RAIN #2 - Nurture: Learning to Let Love In

This is the second 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 mentioned in the introduction to this series that I first encountered RAIN in the Ten Percent Happier podcast episode "Making it RAIN with Tara Brach." I also mentioned that I listened to the podcast in 15-minute snatches during walking breaks at work, and each time I ended up wandering around the neighborhood outside my office sobbing like an insane person.

One of the lines that got me the most was when Tara Brach said, "Here's the thing: most of us actually have trouble letting in love." It doesn't sound as powerful out of context, but in the moment, it immediately caused me to dissolve in tears. I wasn't quite sure in the moment why that line had hit me so hard, but looking back, I think part of the pathos came from having someone articulate something that I had not been willing to admit. All my life, I had thought I was an extremely open, vulnerable, loving person, and, as discussed in the first RAIN post, I was only recently starting to uncover my deep fears and insecurities around truly letting love in. It was like a surgeon, feeling around for the wound, finally lands on the spot that is hurt and presses down, sending shockwaves of pain through your body; you know that it needed to be identified so that it could be treated, but god it hurts to have someone's finger bringing it so painfully to the forefront of your mind!

I had had a similar experience nearly a year earlier, but at that time I had absolutely no psychological or meditative framework for making sense of it. I had recently changed my profile on a dating app and was suddenly getting lots of attention from guys who had previously ignored me, something I had deeply, deeply craved for a long, long time. I was really excited by this new development and recounting it to a friend. When I was finished, she said (paraphrasing), "I'm really happy for you, and I'm excited for you to explore this new phase. But I also hope you remember that your self-worth is not tied to how many guys message you and that you have lots of people like me who still love and care about you no matter what."

Even though I knew she was saying something extremely kind, it felt like someone had shot me in the heart with an arrow. I was so confused by this feeling. As discussed in the previous RAIN post, sometimes our minds and our bodies can get out of sync in their beliefs - I heard my friend and intellectually knew she was saying something really kind, that she was sending me love, but in my body, rather than warmth or nourishment, her words had activated something extremely raw and painful.

I continued to notice this befuddling pattern as I proceeded learning self-compassion practices. Whenever I would tell myself (or imagine someone else telling me) things like, "I'm proud of you. I love you.", I encountered the same morass of pain and grief blocking the way. It was like a dark, tangled mass of vines and plants had grown around my heart, and the arrows of validation my loved ones were sending got trapped by the foliage before they could reach their target. And then the plants would shudder in pain and indignation that they had gotten hit. We saw this in the previous RAIN post - whenever compassionate voices arose, rather than feeling held or nurtured, I just felt intense, cathartic releases of deep reservoirs of pain that I had had no idea were there.

What the f*** was going on???

One clue came during a therapy session a few months after I heard the RAIN podcast. It was mid-July in Austin, TX, in the height of the coronavirus pandemic, and the combination of being stuck inside due to heat, having nowhere to escape because of quarantine, and an inconvenient bout of Zoom fatigue were making it an extremely rough month for my mental health.

I was chatting with my therapist during this month and telling her about all these struggles when she asked a simple question that stopped me dead in my tracks. "When was the last time you felt nurtured?" Similarly to the voices of my inner prophetesses that I discussed in the previous RAIN post, this question seemed to come out of left field and struck a chord I had not realized was there. As we talked, I saw clearly and was able to articulate something I had been uncovering through Breath Work (another spiritual/emotional practice that I will explain more fully later in this post) over the preceding months: either my life was lacking in nurture and validation or there was something blocking me from feeling nurturing (or maybe both).

I was discussing this the following day with a close friend, perhaps unskillfully. I said something to the effect of, "I'm learning that I don't have a lot of nurturing in my life and I feel like none of my friends or family are really active in our expressions of love and care. We could all validate each other a little more clearly." (Later, I would hear Karamo from Queer Eye word this much more eloquently using the phrase, "I need you to love me a little louder.") My friend was, understandably, a little bit defensive, but open to the criticism. However, her response punted the responsibility back onto me and opened a new layer to my investigation (a layer I was not excited to find - I wanted the problem to be someone else's, not my own inner issues!) "How do you want me to validate you? Like, what would resonate? Words of affirmation? Sending you a letter? I feel like we do actually give each other kudos a lot in our friend group, but I'm definitely open to expanding the way we show affection if it's not landing for you. But I'd also challenge you to consider if the issue is really with your own ability to receive the validation."

As always, she was obnoxiously right on both counts. There were certainly sources of nourishment that were already on offer that I was overlooking; I talked about a similar process of discovery in the last post of my February love series, learning to see love in places I had been ignoring it previously. Acknowledging this and beginning to actively look for those signs of care helped, but there was still the primary issue I described in my first friend conversation: many times, when the validation was most obvious, it still really hurt.

I was so confused as to what was going on. Why would it hurt to receive validation? And if so many meditation teachers and my Breath Work coach were advising us to offer ourselves compassion as a nourishment during difficult times, what was I supposed to do when even compassion felt difficult and excruciatingly painful?

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Leading up to my therapist's question about nurture, I had been learning a lot about my inner critic, both through meditation and Breath Work. I was especially getting familiar with him in my traditional Buddhist vipassana or breath awareness practices. Every time I tried to focus on my breath, there would be a diffuse mist of judgment and effort. Slowly, over time, I was able to pick out a panoply of painful voices floating in the mist: "You're not doing it right. Why can't you just concentrate? You never do anything right. You'll never get it right." There was a deeply dark and hurtful implication here: as a "smart kid" who had always staked his identity on being good at things, there was an unconscious belief that I had to excel right off the bat to be worthy and for people to find me attractive. The inner critic was telling me I was fundamentally undeserving of love.

All of this is fairly textbook - almost all meditation practitioners will probably list similar variations of these voices from their own inner critics. But as I mentioned in the previous post, they were kind of shocking to me. When, a few months earlier, I had read Tara Brach's suggestion that many of our most painful experiences are underpinned by a "trance of unworthiness" in the book Radical Acceptance, I remember thinking, "Well, I can relate to the difficult experiences you're talking about, but I don't have any unworthiness. I think I'm great!" It was important for me to start seeing these voices, because they blew a hole in this delusion. The more I became aware of them in my meditation, the more I started to see them show up everywhere in my life: when I woke up and thought about what I should do that day (If you don't get enough done, you won't be worthy of love); when I was feeling tapped out and wanted to watch Netflix rather than meditate (You're lazy and unproductive; why would anyone love someone like that?); when I was feeling conflicted about how to engage in the George Floyd outrage (Whatever you post will be wrong and people will realize you're a fraud who isn't deserving of love). I discussed many of these same insecurities in the first post of my love series, but they were hard-won realizations that took a lot of work to uncover.

It would take me a long, long time to learn how to work with these voices (unsurprisingly, it's something I'm still working on a year later and will likely be working on the rest of my life), but it was good that I was finding them. And they ultimately helped me figure out that - surprise, surprise - my blockers to validation and nurturing were inside me all along.

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The same night that my therapist asked me the nurture question, I attended a zoom meditation with one of my fav teachers Nikki Mirghafori. In the first part of practice, she always guides us through settling into our bodies and arriving in the space. As usual, I noticed my inner critic coming online, the striving and efforting to force my attention into the body, the diffuse mist of unworthiness looming over me. To try and combat this, I had been using techniques for actively cultivating warmth and kindness toward whatever was arising - "warming up the attention," as some meditation teachers say. It often would work for a moment or two, and then the usual cold, harsh, critical gaze would return.

But this night, some combination of the cues Nikki gave and the head/body-space I was in allowed me to open up and feel a truly warm, bright, loving presence inside myself. One catalyst was remembering my therapist's question about nurture. I suddenly remembered what all the self-compassion teachers had been trying to teach me: “I can nurture myself! I have the power to make this space a safe, nurturing space. I don’t have to wait for nurture to come from others.”

It's hard to describe, but for some reason, this realization allowed me to zoom out from the inner critic and inhabit a space that encompassed both the critic and the distracted part of me that was being criticized. I let this broader version of myself speak in order to fully bring forth more nurturing intentions and the following phrases arose: “This is a safe space. You can do whatever you want. I won’t get mad at you if you wander off and get distracted. I won't judge you, I won't judge my body pain, I won't judge my experience. Everything is OK here, there’s nothing to fight. This is a safe space.” The distracted part of me seemed uncertain and confused at first. Really? I can do whatever I want? You're not going to beat and chastise me? I was able to remain in the warm, diffuse space of love and nurture I had opened up and allow the distracted part of me to roam around freely. It was skeptical, and didn't seem very trusting, like an adopted dog who has had a history of abuse and takes a long time to really believe that its new owners are not going to harm it like the old ones did. But it overall felt nurturing to be inhabiting the warm space.

In the second half of the practice, Nikki invited us to offer loving kindness to another person. I was feeling so good about cultivating my safe space that I didn’t feel like I had the energy or resources to start thinking about other people. However, it occurred to me that perhaps the mean, dictatorial part of my mind - the inner critic - could offer kindness and apologize to the child-like, distracted part of my mind. This opened up a wide range of disparate emotions. I suddenly started to see this war within myself as an abusive relationship; I had been SO devastatingly cruel to myself for so long, how could the part of me that had been hurt ever forgive the inner critic (and any other parts) that had done the hurting? I just kept saying, “I’m so sorry for treating you so badly. I hope you can forgive me. I really do love and want to nurture you. But I understand if you can’t trust me.”

It was really hard to see myself in that way. Along with the "trance of unworthiness," Tara Brach uses the phrase "at war with ourselves" to describe the deep beliefs and patterns that underly many of our most painful experiences. There had been a violent and painful war going on within me for years that I had been completely oblivious to. Not only was I denying myself nurturing, but I was adding insult to injury by also beating myself while I was down. Any time I felt low and needed nurturing, my inner critic qua task master would crack out the whip. "We don't have time for you to feel your feelings! You need to be working and improving and progressing!" Capitalism, again! Or the narrative might be, as it had been so often in college in the face of so much romantic rejection, "You have to toughen up! It's clear that no one will ever love you so you just need to get over it and move on. If you get nurtured you'll be weak and vulnerable and they will only hurt you more."

Slowly, I was piecing together where the pain had come from that was blocking my heart. When the inner critic responded to painful emotions in these ways, it was like the initial hurt was compounded manyfold. There was the pain of not being able to fully feel that hurt as the inner critic forced me to push it down in the name of productivity or self-preservation; the pain of not getting any nurturing when I certainly deserved it; and then what is, to me, the pinnacle of all the pains: the inner critic cracking an excruciating whip of unworthiness just when I was already down and feeling my weakest.

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I had finally solved the mystery of why it hurt whenever people gave me kind words. The part of my heart that deeply craved hearing those words had gotten buried under layers and layers of pain, repression, and denial. I was at least somewhat comforted to feel like I had a working explanation that made sense to me, but what was the path forward? Should I just keep practicing letting love in and hope that eventually it would stop hurting? Did I need to heal the wounds first? If so, how?

I eventually found my way to two parallel practices that, together, began to shift things, and then was extremely lucky to stumble upon a new friend and a Rumi poem that gave me the perfect metaphor for what was going on.

The first practice was something that Tara Brach had already discussed in the podcast episode. Right after she revealed her devastating intonement about our collective inability to let love in, she gave a concrete piece of advice for how to move forward. She encouraged Dan to think of any relationships in his life where he did not feel blockers and could immediately conjure uncontrived feelings of warmth and affection. For him, it was his kid, but she offered some other suggestions that often work for people: a pet, a dear friend, a spiritual guide, an abstract embodiment of compassion (God, being of light, mother earth, cosmic energy). There are often some places where love and validation are accessible to us; we start there and slowly work our way up. I had been working on this parallel to the journey I've recounted above through guided meditations by two other teachers I've already mentioned several times on this blog: Kristin Neff and Chris Germer, who I jokingly call the king and queen of self compassion.

It would take too long here to describe all the various practices each teacher has offered, especially when they all have plentiful free recorded meditations online (which I highly encourage you to check out). As always, I'm going to punt this off to a future blog post. For now, the important thing to note is that I was starting to find inroads to offering myself compassion and nurturing that didn't have painful side effects, and learning that, counterintuitively to me at the time, this was not a thing that had to arise organically but could actually be cultivated methodically over time.

The other practice that had perhaps an even bigger effect around this time was Breath Work. I don't fully know the history of Breath Work, and I don't have a ton of resources to back up my claims about it or the way I and the coach I've worked with describe it, but I will give you my very unofficial, unscientific, un-researched overview.

Breath Work is based on the ancient Indian techniques of pranayama, which anyone who has practiced yoga will be familiar with. Similarly to yoga, the goal of Breath Work is to use the breath to actively move energy (prana) through the body to release tension and stuck places. Something my Breath Work coach, George Ramsay, always talks about is that emotions are really just energy moving through the body. When we suppress them or refuse to feel them, they can get trapped in the form of tension, aches, or inner wounds. As the breath washes through our system, it can sometimes dislodge things that have been stuck for a long time and clear them out.

I know this all sounds very woo-woo, but if you ever try Breath Work, I think you'll find that it resonates. I had had similar experiences to this in yoga: having surprising memories well up during a particularly deep stretch, feeling an old mood arising in the swirl of energy after an intense practice. But Breath Work always magnifies this experience a hundredfold, dredging up things I had had no idea were there, both pains and joys I had repressed over the years, leaving me alternately sobbing with grief and cackling with joy.

Around the same time as the therapy session and inner critic meditation mentioned above, I took part in a 5-day intensive Breath Work group led by George (yes, I'm insane - July of 2020 was an unnecessarily intense explosion of spiritual growth for me, which left me reeling and recovering for months after and taught me the important lesson that spiritual growth is a marathon and not a sprint, you stupid bitch!). In the group, we explored themes related to the ones I've already been recounting: the ways in which we judge ourselves and others, our blockers to being our full selves, our ability to access feelings of support.

On one of the last nights, the theme was feeling into the support of those who care about us. As we breathed, George had us visualize ourselves in a circle with the other men in the group, all supporting each other. I pulled in techniques I'd learned from my self-compassion practices and imagined other people in my life also joining the circle and was able to feel a similar sense of nurture as described above in the meditation where I had dealt with the inner critic. I called on one of my favorite techniques from the self-compassion practices I had done and imagined a sun above me with three loving beings around it - the Buddha, an especially compassionate meditation teacher, and my grandmother - all smiling at me and sending me the warmth of their care and concern.

And then George said something about how we were all courageous gay men who should be proud of ourselves for showing up and committing to our spiritual growth. As so many times before, these kind words lodged themselves into the morass of weeds that had grown up around my heart and dislodged layers of pain that the breath picked up and moved out of my body in the form of powerful sobs. I allowed the breath to continue moving the layers of pain that had gotten knocked loose and allowed myself to feel the feelings, to open to the pain my inner critic and the war within me had caused over the years. And then, all of a sudden, I was able to hold both realities simultaneously: I was still in the circle of nurture while the pain was coursing through my heart. I said to myself, "I'm proud of you" and, like magic, I could feel a powerful ray from the sun of my compassionate trinity floating above me pierce through the dark clouds of pain that were swirling around my heart. The pain didn't go away, but I also felt the warmth, even if only a bit of it was able to get through. I let it soak in. "I am proud of you." For once, it wasn't completely deflected by the hardened layers of pain. I felt its warmth seep into my bones. Then I started crying even more, this time not just the sobs of pain but also tears of joy and awe at the magical grace of this experience.

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When I described this experience to one of the other guys in the Breath Work group, he told me about a metaphor his therapist had used to describe the process of healing emotions that have gotten stuck in our body. "She described my wound as being this deep, open gash in my abdomen that was infected over time and now I was debriding the wound, then packing it with sterile gauze and letting it heal. Then, I had to do that all over again: take out the gauze, debride, repack, and rest and heal. Every step of the way is painful, but also ultimately healing, and would become less painful over time."

Finally, I had a metaphor that could make sense of what was happening and what the path forward might look like. I would have to keep confronting this pain, keep allowing it to be felt, so that it could eventually move through and open space for my heart to receive love. I can't give you any more finality because, almost a year later, I'm still working through the layers of pain, encountering ever more new and unexpected beliefs and obstacles along the way, but I can say that the frequency with which the rays of love and validation pierce through the clouds of pain to warm my heart are more and more frequent, leading me to conclude that it's working.

Since I can't give my own triumphal conclusion, I'll end with a poem by Rumi that I came across while preparing this post and that is freakishly so relevant to all of the realizations it took me so many chance encounters and difficult meditations to uncover. If only I could have found this poem a year ago 😂 but I guess I wouldn't have been ready to receive it before walking the path for myself.

“Trust your wound to a teacher’s surgery. Flies collect on a wound. They cover it, those flies of your self-protecting feelings, your love for what you think is yours. Let a teacher wave away the flies and put a bandage on the wound. Don’t turn your head. Keep looking at the bandaged place. That’s where the Light enters you. And don’t believe for a moment that you’re healing yourself.”

— Mevlana Rumi—