Tara Brach - Retreat - Morning Instruction - RAIN - Q and A (2016-08-27)

Episode Date: September 16, 2016

Retreat - Morning Instruction - RAIN - Q and A (2016-08-27) - Tara gives morning instruction on retreat including R.A.I.N. (Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nourish), then responds to questions from retreatants. Includes a question on resourcing when working with trauma. Recorded at the 2016 IMCW Women's Retreat.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. In a few moments we're going to have opened for questions. I just want to make a couple of comments on the practice first. One of them is this. I get a lot of questions about reins. I just wanted to clarify a few things. for those that how many of you are really new to rain

are very unfamiliar with it? Can I see to the acronym? Yeah. So this is an acronym for mindfulness and compassion that's very useful when you're working with a challenging energy. And the original version of it, the way I teach

it's actually different than the original version which creates more questions. The R is to recognize and that simply means okay you've been kind of often a trance and you start realizing, oh, I've been out there. And then you realize, wow, there's some real anxiety in your system. So the R is recognize it. Okay, anxious. And the A is allow, which means don't do something to it. Don't leave. Don't judge. Don't add anything more.

Just allow. Just let it be as it is. Okay. And that creates a pause and the pause enables a deepening of attention. I just want to say that everything about rain is already what you already know and already practicing. It's just a useful way to remind yourself. So you're just noticing it and letting it be there, allowing. And then the eye is a deepening of attention. It's that inquiry and it's a very essential part of sati of mindfulness of what is this. And it's not mental. It's very easy to think investigation as well, my mother treated me like this and now I have a pattern of doing that to other people. It's not that. Okay, it's more, okay, what is it really experienced like? What does it feel like in the body?

It might include what am I believing. There might be a mental idea of, oh, I'm always going to fail. And if you sense that, or I'm unlovable or whatever, then find out where it lives in your body. Keep coming back to your body. It's only when we bring a full presence to the felt sense in the body that there can be really a release of the identification with the scales that we actually open. Okay? So you're investigating where is it, how does it feel, what's it like? And as I mentioned last night, the deepest inquiry really is what is this place need? There's an unmet need when we're in a clench, when we're reactive. There's some basic need for love, for attention, for acceptance, for forgiveness.

Something is going on. And when we can tap into that need with the investigation, we get to the end of rain, which is nurture, which is respond to what's here, from the most awake, tender, wise part of our being. And that's when I usually put my hand in my heart, because for me, that's a very, instinctual way and there's a lot of science that says if you put your hand on your heart, the warmth with this neural net that's right here actually calms down the sympathetic nervous system. But it's a way of communicating presence to yourself. When we're in reactivity, we're feeling cut off and separate. So by communicating presence with yourself, you're connecting

and soothing and coming back into an integrated place. Okay? So the nurturing can be in the form of sending a message of kindness to yourself. It can be, sometimes you feel too small to send it to yourself. You imagine the universe, the bodhisatt of compassion or your mother or a friend or whatever sending it, but it's just nurture. Now the important thing about rain is after you've gone through the steps and there's some doing with each of these steps, The key thing is afterwards to then rest and just notice what it's like. Just like with the real rain, when it comes down, the fruits of the rain are in the blossoming

that happens afterwards. Just stay. And sense, you know, because you can almost viscerally feel that shift from being the anxious self to being the awareness and tenderness that is holding. and with that anxiety. There's a shift in identity. In the old version of Rain, the end was not identify, but I felt like it missed the compassion piece

and the non-identification is not a doing. It's arresting in what is. You inhabit, remember I described the line and above the line as awareness. You inhabit that awareness. You move from the dot to the hall, that vast, edgeless space, that field of tenderness, it's really what we are. So I wanted to just kind of give you a sense again of how you can use rain if some strong energy comes up. And then

lastly to say, don't miss out on giving yourself that gift of non-doing during practice. It can very easily become a project. So if you find a calming down, a quieting of the mind, You might just mentally, sometimes I'll just say, okay, stop, or drop, that the Tibetan sometimes say, just drop, just let it all be. Because it's in the moment of pure non-doing that we actually dissolve the last remnants of identification with a separate self and just become that space of awareness. So I want to invite you to weave that into your practice. Anyone this morning have something you'd like to bring into the room?

We've got our Emma is here with the mic. My question relates to what you were just speaking of in terms of doing and not doing and knowing when which is a skillful means or the most skillful means. They're all skillful means. Something that's been coming up in my practice and in my life is this feeling of not being enough, which then leads this fear of not belonging and wondering

how to know in myself when is the most skillful time to like be with it bring rain to it be compassionate with it, ask it what's it needs and when is the most how to know for myself when is the most skillful time

to just let go and just almost like I see you Mara like I see this thing again coming up like I'm not going down that road. It's a lie. It's delusion. And I'm coming back to like the truth of my belonging or whatever. And have you experimented with the latter of just saying, thank you very much, but that's a little bit of a doing.

And then just coming back to rest? Not really. So experiment. For every one of us, you know, we'll give a general here, the, instructions, but every body-mind is its own. And so this is really an experiment. I find it an experiment almost moment to moment. On some level there's like this, well, let's see, you know, is there some skillful way to be with this? Or, you know, experiment. And notice, you know, with the words, just let go, there's a little bit of a paradox because a self can't let go.

and if you're very identified in a self a self can try to will it or think it wants to but the very nature of selfing is a clutch so letting go actually is when there's awareness naturally isn't holding on so the more there's a resting in awareness

there's a spontaneous letting go and letting be so sense for yourself in your experiment that sometimes you're going to be investigating and actively working with, and sometimes that there's an intention to do less and just kind of rest with and experiment with how much that can be an open-handed process for you.

And you'll find there's a going back and forth, that you might sense, well, okay, just let that nurturing, see how deep the love can be, and then just rest. You'll find a weaving that actually is a very organic process of coming back home. Thank you. My question is about fear and anxiety. I met fear and anxiety about five years ago when my life got flipped upside down, and I really didn't have a lot of them before, so I'm trying to learn to work with them. I lost my brother-in-law and my mother in one full swoop.

And then my husband got sick. So it's been about five years of some vague illnesses. I have so much fear and anxiety around it, and I try to work with it. But in the work I do every day, I'm a nurse practitioner, I take care of really, really sick and hurting people every 15 minutes. So there's this reinforcing that this is what happens. And in working with the grandmother self version of yourself, I found that really helpful

and tried to understand what it was I needed and she was wonderful and caring and reassuring. But when she got to the point about it's going to be okay, then there was a little, the voices came, said, no, it's not, you know it's not, because this is what you see every day all the time. It's so reinforced. And so where I got stuck is,

is that okay to reassure yourself? or do you really just want to sit with the acceptance of we don't really know? I kind of know the answer, as I'm saying it. What's your sense? Well, my sense is that we don't know, and we are supposed to live in the groundlessness, but where can you gain a little bit of that tenderness to get yourself through it? It's a beautiful inquiry, and I feel like it's,

right at the heart of what we're all working with. Every one of us is working with fear. It's the primal clutch of the separate self. Every one of us is afraid of the losses that are inevitable, and we're tensing against it. And that on one level we're being invited to, like, just the only way to the fearless heart is through fear, is through actually opening to the clutch

and opening with as much presence and care as we can. And in order to bring care to it, sometimes we have to very intentionally cultivate that sense of resourcefulness and care. In other words, that's the reason the Buddha taught the love and kindness meditation initially was that we really need to sense the truth of our connectedness, that we belong to something larger. It's the love that can carry us through this coming-going world, that if we don't sense our belonging to a really loving awareness in a big way,

we're going to constantly be a separate self-look goes like this. So sometimes just to nourish that, and that's why that relating to the grandmother figure is a kind of metaphor for relating to that vast, tender heart space that you really belong to. And the more you're familiar with that, the more you'll be able to bring to the presence of fear that tenderness. So again, there's a kind of a back forth here that I'm referring to, and we talked about

it with pain also, that we sometimes have to just resource till we get more familiar with our larger belonging. And then we go right into where the very essence of that tight, tense sensation is until we find in that presence, we can sense a kind of space and radiance and tenderness that is bigger than the tightness. Back and forth. Does that resonate as I say it? Yes. Thank you very much. It's an art and it is again an experiment for each of us. If you're more on the traumatized end of the spectrum, more resourcing first before you go right for the rain. You won't get to the end of rain. You'll be re-traumatized before you get there.

if you haven't resourced. So in a way what that means is that before you do rain, you do more of the end of rain, you do more of the nurturing, and then you come in and do the rain and you have more access. I hope I'm not confusing anyone. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Your questions are really, really beautiful.