Mindfulness for beginners: How you create emotional suffering

Daily, we deal with situations that bring us dissatisfaction and disappointments. Everyday events have an impact on our mood and how we feel about life. Some days can feel more satisfactory and positive than others. Maybe you think that you were lucky, blessed, that the stars align for you, you had a good day. On the other hand, when you feel that you had a miserable day, you think that people were wrong, that you had a curse, and luck was against you.

What if I challenged that interpretation of the reasons? What if your perception was the only thing that created a good day or a snot so good day?

If you could recall the last day, you felt you had a good day. What happened on that day? Reminisce about what were the things that made your day feel satisfactory to you. On that day, events that evolve suit your preferences, and you felt connected with positive emotions. Very possibly, you felt joy, serenity, safety, and support.

Maybe it was one or more situations that made you feel that it was a joyous day. The moments, people, and situations matched your expectations on what is satisfying for you, even if not all, things were great, you perceived it as a happy day.

Recall a day that you felt was a miserable day. Try to remember what situations transpire that made it a not-so-good day. It is likely that your recall connecting with fear, sadness, loneliness, and anger.

A powerful zen meditation story

There is an old Zen story called the second arrow. In this story, a master is talking to a disciple about emotional suffering.

The master asked the 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.”

If you feel that a day was an unhappy day, you decided to shoot a second arrow. When a disappointing or unsatisfactory situation arose in your day, you chose to interpret it as an adverse event that you had to resist. You decided to create emotional suffering; it was not the event itself. It was how you chose to see it.

Our emotional suffering is a choice when we interpret a situation that we have learned to repel. Everything that you experience is unique to your way of interpretation. The same event can have an opposite or different reaction to other people.

Use your meditation to reflect on this:

It is critical to understand that most times, we do not have control of the first arrow. You and I do not have control of many external factors and people that intercept our lives. That first arrow can cause pain. The second arrow is how we chose to react to the pain that just hit us. As this double arrow is optional, we have control of our reaction.

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