Service is my practice.  Service is one of the most powerful of the [spiritual] practices.  As you watch someone being taken unaware by something like cancer, they go through a process of healing.  It's a process of the evolution of the self towards wholeness.  There are steps in the process, and people go through them in different ways.  I believe the final step is service.

     People who are able to use and experience crisis, suffering, and loss in a way that evolves their unique being, will, in the end, use that unique being in service to others, because service has become natural to them.  The experience they've just been through--of suffering and loss--is, in some sense, the universal experience.  It's the human condition.  Having been through it, they don't hold themselves separate from the suffering of other people.  They don't protect themselveds in the way that most people do.

     Often they stay in the lives they've been in.  They're a CEO or they're a real estate agent, or whatever, but they do it now from a different place and for a different purpose.  They do it from a place of deep connection to others.  And for me, that's the sign of true practice.  I think that a lot of people speak of the web of connection as an intellectual thing.  That's very different from knowing it in every cell of your body as the ground of being.

                  - Rachel Naomi Remen, physician