Top 124 Quotes & Sayings by Rachel Naomi Remen - Page 2

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an author Rachel Naomi Remen.
Last updated on November 22, 2024.
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
It has been said that sometimes we need a story more than food in order to live. p 374
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
The sacred lives beyond labels and judgment, in the wood-of-no-names.
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.
Just Listen an excerpt
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.
The choice people have to make is never between slavery and freedom. We will always have to choose between slavery and the unknown.
A woman once told me that she did not feel the need to reach out to those around her because she prayed every day. Surely, this was enough. But a prayer is about our relationship to God; a blessing is about our relationship to the spark of God in one another. God may not need our attention as badly as the person next to us on the bus or behind us in line in the supermarket. Everyone in the world matters, and so do their blessings. When we bless others, we offer them refuge from an indifferent world.
Is it possible to live so defensively that you never get to live at all?
All natural processes are long processes and they last.
People have the natural capacity to affirm and embrace life in the most difficult of circumstances.
Facts bring us to knowledge, but stories lead to wisdom. — © Rachel Naomi Remen
Facts bring us to knowledge, but stories lead to wisdom.
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.
We may need to let go of our beliefs and ideas about life in order to have life.
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.
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.
The way towards freedom from a situation often lies in acceptance of the situation.
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.
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.
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.
If we fear loss enough, in the end the things we possess will come to possess us.
When we pray, we don't change the world, we change ourselves.
Our limitations serve, our wounds serve, even our darkness can serve.
Mystery has great power. In the many years I have worked with people with cancer, I have seen Mystery comfort people when nothing else can comfort them and offer hope when nothing else offers hope. I have seen Mystery heal fear that is otherwise unhealable. For years I have watched people in their confrontation with the unknown recover awe, wonder, joy, and aliveness. They have remembered that life is holy, and they have reminded me as well. In losing our sense of Mystery, we have become a nation of burned-out people. People who wonder do not burn out.
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.
It is not that we have a soul, but that we are a soul.
It is said that the Christian mystic Theresa of Avila found difficulty at first in reconciling the vastness of the life of the spirit with the mundane tasks of her Carmelite convent: the washing of pots, the sweeping of floors, the folding of laundry. At some point of grace, the mundane became for her a sort of prayer, a way she could experience her ever-present connection to the divine pattern which is the source of life. She began then to see the face of God in the folded sheets.
For many years now I have listened to the stories of people with cancer and other life-threatening illnesses as their counselor. From them I have learned how to enjoy the minute particulars of life once again, the grace of a hot cup of coffee, the presence of a friend, the blessing of having a new cake of soap or an hour without pain. Such humble experience is the stuff that many of the very best stories are made of. If we think we have no stories it is because we have not paid enough attention to our lives. Most of us live lives that are far richer and more meaningful than we appreciate.
Religion is a bridge to the spiritual, but the spiritual lies beyond religion.
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
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.
Belief traps or frees us.
Fear is the friction in all transitions.
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.
A loving silence often has more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words.
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.
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
My sense is that you can never teach anybody anything, or change anybody in ways that they don't already have in mind.
Silence is a place of great power and healing.
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
Unexplained pain may sometimes direct our attention to something unacknowledged, something we are afraid to know or feel. Then it holds us to our integrity, claiming the attention we withhold. The thing which calls our attention may be a repressed experience or some unexpressed and important part of who we are. Whatever we have denied may stop us and dam the creative flow of our lives. Avoiding pain, we may linger in the vicinity of our wounds, sometime for many years, gathering the courage to experience them.
Freedom is as frightening now as it was thousands of years ago. It will always require a willingness to sacrifice what is most familiar for what is most true. To be free we may need to act from integrity, on trust, sometimes for a very long time. Few of us will reach our promised land in a day. But perhaps the most important part of the story is that God does not delegate this task. Whenever anyone moves toward freedom, God Himself is there.
Our purpose in life is to grow in wisdom and in love.
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.
I don't think there's such a thing as a bad emotion. The only bad emotion is a stuck emotion.
There should be a word that means beginning/end because nothing begins without something dying.
I had thought joy to be rather synonymous with happiness, but it seems now to be far less vulnerable than happiness. Joy seems to be a part of an unconditional wish to live, not holding back because life may not meet our preferences and expectations. Joy seems to be a function of the willingness to accept the whole, and to show up to meet with whatever is there. It has a kind of invincibility that attachment to any particular outcome would deny us.
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.
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.
When we listen, we offer with our attention an opportunity for wholeness. — © Rachel Naomi Remen
When we listen, we offer with our attention an opportunity for wholeness.
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.
Those who bless and serve life find a place of belonging and strength, a refuge.
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.
We are, in a certain way, defined as much by our potential as by its expression. There is a great difference between an acorn and a little bit of wood carved into an acorn shape, a difference not always readily apparent to the naked eye. The difference is there even if the acorn never has the opportunity to plant itself and become an oak. Remembering its potential changes the way in which we think of the acorn and react to it. How we value it. If an acorn were conscious, knowing its potential would change the way that it might think and feel about itself.
Everybody is a story.
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.
When people are blessed they discover that their lives matter, that there is something in them worthy of blessing.
This site uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. More info...
Got it!