The Second Arrow

It is said the Buddha once asked a student, 

“If a person is struck by an arrow, is it painful? 
If the person is struck by a second arrow, is it even more painful?”

He then went on to explain, “In life, we can’t always control the first arrow.

However, the second arrow is our reaction to the first. 

This second arrow is optional.”

Story phrasing by Anja Tanhane

I have been working on healing my thumb lately. Two years ago, when we were in the middle of house hunting, I had started to pick at my finger whenever I felt stress coming. Without getting too graphic, the damage I did to my nail matrix meant that the new nail growing out would be disturbingly marred by jagged ridges. Even though I had periods of relative calm after we fully settled in, I could never really get to a point where I let my thumb heal completely.

Even though in the past few months there have been more stressful days than not, I’m proud to say that I’m only a few millimeters away from seeing a smooth nail. It is a point of pride for me to look at my thumb and not have it resemble a canyon of despair carved by months of relentless emotional damage.

I cannot say fully what has changed recently, only that this is a problem that I have been dealing with as long as I can remember. This is the first time that I was truly able to find a different way to manage the uncomfortable feelings without resorting to physical pain to distract me from the mental ones. And this is the mindset that I want to share with you today.

The same impulses that drove me to damage my thumb—that urge to do something, anything, when faced with discomfort—show up everywhere in my life, especially in jiu jitsu.

I’m someone who is inherently uncomfortable with conflict. One might think it’s a bit unusual for someone like me to do martial arts, but actually, it’s the reason why I stay. Conflict in a combat situation, even in something as artificial as the sports context, is something that brings out the best and worst in me. I’m fortunate to be able to use conflict as a way of looking at myself honestly and seeing both the delightful positive and the brutally negative sides of me, and everything that is in between.

What I’m learning now is how to deal with conflict in a way that best serves me. When I sense that conflict or even mere dissonance is occurring, my default reaction is to freeze (do nothing) or fawn (stuff down my feelings/try to create outer peace). To make a long story short: the freeze response has not served me in the long run because it results in deep-seated trauma that eventually destroys me from the inside, and the fawn response generates resentment in me that eventually geysers into a rage that is not unlike the fury of an un-burped kombucha bottle.

Which leads me to the third response from conventional psychology: fight. In some situations, fighting is the right response for me. Pushing back against bullying is important. Standing up against micro-aggressions, even unintentional ones, is important. However, when it comes to my emotional state, shaking up a kombucha bottle that is already overpressured has often simply made things worse.

Most people would feel that it is obvious not to shake a pressurized container before opening it. Yet, when it comes to facing one’s emotions, it is a much more difficult—and subtle—task to consider that what is needed is not necessarily more but less.

A few months ago, before the Virginia IBJJF, I told my sports psychologist that I didn't want to spend the moments before competing shaking up my can of nerves so they could explode in my face, which I had done at Pans. After patiently listening to me recount the tumultuous 72 hours before my match, she made a shockingly simple, but profound, observation.

“You're already doing a hard thing,” she said. “Going to a different environment, putting yourself out there publicly, knowing that you might fail—those are already hard things. So maybe…you don't need to make it even harder.”

When I feel stress from the pressure of competing (the first arrow), I feel the need to pile on additional thoughts, judgment, and meaning to the situation (the second arrow). I pile on because the chaos I create in my own mind feels more manageable than the chaos around me.

My sports psychologist helped me see that the piling on wasn’t inevitable—it was a choice. Years of conditioning had taught my brain to default to this response whenever uncertainty arose. But the longer I had relied on this pattern, the scarier it became to try something different. She challenged me to consider what would happen if I simply acknowledged the stressful situation for what it was, rather than trying to control it through mental gymnastics. This shift from managing to accepting, she suggested, would leave me feeling far less exhausted.

In other words, I could make the second arrow optional.

But understanding this concept and applying it on the mats are two different things. In training, I always work with a partner or opponent, depending on the setting. They may fire a first arrow, and it hits, in the form of a guard pass, serious submission attempt, or an imminent face plant moment. Their arrow is sharp and it exposes me. It hurts. I bleed.

The second arrow, though, is more deadly. It is crafted to fly accurately into the darkest parts of myself. Anxiety forms the nock, holding the arrow in place. Shame creates the fletching that effortlessly helps it fly. Fear of failure makes up the heavy shaft, and at the point—my fear of being worthless. This is what turns a simple guard pass into an entire testimony of my skill. This is what turns an off-balance into something that could send me to the shadow realm.

But more and more often, I try to remind myself that the second arrow is optional.

I remind myself that feeling unpleasant sensations from the first arrow does not mean I am weak, stupid, or lazy.

The first arrow hurts because I am human.

The journey of identifying these second arrows will likely always be a work in progress, though with time and practice, I'm confident it will become easier. I'm confident too that if you've made it this far, you are also inspired to identify how your second arrows are landing.

And maybe, just maybe, you might see me in the distance, with two (fully intact) thumbs up, cheering your progress on.