Tara Brach
Appearances
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
If you're stuck in a pattern that's causing suffering, RAIN, again, it's a weave of mindfulness and self-compassion. And the letters, it's an acronym, are recognize, allow, investigate, and nurture. And I'll give you an example of RAIN. I'll give you a personal example. This was, you know, through the pandemic, people have used RAIN a lot.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
So I get people telling me, you know, RAIN has saved my life. Well, when my mother moved down here, and this was... Oh, she moved down here when she was maybe 78 or 80. She came right at a time I was super busy. I was trying to put together all the material for a new book and so on. And I was really torn because... I was feeling very guilty about not spending enough time with her.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
And I was also feeling anxious about getting work done and coming through on my teachings. Now, this is a basic cluster for me. If you say, you know, what are your issues? You know, guilt, like I am very programmed to want to come through for everybody and very, you know, I get a lot of angst when I feel like I'm falling short. So that's a whole story cluster.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
And then the other one is, you know, on the Enneagram, if you're familiar, is I'm a three, which is a performer who wants to make sure she's coming across well. And so I get anxious about not being prepared. So those were playing out. Yeah. I remember one day I was right here in my office and she came in. She was living here then and she had a New Yorker article she wanted to show me.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
And I was completely focused on my screen writing a talk, believe it or not, on love and kindness, which is embarrassing, but that's what I was doing.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
Right, right, right. You're in my way, you know. And so she was very discreet. She just put it down and started retreating. And I turned and I saw her and I thought, wow, I don't know how long I'll have her, you know. So after she left, I did a practice with RAIN and the recognizes, recognizing, okay, guilt, but also anxious, right?
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
The allow is just what we were talking about earlier, Mark, which is, okay, just let it be here. This is the reality of this moment. It's here. Just not try to judge it or ignore it. Okay, anxiety, guilt. The investigate, it's not cognitive. That's an important piece. It's cognitive only. You might identify what you're believing.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
And for me, I was believing, well, I'm letting her down, but I also could fail. But it's mostly somatic. With investigate, you're investigating, how am I experiencing this directly in my body? And for me, I could feel the clutching in my chest and just the tightness. and breathing with it, letting it be there, and really sensing what that part of me, that anxious, guilty place needed.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
And what it really needed was to be reminded of my goodness, that I was a loving being and that the truth would flow through in teaching. It wasn't going to take a whole lot of selfing to do it. And so that was the nurturing. The nurturing was...
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
I like to put my hand on my heart and I often teach it with nurturing the self-compassion just to say, it's okay, sweetheart, you know, just trust your goodness. And, um, Right. There's a piece with rain where I call it after the rain, where you just sense the presence that is emerging.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
And after that kind of presence and compassion, I could just feel I was resting in a much larger, more peaceful, more spacious, more tender place. And I practiced this a lot, Mark, for a few months when my mom, this is still the early days of her being here. And I found that I started really showing up more. We could have our salads in the evening, these giant salads, and I'd just be present.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
And we'd go for our walks by the river. And she died maybe three years later. And deep grief, of course, but not regrets. And I realized that... RAIN had saved my life moments with my mother. It had really given me that. And so it's just an example of how I'd been caught in the stories and the feelings.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
And by interrupting with RAIN, which is just mindfulness and compassion, it really shifted my inner patterning.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
One of the things about it that's helpful to people is that when we're triggered, we have very little access to our prefrontal cortex. We forget how to get back home again. And so this gives a pretty easy to remember sequence. It's not inviolable. Once you go deeper into the practice, you'll find that it's not so logically A, B, C, D. but doesn't matter.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
There's still a way in which those elements are crucial. Now, if there's trauma, if the triggering is traumatic, you actually have to start with the nurturing. You have to start by creating more safety before you dive in and try to feel the feelings. And that's an important thing for people to know.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
Well, first, I want to agree with you that suffering does have a potential to wake us up. And, well, maybe just to give you an example of how I got turned towards mindfulness. When I was in college, I was probably peaking in angst. I wasn't alone. I had many others angsting, but depression, anxiety, and it really kind of the hub of it was just a lot of self-hatred.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
And I remember at one point being on a camping trip with a friend who said, you know, I'm learning to be my own best friend. And how far I was from that. So it just kind of opened up my eyes to, oh my gosh, I hate my body. I feel like I'm failing in my relationships with others. I'm compulsively overeating. I'm not producing. Just every front. That was a real pit of suffering.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
And interestingly, at the same time, I was very much a social activist. So I was out there and on the weekends we'd have rallies and there was a lot of agitation there, but I started doing a yoga class. So weekends I was agitated and then Tuesday nights, and it was yoga and meditation. And I remember one night, Mark, where it was right after class.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
I was walking home and it was spring and fragrance of the fruit trees. I stopped and realized that my body and my mind were in the same place at the same time.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
Amazing. And with that, just such a feeling of peace and belonging to the world. And what really hit me then was, if we want to change our world, it really has to come from a consciousness that is feeling love and connectedness, not agitation and shaking a fist at bad enemy others.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
So it was those two things together, you know, the sense of this is really who I can be and also being at war with myself that I made a kind of 180 degree. I was on my way to law school and I ended up in an ashram for 10 years. Wow. Wow.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
I know, I keep double taking on it. But yeah, yeah, that's what happened. And in a way, I understand it now because I'm still really very dedicated to social change. And I know we have to keep on waking up our hearts in order to have it come from love, not from anger and hatred.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
Well, for a lot of us, it's like what you said, it doesn't necessarily appear to us. And the reason I call it a trance is because most people, if I ask them, I do this at workshops, you know, how many of you judge yourself? And like 98% of the hands will go up.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
But what people don't realize is that there's often this undercurrent of comparing ourselves to some idealized standard of who we should be, or how we should feel, or how we should be behaving in this moment. It's like this inner monitor, like right now as we're doing this, there's a background inner monitor that in some way is evaluating, so how's it going, you know, that kind of a thing.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
And often we're not aware that there's a gap between how we want ourselves to be and how we're showing up. We're just not aware of it. And it can affect everything because we're social beings and we want to be accepted and loved. And if we feel we're falling short, it's profoundly threatening. And so we're not aware that there's that kind of fear and self-doubt.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
And it impacts how close we can feel with others and it impacts how much risk we can take at work or our willingness to be creative or just our ability to relax in the moment if we think we're in some way in the red and we have to make up for it. So it's a trance. And the cool thing is that
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
when we shine a light on it and even get that there's this trance going on, there is something in us that has a yearning to be free from it and it starts activating healing. So just seeing the trance is the beginning of freeing from it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
And that we all have been fed those standards. It's like I'm not thinking my thoughts, I'm thinking society's thoughts about how I should be. And we all have been conditioned by the same culture that says, produce more and look this way and act this way and everything from... you know, how skinny we should be to how spiritual we should be.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
We have these standards and our family is the messenger and so they imprint it in a certain kind of constellation, but it's in there.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace
Oh, my God. He says,