Thursday, September 29, 2022

Extraordinary knowing: Remen excerpt #13

Dr. Remen writes: In response to an invitation to remember a moment in the practice of medicine that might be considered a sacred experience, a seasoned neonatologist, the director of the neonatal unit at a large southern hospital, offered a group of colleagues this account. After weeks of struggle, her patient, a tine premature baby, was dying despite everything that a state-of-the art intensive care nursery could offer. It would not be long and it was time for the parents to say good-bye. With a heavy hear she called the baby’s father and invited him to meet her at the hospital. The child’s mother, distraught after weeks of uncertainty, now required medication. She had stopped visiting a few weeks ago. He would come alone, he said.

As she put down the phone, she became aware of the beeping of the monitors and other machines and the bustle of the  intensive care nursery and felt the need for some quiet to organize her thoughts while she waited for him to arrive. She went down the hall to the chapel, the only quiet place nearby, to be along for a few minutes and find words to tell the young father that his little son was not going to make it.

Fifteen minutes later, as she was walking toward the visitors’ waiting room, she found herself thinking that perhaps she should give the baby a trial with a certain drug. The thought surprised her, as this drug was not customarily used for the baby’s problem, and she shook her head in annoyance. But the strange thought would. Not easily go away. She reviewed the baby’s course with the father, assuring him that everything possible had been done and suggesting they go to the intensive care nursery together to say good-bye. As she looked at the sadness in his face, she found herself thinking ;After all, what does it matter?’ and suggested that perhaps there was one more thing she could try, a drug not usually given for this condition, but which she was thinking of using now. She would like to have his permission to use it. He gave this readily and they went to the nursery together.

The baby appeared moribund. Embarrassed to make so unusual a request of the nurses, she prepared the injection and administered it herself. Together she and the father waited, standing on either side of the Isolette, watching the blue and gasping baby. There was no change. Wanting to give him a chance to be alone with his child for the last time, she left to do some paperwork. A few hours later, she looked into the unit and was surprised to see him still there. She approached the Isolette and found that the infant’s tiny chest had slowed and his breathing was normal. Scarcely able to believe her yes, she raised her head and found the father looking at her. Their eyes held for a long, wordless moment. This was the moment she had chosen to tell us about as a ‘sacred’ moment. Recently these parents brought their child back to visit her. He is twelve years old.

The circle of physicians sat thinking about this for a while. Then the neonatologist began to describe the way in which she had dealt with this strange happening at the time. She has a very orderly and pragmatic mind, she told us, and it had disturbed her. She had tried to find an explanation for it so she could dismiss it. Gradually she became convinced that somewhere she had read or hear a preliminary report of research which mentioned the use of this drug for the baby’s condition and this was why she had thought of it. She could not remember the journal or the meeting where she had gotten this information, but she became more and more certain that it was so. This allowed her to forget the whole thing.

About two years later, she read of a study of premature infants with severe respiratory distress who had been given this very drug and had recovered. The mystery was solved! Delighted, she called the researchers to ask where they had published their preliminary reports or presented their work in progress. She was stunned to discover that this article was the first time the study  had been written up or presented anywhere. It had just been too odd to talk about until the results were final. She told them then that she had an additional case.

 

In musing aloud about her personal reactions, she told us that she had clung to an explanation that would have allowed her to keep her familiar and comfortable sense of the way in which the world works. She had rejected the gift of awe once, so it had been given to her again.


 

Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal (Riverhead books, 1996), page 318. 


Wednesday, September 28, 2022

A vision before death: Remen excerpt #12

Dr. Remen writes: My given name is Rachel. I was named after my mother’s mother. For the first fifty years of my life, I was called by another name, Naomi, which is my middle name. When I was in my middle forties, my mother, who was at that time almost eighty-five, elected to have coronary bypass surgery. The surgery was extremely difficult and only partly successful. For days my mother lay with two dozen others in the coronary intensive-care unit of one of our major hospitals. For the first week she was unconscious, peering over the edge of life, breathed by a ventilator. I was awed at the brutality of this surgery and the capacity of the body, even in great age, to endure such a major intervention.

When she finally regained consciousness, she was profoundly disoriented and often did not know who I, her only child, was. The nurses were reassuring. We see this sort of thing often, they told me. They called in Intensive care Psychosis and explained that in this environment of beeping machines and constant artificial light, elderly people with no familiar cues often go adrift. Nonetheless I was concerned. Not only did Mom not know me but she was hallucinating, seeing things crawling on her bed and feeling water run down her back.

Days went by and my mother slowly improved physically although her mental state continued to be uncertain. The nurses began correcting her when she mistook them for people from her past, insisting that the birds she saw flying a d singing in the room were not there. They encouraged me to correct her as well, telling me this was the only way she might return to what was real.

I remember one visit shortly before she left the intensive care unit. I greeted her asking if she knew who I was. ‘Yet,’ she said with warmth. ‘You are my beloved child.’ Comforted, I turned to sit on the only chair in her room but she stopped me. ‘Don’t sit there’ Doubtfully I looked at the chair again. ‘But why not?’

‘Rachel is sitting there,’ she said. I turned back to my mother. It was obvious that she saw quite clearly something I could not see.

Despite the frown of the special nurse who was adjusting my mother’s IV, I went into the hall, brought back another chair, and sat down on it. My mother looked at me and the empty chair next to me with great tenderness. Calling me by my given name for the first time, she introduced me to her visitor: ‘Rachel,’ she said. ‘This is Rachel.’

My mother began to tell her mother Rachel about my childhood and her pride in the person I had become. Her experience of Rachel’s presence was so convincing that I found myself wondering why I could not see here. It was more than a little unnerving. And very moving. Periodically she would appear to listen and then she would tell me of my grandmother’s reaction to what she had told her. They spoke of people I had never met in the familiar way of gossip: my great-grandfather David and his brothers, my great-granduncles, who were handsome men and great horsemen. ‘Devil,’ said my mother, laughing and nodding her head to the empty chair. She explained to her mother why she had given me her name, her hope for my kindness of heart, and apologized for my father who had insisted on calling me by my middle name, which had come from his side of our family. Exhausted by all this conversation, my mother lay back on her pillows and closed her eyes briefly. When she opened them again, she smiled at me and the empty chair. ‘I’m so glad you are both her now,’ she said. ‘One of you will take me home.’ Then she closed her eyes again and drifted off to sleep. It was my grandmother who took her home.

This experience, disturbing as it was for me at the time, seemed deeply comforting to my mother and became something I revisited again and again after she died. I had survived many years of chronic illness and physical limitation. I had been one of the few women in my class  at medical school in the fifties, one of the few women on the faculty at the Stanford medical school in the sixties. I was expert at dealing with limitations and challenges of various sorts. I had not succeeded through loving kindness. Over a period of time, I came to realize that despite my successes I had perhaps lost something of importance. When I turned fifty, I began asking people to call me Rachel, my real name.

 

Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal (Riverhead books, 1996), page 314. 


Tuesday, September 27, 2022

Witnessing the unexplainable: Remen excerpt #11

For the last ten years of his life, Tim’s father had Alzheimer’s disease. Despite the devoted care of Tim’s mother, he had slowly deteriorated until he had become a sort of walking vegetable. He was unable to speak and was fed, clothed, and cared for as if he were a very young child. As Tim and his brother grew older, they would stay with their father for brief periods of time while their mother took care of the needs of the household. 

One Sunday, while she was out doing the shopping, the boys, then fifteen and seventeen, watched football as their father sat nearby in a chair. Suddenly, he slumped forward and fell to the floor. Both sons realized immediately that something was terribly wrong. His color was gray and his breath uneven and rasping. Frightened, Tim’s older brother told him to call 911. Before he could respond, a voice he had not heard in ten year, a voice he could barely remember, interrupted, ‘Don’t call 911, son. Tell your mother that I love her. Tell her that I am all right.’ And Tim’s father died.

Tim, a cardiologist, looked around the room at the group of doctors mesmerized by this story. ‘Because he died unexpectedly at home, the law required that we have an autopsy,’ he told us quietly. ‘My father’s brain was almost entirely destroyed by this disease. For many years, I have asked myself, ‘Who spoke?’ I have never found even the slightest help from any medical textbook. I am no close to knowing this now than I was then but carrying this question with me reminds me of something important, something I do not want to forget. Much of life can never be explained but only witnessed.”

Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal (Riverhead books, 1996), pages 300-301.

Sunday, September 25, 2022

Life is filled with mystery: Remen excerpt #10

Rachel Naomi Remen writes: I am not much of a meditator. No matter. I have come to suspect that life itself may be a spiritual practice. The process of daily living seems able to refine the quality of our humanity over time. There are many people whose awakening to larger realities comes through the experiences of ordinary life, through parenting, through work, through friendship, through illness, or just in some elevator somewhere.

The recognition that the world is sacred is one of the most empowering of the many realizations that may occur to people with life-threatening illness and those close to them, their friends, family or even their health professionals. It is one of the ways that such people heal the community around them. And should they die, it is often the legacy they leave behind.

After years of trading mystery for mastery, it was hard and even frightening to stop offering myself reasonable explanations for some of the things that I observed and that others told me, and simply take them as they are. ‘I don’t know’ had long been a statement of shame, or personal and professional failing. In all of my training I do not recall hearing it said aloud even once.

But as I listened to more and more people with life-threatening illness tell their stories, not knowing simply became a matter of integrity. Things happened. And the explanations I offered myself became increasingly hollow, like a child whistling in the dark. The truth was that very often I didn’t know and couldn’t explain, and finally, weighed down by the many, many instances of the mysterious which are such an integral part of illness and healing, I surrendered. It was a moment of awakening.

For the first time, I became curious about the things I had been unwilling to see before, more sensitive to inconsistencies I had glibly explained or successfully ignored, more willing to ask people questions and draw them out about stories I would have otherwise dismissed. What I have found in the end was that the life I had defended as a doctor as precious was also Holy.

I no longer feel that life is ordinary. Everyday life is filled with mystery. The things we know are only a small part of the things we cannot know but can only glimpse. Yet even the smallest of glimpses can sustain us.

Mystery seems to have the power to comfort, to offer hope, and to lend meaning in times of loss and pain. In surprising ways, it is the mysterious that strengthens us at such times. I used to try to offer people certainty in times which were not at all certain and could not be made certain. I now just offer my companionship and share my sense of mystery, of the possible, of wonder. After twenty years of working with people with cancer, I find it possible to neither doubt nor accept the unproveable but simply to remain open and wait.

I accept that I may never know where truth lies in such matters. The most important questions don’t seem to have ready answers. But the questions themselves have a healing power when they are shared. An answer is an invitation to stop thinking about something, to stop wondering. Life has no such stopping places; life is a process whose every event is connected to the moment that just went by. And unanswered question is a fine traveling companion. It sharpens your eye for the road.

 

Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal (Riverhead books, 1996), pages 288, 292-293.

Saturday, September 24, 2022

Pray to serve a holy purpose: Remen excerpt #9

Rachel Naomi Remen writes: A patient of mine who is very ill was recently told by his oncologist that there was nothing more that could be done for him. The physician then said, ‘I think you’d better start praying.’ For this doctor, prayer has become a kind of last resort, something to offer his patients when he runs out of ways to help them personally, where there are no more effective treatments. God has become his final referral.

But prayer is not a way to get what we want to happen, like the remote control that comes with the television set. I think that prayer may be less about asking for the things we are attached to than it is about relinquishing our attachments in some way. It can take us beyond fear, which is an attachment, and beyond hope, which is another form of attachment. It can help us remember the nature of the world and the nature of life, not on an intellectual level but in a deep and experiential way. When we pray, we don’t change the world, we change ourselves. We change our consciousness. We move from an individual, isolated making-things-happen kind of consciousness to a connection on the deepest level with the largest possible reality. And then the question ‘How did you become well?’ becomes more a question about mystery than about efficacy. A very different kind of question.

At its deepest, prayer is a statement about causality. Turning toward prayer is a release from the arrogance and vulnerability of an isolated and individual causality. When we pray, we stop trying to control life and remember that we belong to life. It is an opportunity to experience humility and recognize grace.

Sometimes the most powerful prayers are also the most simple. Once, when I was lying on an operating table waiting for anesthesia, one of my surgeons took my hand and asked if I would join him and his operating team in a prayer. Startled, I nodded. He gathered the team around the operating table for a moment of silence, after which he quietly said, ‘May we be helped to do here whatever is most right.’

This traditional American Indian prayer seems such a simple of relinquishing ultimate causality. By means of it, in operating room equipped with the latest technology, we were not alone in the house. The comfort my surgeon offered me was very genuine. I felt my fears about outcome slip away and went under anesthesia holding on to those few words with the deepest sense of peace. Like all genuine prayers, this prayer is a powerful way of embracing life, finding a home in any outcome, and remembering that there may be reasons beyond reason.

Prayer is a movement from mastery to mystery. I used to pray for my patients. These days I pray for myself, too. Sometimes I pray for compassion, but often I pray for harmlessness, the great spiritual quality embodied in the Hippocratic oath. As a human being, I know I can never hope to have the depth and breadth of perspective to know whether any of my actions will ultimately harm or heal. Yet it is my hope I may be used to serve a holy purpose without ever knowing. So sometimes, before I see a patient, I offer up a little wordless prayer: Understanding the suffering is beyond me. Understanding the healing is, too. But in this moment, I am here. Use me

 

Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal (Riverhead books, 1996), pages 270-272. 

Friday, September 23, 2022

Discovering grace within: Remen excerpt #8

Rachel Naomi Remen writes: The shamans attribute illness to soul loss, a loss of a sense of awareness of the sacred in us and around us. Sacred experience is subjective and even intuitive experience. Growing up in this culture, many people have developed and cultivated a harder-edged notion of what is real. Few of us can easily talk about those things we cannot touch or express in numbers, no matter how commonplace the experience. And the experience of God is commonplace. God is in the ordinary, the minute particulars. When you come right down to it, all life is holy. What is most real may be those very things which cannot be expressed at all but only known.

The experience of immeasurable realities is far more important than we might imagine. The things we cannot measure may be the things that ultimately sustain our lives. Much recent medical research suggest that isolation makes us vulnerable to illness and that relationship furthers survival. Medical science has demonstrated that our simple caring for each other sustains us and enables us to better survive even such physical challenges as metastatic breast cancer. Community heals. Yet when it comes to healing relationship, who’s to say that communion isn’t as important as community.

A diagnosis of life-threatening illness casts us headlong into the subjective world. People who have sought healing everywhere else are often afraid to look within, afraid to find, at depth, someone insignificant or even unworthy. Yet this is rarely the case. The soul is our birthright. At depth, everyone is beautiful. Often it is the discovery of the ‘spot of grace’ that heralds the beginning of our deepest healing.

 

Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal (Riverhead books, 1996), pages 261-62.

Thursday, September 22, 2022

Trusting has great power: Remen excerpt #7

Dr Remen writes: ‘Human being’ is more a verb than a noun. Each of us is unfinished, a work in progress. Perhaps it would be most accurate to add the word ’yet’ to all our assessments of ourselves and each other. 

If life is a process, all judgments are provisional. We can’t judge something until it is finished. No one has won or lost until the race is over.

‘Broken’ may be only a stage in a process. A bud is not a broken rose. Only lifeless things are broken. Perhaps the unique process which is a human being is never over.

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.

Naming a disease has limited usefulness. It does not capture life or even reflect it accurately. Illness, on the other hand, is a process, like life is.

Seeing the life force in human beings brings medicine closer to gardening than to carpentry. I don’t fix a rosebush. A rosebush is a living process, and as a student of that process, I can learn to prune, to nurture and cooperate with it in ways that allow it best to ‘happen,’ to maximize the life force in it even in the presence of disease.

Simply trusting process has a great power. The trust of process that comes from personal knowledge and experience is really the foundation of helping and comforting one another. Without it all of our actions are driven by fear. Fear is the friction in all transitions.

Holding and conveying a sense of possibility does not mean making demands or having expectations. It may mean having no expectations, but simply being open to whatever promise the situation may hold and remembering the inability of anyone to know the future. Thoreau said that we must awaken and stay awake not by mechanical means, but by a constant expectation of the dawn. 

There’s no need to demand the dawn, the dawn is simply a matter of time. And patience. And the dawn may look quite different from the story we tell ourselves about it. My experience has shown me the wisdom of remaining open to the possibility of growth in any and all circumstances, without ever knowing what shape that growth may take.


Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal (Riverhead books, 1996),
pages 223-225, 231.

Wednesday, September 21, 2022

We may all be healers: Remen excerpt #6

Rachel Naomi Remen writes: In the past few years a great deal of attention has been paid to angels and many people have become more aware of the possibility that insight and guidance may be offered at surprising times and in surprising ways. Books have been written about meetings with such celestial messengers and the help and healing they have offered. What is not so commonly recognized is that it is not only angels that carry divine messages of healing and guidance; any one of us may be used in this same way. We are messengers for each other. The difference between us and the folks with the wings is that we often carry these messages without knowing it. Like the holy Shadow.

It has been my experience and the experience of many other therapists that when I am facing a difficult personal issue or a painful decision or am struggling with some recalcitrant and stubborn part of my self, a very peculiar thing will happen. Many of my clients will spontaneously bring in the same issue. Completely unaware of the personal importance of the issue to me, they will work on some aspect of it as it pertains to them, all the while offering me, through their own work, guidance and perspective on the issue for my healing. Sometimes they work on the very issue or sometimes in the process of working on something else they will offer a single sentence or thought that cuts through my confusion and free me.

I have many examples of this, but one stands out in my mind. It was a time when I discovered that a friend had incorporated some of my ideas and exercises into her bestselling book without acknowledging where she had learned them. I felt hurt and betrayed by this until my third client of the day sat down and pleasantly remarked, ‘You know, you can get a lot of good done in this world if you don’t care who gets the credit.’ Astonished, I asked her what had made think of this ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘it was on the bumper sticker of the car that just pulled out of my parking spot.’

Perhaps the world is one big healing community and we are all healers of each other. Perhaps we are all angels. And we do not know.

 

Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal (Riverhead books, 1996), pages 247-48. 

Tuesday, September 20, 2022

Listening can be healing: Remen excerpt #5

I have come to suspect that the subjective world is probably a hologram and the pattern of our most fundamental beliefs is reflected in the smallest of our behaviors. If this is so, breaking up that pattern at any one point may eventually free us from it. 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. Healing requires a certain willingness to hear and respond to life’s needs.

We all can 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.

People have been healing each other since the beginning. Long before there were surgeons, psychologists, oncologists, and internists, we were there for each other. The healing of our present woundedness may lie in recognizing and reclaiming the capacity we all have to heal each other, the enormous power in the simplest of human relationships: the strength of a touch, the blessing of forgiveness, the grace of someone else taking you just as you are and finding in you an unsuspected goodness.

Everyone alive has suffered. It is the wisdom gained from our wounds and from our own experiences of suffering that makes us able to heal. Becoming expert has turned out to be less important than remembering and trusting the wholeness in myself and everyone else. Expertise cures, but wounded people can best be healed by other wounded people. Only other wounded people can understand what is needed, for the healing of suffering is compassion, not expertise.

Listening is the oldest and perhaps the most powerful tool of healing. It is often through the quality of our listening and not the wisdom of our words that 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. Our listening creates sanctuary for the homeless parts within the other person. That which has been denied, unloved, devalued by themselves and by others. That which is hidden.

Listening creates a holy silence. When you listen generously to people, they can hear 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, M.D., Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal (Riverhead books, 1996),
pages 214, 217, 219-220.

 

Monday, September 19, 2022

Accepting whatever life offers: Remen excerpt #4

Dr Remen says that as as a child she hid pieces of a puzzle that her parents were working on, which were dark and made her feeling uncomfortable. When her parents asked if she knew where the missing pieces were, she showed them and explained her feeling. She recalls watching her mother complete the puzzle . . .

As piece after dark piece was put in place and the picture emerged, I was astounded. I had not known there would be a picture. It was quite beautiful, a peaceful scene of a deserted beach. Without the pieces I had hidden, the game had made no sense.

Perhaps winning requires that we love the game unconditionally. Life provides all the pieces. When I accepted certain parts of life and denied and ignored the rest, I could only see my life a piece at a time—the happiness of a success or a time of celebration, or the ugliness and pain of a loss or a failure I was trying hard to put behind me out of sight. But like the dark pieces of the puzzle, these sadder events, painful as they are, have proven themselves a part of something larger. What brief glimpses I have had of something hidden seem to require accepting as a gift every last piece.

We are always putting the pieces together without knowing the picture ahead of time. I have been with many people in times of profound loss and grief when an unsuspected meaning begins to emerge from the fragments of their lives. Over time, this meaning has proven itself to be durable and trustworthy, even transformative. It is a kind of strength that never comes to those who deny their pain.

Over the years I have seen the power of taking an unconditional relationship to life. I am surprised to have found a sort of willingness to show up for whatever life may offer and meet with it rather than wishing to edit and change the inevitable. Many of my patients also seem to have found their way to this viewpoint on life.

When people begin to take such an attitude, they seem to become intensely alive, intensely present. Their losses and suffering have not caused them to reject life, have not cast them into a pace of resentment, victimization, or bitterness. As a friend with HIV/DISA puts it, ‘I have let go of my preferences and am living with an intense awareness of the miracle of the moment.’ Or in the words of another patient, ‘When you are walking on thin ice, you might as well dance.’

From such people I have learned a new definition of the word ‘joy.’ 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. Rather than the warrior who fights toward a specific outcome and therefore is haunted by the specter of failure and disappointment, it is the lover drunk with the opportunity to live despite the possibility of loss, the player for whom playing has become more important than winning or losing.

There is a fundamental paradox here. The less we are attached to life, the more alive we can become. The less we have preferences about life, the more deeply we can experience and participate in life. Embracing life may be more about . . . trusting one’s ability to take joy in the newness of the day and what it may bring. More about adventure than having your own way.


Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal (Riverhead books, 1996), pages 170-171.
 


Sunday, September 18, 2022

A stone survival ritual: Remen excerpt #3

Dr Remen writes: One of the most common things people with cancer tell me is that experiences of hospitalization and treatment are profoundly isolating. I suspect that this sense of aloneness may even undermine the will to live. When we feel the support of others, many of us can face the unknown with greater strength. I often use ritual to help people at times like this.

For more than twenty years I have offered a very simple yet powerful ritual to people before their radiation, chemotherapy, or surgery. I suggest they meet together with some of their closest friends and family the day before their procedure. It does not matter how large or small the group is, but it is important that it be made up of those who are connected to them through a bond of the heart.

Before this meeting I suggest they find an ordinary stone, a piece of the earth, big enough to fit in the palm of their hand and bring it to the meeting with them. The ritual begins by having everyone sit in a circle. In any order they wish to speak each person tells the story of a time when they too faced a crisis. People may talk about the death of important persons, the loss of jobs or relationships. Or even about their own illnesses. The person who is speaking holds the stone the patient has brought. When they finish telling their story of survival, they take a moment to reflect on the personal quality that they feel helped them come through that difficult time. People will say such things as, ‘What brought me through was determination,’ ‘What brought me through was faith,’ ‘What brought me through was humor.’ When they have named the quality of their strength, they speak directly to the person preparing for surgery or treatment, saying, ‘I put determination into this stone for you,’ or,’ ‘I put faith into this stone for you.’

Often what people say is surprising. Sometimes they tell of crises that occurred when they were young or in wartime that others, even family members, may not have known before, or they attribute their survival to qualities that are not ordinarily seen as strengths. It is usually a moving and intimate meeting and often all the people who participate say that they feel strengthened and inspired by it. After everyone has spoken the stone is given back to the patient, who takes it with them to the hospital, to keep nearly and hold in their hand when things get hard.

I have had several patients go to their chemotherapy, their radiation, or even their surgery with their stones strapped with adhesive tape to the palm of one of their hands of the bottom of their foot.

Over the years, many of the oncologists and surgeons in our community have learned about these stones from their patients and are very careful about them. One surgeon even had the staff go through the hospital laundry in search of a stone that was accidentally thrown away with the sheets sin the recovery room. I asked why he had done this and he laughed and said, ‘Listen, I have seen people do badly after surgery and even die when there was no reason for it other than the act that they believed they wouldn’t make it. I need all the help I can get.’

Actually, no one has chemotherapy or radiation or goes into an operating room without the thoughts, hopes, and prayers of many people going with them. The stone seems to make all that a little more plain to people and reminds they of the strength and beauty of what is natural. In an environment which is highly technical and sterile, it connects them to the earth. Ritual is one of the oldest ways to mobilize the power of community for healing. It makes the caring of the community visible tangible, real.


Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal (Riverhead books, 1996), pages151-153.

Saturday, September 17, 2022

Anything good is forever: Remen excerpt #2

Dr. Remen writes of dying: Tim, a cardiologist, looked around the room at the group of doctors mesmerized by this story. “Because he died unexpectedly at home, the law required that we have an autopsy,” he told us quietly. “My father’s brain was almost entirely destroyed by this disease. For many years, I have asked myself, ‘Who spoke?’ I have never found even the slightest help from any medical textbook. I am no close to knowing this now than I was then but carrying this question with me reminds me of something important, something I do not want to forget. Much of life can never be explained but only witnessed.”

Sometimes the particulars of the way in which someone dies, the time, place, even the circumstances, may cause those left behind to wonder whether the event marks the healing of hidden patterns and personal issues, and answers for that person certain lifelong questions. Death has been referred to as the great teacher. It may be the great healer as well. Educare, the root word of ‘education,’ means to lead forth the innate wholeness in a person. So, in the deepest sense, that which truly educates us also heals us.

The theory of karma suggests that life itself is in its essential nature both educational and healing, that the innate wholeness underlying the personality of each of us is being evoked, clarified, and strengthened through the challenges and experiences of our lifetime. All life paths may be a movement toward the soul, In which case our death may be the final and most integrating of our life’s experiences.

Anything that is real has no beginning and no end. The stories in your life and in mine do not stop here.

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, M.D., Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal (Riverhead books, 1996),
pages 300-301, 325, 331, 333.


Being a human is never over: Remen excerpt #1

Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., is Professor of Family Medicine at Wright State Boonshoft School of Medicine and Clinical Professor of Family and Community Medicine at UCSF School of Medicine. She is the founder of the Remen Institute for the Study of Health and Illness (RISHI), which was at Commonweal for decades and is currently at Pure Healthcare in Dayton, Ohio. As a medical educator, therapist, and teacher, she has enabled many thousands of physicians to find individual meaning and purpose in the practice medicine, and thousands of patients to remember their power to heal. Dr. Remen has had Crohn’s disease for more than 65 years and her work is a unique blend of the wisdom, strength, and viewpoints of both doctor and patient.


Dr Remen writes: Listening creates a holy silence. When you listen generously to people, they can hear 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.


Perhaps the unique process which is a human being is never over. Even at death
. (Italics added.)


Perhaps the world is one big healing community and we are all healers of each other. Perhaps we are all angels. And we do not know.


I think that prayer may be less about asking for the things we are attached to than it is about relinquishing our attachments in some way. It can take us beyond fear, which is an attachment, and beyond hope, which is another form of attachment. It can help us remember the nature of the world and the nature of life, not on an intellectual level but in a deep and experiential way. When we pray, we don’t change the world, we change ourselves. We change our consciousness. We move from an individual, isolated making-things-happen kind of consciousness to a connection on the deepest level with the largest possible reality. When we pray, we stop trying to control life and remember that we belong to life. It is an opportunity to experience humility and recognize grace.


Mystery seems to have the power to comfort, to offer hope, and to lend meaning in times of loss and pain. In surprising ways, it is the mysterious that strengthens us at such times. I used to try to offer people certainty in times which were not at all certain and could not be made certain. I now just offer my companionship and share my sense of mystery, of the possible, of wonder.


I accept that I may never know where truth lies in such matters. The most important questions don’t seem to have ready answers. But the questions themselves have a healing power when they are shared. An answer is an invitation to stop thinking about something, to stop wondering. Life has no such stopping places; life is a process whose every event is connected to the moment that just went by. And unanswered question is a fine traveling companion. It sharpens your eye for the road.


Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal (Riverhead books, 1996),pages 220, 224, 270, and 293.

Thursday, September 15, 2022

Amazing grace: Pagels excerpt #7

Historian of religion Elaine Pagels begins her book Why Religion? with this personal affirmation: When I began to read the Gospel of Thomas, a list of a hundred and fourteen sayings that claims to reveal "the secret words of the living Jesus,” what I found stopped me in my tracks. According to saying 70, Jesus said, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” Struck by these words, I thought, We’re not asked to believe this; it just happens to be true. Whether Jesus actually said this, we can’t know for sure, but to me that didn’t matter. What did matter was the challenge.

She ends her book with a reflection on her experience of being recognized for her achievements at a Harvard University graduation ceremony: the invisible bonds connecting everyone there, and connecting all of us with countless others and with our world and whatever is beyond it, felt stronger than ever, echoing the words of an ancient Jewish prayer: "Blessed art Thou, Lord God of the Universe, that you have brought us alive to see this day." However it happens, sometimes hearts do heal, thorough what I can only call grace.

 

Pagels, Elaine. Why Religion? (p. 23, 210). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition

 

Her words remind me of the verse from the hymn, "Amazing Grace" . . .

 

Through many dangers, toils and snares
I have already come;
'Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far
And grace will lead me home. 

The lyrics to "Amazing Grace" were penned by the Englishman John Newton (1725-1807). Once the captain of a slave ship, Newton converted to Christianity after an encounter with God in a violent storm at sea.

The change in Newton's life was radical. Not only did he become an evangelical minister for the Church of England, but he also fought slavery as a social justice activist.

Newton inspired and encouraged William Wilberforce (1759-1833), a British member of Parliament who fought to abolish slave trading in England.

 



Gödel's reasons for an afterlife

Alexander T. Englert, “We'll meet again,” Aeon , Jan 2, 2024, https://aeon.co/essays/kurt-godel-his-mother-and-the-a...