Understanding Pain
Or: how the Buddhist metaphor of two arrows can help us to avoid unnecessary suffering.
I make about $30,000 per year. My wife makes about the same, and we live in a pretty expensive part of the country.
Don't worry; this isn't a fundraising letter. But as I was reflecting on our finances over the past couple of weeks, it got me thinking about the problem of pain…and how I think a lot of us experience far more suffering than we were ever intended to or designed for.
Every spiritual tradition worth its salt teaches a variation on this essential concept; I particularly like the "second arrow" metaphor of Buddhism. In this metaphor, the first arrow that hits us is a life circumstance: we lose our house, or our spouse leaves us, we become sick. The second arrow is the suffering that we cause ourselves as a result of that life circumstance. As the Buddha writes, "In life, we can’t always control the first arrow. However, the second arrow is our reaction to the first. The second arrow is optional."
I don't know if the Buddha ever goes into detail on the relative size and impact of each arrow. In my own experience, the first arrow—the life circumstance—is like a shot from a bb gun. The second arrow—the stories I tell myself based on the life circumstance, and how I let said circumstance trigger old psychological wounds—is like the shot from a bazooka.
A shot from a bb gun isn't fun. It stings something fierce. But a shot from a bazooka will really mess you up.
I can see this concept at play when I think about my finances. Sometimes I really let that second arrow hit home. I tell myself stories based on my income: that I'm a failure, that I'm worthless, that I'm a bad provider and a bad husband.
Those stories can really mess me up. They can leave me exhausted; wallowing in self-hatred is like running a marathon every day, only without any upside. They can be intensely painful. Feeling worthless and shameful kills my ability to write and to hear from God. It makes me not want to be around anyone else, because I convince myself that I'm hurting them with my very presence; and makes me want nothing so much as an escape from the pain in my own head.
But believing those stories is a choice. I can also choose to see those stories and to consciously recognize them for the lie that they are. I can choose to ignore the siren song of self-loathing and to instead ask God what He thinks of me. I can choose, instead of believing that I am worthless, to see the reality: that I am made in God's own image and that He delights in me as He delights in every single one of us.
And when I choose to go down this path, something remarkable happens. My finances lose their existential sting and become just one more problem to solve. That's it. When I go down this second path—when I consciously choose to take my finger off of the bazooka trigger—I can feel a powerful sense of God's love and joy and peace and connection. Rather than choosing to shatter my internal sense of safety and security, I can find that safety and security in the loving embrace of the divine.
Of course, from that place of peace and love and joy and connection, my finances remain a problem. I want to be able to take my wife to Cancun and send her to graduate school, and that desire isn't going to go away just because God loves us both.
Which brings me to the second point about pain.
Psychology teaches that people change when the pain of the status quo outweighs the pain of change. That's true, but I think we can sometimes fall into a trap of thinking that pain is the only catalyst for change.
In my experience, there's a much bigger catalyst: God.
God is not static. He is always on the move. He is always inviting us to go deeper with him, to step more into our True Identity, to let go of more of our fear/guilt/shame and to step more into the love/joy/peace/connection that He is offering us. He is always inviting us to go deeper in whatever it means to advance His kingdom here on earth.
Which is to say: God can be a powerful catalyst to move.
I've seen this in my own life. When I'm freaking out about money, I can end up paralyzed by self-doubt and exhaustion. That bazooka shot doesn't leave a lot of wisdom left to discern the right next step, nor a lot of energy to take the next step even if I knew it.
But when I can find God's peace and let go of my infantile desire to control everything, when I can stop shooting my own mental health to pieces with a metaphorical bazooka…then I can hear the next step. Sometimes, the next step is to wait. Sometimes, it's to seek Him via prayer or meditation, because there's a lesson that He wants to teach me that is essential to learn before I take more temporal action. And sometimes, the right next step is to take temporal action.
At present, I'm taking action to look for a writing job in my industry. And, because I am taking this action at (what I feel to be is) God's prompting, the process is far more joyful, peaceful, and effective then if I were to simply let my own fear and shame dupe me into trying to reseize control of my life and try to do it all myself.
Trusting in God's providence doesn't require us to do nothing and simply sit on our hands. Instead, it requires turning our actions over to Him; and, from a place of peace and rest, asking God "What do you want me to know/do about this situation right now?"
Or to put it another way: I don't think that second arrow is very useful. Maybe we should all stop shooting ourselves with it.
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