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Rachel
Naomi Remen
Rachel
Naomi Remen, whose unique perspective on healing comes from her
background
as a physician, a professor of medicine, a therapist, and a
long-term survivor of chronic illness,
invites us to listen from the soul.
"Rachel Remen is one of
the most important women of our time.
She is an
extraordinary combination of wounded patient and highly skilled physician, an intuitively
compassionate healer, who is also a gifted author. She has had a life-changing impact on me,"
says Naomi Judd. Taken
from several of her books
are the following passages
that give us great insight, peace,
and perspective.
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thinkers home
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When
we haven't the time to listen to each other's stories we seek
out
experts to tell us
how to live. The less time we spend together
at the kitchen table,
the more how-to books
appear in the stores
and on our bookshelves. But reading such
books is a very different
thing than listening to someone' s lived experience. Because we
have stopped listening
to each other we may even have forgotten
how to listen, stopped learning
how
to recognize meaning and fill
ourselves from the ordinary events of our
lives. We have become
solitary; readers and watchers rather than sharers and
participants.
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I have come to
suspect that life itself may be a spiritual practice. The
process
of daily living seems able to refine the quality of our humanity over
time. There are
many people whose awakening to larger realities comes through
the
experiences of
ordinary life, through parenting, through work, through friendship,
through illness,
or just in some elevator somewhere.
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Meaning may become a
very practical matter for those of us who do difficult
work
or lead difficult lives. Meaning is strength. Physicians
often seek their
strength in competence. Indeed, competence and expertise are two of the most respected qualities
in the medical subculture,
as well as in our society. But
important as they are, they are not
sufficient to fully sustain us. . . .
Competence
may bring us satisfaction. Finding meaning in a
familiar task often allows us to
go
beyond this and find in the most routine of tasks a deep sense of joy
and even gratitude.
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There
is a great difference between defending life and befriending
it. Defending life is often about holding on to whatever
you have at all cost. Befriending life may be about
strengthening and supporting life's movement toward its own
wholeness. It may require us to take great risks, to let
go, over and over again, until we finally surrender to life's
own dream of itself.
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We have not only lost one another,
we have become isolated from the past as well. |
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The real epidemic in
our culture is not just physical heart disease;
it's what I call emotional and spiritual heart disease:
the sense of loneliness, isolation, and alienation that is
so prevalent in our culture because of the breakdown of the
social networks that used to give us a sense of connection and
community.
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Until
we stop ourselves or, more often, have been stopped, we hope to put
certain of life's events "behind us" and get on with our
living. After we stop
we see that certain of life's issues will be with us for as long as we
live.
We will pass through them again and again, each time with a new story,
each time with a greater understanding, until they become
indistinguishable
from our blessings and our wisdom. It's the way life teaches us
to live.
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People
can learn to study their life force in the same way that a
master gardener
studies a rosebush. No gardener ever made
a rose. When its needs are met a
rosebush will make
roses. Gardeners collaborate and provide conditions which
favor this outcome. And as anyone who has ever pruned a
rosebush knows, life
flows through every rosebush in a slightly
different way.
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We
are all more than we know. Wholeness is never lost, it is only
forgotten.
Integrity rarely means that we need to add something to ourselves; it is
more an undoing
than a doing, a freeing ourselves from beliefs we have about who we are
and ways
we have been persuaded to "fix" ourselves to know who we
genuinely are.
Even after many years of seeing, thinking, and living one way, we are
able to reach
past all that to claim our integrity and live in a way we may never have
expected to live. |
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A
woman once told me that she did not feel the need to reach out to those
around her
because she prayed every day. Surely, this was enough. But a
prayer is about
our relationship to God; a blessing is about our relationship to the
spark of God in one another.
God may not need our attention as badly as the person next to us on the
bus or behind us
in line in the supermarket. Everyone in the world matters, and so
do their blessings.
When we bless others, we offer them refuge from an indifferent world. |
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Those who bless and serve life find a place of belonging
and strength,
a refuge from living in ways that are meaningless and empty and lonely. |
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Few
of us are truly free. Money, fame, power, sexuality, admiration,
youth; whatever
we are attached to will enslave us, and often we serve these masters
unaware.
Many of the things that enslave us will limit our ability to live fully
and deeply. They will cause us
to suffer needlessly. The promised land may be many things to many
people. For some
it is perfect health and for others freedom from hunger or fear, or
discrimination,
or injustice. But perhaps on the deepest level the promised land
is the same for us all,
the capacity to know and live by the innate goodness in us,
to serve and belong to one another and to life.
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Most of us
have been given many more blessings than we have received.
We do not take time to be blessed or make the space for it. We may
have filled
our lives so full of other things that we have no room to receive our
blessings.
One of my patients once told me that she has an image of us all being
circled
by our blessings, sometimes for years, like airplanes in a holding
pattern at an airport,
stacked up with no place to land. Waiting for a moment of our
time, our attention. |
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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.
When we find new eyes, the unsuspected blessing in work we have done for
many years
may take us completely by surprise. We can see life in many ways:
with the eye,
with the mind, with the intuition. But perhaps it is only by those
who speak the language
of meaning, who have remembered how to see with the heart,
that life is ever deeply known or served.
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We have not been raised to cultivate a sense of
Mystery. We may even see the unknown
as an insult to our competence, a personal failing. Seen this way,
the unknown becomes
a challenge to action. But Mystery does not require action;
Mystery requires our attention.
Mystery requires that we listen and become open. When we meet with
the unknown
in this way, we can be touched by a wisdom that can transform our lives. |
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Just
Listen
an excerpt
Rachel Naomi Remen
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. It
has taken me a long time to believe in the power of simply
saying, "I'm so sorry," when someone is in pain.
And meaning it.
One of my
patients told me that when she tried to tell her story people
often interrupted her to tell her that they once had something
just like that happen to them. Subtly her pain became a
story about themselves. Eventually she stopped talking to
most people. It was just too lonely. We
connect through listening. When we interrupt what someone
is saying to let them know that we understand, we move the focus
of attention to ourselves. When we listen, they know we
care. Many people with cancer talk about the relief of
having someone just listen.
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.
This
simple thing has not been that easy to learn. it certainly
went against everything I had been taught since I was very
young. I thought people listened only because they were
too timid to speak or did not know the answer. A loving
silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the
most well intentioned words.
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A
wonderful book of short vignettes by Rachel Naomi Remen, Kitchen
Table Wisdom is an exploration of the meanings of life and
living. Through her experiences as a medical doctor, Remen
has learned much about living and dying, and the meaning of
both. Highly recommended for anyone who wants a dose of
humanity and a positive perspective on life and the people of
this world we live in. |
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The life in us is diminished by
judgment far more frequently than by disease. Our own
self-judgment or the judgment of other people can stifle our
life-force, its spontaneity
and natural expression. Unfortunately,
judgment
is commonplace. It is as rare to find
someone who loves us as we
are
as it is to find someone who loves themselves whole.
Judgment does not only take the form of criticism. Approval is
also a form
of judgment.
When we approve of people, we sit 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.
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As I age I am grateful to find that a silence has
begun to gather in me,
coexisting with my tempers and my fears, unchanged by my joys
or my pain. Sanctuary. Connected to the Silence
everywhere.
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Everyone
alive has suffered. It is the wisdom gained from our wounds and
from
our own experiences of suffering that makes us able to heal.
Becoming expert
has turned out to be less important than remembering and trusting the
wholeness in myself and everyone else. Expertise cures, but
wounded people
can best be healed by other wounded people. Only other wounded
people can
understand what is needed, for the healing of suffering is compassion,
not expertise.
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Life
offers its wisdom generously. Everything teaches. Not
everyone learns.
Life asks of us the same thing we have been asked in every
class: "Stay
awake." "Pay attention." But paying
attention is no simple matter. It requires
us not to be distracted by expectations, past experiences, labels, and
masks.
It asks that we not jump to early conclusions and that we remain open
to surprise.
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