Finding Shelter Amidst Rainstorms & Brainstorms

A storm’s a-brewin’. 

Imagine you can see it on the horizon.

Picture the clouds, dark and ominous, utterly distinct from the fluffy clouds in which you sometimes envision bunny rabbits and dragons—or even from the pervasive gray clouds of an overcast day. You might even glimpse bolts of lightning sporadically ripping through the density, back-lighting sections of the approaching tempest.  

So, what do you do?

With forewarning of the impending torrential rains, I’d be willing to bet that you’d take cover or maybe even get the heck out of Dodge. Regardless of how you’d choose to use the time between noticing the storm clouds and their eventual arrival, it’s pretty unlikely that you’d be completely unprepared when the deluge did show up. 

What if there were signs to foreshadow an emotional or mental onslaught as obvious as those of an approaching thunderstorm? Imagine if you could see a bout of anxiety, hear the crack of depression, or feel the changing winds of a manic episode before their debilitating effects had time to overshadow the rest of your thoughts? Mindfulness is a practice that creates a cushion of space and time around our thoughts, cultivating a pocket of possibilities of our own choosing, and affording us the opportunity to decide when to take action, how to ride out the storm, and, occasionally, to diffuse the turbulence altogether.

Meditation vs. Mindfulness

One of the many cultural shifts born of the challenges of 2020 has been the increased public conversation around mindfulness. Our collective need for self- and squad-care in the time of social distancing has seen the proliferation of online yoga studios and the creation of meditation communities with weekly virtual gatherings. 

(Yes: people are logging in to Zoom meetings to close their eyes in front of a camera.) 

From daytime news broadcasts to alliterative Instagram posts (#MindfulMondays #WellnessWednesdays), it’s easy to take for granted the idea that we are all talking about the same thing. 

But what exactly is “mindfulness”? How is it different from meditation?

The Spiritual vs. Secular Divide

In your mind’s eye, conjure an image of a person in meditation. Given my parenthetical aside about the Zoom meetings, my guess is that you pictured someone sitting tall, cross-legged on the floor or a cushion, with their eyes closed. You wouldn’t be wrong, but that’s only one way to meditate. In addition to lying down, there are also walking meditations, eating meditations, and even meditations to try while running.   

Most often associated with Buddhism, there are many schools of thought and approaches to meditation, using a variety of focal points. Dr. Robert Wright, professor of Buddhism & Modern Psychology at Princeton University, has described the focus on images such as mandalas, common among Tibetan Buddhist meditators, as most attractive to artists. He argues that the emphasis on words, such as mantras or specific phrases, in Zen meditation is ideal for poets, and that Vipassana meditation, commonly known as Insight meditation, which he defines as “observing the workings of your mind.,” is ideal for psychologists. The root of popular mindfulness practices, Vipassana uses the body itself as the focal point, such as the sensation of the breath moving in and out of the body, as a means of acquiring those pearls of wisdom. 

The advent of the smartphone revolutionized the ways people could access meditation teachings. Long gone are the days when one has to clear their schedule and book a flight to find the right teacher for them. (Although with the cozy digs at modern retreat centers you might want to!) Podcasts allow Buddhist teachers to offer dharma talks to practitioners around the world. (My favorite happens to be Gil Fronsdal for Audio Dharma.) Apps make it easy for people of any spiritual persuasion—and lack thereof—to learn a plethora of techniques. Headspace began with a 10-day, 10-minute guided program people could repeat at will. 1GiantMind builds on similar techniques while weaning practitioners off a guided model altogether, developing the skill of sitting in silence. Apps like Liberate are tailored specifically to co-creating safe space for BIPOC communities to learn these skills from teachers of color.

When meditation grew in popularity in North America and Europe, researchers began to take note. As they sought to dissect the practice to understand the impact it had on the mind, they began to pay particular attention to meditation’s ability to refine the focus. Psychologist Zindel Segal defined this as “purposely attending to the present moment without judgement”—but “mindfulness” is a little catchier.

Meditation & Mindfulness

Whether taking a spiritual or secular approach, meditators begin to notice a change in their thoughts off the cushion, and the further they get from the zafu, the more opportunities they have to practice mindfulness, or the awareness of a given moment, in their daily life. 

Biologist Jon Kabat-Zinn adapted the lessons he learned as a student of Buddhist meditation to codify a secular mindfulness course he called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). When MBSR was found to be especially advantageous for practitioners coping with chronic pain, it wasn’t long before psychologists began to wonder how to apply the practices to therapeutic settings. 

Building on the idea that the benefits of meditation could be had without the cushion, psychologist and Buddhist teacher Tara Brach developed the acronym to encourage her clients to “recognize what is going on; allow the experience to be there, just as it is; investigate with interest and care; and nourish with self-compassion.” This fortified her clients’ ability to make room for their feelings without being overwhelmed by them. 

As it turns out, Tara Brach proved that embracing the R.A.I.N. can actually help you battle the storm.

The Therapeutic Approach: From MBSR to MBCT

Dr. Segal and his colleagues combined Jon Kabat-Zinn’s 8-week MBSR course with cognitive behavioral therapeutic techniques in order to harness the benefits of mindfulness to help those working with depression and anxiety. Cognitive therapy has always been based on the twin premises that our thoughts impact our emotions and that once we identify our thoughts we can choose how we’ll respond to them. Mindfulness techniques provided a practice space where cognitive therapy practitioners could improve their ability to identify those thoughts. It’s a little like going to the gym to build up the muscles you’ll need to scale a wall, carry ten shopping bags in a single trip from the car, or whatever else life throws at excessively muscular people to justify all that bulk. Or, rather than mix metaphors, mindfulness practices give you the binoculars to see the storm clouds on the horizon, the time to batten down the hatches, and the shelter in which you can ride out the storm.


Not so long ago people were more skeptical than hopeful about the power of mindfulness, but now universities from coast to coast host centers for the study, practice, and professional training in mindfulness to secular practitioners. Whether you’re interested in deepening your own practice or teaching others these skills in a didactic or therapeutic setting, you can become certified in MBSR and MBCT while boasting credentials from such schools as UC San Diego and Brown University. However, since there is still no official governing body or licensing requirement for therapists to incorporate mindfulness techniques, many have begun to effectively weave these skills into a host of therapeutic approaches that allow them to uniquely combine their expertise as mental health professionals with the lessons they’ve learned as mindfulness practitioners themselves. 


“It becomes less about a treatment and more about a way of life and looking after themselves.” 

-Dr. Zindel Segal 


Further Reading + Resources

If you’re intrigued, here’s a 10-minute guided meditation you can download and try right now, led by yours truly. Additionally, check out the following people to listen to, places to visit and sit, and short articles worth a read:

First, a pair of podcasts:


Next, a trio of retreat centers:

And, finally, a bevy of brief blog posts:

Sel (Selena Brown, MFT-LP, she/her)