How I do this: when my feelings are feeling Too Big, or when I notice that I’m feeling very stuck and unable to get anything done, I often remember RAIN, and turn to a blank page.

First, I take an inventory of what I’m feeling: as emotions rise up, I write them down, along with any reasons or other explanation that I want to get out of my head and onto the page. This is how I often journal, but I try to name the emotions explicitly: I’m feeling cranky, insecure, embarassed, nervous, tired - whatever. This is the R - Recognize what is happening - and a little bit of the I - Investigate inner experience.

When I start to lose steam on describing my current state, I start a new paragraph. For each emotion I identified prior, I write a sentence about how it is okay to be feeling that emotion. I also often write sentences about how the reasons I’m feeling the emotions are okay, or the messy situations that are precipitating all the angst are okay. It is by constructing these sentences that they become true to me: it is by telling myself that I am A - Allowing life to be just as it is - that I do in fact allow life to be just as it is. I resist my current state less. Usually by this point I’ve done plenty of the I - Investigate inner experience - and don’t feel called to do more, but sometimes it helps to dig in to what’s going on and what I might want to do about it. Sometimes in the process of allowing the first batch of feelings, a whole other batch of feelings rises, and I repeat the recognize/allow cycle until it feels like I’ve gotten everything out.

The final step, N - Non-identification - is my favorite. It is what I never knew I needed but always do seem to need; and it works much better after doing the recognizing and investigating and allowing. In a new paragraph, I write sentences to remind myself that I am not identical with my emotions, that I am the awareness underneath them experiencing them. Once again, through the writing of these sentences, I come to see them as true.

This is the resource the therapist who introduced me to RAIN used.

Anki is a spaced repetition flashcard app. Typically used for memorization, spaced repetition is a technique wherein prompts that you have difficulty with are shown more frequently, and prompts that you find easier are shown less frequently. One way to sell this, is that it’s a technique that lets you memorize more stuff, faster. Medical students, who have such large volumes of information to memorize, often use it in much the same way I used flashcards in high school: make a deck with information you need to know for a test, study until the time of the test, and then never look at those flashcards again.

But spaced repetition opens up a whole further expanse of possibilities, and often the implementation looks very, very different from my school self’s time-bound, single-purpose flashcard decks. People often have one deck of spaced repetition flashcards, being used to remember things indefinitely. A prompt might get shown daily, and then weekly, and then monthly - and then perhaps wouldn’t appear for another year and a half. But it would resurface again, a year and a half later, in that same centralized deck. This way of conducting spaced repetition starts to feel like the antithesis of preparing for a test. You create a space, deliberately, with all sorts of things you want to keep in mind, and then you choose to keep them in mind. It’s a way of being connected with yourself.

I am indebted to Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielson for this humanistic, autonomy-expanding view of spaced repetition. They write about these systems with such heart, emphasizing the importance of only using SRS for things you care about, and posing emotional connectedness as essential. Their descriptions of their SRS practices have also expanded my understanding of the what spaced repetition can be used for; in particular, I’ve appreciated the conception of SRS as a way of directing attention, or maintaining salience, rather than facilitating memorization.

I’ve had a low-key spaced repetition practice now for a few years. Mostly I write prompts for turns in books or articles that surprised me, though I also have a number of catechistic prompts adapted from old EnneaThoughts, as well as some straight factual questions about orders of magnitude and units of measurement. I cannot really say that spaced repetition has been at all useful in my life. There’s not much that I’m trying to memorize, and to date I have not been doing work where keeping old readings salient has been much help. But that’s okay.

When I have gaps of time, sometimes I don’t want to just sit quietly. Sometimes I don’t want to read something new. Almost always I don’t want to doomscroll. In these cases, having a backlog of Anki cards available on my phone can be a relief. It’s scaffolding for an activity that I feel actually pretty good about. I like reviewing my Anki deck! I go slow; I take as much time as I want, I look around, I think about what I am doing. It’s fodder for thought that I have put in place deliberately for myself.

The Anki app has transformed my attitude towards my phone: it is easier, now, to regard it as a valuable tool. Instead of draining life away, my phone feels like something that adds to my life. It is a striking shift.

FlipStudy’s interface is simple: it trying to simulate a stack of index cards, without adding additional functionality. The main screen is just blocks of color with the titles of my decks, and tapping into one gives a sequence of cards. There are no buttons. There is no guiding text. When going through cards, I see essentially nothing that I myself did not put in the app. Correspondingly, the interface for adding cards is clunky - lots of swiping up to see the menus that allow me to edit or reorder or change the color of cards - and as far as I can tell it all has to be done on mobile, with no shortcuts. But that’s fine; I rarely want to add or edit cards, now that I’ve done the basic setup. For me, FlipStudy can be just a simple, lovely home for poems and affirmations.

The only other downside of the app is that the app icon is busy-looking and says, like, E=mc^2. But this is easily remedied: I have a shortcut called “Calm Words” set up on my iPhone that just opens the app, and I put an icon for the shortcut (rather than for the app itself) on my home screen, so the whole experience now is very cozy.

Here’s how I was first introduced to the activity. Have a group sit or stand in a circle. Give each person a “Primary Emotions Card” which lists five primary emotions and a sentence parsing out that emotion - for example, SADNESS: I LOST it (There’s something I need to let go of.). The first person in the circle says what emotion (of the five listed) they are feeling ‘on top’ and use the given sentence to help parse out the feeling – e.g., if they identify sadness, then they give name to what they’ve lost or need to let go of. Then, with that top layer cleared, they say what emotion is under that, and parse it out the same way. They continue with further layers of emotions until they’re done, and the next person in the circle can begin.

When I first did this activity, I was terrified of it: it seemed an incredibly intimate activity to do with a group of people, mostly because there’s nowhere to hide - you have to say why you’re feeling what you’re feeling. But it has grown on me. For one, it is somewhat less invasive than it seems: every part of this activity is optional, and besides that, people are usually good at sketching an overview of the objects of their feelings without too much detail - it is part of what makes this activity quite nice. Second, I have used it only in contexts where it was used as a check-in before another intense conversation, often at interfaith dialogue retreats. In these contexts, it felt not at all like vulnerability bonding (which I am skeptical of) - if anything, the conversations that would follow had more of this forced bonding. Instead, this check-in made it very clear that we were all coming to the table in different circumstance, with different capacities, and it opened us to compassion and spaciousness. It was a privilege, as a group, to get to hold intentionally and gently the feelings of sadness or anger that people were feeling under the surface about unrelated events, that might not have been mentioned otherwise.

And then, the actual activity of naming emotions and locating objects was surprisingly helpful. There was a period where I often would look at this card on my own and talk myself through it. It doesn’t matter that I don’t really believe that these five emotions are particularly primary, or that I doubt that the given sentences really can or do parse the emotion. When I am angry, it actually is just helpful to recognize that I am angry, and to ask myself if there is a boundary I need to protect or restore. It usually gets me to the heart of what’s going on and how I can be kind to myself faster than almost anything else.

Are they a little loud? Sure, enough to be noticeable when walking indoors. Is it a little silly to wear plastic pants? I mean, yeah, water droplets literally roll off them. Are they fashionable? Not at all. But are they kind of fun to wear? Absolutely. I feel just a little fierce in my rain pants, I think. I used to be quite concerned about the aesthetics of the clothes I wore, and put good effort into the outfits I wore; I would not have wanted to be seen in rain pants. But there’s been a shift in me, these last years, towards appreciating some good functionality, towards being less afraid of not looking put together. I wear rain pants, and I am delighted because they open up a whole new realm of movement in the drizzly world; and that is enough to count, that is enough to make my silly plastic pants a joy.