**This article was first published in Moxie magazine in 2000. In the United States, what we have come to know as "Jewish" encompasses just one subset of the Jewish people - the Ashkenazim, Jews from Northeastern and parts of Northwestern Europe. There are in fact many distinct Jewish communities from around the world. This essay refers [...]
"Take Your Dance Meds!" will be a live virtual dance class for healing on the mind-body-spirit levels. Date and time TBA - check back for details - and it will be a livestream on Facebook.com/IraqisInPajamas. The class is open to and appropriate for people of all levels of ability and disability, including you, even if [...]
This article was first published in The Huffington Post on June 11, 2016 Last week marked the anniversary of the farhud, the pro-Nazi massacre of Jews in Baghdad, Iraq, in 1941. Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the mufti of Jerusalem, was a Nazi sympathizer who had met with Hitler in Germany and incited genocidal violence against the Jews throughout [...]
I've been contemplating the healing powers of love. On Friday night, my heart was filled with love and joy, as I prepared to lead a prayer service. Over 100 people from the spectrum of faiths, nationalities, and ethnicities showed up on the Zoom call, to share in rejoicing the Iraqi Jewish tradition of my ancestry. [...]
In some ways, I have barely noticed that the world is under lockdown. In other ways, my life has gotten easier. That’s because I have been living with and healing from chronic health issues for the past two decades. Among other considerations, I have physical and auditory hypersensitivity that make gatherings dicey and crowds [...]
Ujjayi breathing in my back yard. About a month ago, I woke up with a dry couching spasm and felt an inexplicable heaviness, as if there were a steel weight inside me, dragging me down. I subsequently had some difficulty breathing, in what felt like an asthma attack from days of yore, [...]
@2020 by Loolwa Khazzoom. All rights reserved. My boyfriend and I recently went for a hike in a local park, only to be confronted by a barricaded parking lot, with the words, “Park Closed.” Dismayed yet not daunted, we continued driving down the perimeter of the park, until we came across an [...]
My mom always talked about “turning a corner,” meaning you can just be sauntering through life, as per the usual, and then POW! You turn a corner, and everything changes. I just turned one of those proverbial corners, leading to an unfolding and a synthesis, on the personal and professional levels - and, by extension, [...]
My life changed a couple decades ago, after I stopped running around trying to get an exact diagnosis for the debilitating chronic pain I was experiencing, and instead, started looking at how to amplify wellness in my life. Eventually, this approach became the cornerstone of the Dancing with Pain® method I developed, and additionally became [...]
My cooking is like my music: There is always a story behind it. So as part of sharing the recipe for this soup, I'm going to share what led up to its creation. I was very upset early this morning - to the point that I ended up convulsing in sobs, hunched over the kitchen [...]
