“If your compassion doesn’t include yourself, it is incomplete.”
– Jack Kornfield
“Feeling compassion for ourselves in no way releases us from responsibility for our actions. Rather, it releases us from the self-hatred that prevents us from responding to our life with clarity and balance.”
– Tara Brach
There is a well known mindfulness quote about suffering that tells us we have some power over how we respond to what happens to us: “Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.” In other words, what we do in response to our pain is a major determinant of what happens to us next.
A metaphor in Buddhism, closely related to the above quote, describes our relationship with what happens to us when things get difficult. It is expressed with the idea of two arrows, the first being whatever it is that hurts us. Whether or not there is a second arrow is determined by what we do in response to the first arrow. For example, the first arrow may be your having run over a nail and punctured your tire, to which you may respond by saying to yourself something like “What an idiot I am! Now I’m majorly inconvenienced, I’ll be late for work and I’m going to be out a couple of hundred dollars because of my own stupid carelessness!”
That is the second arrow! It is cruel, hurtful, useless, and completely unnecessary. To avoid the second arrow, we might just shrug with a smile and acknowledge that such things happen all the time to people and that it wasn’t a huge deal. And in that moment, the pain from the first arrow begins to recede. When we do it that way, it is much less damaging because we are not incriminating ourselves.
Let’s take a closer look at the process of shooting a second arrow: First of all, we have learned that response from our parents, who registered displeasure (at best) whenever we did something they determined we were not supposed to do. By the time we grew up and they were no longer around to shame us or admonish us, we had unconsciously taken on the job ourselves. But there is a significant difference: At least when our parents responded to us in a reasonable way, they were trying to do their job of shaping us, encouraging us to become strong, healthy members of the culture. Ostensibly, they were attempting to teach us adaptive behaviors.
But when we shoot the second arrow, it teaches us nothing. It is borne out of the dysfunctional feeling we’ve learned to associate with our responses to mistakes, without any of the lessons that a justifiable response from one of our parents might have included. “This is for your own good,” they often said, even when it wasn’t, at times even seeming to evidence real regret over the pain we experienced while they were disciplining us. (Maybe…)
When we beat ourselves up for falling short, the effort utilizes critical, negative energy with no redeeming qualities. It is NOT for our own good. The second arrow becomes part of a side to our relationship with ourselves that avoids compassion, kindness and patience, instead dwelling in perfectionism, impatience and intolerance, based on our having inaccurately taken on a job that wasn’t ours to begin with.
Whenever we are pierced by a first arrow, we are presented with an opportunity to be kind to ourselves. When we refrain from directing anger and disgust toward ourselves in response to the initial hurt, the healing can begin and we may become better at being helpful to ourselves through difficult times. It may motivate you to think about all the second arrows you have shot into yourself through your life and feel their collective uselessness.
Self-compassion is never more appropriate than when were are hurting. But it requires that we slow ourselves down. The knee-jerk response to the first arrow will be negative until we change our habitual way of responding, which takes time and depends on our being able to stop, take a good look at where we are and decide the best way of responding. There are no disadvantages to being kind to ourselves when we’re down. Let us try to remember that when the next arrow appears.
If this makes you remember a second arrow story, I’d love to hear it! Please hit the free consult button!
