Hello everyone and welcome back to my channel.
In today's video, I am going to share with you a meditation technique to help you deal
with anxiety when anxiety comes up.
This video is the second video of a two-part series on how to rewire your brain to reduce
anxiety, so if you missed the first episode make sure that you find the link in the description
below or you can find the link right here.
Hi, my name is Olivier and I am a mindfulness meditation teacher.
If you are struggling with stress and anxiety or other emotional difficulties or simply
want to cultivate more joy more peace and more happiness in your daily life, consider
subscribing to my channel.
Every week, I post a new video on these topics and I show you how mindfulness and meditation
can help you in those areas.
With life comes difficult experiences: fear and doubts about the future, stress and anxiety
about work or other responsibilities, the loss of somebody that we love and so forth
... Mindfulness meditation is a tool that can help us suffer less.
Zen Master Thich Nhat Han said that if we know how to suffer, we will suffer less.
So mindfulness meditation can help us not only by reducing the intensity of these experiences
but it can help us to find a way to freedom, to be free from those difficulties.
This sense of freedom is best illustrated by this metaphor: imagine that you have a
glass of water and you are dropping a tablespoon of salt in it.
The glass of water will be very salty but if you drop the same amount of salt in a lake,
the lake will not be salty.
In the same way mindfulness meditation, can show the path to become the lake so that whenever
fear, doubts, anxiety or other challenges appear in your life, we don't have to be so
affected by it.
We can become the lake and develop the capacity to hold those difficult experiences without
losing our peace and our freedom.
I remember this one day when I was working at my previous work where I had these sensations
of fear in me, the same feeling that I had when I was a student and I was about to take
a final exam.
And then I noticed that this sensation of fear, I experienced it many times at work
and I found it strange, because I was no longer in school.
I knew I wasn't going to have any final exams to take and this fear of this anxiety was
really an obstacle to me being able to live with peace, to live with ease and relaxation
and so I decided to practice with the meditation technique that I am just about to share with
you.
This technique is called R.A.I.N and it is an acronym for Recognise, Allow, Investigate
and Nurture.
And by practicing this meditation, these four steps, I was able to find a sense of safety,
a sense of ease, that I could bring back to my daily life and feel less prone to this
fear and anxiety.
Before we get into the steps of the RAIN meditation, I wanted to invite you to reflect on anxiety:
in which areas of your life do you experience anxiety?
And how does it impact your quality of life?
Your relationships?
Your performance at work or at school?
And your happiness?
And can you imagine what life would be like without this anxiety?
So now, let's get on to the RAIN meditation.
The first step of this meditation is called Recognize and it is simply the mere recognition
of our experience as it is.
Often when we have unpleasant thoughts or feelings or sensations in our body, we react
to them by distracting ourselves from them, by running away from them.
We open the fridge to find something, we turn on the TV or we just browse on the internet
because these are unpleasant sensations and we just don't want to be in touch with them.
Here, we're taking a complete different approach which is actually to turn towards them.
When we react to anxiety by eating something or distracting yourself from it, this maps
to a neural pathway in our brain and what we want to do is to actually create and start
a new neural pathway in our brain when we get in touch with this anxiety trigger and
recognition is the first step towards developing this new neural pathway.
The second step of the meditation is called Allow.
It means to allow our experience to be just as it is: to allow thoughts to be there, to
allow feelings to be there and to allow by the bodily sensations to be there without
wanting to modify or change them in any ways, without wanting them to go away.
I remember when I was a student laying in bed before going to sleep and suffering from
panic attacks.
Those panic attacks prevented me from breathing normally, so I was literally suffocating in
my bed and I remember wanting this anxiety to go away and I wanted to take it out of
my body but as soon as we push something away, we create some tensions and the point of allowing
is to disable these tensions.
By allowing, we create already a sense of relaxation.
So as you can see, to recognize and to allow our anxiety to be there without wanting to
modify it or wanting it to go away, it is a radical shift in how we instinctively react
to anxiety.
The third step of the rain meditation is to investigate with kindness.
With the first and second step, when we recognize and allow our anxiety to be there just as
it is, it already provided us some clarity to some extent on our anxiety and this is
a third step is about investigating so that we can gain a deeper understanding of where
our anxiety comes from and what it needs and so, in the investigation part, we ask ourselves
some questions such as: what is happening inside me?
What most wants my attention?
What am I believing?
When we ask those questions, we want to stay connected to our body.
The investigation process is not an intellectual or cognitive process but rather, we ask those
questions and then we pay attention to what is happening in our body and where it is happening.
Our body is a container for our experiences.
When we experience joy, it feels a certain way in our body.
When we experience peace and calm, we feel it in a certain way in our body.
When we experience anger, loneliness, anxiety, fear, they all translate into certain sensations
in our body.
So what we want to do in this step is to pay attention to what is happening in our body
when we experience anxiety and to locate where it is and how it feels like.
The second part of the investigation is: when you notice the anxiety in your body, where
it is and what it feels like, then ask yourself the questions: if this part of my body could
tell me something what would it tell me?
Or what does his part of my body most need?
When I practiced the RAIN meditation regarding my anxiety at work, I could touch this sense
of feeling in me: it was a fear for my own survival and I could also touch down self
doubt: whether I was good enough for this role, for this position and from there, there
was a natural sense of compassion that arose.
The investigation part works best when we are non-judgmental towards our experience.
The non-judgmental attitude will allow us to be vulnerable, to touch places of vulnerability
in us.
This practice is the foundation to build emotional resilience: it is to acknowledge our vulnerabilities,
to go there and to offer what it needs.
And the fourth step of the RAIN meditation is to nurture.
Once you touch the place of vulnerability, offer it whatever it needs.
For example, in my experience with the RAIN meditation, I could touch this feeling of
unsafety and of self-doubt and so what I did is I placed my hand on my body wherever I
felt those feelings and offered some sentences like: "I am safe, I am safe, I am safe" for
the fear in me and for the self-doubt, I told myself: "I do my best, I let go of the rest,
I do my best, I let go of the rest" and so I practiced staying in touch with those vulnerabilities
and offering this energy of compassion and whatever I needed at a time and so I just
rested, breathed with them until I felt better.
When you try the RAIN practice, don't be discouraged because you don't feel a total sense of freedom.
It may take you several tries to get there.
The RAIN practice is a practice of a lifetime, a practice that you will apply to different
difficulties, that have various intensity.
What is important is to stick with the practice.
The first time, maybe you feel a little bit more at ease, a little bit more calm.
Then you try a few more times and you realize that the more you try, the more ease and piece
you will feel.
And then there will be other circumstances in life that will bring anxiety or maybe the
same.
And again, it will be time to practice.
But every time you practice, it will be easier for you to practice next.
For me, for the anxiety the day after I practiced, I felt safe, I felt free but then there were
other projects that created anxiety and then I had to practice with RAIN again, but it
was getting easier and easier for me to feel this sense of safety.
There will be difficult moments in our life and that we won't be able to avoid.
The only control that we have is how we will respond to those events.
Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh said: pain is unavoidable but suffering is optional.
The practice of mindfulness meditation and the RAIN meditation are ways for us to suffer
less.
They are a path for us to free ourselves from our doubts, our fears, our anxiety and so,
I hope that this video will be beneficial to you.
I encourage you to practice to try the RAIN meditation and let me know how it goes for
you and if you have any questions by using the comment sections below.
If you are interested in listening to my guided meditation you can download them for free
by subscribing to my newsletter at peaceful-breathing.com.
I have just added a meditation on gratitude which is the fastest way for you to become
happier.
If you enjoy the content of this video please leave me a like and a comment below and I
will see you very soon.
Thank you so much for watching!