There is an old Buddhist teaching I have come across that stuck with me, because the moment I came across it, something in me recognised it as true.

And it goes something like this: When something painful happens to us, it is as though we are struck by an arrow. It hurts, the way arrows do. This is the first arrow, and much of the time, we cannot avoid it. Life happens. Pain comes. Loss comes. Difficulty arrives unbidden. That first arrow is simply part of being alive.

But then, as the teaching goes, most of us reach for a second arrow. And we fire it into the very same wound.

The second arrow is everything we add to the pain. It is the resisting. The replaying. The “this shouldn’t be happening to me.” It is the anger at ourselves for not coping better, the worry about what it all means, the story we tell about how it will never get better. The first arrow is the thing that happened. The second arrow is what we do to ourselves about it.

And here is what struck me so deeply. So often, the second arrow hurts more than the first.

Think of the last hard thing you went through. Some of the pain was the thing itself. But how much of it was the second arrow? The lying awake. The self-blame. The bracing. The endless turning of it over. We take one wound and we deepen it, again and again, with our own hands. Like there is no ending.

The teaching is not asking us to feel nothing. The first arrow is real, and it is allowed to hurt. We are not meant to pretend it doesn’t. What the teaching offers is gentler than that, and more freeing. It says: you may not be able to stop the first arrow, but the second one, you can begin to lay down – and this is when things begin to shift.

This is not something we master in a day. The second arrow is a deep habit we have build over our lifetime, and habits soften slowly. But simply seeing it changes things. The next time you notice yourself reaching for that second arrow, reloading the self-criticism, the resistance, the worst-case story, you can pause. You can recognise it for what it is. And sometimes, just sometimes, you can choose not to fire it.

That pause is where a great deal of our peace is hidden. Not in a life without first arrows, because no such life exists. But in slowly, and kindly, learning to stop shooting ourselves with the second, easing the conflict that rises from within.

Larisa Sipek