Tag Archives: RAIN Tara Brach

Holding Accountability

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How will we show up to one another this Thursday in the US?

We’ve been here before. I wrote a post during NaBloPoMo 2016 in advance of Thanksgiving, citing resources to help us be more empathetic and open minded. This year feels more fraught compared to then, no? How are we feeling? What do we anticipate? What do we dread? How are we preparing?

Here’s a hard truth: How we show up to any encounter absolutely impacts, if not determines, the outcome of that interaction. Anger, disdain, resentment, derision and the like, even if veiled, seep past our verbal platitudes through posture, facial expression, and energy. So what do we do? Denying our emotions does not help.

I suggest we do these things:

First, let us acknowledge and accept our complex emotions about politics and their current impact on our relationships. Recognize, Allow, Investigate, and Nurture–Tara Brach’s practice bears repeating here. This self-awareness and -regulation practice can help de-escalate the hard feelings and walk us back from the ledge of hijack and lashing out at the off-hand comments of both well- and ill-meaning conversation counterparts. Emotions point us to our values, alert us to threats and connections. Let us remember that this is true for all of us, and we feel differently about things based on myriad factors. Curiosity, if we can manage it, could open important doors of understanding this holiday.

Second, let us maintain the most generous assumptions about the people we gather with this holiday. What ties us together? What do we admire about each other? How do we hold one another up? We can cast our relationship strengths in front and step together onto that raft of mutual respect and shared humanity to carry us over any emotional waves that surge before us. Prevention is the best treatment, right? Can we hold love, connection, appreciation, esteem, empathy, and good humor along with our hard feelings? If we can widen our psychological container for all of our complex emotions, thoughts, confusion, and conflict–intra- as well as interpersonal–then we can more likely keep the tension down… Or at least tolerate it better.

Third, please, let us own our shit. Know our limits and honor them. Some of us just won’t want to engage in any difficult or tense conversations this holiday; this boundary can be honored. We should understand and acknowledge the consequences of non-engagement, however, and know that we choose it. For those of us who choose engagement, let us tread respectfully, soberly, kindly, and calmly. When/if agitation overtakes us, when we devolve toward our less favorite selves, let us stop talking and breathe. Prolonged exhalation, time out, step back. Reset. Then, if needed, muster the sincere apology. When we value our relationships, we strive to not hurt each other with sharp and flippant remarks. When we hurt someone anyway, we say sorry and mean it. “Yeah but s/he/they said….” does not absolve us adults of our responsibility to self-regulate.

We can do this, friends. It’s a hard time for many of us right now, and we can support one another through it, no matter which way we lean or how we voted. If we can own our words and behaviors, especially when impact skews from intention, we can save our relationships from unnecessary rupture. The more fraught our interactions, the more apologies will be necessary. Let us summon the humility and grace to ask for and grant forgiveness.

I Hold Accountability for Us. When we own our shit, no more and no less, and hold one another to equal standards of shit owning, kindly, humbly, and respectfully, then we will really move toward reweaving our frayed social fabric.

Holding Presence: Patience 2.0

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“In some blog can you give us more what holding patience etc. means? I was trying to explain to Kate (spouse) and [not] sure I was giving a good explanation. [I] would like to do more of this practice.”

Thanks for asking, Patty! I hope I can answer your question tonight.

Last night I debated whether to entitle the post Holding Patience or Holding Presence. I see these practices as intertwined. It’s about mindfulness, applied to our inner struggles and those of others.

Mindfulness is defined by many as being in and with the present moment, whatever and however it is, without judgement or resistance. It’s so much easier said than done, especially when the present moment is uncomfortable, difficult, traumatic, and threatening. Mindfulness is an allowing, an active rather than passive acceptance–a firm, stable, non-adversarial and peaceful presence, not a resignation.

What I meant to convey last night is that when we are present with our difficult emotions, when their intensity feels overwhelming and we cannot find our way out just yet, rather than deny, dismiss, judge, or try to control them, we simply allow them to run their course, however long that takes. It’s okay to observe our feelings and sense how they impact our thoughts, perceptions, reactions, and interactions. Allowing is different from wallowing. To me allowing feels like sitting on the beach and letting the water come and go, noticing how each wave has both its own rhythm and shape and also shares its nature with every other wave that day, at that place in time. Wallowing feels more like throwing myself into the water, fighting to stay upright as the waves come, immersing in them, barely able to gasp for air in between the onslaughts. I’m not sure this analogy is totally accurate–it’s late and I’m a bit fried from the work week. Allowing exercises agency; wallowing does not.

Holding Patience is about Holding Presence over time, allowing things to unfold and emerge on their own pulse. It’s about mindful self-regulation, compassion for self and others, meeting us each and all wherever we are. It’s so abstract, I know. I picture us each on a path, paradoxically each to our own and also shared with one another. Some of us jog, some stroll, some huddle, some stand. Whenever any of us interact, we each attune to the other, adjusting our gait, speed, energy, vibration–to resonate with the other–so not moving at the same speed or intensity, necessarily, but in ways that complement one another and promote each other’s ways of being right now, rather than hindering or opposing them. I imagine a fluid movement of all of us, breathing, attending to ourselves and one another in mutual respect and reverence.

This Holding allows space and time for tension and agitation, allows for these vibrations to dissipate and dampen in their natural course. No forcing, no pressure. This allows easier observation of the evolution of feelings, thoughts, relationships, conclusions, and consequences in context. It’s a paradoxically first hand, experiential awareness along with a detached consideration.

On election day I wrote:
I hold space for us to RAIN the hard feelings, as Tara Brach teaches–Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture–if we want. I can also simply sit (stand, hunch, squat) with us, hold it all with us, be with us. We don’t have to do anything else right now.

This feels like Holding Patience and Presence to me.

From Tara Brach’s website:

The acronym RAIN is an easy-to-remember tool for practicing mindfulness and compassion using the following four steps:

  • Recognize what is happening;
  • Allow the experience to be there, just as it is;
  • Investigate with interest and care;
  • Nurture with self-compassion.

Maybe we don’t necessarily have to do it in order. We can Allow before we actually Recognize or name anything. We can Investigate in small bites, over whatever timeline we can tolerate or are able. And we can Nurture ourselves the entire time, holding compassion for ourselves and others. And maybe we don’t have to follow any structure at all–just remembering the concepts themselves can de-escalate our sense of urgency to have everything figured out, tied up, closed, and put behind us.

Does that help? I can barely think straight right now, closing my eyes, feeling for the words from the inside, below the neck. It looks like what I mean. Maybe it will look very different in the morning. Thank you again for asking, Patty. Your engagement allowed me to revisit ideas I had put down after I posted last night. How delightful.

I Hold Presence for Us, my friends, because it helps me stay patient and peaceful.

Calm Down and Connect

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NaBloPoMo 2021:  Do Good, Kid

If you’re a child of the ‘80s and you’re looking for 45 minutes at a time to flash back during mindless cardio, I recommend Halt and Catch Fire on Netflix, a historical fiction series about the advent and uprising of personal computing and the internet.  It’s like watching a slow motion, multi-car emotional pile-up on the highway in your home town.  You see the speeding Porsche coming around the bend, just as the drivers of the F150 that rear-ended the Corolla and pushed it into the MAC truck, all friends of yours, start to realize what just happened.  You feel dread rising, your muscles tense, you know what’s coming.  You cringe and mutter (shout), “Nooo, don’t do it, slooow doooowwnnn!!”  And you can’t look away.

Hubris, ego, vision, Machiavelli, **relationship**, complexity, trauma, identity—I tapped these words onto my iPhone notepad during one particularly vexing episode, while bouncing on the elliptical.  I find myself both cringing and knodding at the raw, intense, and artfully, lovingly rendered drama of human foibles on this show.  There is something about every character that I can relate to.  I’ve been there, I think (feel?) so often.  I’m invested in these characters and their relationships; I want them to succeed—to ‘do good’.  Halfway through season 2 now, I notice what makes me squirm the most: Witnessing decisions made in the throes of emotional hijack—hurtful words slung in rage, impossible promises made under threat, carnal impulses followed in limbic heat.  It’s fiction, which gives me safe distance to reflect on how I know better, while recognizing my own absolute vulnerability to these same and other lapses.

It doesn’t take much, when someone treads too close to a strongly held identity, a fiercely held belief, or an otherwise sensitive spot in my psyche, to upend my attitude from calm clinician to defensive tackle.  I may not lash out in words right away, but I wonder how this affects my decision making going forward, especially at work.  When I experience recurrent threat, rejection, disdain, or disrespect, real or perceived, from or toward you, what stories do I start telling about you (us)?  How do these morph into entrenched assumptions that then cloud my judgment and compromise my objectivity?  In short, how does my being a normal, emotional human put my clinical decision making, and thus my patients’ health and outcomes, at risk?  How so at home?  It’s all potentially dangerous.

I can think of a few ways to guard against relational and decisive pitfalls here:

  1. To calm down, I can take a few deep breaths, remind myself that we are all humans.  We have the same fundamental needs to feel seen, heard, understood, accepted and loved.  I can ask questions, like, ‘What part of me or the other person is not having a need met here?’
  2. Practice ODP:  Observe, Describe, Participate.  This is a mindfulness tool from dialectical behavior therapy that I learned of recently.  I can take my subjective reactions and judgments and substitute objective observations and neutral descriptions.  This helps me slow down, get space and clarity.  Then I can refrain from speaking and acting from a place of hijack.
  3. I can also practice RAIN:  Recognize, Allow, Investigate, and then Nurture my experience, to gain both understanding and acceptance of myself and my circumstances.  Radical acceptance and compassion form the foundation of right relationship with self and others.
  4. Consult objective others.  Colleagues, friends, extended family, therapists—people outside of the index relationship and who have no stake in its workings can give valuable perspective and insight.  Even better if they can make honest observations about me and my hijack patterns, so I may learn and adjust, over and over.

Our lives are most meaningful, I agree with my friend, when we find deep connection with others. But too often it is our encounters and the very relationships we have with people that keep us from connecting. How ironic. Wow, these posts (and this blog) really do revolve around only a few central themes…

Self-awareness and -regulation are key to a life well lived—that is, a life at the end of which we are more likely to look back with the fewest regrets. Keeping practices and connections that tether us to our highest and best selves, even as the gales of life threaten to blow us away, is how we exert positive agency. We make the best decisions and tell the best stories about ourselves and other people when we are truly grounded and stable.

What practices keep you steady?