Session 5 RAIN & Compassion

We ended last week’s session on mindfulness of thoughts really asking ourselves; “what am I believing?” What are our beliefs and when it comes to people’s beliefs, we don’t have to agree with them. However, we need to be respectful and show compassion to ourselves and others for what we believe in, especially when we don’t hold one another’s beliefs to be true.

We have been moving from opening our awareness to the experience of our body and our breath and widening it to all the different domains of experience, feelings, emotions, and thoughts asking, how do we bring a wise and open-hearted attention to the world of thoughts?

As we begin to become aware and recognise the thoughts that are moving through us, we are discovering how they can create and shape our inner atmosphere. And it's an interesting question to ask ourselves: what kind of thoughts are we habitually thinking? The next question we can ask ourselves with a kind curiosity is; instead of being at war with our habitual way of thinking can we try to objectively observe them and try to bring a kind and compassionate curious attention to them rather than judge them in any way. But just listen to what they’re saying as they’re happening.

Grounding Meditation: 

So take a few moments to find that posture that most allows you to be here, alert, sitting upright, and also at ease. (pause) You might notice what parts of your body can relax just a little bit more right now. Perhaps you can relax your shoulders and let them fall down and back a bit. Maybe you can drop your jaw and soften any tightness in the face, by relaxing those searching eyes and furrowed brow. You might roll your head and move it from side to side and loosen any tension in the neck. You might stretch your arms, interlock your fingers and face the palms of your hands away from you and push them away or just shake your hands about. You might sense an openness to the chest, let the belly soften some. (pause) And be aware of the movement of the breath, relaxing with the breath, letting the attention collect some, and settle with the breath.  

(Longer Pause) As we've been practicing letting this wave of the breath be in the foreground, you can also sense the other waves of experience — feelings, energy in motion or emotions, sounds in the background (pause) — and when one particular experience becomes strong, when it starts calling for your attention, to let go of the breath and open to that, letting that be in the foreground, those feelings, emotions, sensations. (pause) 

Expanding now to include thoughts. And when you notice a thought, when you become aware you are thinking, the invitation's to gently note that. You might mentally whisper, or name the thought, the kind of thought, or just the fact of thinking, thinking, thinking. And then pause for a moment, just relaxing open to what's right here (pause) — sounds, sensations, the life that's happening here, as you're ready to gently reconnect with your primary anchor, with the movement of the breath or bodily sensations or movement and again, taking some moments to notice the difference between being inside the thought (pause) and the aliveness of your life, here in this ever-changing flow of experience.  

(Longer Pause) 

You might notice where your attention is Now: if the mind has been wandering in thought, just to appreciate this as a moment of reawakening. (pause) It's an opportunity to ground ourselves with a quality of non-judgmental friendliness and presence, relaxing open, sensing the difference between what's here right now, and any thought, (pause) and continuing, feeling the waves of the breath, moving in and out again, and the background waves of other awakening experiences to what’s happening in the present.  

(Longer Pause)  

From the poet Wu Men, "Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn, a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter-- if your mind isn't clouded by unnecessary things, this is the best season of your life."  

[CHIME]  

So we're going to continue in this session with how do we bring mindful presence, a compassionate awareness, to those moments when we're stuck: when strong emotions arise, such as fear, anger, with that secondary layer, which is feeling bad about ourselves for having these emotions. And that's been called, in the Buddhist tradition, the second arrow: The first arrow is that we're dealing with unpleasant even painful stuff. And the second arrow is we don't like ourselves for having or how we handle that tough stuff. We take it personally and think something's wrong with us. We believe we feel this way because we are this way.

I feel or think, therefore I am but what if that doubting, second-guessing came from our cultural conditioning and causing…

Negative Feelings about ourselves are really common – which leads to a sense of disease or being at war with ourselves whom we’re trying to get away from. Moreover who or where are these selves we’re trying to get away from?

A palliative caregiver who sat with thousands of people, as they were dying said that the greatest regret of the dying is, "I didn't live true to myself, that I lived according to the expectations of others. I lived according to what I thought I should be or do. But I didn't live true to myself."

I was talking with my mentor and peer group about what was coming up in our lives around this time that we might want to discuss. So I shared first as I feel a sense of anxious empathy for the silent awkwardness as well as not wanting to waste valuable time especially when it is limited.

However, on the following Sunday for the first time in a long time I didn’t get up and make coffee, feed the dogs, or do anything but just snoozed in a comfortable bed, while my partner offered to get up and came back with a coffee. Afterward, we just relaxed for the day.

Now, it’s hard to believe just how hard it was for me to do that without having in some way to justify to myself that I was entitled to relax without a sense of disease or feeling that I should have done something productive to allow myself to enjoy this moment, my life in the present.

I spend so much of my life as a human doing rather than a human being and thinking that once I’ve done this course or got that qualification or whatever I’ll be ready to follow my own dreams or path in life. Trouble is there’s always another course, another thing I’m interested in and I have been reflecting on my pattern of behaviour during these times when my regular routine and way of being has been interrupted perhaps indefinitely by being in a relationship not just with my partner but a disease or virus that’s challenging, not just our way of doing but our way of being human, perhaps our very existence…

My Mentor described it in this way:

Movement Masks Dukkha - Dukkha’ in the Pali means suffering

Basically, it comes down to our cultural conditioning: That is to say, in order to feel worthy in the western world, we need to be productive in some way.

Now for someone like me who is interested in the creative arts and living true to my values, there has been quite a lot of conflict about how to live true to myself because what I thought I wanted to be was hurting others and also seemed to be defeating the purpose of achieving success in my artistic career: which was to be able to say to others: you see what I have achieved; am I not worthy of your love and respect.

I was on the hero’s journey: so it or I couldn’t just be ordinary and of value to myself. I had to be heroic, just that bit different, special in a way. Alongside the delusions of grandeur, and the need to prove I was someone, was the ongoing sense of disease, unworthiness, and impostor syndrome… Because what if I made it and all of a sudden people were recognising me, seeking my opinion, listening and finally paying attention to me, thinking I had the solutions to life’s problems what would I have said, knowing how I felt about myself deep down? I don’t know…

This is the story of appearance and reality which are two very different stories.

Of course, I did work at becoming a know-it-all, as my mother likes to say when she’s “praising” me but what I am doing and probably what many more are doing unbeknownst to ourselves is distracting us from our authentic selves and what is our true intention. So my intention and the intention of mindfulness is…

‘To thine own self be true’ as Shakespeare’s Polonius says in Hamlet

A lot of what I was doing was with the idea that I’ll know myself and be happy when I’ve dealt with these stressful distractions. Then I’ll be able to settle down and be creative. However, how can we expect to create something beautiful from a habit pattern which is stressful and often fear-driven and anxious to avoid reality? To create something meaningful, the source of inspiration and our intentions need to come from something natural and not conditioned by our consumer culture so we can see the value in what we might take for granted or call ordinary is really extra-ordinary.

We are not at rest or ease with ourselves most of the time and it seems quite natural in our compulsive culture to resort to these distractions. However, the extent to which we depend on these forms of distraction or escapism can be steadily reduced through self-compassion and awareness.

In other words, we don’t want to be beating ourselves up for what we’ve done or are still doing but recognising when we’re stressed, reactive, restless, or whatever and in that moment come back into our bodies, like a detective, investigating where are these thoughts and feelings coming from?

Left to our own devices the anxious voices or vices accumulate rather than dissipate.

What is the true source of my disease?

So we're going to be offering an acronym, a strategy, really, for finding our way back to presence when these repeating waves of feeling, thinking, and behaving that end up causing ourselves or others harm happen and we're stuck in some way, to engage the wings of mindfulness and the wings of self-compassion.

The acronym is RAIN.

Updated Version of RAIN

• R: Recognize what is happening (roots of understanding)

• A: Allow life to be just as it is (grounds of love)

• I: Investigate with gentle attention (deepens understanding)

• N: Nurture (awakens love)

• After the RAIN (realizing freedom from narrow identity)

When you’ve completed the active steps of RAIN, it’s important to simply notice your own presence and rest in that wakeful, tender space of awareness. 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.

This is really what you have been learning thus far in this awareness training of how to wake up the wings of mindfulness and compassion. But we're slowing it down and doing it really systematically, which helps us find our way back when we're lost.

A story that demonstrates the power of recognising and allowing, the first steps of RAIN, was a man in the early stages of Alzheimer's, where he was giving a talk about these practices to a group of people. He was just about to begin, when he went completely blank. He had no idea, not only what he was supposed to say, where he was, or why all these people were looking at him. So here's what he did:

He paused, and then he just put his palms together, and he started naming what was coming up in him.

"Confused," and then he'd bow. "Embarrassed," bow. "Afraid," bow. "Heart pounding," bow. He took a breath and he'd go, "Breathing, breathing," bow. "Relaxing." He started settling. He looked around and he said, "I'm sorry."

And as you might imagine, there were a lot of people with tears in their eyes. One of the men in the group said, "No one has ever given us the teachings in this way."

So sometimes when we recognize and allow what's going on when we pause and name it and just acknowledge its presence, be it anger, anxiety, doubt, the identification with it, not us, dissolves, and we've arrived back.  We've remembered presence.

So after recognising and allowing we begin to deepen our attention and begin investigating with kindness. what am I believing right now? or, "What am I thinking about?"

Primarily, we're investigating the felt sense of what's going on. How does this feel? Let's say we're anxious about something coming up — a proposal we have to present and want approval for.

And the belief is, It or I might not be liked, or whatever. What's that felt sense of anxiety? How does it feel? What's the quality of the sensations? So there's an interest that we're bringing to it. And in addition to the interest, there's a quality of friendliness or gentleness, or compassion.

And the shift as we move from being the anxious self to that space of presence that is regarding what's happening — the waves of emotions with kindness is the N of RAIN, the nurturing. We're not identified with that small, anxious self. We’re nurturing again in a natural self-compassionate, loving way, or kind awareness. That's the N of RAIN.

So RAIN can be used as a guided meditation on its own. If you're in the midst of a situation and you happen to have the space to be able to step aside and pause, use it then. You will find that it gives us a way to remember when we might have gone off into a chain reaction, repeating the habitual pattern — of coming back to presence and accessing our natural intelligence and compassion.

“You can’t stop the waves but you can learn to surf.”

Cultural conditioning and habitual patterns don’t disappear overnight. Rather, what happens is we keep re-encountering the waves but we begin to gain more and more skill on how to find our balance, and recognition that we’re not the waves of thoughts or emotions arising and passing, we’re part of the sea, the source that can weather any storm with self-compassion.

The challenge is practicing it when we live in a culture that’s constantly telling us in subtle ways that we’re just not good enough yet, at least not in comparison to the neighbours or the stars on our screen or those the media tells us are symbols of success.

And when there's any degree of "Something's not right with who I am," it's very, very difficult to trust a connection with other people. We think they'll discover we’re not who we’re pretending to be, when in fact many of us are afraid of following on our path in life and fulfilling our true desires and dreams. The reason being we’re too easily distracted and kept busy pleasing others or the hegemony. And it really gets in the way of fulfilling our creative potential and living true to our authentic selves.

It's hard to take risks when we fear the tyranny of the silent majority. It's hard to relax and just enjoy being human when one of the first question people asks you after how are you is “So what do you do?’

And we're often at war with ourselves if we’re not really comfortable answering that question?

In order to wake up this wing of kindness or self-compassion, we need to be able to see clearly that place of vulnerability and pain, that place of self-aversion we’re in, where we’ve turned on ourselves.

Anyone who loves you, warts and all…

Many people say that when they get in touch with a sense of deep vulnerability they wish they could offer themselves compassion, but they're so caught in the fear or the pain or the smallness of it that there's really nobody home to offer care and self-compassion. They're really regressed, really young. In those cases we can bring to mind someone else, someone that can offer us care, and sense that person's love towards us as a way to begin to wake up that space of tenderness inside ourselves. That person could be your partner, a parent, mentor, grandparent, fairy godmother, or your dog.

Sometimes our caregivers are the ones we feel we’re disappointing or who are disapproving…

I remember an argument with my father years ago just before I was due to go back to Spain and I was like the prodigal son looking for my inheritance before leaving home again…I wanted to buy a loft and needed some sort of guarantee to go to the bank for a loan… Anyway long story short…Dad wasn’t willing at first and told me he worked for anything he got, implying I didn’t. Despite all the time I’d spent as a child and teenager working on the land with him, being the go-between for my parents with my siblings, until I left to live my life away from parental judgment and my troubled siblings. And then it all came out…all the things I’d held back that had been hurting me and why I left and didn’t want anything from him. I reminded him of how I had come home with my girlfriend one Xmas and we had been out playing in the snow and when we arrived back a little later than intended Dad had a dark face on him because a friend was due to arrive and I wasn’t here to greet him.

‘Out playing in the snow at your age and a friend coming.’

‘Well, at least I have friends, and not stuck at home, feeling sorry for myself.

Of course my partner and objective witness realised that my Dad was anxious about being at home alone and my friend arriving and him not speaking a word of Spanish.

When I recognised and acknowledged his feelings and allowed that to sink in I went back and asked was that the case, which it was and an angry and hurtful situation resolved itself, although it led to the more serious wound for me, which this poem talks about but doesn’t reveal. The poem I’d like to share is about what happens when we don’t resolve things and we’ll go into a RAIN reflection afterwards with a difficult situation.

You might sense or remember moments in your life when you've turned on yourself or others and letting those moments recollected now in tranquility, as Wordsworth put it, be an invitation in the present to pause. And to remember that even the smallest gesture of kindness, just a breath, just the wish or intention to hold your sorrow and suffering, to hold yourself with compassion, with a forgiving heart and kindness, can dramatically alter your biochemistry, your neural pathways, and more fully, holistic sense of who you are now and not just those isolated moments that can follow us around like that same dark cloud that hung over my father and I for a time.

My parents always found some way

To save me from that rainy day

Dad had to dig deep in his pocket

Pulling a few pound from his pay packet

The weekly wage that had a long way to go

But no matter what they had to pay

Seldom if ever did I hear them say No

Now though I remember only sad things about him

Rubbing cream on his cracked skin;

The hard hands of a hard man who worked the land

Whose crude love I couldn’t understand

 Oppressive silences after we’d argued again

Eventually, though we’d both give in

Some things though should not be said

Like his slip of the tongue that day

That I’m afraid won’t go away

What a sad last impression you’ve made

Cut now in two, like the worm beneath the blade of a spade

I wreath and wriggle away from you

For I cannot say what I’d like to

Part of me died that day dad

And I’m sorry is all you’d have to say

For all this sadness to have faded away

RAIN with a difficulty in our lives:

Sitting in a comfortable way, so you're alert and upright and also at ease. Begin by bringing to mind a difficulty that we've encountered — some situation or some circumstance that brings up emotional reactivity, whether it be fear or anger or hurt; some experience you'd like to bring this practice of mindfulness and compassion — the RAIN of Compassion to.

It could be a situation in a relationship, some conflict, a misunderstanding, and reactivity. It could be something about your own behaviour, some addictive kind of tendency. It could be something that comes up around you job or work that brings up feeling of frustration or fear of failure or anxiety.

You might sense the self-aversion that comes when you're hard on yourself. Take some moments to sense that difficulty in a situation where you might have been triggered. Let yourself enter enough into that situation so you can sense what's going on and what's really activating you, what's bothering you.

The beginning of RAIN is to recognize what's happening. Some way to recognize, "I'm stuck," and to recognize whatever is predominant in your experience, whatever emotions or feelings you're most aware of.

And that recognition is met with the "A" of rain, the allowing or acceptance of this experience just as it is. With this allowing comes the valuable practice of pausing and just making space for things instead of trying to fix them or get away from them. Simply acknowledging and giving some space for what's here. Notice what that's like-- just agreeing to experience something for these few moments.

You might sense in your own experience now as you have re-entered an experience that had been triggering you if there's any difference in how you're in relationship with it. Investigating, bringing some nurturing, some compassion. Sense where you are right now.

And if there's anything that feels like it's calling you about the experience inside you, if you feel any call to deepen your attention or to offer some kindness right at this moment, you might sense what that's like.

See what happens if you can make some gesture of kindness, of understanding, of compassion inwardly?

Just to notice the presence that's here — the difference between being totally stuck inside an experience and that openness and presence and care that really expresses the truth of who you are.

"There is a brokenness out of which comes the unbroken, a shatteredness out of which blooms the unshatterable.

There is a sorrow beyond all grief which leads to joy, and a fragility out of whose depths emerges strength.

There is a hollow space too vast for words through which we pass with each loss, out of whose darkness we are sanctioned into being.

There is a cry deeper than all sound whose serrated edges cut the heart as we break open to the place inside that is unbreakable and whole."

Rashani Réa.

Home Practice

Continue the core practice of 20-minutes mindfulness meditation every day. Write bout yur experience in your journal after each meditation session, noting any aspect of your experience that came up, things you noticed, or any insights that may have arisen.

In addition, try to find a time in the next few days to explore the following two short exercises. The first is called Light RAIN, and the second is a Self-Forgiveness Scan.

Light RAIN

Light RAIN, or pausing for brief periods during the day, is as important in awakening us from trance as the more full-blown RAIN practice. This exercise is a wonderful way to begin to recognize your emotional reactivity. The steps are essentially the same as the full practice, just abbreviated.

Start by pausing and taking three full breaths; allow your inner experience to be as it is. Then, investigate with kindness whatever feelings are most dominant. After a minute or two, resume your activity and notice if there is a more natural presence in your awareness. When you have some time, write in your journal about what you noticed.

Self-Forgiveness Scan

The second practice to explore, the Self-Forgiveness Scan, is designed to help you identify the ways you may be blocking or withholding self-forgiveness.

To start this exercise, take some moments to become still and to relax any obvious areas of tension. Then take a few long, slow breaths to help you arrive fully in your body. Now ask yourself, “Is there anything between me and being at home with myself?” Feel free to change the wording in any way that helps you identify the presence of self-blame. Then pause and see what comes up in your body and mind. What stories of wrongdoing have you been telling yourself; maybe stories of letting others down or of performing poorly at work. Are there ways you felt you haven’t met your standards as a parent, partner, or friend? If something arises, simply acknowledge it and offer it forgiveness. You might gently place your hand on your heart and whisper, “Forgiven” or “It’s Okay.” Recall your intention to not push yourself out of your own heart. Then inquire again, “Is there anything else I’m holding against myself?” 

Continue in this way until you’ve identified whatever self-judgments you’ve been carrying. End the scan by offering yourself a wish for your own peace of heart and mind. Then if you feel like it, take some moments to write down anything you noticed about the process of self-compassion in a journal.

Overview:

• Meditate with one of the Central Practice of Mindfulness guided meditations each day for at least 20 minutes or more.

• Write in your journal after each meditation session.

• Practice the Light RAIN exercises and Self-Forgiveness.