RAIN #3 - Recognize, Allow: It's Safe to Be In My Body

This is the third 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 😊

Not all RAIN practices are as pathos-filled and dramatic as the ones I've recounted in the last two blog posts. There is a common piece of wisdom that meditators who are new to the practice feel like they're getting more distracted rather than less, and it's really because they are just more aware of what had always been there. Similarly, when we stop running away from our emotions, the first few (or several) times we encounter them can feel intense and unexpected. Also, as discussed in the previous RAIN post, we have likely accreted layers and layers of extra pain and baggage on top of the initial hurt.

I think for the first several months to a year of my RAIN practice, Investigating and Nurturing took center stage because they led to huge, dramatic, intense emotional outcomes. The power of Recognizing and Allowing is much more subtle, but equally profound. There are certainly times when simply just Recognizing and Allowing can help things to soften. It can be very powerful to practice acceptance rather than our usual MO of pushing things away or trying to distract ourselves.

These days, unless I'm going through a particularly challenging time, I rarely do "official" RAIN practices; instead, they are usually quick little interludes. Sometimes this looks like a brief stop to check in and feel my body when I'm getting frustrated at work, a pause when road rage is starting to take over, some deep breaths when I'm feeling anxiety before bed.

The most common and illustrative example is when I'm working and getting into a frenzy. I may have gotten worked up because the task I'm working on keeps getting harder or I feel like I'm not going to make a deadline, or just because I'm used to feeling frantic at work. There will eventually be a moment where I Recognize, "Oh hey, I'm getting pretty frenzied. Maybe I should take a second." I'll stop, close my eyes, and Allow any negative feelings that may be present to really show themselves rather than trying to swat them away "so I can work" (as if that actually "works," pun intended). Already, the frenzy will die down a bit, because the frenzy or anxiety was really, in part, an attempt to stifle these sensations in the name of productivity (oh, Capitalism, you strike again!). I will usually become aware that there is some sensation in my body that my mind is perceiving as unpleasant, and will Investigate it - maybe my neck was hurting or my throat was sore, or maybe I was actually feeling tired or just had a vague, diffuse sense of feeling kind of crummy (or as Tara Brach says, "not OK"). The Nurturing, in these cases, is often much simpler than the cataclysmic prophesies my inner voices used to drop on me. Usually, I think the nurturing is kind of enshrined in the decision to stop and do the practice in and of itself. The bodily, mental, and emotional sensations often don't go away, but there is always a sense of feeling good, feeling like I'm taking care of myself, feeling like I'm on my own team rather than fighting against myself and trying to control my experiences.

Tara Brach calls these little brief, informal RAIN practices "light RAIN." They involve all the letters, of course, but it does seem to me like, in a sense, the stopping to Recognize and Allow are the most important pieces. One of the most basic ways we cause ourselves suffering is by trying to fight against reality - "This just can't be like this. I can't take this. This has to change." You can see how these feelings can lead to an almost panicky feeling of needing to escape, needing to not feel the way you're currently feeling. I've found, for myself, that underneath this panic, I am often terrified and afraid of what will happen if I let the emotions in and they are too much for me.

Tara Brach and Dan Harris talked about this in the Ten Percent Happier podcast episode that inspired this series, Making it RAIN with Tara Brach. Dan has long suffered from panic attacks - he famously had a panic attack on live TV, which was the experience that ultimately galvanized him to start meditating. In the podcast episode, Dan discussed how his therapist had helped him understand that when he comes into contact with things that cause him panic - riding in elevators is the example he gives - the panic does not actually come from the elevator itself nor from the feeling that arises in him when he is in the elevator but from his mind's desperate unwillingness to be present with that feeling.

My mind fleeing from emotions it thinks it can't handle

This, for me, was an extremely helpful insight. Even though I've never had a panic attack nor really thought of myself as an anxious or panicky person, I've found through practice that, when I stop to do RAIN with my little moments of suffering, there is often a tight knot of several things happening simultaneously that I am only able to disentangle if I take the time to Recognize and Allow: some sensations, whether physical, mental, or emotional; some narrative about those sensations; a panicky unwillingness to feel those sensations or acknowledge the narrative.

The panic can take many forms. Sometimes, it has the flavor, "I don't have time to feel this right now! I have to get this work task done!" Our old frenemy (or maybe just enemy), Capitalism. I talked about this pattern in my last RAIN post; I would have a difficult experience, and instead of acknowledging it or offering myself compassion, my inner critic would come out and crack a whip of productivity over the part of me that was already suffering, adding layers of shame on top of the initial hurt.

Perhaps the most default reaction that many of us have to difficult emotions is to simply try and suppress them and force them down. "I don't want to feel this way. I can't feel this now. I can't let others see me feeling this now." In yet another episode of Ten Percent Happier, Three Lesson from Happiness Research, scientist Emma Seppälä explains that, when we bottle up emotions, their negative health impacts actually become worse. It's not just that bottling up your emotions is bad because your parents did it and you don't want to end up like them; it has scientifically measurable effects on our mind-body complex.

Sometimes, especially with more emotional or difficult experiences, the panicky voice sounds like, "I just can't handle this. This is too much."

Tara Brach discusses this flavor of fear, which she puts under the umbrella of FOF or Fear of Failure, on an episode of her own podcast (which I also highly recommend). She explains that the fear of failure is one of the most universal human fears, and that it is actually an evolutionary fear from the lizard brain (it wasn't a coincidence that I picked a GIF of a lizard running above 😉). It's not just a fear of failing and letting people down; it's a fear of not being able to handle the present situation, a fear of making a mistake that will cost you your life. It was the evolutionary impulse that told our lizard-sister ancestors when to fight, fly, or freeze in order to avoid decimation. This animalistic terror of failing in a lethal way may have made evolutionary sense, but nowadays it gets triggered by things that are not actually going to kill us*: namely, all the things we've been discussing opening to in RAIN - emotions, beliefs, and memories.

This is one of the craziest things I've been learning over the past year - meditation can actually help us undo our evolutionary wiring! Isn't that insane? But how in the world is that possible, and what does it look like?

Post from my Insta, @sassygaybuddhist

As someone with very limited experience, I can't claim to be an expert, but I can recount my own journey. I mentioned in the previous post on Nurture that I have been doing a practice called Breath Work parallel to my Buddhist meditations for the past year. I briefly explained it in that post, and will doubtless write entire series dedicated to this practice in the future, so I don't want to spend too much time discussing it here. Essentially, you use a special breathing pattern to stir up energy in your body and release emotions, beliefs, memories, and anything else that has been stuck and/or repressed, perhaps for a very long time. This probably sounds very woo-woo, but just try it once and I can almost guarantee you will be shocked and humbled by how powerful and intense the experience is.

What I wanted to bring in from Breath Work to add to this discussion is primarily a mantra that my Breath Work teacher, George Ramsay, uses, especially at the beginning of practice. I mentioned in the intro to this series that Tara Brach uses the metaphor of lying down on an icy couch to describe the discomfort we can feel when we first start to open to our difficult experiences rather than pushing them away. Similarly, as you start to breathe in a Breath Work practice and energy starts to move in your body, your mind almost always starts feeling uncomfortable and trying to make it stop. It will start filling you with doubt about whether you're doing it right, or telling you this is too much and you can't handle it. This is when the Breath Work teacher will almost always ask you to say out loud, "It's safe to be in my body. It's safe to feel these emotions."

In both Breath Work and RAIN, we make an intentional choice to be present with our experiences rather than running away from them. Before we've even gotten to Investigating or Nurturing, just stopping to Recognize and Allow already begins to train our mind-body complex that it is, indeed, strong enough to handle these sensations. This is the subtle but profound power I alluded to in the opening of this post: the power in Recognizing rather than denying, in Allowing rather than pushing away. Slowly, with lots of practice, the more we let ourselves sit through the hurricanes and firestorms that arise and see that, in fact, we did come out safely on the other side, we were strong enough to handle them, our mind and body will start to gain confidence and begin to loosen their desperate, panicked need to escape at all costs.

It all comes back to one of my favorite Buddhist teachings of the second arrow. In brief, the Buddha says that, when an average person feels a painful or difficult sensation, they grieve and weep, beating their breasts, creating more and more pain, as if, after being shot with an arrow, they grabbed a second arrow and stabbed themselves with it. We cannot prevent ourselves from being struck by arrows - difficult emotions and experiences will arise. But in learning to be present with them, we can help to reduce the added layers of panic, self-doubt, and unseen beliefs and fears that have gotten entangled with them over all the years.

☔️☔️☔️☔️☔️

At a fundamental level, RAIN is about accepting our experience just as it is, no matter how difficult or painful it may be. This is one of the meanings of the title of Tara Brach's book Radical Acceptance: can you radically accept everything, even the excruciating physical pain, even the heartache? This sounds so simple, but it is profoundly difficult, like lying down on a couch of ice or trying to be calm while getting whipped around in a hurricane. But the more we practice opening to our experiences and weathering the storms, the more confidence we will gain in our strength and resilience. When we truly feel safe in our bodies, we can hold space for whatever arises and, eventually, even meet it with compassion.

Footnotes

* You may have heard similar things about stress (perhaps from the book Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers): stress evolved as a response to mortal threat, but now our modern lives trigger it in all kinds of different ways.