Greetings, my friends, and welcome to this program on the RAIN meditation. The acronym
RAIN: Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture. It’s a weave of mindfulness and compassion that can
radically transform our relationship with difficult emotions. It can bring
deep healing and spiritual awakening - and especially in times of stress.
This applied meditation can give you a pathway back to presence.
It can give you a pathway back to your intelligence, and your creativity, and your heart.
We’ll start this session looking at how RAIN addresses a very core domain
of suffering. And that’s the suffering of self-aversion, self-hate, shame, the feelings of
bad self. Now in other sessions, in the other three sessions, we’ll look at fear,
anger, blaming others, and how RAIN can cultivate a boundless compassion.
And with each, we’ll end with a guided meditation. And you might find it helpful after
the guided meditation to do some journaling, to write down what stands out, and your experience.
And if you have friends or colleagues who are participating in this course
it’ll help to deepen your experience to connect and talk about what you’ve noticed.
Now as a way of introducing RAIN, I’d like to share a story some of you might remember
of an enormous clay statue of the Buddha that was located just north of Thailand’s
ancient capital of Sukhothai. And it had been there for centuries. And it wasn’t the
most handsome statue, it wasn’t particularly refined, but it was revered locally for its
staying power. And it survived great storms, and invading armies, and many changes of government.
In the 1950s it began to crack and, due to hot, dry weather,
one crack was wide enough so that a monk could take his flashlight and peer into the crack.
And what shined back at him was the flash of brilliant gold. So, as he and other monks
looked into the other cracks, they discovered that inside the statue, inside those coverings,
was one of the largest, most luminous gold images of the Buddha ever created in Southeast Asia.
Now, the monks believed that this work of art had been covered with the plaster and clay
to protect it from harm during periods of conflict and unrest. And in a similar way,
we humans encounter difficulty and we cover over our innate purity with our defenses,
our ways of protecting ourself, but so much so that we forget our essential nature.
So, this really reflects the most basic teachings of the Buddha.
That we suffer because we forget who we are. We suffer because we forget who we are.
We think we are the coverings, our personality,
our ego-self, and we forget the gold. And when we’re narrowly identified
and we forget the truth of who we are, we tend to judge ourselves and not like ourselves.
And similarly, when we look at others, we just see the coverings. We don’t see
the gold in them either.
Over the last four decades of working with my own heart and mind, and with students, and with
clients, I’ve seen that the deepest suffering people experience is from self-aversion - from
this sense that this body or mind or personality is flawed, or bad, or deficient. And with that
sense of deficiency comes a fear of personal failure, and intolerance for making mistakes,
a need to prove ourselves. And even when we are not consciously judging ourselves,
there’s an underlying sense of falling short, of never enough.
I saw a cartoon some years ago of a dog who is telling his psychotherapist his troubles
and what he was saying was, “It’s always good dog this and good dog that, but is it ever great dog?”
And we know how feelings of deficiency can really show up in all domains.
Whether it’s falling short at work or in our relationships, as parents, on a spiritual path.
When I teach in live groups, I often ask people how many feel they judge themselves
too much and most people raise their hand. Most of us know we judge ourselves too much.
But what people don’t often realize is how many moments of their life
are actually being shaped by this fear of failing. This feeling of chronic deficiency. And that’s
why I call it the trance of unworthiness. It’s a trance. Which, it’s like a dream.
A trance means that we’re living in a confined, distorted, constricted experience. We’re living
inside very limiting beliefs about ourselves and it cuts us off from a larger reality.
I remember years ago a friend telling me about sitting with her mother as her mother was dying.
And her mother’s last words were, “All my life I thought something was wrong with me.”
That’s what she said and then she closed her eyes and she died. And for my friend,
it was a bit of a dying gift because she realized it doesn’t have to be like this.
We don’t have to go through our life moments with that background sense of falling short.
But the first thing is we have to recognize that we’re actually in a trance a lot of the time. We
have to recognize how that background of something is wrong with me. That background is there. And
if you investigate difficult emotions, if you’re feeling a sense of depression or anxiety or hurt,
what you’ll find is that along with them comes some sort of an aversion towards our inner life.
It’s not just I’m depressed. It’s I’m depressed, and I don’t like my depressed self.
It’s not just that we’re anxious. It’s that I’m anxious, and I don’t like my anxious self.
And the fundamental truths, the most fundamental truths, are the ones that we forget.
And one is that we can’t be happy,
we can’t love life if we’re turned against ourselves if we’re at war with ourselves.
So many wonder, and they ask me a lot, “Well what makes this such a pervasive suffering? How come
so many of us are caught up in self-judgment?” And on the existential level, the primary mood
of a separate self is fear. If we perceive separation, we’re going to feel fear. There’s a
sense that either something’s wrong or something’s about to go wrong, that we’re threatened.
And for humans with our thinking mind and our self-consciousness, that sense of something’s
wrong very quickly becomes I am wrong. We make that shift very quickly. A good example is,
and this is something shown in research, is that young children who are victims of
incest or physical abuse think it’s their fault. They think they did something wrong to cause it.
Fixating on personal deficiencies also makes sense from an evolutionary perspective.
For millions of years, we humans lived in small groups and cooperation was essential
for group survival. So, shame, the emotion of shame, it’s a very painful signal that
motivates us to adapt our behavior and meet the group norms. Shame comes with the fear of being
expelled or rejected. It’s the worst thing that can happen to a social animal. It’s like death.
So, while most shame is no longer adaptive, we’re slow to grow out of these millions of years of
wiring and the trance of unworthiness is pervasive today. We chronically feel like we’re not meeting
the standards, that we’re falling short, and that we’re going to be rejected in some way.
So, we fixate on the standards around us. I should have a certain kind of look. I should have a
certain kind of body. And as we know billions and billions of dollars are spent on cosmetic surgery,
on diets to try to meet those standards. We don’t want to be ashamed of ourselves. We urgently want
to meet the standards for intelligence, for popularity, for business success.
Even in spiritual life, there are standards to meet. We’re trying to be a certain kind of person.
I’m going to share with you one of my favorite little essays about this.
If you can sit quietly after difficult news, if in financial downturns you remain perfectly calm,
if you can see your neighbors travel to fantastic places without a twinge of jealousy, if you can
happily eat whatever is put on your plate and fall asleep after a day of running around without a
drink or a pill, if you can find contentment just where you are, you are probably a dog.
You can understand why it’s a favorite.
So, we have these standards to meet and inevitably we feel like we’re falling short,
that we’re deficient. And the key messengers that invoke shame and invoke our self-aversion
actually are our family and caretakers. We get the message to work harder, perform better, don’t be
so needy and sensitive, look more attractive. We get these messages through our caretakers,
but it’s actually the society that’s setting those standards.
If we look deeply, we are thinking society’s thoughts.
And society gives us the standards and, in a very deep way, reinforces cast systems - feelings
of superiority or inferiority on the basis of class, or race, or ethnicity, or gender. And that
amplifies the trance of unworthiness for many, many people. So, aversion turned inward
is one of the most fundamental expressions of human suffering. It obscures our true nature,
it prevents us from seeing the gold, the goodness in ourselves, and others.
So, our deep inquiry together is what helps us to remember and trust the gold, our true nature?
What helps us? And this is where meditation practice, where training our awareness comes
in. And in particular where we’ll be applying the RAIN meditation. Again, RAIN is a weave of
mindfulness and compassion and you can bring it to any situation that brings up
emotional reactivity. Whether it’s the trance of unworthiness or fear or hurt or anger.