We Need the R.A.I.N. (1/2)

I’ve been following the DC-based Buddhist teacher and clinical psychotherapist, Tara Brach, via her weekly podcasts for some years now. She’s deep, sometimes a bit silly and more than anything, dead real.

Of all of her guided meditations, it’s the RAIN of Self-Compassion that I’ve been returning to during these difficult days.

RAIN is an acronym which proposes quite a radical, and counter-intuitive way of being with your suffering.

It doesn’t make the emotional pain go away, it just makes your heart and mind bigger so, relatively at least, your pain takes up less space. It also steadily and gently encourages you to stop resisting your suffering, which is such a deeply encoded, gut-level, primal manoeuvre that it’s hard to even be aware you’re doing it. Thing is, resistance just exacerbates the suffering and prevents it from just moving through you.

Tara talks a lot about falling into the trance of unworthiness, those moments when you condemn yourself and bag yourself out for the pain you’re feeling. Jeez! As if the anxiety, anger, depression, guilt or whatever wasn’t bad enough, we add another layer of suffering – a layer of judgment.

For me, this is most often the case when I feel depressed. I judge and condemn myself for feeling this way and take it as a sign that there’s something wrong with me and my thinking; that I’m somehow bringing it on myself.

RAIN stands for:

Recognise – ok, right, I’ve turned on myself for something I’ve said or done or for feeling a particular way. I’m being harsh or critical or unforgiving with myself and I think it’s ok.

Allow – I don’t like the tension in my jaw or the pounding in the head that arise when I turn on myself, or the lacerating thoughts that come up but I’m going to allow them to be there anyway.

Investigate – What am I believing when I feel this way? That I’m bad? Unlovable? Broken? Nasty? And where is the emotion most intensely felt? In the jaw? The belly? The fronts of the thighs?

Nurture (best bit) – What do I most need in this moment? My tenderness? Forgiveness? To see things from another perspective? Mercy?

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working particularly with the ‘A’ of RAIN, with ‘allowing’ and it’s made a bit of a difference.

Let me explain how…