Rachel Naomi Remen Quotes

Quotes about:

• Helping, fixing, and serving represent three different ways of seeing life. When you help, you see life as weak. when you fix, you see life as broken. When you serve, you see life as whole. Fixing and helping may be the work of the ego, and service the work of the soul.

  Rachel Naomi Remen

  Broken, Ego, Soul

  87 Copy quote

• 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…. A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words.

  Rachel Naomi Remen

  Love, Inspirational, Powerful

  Rachel Naomi Remen (2006). “Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories that Heal, 10th Anniversary Edition”, p.112, Penguin

  101 Copy quote
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  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.

  Rachel Naomi Remen

  Inspirational, Motivational, Letting Go

  "Turning On The Light At Times Of Loss" by Anne Naylor, www.huffingtonpost.com. April 22, 2010.

  108 Copy quote

• Listening is the oldest and perhaps the most powerful tool of healing. It is often through the quality of our listening and not the wisdom of our words that we are able to effect the most profound changes in the people around us. When we listen, we offer with our attention an opportunity for wholeness. Our listening creates sanctuary for the homeless parts within the other person. That which has been denied, unloved, devalued by themselves and others. That which is hidden.

  Rachel Naomi Remen

  Powerful, Healing, Opportunity

  Rachel Naomi Remen (2006). “Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories that Heal, 10th Anniversary Edition”, p.159, Penguin

  53 Copy quote

• 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.

  Rachel Naomi Remen

  Life, Strength, Sympathy

  90 Copy quote

• The secret of living well is not in having all the answers but in pursuing unanswerable questions in good company.

  Rachel Naomi Remen

  Secret, Answers, Good Company

  60 Copy quote

• Grieving allows us to heal, to remember with love rather than pain. It is a sorting process. One by one you let go of the things that are gone and you mourn for them. One by one you take hold of the things that have become a part of who you are and build again.

  Rachel Naomi Remen

  Letting Go, Pain, Grief

  49 Copy quote

• 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.

  Rachel Naomi Remen

  Healing, Compassion, People

  Rachel Naomi Remen (2006). “Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories that Heal, 10th Anniversary Edition”, p.158, Penguin

  14 Copy quote

• Ours is not a culture that respects the sick, the old or the vulnerable. We strive for independence, competence, and mastery. In embracing such 'frontier' values, we may become intolerant of human wholeness, contemptuous of anything in ourselves, and in others, that has needs or is capable of suffering. The denial of a vulnerability is the ultimate barrier to compassion.

  Rachel Naomi Remen

  Compassion, Sick, Suffering

  8 Copy quote

• We are all healers of each other. Look at David Spiegel's fascinating study of putting people together in a support group and seeking that some people in it live twice as long as other people who are not in a support group. I asked David what went on in those groups and he said that people just cared about each other. Nothing big, no deep psychological stuff-people just cared about each other. The reality is that healing happens between people.

  Rachel Naomi Remen

  Healing, Reality, Long

  7 Copy quote

• Wounding and healing are not opposites. They're part of the same thing. It is our wounds that enable us to be compassionate with the wounds of others. It is our limitations that make us kind to the limitations of other people. It is our loneliness that helps us to to find other people or to even know they're alone with an illness. I think I have served people perfectly with parts of myself I used to be ashamed of.

  Rachel Naomi Remen

  Loneliness, Healing, Thinking

  56 Copy quote

• 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.

  Rachel Naomi Remen

  Lonely, Pain, Cancer

  42 Copy quote

• Everybody is a story. When I was a child, people sat around kitchen tables and told their stories. We don't do that so much anymore. Sitting around the table telling stories is not just a way of passing time. It is the way the wisdom gets passed along. The stuff that helps us to live a life worth remembering.

  Rachel Naomi Remen

  Children, People, Community

  Rachel Naomi Remen (2006). “Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories that Heal, 10th Anniversary Edition”, p.22, Penguin

  58 Copy quote

• When you listen generously to people they can hear the truth in themselves, often for the first time.

  Rachel Naomi Remen

  Compassion, People, Focus

  Rachel Naomi Remen (2006). “Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories that Heal, 10th Anniversary Edition”, p.159, Penguin

  23 Copy quote

• 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 those who speak the language of meaning, who have remembered how to see with the heart, that life is ever deeply known or served.

  Rachel Naomi Remen

  Meaningful, Eye, Heart

  19 Copy quote

• A blessing is not something that one person gives another. A blessing is a moment of meeting, a certain kind of relationship in which both people involved remember and acknowledge their true nature and worth, and strengthen what is whole in one another.

  Rachel Naomi Remen

  Blessing, People, Giving

  17 Copy quote

• 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.

  Rachel Naomi Remen

  Integrity, World, Sometimes

  Rachel Naomi Remen (2006). “Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories that Heal, 10th Anniversary Edition”, p.47, Penguin

  27 Copy quote

• Befriending the life in others is sometimes a complex matter. There are times when we offer our strength and protection, but these are usually only temporary measures. The greatest blessing we offer others may be the belief we have in their struggle for freedom, the courage to support and accompany them as they determine for themselves the strength that will become their refuge and the foundation for their lives. I think it is especially important to believe in someone at a time when they cannot yet believe in themselves. Then your belief will become their lifeline.

  Rachel Naomi Remen

  Friendship, Believe, Struggle

  46 Copy quote

• The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen.

  Rachel Naomi Remen

  Powerful, Listening To Others, Silence

  Rachel Naomi Remen (2006). “Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories that Heal, 10th Anniversary Edition”, p.112, Penguin

  23 Copy quote

• To seek approval is to have no resting place, no sanctuary. Like all judgement, approval encourages a constant striving. It makes us uncertain of who we are and of our true value. Approval cannot 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.

  Rachel Naomi Remen

  Real, Track, Judgement

  65 Copy quote

• Being alive is being aware, being able to be touched and moved and changed, being able to respond rather than to react, being able to see and hear.

  Rachel Naomi Remen

  Inspirational, Alive, Able

  4 Copy quote

• I think ideas only lead to change for intellectual people; and not even them. What really leads to change is experience. Life itself is the teacher.

  Rachel Naomi Remen

  Teacher, Thinking, Ideas

  Source: www.mightycompanions.org

  4 Copy quote

• The willingness to consider possibility requires a tolerance of uncertainty.

  Rachel Naomi Remen

  Tolerance, Possibility, Uncertainty

  Rachel Naomi Remen (2006). “Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories that Heal, 10th Anniversary Edition”, p.223, Penguin

  34 Copy quote

• When we are seen by the heart we are seen for who we are. We are valued in our uniqueness by those who are able to see us in this way and we become able to know and value ourselves.

  Rachel Naomi Remen

  Heart, Who We Are, Able

  Rachel Naomi Remen (2006). “Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories that Heal, 10th Anniversary Edition”, p.115, Penguin

  14 Copy quote

• Perhaps we can only truly serve those we are willing to touch, not only with our hands but with our hearts and even our souls. Professionalism has embedded in service a sense of difference, a certain distance. But on the deepest level, service is an experience of belonging, an experience of connection to others and to the word around us. It is this connection that gives us the power to bless the life in others. Without it, the life in them would not respond to us.

  Rachel Naomi Remen

  Distance, Heart, Compassion

  7 Copy quote

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