Rev. Chani's Blog

I personally have always had a hard time with the celebration and the Holiday of Purim. To start, I never enjoyed going around all over town delivering Mishloach Manos (baskets of food to others) the drinking, or the drunk drivers on the road. The story itself is a violent one. A man kills his wife because she refuses to put on a show for his friends. He selects a new wife who has no choice but to marry him. One group of people blame another group for the problems of the time, leading to a civil war, where the people kill each other in order to stay alive.

I went to a solstice celebration this past Friday night. In a circle of 18 women we celebrated and felt into the longest night. We stepped fully into what keeps us in the shadows, hidden from others and ourselves and what allows us to step into our power, our light our individuality.

A Sukkot Reflection A friend called me about a month ago asking to meet. She had something personal she wanted to share. When we met, she explained that she recently found out that she was a “highly sensitive” person. What that means is that she experiences acute physical, mental, and emotional responses to stimuli.  Here […]

As many of you know on June 25th, 2017 I got injured and have been suffering from PCS (post-concussion syndrome). As I struggled to figure out how to take care of the symptoms, I finally took two months to heal, reflect, retreat in order to come up with a plan for going forward.

“There is a knife sticking out of my heart and a constant trickle of blood comes out… every so often the knife gets moved, twisted and the blood gushes out. I do my job at work, take care of what I need to at home, do the shopping and the errands and marvel that no one sees that I am leaving a trail of blood behind me.” This is what a woman at a support group meeting said in explaining what it felt like when her child didn’t let her know that she had given birth.

A few days ago, I was watching a short clip with Ellen DeGeneres and Sandra Bullock, Bullock was talking about a difficult time she had when her father and her two dogs died within weeks of each other. She said: Life Happens, Whether You Schedule For It Or Not!