RAIN Meditation for Anger

Whose practice is RAIN?

The acronym is Michele McDonald’s, a teacher of insight meditation who co-founded Vipassana Hawai’i, and her centre dates it to “the early 2000s”. Her own letters are Recognition, Acceptance, Interest and Non-identification, and her centre stresses that acceptance “does not mean that you agree with or support it”. Tara Brach, who popularised RAIN, teaches it as Recognize, Allow, Investigate and Nurture. How the N has changed, and her own instructions, are on our page on Tara Brach. The wording in this tool is ours.

How close is RAIN to the early teachings on anger?

RAIN is a modern teaching device from Buddhist insight meditation, not a practice the Buddha taught by that name, and the early discourses meet it only in part. The Recognise step is close to the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, where the meditator, “When they have ill will in them, they understand: ‘I have ill will in me’” (MN 10). The Investigate step is close to SN 46.51, which names what fuels ill will: the feature of aversion, given frequent irrational attention.

Two steps are new. The discourses mostly aim to put anger down, not to allow it: MN 20 teaches replacing an unskillful thought with a skillful one, seeing its drawbacks, ignoring it, stilling it and, as a last resort, suppressing it by force. RAIN’s allowing is a way of meeting the feeling before letting it go, and the tool is careful that the action waits. And Brach’s Nurture, kindness turned towards your own hurt, is the step furthest from the discourses on anger, which point love at the other person, as in the five ways of AN 5.161 the tool closes with; the tradition does value kindness towards oneself (see Buddhism and self-love). For the teaching on anger itself, see Buddhism and anger; for loving-kindness, the loving-kindness meditation guide.

Does it work?

No study has tested RAIN for anger, and we found none of Brach’s Nurture version on its own. The closest evidence is a 2024 proof-of-concept study in mHealth in which 49 adults who ate emotionally used RAIN as a step-by-step sequence on their phones for three weeks, and the authors report improvements. It had no control group, which, the authors note, means the improvements cannot be conclusively attributed to RAIN, and it was about eating, not anger. A 2011 smoking trial used a different RAIN (its N was “Note”) as one part of a larger programme. So treat RAIN as a contemplative practice, offered for reflection, not a tested treatment for anger.

When RAIN is not the right tool

Brach suggests beginning with “not something traumatizing, just a stuck place.” If you are afraid you might hurt someone, the first step is distance: a US military health fact sheet on anger time-outs says to “physically leave the situation”, and while away, “Do not use alcohol or drugs” and “Do not drive.” The NHS says to call 999 if “you do not feel you can keep yourself or someone else safe”, and to see a GP if you are acting in an abusive or violent way. If someone is hurting you, your anger may be telling you something true, and the help lines in the tool come before any practice. Whether anger is ever justified is a question our anger guide takes seriously.

Related: Buddha quotes on anger, the Second Arrow reflection, the metta generator and the breathing pacer. See all our free tools.