stress that I'm talking about,

Right?

You feel out of control,

Not grounded.

You feel like you can't get grounded and it feels like your peace of mind is just completely dependent on your external circumstances.

And it's that feeling of feeling knocked off center to the point where it feels like things must settle down before you can change your mind.

But here's the thing,

Sometimes those things just don't settle down.

The stressors feel relentless and never ending.

Maybe the stressor is that you're caring for somebody with an illness or maybe there's an ongoing stressor at work.

So ultimately we're working to change our minds and to know the truth of unshakable love and peace regardless of what is happening in external circumstances,

Regardless of whether or not that stressor lets up.

So I'd like to start to look at this topic from a course perspective and I have a quote that I'm really excited to share with you.

There's a paragraph in A Course in Miracles that has helped me so much and you're going to hear about two terms that I want to explore together.

Those terms are self-esteem and stress.

So here's the quote from A Course in Miracles and by the way,

I will put this quote and the page references in the show notes,

Which you can get at fromanxietytolove.

Com forward slash episode 13.

So here's the quote.

Self-esteem in ego terms means nothing more than that the ego has deluded itself into accepting its reality and is therefore temporarily less predatory.

This self-esteem is always vulnerable to stress,

A term which really means that a condition has arisen in which the delusion of the ego's reality is threatened.

Okay,

So let's start by looking at the term self-esteem.

The whole self-help movement,

If you think about the self-help movement in general,

It's really about improving one's small self,

Not so much undoing it.

It's about developing self-esteem,

Feeling good about yourself and perhaps there's a place for that in our development.

We need to be kind to ourselves and be caring toward ourselves otherwise the ego is running the show.

But the self,

That self-help and self-esteem are addressing is the small s self,

The lower case s self as I refer to in my book.

That small s self,

The lower case s self is not who you are.

It's that small s self that experiences fear,

Anxiety,

Stress.

It's our choice to identify with this small s self,

To identify with Corinne,

To identify with,

Insert your name.

And the world is here to utterly convince you that you are in fact that small s self.

It's here to convince you that that's who you are and that's all you are.

Now as this quote says from the course and I'm paraphrasing here,

It says self-esteem in ego terms is simply a trick where you're fully identified with your small s self and you accept it as your identity.

So your ego calms down because it's happy that you're identified with it.

This is interesting right?

So if you,

Whether you consider yourself to have high or low self-esteem,

That kind of self-esteem is still in the realm of the ego.

And my main point is that we can go beyond this.

Regardless of whether you have high or low,

Lower case s self-esteem,

You can come to know your capital s self and develop rock solid capital s self-esteem that is not vulnerable to stress.

And this is knowing our true self,

That you're not a body,

That you're something very real and way more awesome than how you perceive yourself now.

Now I want to revisit this quote and look at the term stress.

The quote says,

This self-esteem is always vulnerable to stress,

A term which really means that a condition has arisen in which the delusion of the ego s reality is threatened.

This is profound,

Isn't it?

So all stress,

No matter what the form it takes,

Is merely a condition in which the ego s sense of reality is threatened.

So anytime you experience stress,

You're touching upon the sense of reality of that small self being shaken up.

And that's exactly what happened for me in the example that I shared.

A condition arose in my mind.

I identified myself as Corinne,

As I do when I wake up every morning.

And a condition showed up in form,

Which was multiple water leaks in our basement that we didn't know about,

Which led to the mold growth.

And that mold,

Those tiny little spores,

Threatened the quote unquote safety of our ego identities because there was a seeming health risk with breathing in the mold.

And I had no quote unquote home to go to for a quiet place for a number of days because everything was in disarray.

So my internal sense of groundedness fell inextricably tied to that external form.

So right there is my ego's sense of reality being threatened.

And this is a blessing to be able to see this clearly.

So I want you to think right now about your current state.

What do you currently feel stressed out about?

And go ahead and name a few things out loud.

Name what it is that you're feeling stressed out about.

And now tell yourself,

I'm stressed out about this simply because my ego is being threatened.

Now we're not going to stop there.

Knowing this is great,

But we can use this as a doorway out of fear.

So reality,

Truth,

Heaven,

God,

Love,

Cannot be threatened at all.

What you are,

Who you are,

Cannot be threatened at all.

So if you're experiencing stress,

It's part of the dream.

I do want to pause here for a moment because there's always that risk of bypassing.

So we're not,

This doesn't mean that we're denying our feelings or suppressing anything.

Let yourself feel whatever it is that's coming up.

But this work does mean that we have an opportunity to bring our minds back to the truth.

The stress or the anxiety or the panic is a red flag that it's time to get to work.

You've strayed into thinking that you're a separate self and you're fully identified with that.

And that's not true.

That's not who you are.

So when you experience stress or unease in any form,

You have a grand opportunity to actually sense your own identification with the ego.

You can actually feel how you feel knocked off center by what's happening,

Right?

So right there at that moment is your chance to own your small S self identification.

And now that you can see that clearly,

You can bring it to spirit within.

You can say to spirit,

I see that I am identifying with the small self and I'm handing it over and I'll have some steps for you in just a moment because you know how I love steps and recaps and takeaways and all that.

So the ego then is using that stressful situation to convince you that you are separate from your source.

However,

Spirit,

The Holy Spirit will repurpose that same stressful situation to show you that you are not separate from your source or from your brothers.

But the thing is that you have to take an active part in this through your willingness by turning to spirit and by bringing your mind back to truth.

It's not going to be done for you.

We have to choose to bring our minds back to the truth.

We might occasionally have experiences that feel like revelation where something just dawns upon us.

But in my own experience,

More often than not,

I'm the one that's bringing my mind back to the truth.

Now I just want to share that this experience with the mold remediation showed me how comfortable I was in my nest,

My house,

And again how I tried to plant some roots here in this world.

Because as the Course says,

This world is not your home.

Thank goodness and thank goodness that we have means at our disposal to remember where home is and to not only just remember it but to recognize it and start to experience it within ourselves.

So I think it might be helpful for me at this point to summarize everything I just said and some steps for you to play with.

I have seven steps.

So number one,

Notice any stress or lack of peace that you feel.

Notice it,

Notice it,

Notice it.

Number two,

Feel your feelings.

Number three,

Set the goal to repurpose the stress.

In other words,

The goal is not to avoid the stress by avoiding your life.

Instead,

See it as a red flag telling you that it's time to straighten out your perception.

So you can say,

I am willing to repurpose this stress.

Number four,

Feel that stressful feeling.

It's just your ego being threatened.

Feel that the stress means that you're just simply identified with your small self.

That's it.

This is just your ego being threatened.

Number five,

Bring your identification with your small S self to spirit.

And then number six,

Ask for help in remembering who you really are.

Finally,

Number seven,

Bring your mind back to the truth.

Your mind is not a separate mind.

Your mind is part of one eternal loving mind.

That's our source.

And if you want these steps written out,

You can again just hop over to the show notes at fromanxietytolove.

Com forward slash episode 13.

So I have one final takeaway for you.

The small S self,

The ego,

Is always vulnerable to stress because the small self is not true.

You are not that small self.

You are a holy son of God,

As all of us are,

And it's time to claim that truth about yourself.

As I think about this mold situation,

It really was a wonderful learning opportunity for me,

And I do hope that you will allow whatever stress you're facing to be that same type of opportunity for growth,

To repurpose the stressful experience to help you awaken instead of stay asleep,

To allow that stress to help you to extend love and miracles instead of fear.

I love you,

Miracle worker.

Thank you for the work that you're doing because it helps all of us.

Let's chat in between episodes in my Facebook group at fromanxietytolove.

Com forward slash group.

I'll see you there.

If you benefited from this episode of From Anxiety to Love Radio,

Someone else you know can benefit too.

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Now,

If you are ready to take your inner work to the next level,

Pick up my book,

From Anxiety to Love,

Anywhere books are sold and sign up for my free crash course on undoing anxiety with A Course in Miracles.

It's available at fromanxietytolove.

Com forward slash crash course.

Thank you so much for tuning in and I will see you on the next episode.