My training programs in mental and spiritual development are quite advanced. I’ve gone through all of them myself before I made them into generally accessible courses, and I’m very proud of them.

One thing I am not proud of is that I’m not always able to follow my own advice. My wife would be the first to tell you that with regard to my health and working too much. But this is more insidious. This is about using my own techniques to manage fear and problems—of which there are plenty when you are the CEO of one of the Fortune 500 companies in the IT world in the United States and the leader of one of the biggest growing, free-thinking religious organizations in the United States as well. Then you have a lot on your plate.

And yet, when push comes to shove—and this is one of my most shameful admissions—I’m not able to use these techniques to manage all that stress and anxiety very well. That is, I am able to use them when the anxiety hits, when the stress is high. I know how to meditate. I know affirmations, I know prayer, I know all kinds of techniques. What I’m missing here is my ability to detach in between and to focus on something else—fill up, get some focus on what it is in between the problems, in between the attacks, in between the hurdles, in between the anxieties.

Because if I don’t anchor my mind, then it becomes very easy to just fall back, and then I get another intrusive thought about whatever I have to deal with, and I deal with it quite effectively … until a new thought comes.

These days, it’s typically health-related. Actually, it’s more and more health-related. What if I have another heart attack, for example? I’m not very good at… I’m good at dealing with that thought when it comes, but I’m not very good at finding something to focus on in between it that it comes.

Or maybe I’m focusing on the wrong things, like more work, for example—something that makes my heart beat faster and then reminds me of what happened before. And then we are in the vicious circle. So I guess the solution is twofold. I have to take more time off, physically. And mentally, I have to find something else to focus on in between the dark moments that I have specialized myself in dealing with.

Otherwise, I feel like a doctor who only knows how to operate. I know how to operate quite well. But whenever I’m finished operating and sitting in the canteen or maybe at home on my couch, I’m not detaching. I’m just like, in this constant low-alert mode, waiting for the next call, for the next surgery. And if I’m doing anything else, maybe I’m reading medical journals or something work-related. Does that make sense?

Well, I hope it does make sense. But what doesn’t make sense to me is why I keep tripping over my own feet and undermining my own accomplishments. Like I said, I think the doctor metaphor is really apt. I’m really good at the surgery part of treating illness when it’s there—tumors, whatever. But I’m not good at living. And that means that all the surgeries, all the tumors, all the—the being alert for surgeries and tumors, they just fill up those empty spaces between the operations. And I’ve got to stop that. But how?

I guess a major hurdle is that I don’t want to give up my job or my position or even tune it down, I think. I feel it’s all or nothing. But I guess maybe… maybe that’s just something I have to figure out what to do with. Otherwise, I’ll become this chimera, with one head or whatever it is, and then I’ll attack whatever is coming at me, and the other head then bites myself. And that is the sad state of affairs that I feel like this.

The only thing to soften it is that I’m actually again aware of it. It’s just that then I have to define and design some solutions, both in lifestyle and in, I guess you could say, mental living space, thought lifestyle, that actually hold, that I actually remember, instead of constantly being attracted to what I’m good at dealing with—problems as they arise. It’s a mess. Or it’s become more of a mess. And I thought that in the beginning when I had so much control and I’d learned so many techniques to deal with fear and whatnot, then I thought now I have mastered it. But the trick is, it’s not about mastering fear. It’s about living in spite of it and living healthily.

Go figure.

I wonder if it’s true what my wife says sometimes, that I should start all over again, tear everything down and build from scratch. Or maybe… maybe build nothing at all.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

MARCUS CHEN NIANZHEN, November 2017