I suspect that most of my readers are aware of the Litany Against Fear which has well and truly made it into popular culture.

Fear is an issue for me, due to my upbringing. Not anxiety as such, I have dealt with that, but ultimately irrational fears leading to destructive procrastination and indecision.

I have begun doing meditation regularly. I was using the Litany Against Fear as a focus, but was not entirely happy with it, for reasons based on buddhist psychology. Also, I was after a way of dealing with habits of fearing rather than immediate anxiety.

So I have created my own version. It is something of a work in progress, so comments particularly welcome.

I have created my fear.
It is I who makes my fear matter.
So I will let it not matter.
For my fear is not me.
I was here before my fear. I will be here after my fear.
I will face my fear.
I will look into the heart of my fear and see its emptiness.
I will allow my fear to pass through me.
I will see its path as it passes, leaving nothing behind it.
Having let it not matter, only I will remain.

The following are some excerpts from an essay I have drafted which is intended for publication. Folk may find them helpful.
...
Depression—which has been written about for centuries under the older term of melancholia—is a pattern of thought, belief, feeling. It is—in the powerful metaphor of Australian-born psychologist Dorothy Rowe, whose description of suicide I used above—a prison. Depression is where the sufferer lives. The vantage point from which you view the world. It is patterns of thinking and habits of mind. The story you tell yourself, your interpretation of past and present, that makes sense of your feelings and experiences. Creating thereby dire expectations of the future. Folk who have suffered from both cancer and depression regularly report that depression is worse—for it blights your entire life. To think your way out of the disastrous pattern of your thoughts is not an easy thing to do, since what one wishes to use to heal is precisely what is wounded and malfunctioning.
...
Something I later came to realise about deep emotional distress, particularly depression, is that one operates in layers. A depressed person is trying to manage internal pain. So they behave in ways which respond to that. Ways that can be deeply irrational, even destructive, for their interactions with the outside world. But internal pain has acquired a lexical priority over external sense.
...( changing a pattern of thinking )

I started getting panic attacks in my early twenties. The family GP wanted to put me on Valium™. I decided that night I wasn’t going to do that and looked at various alternative therapies, including a prolonged period of worrying about food sensitivities (which makes one neurotic about food). It was some years later when my Canberra GP, who had been a clinical ecologist for a while, was the first mainstream medicine person to say anything useful. He pointed out that the body only has one system for coping with stress. If it is not doing so, a wide variety of symptoms may result (including anxiety disorders). The trick was to improve the body’s ability to cope with stress.

This did not solve the problem immediately, but at least it pointed me in the right direction. Looking back now, that my ability to cope with certain forms of stress might be flawed, and that problems would manifest themselves in anxiety, makes perfect sense given my upbringing.

If I let my blood sugar get too low, or too high by sugaring up, my body tends to produce anxiety-inducing hormones. My body is less likely to do so if I have been doing a reasonable amount of aerobic exercise. (Tai Chi also seems to help and has the advantage of not being strenuous.) These are physical steps to improve the body’s ability to cope with stress. (Good nutrition, exercise: the normal stuff.)

Nowadays, I can recognise the feeling of the urge to be anxious. More importantly, I can separate the impulse to be anxious from actually being anxious. The main trick to dealing with anxiety disorder is to realise that whatever you are actually worrying about is a complete epiphenomenon. The anxiety is chemically induced. The mind, being a great rationaliser, finds something to cognitively “carry” the anxiety. I am feeling anxious, there must be a reason for that, what is worrying me, oh, it must be … Whatever the […] is, is completely irrelevant to dealing with the problem. If you engage with the […] you are lost in the epiphenomenon, wasting resources that could be used to actually deal with the anxiety. Worse, you will reinforce the anxiety, by creating positive feedback.

Which is where Zen and buddhist psychology can help. It provides the basis for gaining critical distance from one’s mental states. Separating the impulse to be anxious from actual anxiety.

It also provides techniques for quieting the mind. Even if one does not engage in full meditation, just letting the mind rest during some repetitive activity (not worrying if things “pop in” but not going with them either) improves the ability to separate the impulse from the feeling and reduces the uncontrolled “static” that emotional disorders feed off. These are mental techniques for improving the capacity to cope with stress.

It doesn’t happen immediately, it takes practice. But it is amazing what a difference it makes, to dealing with the problem to the quality of life generally.