Common-Sense Lessons Beautifully Told

Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal BY RACHEL NAOMI REMEN

REVIEW BY ARLENE HARDER, MA, MFT

Many years ago, at a seminar on guided imagery for healing, Rachel Naomi Remen began to share a relaxing, calming imagery for a group of several hundred clinicians when someone turned down the lights in the auditorium. She paused and said, "Please keep the lights on. I want you to know how to do this when you're standing in a grocery line. It's easy to find your calm center within when everything's quiet and the lights are low, it's much harder if life is going on around you."

Simple words. A wonderfully common-sense lesson. A beautifully compassionate, eloquent and common-sense woman.

In Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal the author has translated a wealth of life lessons, from her experience as a physician, professor of medicine, therapist, long-term survivor of chronic illness, and founder of Commonweal, a support group for people facing terminal illness, into simple, but not simplistic stories, with honesty and grace.

When I picked up this book to review it for Support4Change (long after I had finished it and put it on my shelf) I remembered again the pleasure of using it for a going-to-sleep book. Not because it put me to sleep. But by reading one or two short chapters a night before turning out the light, the wisdom of these stories suffused my thoughts with healing and understanding.

How to review such a book? The best way is to quote some of the many excellent ideas you will find throughout the book:

We carry with us every story we have ever heard and every story we have ever lived, filed away at some deep place in our memory. We carry most of those stories unread, as it were, until we have grown the capacity or the readiness to read them. When that happens they may come back to us filled with a previously unsuspected meaning. It is almost as if we have been collecting pieces of a greater wisdom, sometimes over many years without knowing. (pg. xxxi)

Those who don't love themselves as they are rarely love life as it is either. Most people have come to prefer certain of life's experiences and deny and reject others, unaware of the value of the hidden things that may come wrapped in plain or even ugly paper. In avoiding all pain and seeking comfort at all cost, we may be left without intimacy or compassion; in rejecting change and risk we often cheat ourselves of the quest; in denying our suffering we may never know our strength or our greatness. Or even that the love we have been given can be trusted. (pg. 75)

Accidents and natural disasters often cause people to feel that life is fragile. In my experience, life can change abruptly and end without warning, but life is not fragile. There is a difference between impermanence and fragility. Even on the physiological level, the body is an intricate design of checks and balances, elegant strategies of survival layered on strategies of survival, balances and rebalances. (Page 7)

According to Talmudic teaching, "We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are." A belief is like a pair of sunglasses. When we wear a belief and look at life through it, it is difficult to convince ourselves that what we see is not what is real. With our sunglasses on, life looks green to us. Knowing what is real requires that we remember that we are wearing glasses, and take them off. One of the great moments in life is the moment we recognize we have them on in the first place. Freedom is very close to us then. It is a moment of great power. Sometimes because of our beliefs we may have never seen ourselves or life whole before. No matter. We can recognize life anyway. Our life force may not require us to strengthen it. We often just need to free it where it has gotten trapped in beliefs, attitudes, judgment, and shame. (pg. 77)

If you want a book to read before falling asleep, or any other time, especially if you are struggling with illness and emotional pain, Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal can be a truly healing experience.

My Grandfathers Blessings: Stories of Strength, Refuge, and Belonging

Rachel Naomi Remen has written a wonderful companion to Kitchen Table Wisdom. You will also want to savor each chapter, finding blessings of hope, kindness and compassion in each wise story and the profound lessons they eloquently express.

Although My Grandfathers Blessings : Stories of Strength, Refuge, and Belonging uses a slightly different style than her earlier book, the author again uses a collection of essays to share stories that allow the reader to understand the lessons her patients, and their physicians, have learned about the abundance of blessings that come from opening our hearts to the blessing from others — and our ability to bless others through contributions we can make in every day's interaction with others.

Although her grandfather isn't the central figure in each story, she is able to carry into her adult life the lessons, insights, and blessings he taught so many years ago. It is almost as though he is still very much alive and sharing his simple, but not simplistic, lessons to all of us.

Remen writes:

"Learning from life takes time. I rarely recognize life's wisdom at the time it is given. Sometimes I am too distracted by something else that has caught my wandering eye, and not every gift of wisdom comes nicely gift-wrapped. I have often received such a gift only many years after it was offered. Sometimes I needed to receive other things first, to live through other experiences in order to be ready. Much wisdom is a hand-me-down. Like all hand-me-downs, it may be too big at the time it is given."

My Grandfathers Blessings is a blessing for anyone who is tries to navigate the trials of every day.