Rain of emotions - regain emotional balance

Are there days when you feel like you can't control your emotions? Maybe you sometimes go through emotional rollercoasters and go from laughing to crying, from relative calm to outbursts of anger? Or do you also have periods when you don't feel like doing anything and feel a lot of sadness or anxiety, cry or worry for "no reason"?

Emotional instability can be related to excessive stress, fatigue or the menstrual cycle. A lot of negative emotions can also appear in sudden difficult situations, such as the coronavirus pandemic. The time of the epidemic is, first of all, a threat to our health and life and sense of security, including financial security. In addition, we are bothered by isolation or changes in daily routine, we have a great sense of uncertainty. This can give rise to a mixture of fear, frustration and anger.

If you feel like you can't handle your emotions and it's hard for you, I suggest you try the RAIN exercise. This acronym comes from the English words: recognize, accept, investigate, and non-identify. It was created by Vipassana meditation teacher Michele McDonald.

RAIN is a very effective way to help deal with difficult emotions. It can be useful if you have PMS and associated mood swings or increased irritability. It helps to deal with anxiety and worry. It consists of 4 steps. It is best to sit or lie comfortably for a few minutes and go through these steps one by one.

R – recognize

This step is to help answer the questions: "What is happening to me? What am I experiencing?" Notice and name your current experience, emotions, and body sensations. For example, "I am afraid and feel my stomach tightening, a lump growing in my throat, a bad taste appearing," "I feel angry and my jaw is clenching, my heart is beating faster, and my breathing is becoming shallow."

A – acceptance (accept)

Try to approach your experience with openness and acceptance. You can allow yourself to experience the feeling or emotion that comes up. Be in touch with what you feel without trying to get rid of it or run away from unpleasant experiences. Usually, we don't like negative emotions and we try to "get rid of" them, e.g. we distract ourselves from them, we pretend to ourselves that everything is OK. In this step of acceptance, you confront them or rather say, "Hello, I see you!"

I – Investigate

Observe the sensations in your body and the feelings and thoughts that accompany them. Be interested in your entire experience. Can you connect the emotion you are feeling with a sensation in your body? Then, see what thoughts come to mind in relation to that emotion. Do these or similar thoughts often accompany the emotion or state you are experiencing? Or perhaps you blame yourself for how you are feeling? You could ask yourself, “What do I need right now? How can I help myself? Maybe by bringing more care and kindness to this experience?”

N – non-identify

Don't identify with what you are going through, be an observer of your emotional state, your difficulty. Notice your thoughts, emotions, body sensations. There is a difference between saying: "I feel angry" and "I am a bad person". Anger is not something that is a permanent element of life. It is a mechanism for protecting your values, boundaries, needs. Sometimes it is activated in us when something does not go our way or someone criticizes us.

In this step, we try to notice that we feel emotions, but they do not have to control us. They can be a state that we are aware of and we can deal with them, understand them. A large part of emotions happens to us automatically and our influence on their emergence is limited. But observation, acceptance and not identifying with them, make us have a choice of what to do with the feelings that affect us: stay with them if we need them at the moment, or let them go if they do not serve us.

Emotions are important signposts, it is worth listening to them. Acceptance is the basis of working with emotions. And naming emotions and noticing them in the body allows you to control them. Then you will not lose control over them (and yourself). You can also draw a lot of strength and knowledge from emotions, e.g. about your needs. So it is worth listening to yourself and approaching emotions with mindfulness. And the next time you are overcome by an emotional storm, remember the power of RAIN and make sure that instead of a storm, you will only have a spring, emotional d(r)rain with you.

You can read more about the author and mindfulness on the website: www.ukokojenie.com 🙂