On the suffering we add to suffering
There’s a moment many of us know well. Something goes wrong. Not catastrophically, just ordinarily wrong. You’re late for something that mattered. You said something that didn’t quite land right. You forgot, again, to do the thing you promised yourself you’d do.
The difficulty itself, the lateness, the clumsy words, the forgotten task, that’s the first arrow. Uncomfortable, yes. But manageable.
Then comes the second arrow. The one you fire at yourself.
I’m so disorganised. This always happens. What must they think of me? I really should have known better.
And suddenly what was a brief, ordinary difficulty has become something heavier: a verdict on who you are.
This teaching comes from the Buddha, and it is disarmingly simple. Pain, he observed, is inevitable. It is part of being alive, part of loving people, part of trying things that matter to you. That original difficulty is the first arrow. It is not something we can always avoid. But the second arrow is different: the suffering we add on top, through self-criticism, rumination, judgement. That one we often fire ourselves.
It is a teaching I return to again and again, both in my own practice and in the groups I teach. I have watched it land differently for different people, but it almost always lands. For one participant, it was the recognition of a pattern she had never named before: that almost every difficult moment in her week arrived with a companion, a voice that told her she hadn’t handled things well enough, hadn’t been patient enough, should somehow have managed better. The difficulty was real. But the second arrow was making it heavier.
What makes this teaching so useful is that it doesn’t ask us to pretend the first arrow doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t tell us to look on the bright side, or to be grateful, or to rise above. It simply invites us to notice: is this difficulty I’m feeling the original thing itself, or is some of it something I’ve added?
What the Second Arrow Looks Like
We don’t always recognise the second arrow when it arrives. Sometimes it’s obvious: a harsh inner voice that shows up quickly after something goes wrong, ready with its verdict. Sometimes it’s subtler, a background hum of low-level self-criticism that we’ve lived with so long we’ve stopped noticing it as something separate from ourselves.
It can arrive as physical tension, the jaw that tightens as we replay a conversation, the shoulders that creep upward as we mentally rehearse tomorrow’s difficulties. It can arrive as withdrawal, the instinct to go quiet and disappear into the story of our own inadequacy for a while.
I know this territory from the inside. There have been periods in my own life when the second arrow flew almost automatically, before the first one had even landed properly. A difficult situation at work would barely register before I was already asking myself what I should have done differently, whether I was cut out for it, whether I would ever be enough. It added a layer of suffering on top of what was already hard. And the practice, slowly, was learning to notice the difference between the two.
Finding the Gap
The good news is that the second arrow, unlike the first, is something we can work with.
Mindfulness doesn’t remove the first arrow. The difficult thing still happened; the loss is still real, the mistake still stings. But with practice, something begins to shift: a small but significant gap opens between the difficulty and the layer of self-judgement we’re used to piling on top of it.
That gap is where choice lives.
I think of a woman in one of my groups who described using a short breathing practice in the immediate aftermath of a hard moment at the hospital that had left her shaken. She hadn’t reached for it in the moment itself, but afterwards, when the second arrow was already airborne: the self-criticism, the replaying, the wondering whether she’d handled it right. The pause didn’t dissolve the difficulty. But it gave her, she said, permission to change what she did next. To put the second arrow down. Another participant described it as moving herself from what she called the red zone to the yellow zone, not calm exactly, but no longer consumed. Present again, and more able to meet what came next.
That, quietly, is a different way to live.
A Practice to Try
The next time something goes wrong, something small to begin with, see if you can notice the two layers.
The first: what actually happened. The event, the pain, the difficulty as it is.
The second: what you’re saying to yourself about it. The judgements, the extrapolations, the stories about what it means about you.
You don’t need to stop the second arrow. You don’t need to argue with it or push it away. Just noticing it as the second arrow, as something added, is often enough to soften it a little.
And sometimes, a little is everything.
If you’d like to explore these kinds of practices in a welcoming space, my Thursday evening drop-in is open to everyone, online or in person in Barnet, 6.15pm, no experience needed. You can find out more and book via North London Yoga.
Ruth McDonald is a BAMBA-registered mindfulness teacher. She teaches weekly drop-in sessions and works with individuals and groups in London and online.