Rachel Naomi Remen Quotes

Most of the things that give life its depth, meaning, and value are impervious to science.

After all these years of listening it seems to me that the essential quality of the human soul is uniqueness. Each of us is one of a kind. None of us has existed in the history of the human race before.

The power of the expert is very great and the way in which an expert sees you may easily become the way in which you see yourself.

There are only two kinds of people in the world. Those who are alive and those who are afraid

If I am not for me, then who is for me?
If I am just for me, then who am I?
And if not now, then when?

Few perfectionists can tell the difference between love and approval. Perfectionism is so widespread in this culture that we actually have had to invent another word for love. 'Unconditional love,' we say. Yet, all love is unconditional. Anything else is just approval.

Suffering shapes the life force, sometimes into anger, sometimes into blame and self-pity. Eventually it may show us the wisdom of embracing and loving life.

All life has in it the dimension of the Unknown; it is a thing forever unfolding. It seems important to consider the possibility that science may have defined life too small. If we define life too small, we will define ourselves too small as well.

"Reclaiming ourselves usually means coming to recognize and accept that we have in us both sides of everything. We are capable of fear and courage, generosity and selfishness, vulnerability and strength. These things do not cancel each other out but offer us a full range of power and response to life. Life is as complex as we are. Sometimes our vulnerability is our strength, our fear develops our courage, and our woundedness is the road to our integrity. It is not an either/or world. It is a real world. In calling ourselves "heads" or "tails," we may never own and spend our human currency, the pure gold of which our coin is made.

But judgment may heal over time. One of the blessings of growing older is the discovery that many of the things I once believed to be my shortcomings have turned out in the long run to be my strengths, and other things of which I was unduly proud have revealed themselves in the end to be among my shortcomings. Things that I have hidden from others for years turn out to be the anchor and enrichment of my middle age. What a blessing it is to outlive your self-judgments and harvest your failures."

"As a physician, I was trained to deal with uncertainty as aggressively as I dealt with disease itself. The unknown was the enemy. Within this worldview, having a question feels like an emergency; it means that something is out of control and needs to be made known as rapidly, efficiently, and cost-effectively as possible. But death has taken me to the edge of certainty, to the place of questions.

After years of trading mystery for mastery, it was hard and even frightening to stop offering myself reasonable explanations for some of the things that I observed and that others told me, and simply take them as they are. "I don't know" had long been a statement of shame, of personal and professional failing. In all of my training I do not recall hearing it said aloud even once.

But as I listened to more and more people with life-threatening illnesses tell their stories, not knowing simply became a matter of integrity. Things happened. And the explanations I offered myself became increasingly hollow, like a child whistling in the dark. The truth was that very often I didn't know and couldn't explain, and finally, weighed down by the many, many instances of the mysterious which are such an integral part of illness and healing, I surrendered. It was a moment of awakening.

For the first time, I became curious about the things I had been unwilling to see before, more sensitive to inconsistencies I had glibly explained or successfully ignored, more willing to ask people questions and draw them out about stories I would have otherwise dismissed. What I have found in the end was that the life I had defended as a doctor as precious was also Holy.

I no longer feel that life is ordinary. Everyday life is filled with mystery. The things we know are only a small part of the things we cannot know but can only glimpse. Yet even the smallest of glimpses can sustain us.

Mystery seems to have the power to comfort, to offer hope, and to lend meaning in times of loss and pain. In surpr

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...
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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.

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.

"There is a Sufi story about a man who is so good that the angels ask God to give him the gift of miracles. God wisely tells them to ask him if that is what he would wish.

So the angels visit this good man and offer him first the gift of healing by hands, then the gift of conversion of souls, and lastly the gift of virtue. He refuses them all. They insist that he choose a gift or they will choose one for him. "Very well," he replies. "I ask that I may do a great deal of good without ever knowing it." The story ends this way:

The angels were perplexed. They took counsel and resolved upon the following plan: Every time the saint's shadow fell behind him it would have the power to cure disease, soothe pain, and comfort sorrow. As he walked, behind him the shadow made arid paths green, caused withered plants to bloom, gave clear water to dried up brooks, fresh color to pale children, and joy to unhappy men and women. The saint simply went about his daily life diffusing virtue as the stars diffuse light and the flowers scent, without ever being aware of it. The people respecting his humility followed him silently, never speaking to him about his miracles. Soon they even forgot his name and called him "the Holy Shadow.

people seemed to seek her out at times of pain and despair. It was hard for her to understand why this was. As a young person and later as a doctor, she had been there for them, had comforted and stood with them. They had thought her heart was whole, had trusted in it. She touched the pinecone in her lap. “I have hidden this all of my life, Rachel,” she said, speaking to me from across the room. We all sat in silence for a few minutes: there was nothing anyone could say. Our retreat center has a labyrinth exactly the dimensions of the one in the cathedral at Chartres in France. The Chartres labyrinth is a walking meditation that has roots in the fourteenth century, a path enclosed in a circle inscribed on the floor. The path inside the circle is long and convoluted and eventually leads into the center; it is more than a third of a mile into the center of the circle and out again. The following afternoon, during the period of meditation, Glory decided to walk this path alone. At the beginning, she had clasped her hands behind her back and started walking slowly and deliberately, looking down, trying to keep her balance on the narrow path. She had been walking step by step by step for about ten minutes or so and was becoming a little bored when she began to experience an urge to hold her hands out, palms up. She fought this impulse for a while, telling herself it was irrational. Finally, she had surrendered to it, and walked on with her hands held out before her. Within a minute or two she had the distinct impression that her pinecone was resting on her upturned palms. She knew she had left it on the bed in her room, but with her eyes on the floor she could feel the weight of it quite clearly in her hands. She felt as if she was being told to offer it to others, just as it was. It was a strange and puzzling thought, but it somehow seemed the right thing to do. She walked on in this way for several more minutes and at last came to a place in the labyrinth close to the