Rachel naomi remen in the service of life

In recent years the question how can I help? But perhaps there is a deeper question we might consider. Perhaps the real question is not how can I help? Serving is different from helping.

Service rests on the basic premise that the nature of life is sacre that life is a holy mystery, which has an unknown purpose.

When we serve, we know that we belong to life and to that purpose. Fundamentally, helping, fixing, and service are ways of seeing life. One was a man who lost his wife to cancer, the other a mother who lost her son in Afghanistan. Life can be very hard.

There is an old wisdom story that is told at the time of Rosh Hashanna, the beginning of the Jewish New Year. It’s called The Birthday of the World and it goes like this: in the Beginning there was only the Holy Darkness, the source of life. We canonly serve that to which we are profoundly connected.

Helping, fixing and serving represent three different ways of seeing life.

She is Co-Founder and Medical Director of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program featured in the Bill Moyers PBS series, Healing and the Mind and has cared for people. When you fix, you see life as broken. It is our limitations that make us kind to the limitations of other people.

She is co-founder and medical director of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program in Bolinas, California and is currently clinical professor of family and community medicine at the University of California at San Francisco School of Medicine. The way we deal with loss shapes our capacity to be present to life more than anything else,” she says. Rachel Naomi Remen , M. As a chil she felt torn between a religious path or a medical career, but has been able to combine the two as an holistic physician. But service tends more to be renewing and even energizing. Thus, service is more likely to nourish, rather than consume or exhaust.

We may help or fix many things in our lives, but when we serve, we are always in the service of wholeness. Great Used Books Starting at $3. Free Shipping Available. Fixing and helping may be the work of the ego, and service the work of the soul. She is cofounder and medical director of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program in Bolinas, California, and is currently clinical professor of family and community medicine at the University of California at San Francisco School of Medicine.

She is a professor at the Osher Center of Integrative Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. She has much to teach us about healing, loving, and living. My Grandfather’s Blessings is a massage to the heart.

Remen ’s grandfather, an orthodox rabbi and scholar of the Kabbalah, saw life as a web of connection and knew that everyone belonged to him and that he belonged to everyone. We fix what is broken, unable to see what works, albeit not always in ways we understand or value. Helping and fixing are the work of the ego, serving is the work of the soul. And whereas we burn out from helping and fixing, service is renewing.

Everyone alive has suffered.