“Releasing the Arrow,” 2021. Procreate. 11″ x 17″.
Any time someone asks me how I’ve learned to cope and deal with my trauma, one of the first things I recommend them is Thich Nhat Hanh’s “No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering.” It’s only about 128 pages and relatively easy to get through! When I first picked it up in 2018, I would read pages in between meetings with my real estate agent, packing up my things, and getting ready to leave the one state that had only ever been my home.
I have a tendency to over think or over analyze, where I get lost in my thoughts and find myself unable to stop thinking about specific things. Even now, 3 years later, I find myself picking it up and re-reading it as a way to help re-center myself.
I just wanted to share one of my favorite excerpts from the book, which inspired this illustration:
There is a Buddhist teaching found in the Sallatha Sutta, known as The Arrow. It says if an arrow hits you, you will feel pain in that part of your body where the arrow hit; and then if a second arrow comes and strikes exactly at the same spot, the pain will not be only double, it will become at least ten times more intense.
The unwelcome things that sometimes happen in life—being rejected, losing a valuable object, failing a test, getting injured in an accident—are analogous to the first arrow. They cause some pain. The second arrow, fired by our own selves, is our reaction, our storyline, and our anxiety. All these things magnify the suffering. Many times, the ultimate disaster we’re ruminating upon hasn’t even happened. We may worry, for example, that we have cancer and that we’re going to die soon. We don’t know, and our fear of the unknown makes the pain grow even bigger. The second arrow may take the form of judgment (“how could I have been so stupid?”), fear (“what if the pain doesn’t go away?”), or anger (“I hate that I’m in pain. I don’t deserve this!”).
We can quickly conjure up a hell realm of negativity in our minds that multiplies the stress of the actual event, by ten times or even more. Part of the art of suffering well is learning not to magnify our pain by getting carried away in fear, anger, and despair.
– Thich Nhat Hanh, “No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering”
This illustration, which is 11″ x 17″ 300 DPI, was started and finished in Procreate. I’ve noticed that ever since I purchased my iPad back in 2017, it’s been much easier for me to work off of it than using my Wacom setup. I finished this drawing in about ~2 days.
The left image is the original thumbnail. When I was wrapping up the drawing, I settled on a green background for contrast and then wrote the text. I’m not sure if I’m the only one who feels this way, but what you draft in your thumbnails or sketches doesn’t always translate well in the final version.
No matter what I did, the writing looked awkward and out of place.
So, I went ahead and removed it. 🙂
And here is the final version:
