What is RAIN practice?
This is a guided meditation for working with difficult emotions. RAIN practice helps us bring awareness and compassion to our experience, so we can find a source of healing within ourselves. The acronym RAIN stands for Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture. In this meditation audio, I guide you through the steps of RAIN.
You can use this guided practice to help move through difficult emotions when you need some support. Over time, as you continue to practice RAIN, you may find the process becomes a natural part of how you work with emotions in the moment, as they arise.
What are the benefits of RAIN?
As we bring awareness and kindness to our inner experience, we can shift out of reactivity and into a place of insight and calm. Rather than being controlled by our emotions, we can learn to shift our relationship with them. The practice is to become mindful, to observe our emotions from a place of wisdom, and to offer ourselves some care.
RAIN practice helps connect us with our inner wisdom—the wisdom of the body and heart. As Jack Kornfield asks, “What is the deep truth that your body is teaching you?” Attuning with the body in an intimate and loving way can bring insight and healing. And importantly, difficult experiences can deepen our wisdom and compassion, broaden our perspective, and even help to make the bright spots more vivid and beautiful. “Joy and sorrow are woven together,” Jack says. “You can’t have one without the other.” In other words, embracing life means learning to be with the full range of emotions, to hold them with care and not close off the heart. This is vitally important, because the open and tender qualities of the heart give rise to the most meaningful experiences of our lives.
When is RAIN helpful?
You can practice RAIN anytime, and work with whatever emotions come into your awareness. However, you’ll likely find this guided audio is most helpful when there’s a particular situation or emotion that’s troubling you or challenging you in some way.
Whatever your situation, as you move through the practice try to be easy on yourself as much as you can.
You can read more about RAIN practice here.
