The RAIN Method

In her excellent book, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection, Sharon Salzberg devotes a chapter to a method handling difficult emotions (as well as welcoming all emotions) known as “RAIN”: Recognize, Acknowledge, Investigate and Non-Identify (pp.52-54). I found this idea to be quite useful, and it is also similar to the 4 steps to handling a problem which I have read in Master Sheng Yen’s writings (Face, Accept, Deal, Let Go). It seems useful to elaborate on a few of the points in detail.

“Recognizing” difficult emotions seems easy, but it’s probably the most difficult for our current cultural climate. Writes Salzburg, “It is impossible to deal with an emotion- to be resilient in the face of difficulty-unless we acknowledge that we’re experiencing it” (p.52). I find that in my own experience, there are two obstacles to recognizing emotions. The first is that emotions are often accompanied by psychological evaluations: I “like” this emotion and “dislike” the other. I find that many of my evaluations of emotions are attempts to manage my experience before I can really understand what the experience is and where it’s coming from. The second obstacle is not being curious enough about the emotion or underlying conflict to want to explore it in detail. Sometimes the lack of curiosity might even come from a lack of vocabulary to describe the emotion as it’s arising. The other reason is that I am too busy trying to control my experiences to be able to yield to difficult emotions and experience tensions as they are.

“Accepting” is similar to the notion of “accepting”; in Salzberg’s words, “you accept the feeling and allow it to be there” or, “you give yourself permission to feel it” (ibid). Again, this goes back to the principle of not judging one’s feelings. While this seems easy, I think what’s difficult is being able to unearth the vulnerability of emotions. Emotions often leave people open to difficult choices, such as how to express something that is painful. Sometimes what this requires is an underlying faith that one is “okay” regardless of the emotion. Salzberg even suggests renaming difficult emotions as “painful” as an “entry into self compassion” (p.53) which is none other than leaving open a space for discomfort to arise. What’s most difficult here is that some emotions are accompanied by efforts to control a primary emotion. I have noticed, for example, that the emotion of desire is often a way of avoiding or mitigating more difficult emotions such as frustration or anxiety. The desire is a way of “medicating” the more difficult emotions. If one constantly acts on desires rather than observing the underlying difficulties which often trigger it, one is losing the valuable knowledge and ability to be with discomforts.

The ability to “investigate” refers to being curious to explore one’s emotional states, without judgment or bias (p.53). But investigating doesn’t mean a rational, discursive exploration so much as a kind of sensuous exploration. Notes Salzberg, “We might explore how the feeling manifests itself in our bodies and also look at what the feeling contains” (ibid). This curiosity might also entail seeing the conditions that arise to compose the emotion. It is a subtle balance between not repressing and not indulging emotions.

Finally, “non identify” simply means not taking the emotions to be ourselves. This might mean simply identifying a state of mind as suffering (p.54) rather than imputing it to a self. I think the best way to look at this is to actually see everything arising in mind as “just mind”: not “mine”, not “yours” and not assignable into distinct bodies or identities. However, one needs to be honest to know when a person is attaching to these phenomena and when they are just phenomena.

Salzberg, S. (2017) Read Love: The Art of Mindful Connection. New York: Flatiron Books.