Rachel Naomi Remen Quotes

My father was the son of immigrants. He had worked since childhood and held two jobs most of his adult life. In the evenings, he would often fall asleep in his chair, his feet in a basin of warm water, too exhausted to talk. Always he had worked for other people, on their terms, for their goals...All throughout my childhood, there was a game my father and I would play. He would talk about his house, the house he would someday own...I was almost twenty when he and Mom bought a little place on Long Island and he retired. For a while, his dream seemed complete.

'Are you enjoying yourselves?' I asked [when I'd visit]. 'Well,' Mom said, 'your father is afraid that someone will break in and take away everything we've worked for. He's still working because he wants to put in an alarm system.' My heart sank. I asked how much it would cost. My mother evaded me and said they would have it in just a little while. Months later, my father continued to look weary. Concerned, I asked when they would be taking their vacation. My father shook his head. 'Not this year — we can't leave the house empty.' I suggested a house sitter. My father was horrified. 'Oh no,' he told me. 'You know how people are. Even your friends never take care of your things the way they would take care of their own.' They never took another vacation.

In the end, my parents rarely left the house together, not even to go to the movies. There could be a fire or some other sort of vague and unnamed disaster. And my father worked odd jobs until he died. The house turned out to have far greater control over him than any of his former employers ever had.

If we fear loss enough, in the end the things we possess will come to possess us.

Often times of crisis are times of discovery, periods when we cannot maintain our old ways of doing things and enter into a steep learning curve. Sometimes it takes a crisis to initiate growth.

Most of us lead far more meaningful lives than we know. Often finding meaning is not about doing things differently; it is about seeing familiar things in new ways.

We burn out not because we don't care but because we don't grieve. We burn out because we have allowed our hearts to become so filled with loss that we have no room left to care.

Those who don't love themselves as they are rarely love life as it is either. Most people have come to prefer certain of life's experiences and deny and reject others, unaware of the value of the hidden things that may come wrapped in plain or even ugly paper. In avoiding all pain and seeking comfort at all cost, we may be left without intimacy or compassion; in rejecting change and risk, we often cheat ourselves of the quest; in denying our suffering, we may never know our strength or our greatness.

It is natural, even instinctive to prefer comfort to pain, the familiar to the unknown. But sometimes our instincts are not wise. Life usually offers us far more than our biases and preferences will allow us to have. Beyond comfort lie grace, mystery, and adventure. We may need to let go of our beliefs and ideas about life in order to have life.

Perhaps we are no longer a kind people. More and more, we seem to have become numb to the suffering of others and ashamed of our own suffering. Yet suffering is one of the universal conditions of being alive. We all suffer. We have become terribly vulnerable, not because we suffer but because we have separated ourselves from each other.

It is actually difficult to edit life. Especially in regard to feelings. Not being open to anger or sadness usually means being unable to be open to love and joy. The emotions seem to operate with an all-or-nothing switch.

Healing may not be so much about getting better, as about letting go of everything that isn’t you - all of the expectations, all of the beliefs - and becoming who you are. (in Bill Moyers' Healing and the Mind)

When we approve of people, we it in judgment of them as surely as when we criticize them. Positive judgment hurts less acutely than criticism, but it is judgment all the same and we are harmed by it in far more subtle ways. To seek approval is to have no resting place, no sanctuary. Like all judgment, approval encourages a constant striving. It makes us uncertain of who we are and of our true value. This is as true of the approval we give ourselves as it is of the approval we offer others. Approval can't 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.

with me to the children’s ward to examine Immy. She greeted us with her wonderful take-no-prisoners smile. She was holding a new teddy bear. Someone had put a white bandage across its chest. I examined Immy carefully. Her heart sounds bore no resemblance whatever to the organized sounds of a normal heart. Once again, I marveled at her endurance. As I helped her to dress, I noticed a Saint Christopher medal pinned to her tiny pink undershirt. “What is this?” I asked her parents. Hesitantly her mother told me that a family member had made a special trip to Rome to have the medal blessed and then dipped into the healing waters at Lourdes. “We feel that it will protect her,” she said simply. Her husband nodded. I was touched. Immy spent the next day or two undergoing tests, and I saw her several more times.

Women have always been present at these times, at death and birth and in many of the other transitions in life. Women have gathered at the transitions, as comforters and companions, as witnesses, to mark the importance of the moment.

While attachment has its source in the personality, in what the Buddhists refer to as the 'desire nature,' commitment comes from the soul. In relationship to life, just as in human relationships, attachment closes down options, commitment opens them up. Modern life has made us people of attachment rather than people of commitment. Indeed, many people have found that it is difficult to tell the difference between attachment and commitment in their own lives. Yet attachment leads farther and farther into entrapment. Commitment, though it may sometimes feel constricting, will ultimately lead to greater degrees of freedom. Both involve in the moment an experience of holding, sometimes against the flow of events or against temptation. One can distinguish between the two in most situations by noticing over time whether one has moved through this activity or this relationship closer to freedom or closer to bondage. Attachment is a reflex, an automatic response which often may not reflect our deepest good. Commitment is a conscious choice, to align ourselves with our most genuine values and our sense of purpose.

The silence in the giant redwood forest near my house draws me...At eight in the morning, the great trees stand rooted in a silence so absolute that one's inmost self comes to rest. An aged silence. Some mornings I sleep through two alarms and awaken only after the first buses have arrived. I go anyway. There are hundreds of people in the woods before me. People speaking French, German, Spanish; people marveling to each other and calling to their children in Japanese, Swedish, Russian, and some languages I do not know. And children shrieking in the universal language of childhood. But the silence is always there, unchanged. It is as impervious to these passing sounds as the trees themselves.

When we approve of people, we sit in judgment of them as surely as when we criticize them. ...To seek approval is to have no resting place, no sanctuary. Like all judgment, approval encourages a constant striving. It makes us uncertain of who we are and of our true value. This is as true of the approval we give ourselves as it is of the approval we offer others. Approval can't 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.

Much of life can never be explained but only witnessed.