The Second Arrow

Desiree Matloob
7 min readAug 23, 2017

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There’s a concept called sadameh in Farsi. It means injury, hurt, or pain. Up until two days ago, I thought it referred specifically to future pain or damage. That’s the only way I’d heard it used growing up, as warnings for what might happen if I take a particular course of action. I shouldn’t lift something heavy, because my back would feel pain (or sadameh) in the future. I shouldn’t run on hills, because my knees would also feel sadameh.

There’s another concept called torshideh. It literally translates to “pickled,” but refers to a single woman past her prime. In traditional Persian Jewish society, there’s no question I would fall into this category as a 28-year-old. Even if the terminology is somewhat outdated, and even as many old-world mindsets have made their overdue transitions into the modern era, the cultural pressure on Persian Jewish girls my age to find a suitable husband sooner (or yesterday) remains.

I bring these two words up because they are part of a crucial realization I had this past December: that much of our lives are shaped by the stories that we tell ourselves, and the fears that are driving them.

These stories can be inherited from family, community, or friends; they can be lessons we’re told from those we consider to be wise, be they religious leaders or successful professionals; and they can be adopted as a result of our own prior experience.

It is incredibly fascinating to sit back and take stock of how many of our stories about life are motivated by fear of something in the future. I’ve even begun to see fear lying underneath the subtlest of actions. Think about when you’re not in control of when you’ll eat your next meal (maybe while on a retreat, or highly structured event). Do you find yourself overeating at your current meal for fear of being hungry before the next meal? Do you reject certain experiences, like reading depressing news or volunteering at a shelter, because you fear they will make you feel sad? Do you ever stick with a situation that isn’t ideal, because you fear that the alternative might be worse?

We’re subconsciously or consciously always on the lookout for any threat to our security and then preoccupied with how to eliminate it. Because so much of the world around us encourages us to listen to this fear, it begins to feel natural, and it’s what motivates us to take actions towards living a happy life. Or so the story goes.

The meditation hall at the December Vipassana course in Occidental, CA [via Bhavana Traveler]

The 10-Day Vipassana Retreat

The realization that so many of my thoughts and actions are motivated by deep-seated fears came to me during the 10-day silent Vipassana meditation retreat I went on last December. 10 days of sitting meditating cross-legged on the floor for 10 hours a day is not to be taken lightly, and the magnitude of pain I felt was not something I had anticipated. It’s important to note that many people report back that pain wasn’t an issue for them during the retreat. For me, it was the issue.

In between sessions, you would see fellow meditators stretching like their lives depended on it, thrusting their legs over any free banister and quickly revolving through a series of yoga poses before the bell rang time. There was no stretching (and at times, no movement) allowed in the meditation hall, so these brief intermissions were taken very seriously. The fear of the pain we would feel was not irrational; we had just felt it in the previous session, and the one before that. We became like warriors preparing for the inevitable brutality of the battlefield that awaited us.

As early as the second day of sitting, I began to have certain thoughts about the physical pain I was feeling. I couldn’t stop obsessing over the future sadameh of sitting with this much pain, and all the very well intentioned stories I had internalized growing up started coming back.

What if I’m permanently damaging my knees? What if I’m permanently damaging my back? What if I’ll need months or years of physical therapy to recover? What if I won’t be able to walk or run without pain, even a little? What if this comes back to bite me when I’m much older?

On the retreat, we were taught that every emotion is felt somewhere in the body. With an afflictive emotion, it might be knots in your stomach, a tightness in your chest, maybe heat or heaviness in your face, or a burning sensation in your eyes. There is always some bodily sensation attached to the mental realization of the emotion. There’s a reason it’s called feeling sad. You literally do feel it.

In my case, I was not only feeling the physical pain in my knees and back, but also the psychological pain of the fear that came along with it.

The dharma talks given in the evening emphasized that resisting certain bodily sensations or craving other ones only led to more suffering, just like resisting certain life events and craving other ones led to more suffering. Could we sit with what was and accept it, instead of running away or wishing it wasn’t so?

In Buddhism, the first arrow is inevitable. The second arrow is optional.

The Second Arrow of Fear

There’s a well-known concept in Buddhism called the second arrow. The pain of the current experience itself is the first arrow. It’s inevitable and out of your control. But then there’s the pain of the thoughts and reactions to the event — that’s the second arrow, the unnecessary suffering we cause ourselves by resisting what is happening here and now.

I began to notice during the retreat that often in my life when I was going through a painful experience, the second arrow I attached to it was more painful than the first one. Fearing the implications of being torshideh and single after a break up, being upset at myself for wasting time rather than offering up self-compassion — these were the second arrows that made it so much worse.

Of course, fear-based second arrows are the hardest to ignore, especially when they are born out of stories from people I trust or from past experience. The fears feel legitimate.

But what I’ve come to realize is that there is no point in attaching a value to fear, such as “legitimate fear” or “illegitimate fear,” for the simple fact that no one, including the wisest of people, is a fortune teller. At the end of the day, fear is a fictional story, just like any other story we make up in our head. The only reality behind fear is the sensation we feel in our body as we experience it. It is this sensation that we need to recognize and accept, and not the story itself.

Back in the meditation hall that December, I thought my fear was entirely legitimate. I’d experienced knee pains before from running downhill while at Berkeley, and had to suffer through months of physical therapy just to get to a point where I could run no more than two miles without feeling pain.

I had learned over the first few days that wishing the pain wasn’t there, or worrying that it would affect me long-term, made it worse. It was then that I started to notice all the second arrows I had attached to moments of pain in my life, including this one. I made a decision in that moment to not live in fear, a resolution that has followed me throughout this year. I decided that during the next hour-long sit, I wasn’t going to change my posture no matter how badly it started hurting. I wasn’t going to give into the stories, no matter how real they felt.

I will caveat this by saying that everyone’s body is different, and we know when to listen to our own body’s signal for danger. I happened to know that the danger arose not from my body but from my mind, and that limiting stories were once again entering my head with what they believed were earnest intentions of protecting me. But I told myself I would not move, I would not give in to the fear of what this would mean for my body’s future.

During that hour, the pain in my upper back became so excruciating I felt like I was being pierced by a rod and scalded by a hot iron at the same time. The pain in my legs became so intense they started to shake. One leg went numb. And then the next. And I sat there and accepted it. Through it all, I reminded myself that these were just sensations, and that like all sensations, they would arise and eventually pass away.

Though the physical pain didn’t pass until Goenka’s chanting came, signaling the end of the session, my acceptance of the pain had made it significantly less painful. That was a turning point for me.

Dhamma Manda, the site of my upcoming Vipassana course in Kelsyeville, CA

Pain Is Inevitable; Suffering Isn’t

Life is truly a gift that was bestowed upon all of us, and it’s a fact we have to remember through times of difficulty. But with all the beauty and joy life brings, it will also bring painful emotions like fear and sadness for each and every one of us. That is inevitable.

What’s not inevitable is our relationships to these emotions, whether we accept the present moment or whether we buy into the stories of how it should be and wish that it were different. Whether we choose to sit with the pain or whether we agonize about how awful it will be at a given point in the future.

If there’s anything I learned on the Vipassana retreat in December, it’s that to be fully open to the battlefield of life, you must learn to leave the second arrow behind.

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