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Enjoy this blog post.
This is the Body Theology blog for July
7th, 2026.
When Wild Spirit Storytelling and Pain Collide.
In the Arrow Sutra, the Buddha talked about
two arrows.
The first arrow, which pierces you, contains any
number of the unavoidable difficulties in life.
This could be chronic pain, which I'll be
talking about today, or stress, or grief.
Life is suffering, the Buddha tells us, and
what causes suffering is attachment, which brings us
to the second arrow.
The second arrow is our own inner reaction
to the first arrow, whatever difficulty we're experiencing.
Worry, fear, anger, self-blame, or self-criticism,
the old woulda, coulda, shoulda that runs through
our minds.
That's the second arrow, and it causes more
suffering than the first.
If we stub our toe, which is admittedly
a small, but often extremely annoying difficulty, it
hurts.
It's the hopping around afterwards, blaming ourselves for
not seeing the chair, or the table, or
whatever we ran our foot into.
We call ourselves klutzy.
We blame it on a lack of perioperception.
We might even call ourselves worse things than
a klutz, and we blame ourselves for stubbing
our toe.
That's what hurts worse than the initial injury.
Even when the difficulties are larger, such as
ongoing, relentless chronic pain, it's often the second
arrow, how we relate to the pain, that
makes it hurt worse.
Now, I want to stop for a moment,
and say that I'm not talking about just
thinking about your pain differently, as if I
were asking you to follow some sort of
cognitive behavioral change.
Instead, I invite you to see the stories
you've told yourself, and the stories you've been
told in the second arrow.
Let me broaden the lens a bit.
Many natural environments have the capacity to restore
themselves when they become ecologically out of balance.
This happens when the damage hasn't gone past
a tipping point, when humans get out of
the way, rather than actively try to help
in well-meaning but misguided ways, and when
all the stressors are removed.
Let's think about this for a moment.
There is a tipping point with pain.
Each person's tipping point is going to be
different, and depending on a person's neurotype, the
sensory issues associated with pain will be different
as well.
If the tipping point hasn't been reached, then
restoration without much intervention is possible.
For too many of us, though, we've passed
that tipping point a long time ago.
Wild Spirit Storytelling invites us to know where
we are.
In other words, I am experiencing pain, and
I have passed my tipping point.
The next step?
Remove all stressors, if at all possible.
Now, I fully acknowledge that this may not
be possible, and for those in certain communities
that are being actively harmed right now, it
may be impossible.
But remove as many stressors as you can.
This may mean seeking medical care if possible,
again understanding that this may not be the
best course of action for many.
It may mean exploring other treatments or options,
if possible.
It might mean taking time off, withdrawing to
focus on you and your care, and what
makes your internal ecosystem flourish.
Like cuddling with your pet, or watching a
favorite television show with your best comfort food.
According to ecosystem restoration, the wild will begin
to restore itself.
I would be a fool if I told
you that you would automatically heal from your
chronic pain at this point.
It is much too complicated an issue, and
our mind-body-gut connections are much too
complex to fix them with a single blog
post.
We can, however, work toward that restoration.
We remove the second arrow.
Examine your stories, the ones you are told,
the ones you internalize, and the ones you're
currently creating about yourself.
This is how we begin to create restoration.
This is how we learn from the wild,
and how ecosystems restore themselves, so that we
can apply this to ourselves.
The most important thing in all of this,
is that we don't blame ourselves.
A natural environment that's out of balance doesn't
blame itself for getting that way.
And those who work in biology and ecology
don't blame the area either.
They understand that it was often external, man
-made forces that caused an ecosystem to get
out of balance, and the same thing holds
true with us.
Body theology means understanding that we are not
inherently bad or wrong for being in pain,
but that it indicates that something is out
of balance, and that we may not be
able to completely remove the pain.
There are things that we can do that
will help, like removing the second arrow.
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