"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."
American academic
Rachel Naomi Remen (born February 8, 1938, New York, New York) is a pediatrician who gained fame as an author and teacher of alternative medicine in the form of integrative medicine. Together with Michael Lerner, she is a founder of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program, a cornerstone program at Commonweal. She is the founder of the Institute for the Study of Health & Illness. She has been featured on the PBS television series, Thinking Allowed. Remen's most well-known books include Kitchen Table Wisdom and My Grandfather's Blessing, both of which made The New York Times Best Seller list. Kitchen Table Wisdom has been translated into 21 languages, and has sold over 700,000 copies worldwide. She is also the founder of a medical student curriculum called "The Healer's Art" used in medical schools throughout the United States.
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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.
REMEMBERING COMPASSION TAKES time, and sometimes the most profound learnings are not a part of a curriculum but are come upon by chance or even grace, the way that Glory found the pinecone. She brought it with her to the afternoon class; a large cone, split down the middle and attached to a Y-shaped branch. I stared at it in fascination, resting there in her lap, and hoped that she would say something about it. If you squinted your eyes, it was exactly the size and shape of a human heart. Glory is a young family practitioner who practices in a small rural town. Her patients range from the newborn to the very old, and her practice has afforded her a profound window on life. I met her at one of the physicians’ retreats I teach on detoxifying death. During the first evening’s discussion, she had said that she would find her own death a relief; in fact, life being as it is, she couldn’t imagine why anyone would struggle to live if there was a way to leave with honor. She had felt this way for as long as she could remember. It was an unusual thing for a physician to say, and the group who listened were surprised. She did not seem suicidal or even depressed, merely matter-of-fact. As she spoke, I found myself wondering what lay behind her words. I had some ideas, but, as it turned out, I couldn’t have been more wrong. When she began to talk about the pinecone, all this became clearer. In a voice that we could barely hear, she told us that she had found it on the path as she was coming in to lunch and had known instantly that it was hers. She looked at it lying there in her lap. “It’s my heart,” she told us. “It’s broken. Split in half.” She began to tell us about a vast sadness that she had experienced all her life, a personal sense of the suffering in the world that goes on and on. She had felt this suffering even as a child. It had broken her heart, made her unwilling to live any longer than she had to. Yet brokenhearted though she was,
team working on two children who had been thrown from the back of their father’s pickup truck onto the roadway. By the time I reached the floor, Immy had been taken upstairs to surgery. The surgery had lasted almost twelve hours, and things had not gone well. The bypass pump, a relatively new technology, had malfunctioned for several minutes and Immy had lost a great deal of blood. She was on a respirator, unconscious and unresponsive, in the Intensive Care Unit. On the day after surgery, Immy’s mother told me in a shaking voice that Immy’s gown had been removed in the operating room and thrown into the hospital laundry. The medal was gone. Concerned, I called the surgery resident and told him what had happened. “Why are you telling me this?” he asked me.
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Perhaps the most important thing we bring to another person is the silence in us, not the sort of silence that is filled with unspoken criticism or hard withdrawal. The sort of silence that is a place of refuge, of rest, of acceptance of someone as they are. We are all hungry for this other silence. It is hard to find. In its presence we can remember something beyond the moment, a strength on which to build a life. Silence is a place of great power and healing.
I think prayer may be less about asking for the things we are attached to than it is about relinquishing our attachments in some way. It can take us beyond fear, which is an attachment, and beyond hope, which is another form of attachment. It can help us remember the nature of the world and the nature of life, not on an intellectual level but in a deep and experimental way. When we pray, we don't change the world, we change ourselves. We change our consciousness. We move from an individual, isolated making-things-happen kind of consciousness to a connection on the deepest level with the largest possible reality.
the hospital to tape it to the closed door of Dr. X’s office. I had signed it and on the way back to my bed I began to worry. What if I had done something really foolish? If the surgical resident didn’t care about such things, why should Dr. X? I was off call the next day and, exhausted, I spent most of the time asleep. When I returned to the hospital for the evening shift, the pediatric day resident told me that Immy was no better. For the next few hours I took care of whatever was most urgently needed on the service, but later in the evening I stopped by the Intensive Care Unit to examine Immy and speak with her family. I found her parents in the waiting room. Together we went to see Immy. She was still unconscious. Leaning over to listen to her chest, I suddenly noticed a medal pinned to her hospital gown. Turning to her parents in relief, I asked if it was another one. “No,” her mother said, “it was the same one that was lost.” Dr. X had come that afternoon and brought it to them. I told them how glad I was that it had been found. “Yes,” her father said. “We are too.” Then he smiled. “She is safe now, no matter what happens,” he told me.