Top 84 Remen Quotes
#1. The sacred lives beyond labels and judgment, in the wood-of-no-names.
Rachel Naomi Remen
#2. 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
#3. The places in which we are seen and heard are holy places. They remind us of our value as human beings. They give us the strength to go on.
Rachel Naomi Remen
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#8. If we fear loss enough, in the end the things we possess will come to possess us.
Rachel Naomi Remen
#9. Being safe is about being seen and heard and allowed to be who you are and to speak your truth.
Rachel Naomi Remen
#10. Most of the things that give life its depth, meaning, and value are impervious to science.
Rachel Naomi Remen
#11. 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
#12. Anger is just a demand for change, a passionate wish for things to be different.
Rachel Naomi Remen
#13. 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
#14. When we know ourselves to be connected to all others, acting compassionately is simply the natural thing to do.
Rachel Naomi Remen
#15. 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 ...
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Rachel Naomi Remen
#16. Freedom may come not from being in control of life but rather from a willingness to move with the events of life, to hold on to our memories but let go of the past, to choose, when necessary, the inevitable. We can become free at any time.
Rachel Naomi Remen
#17. 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
#18. 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
#21. What we do to survive is often different from what we may need to do in order to live.
Rachel Naomi Remen
#22. When you listen generously to people they can hear the truth in themselves, often for the first time.
Rachel Naomi Remen
#23. Sooner or later we will come to the edge of all that we can control and find life, waiting there for us.
Rachel Naomi Remen
#25. 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
#26. It has been said that sometimes we need a story more than food in order to live.
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Rachel Naomi Remen
#27. In the silence of listening, you can know yourself in everyone, the unseen singing softly to itself and to you.
Rachel Naomi Remen
#28. 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
#30. I don't think there's such a thing as a bad emotion. The only bad emotion is a stuck emotion.
Rachel Naomi Remen
#31. Inner peace is more a question of cultivating perspective, meaning, and wisdom even as life touches you with its pain.
Rachel Naomi Remen
#32. When people are blessed they discover that their lives matter, that there is something in them worthy of blessing.
Rachel Naomi Remen
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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.
Rachel Naomi Remen
#36. The best stories have many meanings; their meaning changes as our capacity to understand and appreciate meaning grows.
Rachel Naomi Remen
#37. 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
#38. All life has in it the dimension of the Unknown; it is a thing forever unfolding. It seems important to consider the possibility that science may have defined life too small. If we define life too small, we will define ourselves too small as well.
Rachel Naomi Remen
#39. 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
#40. 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.
Rachel Naomi Remen
#41. 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.
Rachel Naomi Remen
#42. It has been my experience that presence is a more powerful catalyst for change than analysis.
Rachel Naomi Remen
#43. When we listen, we offer with our attention an opportunity for wholeness.
Rachel Naomi Remen
#45. We burn out not because we don't care but because we don't grieve. We burn out because we have allowed our hearts to become so filled with loss that we have no room left to care.
Rachel Naomi Remen
#46. 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
#47. Our limitations serve, our wounds serve, even our darkness can serve.
Rachel Naomi Remen
#48. 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
#49. 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
#52. 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
#54. 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. (in Bill Moyers' Healing and the Mind)
Rachel Naomi Remen
#55. 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
#56. 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.
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Rachel Naomi Remen
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#61. Life offers its wisdom generously. Everything teaches. Not everyone learns.
Rachel Naomi Remen
#62. The willingness to consider possibility requires a tolerance of uncertainty.
Rachel Naomi Remen
#63. There should be a word that means beginning/end because nothing begins without something dying.
Rachel Naomi Remen
#64. 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.
Rachel Naomi Remen
#65. 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.
Rachel Naomi Remen
#67. 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
#69. Those who bless and serve life find a place of belonging and strength, a refuge.
Rachel Naomi Remen
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. One of the reasons many physicians feel drained by their work is that they do not know how to make an opening to receive anything from their patients. The way we were trained, receiving is considered unprofessional. The way most of us were raised, receiving is considered a weakness.
Rachel Naomi Remen
#73. I have learned that the things that divide us are far less important than those that connect us.
RachelNaomi Remen
#74. 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.
Rachel Naomi Remen
#75. 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
#76. The way towards freedom from a situation often lies in acceptance of the situation.
Rachel Naomi Remen
#77. 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
#78. Is it possible to live so defensively that you never get to live at all?
Rachel Naomi Remen
#79. 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
#80. Religion is a bridge to the spiritual, but the spiritual lies beyond religion.
Rachel Naomi Remen
#81. The way in which we go to the grocery store may tell us everything about the way in which we live a life. The way we tend the life force in a plant may be the way we tend our own life force. We are exquisitely coherent.
Rachel Naomi Remen
#83. 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
#84. It is actually difficult to edit life. Especially in regard to feelings. Not being open to anger or sadness usually means being unable to be open to love and joy. The emotions seem to operate with an all-or-nothing switch.
Rachel Naomi Remen
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