Radical Compassion by Tara Brach is her latest book; I’ve previously reviewed Radical Acceptance. This book focuses on RAIN, which can give you the gift of “living from your full potential.”
I did a post not long ago about RAIN, which involves Recognizing, Allowing, Investigating, and Nurturing. Brach explains that basic mindfulness meditation involves the recognize and allow elements. RAIN adds investigating, which is about noticing sensations in the body and linking that to what’s going on. Nurture is her own adaptation of the original RAIN, which involved non-identification. Nurture is where compassion comes into play, either through self-compassion or drawing on outside sources to “nourish our hearts.”
Brach writes about the trance of unworthiness, and she explains that when we’re in it, what we feel is “real but not true.” That’s a good way of putting it. She adds that presence is the way to get out of trance.
To move beyond the suffering of resisting fear, the book offers a meditation that involves handing fear over to the universe or a higher power. RAIN was also suggested as a strategy for dealing with FOMO (fear of missing out).
There was a chapter on forgiveness, and Brach explains that “Both giving and receiving forgiveness are pure expressions of radical compassion.” Other topics covered included installing positive states, increasing inner safety, and mirroring the good in others.
Each chapter concludes with a Q&A addressing the material covered in the chapter. Buddhism is present as an underlying theme throughout, but there’s no expectation that the reader is going in familiar with Buddhist concepts. A lot of the examples given were based on her meditation students, but I didn’t find these resonated with me. Perhaps that’s because I don’t meditate, but I would have liked to see some examples of how someone who’s a non-meditator could approach RAIN.
Overall, I found it a bit too meditation-y for my liking, although that’s pretty ridiculous to say given that it’s a book that’s centred around the RAIN meditation. By the end of the book, I didn’t feel any more connected to RAIN than I did at the beginning. In fact, may even feel less connected. I’m also not sure that radical compassion is even the right name for this.
Despite that, I don’t think this is a bad book, and it will probably be really helpful for some people if they feel inclined to pull up a cushion. I’m just not one of them.
Radical Compassion is available on Amazon (affiliate link).
You can find my other reviews on the MH@H book review index or on Goodreads.