AUDIO: An EASY Self-Compassion Meditation to Shift your Suffering - You are the Ocean, Not the Waves
Sometimes you feel like you’re drowning, battered and broken by the waves of your greatest fears, your most painful regrets and sorrows.
And sometimes the storm that stirred up all these waves somehow sneaks up on you, comes out of nowhere, after many months of glorious sunshine and stillness. Maybe that’s when it’s the hardest to have hope that you’ll ever feel better. Maybe you thought you’d left such times behind. You thought you’d healed enough to move on, to never feel that way again.
But healing isn’t linear. True healing is a spiral, and each time you’re visited by an old, familiar foe, you’re learning to carry yourself through it with more ease, more care, more skill.
So the next time the storms begin and the waves start crashing over you, be assured, dear friend – even when nothing else is working, you possess the greatest means of shifting out of this place. Even when it feels like the pain has taken you over. Even when you believe the harsh words being spit at you by your meanest inner judge.
The greatest tool available to you is the self-compassion you can cultivate.
And because it’s so hard to remember what’s helpful and recall the ways out when we’re in the thick of it, let me offer you this greatest of tools in the very simplest of terms.
The self-compassion meditation above is less than nine minutes long, and it walks you through four easy steps to put it into practice for whenever you feel stuck.
This practice, called RAIN, comes from Tara Brach (see links at the end). RAIN stands for:
Recognize what’s going on;
Allow the experience to be there, just as it is;
Investigate with interest and care;
Nurture with self-compassion.
For self-compassion to work its magic, we need to feel safe enough to be with our own vulnerability.
This RAIN will not make the waves that are battering you more violent. This is a gentle rain that falls softly. The storm clouds start to break apart and the waters calm.
You can catch your breath and then find your feet on the ocean floor. And soon, as you start to settle back into your true Self and release the painful gripping, you realize that you are not those waves that nearly drowned you.
You are the entire ocean.