How to Process Feelings (and Why RAIN Still Works)
There’s a certain kind of tired that doesn’t come from lack of sleep. It’s the fatigue that builds up when you’ve been carrying feelings you never quite got to feel.
You keep moving, thinking, solving, but somewhere beneath the logic, there’s a quiet backlog. Emotions waiting in the wings, hoping to be noticed.
This is where the practice of RAIN comes in.
Developed and popularised by Tara Brach, an American psychologist and meditation teacher known for Radical Acceptance and Radical Compassion, RAIN is a simple but powerful framework for processing difficult emotions.
It’s not a spiritual shortcut or a mindfulness cliché. It’s a way of turning toward what’s happening inside, rather than away from it, a language the body understands.
The Origins of RAIN
RAIN is an acronym, but more importantly, it’s a map for navigating your internal landscape when things feel overwhelming.
It stands for:
Recognise, Allow, Investigate, and Nurture.
At first glance, those words sound soft. But what they represent is deep emotional courage: the willingness to pause and meet what’s real, even when every part of you wants to think your way out of it.
Over the years, I’ve found it helpful to pair each step with its opposite, the reflex we often fall into when we’re too tired, too defended, or too busy to feel.
So, let’s explore RAIN not as a rigid sequence, but as a living conversation between what your mind wants and what your body needs.
R – Recognise
To recognise is to notice what’s here.
It’s not about fixing or labelling, just orienting to your inner and outer world. What sensations can you feel in your body right now? Is there pressure in your chest, a tight jaw, a shallow breath?
Recognition is the moment awareness returns. It’s when you stop running, even for a second, and say: Something’s happening.
The opposite of recognition is rumination, thinking about your emotions instead of feeling them.
When we ruminate, we loop. We analyse, replay, and dissect, hoping logic will dissolve discomfort. It never does. Recognition asks for presence, not performance.
A – Allow
Allowing is the hardest part.
It’s the moment your logical mind starts shouting: Move on, distract yourself, fix it, do something.
But allowing asks you to stay.
To let the wave crest instead of trying to outrun it.
You’ll probably notice the body wanting to do the opposite, to avoid, to argue, to flee.
Avoidance is the flight response; arguing is the fight. Both are ways the nervous system protects you from pain.
But safety doesn’t come from avoiding emotion. It comes from learning you can survive it.
Allowing doesn’t mean you like what’s happening. It means you stop pretending it isn’t.
I – Investigate
Once you’ve recognised and allowed the feeling, you can start to investigate it — gently.
Investigation here doesn’t mean interrogation. It’s not “Why am I like this?” It’s “What does this feel like in my body?”
Is it heavy or light? Still or moving? Where does it live? Does it shift if you breathe into it?
This is the somatic part of the process, getting curious about the texture of emotion, rather than the story about it.
The opposite of investigation is ignorance, not in the moral sense, but in the literal one: to ignore. To numb out, to scroll, to work, to fill the silence.
But when you investigate with care, you invite the body to reveal its own wisdom. You begin to see that every emotion is movement, energy asking for release.
N – Nurture
And then, nurture.
This is where compassion meets the body. It’s how you close the loop.
Nurturing can take many forms, a hand over your heart, a deep exhale, a walk outside, a few tears, a stretch, a call to a friend.
It’s the act of meeting your own experience with kindness, rather than criticism.
Because if recognising brings awareness, and allowing brings safety, nurturing brings repair.
Neglect is the opposite here, the habit of pushing through, meeting everyone else’s needs before your own. It’s how burnout, anxiety, and disconnection quietly take root.
To nurture is to remember that your emotions aren’t problems to solve. They’re signals asking for care.
RAIN in Practice
When clients first try RAIN, they often say, “I don’t have time to feel everything.”
The truth is, you don’t need hours. You just need moments.
RAIN can happen in thirty seconds, on a commute, in a meeting, before bed.
- Recognise what’s present.
- Allow it to exist.
- Investigate how it feels.
- Nurture the part of you that’s struggling.
Over time, something shifts. Feelings that once felt threatening start to feel tolerable. You stop reacting and start responding.
You don’t become emotionless; you become fluent.
Coming Back to Compassion
The RAIN process isn’t a one-off technique. It’s a practice of re-humanising yourself in a world that constantly asks you to stay in your head.
When you bring curiosity to your pain instead of judgment, you’re telling your body: It’s safe to feel.
And safety is what allows emotion to move, and eventually, to release.
As Tara Brach often says, “The boundary to what we can accept is the boundary to our freedom.”
Learning to process feelings isn’t about becoming calm all the time. It’s about expanding your capacity to stay present, to recognise, allow, investigate, and nurture what’s real, moment by moment.
That’s how we make peace with our inner weather. Not by stopping the rain, but by learning how to stand in it.
