Rachel Naomi Remen: Our Purpose In Life Is To Grow In Wisdom and In Love

Photo by Molly

Quotes by Rachel Naomi Remen

Our purpose in life is to grow in wisdom and in love.

Those who don’t love themselves as they are rarely love life either.

There are only two kinds of people in the world. Those who are alive and those who are afraid.

Healing may not be so much about getting better, as about letting go of everything that isn’t you – all of the expectations, all of the beliefs – and becoming who you are. 

Wounding and healing are not opposites. They’re part of the same thing. It is our wounds that enable us to be compassionate with the wounds of others. It is our limitations that make us kind to the limitations of other people. It is our loneliness that helps us to to find other people or to even know they’re alone with an illness. I think I have served people perfectly with parts of myself I used to be ashamed of. 

Every great loss demands that we choose life again. We need to grieve in order to do this. The pain we have not grieved over will always stand between us and life. When we don’t grieve, a part of us becomes caught in the past like Lot’s wife who, because she looked back, was turned into a pillar of salt. 

Many times when we help we do not really serve. . . . Serving is also different from fixing. One of the pioneers of the Human Potential Movement, Abraham Maslow, said, “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.’ Seeing yourself as a fixer may cause you to see brokenness everywhere, to sit in judgment of life itself. When we fix others, we may not see their hidden wholeness or trust the integrity of the life in them. Fixers trust their own expertise. When we serve, we see the unborn wholeness in others; we collaborate with it and strengthen it. Others may then be able to see their wholeness for themselves for the first time.

Belief traps or frees us.

It has been said that sometimes we need a story more than food in order to live. 

When we know ourselves to be connected to all others, acting compassionately is simply the natural thing to do. 

Helping, fixing, and serving represent three different 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. Fixing and helping may be the work of the ego, and service the work of the soul.

Suffering shapes the life force, sometimes into anger, sometimes into blame and self-pity. Eventually it may show us the wisdom of embracing and loving life.

The willingness to consider possibility requires a tolerance of uncertainty. 

Life offers its wisdom generously. Everything teaches. Not everyone learns.

It is not that we have a soul, but that we are a soul.

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