The Arrow We Fire at Ourselves
What the Buddha taught about pain, what neuroscience just confirmed, and why the distinction matters
The bottle of Dettol looked older than me.
I’d just crashed a motorbike in a small Indian village in the Himalayas. Not a spectacular crash. Just me trying to avoid a street dog that seemed determined to get run over, but it may have been the most interesting thing to happen all week here.
I was fine, but the locals’ natural concern for visitors meant I was sat on a chair, handed chai, and had superficial scratches doused with Dettol from an antique bottle.
“Doesn’t that hurt?” my friend (who had come out unscathed) asked.
None of the old guys spoke English, so I exhaled and, in the calmest, most relaxed voice, smiled and answered, “Yep, this really hurts a lot.”
I didn’t want to alarm anyone.
My friend laughed, the locals smiled and relaxed, I sat back and finished my chai, looking down the valley, barely thinking about the crash or the more traumatic Dettol incident.
Even the dog was napping on the side of the road as if nothing had happened.
This was not a high-stakes crash or injury. I might have forgotten it altogether if I hadn’t come across some research on irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) that reminded me of it many years later. It seems that mindfulness training helped reduce IBS symptoms, not by acting on the symptoms themselves, but by reducing the catastrophising, worry, and “emotional interference” that accompany them. This predicted a decrease in the reported severity of the IBS symptoms.[1]
Sceptics always cry “placebo” at these kinds of results, which is helpful because it pushes the field into more interesting territory. And this research took me on a fascinating detour.
In a nutshell, it goes like this: When you hold your thumb after hitting it with a hammer, or grab your foot where you step on a Lego piece, this is part of your body’s natural pain management. It’s an in-house opioid system that many pain treatments, such as breathing exercises and acupuncture, are known to activate. Even giving someone fake medication will activate their opioid pain-killing system if they believe they’re taking pain meds.
Mindfulness training is different. It reduces pain and discomfort, but doesn’t activate our natural opioid system. It’s not a physical mechanism.
Pain is usually measured by intensity and discomfort, or unpleasantness. In much of the research on mindfulness and pain, it’s the unpleasantness that is reduced with no significant reduction in the intensity.
So, as I calmly explained to my friend that the Dettol was indeed causing me pain, the intentional relaxation and my regular meditation practice are likely to have reduced the unpleasantness of it. The sting of Dettol on road rash was probably easier to brush off with some concerned new friends, sweeping views of the Himalayan valley, and sweet chai with cardamom. It’s a state of mind quite different from that of an adolescent being treated for doing something stupid, which is how many of us are introduced to the Dettol experience that we carry into our adult lives.
Just as a calm demeanour with my Dettol-brandishing friends made the discomfort easy to ignore, cultivating a relaxed, accepting approach to more significant pain can make the experience easier to bear.
The possibility that our attitude and emotional reaction to pain influences our perception of discomfort can be traced back at least 2,500 years, to the Sallatha Sutra[2]. When asked about physical pain, the Buddha answered that most of us respond to it with “worry, grief, lamentation, and tears.” And this mental distress means we’re under the influence of “two kinds of feelings, a bodily and a mental feeling. It is as if a man were pierced by an arrow and, following the first piercing, he is hit by a second arrow.” This is in contrast to a well-trained meditator who won’t succumb to these mental “lamentations” that we ordinary folk are prone to. Such a practitioner will experience pain, but won’t be “hit by a second arrow, following the first one”, resulting in less distress.
A recent research paper tested this by electrocuting monks and nuns[3].
Actually, it was a little less dramatic and more sophisticated than that, and it also included laypeople.
The researchers recruited twelve monks and nuns from Theravada Buddhist monasteries, with an average of about 26,000 hours of meditation experience, and another twelve lay people, with an average of about 150 hours of meditation experience.
After each pulse, participants rated three things: how much it hurt, how strongly they wanted to avoid it, and how much it felt like their pain, which was defined as “self-involvement, or getting caught up in the experience.” From a research perspective, you could say this is an attempt to “operationalise” the second arrow.
Very clever.
Perhaps the most interesting result of this study is that experienced meditators had lower identification with pain than lay people across all conditions. The experienced meditators were less affected by the second arrow just resting than the lay people were during meditation, and that’s not all: the monks’ and nuns’ ratings of the intensity of the pain were no different, whether in sessions of mindfulness, loving-kindness, or even just at rest.
Essentially, there is a mental component to the experience of pain that experienced meditators can isolate from the physical pain and prevent it from forming an amplifying loop that happens to non-meditators.
For them, the second arrow is never fired.
Using some fancy statistics, the study goes even further to show a loop: pain sparks aversion, aversion drives identification, and identification amplifies the experience of pain, creating more aversion, and so on. This is the mechanism that can turn acute pain into chronic suffering, and it’s the same chain the Buddha discovered and taught as “dependent origination” without any stats. At least, not that I know of.
None of this is to say that pain is imaginary or trivial. It’s real – the electric shocks were real, the Dettol was real, and there are times when even painkillers don’t give relief. It can be totally debilitating. The point here is that we don’t just experience the sensation in the body. We also bring other things to it: emotions, preconceptions, and our identification with it, all of which occur in the mind. Then we tend to point to these two experiences and call them “pain” and treat them as one indivisible thing.
Which it’s not.
The physical sensation is one element, and our mental representations of it another. And it’s the second of these that meditation can most reliably change.
This is the reification mechanism I described in the last post. Treating a mental representation as the thing it refers to. There, it was thoughts, opinions and memories; here, it’s pain. The mechanism is the same, and the training that loosens it in those other contexts also works here.
We know that dereification is a natural by-product of mindfulness training. It’s something we can experience very directly in a meditation session. I’ve learned and taught many practices designed specifically to do this, but regular practice makes it a trait that is just part of our day-to-day life.
This explains why the monks and nuns experienced less pain than the laypeople, even when they were just resting, and why the laypeople only experienced pain reduction while they were in meditation. It’s the difference between needing effort to achieve a state in which the relationship with pain is dereified, and being so familiar with that state that it becomes a trait. An embedded way of viewing the world, rather than something you have to look for.
My PhD revolved around this concept of reification, but it’s not why I keep returning to it. The convergence of Buddhist discoveries from 2,500 years ago with those of modern psychology is one of the most exciting developments in contemplative science. In this series, we’ve looked at this mechanism through the lens of trauma, pain, and even cookies. The next post goes further: dereification removes the weight of mental content, but is that enough? Is there something more we can cultivate once that weight has lifted?
There are ways of working with a freer mind to build compassion and insight, to understand and remove the causes of our own suffering, and make a genuine contribution to the world. That’s where the next post takes us.
These ideas take on a different quality in practice than they do on the page. Next Monday in Balanced Minds, we’ll work with the pause — the space between stimulus and response where the second arrow either fires or doesn’t. That’s where this becomes something you can actually use.
The first 30 days are free.
[1] Garland, E. L., Gaylord, S. A., Palsson, O., Faurot, K., Douglas Mann, J., & Whitehead, W. E. (2012). Therapeutic mechanisms of a mindfulness-based treatment for IBS: effects on visceral sensitivity, catastrophizing, and affective processing of pain sensations. Journal of behavioral medicine, 35(6), 591-602. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3883954/pdf/nihms512860.pdf
[2] Nyanaponika Thera (Trans.). (1983). Sallatha Sutta: The arrow (SN 36.6). Access to Insight (BCBS Edition). https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn36/sn36.006.nypo.html
[3] Nicolardi, V., Simione, L., Scaringi, D., Malinowski, P., Yordanova, J., Kolev, V., ... & Raffone, A. (2024). The two arrows of pain: Mechanisms of pain related to meditation and mental states of aversion and identification. Mindfulness, 15(4), 753-774. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12671-021-01797-0