About
Rachel Naomi Remen is a physician and medical educator affiliated with Upaya Zen Center. She is a professor of family medicine at Wright State Boonshoft School of Medicine and clinical professor at UCSF School of Medicine. She founded the Remen Institute for the Study of Health and Illness and co-founded the Cancer Help Program at Commonweal. She developed The Healer's Art, a curriculum for medical students taught in the majority of American medical schools, completed by over 30,000 students. She is the author of Kitchen Table Wisdom and My Grandfather's Blessings, which have sold over 2 million copies in 21 languages. Her work combines perspectives from medical practice and patient experience, informed by her own experience with Crohn's disease.
Teaching focus
Remen's teaching at Upaya sits inside the center's Soto Zen container. The basic form is zazen, just sitting, with the posture and breath held lightly and the mind allowed to settle without force. Around that core, Upaya's programs build out a wider arc that includes the Bodhisattva precepts, oryoki meal practice, walking meditation (kinhin), dharma talks, and the GRACE framework Roshi Joan developed for clinicians working at the bedside. Remen teaches inside that framework, which means the work isn't just on the cushion. Students are asked to bring practice into the spaces where it actually gets tested: at the bedside, in conversation, in moments of grief or political reactivity, in the long, slow work of climate and justice. Upaya's approach is recognizable for its refusal to keep zazen and the world in separate boxes. The cushion and the clinic, the cushion and the kitchen, the cushion and the protest line are all treated as the same field of practice, not different ones. Remen's contribution stays in that key. Teaching sessions emphasize uprightness, attention, and the Bodhisattva vow as something lived in specific situations rather than recited as an idea. There's room for silence. There's also room for hard conversations about what practice asks of a person in a world under pressure.
Background
Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D. appears in Upaya Zen Center's teacher and faculty roster as part of the wider contemplative community Roshi Joan Halifax has gathered in Santa Fe, New Mexico, over the past four decades. The biographical material on file is drawn directly from Upaya's own teacher page and reflects what Remen has chosen to share there. Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., is Professor of Family Medicine at Wright State Boonshoft School of Medicine and Clinical Professor of Family and Community Medicine at UCSF School of Medicine. She is the founder of the Remen Institute for the Study of Health and Illness (RISHI), which was at Commonweal for decades and is currently at Pure Healthcare in Dayton, Ohio. She is one of the best known of the early pioneers of wholistic and integrative medicine, and one of the founders of the Cancer Help Program at Commonweal. As a medical educator, therapist, and teacher, she has enabled many thousands of physicians to find individual meaning and purpose in the practice medicine, and thousands of patients to remember their power to heal. More than 30,000 medical students have completed The Healer’s Art, her groundbreaking curriculum for medical students taught at the majority of medical schools in America. A master storyteller and observer of life, her bestselling books, Kitchen Table Wisdom and My Grandfather’s Blessings, have sold more than a 2 million copies and have been translated into 21 languages. Dr. Remen has had Crohn’s disease for more than 65 years and her work is a unique blend of the wisdom, strength, and viewpoints of both doctor and patient. That body of work places Remen inside a center known for blending Soto Zen practice with contemplative care for the dying, climate work, neuroscience dialogues, and a long-running program for clinicians and chaplains called GRACE. Upaya's roster mixes resident priests with visiting scholars, doctors, scientists, poets, and indigenous knowledge holders, and the programs reflect that blend. Remen's appearances at Upaya situate this work inside that wider conversation between zazen and the world it sits inside. For practitioners who arrive at Upaya through a sesshin or a Being with Dying training, the common thread is a posture of upright, alert presence under whatever conditions show up. The forms are recognizably Soto Zen: zazen, kinhin, oryoki, the Bodhisattva precepts, dharma talks, and dokusan with senior teachers. The framing is wider than any single discipline, which is part of what has made Upaya a meeting ground for working clinicians, scientists, artists, and long-time Buddhist practitioners. Remen contributes to that container in the role Upaya's website assigns. People interested in the specific arc of Remen's career outside Upaya can follow the linked website and external publications listed on the Upaya page itself, which is where any deeper biographical detail belongs.
Lineage
Remen's teaching home for the work documented here is Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, founded by Roshi Joan Halifax in the 1980s and rooted in the Soto Zen lineage. Upaya's broader faculty includes resident priests, visiting senior teachers, scientists, clinicians, poets, and indigenous knowledge holders. Remen contributes as part of Upaya's wider faculty rather than as a Zen priest. Information about specific dharma transmission lines, ordination, or external lineage roots belongs on Remen's own site rather than fabricated here.
What to expect
In a program with Remen at Upaya, expect zazen and Soto Zen forms paired with teaching in Remen's own area of focus. Days follow Upaya's rhythm of sittings, walking meditation, meals, talks, and time for questions. Silence is taken seriously, but so are the conversations that come out of it. The framing is wide enough for people from outside Buddhist practice to take part fully. Long-time Zen students will recognize the forms; newcomers will be supported through them. Expect to leave with a clearer sense of how practice meets the specific subject Remen is teaching.
