After the RAIN: What Are You Ready to Let Go?

This is the final post in a series on the meditation technique RAIN as taught by Tara Brach. If you aren't familiar with RAIN, you can go back and read the introductory post to the series or check out the resources on Brach's website 😊

In preparation for writing this series, I went back and re-listened to the Ten Percent Happier podcast episode that first introduced me to RAIN in order to refresh my memory on some of the specifics of the practice. Embarrassingly, I had completely forgotten that there is an ultimate goal of RAIN beyond just opening to your experience and learning to respond with nurturing. Tara Brach calls this "After the RAIN": "realizing freedom from narrow identity." I mentioned in the introduction that RAIN was initially created by a teacher named Michele McDonald; in her version, the N stood for "Non-Identification." This state is, supposedly, the natural byproduct of the RAIN practice. Brach says, "In the same way that the earth blossoms following a spring shower, after RAIN, realization naturally arises as to our true nature. We are no longer identified with passing states like fear or anger; we are free to inhabit the wholeness of our Being."

I felt a bit embarrassed re-listening to the podcast. Here I was, about to write an entire blog series around this meditation technique, and I had completely lost site of its ultimate purpose. As mentioned in the last several posts, my first year of RAIN practices uncovered deep wells of pain and insecurity that burst forth in tidal waves of violent emotions that swept me away. It's understandable that, confronted with such intense emotions that had been suppressed for so long, I was not yet ready or able to zoom out and view these experiences as "passing states." (Another thing I had lost site of while doing the practices last year was the idea of titrating - starting with small challenges so that you are able to handle them without getting swept away. If you do RAIN, maybe don't start with the most difficult things like I did. Although, to be fair, when you've been completely out of touch with your emotions for so long, things you thought were going to be "easy" may end up being way more intense than you ever expected.)

Now that I've been practicing for over a year, there are certain times when I get through all the letters of RAIN and do feel some sense of release from the emotions that were owning me. But there are also probably going to be times, as I've recounted in the first posts of this series, when the intensity of the experiences being confronted requires multiple passes over an extended period of time. It very well may take a year or more to swing from the extreme of fully suppressing through opening and fully feeling to land on the sweet spot of fully non-identifying.

However, as I was writing these posts and reflecting, I started to see that I may have fallen into a trap somewhere along the way. In trying so hard to swing away from emotional suppression, I swung too far in the opposite direction and got stuck on the opposite pole of self-pity, glorifying my emotions and perhaps taking them too seriously. I had to get to a point in the middle where I could healthily respect what I was experiencing, but ultimately let it go.

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The path to learning about and improving my mental health was a long, bumpy, dark, difficult one. Along the way, I learned all the ways in which society tries to block us from helping ourselves (dissatisfied consumers are the best consumers! Thanks once again, Capitalism). I learned how past generations had immediately defaulted to suppressing their emotions and stigmatizing any kind of healthy psychological growth. I felt angry and indignant. Why had the world been set up like this? Why, when there were tools out there, weren't we using them to help ourselves?

Image via @bunnymichael

Over the years, as I delved deeper and deeper into more spiritual practices, a conviction developed subconsciously within me: what the past generations did was so horrible and stupid and wrong, that I needed to swing as far as I possibly could in the opposite direction. Instead of stigmatizing mental health, I needed to harness ALL the methods to improve mine (therapy, yoga, meditation, reading, BreathWork, exercising, etc). Instead of suppressing my emotions, I needed to dig them up, dust them off, put them on a pedestal and listen carefully to everything they had to tell me.

And the more I listened to my emotions, the more they did tell me. I've recounted this in the first two posts of this series. As I recounted in RAIN #1, as I got in touch with the emotions hanging out in my body, they revealed to me deep, sometimes primordial beliefs and fears that had been haunting me my entire life without me ever realizing it. As I recounted in RAIN #2, I learned how much pain I had caused myself by suppressing these emotions, by not believing them, by trying to whip the parts of me that did believe them into submission rather than offering them any kind of nourishment.

So I swung myself all the way in the opposite direction and tried to seek out the emotions. Buddhist meditation usually advised me to just sit there and do nothing; if an emotion arose, to simply notice how it felt in my body. They hardly ever did arise while I was calmly breathing and, when they did, they felt too intense to simply sit with. This advice always frustrated me. Then I discovered Breath Work and learned I could actively use the breath to dredge up the stored emotions and allow them to move through, like using smoke to flush out a swarm of bees that has been living under your deck. I started exploring more "active" styles of psychological work like Internal Family Systems, where I not only went looking for the emotions but then sat down with them to chat and get to know the parts of me that had been believing them over all these years. There was a feeling that the emotions and beliefs had something important to tell me, and I needed to actively engage with them to reap their wisdom.

I was always really frustrated when meditation teachers acted so cool and detached when talking about emotions. "Just notice them." "Just be with them." "They are just passing phenomena." This sounded so much like the unhealthy suppression and stigmatization of my parents' generation. Why should I just sit with my demons when other people were offering me techniques for exorcising them?

But the more I interrogated my parts through Internal Family Systems or tried to flush out my stuck emotions with Breath Work, the more often I would get stuck at an intractable belief. One that I continue to grapple with to this day is the deep, deep, excruciating conviction that I am not worthy of love. I want to let go of this belief so badly - I've tried using Breath Work to flush out the pain it's caused over the years, I've tried engaging with the parts of me that believe it to try and offer them nurturing and help them let go of the belief, but like petulant children, they cling to it desperately and refuse to let go.

Original content from my Insta, @sassygaybuddhist

Recently, during a particularly difficult time when this belief was really owning me, I realized the irony that I was writing a blog series about RAIN but that I hadn't actually sat down and done a formal RAIN practice in a long time. I pulled up Tara Brach's 20 minute RAIN meditation on Youtube and went through the letters as usual: Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture. During nurturing, as usual, I heard the voice inside that was terrified I might be unworthy of love, and held myself as I sobbed. I did feel a bit more nurtured than I would have in the past, but the emotion was still so powerful and strong compared to my nurturing capabilities; it was like using an eyedropper to try and stop a boat from sinking, or throwing torches to try and make a monster go away.

Original content from my Insta @sassygaybuddhist

Tara Brach spoke up after a long silence as though she were speaking directly to me. "If it's difficult to offer compassion from your own high self," she said, "you could try imagining a being that represents compassion." I was familiar with this technique, and had often found it useful, but that night, I was having trouble visualizing and getting a felt sense of another being helping me hold my intense emotions. Since my belief was that no one would ever really love me, it was difficult to be in the presence of anyone, even a fully-compassionate being. The petulant child who was hurting hardened and contracted away from any presence that tried to approach.

And then, Tara Brach said something that shifted the perspective radically and changed everything. After listing possible compassionate beings like the Buddha, Jesus, mother Earth, or a being of light, she finally offered: "Or it could be the love and the wisdom that fills this universe; let it flow into your heart where the vulnerability lives."

Somehow, in that moment, it was my Open, Sesame!, the Kryptonite for my intractable situation. Suddenly, I was able to visualize the vast, unimaginable expanses of the cosmos, like pictures you see Googling stars, black holes, planets, solar systems. I imagined the luminous gases and spaces between the objects were love, a diffuse, a-personal, cosmic energy that flowed through everything and animated all phenomena, from planets orbiting to stars exploding to me, sitting here, with my intractable problem. Not only did this give me the cliched reminder that my problems are tiny on a cosmic scale; it helped me remember and reconnect to the felt sense that I am part of something bigger, that my problem is shared by many humans; and, on an even more fundamental level, that this combination of beliefs and emotions and physical sensations and mental narratives that I was calling "my problem" were not cruel injustices crafted just to torture me but were simply natural phenomena, swirling manifestations of that same ineffable cloud of cosmic love that I could feel pulsing and coursing through everything. It was not "my problem," per se; it was just another expression of life, of energy manifesting, of the universe doing whatever the hell the universe does. It was a process unfolding that, really, had little to do with me and that I had no control over.

Image via Greg/Goodfreephotos

There was still a part of me, though, that did not want to let go. There was a part of me that did not want to release this fear we had lived with for years into the cosmos. I suddenly remembered another mantra my Breath Work teacher often drops into practice as we breathe: "Ask yourself, 'What am I ready to let go?'" The "higher" self, as Tara Brach called it, that could feel the vastness of the cosmos, realized that I had swung so far away from repressing my emotions that I had ended up clinging to them for dear life, expecting that they would be the thing that gave me meaning. In that moment, my "higher" self saw clearly that, while sometimes difficult emotions have an underlying truth or belief that needs to be painfully worked through, there are also times when they are just being maintained by our fear or habits. "Who will I be without this fear?" "Am I really strong enough to open up to love?" "Will I really survive if no one accepts me?" When, rather than repressing or trying to forcefully push them away, we ask gently, "What are you ready to let go?", we may sometimes be surprised how easily they begin to release when we stop clinging to them.

Instead of trying to pry the belief out of my inner child's hands as I had before, I asked if it was ready to let go. I simultaneously felt the expansiveness of the cosmos holding me and the tight contraction of the belief being held in my body. Slowly, hesitantly, the space around my heart softened a bit, my throat relaxed slightly. This is spiritual growth, so I can't give you a "one-and-done" story; the belief was not fully relinquished then and there, that's just not how spiritual growth goes. But this was the first time I had ever managed to achieve even the slightest relaxation. My inner child was starting to feel like it might be ready to start letting go; I was finally getting a taste of Tara Brach's "after the RAIN": "freedom from narrow identity."

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When I first had the idea for this series, I was excited. I loved the joyful stupidity of fashioning an entire blog series around a silly proverb (April showers bring May flowers - there was literally no better reason than that) and I was excited to use the Hilary Duff song. On a more serious note, I also remembered what a powerful and meaningful tool RAIN had been to me in my first year of meditation practice and thought others could probably learn and be inspired to try it from hearing my stories (though Idk, the stories of intense hurricanes may have scared people away 🌀😂).

RAIN is a deceptively simple-seeming practice that, in fact, has nearly infinite troves of wisdom to offer us. It provides the tools to accept our experience as it is, to grow our compassion, to work through our inner beliefs and fears, to heal our past wounds, and to reconnect with our true nature as unbounded manifestations of cosmic forces beyond our understanding.

Are you ready to let the RAIN fall down and wake your dreams? There will be thunder, and you will probably scream, but, ultimately, there will be healing that comes from your toil. There's no growth without pain, and there can't be any flowers without RAIN.