I used to think I had to resign myself to worry and anxiety. They always arrived in unexpected moments, and since I couldn’t forbid them from coming, I figured I had no other choice but to live with them.

The drawback was clear: worrying and being anxious never actually solved my problems. The very things I wanted to avoid kept coming back anyway. It left me speechless, forcing me to rethink whether being anxious was beneficial to me at all.

So, I decided to calculate the cost of anxiety. As I studied Reiki and Qigong, I learned that chronic anxiety drains our spleen, and because anxiety stems from fear, it eventually damages our kidneys.

That realization terrified me. If that was the price, I was at a total loss—I couldn’t solve my problems through worry, yet I was paying dearly with my health. Let alone the physical sickness, the potential financial cost of kidney illness spooked me to my core.

I was originally drawn to Reiki and Qigong by a desire to manifest my dreams. It is a popular theme in these circles that you can achieve your goals through visualization and Qi, and that your deepest wishes might magically materialize when you least expect them (reference link to previous post).

After initially trying many visualization techniques, I concluded that visualization is essentially a goal-setting tool. It is far better to know precisely what you want, visualize the outcome, and then direct your mind, feelings, and effort toward that exact target.

Even before that, however, how do I know whether a goal is truly relevant, or whether I will regret the outcome later? When I asked myself that question, my mind was in total disarray. Sometimes my logical brain said a goal was important, but I felt awkward about it. Other times, I felt the outcome wouldn’t satisfy my immediate needs. There was a constant tug-of-war among the forces inside me.

I felt torn apart for quite some time until I encountered a lesson by Master Mantak Chia about the three brains that humans possess:

1. The Physical Brain: Housed inside the skull, it governs rational decisions and directs physical actions.
2. The Heart: Our emotional brain, which thinks with feelings and constantly compares past events with current situations or future imaginations. It dictates whether we feel good or bad and sits at the core of the five elements in the body.
3. The Gut: Responsible for our body’s immediate needs. It gives you instant physical symptoms if you eat something bad, or stomach trouble when you feel depressed.

In short, every thought we have is evaluated and discussed by these three brains. In Qigong practice, we learn to align all three brains, letting them confer and judge whether a plan or decision is truly sound.

If all three brains reach a single conclusion, you can be certain you are making a good decision. (Hmm, perhaps that is the origin of the Chinese idiom: think thrice before you make a decision—who knows?)

Once you set your goals with enough specificity, you can start visualizing them and working toward them. Believe me, that approach is infinitely better than indulging in anxiety. Every time we fail, we learn something; at the very least, we move closer to the end of the tunnel of our problems, whereas worry and anxiety offer nothing more than toxic companionship.

Agree?