MY OWN WALKING - November Journal 2025

Like most folk, I sometimes get far too caught up in the intricate tangle of my self justifications. The finely woven warp and weft of my own terribly tedious self story. So much so that it can be one devil of a job putting a stop to it. To cease the constancy of my weaving it. And then, comes the day when I can for some reason, after some directional wind change, I see through it just one tiny little chink. How the intensity of any perceived injury to ones selfhood, is firmly embroidered into it with sutures of my own making.   

I say this, full knowing one of the Buddha's wisest utterances, urged us to become closely familiar with the pain caused by 'the second arrow.' The first arrow being our experience of suffering, the second arrow our response to that suffering. That second arrow being by far the more dangerous to life, because it is entirely a self-inflicted wound, ever so easily embedding itself into 'that story of our self'. Usually with the help of a charitable variation of  'poor me' narrative. And, once ensconced, it sits there like an AIDS virus, waiting for future suffering to provide advantageous circumstances for yet another virulent outbreak of self pity.

With this years extended prolongation of Autumnal mildness, I'd became prematurely lulled into thinking that Winter's onset this year was hopefully delayed. So the arrival of damper, chiller winds and turbulent storms, arrived like an unwelcome salesman at my doorstep. After months and months from spring through to an indian summer, I'd got used to milder weather and the consequent low level of bodily discomfort. Then over the matter of seemingly a mere few days the weather changed, and that discomfort cranked up. Furiously aching joints and muscles, most tender particularly in the hips and lower back. Voltarol gels could do too little to pacify its inflamation and soreness.

One morning, post another fitful incomplete nights sleep, I arose in one cross patch of an internal bad mood. I did not feel well disposed towards my usual morning routine of practice, and this had been increasingly so for a couple of days. I'd sort of struck a deal with myself, to take the level of it all down by a peg or two. To maintain a morsel of connection with the continuity of practice. But by this particular day, the most I could persuade myself to do was to meditate, and that was after quite an extensive period of coercive encouragement. Once I did sit down to meditate, it was clear there was a job of work to do, cultivating a more loving and kinder relationship towards myself. Bring on the Metta bomb.

A Metta Bhavana meditation practice,is most usually a progression of five distinct stages. But this can be stripped down to the simpler mode of it radiating outwards, which given my current level of resistance, was probably advisable. So I began with as much gentle encouragement I could find, to cultivate loving kindness for myself, my body, my mental states, my overall state of being, and then gradually expanding that out to the people surrounding me, to the area, county and country, to the world, to the universe and the cosmos. Wishing all to be existentially well, to be happier, more content and less suffering beings. All its usual generic elements were there, where paradoxically, I was placed at the living centre of my own mettaful cosmos. But by the end, when I got up, the discomfort in my hips and back had quite dramatically diminished. 

All of which caused me to reflect more deeply on the role of the second arrow in suffering. Now I do have osteoarthritis present in some major joints, there is no getting away from that, nor the consequences thereof. And its certainly been my experience that changes in barometric pressure, the severity and depth of weather fronts, can sometimes put my whole body physically on edge. But what this meditation experience pointed out, was how much the depth and prolongation of my bodily aches and pains, can also be due to, in my very being, hating and loathing them on almost an existential level. The self antagonism, once I noticed it, seemed quite obvious.

So much of the intensity of any suffering is down to how you feel about the suffering, not the suffering itself. Now this infinitesimally small insight, does not in itself take away the original cause of the pain or discomfort, but just encourages me to turn off the bloody megaphone. Whenever I start writing about physical ailments and how this or that particular part of this body of mine is aching or aging, it makes me hyper aware of how frequently I use the word 'my' as I write, That I take my body, and my osteoarthritis, and my pain, and my suffering, and my advancing age, and turn them into the largest badge I can wear. One that declares a technicolour statement - 'look on the size of my suffering, you bitches, and despair' .

And there, right there, I stop myself to further remark - my goodness me, how unkind you can be, just in the general castigating tone in which you converse with yourself.  Listen to how the purpose of words dance around from reactivity to insight, then back to reactivity again. It's also to recognise the heavy rainfall that the second arrow brings with it, and how that precipitation forms the precursor and resplendent rainbow of a third, maybe fourth or fifth bit of self injury - should you let it.