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Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal | 
 enlarge | Creator: Rachel Naomi Remen
Publisher: Audio Literature
Category: Book
List Price: $17.95
Buy New: $12.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  44 reviews
Sales Rank: 230954
Format: Abridged
Media: Audio Cassette
Edition: Abridged
Number Of Items: 2
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7 x 4.4 x 0.8
ISBN: 1574530631
Dewey Decimal Number: 610.92
EAN: 9781574530636
ASIN: 1574530631
Publication Date: September 1996
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Amazon.com
"Sitting around the table telling stories is not just a way of passing time," writes Rachel Naomi Remen in her introduction to Kitchen Table Wisdom. "It is the way wisdom gets passed along. The stuff that helps us live a life worth remembering." Remen, a physician, therapist, professor of medicine, and long-term survivor of chronic illness, is also a down-home storyteller. Reading this collection of real-life parables feels like a late-night kitchen session with a best friend, munching on leftovers while listening to the good-as-gossip stories of everyday heroes and archetype villains. Every story guides us like a life compass, showing us what's good and lasting about ourselves as well as humanity.
Book Description
Enthusiastically praised by everyone from Bernie Siegel to Daniel Goleman to Larry Dossey, Rachel Remen has a unique perspective on healing rooted in her background as a physician, a professor of medicine, a therapist, and a long-term survivor of chronic illness. A deeply moving and down-to-earth collection of true stories, this prominent physician shows us life in all its power and mystery and reminds us that the things we cannot measure may be the things that ultimately sustain and enrich our lives. Kitchen Table Wisdom addresses spiritual issues-suffering, meaning, love, faith, courage, and miracles-in the language and authority of our own life experience.
Foreword by Dean Ornish, M.D.
"This is a beautiful book about life, the only true teacher."-Bernie Siegel, M.D.
"Rachel Naomi Remen is nature's gift to us, a genius of that elusive and crucial capacity, the human heart. She has much to teach us about healing, loving, and living."-Daniel Goleman, Ph.D., author of Emotional Intelligence
"A great healer and a living saint."-Larry Dossey, M.D.
"Heartfelt...compassionate and courageous."-Publishers Weekly
"I recommend this book highly to everyone."-Deepak Chopra, M.D.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 39 more reviews...
 Introspective life stories June 13, 2008
There was a seeming dual purpose motivating the author to write this book. Remen is a medical doctor who basically tells the stories about how her professional experiences moved her closer to, rather than away from, emotional involvement with her clients particularly as it pertained to the connection between one's spirituality and recovery,amongst other things.
Remen also shares some very deep and moving stories that were shared with her by her clients once she became a therapist.
It's a wonderful read and will be helpful to anyone seeking spiritual enlightenment and motivation.
Must Be Present to Win December 29, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Rachel Naomi Remen believes in the healing power of stories. She trained as a pediatrician and expected to practice traditional medicine much as her father and other male members of her family had done before her, but something happened to change her carefully planned course.
In the introduction to Kitchen Table Wisdom, Remen tells how her male colleagues frequently knocked on her office door to ask for her help with a crying patient. They believed that she, as a woman, would know what to do. Though she knew no more than they, she felt flattered that they came to her and felt that this helped her be more a part of their exclusive "Old Boys Network." She began to spend more and more time listening to patients share their fears and feelings of living with a terminal disease.
Since the age of fifteen, Remen has suffered from Crohn's disease. As she listened to her patients, she began to feel less lonely and isolated. Probably, her guidance and uncanny understanding of her patients stemmed from her familiarity with physical and emotional pain.
Kitchen Table Wisdom is a compilation of eighty-eight poignant stories that Remen heard over many years, as well as stories of her own life. Her stories demonstrate her belief that a larger process is at work in all our lives and that human beings are "unfinished, a work in progress." She believes we come into the world whole but lose faith in our wholeness and become discouraged by feelings of not being pretty enough, smart enough, etc. " ... our wholeness exists in us now," she writes, "Trapped though it may be, it can be called upon for guidance, direction and most fundamentally, comfort."
No retelling of Remen's stories can do them justice. One of my favorites is "The Question"--a story told by a patient named Tim (now a cardiologist) of his experience at the age of fifteen with his father, who was in the last stages of Alzheimers disease. At the time, his father had not spoken for ten years and was totally helpless. Tim and his brother were alone with their father when he suddenly slumped over and fell to the floor. The brother was calling 911 when both boys heard a voice commanding, "Don't call 911, son. Tell your mother that I love her. Tell her that I am all right." With those words, the man died. An autopsy later revealed that Tim's father's brain had been entirely destroyed by the disease. Tim never stops wondering who spoke those final words. He tells Dr. Remen, "Much of life can never be explained but only witnessed."
The author believes that talking about and sharing ones feelings revives memories that can lead to important new insights about ones life, bringing about a healing that formal treatment is unable to offer. She says that Shamans believe illness is a direct indication of soul loss. The soul, she explains, is that which is aware of the sacredness we carry and the sacredness that exists in the external world as well. Losing our appreciation for our sacredness, living with sadness, with feelings of unworthiness can manifest illness.
"Life is the ultimate teacher...," she writes. "It is through experience, and not scientific knowledge or expert academic training alone that we learn our deepest lessons." In her lectures and writings, Dr. Remen likes to tell of a sign on the wall of a room in Florida where the elderly come to play Bingo. It reads, "You Have to Be Present to Win." And so it is in life.
by Duffie Bart
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women
Sweet book May 6, 2007
Beautiful sweet touching book that helped me get me through some tough times. Celebrates the human spirit.
I recently had the privilege of hearing the author speak. she is an amazing woman.
Extraordinary book March 24, 2007
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
For years I refused to read this book after a friend's recommendation thinking that it would be another "feel good" attempt . Boy was I wrong! This book is one of the most extraordinary pieces of writing I have ever encountered. I have read it over and over again many times (the stories are short enough that allow you to read at your own pace). It has actually become sort of a "guide to Life" for me. Furthermore, as story-telling itself goes, is simply masterful. Dr. Remen is a powerful communicator and her wisdom goes beyond "new age". It is a groundbreaking work about mystery, awe and Life with a capital "L".
thinking positively November 6, 2006
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I am presurgery and this book helps to calm me and encourage me to think positively.
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