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Rachel Naomi Remen Biography

Rachel Naomi Remen (born February 8, 1938, New York, New York) is an author about and teacher of alternative medicine in the form of integrative medicine. She is a professor at the Osher Center of Integrative Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Together with Michael Lerner, she is a founder of the Cancer Help Program at Commonweal Institute, better known as Commonweal.[citation needed] She is the founder of the Institute for the Study of Health & Illness. She has been featured on the PBS television series, Thinking Allowed.

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Rachel Naomi Remen Quotes

Our limitations serve, our wounds serve, even our darkness can serve.

Darkness, Limitations, Night, Serve, Sunset

Our purpose in life is to grow in wisdom and in love.

Grow, Grows, Life, Life Is, Purpose

Befriending the life in others is sometimes a complex matter. There are times when we offer our strength and protection, but these are usually only temporary measures. The greatest blessing we offer others may be the belief we have in their struggle for freedom, the courage to support and accompany them as they determine for themselves the strength that will become their refuge and the foundation for their lives. I think it is especially important to believe in someone at a time when they cannot yet believe in themselves. Then your belief will become their lifeline.

Befriending, Believe, Friendship, Strength, Struggle, Support

A human life has seasons much as the earth has seasons, each time with its own particular beauty and power. And gift. By focusing on springtime and summer, we have turned the natural process of life into a process of loss rather than a process of celebration and appreciation. Life is neither linear nor stagnant. It is movement from mystery to mystery. Just as a year includes autumn and winter, life includes death, not as an opposite but as an integral part of the way life is made.

Appreciation, Death, Mystery, Process, Stagnant, Summer

In the silence of listening, you can know yourself in everyone, the unseen singing softly to itself and to you.

Listening, Silence, Singing, Softly

To seek approval is to have no resting place, no sanctuary. Like all judgement, approval encourages a constant striving. It makes us uncertain of who we are and of our true value. Approval cannot be trusted. It can be withdrawn at any time no matter what our track record has been. It is as nourishing of real growth as cotton candy. Yet many of us spend our lives pursuing it.

Constant, Growth, Judgement, Real, Track, Value

The sacred lives beyond labels and judgment, in the wood-of-no-names.

Judgment, Labels, Lives, Names, Woods

Grieving allows us to heal, to remember with love rather than pain. It is a sorting process. One by one you let go of the things that are gone and you mourn for them. One by one you take hold of the things that have become a part of who you are and build again.

Gone, Grief, Letting Go, Pain, Remember

I suspect that the most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention And especially if it's given from the heart. When people are talking, there's no need to do anything but receive them. Just take them in. Listen to what they're saying. Care about it. Most times caring about it is even more important than understanding it. Most of us don't value ourselves or our love enough to know this.

Caring, Communication, Heart, Powerful, Take, Talking

Mystery has great power. In the many years I have worked with people with cancer, I have seen Mystery comfort people when nothing else can comfort them and offer hope when nothing else offers hope. I have seen Mystery heal fear that is otherwise unhealable. For years I have watched people in their confrontation with the unknown recover awe, wonder, joy, and aliveness. They have remembered that life is holy, and they have reminded me as well. In losing our sense of Mystery, we have become a nation of burned-out people. People who wonder do not burn out.

Cancer, People, Seen, Unhealable, Watched, Years

How strange to think that great pain may be impermanent. Something in us all seems to want to carve it in granite, as if only this would do full honor to its terrible significance. But even pain is blessed with impermanence. . . p 259

Blessed, Full, Impermanence, Pain, Strange, Thinking

Of course love is never earned. It is a grace we give one another. Anything we need to earn is only approval.

Approval, Earned, Giving, Grace, Love

Goose bumps happen when your soul is close to you, breathing lightly on the back of your neck, and wakes you up.

Breathing, Bumps, Close, Neck, Soul

The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention…. A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words.

Inspirational, Love, Person, Powerful, Thing, Way

Life is known only by those who have found a way to be comfortable with change and the unknown. Given the nature of life, there may be no security, but only adventure.

Adventure, Comfortable, Found, Life, May

I have even learned to respond to someone crying by just listening. In the old days I used to reach for the tissues, until I realized that passing a person a tissue may be just another way to shut them down, to take them out of their experience of sadness and grief. Now I just listen. When they have cried all they need to cry, they find me there with them.

Grief, Listening, Old, Sadness, Take, Used

When we know ourselves to be connected to all others, acting compassionately is simply the natural thing to do.

Bad Ass, Compassion, Kindness, Know, Natural, Simply

Being alive is being aware, being able to be touched and moved and changed, being able to respond rather than to react, being able to see and hear.

Able, Alive, Changed, Inspirational, Respond, Touched

We are all healers of each other. Look at David Spiegel's fascinating study of putting people together in a support group and seeking that some people in it live twice as long as other people who are not in a support group. I asked David what went on in those groups and he said that people just cared about each other. Nothing big, no deep psychological stuff-people just cared about each other. The reality is that healing happens between people.

Big, Healing, Long, People, Reality, Seeking

When we listen, we offer with our attention an opportunity for wholeness.

Attention, Offer, Offers, Opportunity, Wholeness

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