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… — Rachel Naomi Remen Copy Share
The wisdom in the story of the most educated and powerful person is often not greater than the wisdom in the story… — Rachel Naomi Remen Copy Share Image
Until we stop ourselves or, more often, have been stopped, we hope to put certain of life's events "behind us" and get… — Rachel Naomi Remen Copy Share Image
Life offers its wisdom generously. Everything teaches. Not everyone learns. — Rachel Naomi Remen Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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… — Rachel Naomi Remen Copy Share
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… — Rachel Naomi Remen Copy Share Image
The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give… — Rachel Naomi Remen Copy Share Image
The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. — Rachel Naomi Remen Copy Share Image
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… — Rachel Naomi Remen Copy Share
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… — Rachel Naomi Remen Copy Share
Healing may not be so much about getting better, as about letting go of everything that isn’t you - all of the expectations, all… — Rachel Naomi Remen Copy Share Image
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… — Rachel Naomi Remen Copy Share
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 Copy Share Image
We have become terribly vulnerable, not because we suffer but because we have separated ourselves from each other. A patient once told me that… — Rachel Naomi Remen Copy Share Image
