The Two Arrows

I've been thinking about how relationships, mindfulness, and meditation work.  All of them seem to share a striking characteristic.  When everyone is happy, they all seem to flow easily.  But when someone is feeling a strong emotion (e.g., anger, fear, jealousy, sadness), they all seem to get harder. This is perhaps one of the real benefits of working on mindfulness in a supportive group - it's not like we're leaving the world behind.  We bring it with us all the time.  Meditation offers us an opportunity to practice the hard things in a little simpler and safer way, so that then we can practice them in the "real" world more easily later.

So, this is one of the goals of mindfulness: to allow us to go through the ups and downs of daily life with a sense of ease, to gain clarity into what is actually happening so that we can act skillfully and thereby make problems better rather than adding fuel to the fire.  In this spirit, the next several posts will examine aspects of dealing with relationships skillfully, even when we're in the middle of a difficult emotion.

To start, consider this question: How often do we say “You did this to me!” when what we really mean is “I didn’t get what I wanted?"

There is a classic Buddhist parable of the two arrows. In brief, the idea is that most people, when hurt, add to the hurt. If shot with an arrow, we spend a lot of effort focused on wondering why we got shot, how we didn't deserve that, how the person who shot the arrow is a  jerk, what we are going to say when we get in front of him/her, etc.  It's like being struck by a second arrow - the first one is physical and the second is mental.  In contrast, if we are able to maintain our mindfulness and not spin off into a story about our pain, we only get struck by one arrow. (For the geeks, here is the original Sallatha Sutra).

I might even go further than this - once we start down the story road, we not only make ourselves feel worse (the second arrow), but then we are more likely to do something that makes the situation worse.  This is a third arrow!

We need to take responsibility for our emotions. We need to stop thinking that something outside us will make everything better. All you can work with is yourself, and this is true even for recurring situations. If you have a difficult boss who makes your life difficult, it is unlikely that you can change your boss. You can, however, change your reactions, your work habits, or even your job.

If we look a little deeper into any interaction, we will notice that whenever someone does something to you, you are at the same time perceiving it.  To quote Ethan Nichtern's riff on the classic Zen koan, "If a person is an ass and there's no one around to see it, is he still an ass?"

We expect that our perception and our point of view is accurate and that any other observer would agree with our perception. This is called the False Consensus Bias, where we assume that whatever we think/feel, most people would agree with.  The classic study (Ross, Greene, & House, 1977) had people read stories that included a conflict and asked them which solution most people would pick, which one they themselves would pick, and what people who pick each of the two sides would be like.  In general, people estimate that most people would pick the same choice they themselves would, and rated them more positively than people who would pick the other choice.

Attention is a narrow spotlight - look at something in your room right now.  As you focus on that 5% of the room, you can't pay attention to the other 95% of what is actually happening now. Your perception is therefore always 95% wrong, and your memory is even worse (especially once you start telling yourself a story about what just happened). So although we can’t overcome the false consensus bias, we can start to recognize that we never have all the information, and that from the other person’s point of view, maybe you’re the ass. 

In truth, usually no one is the ass. We actually just have different perspectives, attention to different aspects, different goals, different motivations, and different approaches.  But because we assume that everyone else must have the same perspective, goals and approaches, we then decide that anyone not following our script must be being difficult.

If we can begin to see that we are very changeable based on what we pay attention to, it may give us the space to pause before we shoot ourselves with the second arrow.

Working with Anger (and other Strong Emotions)

On the American Buddhists group on the Insight Timer app, a question came up about dealing with strong emotions.  In particular, this colleague asked,  "How do I apply the peace of mind I feel while meditating when I finish my session?  I have anger issues."

There's obviously not one single answer nor is there a simple answer (well, there is - it's practice and time, but that's not a very satisfactory answer at the moment you're feeling the anger). 

In the Buddhist view, emotions have two properties that are co-emergent - wisdom and confusion. That is, when you are feeling an emotion, there is an aspect of wisdom behind it. With anger, it's usually the recognition that something isn't right. The problem is that co-emerging with the wisdom is also ignorance/confusion/clinging - we feel the anger and then (1) believe we have to DO something because of it, (2) believe that our story about it is somehow "real," and (3) our clarity of thinking often gets impaired, so we act unskillfully. So when you are seized by anger, can you separate the wisdom part out from the ignorance part? Can you allow yourself to feel it but not feel the need to act, at least until you've considered what would be a skillful action?

Another way of thinking about using what you find in meditation in the moment may be to focus on the gaps. This is kind of hard to explain in words, especially if you haven't really noticed it in your practice yet, but one thing many people notice in their mindfulness meditation is that there are actually spaces between thoughts, feelings, and impulses to act. In our normal lives we usually just let them run together so that they not only feel continuous, but they feel causal - you said that which caused me to feel this which caused me to say that. But in truth, there can be a gap between all of these parts. Can you find it in the moment? Focusing on that gap can greatly lessen the intensity with which you feel the anger, or can lessen the intensity with which you feel you must react to the feeling or the other person.

These are not the only approaches one could take (e.g., you could try to find compassion for the person annoying you, but I think that's really not realistic for someone struggling with anger issues). You also might want to stop trying to achieve peacefulness in your meditations, and instead begin to do mindfulness of feelings, seeing where anger comes from and where it goes. If you're only using meditation to try to achieve a special state (i.e., peace of mind), then you're not getting everything out of it that you could.  In a sense, meditation doesn't really get "rid" of anything we feel, but it can help us to not be so caught by the feelings that we feel trapped into a habitual pattern.

There's a Lojong slogan that is sometimes translated as "Don't be so trustworthy."  I like this because it encapsulates very simply how we are such creatures of habit.  Something triggers our anger, and we already know how we're going to feel, how we're going to react, and what will come of that - it has a feeling of destiny like a rushing freight train.  This is especially true in our relationships, where we've often spent many years practicing the patterns.  That may be where the real fight is with your anger issues -- there is a habitual trigger and a habitual response.  These conditioned states are the hardest to break, and yet they're so central to our peace (or lack of it).  So the slogan is meant to help us realize that there is a gap between trigger and response, and we don't have to be so trustworthy - don't do what you and everyone else expects you to do.  Do something different.  Maybe it will turn out badly, but maybe it will just be surprising enough to derail the rushing train of habitual events, or at least push it onto a new track to see where that goes.

Ultimately, this isn't the path just for anger issues, but for all of our habitual emotional reactions that keep us stuck in bad patterns (the kleshas).

What Does Meditation Do?

Western stereotypes about meditation are interesting.  People often initially come to meditation because they believe it will bring them bliss, or bring sudden enlightenment, or at least be a relaxing break from the stresses of the day. Yet, instead, it often feels really bad, and people then believe they're doing it wrong or that it doesn't work.  But what does meditation actually do?

There are many answers to this, at many different levels of analysis, but at least in the beginning stages for most new meditators, it allows us to see how the mind works.  It is constantly jumping -- emotions follow thoughts which follow emotions which follow thoughts and on and on ad nauseum.  Sometimes this is called "monkey mind," although I personally think that's somewhat unfair to monkeys.  By recognizing how easy it is to get trapped into this pattern of chasing every thought and feeling to the next, and how difficult it is to slow that pattern, it teaches us that we don't need to put quite so much faith in our thoughts and feelings.  They will all change, even if we try to hold on to them.

This can allow us to not react when under their influence.  We can refrain from automatically reacting.  We can pause briefly and add some space, and perhaps even relax to see what will happen naturally.  This can allow for a much gentler approach both to oneself and to others.

As an example, my girlfriend once told me that she didn't trust me entirely.  She wasn't being unkind or attacking me - it was simply true.  My immediate reaction was to feel hurt and I immediately thought of all sorts of angry things I could say in response or to make a pronouncement about how we couldn't be together then.  But it was bedtime, so instead I lay in bed and let my thoughts and feelings flow as they would until I finally slept (not particularly well).  The next day I was able to express my disappointment with her lack of complete trust, but I could also see how my behaviors had caused it.  She was right not to entirely trust me - I had told her not to in several small ways.  My disappointment was, in fact, equal to hers.  She was disappointed that she wasn't able to trust me completely and to always be feeling as though she might lose this relationship soon.

By recognizing that my immediate thoughts and feelings were not "truth," and indeed were limiting my view as long as I focused on them, I was able to not be trapped into believing I had to act on them at the minute I was thinking/feeling them.  Adding a pause allowed for a better view on the situation, and ultimately meant that we didn't even argue at all - instead, we had a good conversation and a better understanding of each other because of it.

If we consider the stereotypes about the outcomes of meditation, this example doesn't fit any of them.  At no point in this experience did it feel blissful, enlightened, or relaxing to me.  But meditation had allowed me to see the nature of mind, so that the thoughts and feelings didn't feel so solid or overwhelming that I had to do something at the minute I was caught in them.  If I had, it would invariably have been less than skillful and would likely have made the situation worse rather than using the opportunity to make our relationship better.