Why does part of you not want the pain to stop? Pain is inevitable. Suffering is the second arrow, and you fire that one.
The first arrow lands and it hurts. Then we load the bow ourselves. Every replay in your head, every post, every phone call to a friend, is another arrow into the same wound. And here is the uncomfortable bit. The suffering loop feeds us, because it makes us the hero of our own story. Nobody wants to hear about the good day and the view over the ocean. Everybody leans in for the battle. I have been the victim hero for the last few weeks and I know exactly how it works.
One thing to try: When a painful thought comes back, ask one question. Is this taking me anywhere? If not, it is the second arrow.
In this episode
(1:42) The council motion, and the word I actually said
(2:49) I think you meant albatross
(5:23) Thinking about them with other people
(6:37) Every replay loads the bow again
(7:51) Pain does not mean your practice is failing
(9:12) Life will still dish it up to you
(11:17) Why the suffering loop feeds us
(13:01) Nobody leans in for the good day
(16:28) Is this the second arrow
With gratitude to
Adam, Alison, Anna, Diana, Dominique, Dova, Ellen, Fran, Jenna and Mia, Jennifer, Jude, Kellee, Kylin, Marcie, Rita, Simon, Stefan, Steven and Sue
Support the podcast and join the Weekly Calm: stevenwebb.uk
Thank you for listening.
Steven
The question this answers
Why does the same hurt keep coming back when nothing new has happened?
Somebody said something to you weeks ago. It is done. And still there you are at eleven at night, running it again, sharpening the reply you never gave, checking the wound to see if it hurts. It does.
I have one of these. My first proper speech in the council chamber, a motion about single use plastic, and I meant to say albatross and said pterodactyl in front of full council. It went through unanimously. I think they felt sorry for me. Years on, I still feel sick before I stand up to speak.
So this is not an episode from the far side of it. I recorded it because I needed it.
The heart of it
Pain is the first arrow. Life fires it and you cannot dodge it.
The second arrow is every replay, every phone call, every post. You fire that one.
The loop keeps going because it feeds us. While you are battling something, you get to be the hero.
Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. The Buddha put it as two arrows. The first one is fired at you. The second one you load yourself, and so is the third and the tenth.
We are a very good shot, too.
Life's arrows don't always land, but ours do.
Then there is the part people do not like when I say it out loud, and I did not like it either when I first heard it. The hero needs a battle. When I did my five hundred miles round Cornwall, there was a beautiful day, quiet roads, warm, the sea out in front of me, and I could barely bring myself to ask anybody for a donation. On the cold wet miserable days, no problem at all. Nobody leans in for the good day.
I have been the victim hero for the last few weeks myself, ill and worn down by the heat, and I knew it while I was doing it.
None of this makes you faulty. Going back over the bad thing is how our ancestors stayed alive, and it still has a job to do. It only becomes suffering when the replaying stops taking you anywhere.
The mind cannot think its way out of a problem it did not cause.
One small thing to try
When a painful thought comes round again, ask it one question. Is this taking me anywhere?
If it is, stay with it. There may be something you actually need to do. If it is not, you have just caught yourself loading the bow, and the catching is the whole skill. You do not have to make it stop. Noticing is plenty to start with.
There is a meditation that goes with this one, The Second Arrow, if you would rather be walked through it than think about it.
Questions people ask
Are you saying my pain is my own fault?
No. The first arrow is not yours and I would never say it was. What is yours is the thirty that follow, and only because you are the one holding the bow.
I do not make myself the hero. Do I?
That is exactly what I said when I first heard this, and it annoyed me. Try it the other way round. When somebody last asked how you were, did you tell them about the good bits, or the battle?
Does feeling this much pain mean my practice is not working?
No. When you get more in touch with what you feel, you tend to feel more, not less. What changes is how long you stay there.
Read along
The transcript
It follows the audio. Press any line to jump there.
pain · suffering · acceptance · disability
Read the transcript
So, on this episode, I want to talk about suffering and our pain. And if there's
one thing I've learned in my life is pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. I know, I think it was
the Buddha or someone like that said.
And I always remember one of the very first times I spoke in the council chamber.
So I was on Truro City Council at this point. I'd only been on there a few weeks. The very
first meeting I never turned up to because I. I made some excuse, I said, like I was away that
weekend, I wasn't at all, I was just so terrified to turn up. So I went to the next meeting
I never spoke for several weeks, several months. And finally there was an idea of trying to
reduce single use plastic in Truro. And I seen a an amazing film, the. It was called the Albatross.
And I wanted to show it in the cinema, to show it to all the local um restaurants and cafes
and things like that.
And I put a motion to council to see if we could write to Truro Cinema to see if they
would show it for free and we could invite everybody, because the film depicts the way the Albatrosses pick up
all the plastic in the oceans right over there in Midway island, where there isn't many people at all, unless
you go there for a certain reason. And they filmed them not being able to take off because they cannot
bring it up, and because they stay on the island, they starve.
So that was the story I wanted to tell So I put the motion there. It was full council. I
remember exactly where I was sat. I was so nervous it come to my part. And the mayor said, and
comes the web do you want to speak to your motion? And I said, yeah. And I tried to tell
them the story and because I store words in my brain in the same way that are similar words,
like I asked someone to put my lid on one day and I meant my top, you know lid top.
I can see where they were both stored the same place. And I looked up and said the birds were
pterodactyls. It was a big bird, you know, And I didn't realise until
probably several sentences on I was thinking, no, I didn't, surely I didn't. And I got my way through it.
And after, I think it was voted unanimously, yes to go ahead, I think they felt sorry for me because
I fumbled it that badly. Although they said I did a good job, I. One of the councillors one of
the veteran councillors come over to me and said, I think you meant Albatross. I went, did I say pterodactyl?
He went, you did? I said, oh, I just wanted to die. And then he popped in soul and He
looked over and in his deep voice he goes, and you know an albatross is just a large seagull, don't
you I'm like, I'm sure it's not, but I'm not going to argue. And for years, even now, I still
go over it and I still panic. So whenever I'm going to talk in the chamber or talk in council
or go to speak out loud, I'm terrified that feeling. I felt sick and I. I still suffer
today because of that. And that's what I want to talk about on today's podcast is how much we suffer
when it comes down to the
pain and the suffering, the differences, and how we can reduce some of that suffering. And it's probably a podcast
I need at the moment, and that's why I'm doing it. So welcome. This is Stillness in the Storms and
I'm Steven Webb, your host, and over the next 10 minutes, I'll explain all about that. But before that, I
want to say thank you to some very special, incredible people. So this podcast would not exist
without these incredible people. So thank you. Adam, Allison, Anna, Diana,
Dominique, Dover, Ellen, Fran, Jenna, Amir, Jennifer, Jade,
Kelly, Killen,
Marcia, Rita, Simon, Stefan, Steven and Sue. Now, I know there's quite a long list there, but it has been
two weeks, nearly three weeks, I think, since I've done a podcast. So thank you, guys. I've always said I
will not put adverts in any of my podcast or any of my inner peace meditations. So if you'd like
to support, just treat me to a coffee head over to StevenWebb.uk but
getting back on with the show, talking about, how many times have you read an email and then you repeat
it to yourself hours later? Or you phone a friend like in the who Wants to Be a Millionaire? And
you repeat it and you go over in your head and every time you think about it, or someone cheats
on you or someone does something wrong, and you just. You
just feel that pain every single time you think about it. I remember when I first split up with somebody
I was deeply in love with, and that hurt. That really did hurt badly. But then I would think about
them with other people. I would think about what they said to me and every single thing that I said
in a relationship, and every single time this cut really deep. It was really painful. And if someone says something
quite harsh, to me, or I make a mistake, it goes on in my head for hours and hours. And
I go to bed at night and I cannot put it down. And this is what the Buddha meant by
the second arrow. So the first arrow is the pain that happens. Life's gonna
fire the first arrow. You cannot avoid that. As much as we'll say, why me? And, you know,
we'll always be a bit annoyed by it, and we'll always feel like a bit of a victim him especially
when we think we don't deserve it.
But then the second arrow is the one we fire, the second arrow is the one we pick up. We
load the bow, and every time we think about every time we go over it in our heads, every time
we post on Facebook or phone a friend or moan to somebody else or just trying to work it out
in our heads, always creates a feeling as well. And that's the suffering.
The pain is inevitable. The suffering is optional. I think it was the Buddha that said. And he explained it
by the two arrows.
And one thing that we're incredibly good at with the second arrow is the aim.
You know, sometimes life misses with the first arrow. Sometimes it's a close call was like, yes, I got away
with that one. But the second arrow, because we're the one firing it internally, it never misses. We're a damn
good aim with that. So and And I think that's where a lot of the suffering comes.
I gotta be honest, my life's taught me that no matter how much pain I go through, I'm still going
to go through more pain. There's still going to be new things happen I'm still going to lose on something,
not get a job or something like that. And it's still going to be painful. But if I stay there,
that's when the suffering really does hit
home. And just because you have pain, it doesn't mean your practice isn't working. It doesn't mean
that you're sitting down and you're meditating and all that, and you're going to live happily ever after and you're
never going to have any kind of suffering again. Just because you're feeling pain, that doesn't mean your practice isn't
working. Your meditation isn't working In actual fact, you'll probably feel a lot more pain when you get more in
touch with your feelings, when you see your thinking a little more, when you become aware of your deeper feelings,
you'll end up feeling the pain around the world a lot more and a lot deeper.
But it won't stay so long. You won't suffer so long with it. You'll recognise that, well, this is something
I can be aware of, but I'm not going to fire the second arrow and do this to myself.
But I can still be really hurt by some of the terrible things that are going on in the world.
Some of the news we hear. It's not a matter of disconnecting and feeling no pain whatsoever. This is, I
think, sometimes where the spiritual realm gets it wrong. Sometimes. It's like, oh, it's all about living in place, And
I'm going to turn off the news, and I'm going to avoid all kinds of pain and all that. I'm
going to live happily ever after. No life will dish shit up to you. You know what one thing is
guaranteed is we're all going to die
And you know, someone around us can die we're going to have grief, our bodies are going to break down.
They're not going to be as good as they were. You know, I don't know anyone 60 years old jumps
out of bed and goes, yeah, I'm just like a 20 year old and I don't know anybody. 50, 60,
Like went yeah I totally took advantage of my body when it was useful and everything like that. And now
I I'm totally happy with settling into the aches and pains every single day. And
we can reduce those kind of things just a little bit, but you're not going to get rid of the
pain. The difference is if you lie in bed in the morning complaining about the pain you're going to get
when you move your arms. And don't move your arms. And I'm talking about me now,
literally lying in bed in the morning with my arms and my shoulders. It's like, oh, they're going to feel
like they're going to break when I move.
But once I do it, once I get on with it, it's fine. The suffering goes away. It disappears because
you get on with it. And I do recognise that we get stuck in a suffering loop because it's
one of the things that feeds us as humans. Because as humans our lives are quite messy.
It's a different subject really. But like Ai, we're trying to have that perfect everything at the moment with
Ai, and it's terrible because humans are not perfect and that's what makes them brilliantly human. We're taking the human
side out of things and. But going back to the suffering and pain, and
very much we
get stuck in that suffering loop. And that suffering loop feeds us. And I'll tell you how it feeds us.
Because we become the hero of our own journey. Bear with me on this. I've spoke about this a
few times, but whenever I say this to someone in person,
I always get quite a reaction. It's Like, me? No, not me. Well, I'm saying you and everybody. I'll tell
you why. Because when we are suffering, when we're going through a really bad time,
we have this inner feeling inside of us which is brilliant. A mechanism that absolutely works, that
makes us feel like the hero that's battling through, you know? How you don't Yeah I'm doing good. I'm doing
all right. You know, it's a struggle, but I'm still here. And we still feel like we're winning the war.
We're in the middle of the battle, but that's the hero in us. But
the problem is, if life is really easy, then what's that hero got to do?
That one of the last things that hero wants is an easy life. Because if life is easy, then
we've got nothing to really go. No, I'm battling through. And I'll give you an example. When I was doing
my 500 miles around Cornwall on the really sunny days, and I remember one particular day up near Salt house
it's a really sunny day. The roads are really quiet. It was really warm, not too hot. And I was
like, I'm doing this. I'm raising money. I'm loving this. This is, like, so awesome. You know, if I was
doing this and I'd pay to do this, this is just the best day. The view out over the ocean.
And and then it's almost like you don't want to ask for the money. You don't want to say, oh,
donate. But when the day is raining and when the day is, like, miserable and cold and you're battling through,
it's like, it brings out a hero, brings out that toughness in us. And I think we need a bit
of that sometimes. So I think the suffering feeds that in us, and it keeps an adrenaline there
that we're doing okay.
We're doing good. And I don't see a problem with that, because I frame every single story in my life
as I'm a hero Of course I am. I'm the centre of my story. You cannot not be the centre
of your story. You cannot have an opinion of somebody else. You can only have an opinion of yourself. You
can only have your own perspective. You can try and simulate other perspectives. You can see another
perspective, but you cannot truly ever see. You can't truly ever be another perspective. When you come back to
looking at it, and so
that's why I do believe we come at everything as you know, we're here, we're battling through, we're doing okay.
And when life is really good, it doesn't serve us well, it doesn't serve the hero in us.
And I hope you're not offended by this, because I was offended by this when I heard about we frame
everything as a hero it was like not me. No. And the more I think about, the more I become
aware of it. Absolutely me, you know? How are you doing Steven Yeah I'm okay. Despite all my pain, despite
all my spasms and despite all my. It's like my life really isn't that bad um you know, but
we compare it with each other and we do what we do. So I've
gone off on a little bit of a tangent now, but it is the same kind of thing. And I
just wanted to. Because I haven't scripted this um podcast forgot what it's called. I haven't even scripted this
podcast or anything. I just wanted to talk about the two arrows and what the Buddha says and how much
of our life that we cause the suffering. And I believe we do. I think back to my life. How
much of my life have I suffered through my sulking, through my cutting my nose off to spite my face,
making decisions because I want to. I want it to be tougher than what it would normally be. It. There's
almost something in that remembering and we I was gonna say
regurgitating and I suppose we are in some way.
It has a purpose, though, in evolution. Because in evolution, if we don't go over what could happen to
us and the bad things, if we don't consolidate it in our minds in some way we're going to repeat
the bad things. It makes sense. We lived in for two three hundred thousand years We lived with having to
hunt in forests and in open areas. And we had to remember to not do the bad things. When we
seen our friends arms ripped off, we got to remember not to do that and we've got to repeat it,
we've got to go back and tell that story. So I'm not saying we should never repeat it, and we
should never think about it. I'm just saying, if it isn't serving you,
if it isn't putting you towards where you need to go,
start to think, is this the second arrow that I'm firing? And am I doing the suffering? Am I causing
the suffering now?
And I've recorded the meditation that goes with this um podcast because I
think it's just nice to sit back and recognise a time when someone cut us up in a road or
someone said something to us that wasn't very nice and they were projecting their lives. And then we just repeat
it again and again in our heads. And like I said earlier, we are really good aim. You know, I've
never failed with that second arrow to land it because it's always on us. It's always on us.
And the mind cannot think its way out of a problem it did not cause.
It's really worth remembering that.
So that's my podcast this week. I'm sorry, it's been almost three weeks that I haven't done one.
I have. I've been the hero for three weeks, battling a little bit of illness and the heat and things
like that. And I've been the victim hero day in and day out for the last few weeks. I'm feeling
a little bit better now,
just before the new heat wave comes in. I hope you're doing well. We got a lot of forest fires
in Europe and America and all at the moment, and I think we now realise what Australia goes through when
they have the forest fires or the bush fires I Can't remember what you called out over there
um But anyway, look, thank you for being there. Thank you for allowing me to be the hero um I
say that with a really open heart because I think when we realise we frame everything as the hero
from our own perspective, I think it opens up doors for us to realise and we stop suffering a little
bit more. So your homework this week. Homework. Your
homework this week is to do the meditation. There'll be a link in the show notes, but also, just
consider how many times you repeat what people say to you and as if
we're going to solve it, as if we're going to get them back or as if we're going to improve
it in some way or justify it. Very often it's their problem. It's what they did. They're they're the ones
projecting. Well, it always is. You know, we can only ever do that. And you think of how many times
you've said something wrong in the heat of the moment, and then you suffer because you repeat it back to
yourself. And, why did I do that? Why did I do that? And, yeah, life sucks that life is
Life is pain. Life is to some degree suffering. But we don't have to suffer entirely.
We don't have to suffer anywhere near as much as we suffer with shooting our own arrows in our own
feet or wherever we shoot our arrows um So I just want to say thank you again to all the
donators. People that leave a review. You guys are absolutely awesome. If you're not part of my weekly Calm newsletter.
I
haven't done it for two weeks, but I'm going to do it after this podcast I'm Going to write it.
I enjoy writing that. It's just, yeah, like I say I've been a bit of a victim last two weeks
um and I'm coming out the hero, so that's enough for me for now. Just want to say thank you
to You're awesome. And you can watch this over on Youtube now. Just look for still on us in the
Storms Youtube channel and the link will be below as well, if you want to. I don't know if you
want to watch me stay in these words, but anyway, head over to StevenWebb.uk all the links are there.
Take care and thank you for sitting with me and I love you.
