Let’s talk about the Buddhist parable of “The Second Arrow.”
Imagine someone is walking along, living their best life, and then - out of nowhere - they're shot in the arm by an arrow. Painful. Surprising. Who the hell still uses arrows, right? (remember this parable emerged around 500 B.C.). And then, boom: before they have time to recover, they’re hit with a second one.
Of these two arrows, Buddha is believed to have asked one of his students, “Which one hurts more?” To which the student replies, “The second.”
In this metaphor, the first arrow is the inevitable human experience of difficulty, hard moments, painful experiences.
We cannot control this arrow.
Think of the first arrow as exposure to a culture that teaches people to have a negative relationship to their body. Yes, you were taught to feel negativity about your body. You weren’t born feeling this way.
You didn’t ask to be taught this. You didn’t do anything wrong. You were just existing, minding your own business when the culture decided it was time to teach you that something was fundamentally wrong with your body.
Let's move on to what the second arrow represents.
In this metaphor, the second arrow is the reaction we have to being hit by the first arrow.
We can control the second arrow - how we process or experience the pain of the first arrow - at least a little bit more.
In the context of body image, a second arrow might look like reacting to our problematic culture of body negativity by adopting shame.
Perhaps it’s shame about your body.
Perhaps it’s shame that you aren’t “strong” enough to “resist” or “overcome” the culture’s body negativity.
Here’s something important you need to know: it is 100% not your fault that the culture taught you to feel negatively about your body. You have nothing to be ashamed of.
You didn’t do anything wrong. You just have a body. Further, an individual cannot "overcome" an entire culture; this has nothing to do with how strong you are.
Our culture has a problem with how it thinks of and treats bodies - probably due to a lack of resolution around its own problematic history of patriarchy, sexual shame, ideas about Manifest Destiny (and who “deserves” to “inherit the earth”), and a ton of sublimation/bypassing of guilt for slavery, genocide and the creation of white exceptionalist (or white supremacist) thought (more on all that in future newsletters).
This body-negative cultural backdrop has very clear negative outcomes. Let’s look at just a few, as they relate to women and girls, from the Dove Global Beauty & Confidence Report:
I want to offer you a reframe: you can’t control how the culture treats you or what the culture has taught you about your body, but you can control whether you see it is a personal failure or a cultural one.
It takes time to learn how to refuse to be ashamed (“How To Unlearn Body Shame” article forthcoming), but that process starts with knowing that you don’t have to be. You can put blame where it belongs: out of your hands and straight into the lap of the culture that created it.
Class dismissed.
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