You Can Decide to Choose Suffering- Or Not!
How can we reduce our suffering?
Life is 50% joy and 50% suffering, so how can we accept that fact and stop rolling around in painful stories that happened in the past? The Buddhist concept of the second arrow brings helpful wisdom that we can all benefit from. Learning this concept can help you notice when you are choosing suffering—then you can decide if you want to continue making that choice.
Things happen in this beautiful, precious lifetime that we may not like, that may fill us with sorrow, anger, grief or despair. The fact is, we can only control our own reaction to life happening. We have two choices—to accept life on life’s terms and to feel our feelings in our bodies so that we can process and release them, or we can blame ourselves, shame ourselves, and make our suffering all the stronger.
Why do we choose suffering and how can we halt this harmful habit in its tracks?
The Buddhist concept of the second arrow is very present for me this week.
I just found out that we lost a beautiful member of our family, my Tía Celia Nora Echeveste, who we called Coca, in that very South American way of calling everyone a tender pet name.
What I’m moved to share with you today is the concept of the second arrow, which is a Buddhist teaching about suffering and pain. The teaching goes that life shoots the first arrow. A thing happens, for example, your tía dies or your husband walks out on you and your kid gets sick. Your thoughts about these occurrences produce feelings within you—the way thoughts want to do.
The second arrow is the additional suffering—the arrow we sling at our own hearts, the suffering we choose.
The second arrow is our reaction to the event, our self-blame for the facts of life—the stories we tell.
I started to sling that second arrow today. To spin in thoughts like, “I should have gone home more often. I should have called Coca more. I should have, I should have, I should have.” But the truth is, I did the best I could from so far away.
I loved her the best I could for the last 40 years and the rest are things I didn’t do.
Whatever those “should-haves” ends with, it’s done, it’s over. It’s the past and it’s done with.
Choosing to spin in these thoughts, these self-recriminations, it’s just shooting that second arrow right into my own heart and it doesn’t serve me. It doesn’t bring my Coca back. It just compounds my own suffering. And the truth is, it’s a choice.
Taking on that extra suffering is always a choice.
Sadness, grief, sorrow, these are all a natural, normal part of this human experience. Taking on extra suffering is always optional. You can always choose to fight against the facts of life, to beat yourself up for someone else’s choices, an occurrence beyond your control. You totally get to make those decisions, absolutely.
You are an adult with free will and you always get to choose to suffer more than you already are. The message I want to send to your tender heart, and to mine, is that the additional suffering is always optional. To be clear, I recognize and hold space for your pain and mine, your grief, and mine, your regret, and mine.
I’m not negating that pain at all. Oh, it’s real. The tía died, the husband left, the bombs were dropped, the thing happened. That pain of loss, of grief, will always be there in your life. I will always hold sadness for the death of mi abuelas, the pain of immigration and living far from mi gente, the grief of not being there in Argentina for the good times and the bad.
You don’t need to compound the facts of the pain by adding self-blame to the facts.
Self-blame just harms yourself for no good reason. What I get to do and what I’ve been practicing is to not shoot the second arrow.
You get to feel your pain without attaching any extra stories to it.
You get to feel your pain without making it mean anything beyond the facts. Terrible things happen. It’s real. The opioid crisis, what’s happening in politics, people cheat, people die.
Lousy shit happens. Naming it, recognizing the feelings in your body, letting yourself grieve and feel that pain is a beautiful thing and allows you to move through it in a healthy way.
Rolling around in “what ifs” and “should haves” does nothing to improve or change the situation. They can’t bring your dead father back or help you move through the pain. These stories, these are second arrows and they’re a way to choose further suffering to keep you spinning in the past, which keeps you tied to it, keeps you from being present now so you can build towards the future of your dreams.
Second arrow stories keep you from seeing your beautiful highest self.
Second arrow stories send us into a reactive place versus a responsive place. With our hearts and minds full of these questions, these stories, this lack of acceptance of the fact of the first arrow, we avoid our pain and buffer against it.
We spiritually bypass that pain—we rant and scream at the universe. When we don’t get the answers we want, we rant and scream at our friends, our families, our children and our coworkers.
In a different setting, say a partner leaving us, we send rambling terrible emails or texts. We show up with anger when we actually feel sad. Instead of sitting with and processing the pain, feeling and accepting the fact of it. The second arrow is the reaction, the ways we make the suffering worse for ourselves and find ourselves feeling sadness about the thing that happened plus regret for the way we reacted.
We burn it all down because we’re not managing our minds and accepting our sadness.
Celia Nora Echeveste, my Coca, I say her name, I honor her. I cry it out and work it out and know the sadness will continue to swirl in me for a long time to come.
I can grieve and accept the fact of her death without compounding it with stories of how much more I could have helped, how it could have been different. Those stories don’t serve me and they certainly don’t serve the dead folks I love and miss.
I choose not to shoot the second arrow. I do not choose suffering.
I choose to stay present to the facts of missing and grief and not to add the suffering of self-blame to my sadness.
Maybe you haven’t lost someone you love, but you may be shooting that second arrow at yourself in countless small and large ways. Let’s say you write a memo and your boss hates it. You could rewrite it and accept the first arrow—wrote memo, man hates memo.
Or you can do what so many of us do and shoot the second arrow, “Damn it, I’m incompetent.” This story keeps you rolling around, indulging in thoughts and feelings that don’t serve you and don’t help you improve your life.
The fact here is, you wrote a memo and someone doesn’t like it. Okay, cool. Now you get to choose, you can beat yourself up and make this fact, “Dude didn’t like memo,” mean something about you, about your core beautiful human self.
You can choose a thought like, “He shouldn’t be so harsh.” But that gets you nowhere.
You can accept that you did something that someone didn’t like, and that’s okay.
If you want to do it differently next time, you can ask yourself, “Did I do my best work here? Did I procrastinate? I could have a colleague read my work before I submit it. That could help.”
You could accept that you’re a human learning to do a thing and choose to be kind to yourself, accepting the facts versus reaching out to blame others or shame yourself. You can create space to learn from what happened.
Let’s say your partner cheats on you. I am not saying you need to be happy about that. But I do think that starting to tell second arrow stories like, “partners shouldn’t walk out, partners shouldn’t cheat, if only I had been more attentive,” those stories don’t serve you and don’t create true space for your feelings.
When you’re blaming or shaming, you’re not creating space to learn and grow, much less to feel your own feelings. These thoughts are also putting the onus for other people’s thoughts and the feelings they create for that person squarely on your own shoulders—a place they don’t belong.
He cheated because he had the thought that that was something he wanted to do. It has zero to do with you.
He had the thought that he would cheat and he felt however he did about it that led him to take the action of stepping out. In this situation, you didn’t cheat. He did, and you can’t control his choices, like I can’t control that my tía died or that an earthquake happened.
You can get angry about it. You can ruin your own life, spinning in the story that he did wrong by you, when the fact is, he just did wrong and it has nothing to do with you. More importantly, he did what he wanted to do, and how you think and feel about that choice is purely yours to manage.
His choices are his, your choices are yours.
His thoughts are his, your thoughts are yours. You don’t have to puncture your own heart about it. That extra suffering that led you to send angry texts. The “should have, could have, would have,” none of it serves you and it’s all optional.
I get it. I’ve been cheated on too. There are feelings of abandonment, betrayal and disappointment that come with the moment of learning the facts. You get to feel all of that, to process it through and out of you.
The second arrow stories aren’t useful because we cannot control other people, places, and things.
That first reaction of shock, that’s physiologic. That’s human. That’s mammalian. That’s a body going into the fight, flight, freeze place—the sympathetic nervous system.
The work is to allow that feeling in your body, even if it feels terrible.
Where you do have power is to decide how you want to react or respond.
You can lash out. You can seek to punish the wrongdoer emotionally. You can spin about it, when in fact, hate it though you might, he has a right to do what he wanted to do for his own life, and that had everything to do with his thoughts and nothing to do with you.
Your tía died, your boss hated your project, your husband cheated on you and walked out. Okay, that happened. You get to choose what you want to make these facts mean. You can make things worse for yourself or:
You can allow yourself to feel your pain instead of struggling against the truth of life.
The true solution is to recognize the first arrow—the shitty thing happened—and then notice the second arrow—the suffering we choose to take on. That’s it, feel it in your bones. Start to recognize and see where you’re worsening your suffering by fighting against it and creating tension in your body. This is how we create anxiety versus accepting the facts.
Your homework for this week is to be your own watcher.
When, where and why are you choosing to worsen your suffering?
When do you blame yourself for something beyond your control? When do you shame yourself for the facts of life? When do you shoot that second arrow at your own tender heart, which keeps you from truly feeling your feelings about what’s going on? Rolling in these shame stories keeps you from changing your behavior for the future and learning life’s most beautiful lessons.
This week, I want you to write it out and I want to remind you to remember the importance – and this comes from neuroscience – that kinesthetic connection between thinking something and making the physical movement required to write. The things we see on paper are the things we can work to shift, recognize, change.
You’ve got this, my love. As always, be gentle and loving with yourself. I have been working with this Buddhist concept of the second arrow for ages now and when this thing happened, when my tía died and I got that call, my brain started spinning in all the second arrow thoughts.
So, please, be loving. Be sweet with you. If this is a new practice, remember, it’s a new practice. If you’ve been sitting with and working with this concept of the second arrow for ages and it still comes up for you, that’s okay too. You’re just a human being in your process, in your own time.
Sit with it, write it out, be loving, and know that change is on its way.
Remember, my beautiful love, that when one of us heals, we help heal the world.
Thank you for taking the time to read Feminist Wellness. I’m excited to be here and to help you take back your health!
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