“We wait for stuff to get easier. It will never get easier. What happens is you handle hard better.” Kara Lawson, Duke University’s women’s basketball head coach
Life throws us a lot of curve balls. I used to just sweep all those difficulties under the carpet and pretend they didn’t exist. If you are like me, you may find that you have a number of difficult things that you swept under the carper, poking at you to get out.
How you handle difficulties can be a continuum from being overwhelmed and feeling helpless; to feeling anxious which spurs us to action; to ignoring the facts and pretending it is no big deal. 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 and use RAIN to process and learn to deal with hard things.
RAIN (Recognize-Allow-Investigate-Nurture) helps 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 your moment-to-moment experience.
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 this living world. We see the hurtful words of a friend, but we don’t see how that friend is suffering.
When you bring RAIN directly to the experience of any difficulty, you’ll discover the vulnerability that drives it, and you’ll awaken your capacity for self-compassion. This will naturally loosen the grip of selfishness or any other ego coverings that limit you.
So, our negative self-beliefs, even when deeply painful, often give us a sense of certainty, orientation, and control. 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.
If you scan your uncomfortable feelings, chances are you will notice that you have ignored a hard thing or turned on yourself when experiencing a hard thing. 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 taking care of the needs of yourself, a partner, a friend, or your child.
The four components of RAIN are: Recognize: What is happening inside and outside of me? Allow: Can I be with what is happening, just for a moment? Investigate: What is happening inside myself: my feelings, sensations, emotions, beliefs? Nurture: What does the hurting, frightened, wounded place inside of me need right now?
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. Some of those thoughts are our inner critic judging us or repeating painfully constricting beliefs. If we ignore it keeps poking us underneath. When we are poked unconsciously, we often feel uncomfortable sensations in our body, which we also ignore. But those sensations are trying to communicate to us. For example, if you are constantly shaking your leg, that tells you there is some unconscious anxiety you need to deal with. While shaking the leg releases some of the anxious energy, the anxiety keeps feeding itself. 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 body feels jittery, you might not recognize that this physical response is being triggered by your belief that you are about to fail. 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.
Allow
“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.” David Emerald & Donna Zajonc
Allow means to admit that our suffering actually exists. We see clearly that the external world is not meeting our wishes and accept that we cannot change it. We concede that we cannot control the external world, but we can control our reaction to it. We stop fighting what is real, so we can learn from it and choose how to respond. Allowing lets us turn toward our thoughts, beliefs, emotions, and sensations instead of covering them up or pushing them away. We can release ourselves from fighting against reality by accepting the fact of our experience in the here and now. We acknowledge and accept the reality of our experience in this moment instead of jumping on the hamster wheel of reactivity.
“My favorite phrase is, ‘I can handle it.’ If you can handle something, it’s not a big deal. When you feel you can’t handle something, that’s when it becomes a big deal.” Michael Singer
As you become more willing to be present with “what is,” a different quality of attention will emerge. We begin with a conscious intention to just be with what is, hard as that can 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, not forever, but for this moment.”
Allowing is not the opposite of rejection. True allowing means not judging. Neither rejecting nor approving. Rejecting or approving are actions of moving away from or toward. Allowing is not an action at all. It is just letting an experience be. Can I just be with this?
Investigate
Sometimes, simply working through the first two steps of RAIN is enough to provide relief and reconnect you with presence. However, if you are in the middle of difficulties – the thick of a divorce, dealing with a difficult partner, sibling or friend or dealing with a life-changing or threatening illness, 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 feelings and sensations are strong? Do your shoulders tighten? Does your jaw lock down? How does your stomach feel? 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.
- What happens in your mind? Do you run revenge scenarios through your imagination? Do you replay arguments with the accused, saying what you wish you had said at the time? Does it make you feel important?
- 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 am I believing? How has living with this belief affected my life? Can you see its impact on how you relate to yourself and others, on your creativity, your capacity to serve, your ability to enjoy experience, your inner growth? How tightly are you holding onto that belief? Can you loosen your hold a little?
- What is my intention: to tear others down and be “one-up” or to try to improve the situation?
- What do you most long for right now? Attention? Safety? Acceptance? Connection? Understanding? Love?
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 offer 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 (recommended by Tara Brach). I’m here with you. I’m sorry, and I love you. I love you, and I’m listening. It’s not your fault. Trust in your goodness.
To Nurture, ask the question: What does the hurting, frightened, wounded place inside of you need right now?
RAIN Meditation
Looking at the order of RAIN above, it appears that they are steps to be taken in order. And if you are dealing with small irritations and mildly unpleasant emotions, that is often the case. 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 and to Allow those feelings to be.
If you want to handle your difficulties, Recognize what you are feeling, Allow the external situation and your feelings about it to be what they are, Investigate what most needs attention and Nurture yourself with self-care.