“Each person is born with an unencumbered spot, free of expectation and regret, free of ambition and embarrassment, free of fear and worry; an umbilical spot of grace where we were each first touched by God. It is this spot of grace that issues peace. Psychologists call this spot the Psyche, Theologians call it the Soul, Jung calls it the Seat of the Unconscious, Hindu masters call it Atman, Buddhists call it Dharma, Rilke calls it Inwardness, Sufis call it Qalb, and Jesus calls it the Center of our Love.

To know this spot of Inwardness is to know who we are, not by surface markers of identity, not by where we work or what we wear or how we like to be addressed, but by feeling our place in relation to the Infinite and by inhabiting it. This is a hard lifelong task, for the nature of becoming is a constant filming over of where we begin, while the nature of being is a constant erosion of what is not essential. Each of us lives in the midst of this ongoing tension, growing tarnished or covered over, only to be worn back to that incorruptible spot of grace at our core.

When the film is worn through, we have moments of enlightenment, moments of wholeness, moments of Satori as the Zen sages term it, moments of clear living when inner meets outer, moments of full integrity of being, moments of complete Oneness. And whether the film is a veil of culture, of memory, of mental or religious training, of trauma or sophistication, the removal of that film and the restoration of that timeless spot of grace is the goal of all therapy and education.

Regardless of subject matter, this is the only thing worth teaching: how to uncover that original center and how to live there once it is restored. We call the filming over a deadening of heart, and the process of return, whether brought about through suffering or love, is how we unlearn our way back to God.”

LISSA’S STORY

As children, we are all born with healthy souls, and after a happy childhood, my soul was still very alive and vital through my teen years, but my medical education changed all that. After a decade of difficult, sometimes abusive medical education, I felt disconnected from my soul. I know it never left me- souls never do- but at the time, I found it hard to let my soul guide my life. After ten more years working within a system that left me feeling like I was selling my soul for the job security and financial stability my career offered, I found myself coming home from work at the end of every day feeling like I had so much more to give my patients, but the system was keeping me from serving in the way my soul yearned to serve. What resulted was illness, depression, chronic anxiety, insomnia, divorce, and a feeling of disconnection from the calling that drew me to medicine in the first place.

On the outside, it looked like I had the perfect life. Nobody guessed that something my soul was getting buried deeper and deeper. I was so worried people could see how dark I had gotten without the light of my soul shining through unimpeded that I tried even harder to cover the darkness with a mask of perfection. The more worried I got that I would somehow blow my cover, the more pressure I put upon myself to keep the masks in place.

But those masks only furthered my disconnection from my soul. I had the Doctor Mask, which led me to climb up onto a pedestal and pretend to know it all. Then I had the Artist Mask, where I pretended to be deep and brooding and mysterious. And then there was the Mommy Mask and the Perfect Wife Mask, which led me to feel the pressure of baking the perfect cupcake or always wearing sexy lingerie in bed.

It was exhausting, trying to keep up appearances, when deep down, I felt so lost, helpless, hopeless, and alone. But I was afraid to seek help. After all, I was a doctor. I thought I had to keep up the appearance of having it all together. Otherwise, who would trust me to take care of them?

Then my Perfect Storm blew through. Within two weeks of giving birth to my daughter, my dog died, my healthy young brother wound up in full blown liver failure as a rare side effect from the antibiotic Zithromax, and my beloved father passed away from a brain tumor. All hell broke loose, and my beleaguered soul stood up and said, “NO MORE!”

I finally decided to quit my job in conventional medicine in 2007. I now realize that as a sentinel moment in the evolution of my soul. Shortly after quitting my job, I wound up taking a writing workshop at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, where a quiet little voice inside me kept telling me I was supposed to go and meet someone. After ignoring the little voice for way too long, I finally gave in, and when I arrived at Esalen, a woman asked me why I was there, and I said, “Because I’m supposed to meet someone here.”

After listening to a little bit of my story, she piped up and said, “Oh, you’re supposed to meet Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen.”

I had never heard of Rachel, but when I got back home, I looked her up online, bought her book Kitchen Table Wisdom, read the whole book within 24 hours, and along with the 4 million other readers who have read Kitchen Table Wisdom, I fell in love with Rachel. We met soon afterwards at a workshop she was leading for doctors, and I have spent the last six years as part of a small group of doctors who meet monthly at Rachel’s house to discuss finding meaning in medicine.

In that circle of love, my soul started to heal from two decades of insults, and under Rachel’s mentorship, I found within myself a strength and a resilience I didn’t know I had. Some dim part of me I had almost lost touch with, the part I now call my “Inner Pilot Light,” began to flicker, and with the medicine of Rachel’s love and the love of the other doctors in our study group, I started to feel whole again for the first time in years. Once the barriers between me and my soul started mending, other parts of my life started falling into place. I started blogging and writing books and got in touch with my life’s purpose. Doing my soul’s work generated plenty of revenue so I could dig my family out of the hole of debt I had landed us in after quitting my job. Relationships I had nearly destroyed began to heal, and I started attracting new relationships into my life with people who were on the same healing journey to reclaim the soul that I was.

As a result, my spiritual life, which I had long ago abandoned because my soul didn’t resonate with the rigidity and judgments of my strict Christian upbringing, began to come back to life. I found myself on a spiritual path that led me to explore a variety of spiritual practices that felt authentic to my soul. As a result of this soul work, my health also improved, and I went from taking seven medications to taking only half the dose of one of them, and all of my many symptoms, the ones my doctors had told me would be chronic and require medication for life, disappeared.

In other words, my entire life changed. And it all started with a little voice I now recognize as the voice of my Inner Pilot Light, which told me to go to Esalen, because I was supposed to meet someone there. Your soul can be tricky like that. The soul speaks in mysterious ways. It’s persistent and unrelenting when you’re not paying attention. It will appear in dreams if your conscious mind is resisting its presence. And if you’re really ignoring the whisperings of the soul, the Divine is likely to thwack you upside the head with the proverbial two by four, the way I was hit with my Perfect Storm. The voice of your soul may feel scary, because sometimes the whispers speak of truths you’d rather suppress. But the truth will always set you free.

Having been through the dark nights of the soul, I know the pain of that kind of suffering, and it fuels me to want to share with you what I’ve learned along the way, as well as the wisdom Rachel has helped me find within myself, which I have every confidence we can help you find as well.

RACHEL’S STORY

My story is a little different. I did not expect that I would be welcomed into Medicine, which was at the time almost entirely a man’s field. Back then being a woman was seen as a significant professional shortcoming, something to be overcome. Respect for the healing qualities of feminine principle: compassion, intuition, touch, human connection, emotional literacy lay far in the future. I did not expect that the men in medicine (and even the few women in it) would be kind to me or appreciate me or enable me to fulfill my unique potential. I did not expect them to care about my emotional needs or my personal dreams. I simply decided that I would be a doctor no matter what it took, and if what it took was becoming a man, then I would be the best man in the game.

Like most other women in medicine at the time I had few other dreams and if I did I would certainly never speak of them in a professional setting. As I remember, the few women in medicine I knew put their profession first and the rest of their lives very much second. We all worked 36 hours on call and 12 hours off for years.

At the time I started medical school, Medicine was about curing the body, about the mastery of science and technique, the toughness to be objective no matter how much pain and suffering were around you, the ability to take fast, decisive and accurate action. Doctors never cried or hugged or even responded to the tears of others….even if those others were children. Doing so would be seen as radically unprofessional.

The first assignment of my internship training was in one of the most difficult places in the hospital for a neophyte to be, the pediatric emergency room. As a woman I had expected this. One of my first patients was a 16 month old toddler who drowned in his bathtub in the few minutes that his mother went to answer a knock at the door. We worked over him for hours but could not bring him back. Shaken, I accompanied the senior resident to tell the parents their little son was dead. They put their arms around each other and began to sob. I was so new at this that I too had tears on my face. Afterwards the senior resident told me that I had behaved very unprofessionally. “These people were counting on our strength and you let them down” he told me. Three years later when I myself was a senior resident almost the identical thing happened, This time I was in charge of the failed code. Taking the interne with me I went to tell the parents their baby was dead. They too broke down sobbing. After a few minutes the father looked up at me, standing silent and strong in my white coat with the shaken interne by my side, “I am so sorry doctor,” he said “I’ll get hold of myself in a minute.” It had only taken three years to become the sort of person that a grieving father feels the need to apologize to for weeping when his infant daughter dies. I had become a “real” doctor

The more I denied and repressed the feminine side of my nature, the more wounded and less than whole I became, the more I was rewarded by my colleagues and my profession. At one point, an attending physician told me that he had not wanted to work with me. “But I was wrong,” he said. “Working with you is just like working with a man.” I took this remark as the highest praise and was thrilled by it. I actually treasured this incident for years before I realized what it really meant. I had not even noticed what had been happening to me or how wounded I had become. I did not realize I had let go of a vital part of myself and my identity.

But my soul was alive and well throughout all of this…periodically it would reach out and touch me…..in dreams, in poetry, in moments of deep connection with a patient that I never spoke of to anyone else. The soul is patient, subtle, and present despite all. Often it will take you by whatever handle is sticking out and claim you for its own.

My healing began one afternoon as I was sitting at my desk at work. At the time I was the Associate Director of the Pediatric Clinics at Stanford and supervised a large number of men. My opposite number in the Medical Clinic came into my office and put a few brightly colored mimeographed sheets on my desk. “Look at this”, he said with a smile. “I think we should do this.” Reading quickly I saw that it was an opportunity to spend a free weekend a month for two years at a spa on the coast an hour south of us in the company of other doctors. “What is this?” I laughed. “What do these people want us to do?” “Nothing much,” he said. “Some people there have their own ideas about the causes of illness and the recovery health and they want to present them to us for our opinion.” I read on….and suddenly I just knew that this was for me. My current boyfriend, tired of always being second to my profession, had just left me and this seemed like a GREAT way to meet men. So I went.

The “spa” was Esalen Institute, at the height of the human potential movement, the huge worldwide cultural shift that has expanded our sense of possibility and revolutionized the way we all think of human nature and the causes of health and illness. I did not meet a new man there. I met Abraham Maslow, Elmer Green, George Leonard, Michael Murphy, Carl Rogers, Virginia Satir, Fritz Perls, Moishe Feldenkrais, Joseph Campbell and many more extraordinary thinkers and teachers. Brave people who thought and lived outside of the existing box. In their company I discovered that I, who had always obeyed the rules was by my very nature an “outside of the box “ person myself. Ultimately I became a pioneer of a new medicine and my soul became the compass of my life. But had I realized sitting there at my desk that I would have to leave Stanford and let go of years of hard earned training, that I would never realize my dream of becoming the first woman Head of a Department of Pediatrics on the West Coast or the Dean of a medical school, that I would suffer the disrespect and even the redicule of my profession for years until a sea change in Medicine turned into a tsunami of colleagueship and approval, I would have thrown those papers straight into the trash. But my soul had come back for me and took me by the handle that was sticking out and led me home to myself. I discovered among other things that the person I really was was exactly the right person for the work I was meant to do. I had dreamed too small…and had worked for the wrong employer. I had not worked for my soul.