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Tuesday January 7, 1997

`Kitchen Table Wisdom' offers folksy fare for healing the soul

JANET SILVER GHENT
Bulletin Staff

When Rachel Naomi Remen was growing up as the daughter of socialists in New York, her religious training came from her Russian-born grandfather's stories.

The Orthodox rabbi's teaching techniques were subtle. He wove tales of Grandmother Eve, Queen Esther and Rachel, her namesake, never once revealing that his stories came from scriptural sources or that he was talking about religion. To do so would have incurred the wrath of Remen's parents, who considered religion the opiate of the masses.

In the course of her life, Remen, 58, developed her own repertoire of stories -- her personal struggles with life-threatening Crohn's disease, a chronic digestive-system affliction she has battled since the age of 15; her youthful encounters with her friend the skeleton in the basement of her uncle's medical office; attending medical school when women students were a rarity; and evolving from conventional practice to psycho-oncology, a field she has pioneered.

She's distilled the stories of friends, family, patients and colleagues in "Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal," which she will discuss Thursday, Jan. 16 at the Marin Jewish Community Center in San Rafael.

The book reveals the sacred connection between the lessons of the sages, which Remen's grandfather imparted so many years ago, and the power of humans to heal themselves and one another -- by talking, listening, opening up without judging.

"The kitchen table," she writes, "is a level playing field. Everyone's story matters."

For those who enjoy contemporary parables that reveal timeless truths, "Kitchen Table Wisdom" ranks with the writings of Thomas Moore, James Hillman and Rabbi Lawrence Kushner. But its vision is that of a woman and a healer who has long recognized that strength lies in vulnerability, a willingness to take the risk of uncovering one's humanness.

"The wisdom of this book is grounded in real life," writes Dr. Dean Ornish in the foreword. Remen "can hear and transmit the message of the ultimate spiritual teacher, which is life itself."

Today, Remen's kitchen table is in her Mill Valley A-frame on the edge of Mount Tamalpais, where the silent redwoods serve as her sanctuary. When she moved in, she began to "edit" the house, clearing away a shelf here, a wall there, following a practice she has followed in her own career.

Remen began her career traditionally, serving on the faculty of Stanford School of Medicine before evolving into the private practice in psycho-oncology. In helping people with cancer rally their mental and spiritual resources to heal themselves, she was able to come up with many of their stories, included in the book.

In 1984, she co-founded Commonweal Cancer Help Program in Bolinas, which was featured on Bill Moyers' acclaimed PBS series "Healing and the Mind." She's also an associate clinical professor at UCSF School of Medicine.

As her career unfolded, Remen discovered an ability to heal that transcended the objective lessons of her medical training. One such epiphany was as a patient in 1981. After undergoing repeated surgery for Crohn's disease, she developed serious infections when the sutures holding her intestine together gave way. Because of the infection, the physicians could not resuture.

"You know," said one of the surgeons, "because of the infection we will have to close by primary intention."

When the bandage was changed the day after surgery, Remen suddenly realized she was bearing an open wound left to heal on its own. Contemplating living the rest of her life with a "great hole in my front," she refused to examine the wound for about a week. When she did look, she was astounded. The great wound had become "a hairline scar."

Primary intention?

"It was so much beyond my own intention that I was astounded," she said.

The lesson is "that there's mystery in life and that we have healing as a birthright, and that there might be something called life force, which we don't recognize until it's called upon in this way.

"It also made it very clear to me that as a physician, my interventions were cooperating with something; they weren't making something happen."

In retreats at Commonweal, people with cancer discover their ability to heal themselves and one another through touch, poetry, art, meditation and discussion. In her book, Remen reveals the story of Yitzak, a physicist and concentration camp survivor who had difficulty adjusting to what he called "all dis huggy-huggy" at Commonweal.

Finally able to open up as the weeklong retreat came to a close, Yitzak said he had a dialogue with God as he walked along the beach. "I say to Him, `God, is it okay to luff strangers?' And God says, `Yitzak, vat is dis strangers? You make strangers. I don't make strangers.'"

Like Yitzak, Remen's own father had difficulty trusting. Winning the New York lottery, he wouldn't spend the money because he didn't want others to know he had received a windfall.

Later, when he and his wife left their Manhattan apartment for a Long Island home, he wouldn't go on vacation, for fear something disastrous would happen. And when Remen had a couch sent from Macy's to replace one that was dilapidated, her father canceled the order, "because he couldn't figure out how to let go of the [old] couch without putting himself at risk in some way.

"It's the shadow side of the diaspora," said Remen. "That anything that you had could be taken away from you."

In her own life, battling Crohn's disease as well as glaucoma and cataracts that have left her partly blind, and in her work as a healer, Remen constantly comes to terms with loss. One day she sat down in a workshop with eight people with cancer and began to write a poem, acknowledging, "Deep inside, I am whole."

"Most of us don't realize that there is that place of integrity in us until the body becomes challenged," she said. "Basically, what healing is is the ability to enable another person to uncover a hidden integrity that they recognize they had all along. It's about growth."

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