Acceptance and opening

• Recognise and accept your suffering.
  • Take care of it. Be absorbed into it.
• Rest in the wider space of awareness.
  • Notice that there’s room for joy too.
• Meet life as it is, not as you want it to be, as it “should” be.
  • Don’t only focus on what’s wrong, what’s missing.

Running away

• If you try to avoid something, it’s still affecting you.
• We run away from suffering, we’re nudged into doing by grasping and resisting.

Take care of your suffering

• When we learn to acknowledge, embrace, and understand of our suffering, we suffer much less.
• Recognise the suffering, then take care of it, embrace it, cradle it with tenderness.
• When a painful emotion comes up, stop whatever you’re doing and take care of it.
• Meet your edge and soften. Invite yourself, don’t demand.

Meet life as it is, not as you want it to be

• We meet the conditions of our work, our relationships, our politics, and our finances not as they are but wrapped up with glitzy ideas about the way they should be.
• We risk missing the precious unfolding of life as it is right now in the pursuit of an imagined future outcome or destination.
• Question our beliefs about what we think our life should be and to turn our effort toward full presence of how it is.
• Our idea of happiness can be the main obstacle keeping us from happiness.
• Let go of the story.
• Slowly, painfully, reconcile to life.
• Recognise suffering, without trying to change it, or add anything.

Let go

• Not let go of reality. Let go our of wrong ideas and perceptions about reality.
• Come home to the present moment. Right Now I’m Aware Of.
• Break the mind-body-mind negative loop.
• The intensity of the pain is equal to the intensity of the grasping.
• Let go. Don’t push, don’t pull. Make space.
• Not a heroic request, but a silent attunement.

Not-two

• Suffering and happiness are not separate. Where there is no suffering, there can be no happiness, and vice versa.
• If you can recognise and accept your pain without running away from it, you will discover that joy can be there at the same time.
• We focus on what’s wrong, what’s missing.

Both

• Notice that your heart is big enough to include things that get you down and what inspires you, lifts you up, or gives you hope.
• If you can recognise and accept your pain without running away from it, you will discover that joy can be there at the same time.

Acceptance and absorption

• Being well integrated with any matter or thing, we will naturally come to be liberated from our attachment to them.
• The way to be liberated from suffering is to be quickly absorbed into it.
• Don’t ignore your suffering. Just allow the positive seeds already there to get attention and nourishment.
• Sit still and feel the discomfort.

Slow your tempo

• When struggling with the Allow of RAIN, it can be a sign to slow down.
• Rest in the wider space of awareness.

Added 2024-03-09.