86. The Two Arrows—Why Your Suffering About Suffering Is the Real Problem

You know the spiral. A student walks out of your class early, and by the time you reach your car, you've decided your classes are getting stale, the studio is about to replace you, and you should probably go back to your day job. The student leaving was the first arrow. The forty-minute story you built on top of it? That's the second arrow—and it hurts far more than the first one ever did.

This week, I unpack one of the most useful teachings in yoga philosophy: the Buddhist concept of the two arrows of suffering. You'll learn what dukha actually means (spoiler: it's about a wagon wheel), how the kleshas load the second arrow, and the three flavors of second-arrow thinking that show up in every teacher's life—the story of meaning, the projection forward, and the retrospective edit.

From there, we move from diagnosis to practice. I walk you through simple tools for your own life—the three-breath pause, the label, the journal prompt—and show you how to bring this teaching into your classroom without a lecture. One sentence can land the whole concept in your students' bodies: “Notice if you're adding a story to the sensation.”

Chapter 22 of Yoga Off the Mat goes much deeper into dukha, with a full ACTIONS box of practices for the week ahead. Preorder here: https://amzn.to/3LB2JAv —preorders genuinely move the needle for a book, so thank you in advance.

Whether you're planning this week's classes with a blank notebook on your lap or replaying last night's class at 2 a.m., this episode will help you notice which arrow you're actually carrying.

Join the waitlist for the July cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing: A Mentorship Membership (MMM): sagerountree.com/mentorship

Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Get in the Zone at Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you—let's chat there!

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Transcript

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Can I tell you something? It's Sunday night. You have three classes to teach this week, and you are staring at a blank notebook. You've been scrolling Instagram for sequence ideas for the last 45 minutes. Five browser tabs are open. Nothing feels right for the actual students who will show up tomorrow morning. That's the first arrow, the blank page, the real challenge of building a class. But here's where it gets worse, because somewhere around minute 30 of that scroll, a voice crept in. Everyone else just walks in and teaches what's wrong with me. I've been doing this for years and I still can't plan a class without a meltdown. Maybe I'm not cut out for this. That's the second arrow, and if you are being honest with yourself, it hurts a lot more than the blank page ever did. Today we are talking about one of the most useful concepts in all of yoga philosophy and one of the most useful concepts for your life as a yoga teacher. It's called The Two Arrows of Suffering. It comes from the Buddhist tradition, and it's explained through the Sanskrit concept of dukha in my new book, Yoga Off the Mat. If you take nothing else from this episode, take this: the struggle is real. The story you're telling yourself about, the struggle is where the real damage happens. I'm Sage Rountree, and this is Yoga Teacher Confidential: Secrets of Becoming a Great Yoga Teacher. Let's start with the Sanskrit, because the etymology here is genuinely illuminating and genuinely useful for your teaching. Dukha, spelled D-U-K-H-A is usually translated as suffering. But the literal meaning is more specific than that. Dukha means bad axle space do is bad. KA is the space in the center of a wheel where the axle sits, picture a wagon wheel. When the axle hole is well fitted, when it's smooth and round and the axle turns freely, the ride is smooth. That's sukha, good axle space, ease, the pleasant hum of things working as they should. But when that axle hole is off center or rough or misaligned, every single rotation grinds, every turn of the wheel adds friction. That's dukha. It's not one catastrophic break. It's the persistent wearing wobble that makes everything harder than it needs to be. Here's a mnemonic that I used to remember that dukha is the bad one. You may know I'm a graduate of the University of North Carolina and as a Tar Heel fan, duke is my nemesis school, and I remember dukha bad. Duke. Now, if you're a yoga teacher, I want you to sit with a metaphor, not the Duke UNC one, but the metaphor about the axle space for a second. Because dukha isn't the class that went badly. It's the low grade friction that accumulates the hours spent planning the confidence that never quite arrives. The comparison to every other teacher on your feed, the Sunday night dread that settles into your chest like clockwork. That wobble the grind. And here's the teaching. In the Buddhist tradition, the Buddha described two arrows. The first arrow is the thing that happens to you, the event, the blank page. The student who leaves your class early, the workshop that doesn't fill the feedback, that stings you cannot dodge the first arrow. It's part of being alive and it's definitely part of being a yoga teacher. The second arrow is what you do. After the first arrow hits, it's the story you tell yourself, the rumination, the catastrophizing, the self blame, the anxious projection into the future. And here's what the Buddha pointed out. The second arrow almost always hurts more than the first one because the first arrow lands once the second arrow. You can keep shooting it at yourself for hours, days, years. A student walks out of your class, that's the first arrow. It happens. People have places to be, but by the time you get to your car, you've decided you're losing your touch. Your classes are getting stale. The studio is going to replace you, and you should probably just go back to your day job. That is the second arrow. That is the feature length film about failure that your mind produced from a single person walking out of a room. now before I go any further, I want to be careful here because this teaching can be weaponized. Your suffering is optional, can easily become, get over it, or you're choosing to be miserable. That is not what this is about. The first arrow is real. The struggles of building a teaching career are real. The time drain of class planning is real. I've heard from hundreds of you, and it takes forever to plan is the single most common thing yoga teachers tell me. The confidence gap is real. The sense of imposter syndrome is real. The financial pressure is real. Yoga philosophy is not asking you to pretend those things don't exist. That would be spiritual bypassing, and we address this directly in the book, yoga Off the Mat. What the Two Arrows Teaching does offer is a diagnostic tool. It helps you see the difference between what is actually happening and what you are adding to what is happening. In my own life and in 20 years of working with yoga teachers, I have noticed the second arrow shows up in three flavors that I think you'll recognize immediately. The first flavor is the story of meaning. Something happens and within seconds your mind has assigned it. Cosmic significance. A student leaves your class early and suddenly it's not. They had somewhere to be. It's, I'm losing my touch. Someone doesn't sign up for your workshop, and it's not, the timing didn't work. It's nobody wants what I'm offering. The first arrow was an event, the second arrow was a verdict on your entire worth as a teacher. I asked almost 150 yoga teachers to tell me their biggest struggle. You know what came up? More than anything? I don't feel confident. I second guess myself. I've been on the sidelines thinking I wasn't ready. Those are all second arrows. The first arrow is that teaching is genuinely hard and nobody prepared you for the real work of planning and leading class week after week. For real humans, that's legitimate. The second arrow is the story that says. You specifically can't do it that everyone else has it figured out and you are the only one faking it. You are not. I promise you you're not. The second flavor is the projection forward. One thing goes wrong and your mind fast forwards to catastrophe. You stumble over a cue in class and within minutes you're imagining the negative review, the dwindling attendance, the studio owner pulling your spot. You spend three hours planning a class and the second arrow whispers if it takes this long now, it will always take this long. This is unsustainable. You will burn out. The first arrow was a tough planning session. The second arrow was a prophecy. The third flavor is the retrospective edit. Something difficult happens now and you go excavating the past, searching for evidence that it was always going to be this way. You get tongue tied in a mixed level class and suddenly it's, of course, this happened. I've never been good under pressure. My training didn't prepare me. I should have picked a different career. The first arrow was today, the second arrow was rewriting your entire history to match today's pain. Now here's what connects this to the broader framework of yoga philosophy. In the book, Alexander DeSiato, my co-author and I discuss the kleshas, the five obstacles that create suffering and duga doesn't exist in isolation. The cliches are what load the second arrow. Avidya, wrong seeing, is the root klesha. You are misperceiving the situation. You are comparing your behind the scenes to everyone else's highlight reel. Ego adds the eye to it. This isn't just a thing that happened, it happened to me. It means something about me as a teacher. Raga and dvesha, craving and aversion. Create the pole. You want the confidence to arrive now. You want the planning to be effortless. Already you're averse to the discomfort of being in the growth zone. Abhinivesha, fear of the unknown, keeps you gripping. You can't let go of the second arrow because you are afraid of what's on the other side of letting go. What if you really aren't good enough? Better to keep worrying than to find out. When you can see the cliches as loading the bow, you start to have a choice about whether to release. so what do you actually do with this? I want to give you two layers here. One for your own practice and one for your teaching. For you, the practitioner, the next time you notice suffering, especially the kind that lives in your teaching life, pause and ask, is this the first arrow or the second? That's it. You don't have to do anything with the answer. You don't have to fix it, solve it, or make it go away. Just ask the question. Here's why this works. The act of asking which arrow this is requires you to get into the witness position. You shift from being inside the suffering, to observing the suffering. And that tiny shift, even for a moment, is pr yahara, the fifth limb of yoga. You're creating a sliver of space between stimulus and response. You're withdrawing your senses. Let me give you a specific scenario. So you've been planning for this week's classes, it's been an hour, and you are not happy with what you've got. The second arrow is loading up. I should be faster at this by now. Other teachers just walk in and do it. Why can't I pause? Name it. That's the second arrow. The first arrow, the real thing is that class planning is a skill and skills take time to develop. The fact that it takes you an hour right now isn't a character flaw. It's where you are in the process. In 20 years of teaching, I can tell you the planning gets simpler, faster, and more intuitive. Not because you skip it, but because you practice it like any other skill. And if you're familiar with my offer ecosystem, I have several products that are designed to help you plan faster, including the Prep Station and my book, the Art of Yoga Sequencing. A few more practices for you. The three breath pause when the first arrow hits a tough class, a critical comment, a low turnout. Take three conscious breaths before you respond either out loud or to yourself. Three breaths is usually enough time to notice whether you are about to shoot a second arrow and the label. When you catch the second arrow, name it internally, just say second arrow. The same way a meteorologist names a storm. Not to stop it, but to track it. Naming reduces its power. Here's a journal prompt. At the end of each teaching day, write down one first arrow and one second arrow. Just one of each. Over a week, you will start to see patterns. You will notice which situations reliably trigger your second arrow loading, and which Ches are doing the loading. Now for you, the teacher, how to bring this into your classroom.'cause this is one of the most teachable concepts in the Buddhist philosophy, in yoga philosophy in the book, yoga off the mat, and you don't need to say Dukha to teach it in a physical practice, the two arrows are happening constantly. The first arrow is the sensation, the stretch, the effort, the wobble, the shaking quad. That is real. That's information. The second arrow is the story about the sensation. I'm not flexible enough. Everyone else can do this. My body is broken. I'll never get this pose. You can cue this simply for your students. Notice if you're layering a story onto the sensation that's the two arrows in one sentence, your students will feel it immediately because they're already doing it. They just might not have the language for it or try this. The wobble in your standing balance. That's the first arrow. The frustration about the wobble. That's the second one. See if you can stay with the wobble and let the frustration go. That's philosophy landing in a body, in a room in real time. No lecture required. No sods, scri necessary though. If you want to go deeper and explain the etymology, the axle metaphor is beautiful and your students will remember it. If this kind of teaching is the work, you want to go deeper in weaving philosophy into your classes in a way that actually lands building Dharma talks from concepts your students can feel. This is exactly what we work on together in my mastering The Art of Yoga sequencing mentorship. It's not just about what to teach, it's about becoming the kind of teacher who walks into. Any room and serves, whoever shows up. Visit sage Rountree.com/mentorship to learn more and pick up the books that I co-wrote with Alexandra called Teaching Yoga Beyond the Poses and Teaching Yoga Beyond The Poses Volume 2. Here's what I want you to take from this episode. You can't avoid the first arrow. Teaching yoga is hard. Planning yoga classes takes time. Not every class you teach will land. Students will leave, workshops won't fill, and some weeks you will stare at that blank notebook and wonder what you're doing. That's the first arrow and it's part of the craft. But the second arrow, the story that says you're failing, that you are the only one struggling, that everyone else has it figured out. Friend, that one is yours. Not in a blamey way, in an empowered way. You get to decide how long you hold the bow, how many times you release, how deeply you let the story go. The practice isn't perfection. In 20 years of teaching, I still shoot second arrows all the time. The difference is that now I notice and noticing is the beginning of yoga. We go into this much deeper in Yoga Off the Mat. Chapter 22 lays out the full framework and the actions box. We give you a lot of actions in the book. It'll give you a week's worth of practices. Pre-order links are in the show notes. Pre-orders matter a lot to the fate of a book, so I am deeply grateful for yours. Alexandra is deeply grateful for yours. We worked so hard on this book and we can't wait for you to read it. If you want to practice with a community of yoga teachers doing the same work, both on and off the mat, come join us in the Zone. It's the free community for yoga teachers at comfortzoneyoga.com. If you found this episode helpful, I would love it if you would rate and review the show because it helps other yoga teachers find us. For now, this is Yoga Teacher Confidential. I'm Sage Rountree. Thank you for joining me. I'll see you next time.