19: How To Deny Fear: Lessons From A Cabin In The Woods At Halloween

Does your imagination ever run wild and create unnecessary anxiety and fear? In this episode of From Anxiety to Love Radio, Corinne shares a story of unnecessarily (and humorously) freaking herself out while she was vacationing in an off-the-grid cabin in the middle of the woods with her husband. The following morning, upon reading A Course in Miracles, she learned that “you are much too tolerant of mind wandering.”

Transcript

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 there,

Friend!

On this episode of From Anxiety to Love Radio,

I've got a great story for you about how we need to be active in the process of denying fear.

This story comes out of my experience from staying in a cabin in the middle of the beautiful woods,

But for one particular night they were creepy woods to me and I learned some really beautiful lessons.

Before we dive in though,

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So let's dive into my story about denying fear.

This happened during my most recent trip to a cabin in the woods with my husband.

We went there for a mini vacation.

This cabin is in western Massachusetts.

It's part of a very small retreat center.

There's really only four or five cabins total.

And it's on a mountain in the middle of hundreds of acres of forest.

It's entirely off the grid,

Which we love.

There's no electricity,

No running water.

And there's actually a well where you have to pump your own well water into jugs and then you hike your water to your cabin.

And the cabins are heated by a wood burning stove.

And of course,

With no running water,

You use outhouses.

Already you might be thinking I'm out of my mind for doing this,

But this is actually the type of vacation that we love to take.

It's essentially camping,

But you're in a cabin instead of a tent.

Our cabin was adorable.

It had a high pitched roof,

Cedar shingles,

And blue trim.

Inside the one room cabin is a bed on a sleeping platform,

A kitchen area,

A small table,

And a tree trunk that rises from the floor to the ceiling,

Smack in the middle of the cabin.

It's so super cute.

I posted some pictures for you to see on the show notes page for this episode at fromanxietytolove.

Com forward slash 19.

Now our cabin was the furthest away from all cabins.

Literally it was in the middle of the woods.

There was nothing around us except trees,

Our wood pile,

And our outhouse.

Oh,

And I should mention an important detail.

Our cabin had windows surrounding the cabin on all sides with no shades.

So fast forward to our first night.

We are in bed and my husband is fast asleep and there's a storm outside.

It's raining.

There's lots of strange noises and unidentifiable noises.

And like a child,

My imagination started going wild.

Now this is partly due to having watched a number of Halloween movies before we left.

Although I tend to not like thrillers or suspenseful movies,

Sometimes in the fall I get a hankering for a good Halloween spook.

In the weeks leading up to our trip,

We watched an abundance of movies that all involved scenes with people trying to flee the woods while bleeding,

Usually trying to escape a witch,

A killer,

Or a radioactive zombie.

These movies included The Shining,

The Boy,

The Witch,

Chernobyl Diaries,

And Malevolent.

So if you know any of these films,

You get the idea.

When I'm watching films like these,

They aren't all that believable to me,

So they don't truly freak me out.

But I do tend to avoid disturbing movies,

Psychological thrillers,

Or really upsetting or gory films.

Movies tend to go deep into me.

I've always sort of joked around that I have a glitch in my head because I can be affected by movies for days.

When Titanic came out long ago,

I literally cried for 24 hours over the workers who were locked in the hull of the ship when the ship went down.

So storylines tend to linger in my mind.

In the past,

I used to have a really hard time with losing myself in movies.

I couldn't separate myself,

And although that's gotten better,

I'm still very selective about what I watch and let in.

So back to the cabin.

Here I was in the middle of the woods,

Hearing strange sounds in the storm outside and seeing that there was literally a ton of fear in my mind.

I remember saying,

My gosh,

There's so much fear in my mind.

In my mind,

The screeching sounds of the branches sliding down the skylights became witch fingers scratching at the glass.

The pounding rain and wind became zombies knocking at the door.

And without curtains on the windows,

I imagined someone with ill intentions on the outside peering into our cabin.

I got myself so freaked out that even though I had to pee,

I could not bring myself to go outside to do so,

And I did not want to wake up my husband.

Now let's pause here in my story and talk about A Course in Miracles for a moment.

Part of what I was so excited about for this trip was the quiet time that I'd have where I could dedicate myself to reading A Course in Miracles.

We were off the grid.

There was no TV,

No internet,

No distractions,

A fabulous time to read.

I even had a really cute desk with an oil lamp on it,

And it overlooked just a beautiful view of the woods.

You can actually see this photo on the show notes page at fromanxietytolove.

Com forward slash 19.

After having a night where I completely freaked myself out,

My reading in the course the very next morning was about the proper use of denial.

We're going to explore this together now because it was perfect and exactly what I needed to hear.

Let's start with this term that we're talking about,

Denial.

As we know denial,

Denial is a defense mechanism.

It's something we use to protect ourselves.

Denial is when we block things from our own awareness or refuse to acknowledge what's actually happening.

Probably the most common example is a person who has a drinking problem and denies that they have a drinking problem,

Or they deny that they're hurting their family with their drinking.

There's a problem there,

But they refuse to see it.

And this is how the ego uses denial.

It's denial to conceal something.

Now drinking problem aside,

We use denial as a concealment device all the time.

If we're honest,

We can actually see denial show up in our lives.

I think the most common example of how we use denial is that we have icky,

Judgmental,

Ugly attack thoughts in our mind,

And yet we quickly deny that those thoughts arose in our mind.

We don't want to admit those socially unacceptable thoughts to ourselves,

And of course we don't want to admit it to others.

Now A Course in Miracles brings us deeper into this concept of denial.

We are actively using denial to deny love.

We use denial to deny our source.

We use denial to deny the fact that we are eternal beings.

We deny the truth every time we look to the world for our peace,

Our happiness,

And we use denial every time we identify as the small sense of self,

A body.

Which,

Let's be honest,

This is pretty much every moment of the day.

So we are constantly denying the truth to stay fixated on this level of form,

On form,

On bodies,

On the world.

And the purpose of the world,

By the way,

According to the ego,

Is to deny the truth and for the world to be more convincingly real than God.

So denial is a defense mechanism that the ego thought system uses to deny our truth.

But like any defense mechanism that we've made to block out love,

Spirit,

The Holy Spirit,

Your inner therapist,

Has a different purpose for it,

And this is a super key point.

Enter one of my favorite terms,

Repurposing.

You've probably heard me use this term before.

It refers to the fact that we can repurpose everything the ego calls forth to keep us asleep,

And we can do this by giving it to Spirit so it can be used by Spirit instead to help us awaken to love.

So in other words,

We can give our defense mechanism of denial to Spirit to be repurposed.

Instead of remaining just an ego defense mechanism to keep us asleep,

Denial can now be used by Spirit to help us awaken.

Specifically,

We can use denial to deny our denial of truth.

I will say that one more time.

We can use denial to deny our denial of truth.

That's language from the Course.

Even though we've denied that we're eternal beings made of pure love,

Our reality is still unchanged.

We are still wholly innocent,

Complete beings of love.

So we can deny or reject our initial denial of this truth.

Stated in the positive,

We can affirm the truth that we remain still as God created us.

I wanted to share some sentences with you from the Course.

I'll read one at a time.

This is from the CE,

The Complete and Annotated Edition,

Chapter 2,

Part 3.

It says,

When you are afraid of anything,

You are acknowledging its power to hurt you.

It goes on to say,

If you are afraid,

You are valuing wrongly.

This passage then goes on to talk about the peace of God,

Which passeth human understanding.

It says,

And again,

This is a quote,

This peace is totally incapable of being shaken by human errors of any kind.

It denies the ability of anything which is not of God to affect you in any way.

This is the proper use of denial.

It is not used to hide anything,

But it is used to correct error.

True denial is a very powerful protective device.

You can and should deny any belief that error can hurt you.

This kind of denial is not a concealment device,

But a correction device.

The right mind of the mentally healthy depends on it.

End quote.

I'll post the quotes I just read from the Course on the show notes page,

And I encourage you to read them slowly and remotely.

Let the meaning behind the words sink in as well.

So back to the cabin.

When I sat down to read the course the next morning,

I was of course blown away by how this whole section was so relevant to my imaginary fears.

I had simply been keeping my denial of truth in place by getting hooked into fear by pumping energy into those fear thoughts.

And I started instead to practice this proper use of denial.

I read this section super slowly and really let the meaning of the words sink in.

Really feel into the power behind this statement.

Anything which is not of God has no power to affect you in any way.

Isn't that awesome?

I love that.

And I really started dropping into that.

So if you remember the movie Labyrinth from the 80s,

I believe,

With David Bowie and Jennifer Connelly,

One of my favorite movies by the way,

You'll remember there's a character,

Sarah,

And there's the scene where she says to the Goblin King,

You have no power over me,

And he disappears.

As I started denying my denial of truth,

I started saying things to myself like,

This fear has no power over me.

Only love is real.

I am in danger nowhere in the world.

Truth is true,

And I am in fear.

Truth is true,

And nothing else is true.

As I really felt into these teachings,

I felt myself get grounded again.

I felt grounded in truth.

I shifted out of fear and back into peace.

And I can tell you the next night was way better.

No more zombie thoughts in my mind.

But this experience showed me how vigilant we have to be in watching our thoughts.

We let so much fear into our minds.

And this cabin showed me how much fear I had in my mind,

How much I was okay with just letting these fear thoughts in.

The course actually says that you're much too tolerant of mind wandering.

And I was like,

Wow,

No kidding.

We let a lot of crap in and we let our minds go into the muck and we don't do anything about it until we realize that we're in some kind of fear or anxiety trouble.

So I had allowed a lot of fear thoughts in my mind with my movie binge.

And I'm not saying don't watch movies,

But we just have to be aware of what they bring up in us.

And as I mentioned,

I can be really susceptible to losing myself in films.

So I have to be very selective.

One of my favorite quotes from spiritual teacher Peace Pilgrim is when she said,

I don't eat junk food and I don't think junk thoughts.

And I absolutely love that.

It's not that we're going to stop having junk thoughts.

It's that we have none that we would keep.

Our job is to notice those junk thoughts,

Give those junk thoughts to the Holy Spirit,

Choosing a thought of love instead.

So every moment,

Literally every moment that we notice a fear thought or a judgment thought,

We work vigilantly to catch it and to bring it to spirit.

This experience really taught me that we have to be active.

We are asked to be active as miracle workers.

This is not a passive job.

We don't just passively witness the mind and do nothing.

We have to watch our minds,

Turn to spirit,

Choose again,

And make that choice for truth.

Ultimately,

We will learn that we don't need to be vigilant at all because truth is true and nothing else is true.

But in the time being,

This vigilance is necessary.

And I've seen in myself as well,

Even subtly at times,

That we can experience some peace and then go on cruise control.

It's like,

Oh,

I'm feeling good.

I'm just going to kick back and not be watching my mind.

Yet we're being now tolerant of the mind's garbage thoughts.

And we check out of being vigilant until we realize that we're again in the ego basement.

We don't realize that we've slipped.

So it's super important to be vigilant,

To be active in watching the mind.

And this process of denying the denial of truth really transformed the rest of my weekend.

And of course,

Because of that experience,

Yet again,

My relationship with spirit feels deeper.

My ability to listen and tune in feels deeper.

And I just feel so enthused and invested in this miracle work.

So here are my main learnings from this experience,

My takeaways.

Takeaway number one,

Utilize the proper use of denial.

Deny our denial of truth.

Deny fear and claim the truth of the magnificent,

Radiant,

Capital S self that you are.

Takeaway number two,

This process of healing is active and more than just passively witnessing the mind.

We must actively watch the mind,

Catch every fear thought,

Bring those thoughts to spirit and ask for a miracle instead.

We can always do this in hindsight as well.

And takeaway number three,

We need to make a choice for truth,

Even in spite of fear.

Don't wait for fear to subside and then get to work.

Get to work in spite of the fear.

Say something like this has no power over me.

I'm choosing to abide with spirit instead.

I love your beautiful radiant soul.

Thank you so much for joining me on this journey.

I am with you in your journey of undoing fear.

I'll leave you with the last few sentences from my book,

From Anxiety to Love.

I believe in you.

We're healing together.

Every gain that I've made is a gain for you.

And every gain that you make is a gain for me.

My gains are yours and yours are mine because we are one.

I love you.

I love you.

I love you.

I love you.

I love you.

I love you.

Yours are mine because we are one.

We're going to make it.

The light in you is too bright to fail.

If you buy a copy of From Anxiety to Love,

Make sure you take advantage of your free bonus,

The From Anxiety to Love Summit,

Which features six interviews with experts in undoing fear.

Get access at fromanxietytolove.

Com forward slash summit.

Thank you so much for listening,

And I'll see you on the next episode.

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