Processing Your “Stuff” With RAIN

We push things down under the line, making it unconscious, because we don’t think we can deal with it. When we push it down, it covers our inner goodness with all this junk. It’s like a closet that you throw things in that you don’t want to deal with. To get to the one thing you do want in there, you have to empty out the closet.  So, we want to get rid of all the junk you have thrown on top of your inner goodness. For me, that is what practice has been. Taking this mask off and getting rid of this brick (I use both mask and brick because sometimes things are too big to call a mask.) We can’t get rid of our “stuff” by pushing it away. We can only get rid of it by dealing with it.

“The path to bringing love to our world begins by healing our inner divides. If we are willing and courageous enough to feel what’s going on inside us, to really contact the feelings of personal deficiency, fear and vulnerability and be intimate with them, that’s what gives us the capacity to be intimate with others… When we bridge inner divides, we become aware of our basic goodness—the care in our hearts, our natural intelligence, creativity, longing to be awake.” Tara Brach 

Life throws us a lot of curve balls. If we just sweep all those difficulties under the carpet, we have covered our true self up. It is covered with all the junk we have thrown below the line, all the stuff we thought we couldn’t deal with. And then because we don’t feel good, we try to manipulate the world around us.

I have talked about my tendency to be a know-it-all and do-it-all. I thought if I knew everything and did everything for others, I would feel like I was enough.  However, there was always more I could know and more I could do so it didn’t make me feel better.  My compulsive actions did not fill up the hole I felt inside of me. External fixes like compulsive fill up the hole in your heart. Those difficult things are still going to be there under the line. And as long as they are in you, someone is going to press a button that triggers them.  You can’t keep yourself from getting triggered. What you can do is deal with the difficulties.

“When we go into fight-flight-freeze, our executive function shuts down, and there’s no access to empathy, compassion, and connectedness. We are cut off from others and from our own heart and spirit. We are hijacked by the survival limbic brain, and the unprocessed fear gets expressed through the hatred and contempt of others. We create enemies, bad others who are less than human, and aggress against them.” Tara Brach

How you handle difficulties can be a continuum from being overwhelmed and feeling helpless; maybe become a recluse because it is all too much. Some people prefer to ignore the facts and pretending it is no big deal. One of those little no big deals is going to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. We still tell ourselves we are not going to deal with it; we are just going to let it go. We think we are letting it go, but what we are really doing is stuffing it below the line, covering up our inner goodness. Another way is feeling a little anxious which spurs us to action. We move from one spot on the continuum to another throughout the day. We basically have three choices, we bury our head in the sand and pretend the difficulty doesn’t exist, we continue being overwhelmed by the difficulty, or we can acknowledge our difficulty, process it and learn to deal with hard things.

“So, you’re using all this energy to hold it down. Now, because you’re so uncomfortable, and you’re not feeling love, you’re not feeling joy, you’re not feeling inspiration in life, and you’re feeling guilty, whatever the heck it is, you now have to use energy to figure out what to do to not have to deal with yourself.” Michael Singer

When we push all that stuff down, we are covering up all our joy, our love, our inspiration for life. We are feeling like crap. And then we have to figure out what we are going to do to make ourselves feel better.

RAIN (Recognize-Allow-Investigate-Nurture) is the tool that I use to feel better. It works because you apply mindfulness and self-compassion to the hard things in your life.  Each step of RAIN helps you build inner strength by deconditioning the habitual ways in which you resist the difficult things.  

It doesn’t matter whether you resist “what is” by lashing out in anger, by getting drunk, or by getting immersed in obsessive thinking or my go to – busyness. Your attempt to control the life within and around you actually cuts you off from your own heart and from living in the present moment. We see the hurtful words of a friend, but we don’t see how that friend is suffering. We think she is a terrible person, when in reality she is really hurting.  I saw a meme on Factbook today that said don’t give someone a lecture when they need a hug. We end up giving ourselves lectures when we really need a hug.

When you bring RAIN directly to the experience of any difficulty, you’ll discover the vulnerability that drives it. You don’t think you are strong enough to deal with that vulnerability. But when you see it, you’ll awaken your capacity for self-compassion. This will naturally loosen the grip of selfishness or any other ego coverings that limit you. You are loosening the grip of all the stuff we have thrown on top of our true self.

So, our negative self-beliefs, even when deeply painful, often give us a sense of certainty and control. We don’t like uncertainty, so we don’t change. We think, I don’t know if meditation is really going to help so I am not going to bother. We can easily stay entranced for years and decades, perpetuating our sense of unworthiness with a habitual narrative of self-judgment and fear-based thinking. It is only when we directly open ourselves to the suffering of this difficulty—how it cuts us off from others and from our own heart and spirit, how we don’t have to believe we’re flawed—that we begin to intuit the freedom possible in shedding old skin.

I have talked about how my best friend dropped me in 7^th grade. I pushed it below the line. That cut me off from my heart and from other people for many years. I kept it below the line. Remember, everything below the line are thoughts that are included in the 2000-3000 thoughts we have each hour. These thoughts are playing over and over; you just don’t know it.  Those thoughts were jerking me around for years until I finally stopped and looked at it. I saw it wasn’t so scary that she didn’t want to be my friend. I found another group of friends that were better suited to me.

If you scan your uncomfortable feelings, chances are you will notice that you have ignored a hard thing or turned on yourself when experiencing difficult times.  It could be an experience from your childhood. It could be that you did not take care of a relationship (or yourself) in a skillful way.  It may be that you lashed out in anger.  Maybe you were not careful, and you made a mistake.  Or you are at war with yourself for not being the person you really want to be. You are at war because you are not sitting in meditation as long as you think you should be. Or you are not communicating as skillfully as you should be.

Let’s us use the example of lashing out at someone we care for. Something I am sure we all have done.

Recognize

Recognize means to simply become aware of what is happening right now, without rose colored or dark glasses.  Recognizing is shining the light of awareness on your inner life: your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. When you lash out at a loved one, your inner critic starts telling you how awful you are, no wonder no one can love you. Often, we try to ignore it and just brush the whole experience under the carpet. When we ignore it keeps poking us, unconsciously. We feel an uncomfortable sensation in our body, which we also ignore.  But those sensations are trying to communicate to us. We can use the uncomfortable sensations as a bell of mindfulness, telling us to be aware of our thoughts, beliefs, or feelings instead of sweeping them under the rug.

We begin recognizing by focusing our attention on whatever thoughts, emotions, feelings, or sensations are arising right here and now. Notice that some parts of your experience are easier to connect with than others. For example, when your chest tightens, you might not recognize that this physical response is being triggered by your belief that you are about to be rejected. If you feel sensations of hollowness or shakiness, you may find a sense of unworthiness and shame buried. 

Awaken recognition simply by asking yourself: “What is happening inside me right now?”  Call on your natural curiosity as you focus inward. Try to let go of any preconceived ideas and instead listen in a kind, receptive way to your body and heart.

Admit and Allowing

“Denying or rejecting appropriate emotions in response to difficult situations can diminish your resilience and capacity to work with life’s challenges. The more you practice staying with your emotions, rather than forcing positive thinking, the more you will trust your ability to fully inhabit all your emotions.” Donna Zajonc

When you fight against reality, you always lose. We need to see clearly that the external world is not meeting our wishes and accept that we cannot change it.  We concede that we cannot change our loved one, but we can control our reaction to their criticisms. Instead of lashing out, we can learn from it and choose how to respond. We admit that reality is not what we want it to be, and we allow the thoughts, emotions, feelings or sensations we feel to be there. We may feel a natural sense of aversion, of wishing that unpleasant feelings would go away, but as we become more willing to be present with “what is,” a different quality of attention will emerge. Admitting and allowing is intrinsic to healing and realizing this can give rise to a conscious intention to “let be.”

“So first, own it. Don’t blame it on anybody. You own that you weren’t able to deal with things well enough.” Michael Singer

It is really hard to just let unpleasant sensations or thought from the unskillful comments of a loved one be.  You may want to whisper an encouraging phrase.  You may say, “Yes, this is happening.” Or “this to” or “I can be with this.”  At first you might feel you’re just “putting up” with unpleasant emotions or sensations, that’s OK. Just don’t say “yes” to the unpleasant feelings and hope that they will magically disappear. The first gesture of allowing, simply whispering a phrase like “yes” or “I can be with this” begins to soften the harsh edges of your pain. Your entire being is not so resistant.

Investigate

Sometimes, simply working through the first two steps of RAIN is enough to provide relief and enable you to let go of the difficult emotion.   However, if their unskillful comment is a trigger to unprocessed difficult experiences, you are likely to be overwhelmed by intense feelings. Because these feelings are triggered repeatedly, your reactions can become very entrenched.

To Investigate, call on your natural curiosity to see what is really going on. This is not an intellectual analysis that will leave you feeling drained.  If you feel drained, you are too much in your head. Investigating is letting your mind rest, so it is not so cloudy. What clouds our mind? Pettiness, jealousy, entitlement or envy to name a few.

“Open to a wider, more impersonal, big picture view of the situation – so it’s less about you and more about lots of swirling causes coming together in unfortunate ways. See if any kind of deeper insight about the other person, yourself, or the situation altogether comes to you.” Rick Hansen

Don’t analyze the situation, who said what and why – that only strengthens your neuropathways of being the victim. Instead, notice what is underneath the feelings. We all have a natural resistance to feeling uncomfortable and unsafe. So, we busy ourselves with our thinking mind, leaving our body.  Instead of accepting what is and figuring out what we need, we judge what is happening.

We begin by investigating ourselves, so we can let the mud settle and see more clearly. Investigation means calling on your natural curiosity and directing a more focused attention to your present experience.  You might ask yourself:

• What stories are you telling yourself about what your loved one said? What stories have you added on to whatever they said?
• What feelings and sensations are strong? The most important part of investigating is connecting with what it feels like in your body. That will help you be aware of the difficulty arising in the future.  That is your bell of mindfulness so you can pause before you get on the hamster wheel of reactivity.
• What is happening in your mind? Are you running revenge scenarios, replaying arguments, one upping? What is my intention: to tear them down and be “one-up” or to try to improve your relationship with them?
• What are the honest feelings in your heart? Not just the anger, but what about the fear, shame, helplessness, hurt, or sadness that sits just under that rage?”
• Widen the investigation by asking: What are you believing about yourself when they talk that way? How does this belief affected your relationship with them?
• Sense the most vulnerable part of you.  Where you feel the worst?  Sense what that part most needs.  The part that feels not OK.  What does it need? 

Nurture

Nurture is providing self-compassion to ourselves.  We can train ourselves to allow self-compassion to arise naturally when we recognize we are suffering. By nurturing ourselves with self-care, it gives us the strength to face uncomfortable emotions and helps us realize that we are not alone. To nurture ourselves we do have to let go of the belief that we do not deserve to be nurtured.

Nurturing is sensing what the wounded, frightened or hurting place inside you most needs, and then offering some gesture of active care that might address this need.  Think about how you would treat a loved one or valued friend in the same situation.  Then offer the same kind words or gestures to yourself. That may be reassurance, forgiveness, companionship, understanding or love. You may choose to mentally whisper to yourself one of the following phrases.  They are letting their suffering spill out onto me. It is their hurt talking. I don’t need to defend or prove I am right, this relationship is more important to me than being right. I’ve got my own back, I don’t need to rely on them to give me what I need.

Here is the answer to the question: What does the hurting, frightened, wounded place inside of you need right now? from one of Tara Brach’s clients.

“‘It needs me to accept not knowing and to hold this grief with kindness.’ She put her hand on her heart and just held what was in her heart. Embedded in the grieving was love, and she said softly, ‘I love life, I want to protect life.’ Her heart was open and tender with an all-inclusive caring.” Tara Brach

We discussed RAIN in a specific order. But you don’t always take the steps in order. If you are dealing with small irritations and mildly unpleasant emotions, you probably take the steps in order. Sometimes you only need to Recognize and Admit and Allow.  However, when you are dealing with something overwhelming, you may need to bounce from one to the other. For example, if you are on the overwhelmed side of the anxiety continuum you may not have the ability to Recognize all you are feeling. You may need to start with Nurture. If you can’t move from Recognize to Admit and Allow, letting those feelings to be, you may need to do some Investigation before you can Allow them to be.

If you want to handle your difficulties, rather than stuff them below the line and carry them around for the rest of your life, you need to Recognize what you are feeling, Admit and Allow reality and your feelings about it to be what they are, Investigate what most needs attention and Nurture yourself with self-care.