Mindfulness RAIN and Mental Health
I first encountered RAIN (“Four Principles for Mindful Transformation”) in Jack Kornfield’s wonderful book on buddhist psychology. Kornfield describes RAIN as a staple of Western mindfulness retreats, I haven’t yet tracked down it’s exact origins.
RAIN is comprised of four transformative principles, which proponents describe as useful for getting through life’s difficulties and for understanding triggers of strong emotional reactions:
- Recognition: The willingness to see what is happening allows us to step out of denial.
- Acceptance allows us to “… relax and open to the facts before us. … With acceptance and respect, problems that seem intractable become workable.”
- Investigation: “Whenever we are stuck, it is because we have not looked deeply enough into the nature of the experience. As we undertake investigation, we focus on the Four Foundations of Mindfulness (body, feelings, mind, and dharma).”
- Non-identification “… means that we stop taking the experience as ‘me’ or ‘mine’. … ‘Is this really who I am?’ … We see the tentativeness of this identity. Then we are free to let go and rest in awareness itself.”
From RAIN’s appearance on one of the blogs in Psych Central (”the Internet’s largest and oldest independent mental health and psychology network”), it seems that this useful framework is at least being introduced to a wider range of mental health practitioners. Here are some notable posts:
