Rachel Naomi Remen,
Best Selling Author & California Resident

Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D. is one of the nationally recognized and most beloved pioneers of the mind-body health movement. Over the last twenty years, her articles, poetry, workshops, speaking engagements and television appearances have opened the hearts of hundreds and thousands of people across the nation. Medical Director of Commonweal, her work with people with cancer touched millions in the Bill Moyers PBS special "Healing and the Mind." She runs one of the first training programs for physicians in relationship-centered care and has cared for thousands of people with cancer and their physicians in her private practice of psycho-oncology over the past twenty years.

She is currently a clinical professor at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine and a founding fellow of the Fetzer Institute. Dr. Remen has a forty year personal history of chronic illness and her work represents a unique blend of the wisdom of patient and physician.

Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D. resides in Mill Valley, California.

Now she has written My Grandfather's Blessings, a work that further examines the human heart and celebrates those who serve life so beautifully, so effortlessly, so selflessly often without knowing. It was Rachel Remen's grandfather, a kabbalistic rabbi, who gave her the eyes to see that service is what heals the isolation and loneliness in us all. Service happens every day in ways we don't notice: we serve each other; life serves us; and it is discovering the place of service in ourselves that leads at last to wisdom. As Remen says, "Every life serves a purpose which is both simple and profound. We are here to grow in wisdom and to learn to love better. What this says is that there are many life paths but all life has a spiritual agenda. And all people are on a spiritual path." These stories give us a profound sense of strength that is achieved by knowing that we belong to each other, and to life itself.