Hello ….how are you today?

I was thinking about what I’d do without my daily Mindfulness practice, my meditation, and my tools to anchor myself in the here and now. This helps me not only to see things are they are but also to avoid going through life on automatic pilot. There are days when I can't make it, of course, but most of the time, I can. Mindfulness has become my second skin.

How do you handle everyday stress? How do you manage anger, overwhelm, and even sadness and anxiety?

You can listen to the podcast with this player, or if you prefer reading you have a written version below. Enjoy it!

This week I’d like to share with you a simple and effective practice of Mindfulness called R.A.I.N. I like thinking about it as a kind of rain that bathes me from head to toe and washes all agitation away from me. Meditation teacher Michele McDonald invented the acronym R.A.I.N, however, I learned it from my teacher Tara Brach. Below I’ll show you what each letter in the acronym means and through a personal example I’ll show you how to go about each step.

*** To my dear subscribers: this blog comes with a special bonus exclusively for subscribers. You’ll find it after the blog! 👇🏼

Letters in R.A.I.N

R: Recognize

A: Allow

I: Investigate

N: Non-identification and Natural awareness

An example from my personal life

When my first child was born, I worked a lot, I enjoyed it, I didn’t feel overwhelmed at all, and I lived very fast. I felt blessed to enjoy life with my husband, who was and is the best father in the world, and with my baby who’s been terrific and beautiful since the day he was born. I confess I wasn’t the type of mother who played on the floor with my baby, I guess I wasn’t as relaxed as I thought. I liked holding, hugging and kissing him. I took him for walks, breastfed him, and I was also very concerned about his well-being. I kept a record of pediatrician visits, meals, baths and sleep schedules, etc. to the letter.

Looking at my life from the outside, it was almost perfect. However, despite this pseudo-idyllic image, my strength was fading away; my fatigue grew more and more every day. I slept without interruption (I know! I was a very lucky new mom) but I woke up feeling tired. I felt great frustration at feeling so badly physically. I didn’t listen to my body, I kept doing what was needed without pausing, but my tasks turned into obligations. I was missing something fundamental: inner calm. I started looking for information about the signs of chronic fatigue and came across a transcendental meditation course that promised readers that they’d be back in their center after 4 weeks. I started to cry, I was a stranger in my body, my whole being yearned to get aligned.

Spoiler alert: I didn’t learn transcendental meditation and I think that frustrated my teacher a lot as he kept telling me that my head was always non-stop. He was right. It wasn’t until 3 years afterwards that I learned Mindfulness and my life changed forever.

R.A.I.N. in Action

The R of RAIN invites us to be able to name our emotions, to be able to recognize them. In the personal example I gave you, I could have label my feelings as "exhaustion", "overwhelm", and “worry". The idea is to be able to name what happens to us without judging it. It’s about awakening from the trance in which we’re living. Tara Brach tells us that typical signs of being in this trance are our inner critic, shame, fear, anxiety, and the weight of depression on the body. When we open our eyes to observe our experience, we’re able to take the first step to quiet ourselves down.

The A in RAIN helps us to accept the emotions, feelings, sensations and thoughts that we’ve previously recognized. It’s a pause to allow ourselves to "be present" with those feelings without judging ourselves. This part of RAIN is probably the most challenging because we’re used to moving forward without any regard for our internal experience. Alternatively, we may want to cover it up with food, drinks, drugs, sex, etc. In the example that I gave you, accepting and allowing would have been my opportunity to be with my experience without covering it up by living so fast and working non-stop.

The I of RAIN is the inquiry stage. It’s about opening to investigation with genuine curiosity in the present moment. This is the time to see what lies beyond what we’ve named and allowed. It’s important to emphasize at this point that the idea is not to rationalize our experience but to feel it in our bodies. In my example, I could have asked myself "how does this fear and worry manifest? What does it mean" "What’s beyond my fear of not meeting my goals?" "What bodily sensations do I associate with this concern?" "What lies behind my tiredness?" Just asking ourselves these questions opens some immense space where the answers will appear little by little.

The N in RAIN refers to non-identification and natural self-awareness. The RAIN exercise requires great self-compassion from us because it makes us face what hurts and what’s uncomfortable. We’re so much more than our thoughts, emotions and feelings. If we are nervous, it doesn’t mean that we are nervous but that something has triggered that feeling. If I was exhausted, it didn’t mean that I was flawed but that there were factors contributing to that feeling at that time. This is where non-identification comes into play because we aren’t what we are experiencing, we’re the experiencer. Tara Brach gave N a turn and calls it our natural self-awareness. The first three steps require our action; the last only requires that we rest with what has unfolded in front of us, something that’s totally liberating. In my example, if I had found peace in what required my attention, I’d also have had the necessary compassion to seek solutions.

🎁AUDIO BONUS🎁 ONLY FOR SUBSCRIBERS: R.A.I.N. PRACTICE

I recorded a practice of R.A.I.N. exclusively for subscribers, so you can start using this technique by following my voice.

If you´re already a subscriber, you received an email with this bonus on Mar 21st, 2021. If you cannot find it or if you subscribed after that date, you can contact me and I´ll send you the exercise.

Do you want to subscribe? You can subscribe here (you´ll get two more gifts!) and then contact me to send you the R.A.I.N exercise.

It’s very easy to implement. I’m so pumped that you can enjoy RAIN in action!

A big hug ❤