RAIN #1 - Investigate: What Am I Unwilling to Feel?

This is the first 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 😊

I spent a lot of time debating how I wanted to structure this blog series. My two main ideas were to do a post per acronym letter or to tell the overarching narrative of how RAIN helped uncover some of my deepest insecurities. I ultimately landed on a combination of the two, and as I started writing, I realized that the importance each letter played in my journey did not go in the order of the acronym. For me, as I first began RAIN, R and A just felt like precursors to the real work of I and N; openers for the headliners, just setting the stage. And above all the others, "I" was the most powerful letter for me, like a preternatural prophetess of my inner world. So let's Investigate: what is so powerful about watching the way our emotions show up in our bodies?

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The I of RAIN stands for Investigate and, at its most basic level, is a fairly simple idea. After you have Recognized that something is going on and Allowed your experience to be just as it is, you then dive into your body and feel into what sensations are present. Tara Brach explains that the process should not be cognitive - we are not doing a scientific investigation or trying to intellectually analyze what's going on - but somatic - actually feeling the sensations just as they are manifesting in our body. Perhaps I can only speak for myself, but I think this is something that many of us in the West are simply not used to. We tend to live most of our lives in our heads and be fairly disconnected from our bodies. We vaguely understand when our stomach shouts at us with crude messages like rumbling hunger or when our body aches with sickness, but rarely could we feel into or describe the nuances of what tummy rumbles really feel like or where the sickness is showing up in our bodies.

Original content from my Insta @sassygaybuddhist!

This article is not a technical guide for how to feel into your body in a somatic way - I would recommend meditation practice with qualified teachers for that (many therapists also use somatic techniques). I'll describe what it has looked like for me, but what I really want to talk about is another nuance of RAIN that can show up through Investigating.

The goal of RAIN, at its foundation, is to be able to view whatever is arising with compassion and nurturing in order to ultimately get some space between ourselves and the emotions. But sometimes this is hard - we are so strongly trained to resist our emotions or try to suppress them or run away from them. Tara Brach put this powerfully in the podcast episode mentioned in the introduction to this series: RAIN can help us answer the question, “What am I unwilling to feel right now?”

This can be a difficult and intense question to answer. The part of us that is unwilling to feel has probably been hardened defensively for a long time. To figure out what you're unwilling to feel, the place that is unwilling has to be softened, has to feel trusting and safe so that it can open up and be vulnerable. Tara Brach explains that, when we can help this place to soften, the compassion of Nurturing will arise as a natural reaction to its vulnerability.

But getting in touch with the vulnerability can be hard, especially when we aren't used to listening to our bodies or viewing our feelings with compassion. We may likely end up feeling into our body in a cold, clinical way - there may even be some judgment and aversion creeping in. Tara Brach offers an interesting technique for warming things up, a technique that is also recommended by Kristin Neff and Chris Germer for cultivating self-compassion.

The technique is to drop certain questions into our body during Investigation to see what answers may arise. Some example questions Brach, Neff, and Germer give are, “What does this place need right now?” or “What do I most need to hear right now?” We can "drop these questions in," as meditation teachers often say, which goes back to Brach's initial guideline to approach Investigation as somatic rather than cognitive. We don't think about what we need to hear; we stay aware of and in touch with the sensations in our body and drop the question into our body as though dropping a pebble into a pond, and then we wait to see what arises. This will probably take practice if you're new to meditating - again, we're so trained to use our brains all the time.

In addition to "dropping the question in," we can also envision someone who embodies compassion (a spiritual teacher, a religious figure, a dear friend, a being of light - anyone) and imagine what this person, who has unconditional care and concern for us, would say right now. Oftentimes, we are our own harshest critics yet are unaware just how harsh we're being with ourselves. Imagining how a compassionate observer might view the situation can help to soften things and get in touch with what’s going on beneath the surface.

The first few times I applied this technique and asked one of these questions, I was shocked by the responses that arose. They almost always seemed unrelated to what I thought was going on, revealing much deeper fears, insecurities, or psychological baggage that I had had no idea were there. And, each time, just as Tara Brach promised, they usually helped the tension to ease and the underlying emotions to be released in a dramatic flood of tears, allowing for a more compassionate view of the situation to arise.

Enough explanation - let's Investigate some examples 😛

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So, rewind to a little more than a year ago, just weeks before the coronavirus shut down life as we knew it. I was at my local climbing gym when, at one point, I ended up right next to a guy I had talked to a few times online and whom I found extremely attractive. We had never actually met in person, and for some reason that night I finally found the courage to begin a conversation with him. I won't lie - the conversation was hella awkward 😅 - but I felt very excited and proud of myself that I had finally been brave enough to say anything at all.

Later, as I was letting my muscles relax in the sauna as I always did post-climbing, I was aware that the excitement from my chance encounter was still present. I felt the usual butterflies and optimism you might have after you chat with someone you like, and I watched my mind go off into ooey-gooey daydreams about the two of us starting a beautiful, perfect life together. The more I leaned into this feeling, I felt a bright expansiveness and vibration in my chest that then started radiating down my arms. Maybe it was just exacerbated by the heat of the sauna (very possible - I don't recommend doing RAIN in a sauna!!! That was probably NOT a good idea), but as the feeling grew and grew, it started to scare me a bit. My heart was racing, my arms were tingling, my body was filled with an energy that seemed to be threatening to overwhelm me. Although it had started as a warm, tender reverie, there seemed to be a terror lurking just behind the excitement. I hadn't been expecting that and couldn't imagine what it might be. I tried to do some deep breathing to calm myself down and soon left the sauna to douse myself in a cold shower.

But the pleasant and slightly terrifying feeling wasn't done with me; it kept returning later that night after I got home. Eventually, I decided to sit down and do a RAIN meditation. I almost didn't - for one, I didn't really want to feel into the sensation, and two, there was a part of me that felt like excitement was a good thing and I was being silly for thinking I needed to offer myself compassion. But I proceeded with the RAIN anyway: I Recognized that something was going on, replayed the moments at the gym, and Allowed the excitement to arise unbounded. As I Investigated the sensations, I again noticed that unidentifiable something trembling just beneath the surface, slightly terrifying, slightly destabilizing, like all the energy of the excitement was threatening to overwhelm me or cause me to burst at the seams. I tried to offer myself Nurturing phrases - "May you be safe, may your suffering end" - but the swirling storm clouds of sensation swept these weak phrases away before they could reach my heart. So I decided to try Brach's technique for softening things and dropped in the question, "What do I most need to hear right now?" I waited to see what would happen.

The statement that arose with shocking clarity seemed to come out of left-field and caught me completely off guard, as though a possessed prophetess had popped up and was intoning inner truths I hadn't been expecting to hear. The compassionate voice inside me responded without hesitation, “It’s OK to want to feel loved.”

My inner prophetess telling me things I wasn't prepared to hear

Immediately, I started sobbing. It was as though the dark clouds of terror and unease that had been swirling around inside, looming over my feeling of excitement, had finally burst and were washing down in my cascades of tears. Even though the statement may sound simple, it felt like a veil had been ripped away and I suddenly saw a vast sea of suffering I had been causing myself for years without realizing it. I saw with clarity something I had never dared to acknowledge to myself before: I was terrified of admitting that I wanted to feel loved because I believed somewhere deep down that I would discover I wasn't really worthy.

Now that I had gotten in touch with the underlying fear, true compassion and tenderness toward this scared, insecure part of me arose uncontrived. I continued repeating the phrase, "It's OK to want to feel loved" and held myself as I cried, rocking myself like I would a child, stroking my arms and the back of my neck. The phrase had, indeed, allowed things to soften and thereby enabled me to hold the experience with compassion.

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After this initial contact with the underlying fear I had not realized was there, I went on to disentangle where this fear had come from and understand all the ways it operated in my life without me realizing it. That is a blog post for another day - for now I want to stay focused on the power of Investigating by giving one more example. This one is only a slight modification of a journal entry I wrote right after it happened, and it points to a related question that Investigating can help untangle, the half-sibling of "What am I unwilling to feel?" - "What am I believing right now?"

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Journal Entry from July 20, 2020:

Or, that time I was doom scrolling on Instagram, tried for a soothing RAIN, and got walloped by a hurricane of unworthiness

I was just looking at Instagram and, for once, a guy I am attracted to linked to his boyfriend's profile. I had never seen a picture of his boyfriend and I was dismayed to find that he is super attractive. For some reason, I had believed I had a chance with my crush, but seeing how hot his boyfriend was made me feel like there was no way he could ever be attracted to someone as plain as me. I started feeling the usual feelings of jealousy, mounting sadness and upset-ness, swirling, constricting energy around my heart, but I kept ignoring it and looking at pictures of the two of them together. I was frowning, my heart area felt constricted and painful, my face felt flushed. I kept scrolling, and the feeling kept mounting.

Storm clouds of emotion brewing beneath the surface

Finally, when I could bear trying to hold it in no longer, I hurled my phone away from me and decided to do a RAIN practice. It felt like a storm was brewing just under the surface of my experience, and if I didn't let it fully pass through and rain down on me (pun intended), the dark clouds would hang around and haunt me for a long time. I closed my eyes and Recognized: "this is a moment of suffering." That was an understatement! I brought back to mind some of the pictures and Allowed myself to truly open to how bad they made me feel. I Investigated the feelings: my throat was now wrenching itself shut so tightly I started to get worried, but I kept breathing and tried to trust in the power of my body to handle this experience. My eyes were clenching, my chest closing in on itself, my inner thighs and arms felt tingly and warm as if preparing for fight, flight, or maybe both. I was disturbed to see how intensely looking at Instagram was affecting my body - I knew it had always been this painful and I was only now becoming aware of it thanks to meditation.

And then I started trying to Nurture - to ask, "What do you need to hear?" - but my body forcefully responded: "Let me tell you what I'm really trying to say." And then it was as though all the energy and winds of negative emotion that had been swirling around me coalesced and revealed themselves as a many-headed demon that started shrieking the excruciating things I had been telling myself for years without realizing it: "You idiot! You're not worthy! You thought he was in your league and could like you? No one beautiful and smart like that will ever love you! Nobody cares about you and you will always be alone!"

I can't even describe how painful this was. As always with RAIN, once the voices spoke clearly, I immediately started crying, but it still felt like part of me was resisting, part of me had still not fully softened.

Eventually, I asked again, “What do you need to hear?" and decided this time to try and imagine someone who represents kindness and love in order to hopefully make the answers a little more nurturing. The first person who came to mind was Sharon Salzberg, a big-hearted meditation teacher who I jokingly describe as my patron saint of loving kindness and compassion. I conjured an image of her in my mind's eye and asked what message she had for me. The response shook me to my core:

"I'm so sorry you can't have this thing you desire so badly."

As in the previous RAIN story, there was such an unexpected power in having someone acknowledge and validate my desire rather than trying to repress it, in bowing to my heart rather than trying to bend it to my will. Finally, my throat relaxed a bit and the real deluge of tears arrived. I wept even harder than before, sobbing, ugly crying, gasping for breath - I probably would have moaned and yelled if my roommate hadn't been asleep in the next room. I can't remember the last time I've cried so hard - I don't think it's happened since I was a child.

At a certain point, after crying intensely for the better part of a half hour (literally a half hour, not just dramatic hyperbole), I remembered recent advice I had heard in a podcast about grounding yourself in a neutral body part when feelings start to be too much - the teacher randomly offered feet as an example - so I stopped interrogating my heart and let my awareness rest in my feet, giving my emotional body a chance to rest.

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Just as in the first RAIN story, I was shocked by the voices that arose. As I worked through these fears and insecurities, I would learn that they had grown up as defense mechanisms - if I tell myself I'm unworthy, then no one else can make me feel it; I'll break my own heart first so no one else can. Again, diving into the nuances of these beliefs and where they came from is a story I definitely want to tell at some point, but not now. For now, I just want to show how RAIN allowed me to see these defensive patterns and, in both examples, showed me for the first time how, rather than protecting me, these beliefs had been causing me extreme suffering for years without ever realizing it. I had always thought I had decent self-esteem and believed in myself, but when I Allowed the sensations to flow through and Investigated the feelings in my body, it became clear that they were believing a different story.

This seems to be another one of the reasons Investigation needs to be somatic and not cognitive. In directly feeling into the sensations arising in our body, we can start to realize that they have a "truth" of their own outside of whatever our minds believe. As mentioned earlier, in addition to the question, "What am I unwilling to feel?", Tara Brach also proposes that Investigation can help answer the question, "What am I believing right now?" Intellectually, I was convinced that I believed I was worthy and deserving of love, but my emotions and my body had gotten stuck believing something else.

This is yet another dense topic that I'm going to punt off to a future blog post (sorry for all the cliffhangers, but this post is already long enough!), but I have been learning through meditation that knowing something intellectually and knowing something at a gut/physical level are two very different things. Clearly, I had no objective evidence that my crush could never like me, and it seems that once I uncovered this belief, it should have just disappeared. But if you've ever tried logicking your way out of a difficult emotion, you know already that it is a fool's errand. We can intellectually know something all day long, but when our body is filled with a certain emotion that influences how we act and move through the world, logic and intellect are of little avail. Try convincing your throat, chest, and heart in the moment that they shouldn't be feeling the way they do. It's like trying to lasso a hurricane.

Also, as we saw in the first story, once you get in touch with these deeper beliefs, it can help your Nurturing voice figure out what it really needs to offer. You can't exorcise the demons if you don't summon them forth first.

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Hopefully this post has demonstrated the two component parts of Investigation - feeling somatically into what's happening in your body and then trying to get in touch with any repressed or unacknowledged beliefs and emotions that may be stored in that part of the body. Investigating can help to answer the questions, "What am I unwilling to feel?" and "What am I believing?" Once you get in touch with the underlying feelings and beliefs, it can become easier to soften and open up to them, to offer them the Nurturing they need.

But sometimes Nurture and compassion are much harder than you might think. There was no tidy conclusion to the second RAIN story because, in that moment of first contact with these deep beliefs, the sensations were too strong and my ability to offer - and receive - compassion was still pretty underdeveloped. This is what we'll be exploring next week: what are the blockers to Nurture, how can we overcome them, and what can we learn in the process? Yes, it's going to be as intense as it sounds - this is not a light and happy blog series 😂☔️ but I promise there will be May flowers after we weather the April storms. We have to feel the thunder and scream before the RAIN can wake our dreams!

See you then!