Rachel Naomi Remen - Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal (1994)

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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
An unanswered question is a fine traveling companion. It sharpens your eye for the road.

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 It can be withdrawn at any time no matter what our track record has been.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
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
If we fear loss enough, in the end the things we possess will come to possess us.

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

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
Anger is just a demand for change, a passionate wish for things to be different.

Rachel Naomi Remen
In some basic way, it is our imperfections and even our pain that draws others close to us.

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 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
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
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
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
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
Those who don't love themselves as they are rarely love life either.

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
The willingness to consider possibility requires a tolerance of uncertainty.

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

Rachel Naomi Remen