Religion predates psychotherapy as a means of mitigating human anxiety.

Spirituality can be a powerful factor in learning to manage stress and anxiety.

Spiritual approaches to anxiety can complement psychotherapy.

This is Part 2 of a series of posts on anxiety. See Part 1 here.

Psychotherapy, often coupled today with psychopharmacology, is the traditional go-to for treatment of anxiety. Existential psychotherapy, for instance, asserts that we must learn to accept and tolerate our anxiety, losses, and ultimately, mortality, and that some anxiety is the inescapable cost of being free, conscious, mortal, and responsible for ourselves. But, from a philosophical or spiritual perspective, is this necessarily so?

Philosopher and theologian Alan Watts didn't buy it (1951). He wondered what we lose if we stopped caring so much. In Buddhism, for instance, suffering or dukkha (which certainly includes the experience of worrying and anxiety) is seen as the consequence of having too much desire, grasping, or attachment. Attachment to material things. Desire to have certain feelings or experiences, and not others. Expectations about how life, relationships, and people should be, and what our labor will bring. Psychologist Albert Ellis (1957) focused on identifying and eliminating these “shoulds” and "musts," or at least converting them to preferences, in his rational-emotive behavior therapy.

But what if we actually have nothing to lose? Because, in reality, we have nothing but our existence itself. All else is non-essential accoutrements or accessories. And what if our existence is itself illusory, nothing more than a dream? A very convincing hallucination? Or, in Hindu and Buddhist terms, mere maya or illusion? (The Zen teacher Chuang Tzu........

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