102+ Rachel Naomi Remen Quotes On Friendship, Happiness And Being

Rachel Naomi Remen was an American physician, author, and professor. She was a pioneer in the field of narrative medicine and wrote several books about the healing power of stories, including the New York Times bestseller Kitchen Table Wisdom. She was a major proponent of the idea that healing is a spiritual journey, not just a medical one. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Rachel Naomi Remen on life, friendship, love.

Top 10 Rachel Naomi Remen Quotes

1. 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.
2. The secret of living well is not in having all the answers but in pursuing unanswerable questions in good company.
3. 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.
4. The willingness to consider possibility requires a tolerance of uncertainty.
5. Our listening creates a sanctuary for the homeless parts within another person.
6. Big messages come in small packages. All it may take to restore someone's trust in life may be returning a lost earring or a dropped glove.
7. 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.
8. In the silence of listening, you can know yourself in everyone, the unseen singing softly to itself and to you.
9. Sooner or later we will come to the edge of all that we can control and find life, waiting there for us.
10. A loving silence often has more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words.

Rachel Naomi Remen Short Quotes

• An unanswered question is a fine traveling companion. It sharpens your eye for the road.
• It has been my experience that presence is a more powerful catalyst for change than analysis.
• When we pray, we don't change the world, we change ourselves.
• Fear is the friction in all transitions.
• Belief traps or frees us.
• Anger is just a demand for change, a passionate wish for things to be different.
• We are all born to be a blessing.
• Those who bless and serve life find a place of belonging and strength, a refuge.
• The way towards freedom from a situation often lies in acceptance of the situation.
• The sacred lives beyond labels and judgment, in the wood-of-no-names.

Rachel Naomi Remen Quotes About Life

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

Deep inside, our integrity sings to us whether we are listening or not. It is a note that only we can hear. Eventually, when life makes us ready to listen, it will help us to find our way home. — Rachel Naomi Remen

In our instinctive attachments, our fear of change, and our wish for certainty and permanence, we may undercut the impermanence which is our greatest strength, our most fundamental identity. Without impermanence, there is no process. The nature of life is change. All hope is based on process. — Rachel Naomi Remen

The worst thing that happens in life is not death. The worst thing would be to miss it. . . . I think the great danger in life is not showing up. — Rachel Naomi Remen

I have no idea about what death is, but because I have been in association with it so intimately, I have a much greater sense of the value of life and of what life can be. — Rachel Naomi Remen

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. — Rachel Naomi Remen

Our purpose in life is to grow in wisdom and in love. — Rachel Naomi Remen

People have the natural capacity to affirm and embrace life in the most difficult of circumstances. — Rachel Naomi Remen

The wisdom in the story of the most educated and powerful person is often not greater than the wisdom in the story of a child, and the life of a child can teach us as much as the life of a sage. — Rachel Naomi Remen

Life wastes nothing. Over and over again every molecule that has ever been is gathered up by the hand of life to be reshaped into yet another form. p 259 — Rachel Naomi Remen

Rachel Naomi Remen Quotes About Love

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

Of course love is never earned. It is a grace we give one another. Anything we need to earn is only approval. — Rachel Naomi Remen

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

Suffering shapes the life force, sometimes into anger, sometimes into blame and self-pity. Eventually it may show us the wisdom of embracing and loving life. — Rachel Naomi Remen

Rachel Naomi Remen Quotes About Inspiring

Being safe is about being seen and heard and allowed to be who you are and to speak your truth. — Rachel Naomi Remen

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

There should be a word that means beginning/end because nothing begins without something dying. — Rachel Naomi Remen

I don't think there's such a thing as a bad emotion. The only bad emotion is a stuck emotion. — Rachel Naomi Remen

Rachel Naomi Remen Quotes About Healing

At the deepest level, the creative process and the healing process arise from a single source. When you are an artist, you are a healer; a wordless trust of the same mystery is the foundation of your work and its integrity. — Rachel Naomi Remen

A shaman is someone who has a wound that will not heal. He sits by the side of the road with his open wound exposed. — Rachel Naomi Remen

Silence is a place of great power and healing. — Rachel Naomi Remen

Perhaps wisdom is simply a matter of waiting, and healing a question of time. And anything good you've ever been given is yours forever. — Rachel Naomi Remen

Rachel Naomi Remen Quotes About Listen

The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. — Rachel Naomi Remen

Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention — Rachel Naomi Remen

Just Listen an excerpt — Rachel Naomi Remen

When we listen, we offer with our attention an opportunity for wholeness. — Rachel Naomi Remen

When you listen generously to people they can hear the truth in themselves, often for the first time. — Rachel Naomi Remen

From a good teacher you may learn the secret of listening. You will never learn the secret of life. You will have to listen for yourself — Rachel Naomi Remen

Rachel Naomi Remen Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

When we know ourselves to be connected to all others, acting compassionately is simply the natural thing to do. — Rachel Naomi Remen

Goose bumps happen when your soul is close to you, breathing lightly on the back of your neck, and wakes you up. — Rachel Naomi Remen

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

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

Perhaps losing integrity with yourself is the greatest stress of all, far more hurtful to us than competition, time pressure, or lack of respect. Our vitality is rooted in our integrity. When we do not live in one piece, our life force becomes divided. Becoming separated from our authentic values may weaken us. — Rachel Naomi Remen

Every great loss demands that we choose life again. We need to grieve in order to do this. The pain we have not grieved over will always stand between us and life. When we don't grieve, a part of us becomes caught in the past like Lot's wife who, because she looked back, was turned into a pillar of salt. — Rachel Naomi Remen

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. — Rachel Naomi Remen

God's presence. . . is an inner experience that never changes. It's a relationship that's there all the time, even when we're not paying attention to it. Perhaps the Infinite holds us to Itself in the same way the earth does. Like gravity, if it ever stopped we would know it instantly. But it never does. — Rachel Naomi Remen

How strange to think that great pain may be impermanent. Something in us all seems to want to carve it in granite, as if only this would do full honor to its terrible significance. But even pain is blessed with impermanence... p 259 — Rachel Naomi Remen

In order to live fully we may need to look deeply at our own suffering and at the suffering of others. In the depths of every wound we have survived is the strength we need to live. The wisdom our wounds can offer us is a place of refuge. Finding this is not for the faint of heart. But then, neither is life. — Rachel Naomi Remen

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. — Rachel Naomi Remen

Facts bring us to knowledge, but stories lead to wisdom. — Rachel Naomi Remen

Most of us encounter a great deal more Mystery than we are willing to experience. Sometimes knowing life requires us to suspend disbelief, to recognize that all our hard-won knowledge may only be provisional and the world may be quite different than we believe it to be. This can be very stressful, even frightening. But if we are not willing to wonder, we may have to hang up the phone on life. — Rachel Naomi Remen

Our limitations serve, our wounds serve, even our darkness can serve. — Rachel Naomi Remen

We may need to let go of our beliefs and ideas about life in order to have life. — Rachel Naomi Remen

Everybody is a story. — Rachel Naomi Remen

Many people do not know that they can strengthen or diminish the life around them. The way we live day to day simply may not reflect back to us our power to influence life or the web of relationships that connects us. Life responds to us anyway. We all have the power to affect others. We may affect those we know and those we do not even know at all. . . . Without our knowing, we may influence the lives of others in very simple ways. — Rachel Naomi Remen

In this culture the soul and the heart too often go homeless. Listening creates a holy silence. When you listen generously to people, they can hear the truth in themselves, often for the first time. And in the silence of listening, you can know yourself in everyone. Eventually you may be able to hear, in everyone and beyond everyone, the unseen singing softly to itself and to you. — Rachel Naomi Remen

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. — Rachel Naomi Remen

…blessing is about filling yourself up so that your blessings overflow onto others. — Rachel Naomi Remen

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

The spiritual is inclusive. It is the deepest sense of belonging and participation.We all participate in the spiritual at all times, whether we know it or not. — Rachel Naomi Remen

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

Illiness could be considered a Western form of meditation. — Rachel Naomi Remen

What we do to survive is often different from what we may need to do in order to live. — Rachel Naomi Remen

It has been said that sometimes we need a story more than food in order to live. p 374 — Rachel Naomi Remen

Chances are that any helpful two-year-old will break some eggs. We are often not very good at things when we are new. But there may be an important choice to make at such moments. Do we support and protect the innate wish to be of help to others in our children, or do we protect the eggs? Hard as it seems, the greater mother wisdom may lie in a willingness to clean up broken eggs or replace a mitten and a box of crayons. — Rachel Naomi Remen

When people are blessed they discover that their lives matter, that there is something in them worthy of blessing. — Rachel Naomi Remen

Our wounds are our sources of growth. — Rachel Naomi Remen

I spent the first forty years of my life making major interventions into other people's lives, and I have an idea of the limitations of that method. I see a major event as rather like major surgery. It is a moment, but whether people use it, whether people go with it, needs to be seen. — Rachel Naomi Remen

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. — Rachel Naomi Remen

My sense is that you can never teach anybody anything, or change anybody in ways that they don't already have in mind. — Rachel Naomi Remen

A label is a mask life wears. We put labels on life all the time. 'Right,' 'wrong,' 'success,' 'failure,' . . . Labeling sets up an expectation of life that is often so compelling we can no longer see things as they really are. This expectation often gives us a false sense of familiarity toward something that is really new and unprecedented. We are in relationship with our expectations and not with life itself. — Rachel Naomi Remen

All natural processes are long processes and they last. — Rachel Naomi Remen

Befriending life is less a matter of knowledge than a question of wisdom. It is not about mastering life, controlling it or exerting our will over it, no matter how well intentioned our will may be. Befriending life is more about harmlessness than it is about control. — Rachel Naomi Remen

Those who wish to change things may face disappointment, loss, or even ridicule. If you are ahead of your time, people laugh as often as they applaud, and being there first is usually lonely. But our protection cannot come between us and our purpose. Right protection is something within us rather than something between us and the world, more about finding a place of refuge and strength than finding a hiding place. — Rachel Naomi Remen

Cancer changes your whole life. — Rachel Naomi Remen

It is not that we have a soul, but that we are a soul. — Rachel Naomi Remen

If you carry someone else's fears and live by someone else's values, you may find that you have lived their lives. — Rachel Naomi Remen

The choice people have to make is never between slavery and freedom. We will always have to choose between slavery and the unknown. — Rachel Naomi Remen

We have become terribly vulnerable, not because we suffer but because we have separated ourselves from each other. A patient once told me that he had tried to ignore his own suffering and the suffering of other people because he had wanted to be happy. Yet becoming numb to suffering will not make us happy. The part in us that feels suffering is the same as the part that feels joy. — Rachel Naomi Remen

Religion is a bridge to the spiritual, but the spiritual lies beyond religion. — Rachel Naomi Remen

I think that people get experiences, and out of those experiences come meaning and ideas. It's like watching a rose bush grow. — Rachel Naomi Remen

Life offers its wisdom generously. Everything teaches. Not everyone learns. — Rachel Naomi Remen

People are waking up in their homes - without conferences. They're waking up because life is waking them up, not because of some conference called "Body and Soul." — Rachel Naomi Remen

We bless the life around us far more than we realize. Many simple, ordinary things that we do can affect those around us in profound ways: the unexpected phone call, the brief touch, the willingness to listen generously, the warm smile or wink of recognition. All it may take to restore someone's trust in life may be returning a lost earring or a dropped glove. — Rachel Naomi Remen

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. — Rachel Naomi Remen

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

Is it possible to live so defensively that you never get to live at all? — Rachel Naomi Remen

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

Most people have come to prefer certain of lifes experiences and deny and reject others, unaware of the value of the hidden things that may come wrapped in plain and even ugly paper. In avoiding all pain and seeking comfort at all costs, 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 — Rachel Naomi Remen

Wisdom comes most easily to those who have the courage to embrace life without judgment and are willing to not know, sometimes for a long time. It requires us to be more fully and simply alive than we have been taught to be. It may require us to suffer. But ultimately we will be more than we were when we began. There is the seed of a greater wholeness in everyone. — Rachel Naomi Remen

If we fear loss enough, in the end the things we possess will come to possess us. — Rachel Naomi Remen

Life Lessons by Rachel Naomi Remen

1. Rachel Naomi Remen emphasizes the importance of connection and relationship in our lives, teaching us to be present and mindful of the people around us.
2. She encourages us to be open and accepting of our own vulnerability, and to recognize the power of small moments of joy and compassion.
3. Lastly, she teaches us to embrace our own unique gifts and to use them to bring healing and love to the world.