You amplify what you focus on

The room was silent and 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 intense pain radiating from my knees. It felt like they were being crushed by giant invisible fists that were 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 knees. The more I obsessed about it, the more it grew. And the more it grew, the more I obsessed about it. It was a feedback loop of suffering from which I couldn’t escape.

But on day five, pure exhaustion from focusing on the pain in my knees made me stumble onto a realisation 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 I did this, the pain in my knee ceased to affect me.

I realised 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 focuses 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.