Chaya Barash

Last time, I wrote about the day my husband Jed’s body started to shake. In this upcoming week that includes the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, I am meditating on the holiday’s insistence that our community’s faith creates miracles out of the most profound everyday constraints.  October 2024 I insisted Jed go back to the neurologist … Read more

I felt a surge in the energy running through my body. Questions that had been emerging for several years came together and made sense in a moment. My knowing shifted, but not in a rational or intellectual way. And not just the content of the knowing shifted, but the vessel — my way of knowing … Read more

Berlin 2025 I’ve been reading Daniel Foor, Ancestral Medicine, and watching Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s course, Hospicing Modernity, on the Science and Nonduality website. That combination, and living for three weeks in a city not my home, has opened up a lot of thinking about my maternal line. The words “space of the mother” have … Read more

In my last newsletter, I focused on some of the important lessons my mother passed down to me. This week, I am looking at some of the hard lessons that caused me harm growing up.  I often think the most important things we learn from our closest family and friends are the things they are … Read more

The most important lessons my mother taught me are the ones she wanted the world to take away from her memoir and her life. Eat First, Cry Later was her first-generation college alumna version of “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade”; “put your own oxygen mask on first,” and “never, ever, ever give up” … Read more

[Content warning: SA will be mentioned] More than three weeks ago, I received a terse email from my brother-in-law to me and my cousins saying that one of my mother’s hospice nurses had said she could die any day. The physical pain of the rupture between me and my sister coursed from my brain to … Read more

A week ago, very early Saturday morning, I looked out the window and saw a shimmering arch in the backyard. For a second, I wasn’t sure if I was having a vision or a hallucination. As the archway faded in and out, I saw how the lights from the front of the house worked their … Read more

I had two amazing grandmothers … and I will write about them and their influence on me in due time …  This week I want to explore what it means to me to call myself “grandmother to the world.”  The first time this exploded into the present for me was right after Hamas invaded Israel … Read more

Here is the blog I wrote to introduce Aunty Carol to the World in the fall of 2020 This is who I am. I’m sitting on the living room floor, red coffee cup from a French restaurant overlooking the Forbidden City and headphones to my right, iPhone with a flowery case to my left, laptop … Read more

One of the best pieces of advice anyone ever gave me was from Kerri Kelly, author of the fabulous book, American Detox. “Don’t give people advice unless they ask for it,” she said, shaking her head no and walking me back from the ledge of having given someone I look up to as a mentor … Read more