photo and bio from www.rachelremen.com/about/biography/

Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D. is Clinical Professor of Family and Community Medicine at UCSF School of Medicine and Founder and Director of the Institute for the Study of Health and Illness at Commonweal. She is one of the best-known of the early pioneers of Wholistic and Integrative Medicine. As a medical educator, therapist and teacher, she has enabled many thousands of physicians to practice medicine from the heart and thousands of patients to remember their power to heal. Her groundbreaking curriculum for medical students, The Healer’s Art, is taught in 90 of America’s medical schools and medical schools in 7 countries abroad. A master storyteller and observer of life, her bestselling books, Kitchen Table Wisdom and My Grandfather’s Blessings, have sold more than a million copies and are translated into 23 languages. Dr. Remen has had Crohn’s disease for more than 60 years and her work is a unique blend of the wisdom, strength and viewpoints of both doctor and patient.

"Healing Eye"

Twenty-five years ago I found myself caught between two paradigms. I had been on the faculty of Stanford's medical school for several years but I had become increasingly restless. A number of people had come my way who had knowledge of a different way of doing things: anthropologists, psychologists, artists, messengers from the world beyond medicine, students of another wisdom about pain and suffering. More and more, I found myself participating in discussions of healing rather than curing.

It was 1973 and at the time there was no place for these ideas in medical work or teaching, and yet, as a patient myself, I recognized them and they seemed to me to be of great significance. I began to wonder about certain things. Did people's beliefs about themselves affect their ability to get well? Could people have an intuitive sense of the direction of their healing? Was there more to helping people recover than knowing the right diagnosis and offering the proper treatment? Did our relationship to our patients affect outcome as profoundly as our medications? Slowly, I began to question things that no one around me doubted were true. Over a period of time, l felt myself moving farther and farther away from the perspectives of my colleagues. I was unable to reach across the widening gap in our thinking and it was frightening.

The stress was so severe that I found myself wondering if I could continue in my present work, although there was nowhere to go to work differently. I didn't seem to belong anywhere and I was no longer sure of who I was or what I believed in.

One of my new friends had given me a book of poetry—Khalil Gibran's The Prophet—which had in it several illustrations by the poet himself, among them a drawing of a hand with a gentle and compassionate human eye in its palm. I discovered that this was a traditional Hindu symbol for the healer. In the Hindu belief the energy centers called chakras, in our palms, connect the hand and heart of the healer and convey the wisdom and energy needed for the healing. This was in direct contrast to my training, which had led me to place trust in the intellect as the tool of healing. Yet this older idea of being able to "see" with your hands was for some reason compelling to me, and I found myself thinking about it a great deal. It seemed familiar.

Eventually, I took the page from the book and framed it. I felt uncomfortable hanging it in my office at Stanford and so I put it over my desk at home.

The stress continued to build and then I received an unexpected and significant faculty promotion. Amid a flurry of congratulations, I became increasingly troubled. It seemed to me that a choice had to be made, between the path that I had spent half my lifetime preparing to travel—the way to recognition, security, and professional acceptance—and another path, dimly perceived and poorly understood, that led off into the unknown. How could I even consider such an alternative? A hundred other physicians would kill to step into my shoes. I desperately wanted to accept the promotion, but something held me back. I temporized.

At this time I was living on one coast and my family was on the other. A few times a year, I would fly across the country to visit my parents, to New York in the summer and to Florida in the winter. One of these occasions, my thirty-fifth birthday, was coming up. With a heavy heart, I arrived in Florida to spend a week with the family, whose financial sacrifices had made possible my medical training. I knew my promotion would bring them great satisfaction, but somehow I couldn't bring myself to tell them about it.

On my birthday I took a walk with my mother. We sat after a while on a park bench in the Florida sunshine, talking about what she could remember of my birth: I had been born ahead of time by cesarean section. I had been in an incubator for some time. She had felt guilty about this, as if my suffering were her fault. It was very moving for me to hear some things that I had not known, and as I sat listening to her tell me my own story, I remember having the single clear thought that here was the one person who had known me from my very beginnings, who knew who I really was.

Just then my mother turned to look at a young woman sitting on the next bench who was playing with her little girl. The child was drawing little faces on the tips of her fingers with a felt-tip pen and speaking to them as if they were little puppet people. She and her mother were laughing. I was charmed.

After watching for a while in silence, my own mother turned to me with a smile and remarked with some emphasis, "Some things never change."

"Why, what do you mean, Mom?" Delighted with the memory, she told me that when I was small I too used to draw on my hands. I had absolutely no recollection of this and asked her if I had drawn little faces on my fingertips.

"No," my mother said. "You used to do a funny thing. You would take your daddy's fountain pen and draw eyes in the palms of your hands. Then you would hold your hands up on either side of your face with your palms facing forward like this," she said, showing me. "You would close your eyes and say, `Now I can see you,' and giggle. Such a funny thing. Sometimes you would not let us wash your hands for days. You were about four. Do you remember now?"

On an average day in the pediatric clinics, I washed my hands thirty or forty times. Perhaps over the years, I had washed away my eyes. About two weeks later, l resigned from Stanford and began searching for my lost eyes.

~ Rachel Naomi Remen in Kitchen Table Wisdom