Discovering Your Internal Universe: The Unexpected Good News About Anxiety, Panic, and Fear

by Rob Bell; Cody Deese

Publisher:

Eerdmans

, 2025

Overview

A liberating and life-giving approach to making peace with anxiety
 
What if anxiety is not an enemy trying to destroy you? What if anxiety is an unexpected ally trying to save you? In Discovering Your Internal Universe, author and pastor Cody Deese invites readers into this counterintuitive shift in how they understand anxiety. Challenging the common assumption that anxiety is an illness that only ever undermines us, Deese demonstrates how anxiety can be a helpful guide pointing us toward things that need our attention.
 
Revealing his own lifelong struggle with a panic disorder, Deese describes how his anxiety illuminated a path that he needed to explore—a path into his internal universe. The journey brought Deese face to face with unresolved grief, childhood wounds, religious trauma, and personal rejection—and ultimately led to greater self-understanding and acceptance. Through Deese’s story, readers will learn how to access their own internal universe, discover the root causes of their anxiety, and find the courage to embark on their own internal quest. Unconventional, practical, and spiritually insightful, Discovering Your Internal Universe is an invitation to listen to the gentle truth behind anxiety: it is good to be human and it is good to be you.

Contents

Table of Contents

Foreword by Rob Bell 
Introduction: The Outlet 

Part 1: All the Way In
1. The Language of Anxiety 
2. Healing Is an Inside Job 
3. Welcome to the Internal Universe 

Part 2: All the Way Through
4. Unprocessed Grief 
5. Fear-Based Religion 
6. The Art of Future Tripping 
7. The Childhood Wound

Part 3: All the Way Out
8. The Transforming Power of Anxiety 
9. The Integration of Anxiety 
10. Welcome to the External Universe 

Acknowledgments 
Notes 
Resources

Praise for Discovering Your Internal Universe

As somebody who’s read a lot of books about fear and anxiety, I’ve never read anything that comes close to Discovering Your Internal Universe—and that’s a really beautiful thing. Cody Deese’s book is wise without trying to be. It’s helpful without making you feel like you need help. If you’re anxious like me, you might find healing and hope inside these pages and you’ll find those things without ever feeling broken or overwhelmed. What Deese gives us here is a profound gift that I want to give every anxious person I know.

——Matthew Paul Turner, author of When God Made You 

Product Details

• Title: Discovering Your Internal Universe: The Unexpected Good News About Anxiety, Panic, and Fear
• Authors: Rob Bell, Cody Deese
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Print Publication Date: 2025
• Logos Release Date: 2025
• Pages: 250
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Ebook
• ISBNs: 9781467469951, 9780802885401, 0802885403, 1467469955
• Resource ID: LLS:9781467469951
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-15T00:48:26Z

About the Authors

Cody Deese is an author, speaker, and spiritual guide. He holds an MDiv degree from Emory University’s Candler School of Theology and serves as the lead pastor of Vinings Lake Church, an ever-evolving spiritual collective. He is also the founder of Atlanta Becoming, a progressive organization that hosts roundtable discussions with authors and speakers on spiritual topics.