How an Archery Lesson Can Make You Happier
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In 1924, a German professor named Eugen Herrigel set out to learn about Zen Buddhism, which was starting to penetrate the West. He found a teaching position in Japan, where he hoped to locate someone who could instruct him in the philosophy. Rather than the sort of course he had in mind, he was informed that because he lacked proficiency in Japanese, he would be required instead to learn a skill—namely, kyūdō (the way of the bow)—and this would indirectly impart the Zen truths that he sought. To this end, Herrigel took up his archery studies with the master Awa Kenzō, which he later chronicled in his 1948 book, Zen in the Art of Archery.
Herrigel’s archery program was arduous and frustrating. “Drawing the bow caused my hands to start trembling after a few moments, and my breathing became more and more laboured,” he wrote. “Nor did this get any better during the weeks that followed.” Indeed, the weeks became months, and the months wound up becoming five years. At long last, Herrigel learned how to loose an arrow and hit his mark. When he finally acquired the skill, he also realized that he now understood the Zen attitude. “The shot will only go smoothly when it takes the archer himself by surprise,” he wrote—when you “let go of yourself.”
In short, Herrigel learned that the secret to archery—and the approach to life he was seeking—is to know when to stop resisting change and simply let it occur. Fortunately, you don’t have to spend half a decade studying archery in Japan to benefit from this central insight. To figure out what sources of resistance are holding you back, and discover how to find release from them and live better, read on.
[From the January/February 2012 issue: Arrow envy]
Unless you are a monastic, your life is probably characterized by a lot of resistance, especially to change. Even the most adventurous people are susceptible to this because change almost always means an uncertain or challenging future. Researchers have found that our resistance to change is rooted in at least four sources: routine seeking (a preference for boredom over surprise), emotional reaction to imposed change (stress aversion), a short-term focus (seeing change as a hassle of adjustment), and cognitive rigidity (a reluctance to rethink things).
Scholars have argued that change-resistance is a behavioral pattern that can be epigenetic—that is, a trait that becomes heritable because, without altering a person’s actual DNA, it modifies the way their genes are expressed at a cellular level. Change-resistance, the argument goes, gets reinforced and passed on because it provides a way to conserve energy, rather than having to learn the same routines over and over. And people almost certainly evolved a resistance to change in the first place because it leads to stability in decision making, and that makes living in social groups easier.
This helps explain why most people naturally resist change—whether that change involves becoming single even when a relationship has gone south, remaining in a job that bores you, or staying put in a city you haven’t liked for years. And that also explains why, as natural as change-resistance is, it tends not to improve your happiness. Change in life is inevitable, after all—and always resisting it is onerous. In fact, your resistance to change may well be making you unhappier, because it is positively correlated with neuroticism, a trait that personality research has found to be a driver of unhappiness.
An especially common area of change-resistance is unwillingness to think differently, which manifests as a rejection of ideas and opinions that vary from our own. In 2017, three psychologists used a series of experiments to demonstrate that most people prefer to hear the views of those who vote as they do, and that on cultural issues, most would forgo a small cash sum ($3) rather than have to hear a view opposing their own. Neuroscientists have shown that hearing political views you don’t share activates the amygdala, which is implicated in the human response to perceived threats.
Once again, this mechanism probably evolved from a time in human prehistory. In this case, what we think of today as an opposing ideological allegiance back then actually implied membership in a different, and potentially hostile, tribe or kinship group. Today, that trait persists in maladaptive ways: I find your view on climate change so disagreeable that my Pleistocene brain reacts as if you’re an unwelcome interloper who’s come along to burn my village. Aren’t we always complaining about how tribal politics has become?
[Read: In praise of pointless goals]
The impulse to resist is so natural, then, that it’s encoded in your genes. As that suggests, a degree of resistance can be perfectly appropriate and healthy. But your predisposition to resistance may affect your life in negative ways when it makes you rigid, like Herrigel locked in place with his arms trembling, not knowing how to take a shot. Such rigidity in the face of change will lower your happiness.
As the years passed, Herrigel finally understood that productive nonresistance means effortless effort, a phrase Herrigel used elsewhere to describe how he ceased to focus consciously on trying to hit the target and—in something akin to a “flow state”—lost himself in the process of shooting. In other words, he became indifferent to performing correctly at each stage, such as the release of the string from his finger or the business of keeping aim; rather, his self dissolved into a state of nonjudgmental absorption in the complete action of drawing the bow and shooting the arrow when the string’s time came to slip his finger.
Herrigel had thus mastered the whole “way of the bow.” One word of caution: Herrigel may sometimes have taken his own advice too far, as when, after his return from Japan to Germany in 1929, he acceded to the demand that he join the Nazi Party. Nonjudgmental absorption in the moment is not an alibi for bad judgment.
Nevertheless, from his philosophy of archery, we can infer three valuable lessons for tackling a situation in which resistance is natural but is also lowering the quality of life.
1. Focus on process, not outcome.
Some common business advice is Do things well and let the results come naturally, but this applies equally well more generally. Take the case of your job: Focusing on an involuntary change, such as the possibility of being laid off, will make you fearful and rigid, and distract you from what you’re working on from moment to moment. By all means, think about that potential problem for a few minutes when it crosses your mind, but then put it aside and refocus on doing a great job today. Be kind and generous to others who may also be worrying about their job. Live in what the self-improvement author Dale Carnegie called “day-tight compartments.” Resisting an outcome you probably have little control over will make you miserable. So, instead, allow yourself to work on the processes that you can control more, and you will feel better.
2. Practice mindful absorption.
Now that you are mentally released from obsessing over outcomes, the next step is to practice being completely absorbed in the necessary action. This will improve your performance and reduce your stress. Say, for example, that your romantic relationship is in trouble: Shelve your fear that your partner might leave you at some future date, and instead be mindful of your role in the relationship today and what you can do to make it better. This might or might not save the relationship ultimately, because it can’t make past difficulties disappear, but being fully present and attentive as a partner gives you a better chance of success—if not in this relationship, then in your next one—than trying some shortcut fix or melodramatic gesture.
3. Release the ego.
Herrigel emphasized that, as an archer, he had to learn to focus on the arrow as opposed to himself. In other words, he had to exercise a degree of ego erasure, an exclusion of self-consciousness. This is a topic I’ve touched on before, about what it means to shift from the “me-self” to the “I-self” and how that can produce greater happiness. Let’s return to the situation of being confronted by a point of view with which you strongly disagree. Given your resistance to changing your own view, your amygdala will tend to make you overreact and see this contrary argument as a threat. Instead, release your ego and tell yourself, “This opinion has nothing to do with me.” Then simply listen with detached curiosity; you may learn something interesting about why this person thinks that way and avoid an unnecessarily negative encounter. And if you do choose to engage further with this interlocutor, you will probably be more persuasive by being a listener. Not that it matters to you, O enlightened one.
[From the October 2015 issue: How an 18th-century philosopher helped solve my midlife crisis]
I first read Zen in the Art of Archery at the age of 20—I’ll admit, not with the purest of motives. My purpose was to become a better French-horn player for fame and fortune rather than for the Zen of playing. Obviously, I was completely missing the real message. I picked up Herrigel’s book again at 55, when I was in the necessary process of changing jobs, careers, and cities, and in a state of abject terror.
Clearly, I had some resistance to overcome. Now the book made sense to me. It helped me stop thinking so much about how I was going to hit the target of my professional shift, and instead get mindfully absorbed in my daily work. That largely took my ego out of the equation and enabled me to allow the shift to occur naturally, without judgment or forcing anything. The openness to change that I learned from Herrigel’s mastery of archery has made these past five years among the happiest and most fulfilling of my life.