12d • Meditation
The two arrows
There’s a teaching I come back to again and again because I think it explains so beautifully how our minds can sometimes add to our suffering.
It’s called the two arrows.
🏹 The first arrow is what happens to us.
Pain. Loss. Rejection. Disappointment. Illness. Something going wrong that we desperately wanted to go right.
That arrow hurts.
And sometimes there is absolutely nothing we could have done to prevent it. It’s simply life being life.
But then comes the second arrow.
The second arrow is the one we can fire at ourselves afterwards.
Why did this happen to me?
I should have known better.
I’ve messed everything up.
What if this happens again?
I’m never going to get over this.
There must be something wrong with me.
And suddenly we’re no longer only experiencing what happened.
We’re experiencing what happened plus everything our mind has decided it means.
And if we repeat that story often enough, it can begin to feel less like a story and more like an absolute truth.
That’s one of the reasons I love meditation, mindfulness and therapeutic work with the subconscious mind.
Not because they somehow make us immune to pain. They don’t.
The first arrow will still occasionally come flying our way.
But we can learn to create a little bit of space between what happens and what we do with what happens.
A moment to notice.
A moment to breathe.
A moment to become curious about the story our mind is beginning to create.
And perhaps, in that moment, we don’t automatically pick up the bow.
That little gap can change so much.
Because we might not always get to choose the first arrow.
But we can become much more conscious about whether we fire the second. 💚
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The two arrows
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