Sasu reviewed Radical Compassion by Tara Brach
A Versatile & Powerful Practice
4 stars
When I started listening to the book, I thought that it would probably be a lot of elaboration around one technique based on an acronym to make the acronym easier to remember and to make clear which situations might call for application of that technique. Those elements were indeed present in the book, but Tara Brach's version of RAIN surprised me in its versatility and its connections to other techniques and systems which I did not expect. For anyone who needs a simple technique which can be used to relieve suffering in a wide variety of situations, I would heartily recommend this book.
That said, there are a few weak points which bothered be and which I think need to be considered in order to get the most out of Tara Brach's teachings.
First, I wish that she had gone into more detail about the development of RAIN. …
When I started listening to the book, I thought that it would probably be a lot of elaboration around one technique based on an acronym to make the acronym easier to remember and to make clear which situations might call for application of that technique. Those elements were indeed present in the book, but Tara Brach's version of RAIN surprised me in its versatility and its connections to other techniques and systems which I did not expect. For anyone who needs a simple technique which can be used to relieve suffering in a wide variety of situations, I would heartily recommend this book.
That said, there are a few weak points which bothered be and which I think need to be considered in order to get the most out of Tara Brach's teachings.
First, I wish that she had gone into more detail about the development of RAIN. While I appreciate her inclusion of a brief appendix explaining something about the origins and development of RAIN, especially the transition of the N from "Non-Identification" to "Nurture", I would have appreciated more details about how the original version developed and also more detail about why she adapted it in the way she did.
The other part that I thought was missing was referring to sources of ideas more specifically. The book was written more like a talk to listen to than a book to refer to, and it was indeed good to listen to, especially for the benefit of having the guided meditations & reflections integrated. However, most of the references to where ideas came from were vague or nonexistent so that the burden is on the curious reader to figure it out. For example, it was at least mentioned that certain ideas originated in Buddhist thought, psychology, or neuroscience, but I would have liked a clearer pointer, or at least some footnotes. I don't have the print version of the book, so maybe there is something like a bibliography or recommended reading there and this weakness is specific to the audio version, but when I want to know more or look at sources, I'd prefer not to have to dig.