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What it has taken me years to learn - and what I am constantly re-learning - is that having a hard time does not mean I’m doing anything wrong.
You might know what I’m talking about here. Many people - especially highly sensitive folks and those dealing with the effects of trauma in their brains and bodies - have a propensity to feel such responsibility for their pain and responsibility for making it go away. If we can’t make it go away, we feel like we’re somehow getting this whole life thing wrong.
It might look something like this: a painful pattern reemerges, and we feel terrible for being stuck in it again; we can’t seem to get our stuff together in a particular area, so we continually berate ourselves for not being able to figure it out; we have an extended period of feeling depressed or anxious, and tell ourselves angrily if only we had better routines, better eating habits, better fill-in-the-blank, we wouldn’t be feeling this way; we are grieving a loss we can't seem to fully integrate, and feel impatient with ourselves for not being able to "get back to normal".
In Buddhist thought, there’s actually a name for this experience: it’s called the second arrow. The first arrow is the pain we inevitably experience as a result of living; the second is the one we stab into our own heart, telling ourselves we’re wrong, bad, or insufficient because we are feeling bad.
I often find that this second arrow can be especially painful when we’re doing absolutely everything we know how to support our nervous systems and take care of ourselves and heal - and we’re still having a really hard time.
I remember taking a class with the abundantly wise Arielle Schwartz in which a fellow student told Dr. Schwartz all of the yoga, mindfulness, and vagus nerve practices she was trying to apply to an extremely painful area of life, and how frustrated she was that she was obviously not getting it right, because she was still in pain. Dr. Schwartz’s answer was simple and beautiful: “The first thing I might say is, ‘Can we make this not wrong? Can we let it be okay that you’re having such a hard time?’” The student immediately began to cry, and I felt a flood of relief in my own body, too. Something profound happens when we let ourselves have an experience without making it wrong.
Can we take some of the weight off ourselves, recognizing that sometimes the best we can do in a day is get up and shower, or cry, or make it through our duties feeling numb and sad or anxious and angry or just not quite aligned? Feeling stuck in familiar patterns, having a hard time regulating our systems, feeling unsure how to shift the anxiety or heaviness we’re feeling - all of these are normal, even foundational, parts of life on this planet. Struggling does not mean we’re doing it wrong; it means we’re human. Can we allow ourselves the recognition that our interior lives are a constantly shifting frontier, that, like Rumi says, “This being human is a guest house, every morning a new arrival - a joy, a depression, a meanness…” and that none of these states entirely define us?
Can we be gentle with ourselves when we are hurting, allowing for the possibility that feeling stuck in cycles of pain or difficulty does not make us bad, it just makes us human?
My hope and prayer for you is that you would feel the possibility of your own enoughness, that the healing path would not be yet another thing you feel like you’re not getting right, that you would remember that we are all provisional beings, constantly in flux, and that you get to have a hard time without it being wrong.
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