Radical Compassion: Learning to Love Yourself and Your World with the Practice of RAIN

When we encounter the difficult ones like hurt or fear and acknowledge “this belongs,” there’s a natural sense of enlarging and more ease with what is moving through us.

The fear we are unwilling to feel controls and binds our life.

When we’re stuck and reactive, anxiety feels totally personal—a negative commentary about ourselves.

We may still feel fear, but we are above the line, reconnected to a larger space of presence and self-compassion.

And when I get stuck in painful emotions, it brings me to a repeating realization, an insight that has profoundly changed my life: I have to love myself into healing.

Sometimes our unwillingness to experience our feelings shows up as depression.

With practice, we discover that when our resistance is gone, the demons are gone.

Especially when fear is intense, we’re afraid we’ll drown in it, be annihilated.

When we resist fear, we are living partially below the line—identified with the fear, and cut off from our full lucidity and presence.