Not All Wounds Are Created Equal

You may have heard this ancient Buddhist parable: a man is walking through the woods when a hunter mistakes him for an animal and fires. The arrow goes into his shoulder.

The hunter flees in horror.

The man stands there in shock thinking: "What if I lose so much blood I faint? What if it gets infected before I make it home? What if an animal smells the blood? What if I don't make it back at all — what happens to my family?"

The first arrow came from the hunter. The second arrow — the cascade of imagined catastrophe, each one lived in the body as if it were already happening — that one the man fired himself, transforming pain into potential catastrophe, living each what-if fully in his mind.

I had heard this before, but here's the part that took me years to see clearly, and I don't think it gets enough love.

Not all first arrows are equal, and the second arrow isn't always the main problem.

When I was coming apart with panic attacks in my mid-twenties — before I had any language for what was happening to me — two specific events defined the whole trajectory. The first was in a bank lineup in Montreal. I was about to cash an unemployment cheque, the floor started rising toward my face, and I ran out of the building and went straight home and got into bed.

That was the first arrow.

A few weeks later I took a friend to lunch for his birthday. Hot day, crowded restaurant, no air conditioning worth mentioning. I took a too-big bite of a Philly cheesesteak and the thought arrived: "Oh no — what if it were to happen now, with my mouth full, just like this?"

Everything crashed in at once. I spent the next several minutes frantically searching for a bathroom I couldn't find, sweating through my shirt, enormous mouthful of sandwich. I eventually found it, in the office building next door.

That was the worst.

Those two events did completely different jobs. The bank arrow cracked the door open but the restaurant arrow locked the pattern in — public places, people, no easy exit, were all coded DANGER — and my nervous system filed that away as permanent operating procedure.

Here's why this matters in practice: when you're working with people, it genuinely matters which one you're dealing with. The first incident and the worst incident are not interchangeable. Sometimes you need to go back to the original crack. Sometimes the crack barely matters and what you're actually dealing with is the event that poured concrete into it.

Mistaking one for the other doesn't just slow the work down. It can leave the real thing completely untouched while both you and your client assume the job is done.

The same system that learned panic that quickly, I eventually discovered, could also unlearn it.

The Hümmo Method — Energy Healing for the Rest of Us arrives August 18, 2026. The distinction between first incident and worst incident is one of the practical cornerstones of the method. The book explains how to find both — and what to do with them. Reserve your copy here.