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More
from and about
Rachel Naomi Remen
(biographical info at bottom of page) |
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To
recognize your capacity to affect life is to know yourself
most intimately and deeply, to recognize your real value and
power, independent of any role that you may have been given
to play or expertise you may have acquired. |
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The real epidemic in
our culture is not just physical
heart disease;
it's what I call emotional and spiritual
heart disease: the sense of loneliness, isolation, and
alienation that is
so prevalent in our culture because
of the breakdown of the
social networks that used to
give us a sense of connection and
community.
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We
are all more than we know. Wholeness is never lost, it is only
forgotten. Integrity rarely means that we need to add something to ourselves; it is
more
an undoing
than a doing, a freeing ourselves from beliefs we have about who
we are
and ways
we have been persuaded to "fix" ourselves to know who we
genuinely are. Even after many years of seeing, thinking, and living one way,
we are
able to reach
past all that to claim our integrity and live in a way we
may never have
expected to live.
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Most of us
have been given many more blessings than we have received. We do not take time to be blessed or make the space for it. We may
have filled
our lives so full of other things that we have no room to receive
our
blessings. One of my patients once told me that she has an image of
us all being
circled
by our blessings, sometimes for years, like airplanes in a
holding
pattern at an airport,
stacked up with no place to land. Waiting
for a moment of our
time, our attention.
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A
woman once told me that she did not feel the need to reach out to those
around her
because she prayed every day. Surely, this was enough. But a
prayer is about
our relationship to God; a blessing is about our relationship to the
spark of God in one another. God may not need our attention as badly as the person next to us on the
bus or behind us in line in the supermarket. Everyone in the world matters, and so
do their blessings. When we bless others, we offer them refuge from an indifferent world.
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We have not only lost one another,
we have become isolated from the past as well. |
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As I age I am grateful to find that a silence has
begun to gather in me,
coexisting with my tempers and my fears, unchanged by my joys
or my pain. Sanctuary. Connected to the Silence
everywhere. |
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Life
offers its wisdom generously. Everything teaches. Not
everyone learns.
Life asks of us the same thing we have been asked in every
class: "Stay
awake." "Pay attention." But paying
attention is no simple matter. It requires
us not to be distracted by expectations, past experiences, labels, and
masks.
It asks that we not jump to early conclusions and that we remain open
to surprise.
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Few
of us are truly free. Money, fame, power, sexuality, admiration,
youth; whatever
we are attached to will enslave us, and often we serve these masters
unaware.
Many of the things that enslave us will limit our ability to live fully
and deeply. They will cause us
to suffer needlessly. The promised land may be many things to many
people. For some
it is perfect health and for others freedom from hunger or fear, or
discrimination,
or injustice. But perhaps on the deepest level the promised land
is the same for us all,
the capacity to know and live by the innate goodness in us,
to serve and belong to one another and to life. |
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I have come to
suspect that life itself may be a spiritual practice. The
process
of daily living seems able to refine the quality of our humanity over
time. There are
many people whose awakening to larger realities comes through
the
experiences of
ordinary life, through parenting, through work, through
friendship,
through illness,
or just in some elevator somewhere.
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We have not been raised to cultivate a sense of
Mystery. We may even see the unknown
as an insult to our competence, a personal failing. Seen this way,
the unknown becomes
a challenge to action. But Mystery does not require action;
Mystery requires our attention.
Mystery requires that we listen and become open. When we meet with
the unknown
in this way, we can be touched by a wisdom that can transform our lives. |
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| Rachel
Naomi Remen is one of the earliest pioneers in the mind/body
holistic health movement and the first to recognize the role of
the spirit in health and the recovery from illness. She is
Co-Founder and Medical Director of the Commonweal Cancer Help
Program featured in the Bill Moyers PBS series, Healing and the
Mind and has cared for people with cancer and their families
for almost 30 years.
She is also a nationally recognized
medical reformer and educator who sees the practice of medicine as
a spiritual path. In recognition of her work she has received
several honorary degrees and has been invited to teach in medical
schools and hospitals throughout the country. Her groundbreaking
holistic curricula enable physicians at all levels of training to
remember their calling and strengthen their commitment to serve
life.
Dr. Remen is Clinical Professor of Family
and Community Medicine at the UCSF School of Medicine and Director
of the innovative UCSF course The Healer's Art, which was
recently featured in US News & World Report. She is
Founder and Director of the Institute for the Study of Health and
Illness, a ten-year-old professional development program for
graduate physicians.
She is the author of the New York
Times bestseller Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal,
Riverhead Books, 1996. Her newest book, My Grandfather's
Blessings: Stories of Strength, Refuge and Belonging,
Riverhead Books, 2000, is a national bestseller. As a master
story-teller and public speaker, she has spoken to thousands of
people throughout the country, reminding them of the power of
their humanity and the ability to use their lives to make a
difference. Dr. Remen has a 48-year personal history of Crohn's
disease and her work is a unique blend of the viewpoint of
physician and patient.
She is a master storyteller and a great
observer of life. The wisdom in her books comes from many places,
a loving old grandfather and his books of Jewish mysticism, from
sick people and dying people and the doctors and nurses who serve
them, from children and animals and the people who sit next to you
on airplanes or stand behind you in the grocery store. It is the
same wisdom you encounter in your own life every day. |
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