Throw a stone into a pond. Enjoy the concentric circles. Here, now think of the stone as an emotion and water as if it were the human body: here, in traditional Chinese medicine, emotions propagate through the organism and influence it .

Mental energies are deposited within the organs. A few examples? Thought is preserved in the stomach and spleen, intuition dwells in the lung, the will rests alertly in the kidney, decision-making dominates in the liver.

This means that the kidney feels fear, the liver collects anger, the lung feels sadness and restlessness.

But if we talk about anxiety , the heart is the absolute protagonist. It is in the heart that the actual mental energy is lodged. In other words, the heart “feels” joy.

Health depends on balance

Balance is favored by the harmonious flow of blood and, to preserve this harmony, the body must be nourished, both in terms of food intake and in terms of physiological stimuli. All this serves to maintain the so-called shen well , understood as a very subtle vital substance closely linked to qi , the energy that pervades the body.

To understand what the shen is you should imagine an almost immaterial substance, a kind of floating trail that circulates in the body and releases vitality.

The state of the shen depends a lot on all the organs, but it is in the heart that it would find its original home. For the Chinese, the heart is a bit like what the brain is for us. It is the organ that plays a key role from a psychic point of view. The heart is attributed the function of “judge of sensations”.

According to traditional Chinese medicine , through the heart we should understand which sensations harm us, on which aspects of our character we should focus.

In short, a good “plan” to escape from the cage of anxiety starts from the heart.