Radical Compassion: Learning to Love Yourself and Your World with the Practice of RAIN

Many spiritual traditions describe presence as an open, sunlit sky. When presence is full, like the sky it is luminous and boundless, and it provides warmth and nourishment for life. All kinds of weather systems pass through it—happiness, sorrow, fear, excitement, grief—but like the sky itself, presence can hold them all.

Between the stimulus and the response there is a space, and in that space is your power and your freedom. • VIKTOR FRANKL The deepest transformations in our lives come down to something very simple: We learn to respond, not react, to what is going on inside us.

When I assume the facial expression and body posture that best reflect these feelings and emotions, what do I notice?

You might be saying yes to the part of you that is saying, “I hate this!” That’s a natural part of the process. At this point in RAIN, you are simply noticing what is true and intending not to judge, push away, or control anything you find.

RAIN provides a way out of trance through what I call a “U-turn” in attention. We are taking a U-turn whenever we shift our attention from an outward fixation—another person, our thoughts, or our emotionally driven stories about what’s going on—to the real, living experience in our body.

Allowing expands us in a way that enables us to include, not fight, physical and emotional pain. Psychologists call this “affect tolerance.”

Nodding sagely, the therapist replied, “You are feeling better . . . you’re feeling your fear better, feeling your anger better, feeling your grief better!”

“Our issues are in our tissues.”

Sense that you have the space of awareness to include everything you’ve discovered, that you can fully allow it to be as it is. You can even say yes to the parts of you that are saying no and resisting what’s happening.