In Memoriam: Rachel Naomi Remen

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A letter to Rachel from Laura Pole:

Rachel Remen’s writings and teachings changed the course of many people’s lives, including mine. I first learned of Rachel in the early 1990s through her appearance on Bill Moyer’s “Healing and the Mind” series, where she talked about the Commonweal Cancer Help program and introduced the idea of “wounded healers.” Rachel personally knew what it was to be a fellow wounded healer because she lived with a serious chronic medical condition.  

Back then, I was a nurse at a cancer center in central Virginia and we tried to entice Rachel to travel across the country and give presentations to our oncology staff and to our patient support groups. It didn’t work out. Then, in 1996, when I was on a sabbatical from my nursing job to become a health supportive chef, I picked up Rachel’s new book, Kitchen Table Wisdom. I read it non-stop from cover to cover. How could so much wisdom be so beautifully communicated in this little book?    

One month later on the first day of my culinary internship at a health resort, my boss asked me if I knew of Rachel Naomi Remen. “She’s my shero,” I replied. “How would you like to cook for her and a group of physicians who are attending her ‘Recovering the Soul of Medicine’ retreat?” My “yes” to the request brought me “through the kitchen door” to begin what is now three decades of working with Smith Center for Healing and the Arts and Commonweal. Since that time, my work as an oncology nurse and integrative oncology navigator has been inspired by Rachel’s teachings and wisdom. I’ve lost count of how many presentations and workshops I’ve given on healing where I’ve passed on what I learned from Rachel. Multiply that by all the health care professionals who’ve learned from Rachel what it is to care, to heal, to love, to serve as a fellow wounded healer, and you have an endless succession of lives transformed for the good.     

I’ll leave you with some of my favorite quotes from Rachel:  

“A wound is an opening.”

“Listening is the oldest and perhaps the most powerful tool of healing. Through the quality of our listening and not the wisdom of our words, we are able to effect the most profound changes in the people around us. When we listen, we offer with our attention, an opportunity for wholeness.”

“Fundamentally helping, fixing and service are 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… From the perspective of service, we are all connected: All suffering is like my suffering and all joy is like my joy. The impulse to serve emerges naturally and inevitably from this way of seeing.” (from In the Service of Life)

“When we are doing healing work, we honor something innate in the person—something which is sometimes deeply buried. The healing work is to bring that out into the light, into the day and allow it to do its work.”

“Perhaps the purpose of life is to grow in wisdom and love better.”

With deep gratitude to Rachel,
Laura Pole