Quotes from Rachel Naomi Remen

Perhaps winning requires that we love the game unconditionally. Life provides all the pieces. When I accepted certain parts of life and denied and ignored the rest, I could only see my life a piece at a time - the happiness of a success or a time of celebration, or the ugliness and pain of a loss or a failure I was trying hard to put behind me out of sight. But like the dark pieces of the puzzle, these sadder events, painful as they are, have proven themselves a part of something larger.

I suspect that the most basic and powerful way to connect with 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 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.

Often times of crisis are times of discovery, periods when we cannot maintain our old ways of doing things and enter into a steep learning curve. Sometimes it takes a crisis to initiate growth.

I am no longer as inspired by expertise as I once was. Perhaps the worth of any lifetime is measured more in kindness than in competency.

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.

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

When we recognize the spark of God in others, we blow on it with our attention and strengthen it. No matter how deeply it has been buried or for how long .... When we bless someone, we touch the unborn goodness in them and wish it well.

Like all genuine prayers, this prayer is a powerful way of embracing life, finding a home in any outcome

As a human being, I know I can never hope to have the depth and breadth of perspective to know whether any of my actions will ultimately harm or heal.

Understanding the suffering is beyond me. Understanding the healing is, too. But in this moment, I am here. Use me.

We are all here for a single purpose: to grow in wisdom and to learn to love better.

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.

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.

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

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.

Was it possible to live so defensively that you never got to live at all?

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.

Medicine is as close to love as it is to science, and its relationships matter even at the edge of life itself.

Attachment is a reflex, an automatic response which often may not reflect our deepest good. Commitment is a conscious choice, to align ourselves with our most genuine values and our sense of purpose.

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.

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

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.

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.

Life is known only by those who have found a way to be comfortable with change and the unknown. Given the nature of life, there may be no security, but only adventure.