Pain and the Second Arrow

 

Pain and the Second Arrow

From a Q&A session with Thich Nhat Hanh, 2011, in response to the question, "I wonder what advice you might have or what practices you might recommend for those of us who are living with physical pain or living with despair in our caring for the world?"

Here is Thay's response:

"And the Buddha said that we should not try to amplify our pain, exaggerate the situation. He used the image of someone who is hit by an arrow, and a few minutes later a second arrow comes and strikes exactly at the same spot. So after the second arrow comes, not only the pain is double, but it can be triple or ten times more painful, intense. So when we have some pain, whether it is physical or mental, we have to recognize it as it is, and we should not exaggerate. Breathing in, I know this is only a minor physical pain. I can very well make friends and peace with it. I can still smile to it. And if you recognize it as it is and do not exaggerate, and then you can make peace with it and you don't suffer much. But if you get angry, revolting against that, if you worry too much, if you imagine that you are going to die very quickly, and then the pain will be multiplied by 100 times, and that is the second arrow, we should not allow it to come. That's recommended by the Buddha. This is very important. Don't exaggerate, don't amplify the pain."

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Hugh, April 23

 Live Session Summary, Sunday, April 23, 2023: It was good to be with you today for our Live session on ‘Five Steps to Free the Heart and Mind.’ In this session we focused on the second step: Opening fully and wholeheartedly to what we are experiencing. Here is a summary of the key points, quotes and poems from today’s session: 

I began by highlighting the five steps: 

• First Step: Turn towards our experience with awareness

• Second Step: Open fully and wholeheartedly to what is present

• Third Step: Investigate and recognize where and how we are suffering

• Fourth Step: Recognize our own role in creating and perpetuating suffering—clinging/craving, the ‘second arrow’

• Fifth Step: Seeing clearly into how we are creating suffering—through clinging—creates the conditions for letting go and freedom. 

I then discussed the second step: Open fully and wholeheartedly to what we’re experiencing: 

We begin by turning towards our experience and then open fully to what is present. It’s essential that our opening to what’s present be wholehearted—we can’t ‘phone it in.’ This wholeheartedness is expressed well in different images and metaphors:

• Rumi’s image of ‘welcome the guests… even if they’re a crowd of sorrows…’ 

• Eckhart Tolle speaks of saying ‘yes to what is’ 

• Dorothy Hunt in her poem ‘Peace’ points to the quality of opening to everything: ‘Peace is this moment without judgment. // This moment in the heartspace where everything that is is welcome.’ 

• Tara Brach teaches the importance of ‘radical acceptance,’ deep-rooted acceptance of ourselves and our experience

• Ajahn Sumedho’s encouragement is to reflect, ‘it’s like this…’ ‘Sadness is like this…’, ‘anger is like this…’

• Anthony de Mello described enlightenment as ‘absolute cooperation with the inevitable’—and we can look at our acceptance of our experience as it is through this lens of complete cooperation. 

We cultivate the intention to not leave anything out, not push away or reject anything—difficult emotions, like anger, fear, sadness—and open to our direct experience, particularly bringing mindfulness to our body… and bring awareness to the stories in our mind… Opening to what’s coming in from the ‘world’—sounds, news, sensations—as well as our own thoughts and reactions… making space for everything.

Opening to our experience, particularly when it is painful or difficult, can be challenging: It’s not easy to sit with and befriend fear, anger, and other difficult emotions and mind states. Some qualities that can help support us in experiencing challenging states include kindness, acceptance, self-compassion, non-judgment, patience, humor…

Poems I shared in the Live session included ‘Ten thousand flowers in spring,’ by Wu Men; parts of Rumi’s ‘The Guest House’ and Dorothy Hunt’s ‘Peace’; and Naomi Shihab Nye’s story from the Albuquerque airport, ‘Gate A-4.’

In the May 21 session I’ll continue with the third step to free the heart and mind: Investigate and recognize where and how we are suffering.

Wishing everyone a good week ahead and see you on Sunday, May 14 for a Live session that Laurie Cameron and I are doing together on gratitude. I’ll also be teaching Live sessions on May 21 and 28. Warmly, Hugh 🌻 💜 🙏🏻

If you're busy regretting the past, then a new future can't come in. ~ Marianne Williamson

On Suffering

If you’re going through a difficult time, Parallax hopes that the new year leads to the blossoming of a new you. To help get you started, here’s one of my favorite passages from No Mud, No Lotus: 

“There is a Buddhist teaching found in the Sallatha Sutta, known as The Arrow. It says if an arrow hits you, you will feel pain in that part of your body where the arrow hit; and then if a second arrow comes and strikes exactly at the same spot, the pain will not be only double, it will become at least ten times more intense.

The unwelcome things that sometimes happen in life—being rejected, losing a valuable object, failing a test, getting injured in an accident—are analogous to the first arrow. They cause some pain. The second arrow, fired by our own selves, is our reaction, our storyline, and our anxiety. All these things magnify the suffering. Many times, the ultimate disaster we’re ruminating upon hasn’t even happened.

We may worry, for example, that we have cancer and that we’re going to die soon. We don’t know, and our fear of the unknown makes the pain grow even bigger.

The second arrow may take the form of judgment (“how could I have been so stupid?”), fear (“what if the pain doesn’t go away?”), or anger (“I hate that I’m in pain. I don’t deserve this!”). We can quickly conjure up a hell realm of negativity in our minds that multiplies the stress of the actual event, by ten times or even more.

Part of the art of suffering well is learning not to magnify our pain by getting carried away in fear, anger, and despair. We build and maintain our energy reserves to handle the big sufferings; the little sufferings we can let go.

If you lose your job, of course it’s a normal response to feel fear and anxiety. It is true that in most cases to be out of work is a suffering; and there is real danger attached if you don’t have enough to eat or can’t afford necessary medicine. But you don’t need to make this suffering worse by spinning stories in your head that are much worse than the reality. Some people in this situation may think “I’m no good at this or that,” or “I’ll never get another job,” or “I failed my family.” It’s important to remember that everything is impermanent.

A suffering can arise—or can work itself out—for anyone at any moment. Instead of throwing good energy away on condemning yourself or obsessing over what catastrophes might be lurking around the corner, you can simply be present with the real suffering that is right in front of you, with what is happening right now.

Mindfulness is recognizing what is there in the present moment. Suffering is there, yes; but what is also there is that you are still alive: “Breathing in, I know I’m alive.”

Your eyes still work: “Breathing in, I’m aware of my eyes. Breathing out, I smile to my eyes.” To have eyes in good condition is a wonderful thing. Because you have eyes in good condition, there’s a paradise of shapes and colors….”

— Thich Nhat Hanh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering