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.

LOST AND FOUND IMMY WAS A frail little girl, the only child of older parents. At three, she was only as big as the average eighteen-month-old toddler. She was unable to walk more than a few blocks without tiring and did not have the strength to play games you could not play sitting down. A desperately wanted and long-awaited baby, she had been born with a hole in her heart and a badly formed heart valve. Only the most careful medical management had helped her

We can all influence the life force. The tools and strategies of healing are so innate, so much a part of a common human birthright, that we believers in technology pay very little attention to them. But they have lost none of their power.

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.

Immy spent the next day or two undergoing tests, and I saw her several more times. The medal had been moved from her shirt to her hospital gown. It had seemed so important to her parents that I mentioned it in passing to the cardiac surgery resident as we sat writing chart notes in the nursing station on the evening before the surgery. He gave me a cynical smile. “Well, to each his own,” he said. “I put my faith in Dr. X,” he said, mentioning the name of the highly respected cardiac surgeon who would be heading Immy’s surgical team in the morning. “I doubt he needs much help from Lourdes.” I made a note to myself to be sure to take the medal off Immy’s gown before she went to surgery in the morning so it wouldn’t get lost in the OR or the recovery room. But I spent that morning in the emergency room, as part of

No matter what means we use, service is always a work of the heart. There are times when the power of science is so seductive that we may come to feel that all that is required to serve others is to get our science right, our diagnosis, our treatment. But science can never serve unless it is first translated by people into a work of the heart.

On the deepest level, I know my body is on my side.

Sand is a way of life for an oyster. If you are soft and tender and must live on the sandy floor of the ocean, making pearls becomes a necessity if you are to live well.

I guess anything good you’ve ever been given is yours forever.

Protecting ourselves from loss rather than grieving and healing our losses is one of the major causes of burnout. Very few of the professionals I have treated for burnout actually came in saying that they were burned out. I don't think most of them knew. The most common thing I've been told is, 'There's something wrong with me. I don't care anymore. Terrible things happen in front of me and I feel nothing.

After listening to hundreds and hundreds of [people's] stories over the last twenty years, I think I would have to say that most people do not recognize the strength of the life force in them or the many ways that it shows itself to them...So when people first come, this is the place we usually start - talking about life itself, our attitude toward it, our experience of it, our trust or distrust of it. Developing an eye to see it, in others and in ourselves. In the beginning is the life force. After more than fifty years of living, I have learned it can be trusted.

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?

"I recall vividly the night before one of my own early surgeries, an eight-hour affair that would alter my body permanently. I was twenty-seven and unmarried at the time. Late in the evening a pleasant elderly woman, a technical aide, had come to my hospital room to shave my abdomen in preparation for the procedure. As she went about this humble task with great skill, she had asked me about the next day's surgery. Filled with resentment, self-pity, and a sense of victimhood, I told her what was planned and burst into tears. She had seemed quite surprised. "How would YOU feel if they were going to do this to YOU tomorrow?" I asked her angrily. she had taken my question literally and had thought it over. Then, patting me gently, she had said, "If I needed it to live, I would be glad for the help." Her answer had changed everything."

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.

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.