Hello and welcome to The Upgrade, the podcast from the team at LifeHacker, where we help you improve your life one week at a time.

I'm Melissa Kirsch, editor-in-chief of LifeHacker.

And I'm Alice Bradley, Lifehacker's deputy editor. And today we're talking about how to be kinder to

ourselves. More specifically, we're learning how to love ourselves. That's right, Alice.

Yes. Our guest today is Tara Brock, a psychotherapist, meditation teacher, and founder of the Insight Meditation

Center of Washington, D.C.

I found more than any kind of suffering, at least especially in Western society, there's this

core sense of, I'm flawed, I'm not okay, I'm not enough.

Tara is one of the leading teachers of Buddhist meditation and philosophy in the Western

world and also leads the Awareness Training Institute with Jack Cornfield.

Her podcast reaches 1.5 million people every month, and her latest book is called

Radical Compassion, Learning to Love Yourself and Your World

with the Practice of Rain. Tara spoke with us from her home in Great Falls, Virginia, about

dealing with uncomfortable emotions, how to implement her rain strategy in your daily life, and how that

can lead to true self-compassion.

So welcome to The Upgrade. Thank you so much for being here. We're big fans of your work already. I personally, your talks have gotten me through many difficult times in my life and I have

passed them along to everybody close to me. So it's a

delight to be able to talk to you. Oh, thank you. And thank you for saying that. It just gives me a

sense of the connection in the field. So that's lovely. Thank you. So why do you think it is that

we have so much trouble with loving ourselves? That's the question so many people ask,

and it seems like if we think of it in a real existential way, that all of life, when it takes form,

has a sense of separation, that we kind of know what this is inside, this is me, and outside the world is, you know,

...