Buddhists have a process called RAIN that can get you unblocked and back into healing and growth. It turns out that Hakomi uses almost the exact same process, but they go a few steps further. I’ve tacked ING onto the end to address that. Note that I’m not quite exactly getting the Hakomi extra steps right, but at least it is the gist of it. And I do dearly love the cuteness of the expanded acronym.
If you are new to this, you are in for a treat. This is a really powerful technique. Again this is one of those things best addressed in a book or course. I’m just summarizing here. My favorite teacher of RAIN is Tara Brach, I recommend all of her books highly.
Recognize Allow Investigate Nurture/Needed ** — Extra Hakomi steps —** **_Integrate_** **_New/Not Me_** **_Gratitude_**
The very first step is to simply recognize that something is going on. Maybe you are avoiding something. Maybe you are holding a pain somewhere in your body. Just notice this.
Then see how much you can simply allow this pain. Is it overwhelming? Maybe you can just breathe with it. Buddhists hold that pain is unavoidable, but suffering comes when we resist the pain. We don’t have to suffer, we can instead (as much as safely possible) allow this pain without resistance.
Now maybe investigate a little. Where is the pain in your body? What does it feel like? Does it have a shape or color? Is it heavy? Does it have something to say to you? Are there insights here?
Next we send loving kindness and compassion to the pain. What is needed here? A Hakomi practitioner is looking for the missing experience that their client needs. Maybe safety, maybe being seen. Maybe simply unconditional love and acceptance.
Now we have something new to integrate. We have stepped into a deeper place of acceptance and compassion for ourselves. We have found a kind of peace with our pain. It is important to integrate this. We feel better now. There is hope. We need to really bring this all the way into our body and make it ours. This is the key step. This is how we heal long term.
Next we see that we are not our pain. We might have been feeling depressed or terrified, but that is just what we were feeling in the moment. And in Hakomi therapy we can see how, probably as a child, we made a key decision about how life works. Maybe we just decided people aren’t safe and can’t be trusted. Now as adults we realize that we can make some new choices.
But we honor the courage of that desperate child finding a path to survival. We are so grateful for whatever it was that protected us. And we are also grateful to find this new aliveness and possibility inside of us. We all are striving towards growth. Always. It is just that we get blocked at times. And when we get unblocked and find ourselves flowing again, we take a moment to feel gratitude for the blessings of it all.
Let me give some examples to hopefully make this all more concrete.
I recently went through a very serious relationship crisis with my partner and I went into a lot of pain. It is one thing to do mindfulness when everything is mostly going ok. It is completely another when you are in crisis. But I knew I had to — it was the only thing that could work. OK, so the first step was simply to recognize how much pain I was in. I was so busy thinking angry, hurt, outraged thoughts that I didn’t even stop to notice exactly what I was feeling. It turns out this was kind of on purpose. When I truly got in touch with how much pain I was feeling, I couldn’t stand it. It was much easier to go back to focusing on how wrong my partner was. Somehow that kind of eased things for me — my focus was on her not my pain. But it wasn’t really a solution of course. It just was the temporary fix that I kept on grabbing.
That let me start to explore how much of the pain I could simply allow. Turns out at first not much. I would sit with the pain for just a bit and then go back to my (oddly) comforting angry thoughts about my partner. Then I would catch myself and gently come back to just allowing the pain. I had to do this over and over, and honestly mostly failing. Slowly slowly there were periods where I could simply allow the pain, and then I was able to start sending loving kindness and compassion to it. I mentioned earlier that one night I startled awake at 3am to my usual panic, but this time there was a spirit animal hovering over my belly. Reassuring me that I was not going to die. This was the nurture/need step. That spirit animal was giving me back the feeling of being whole and complete.
But again, simply having an insight no matter how amazing is not enough all by itself. The work then is to integrate it back into yourself over and over. I realized most of my pain had nothing at all to do with my partner. It was all about my fear of abandonment. It was also my fear of being worthless. And yes I have this incredibly hurt child inside that is desperate for love and validation. So hungry for that reassurance that I have value, and so scared that maybe I don’t. The feelings can get so overwhelming that they consume me. But when I get back to a nurtured, secure place I can see how I am not just that hurt child. That is not who I really am any more. And then finally I go to gratitude. Gratitude for the learning. Gratitude even for the pain because it took the incredible energy of that pain to finally force me to get unblocked. I had been so blocked and in denial that it took something as big as that to get me unstuck. And finally deep, loving gratitude to my hurt child who despite all odds managed to keep his sweet, tender heart intact.
RAINING doesn’t always have to be around wounds and pain. It can also help us to open up to the next thing that wants to happen but is blocked for some reason, maybe because we are too scared.
Let me go back to what happened after my angel story. After the initial power and glory of it, I tried to go back to my life as a software engineer. A life that did not have any room for spirit in it. I knew on some level that I was not an atheist any more but I didn’t really want to think about it. It was too much. Over many years (again this would have been greatly speed up if I had just done the process consciously) I would recognize from time my spiritual intuitions coming up. And eventually I just started to allow them. Maybe not for very long, but I started to just allow that I had now another way of looking at the world. Then I let myself start to investigate what these spiritual longings were all about, and the fear that came up with them.
I needed a little nurturing around the fear, but what I needed most was to really trust myself. To trust that this new way of looking at the world was just as valid as anything my rational mind came up with. To really trust that I loved myself way too much to ever forsake the rational/logical side of myself. Even as I started to venture off into these new worlds of spirit, I promises myself over and over that I would not forsake the other parts of me. This is the nurture/need step. It was so necessary. It let me start to integrate this whole new world of spirit. It let me accept that I am extremely intuitive and can at times sense people’s energy. I started to integrate this spiritual side of me. Really let myself bring both spirit and rationality into how I decide if something is true. And I realized that I was not just the rationalist or someone having a spiritual awakening. I was both and more. And I started to get curious, just how big am I? Just how big is everyone if they only knew? And then I go back to gratitude for finding all of this. What a gift. What a gift all of this is. I’m so very grateful.
I’m presenting this now as a very smooth process, but it was not anything like that of course. And oddly the thing that most helped me return to spirit was a masturbation technique. Weird right? But it almost always our body that guides the way. Let’s go back there next.