It was my mentor Rachel Naomi Remen, MD who taught me the profound difference between fixing, helping, and serving. Fixing and helping, she said, can be a form of control, a way to bolster our own egos, but often at the expense of someone else’s self esteem and wholeness. Fixing and helping can “one up” someone we view as weaker in ways that disempower them, rather than truly serving them. Serving, however, is the work of the soul. We serve as equals, in ways that empower rather than disempower, those we serve. In this audio, I read to you, in her words, as a testament to so many teachings that touched me profoundly.
Rachel’s memorial is today, so please accept this gift of her words in my words, as a way to honor Rachel who died of breast cancer on 8/8/26 at 88 years old.
I’ve spent a lot of words on this Substack deconstructing harmful spiritual teachings, and one of the reasons I’ve been able to do that is because Rachel let me learn my hard knock lessons but was always here to help me make sense of things when the spiritual shit hit the fan. I was very blessed to have such a trustworthy and wise teacher, who let me become myself while imbuing me and so many others with pieces of herself, like gems in our hearts. I’ll be sharing more about what I learned from twenty years of having Rachel as my spiritual teacher, so if you’d like to spend some time immersed in what I learned, please subscribe.
*This photo was taken by Rachel. It’s the gravestone of her cat Cashmere, taken in the backyard of her Mill Valley home before she moved to Concord. Now, I think it applies to her.
