Lineage and training
Brach trained at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts — the centre founded by Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg and Jack Kornfield to bring Burmese and Thai forest Vipassanā into the West. She holds a PhD in clinical psychology and ran a psychotherapy practice in parallel with her dharma teaching for many years. The two streams are visible in her work: the cadence is recognisably IMS, but the language for emotional difficulty is therapeutically literate in a way that earlier teachers' wasn't.
RAIN
The acronym describes a sequence for meeting difficult feeling: recognise what is here, allow it to be as it is, investigate with kindness, nurture the part of the self that is hurting. Brach did not invent the steps — Michele McDonald used a similar framework earlier — but she is responsible for the version that has spread most widely. Its acceptance in clinical settings is partly because each step is both a meditation instruction and a recognisable therapeutic move.
In the index
The piece in the index is characteristic: a guided meditation embedded in a talk, with the dharma framing kept light enough that the listener can take the practice without taking on the cosmology.
— end of entry —