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Quotations from

Rachel Naomi Remen

About

Rachel Naomi Remen (February 8, 1938 – August 8, 2026) was an American pediatrician who gained fame as an author, medical educator, and pioneer in integrative medicine. She was a professor at the Osher Center of Integrative Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Together with Michael Lerner, she was a founder of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program, a cornerstone program at Commonweal. She was the founder of the Institute for the Study of Health & Illness. She has been featured on the PBS television series, Thinking Allowed. She drew on Jewish traditional wisdom "to propose that the future is determined by the potential of the present."

from Wikipedia

Quotes from Rachel Naomi Remen

We have become terribly vulnerable, not because we suffer but because we have separated ourselves from each other. A patient once told me that he had tried to ignore his own suffering and the suffering of other people because he had wanted to be happy. Yet becoming numb to suffering will not make us happy. The part in us that feels suffering is the same as the part that feels joy.

—Rachel Naomi Remen

happiness joy suffering vulnerability distance numbness

I heard a Tibetan lama address this same issue in a far different language. "We die not because we are ill but because we are complete.… Illness is the occasion of our dying, but not the cause.

—Rachel Naomi Remen