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The Buddha explained, “In life, we can’t always control the first arrow. However, the second arrow is our reaction to the first. The second arrow is optional.”
pain is unavoidable, but how we react to that pain is up to us, and that reaction will dictate whether or not we suffer.
suffering is optional.
The problem wasn’t the pain itself; it was in my reaction to the pain.
how long are you going to keep holding on to the story you don’t want to keep reliving?
One who looks around him is intelligent; one who looks within him is wise. —Matshona Dhliwayo
Philosopher Sydney Banks once said, “Thought is not reality, yet it is through thought that our realities are created.” What he means by this is that each of us lives through our own perception of the world, which is vastly different from that of the person next to us.
Many of us go through the same events in exactly the same locations at the same time, yet we are having radically different experiences of the world. This is what I mean when I say that we live in a world of thought and not reality.
Reality is what is happening right now. It is the objective circumstance that is occurring without any meaning or judgment attached to it. And so what we experience is not reality itself but our perception of reality. Any meaning or thinking we give something is self-created and our choice.
Our feelings come not from external events but from our own thinking about the events.
The root cause of our suffering is our own thinking.
Our perception of reality is very real. We feel what we think, and our emotions are real. That is undeniable. However, what I am saying is that how we feel will look like an inevitable, unchangeable reality until we recognize the role that our thinking plays in creating it. By changing our thinking, we can change our reality. And if that is true, then we are only ever one thought away from transforming our lives and letting go of our suffering. In short, the moment we stop thinking is when our happiness begins.
When you change your thinking, you change your experience of life—without needing to change the event that happened.
Event + Thinking = Perception of reality Event without thinking = Reality Event without thinking = Peace
“Do you know what is really making you angry?” Now he knew he had his answer. “It’s not other people, situations, or circumstances. It’s not the empty boat but my reaction to it that causes my anger. All the people or situations that upset me are like the empty boat. Without my reaction, they don’t have the power to make me angry.”
true freedom isn’t in having complete control of our minds but in the ability to be unattached to whatever happens in it
I think and think and think, I’ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it. —Jonathan Safran Foer
The mind’s job is to alert us to potential dangers in our environment that may threaten our lives. It does its job so well that not only will it scan our immediate surroundings for threats, but it will even reference past experiences to create predictions of possible future dangers based on our memories.
But while our minds do an incredible job of keeping us alive, this same ability does not allow us to thrive.
🤯
The problem is that we often forget this distinction. Our mind’s duty is to keep us alive. Our consciousness’s duty is to help us feel fulfilled. Our soul is the reason why we’re even on this journey in the first place—to find peace within ourselves.
If we keep allowing this thinking to direct our lives, we will stay in a state of fight or flight, anxiety, fear, frustration, depression, anger, resentment, and negative emotion because the mind views everything as a threat to our very existence. And it is this tendency of our minds that leads us to the torturous thinking at the root of our suffering.
If you want to be free and at peace, then you will need to let go of only listening to your mind’s fight-or-flight thinking. You are not just a product of your environment but a co-creator of it. With this understanding, you can begin to shift your experience of reality from merely surviving to truly thriving.
the path to self-actualization isn’t to try to improve ourselves because we think we’re not enough but to let go of the illusion that we’re not already enough as we are
Stop thinking and end your problems. —Lao Tzu
