Ignore your problems

A counterintuitive life lesson

The room was silent. My body was motionless. But my mind was agitated.

I’d been sitting cross-legged on the floor for over an hour, with sweat dripping down my brow, and twenty other silent, suffering souls sitting around me. Intense pain radiated from my knee. It felt like it was being crushed by a giant invisible fist that was provoked by my stillness. 

I needed a break from the pain before it could break me.

It was my first Vipassana retreat, and it was only day three. I had seven more to go.

The instructions were straightforward – I was supposed to repeatedly scan my body from head to toe. But all I could focus on was the pain in my knee. The more I obsessed over it, the more it grew. And the more it grew, the more I obsessed over it. It was a feedback loop of suffering from which I couldn’t escape.

But on day five, pure exhaustion from focusing on the singular point of pain made me stumble onto a realization that would make it bearable. For a few seconds, my attention shifted to a different part of my body. A part that wasn’t engulfed in the hellish flames of pain. When this happened, the pain in my knee ceased to affect me.

I realized that pain only exists in the mind, not the knee. And the mind amplifies what it focuses on. If I could train my mind to stop focusing on the pain in my knee, with time, the pain would fade away. So I did.

The mind might amplify what it focused on, but I could control what my mind focused on. I chose to focus on the better parts of my experience.

I made it through all ten days.

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Isn’t much of life like this?

We fixate on problems that we have no control over, making them appear larger than they actually are. We live in the most abundant of times, but record numbers of us are going to therapy. Instead of normalizing this trend, maybe we could shift our focus.

Could we reassign our mental bandwidth from the parts of our life that aren’t going well, to the parts that are? In our short lives, could we amplify the positives instead of the negatives? Could we choose to be more grateful?

I’d be willing to bet that some of us would be better off if we ignored our problems, especially the ones whose solutions we don’t control.

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Thanks to Helen Jiang, Kirsten Corbett, and Steven Foster for their feedback on a draft of this piece.