Ep #194: The Second Arrow

What if the biggest source of your suffering isn't what happened to you, but the story you've been telling yourself afterward? In this episode, I share a powerful conversation I had with my son on the golf course that became a profound reminder of how often we create unnecessary suffering by turning life's setbacks into judgments about ourselves. Drawing from the Buddhist teaching of the "second arrow," I explore how our thoughts, beliefs, and interpretations often hurt us far more than the original event itself.

I also explain how this wisdom connects so deeply with midlife, when many of us begin questioning the lives we've built and wonder why they no longer feel aligned. I walk through practical tools I use with my clients, including thought downloads, honest self-appraisal, and separating facts from the stories we create. My hope is that you'll begin to recognize where you've been shooting yourself with unnecessary second arrows—and discover that you have far more power to create change than you may realize.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• What the Buddhist teaching of the "second arrow" can teach us about suffering

• Why our thoughts often create more pain than our circumstances

• How to separate facts from the stories you tell yourself

• Practical tools for creating lasting change in midlife

• Why small, intentional shifts create powerful long-term transformation

If you're ready to stop holding yourself back and begin creating a life that's truly aligned with who you are today, I'd love to help. Reach out at hello@mikkigardner.com and let's begin that journey together.

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Full Episode Transcript:

What if the reason your life suddenly feels so misaligned in midlife isn't because something is going wrong, but because something inside of you is finally waking up? Well, welcome to Led From Within. I'm Mikki Gardner, and this is a podcast for women who are done outsourcing their authority and are ready to claim a life aligned with who they are today. Because midlife doesn't need to be a crisis.

It can be a return to yourself, to clarity, to courage, and to inner authority. So let's begin. Hi, and welcome back to the podcast. So I wanted to talk to you today about a conversation I was having with my son while we were out on the golf course.

We were playing 18 holes and the first nine were a train wreck. Let's just be totally frank. My son, who this is not uncommon for where he's at in his game, he's got the swing right, he's got the drive, he works harder than any kid I know, and he genuinely wants to succeed. And I keep watching him get in his own way, shot after shot, day after day.

And it's not his mechanics, it's not his skill, it's not the coaching, it's what happens in his head after the ball doesn't go where he wants it to. So after the first nine holes, where, uh, this is just happening over and over and he is in one of those negative spirals, we started to have a conversation, one of those ones that, like, comes up and you don't plan for it, but it kind of changed everything. He started telling me about his mindset and how it wasn't working. And then he started to tell me how golf was actually really quite easy.

And I'm like, hm, do tell. Because everyone talks about how hard it is, and as I'm playing the game, I think it's really hard. But he's saying, when you actually just think about it, when you look at it, right? And he had this whole theory about how it's actually pretty simple, that you just have to kind of get the ball in the right enough position, you just have to put it in the kind of right place on the course for whatever hole you're playing, whether it's par five, a, uh, par three, a par four.

He's like, there's strategy and you just kind of get it good enough and you can actually make it pretty easy. So this got us talking, right, about, well, if it's so easy, why isn't it right? Why is it so challenging? And why do you keep ending up so frustrated round after round?

After round. And so as we're talking, I found myself telling him about something that I've been sitting with for a long time, something that I learned through Buddhist teaching that I think about a lot, like a lot in my own life, and especially here in midlife. And it's that most of our suffering doesn't come from the things that happen to us. It comes from what we do to ourselves after the thing happens to us, right?

Just like my son. It's not the shot, right, that is the issue for him, it's what he does to himself after. So I was, uh, describing to him that there's this old teaching, and sometimes it's called the second arrow. And I shared it with him right there on the fairway as we're driving down on the golf cart.

But the idea is the first arrow is that thing itself, right? The miss shot, the hard diagnosis, the argument that we had with someone, the thing that we didn't see coming. And that arrow is going to land. And that's just part of being a human, just part of being alive.

Nobody gets to opt out of those arrows just arriving. But the second arrow, this is the interesting part. This is the one where we shoot ourselves. It's the story that we tell about the first arrow.

It's the negative thought spiral that keeps us trapped. It's the, of course this happened. I always do this, or I'm not good enough, I'm never going to get there. Or I, uh, should have known better.

How did I not see this coming? That second arrow, that one's optional and it's usually the one that does the most damage. And watching my son, I could see this so clearly. You know, that mishit that he just like, sort of didn't mean to do, that was the first arrow.

But the tightening of his shoulders, the anger, the frustration, the berating himself, that was the second one. And that one's the one that self inflicted. And this idea isn't just a nice metaphor. I mean, it really is the backbone of one of the oldest frameworks in Buddhist thought, which is the four Noble Truths.

And I'm going to walk through them because I think that they really map out into midlife more precisely than anything else. So the first truth is that suffering is just part of being human. I mean, we all know this, right? Intellectually, we know this, and it's not a sign that you're doing something wrong.

It's just baseline. It just kind of is. Losses happen, disappointments happen. We lose things that we love, people that we love.

The ache of those things going away that we had hoped for. That's not evidence of us failing. It's just part of life. It's part of what it is to be here in this human form.

The second of the noble truths is that suffering has a cause, and that cause is a craving and attachment. It's the wanting the things to be different than they actually are. This is where a lot of suffering comes in. When we have trouble accepting things for what they are, but we want them so desperately to be different.

It's not so much the circumstance itself, but it's our grip on how we think it should be. My son wasn't suffering because of the missed shot that he had. He was suffering because some part of him was kind of white knuckling. That image of himself, of who he thought he should be, that he should be the golfer that never makes those shots.

But that's nobody ever in the history of golf. So the third truth is really the hope that lies in all of this. That suffering isn't permanent, that our grip can be loosened. Not all at once, not through some overnight transformation, not through just the magic genie just allowing it to happen, but gradually, with practice, with faith that small shifts can compound over time.

It's when we learn to identify the stories that we're having, the stories that we're telling, and we choose not to carry them anymore. And the fourth truth, well, this is where there's an actual plan, not just a wish, but a way of seeing things clearly, of paying attention, of acting with intention. Right. That there is a way through this experience, this suffering, added layers that we put on ourselves.

I'm not going to really get into the weeds on this, but I am going to name it. Because the Buddha didn't just diagnose the problem, he actually gave a practical route out. An eight fold path is the right view, the right intention, the right speech, the right action, the right livelihood, the right effort, the right mindfulness, the right concentration. We're not going to talk about all of those, but a couple of them that I think really do apply to modern midlife m women is this idea that there is kind of like a right view or a right mindfulness that actually helps us move through the change that's necessary in this time of life.

I think this is so important to talk about midlife specifically because by this point in our lives, most of us have spent 20, 30 years building a life that fits, fits expectation, fits roles, fits the picture that we were sort of told was the way to do it. Someone else Handed it to us or. Or it might be one that we handed to ourselves, like, a long time ago, but it doesn't necessarily fit now. And we've tried to control every circumstance along the way, to control the people around us, to control ourselves, to keep that picture intact.

But when reality, right, when the way that we're actually feeling inside of our bodies, the way that we're feeling in our emotions doesn't match the picture on the outside, whether that's the. The marriage, the body, the career, the number in the bank account, the number on the scale, the relationship we have with our kids, we don't update the picture. Often we suffer because we tell ourselves that it should be different, that we've done something wrong, that we're missing something. Or we tell ourselves that it's just part of midlife.

It's just part of where we are. We're just tired, right? We're just being who we are. But so much of that suffering.

That's a second arrow. Listen, the first arrow already landed. Shit happened. Things happened in life.

The situation is what it is. Yeah. You might not be happy with the marriage. You might not be happy with the number in the bank account.

You might not be happy with the number on the scale. But oftentimes, and I think this is where midlife M really points it out, is that the. The second arrow has been our refusal to really look at it. The second arrow has been our refusal to change it.

The second arrow has been our kind of just going along, going along with the flow, trying to make the best of it, and somehow thinking that we are doing it wrong and that's what causes the suffering. So what do we want to do instead? Well, that's what we want to talk about, right? Because there are ways that we can move through and not allow those second arrows to keep pummeling us.

So I want to offer you just a couple ideas here, right? Because there's tools that I use with my own clients that are based in psychology, that are based in coaching. And also we utilize these truths from Buddhist, uh, teaching as well, right? It's sort of like a conglomeration.

And so I want to offer a couple of things here because I think it's worth noting, first and foremost, we have to build awareness, right? We have to be aware that we are suffering, that we've had a second arrow. And we do that by really separating out in an honest appraisal, which we've talked about on past episodes. But how do we do that?

How do I do this in my own Life. And how do I do this with clients? Well, a lot of times I start with a thought download. A thought download is where we actually just take a blank piece of paper and we get everything out of our head.

It can be about a specific topic, it can be whatever's coming up, it can be about whatever you want, but you just get everything out of your head and onto the paper, unfiltered. Don't try to organize it, don't try to make sense of it. Just don't try to sound reasonable. Just empty it out.

Then after you've done that, what we want to do is start to separate the fact from the fiction. And this is the appraisal process, right? And this is part of where we start to separate the arrows. There was a first arrow fact.

Everything else, those are different arrows, and that's what we want to start to separate. So you go back with, uh, what you wrote, and you ask what actually happened here, right? Or what am I adding? And this is where reality gets isolated from interpretation, where you stop asking, what do I want to be true?

Or what is everyone telling me is true? And you start actually seeing factually what is true. So you go back, and I always say, just take a pen and scratch out anything that isn't a fact. And when I say fact, I mean real fact, like that anybody that could agree on.

Then you're left with sort of a lot of different pieces, and you can start to see really clearly what are the facts, what are those? You know, again, number on the scale. Number, number in the bank account, state of the marriage, right? Like different things.

And then you can start to see, well, what are all the other things that I'm telling myself? And that's the interpretation. That's where a lot of suffering comes from. So the third step after we get start to get into this honest, uh, appraisal is to name your contribution.

And I'm not talking about blaming. I am not talking about taking responsibility for other people, but asking yourself, where do I have a hand in this? Maybe it's been anger, maybe it's been an avoidance. Maybe it's been just out of sheer exhaustion, not having the capacity to change something.

This isn't about finding fault. It's about finding your leverage. It's about understanding what part of this did I have a hand in creating, and therefore, what power do I have to shift it? And this is the part where the Buddha was really talking about is when we start to understand what the reality is versus what we're arguing against, or when we Start to see the facts from the fiction.

Well, now we can start to create a path out of it, right? With looking at it in a different way. Right? This honest appraisal, choosing intention.

How do I want to intentionally move through. Through this? Do I want to stay suffering, or do I want to see what part of this I can change? And then, uh, that's where we start to look at right intention.

And then that leads to right speech and right action and right effort. Right? It's aligning our actions with what we want. It's deciding what is the direction I want to go, and then aligning our thoughts, our feelings, our.

Our actions and our behaviors with that. And this is the piece I want to leave you on. Because when we are able to see our contribution clearly, it's not an indictment on ourselves. It's information.

And that is the only thing that actually gives you power in the situation is having that information. And once you see it, you get to start to ask real questions. Am I willing to make a small shift here? Is there something I can do to shift?

This doesn't mean overhaul your entire life overnight. We've talked about that before, but it's. Can I make one adjustment? Are you willing to have the faith that if we change one thing, that over time it is going to change?

You know, I asked my son while we were on the golf course, I said to him, if I told you that if you spent the next year letting go of the results and letting go of the scores and not thinking about it at all, but you stayed consistent, you took care of your body, you took care of your sleep, you took care of your swing, you were coachable, you did all the work, you did all the practice, that after that one year you would be in a completely different spot and your scores would be totally better, would you accept that one year of hard suffering? Would you accept the challenge of that one year of really hard work if you were promised that there was going to be light on the other side? And he said, absolutely, of course I would. It's kind of the same thing for us.

We have to have the faith, the willingness to continue to put in right effort, right view, right speech, right action, right intention, right mindfulness in order to see the results down the road and stop, uh, stop expecting them overnight. So this conversation with my son, it really impacted me, I think as much as hopefully it impacted him, where we both started to see really clearly that there's things that need to change in his life, right? With his swing, with his. The way he's approaching things.

And when I look at it in my own life, and when I look at it in the life of my clients, instead of beating ourselves up, instead of continuing to shoot arrows at ourselves that are optional, that we do not have to accept, are we willing to instead shift that perspective, to believe that one step at a time, the right intention, the right action, the right belief, the right concentration, the right mindfulness, that over time these things will compound and change everything? Because they will. Midlife is an opportunity to take an honest appraisal, to reevaluate where you are, where you want to go. And you have the wisdom, you have the life experience, and you have different resources.

It's about giving yourself the capacity to be able to utilize them, to empower yourself to create the next chapter of your life. So it is the most beautiful, the m most fulfilling, the most purposeful, the most joyful, and the most passionate. It's possible and I know you can get there. But we've got to stop shooting ourselves with arrows that just don't belong.

I hope this was helpful. I'll see you on the next episode. In the meantime, take really, really good care of you. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode.

I hope that it spoke to you and you found something useful to take away from it. If you did, I would be so grateful if you would take 2 seconds to subscribe to the show, which will help you because you won't miss another episode. And it would help me because you would never miss another episode.

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