The One You Feed - The Second Arrow- Mini Episode

Episode Date: February 5, 2016

The Second Arrow “The Buddha once asked a student, “If a person is struck by an arrow, is it painful?” The student replied, “It is."The Buddha then asked, "If the person is struck by a second arrow, is that even more painful?” The student replied again, “It is.” The Buddha then explained, “In life, we cannot always control the first arrow. However, the second arrow is our reaction to the first. The second arrow is optional.”Eric describes the parable of the Second Arrow and how it to makes things worse.Our Sponsor this Week is Spirituality and Health Magazine. Click here for your free trial issue and special offer.  The Tale of Two WolvesA grandfather is talking with his grandson and he says there are two wolves inside of us which are always at war with each other. One of them is a good wolf which represents things like kindness, bravery and love. The other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed, hatred and fear.The grandson stops and thinks about it for a second then he looks up at his grandfather and says, “Grandfather, which one wins?”The grandfather quietly replies, the one you feed The Tale of Two Wolves is often attributed to the Cherokee indians but there seems to be no real proof of this. It has also been attributed to evangelical preacher Billy Graham and Irish Playwright George Bernard Shaw. It appears no one knows for sure but this does not diminish the power of the parable.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Man, I cannot believe we're already wrapping up another season of Questlove Supreme. Man, we've got some amazing guests lined up to close out the season, but, you know, I don't want any of you guys to miss all the incredible conversations we've had so far. I mean, we talked to A. Marie, Johnny Marr, E, Jonathan Sheckner, Billy Porter, and so many more.

Look, if you haven't heard these episodes yet, hey, now's your chance. You gotta check them out. Listen to Questlove Supreme on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Happy holidays from me, Michael Rappaport, and my gift to you is a free subscription to the I Am Rappaport Stereo Podcast,

where I discuss entertainment, sports, politics, and anything and everything that catches my attention. I am here to call it as I see it. And there's a whole lot of things catching my eyes these days. Listen to the I Am Rap Report Stereo Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcast. Hey, everybody. It is Eric from The One You Feed, and I am back with a long overdue mini episode. I apologize for the delay between these. If you like them, let me know and encourage me to do more. What I want to talk about this week is something we've talked about on the show an awful lot. It's

the parable of the second arrow, but I'd like to talk a little bit more. I've never done a mini-episode specifically on that, so I'd like to tell the parable, talk about it a little bit, and talk about some common cognitive biases that come up when we are dealing with the second arrow. So the second arrow is a Buddhist parable, and I'll just go ahead and read it. The Buddha once asked a student, if a person is struck by an arrow, is it painful? The student replied, it is. The Buddha then asked, If the person is struck by a second arrow, is that even more painful? The student replied again, It is. The Buddha then explained, In life, we cannot always control the first arrow. However, the second arrow is our reaction to the first. The second arrow is optional. And so the second arrow

represents our reaction to the event that happened. It's the manner in which we choose to respond to it emotionally. And this gets to a difference that is talked about in certain Buddhist schools. The episode we had with Noah Levine, we talked a lot about it. But the difference between pain and suffering, and the way I think of that is pain is inevitable. It's the things that happen to us in life. It's the getting sick. It's the losing a loved one. It's the losing a job. It's basically not getting what we want or getting things that are painful. And that is inevitable in life. That is going to happen. However, suffering is the additional layer that we put on top of that. It's when we condemn it, when we judge it, hate it, deny it, or oftentimes it's the stories we tell ourselves

about what that first arrow means. It's the meaning that we construe out of the bad things that happen. So an example would be if you're in a relationship and your lover chooses to leave, there's lots of ways that that event can be turned into other stories. We can resist it. We can fight it. I was talking with somebody the other day and there was a story about them being surrounded by police officers on his girlfriend's front or his ex-girlfriend's front porch. That's an example of the second arrow. All that suffering is what he added to that. There's something known as cognitive distortions.

And they are similar to cognitive biases, but they're a little bit more focused on the emotional aspect of things. little bit more focused on the emotional aspect of things. And I think right after we've been shot with the first arrow, right after something painful has happened to us, is a time that we are particularly primed to fall into some of these cognitive distortions. So what I want to do now is talk about some of the common cognitive distortions that we fall into so that maybe next time we're shot with the first arrow, we don't react in the same way. The first cognitive distortion that comes up is something known as overgeneralization. And it's basically taking a single event and applying it inappropriately to every other event. So to go back to our previous example, if there's someone and you've lost your lover,

So to go back to our previous example, if there's someone and you've lost your lover, the overgeneralization would be that no one will ever love you, that you're unlovable, and that you'll never find another person. That's an example of overgeneralization. cognitive distortion that we can run into is polarized thinking or black and white thinking. Things are either black or they're white. They're either great or they're terrible. We're either perfect or we're a failure. No middle ground. That is a very easy thing to fall into when we are under emotional stress is to really take things to the extreme. Another common one is what's known as emotional reasoning. And it's basically believing that what we feel has to be true. We assume that our unhealthy emotions reflect the way things really are. Sort of an I feel it, therefore it must be true. And then the last one that we'll cover, at least in this episode, is labeling. And it's sort of an

extreme form of the all or nothing thinking. But it's instead of saying, I made a mistake, we go all the way to, I'm a loser, or I'm a jerk, or I'm a fool, or I'm a failure. It's an irrational and cognitive distortion because we are not the same as what we do. The label is a useless abstraction that leads to anger, anxiety, frustration, low self-esteem. So what are some of the things that we can do to deal with these cognitive biases? The first thing, most important thing is, and it's the cliche of mindfulness, but it's about recognizing I'm having an emotion, not condemning it or condoning it, just being aware of it and that we're reacting to it. I think that's the very first step.

The second then is to explore our thinking around it. Try and identify the cognitive distortion that you might be having. Look at your negative thoughts and see if any of the distortions we talked about apply to those. You can examine the evidence. So instead of just assuming that your negative thought is true, is there any actual evidence for it? Some of this gets back to the episode we had with Byron Katie where she talked about the work and her four questions, and it was really a robust way to examine your thought patterns. Thinking in shades of gray, not 50 of them, but shades of gray nonetheless, is really trying to get away from that black or white thinking. And so instead of thinking about extremes, you can try and evaluate things on, say, a 0 to 100.

Put them on a scale. That gets you out of the extremes and allows you to place it in the middle. And then another useful thing is to define terms. When you're calling yourself a jerk or a fool or an idiot, what is a jerk? What is a fool? What is an idiot? And what we're trying to do here is to move up our brain, so to speak, from the lower emotional reactive parts of our brain and more into the parts of our brain that are able to think and make good judgments. We're not trying to get rid of emotion. Again, this is not about talking yourself out of feeling bad if you broke up with your girlfriend. This is about not making it worse by adding all sorts of other stuff on top of that. So this is not a cure for any type of negative emotion. What it is a cure for

is for self-inflicted negative emotions. That parable is one of my favorites because I think it is the clearest illustration of the way that we add suffering to our own lives. And if we were able to minimize that, life gets a lot better. There's enough actual regular pain in life that we don't need to be adding on to it ourselves. And so becoming more familiar with your cognitive biases, the way that you react to these things can allow you to make the best out of situations and again, not to make things worse. Hopefully that is helpful to you. If you are interested in working with me in a one-on-one way about behavior patterns, habits, thought patterns, you can go to oneufeed.net slash coaching and find more information there. Thanks for listening

and we'll talk to you soon. Bye.