Salima Adelstein: Awakening Hearts: Education with Love and Healing

Welcome to Why Not Me? Embracing Autism and Mental Health Worldwide?
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world one story at a time. Hi, I'm Tony Mantor.
Welcome to Why Not Me? Embracing Autism and Mental Health Worldwide.
Joining us today is Salima Adelstein, a renowned Sufi mystic, master,
healer and spiritual guide whose life's work centers on illuminating
the divine essence within every individual. She has dedicated over
thirty five years to mentoring seekers on their past to
spiritual awakening, purification and embodiment of God's love. As co
president and academic dean of the University of Spiritual Healing
and Sufism. She shapes transformative programs in spiritual healing and ministry.
She founded The Farm of Peace, a Sufi retreat center
fostering inner peace and connection. She's a co author of
A Drop in the Ocean of Love. She teaches globally,
blending ancient Sufi wisdom with modern spirituality to inspire authentic,
heart centered living. She has a great journey to share
with us today, So before we dive into our episode,
we'll be back with an uninterrupted show right after. A
word from our sponsors. Thanks for joining us today.
Oh, thank you so much. It's really and honor thank
you for doing this. You have a beautiful service that
you're offering. Appreciate what you're doing.
Oh thanks for your kind words. It's my pleasure to
have you on. If you would give us a little
information on how you started doing what you do today.
I was an energy healer before I got involved in
Sufi's spiritual healing. Before that, I was actually a special
needs teacher and also working in a children's hospice program.
So most of my life I've been involved in a
service profession, helping people find out sort of the truth
of who they are and the beauty that they carry inside.
I got involved in Sufism because I was continuing to
search for how can we continue to help more people
understand the beauty of who they are and the truth
of their being and bring out their innate strengths and
what makes them unique and beautiful and give their talents
a chance to shine in the world.
You mentioned you work with those with special needs. Can
you give us a little more information on what range
of people that you've worked with.
I worked with adolescens, and those adolescents had a variety
of different what was then called learning disabilities or what
they called emotional disturbances, but it really was an unfair
way of characterizing them. They needed a different way of
learning than what traditional public schools offered. They exhibited sort
of what public school teachers back in the seventies might
have considered strange. Okay, they just needed somebody to understand
that they learned differently. They wound up acting out a
lot because they were not knowing how to cope, and
they acted out enough that they got themselves kicked out
of public schools. So our school was an alternative for
those children that needed a strong educational environment without the
pressures of the public school.
Once they were in your schools, what was the objective?
Our goal was to bring them back into the public
school arena. We found was they were finally having success
at our school and they didn't want to go back.
So we then started an elementary school and a high
school so that they could finish and feel that sense
of pride and success in learning that a lot of
them didn't.
Wow, that's just so good to hear. What happened next
from that?
What I noticed about myself and this is what the
students would say to me, Selima, you have a way
of healing a place inside of me that felt broken.
That's a huge compliment.
That's when I started to explore alternative healing and started
to look more at what is this whole field of
alternative healing, because basically what I was doing was just
sharing love with them and helping them learn how to
love themselves. Does that make sense?
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. What were some of the
challenges you faced when you first started this, when.
I started the healing.
Work, when you started the school system for them?
Oh, when I started the school system, the challenges because
we were an alternative private school, there weren't as many challenges,
as you would expect. The challenge was really working with
the public schools and helping them relook the way that
they see their students. I lived in Massachusetts at the time,
and back then there was a state law, it was
called Chapter seven fifty. To get a child into our school,
the parents had to go to the governor of the
state of Massachusetts have their child de cleared emotionally disturbed.
Actually a certificate from the governor.
Wow, that seems a little extreme.
I was so outraged. I worked with a group of
people to start what is now known as the federal
law Chapter seven sixty six, so that the children wouldn't
have that kind of stigma attached and their parents wouldn't
feel like, oh my god, what did I do so
wrong that my child has to have this kind of
stamp on them in order to just get a good education.
Our students have gone on to college, and you know,
I met one of them, when was it about three
or four years ago, and she just said to me,
I can't believe I found you again. You made such
a difference in my life. I'm married now, i have kids,
I've got a good job. I love life.
Yes, that's an awesome testimony to what you've done within
that school system. Are the majority of the people that
you work with autistic or is it a variety of
those with special needs?
It's all of it. Yeah, it's not limited in that way,
especially now at the university. You know, we have employees,
for example, at our university who are on that autism spectrum.
We have students who are on that. We have some
students that have different kinds of mental illness. So it's
really not pigeonholed in that way.
That totally makes sense where you located.
Now because of COVID, we are now online, so we
are global. We have students at the University of Sufism
and Spiritual Healing that are from a far away is Australia.
They stay up till three am in the morning because
of the time chain. But we really have students all
over the world now who attend our programs.
Well, that's great. Do you do the classes live or
are they taped and then people can just look out
and go through them at their convenience.
So we do do it live okay, three times a
year for five to six days depending on the program.
We have shorter programs that meet over the weekend and
those programs are live and then they get a recording
that they can listen to again. They also get support
from the other teachers in between the time periods that
we have the classes at the university, students can come
and get a master's degree if they wish, if they
stay with the program for four years, or they can
just take it because they have a desire to learn.
For example, we offer a course in Living and Dying
in Dignity for someone who might want to work in
hospice or might want to help be a birth doula.
One of my students is now we're birth doula, you know,
helping to work with midwives and bringing a new life
into a whole course. You also can just take a
weekend program and learn a little bit about it.
Yeah, so now your school you have to have so
many hours, so many credits, all those things to get
a diploma so they can go to college. Is that
an accredited school still?
I'm no longer involved in that school anymore. That school
still is in existence, and yes they do they now
even I think have a sailing program for students who
want to learn how to sail and have their education
aboard a boat. They've expanded the program quite a bit
since I was there in the early eighties.
That school is still located in Massachusetts.
Correct, That school's in Massachusetts.
Yes, so it's still ongoing and growing.
Still ongoing and growing.
Yes, Okay, I get it. You're not part of the
school anymore. What you are is a place the kids
can go to for further education.
It is, it is. We offer Masters of Divinity degrees.
Now you don't have to have a bachelor's in order
to attend the program. We'll just offer you a certificate.
They're called Masters of Divinity degrees, and we have them
in four different areas for people. We have them in
spiritual healing, which helps people either become healers or learn
how to heal themselves. We have a program in spiritual
ministry which helps people become chaplains in either a hospital
or a school or a religious organization. We have a
program in peacemaking for people that want to learn reconciliation
skills and learn how to have more peace within themselves
and peace in their family and peace in the world.
And as I said, we have this living and dying
and Dignity program as well as just programs that really
teach people how to be good human beings.
Yeah, that's great. Now, when someone comes to you for
a master's is this the same type of masters they
would get in any other college. Is it fully accredited?
Yes, it is. And some of our students have gone
from our master's program into a PhD program, not in
our program, but they've taken the transcript and then applied
to a PhD program to get there PhD. And our
master's degree is recognized and they haven't had a problem
transferring those credits.
That's really good. With everything that you have going on,
what do you do? What is your day to day
and what does it look like?
So my day to day mostly consists now of teaching,
So I'm teaching a lot of those classes, preparing the curriculum,
redesigning the curriculum, adding new programs, as well as reaching
out and letting the public know about the work that
we do. So much of our school, as we call it,
it was a hidden secret. A lot of people didn't
know about it. So part of doing podcasts like this
and going to different conferences and speaking engagements gives people
an opportunity to learn about who we are and what
we do and who we serve.
How do you aggressively get out there to let people
know what you do? I mean you just mentioned podcasts
and various other things to get people around the world
to know what you do. It takes a concentrated effort
to get this done. So how do you go about
doing that?
What I found is what works best is when people
have the opportunity to experience what we do. So we
offer very short programs that will give people just an
opportunity to see, Oh, what is Sufism really all about?
What is this spiritual healing really all about. We have
what we call a Sufi Circle, which is just an
evening program once a week that gives people an opportunity
to have experience of the spiritual healing, to have a lecture,
to have their questions answer. And those are the ways
that we try to be accessible for people to experience
what we have. We find that once people experience it,
once people feel the peace that comes, once people feel
the universal divine love, that they want more.
Okay, why didn't you stay in the schooling part of
it where you could still nurture these kids and teach
them so that they could get to a level of
further education. What made you decide to change your pathway?
I think two things have been Number one, the students
that graduated from our program, they were really looking for
what's next. So it made me start to question, well,
what's next? Yes, they now have a high school diploma,
but what's next? How do we help them develop themselves
into the most complete human being so that they're living
fulfilled and happy lives. That got me interested in the
healing aspect. Right, most people don't feel good about themselves,
whether you're artistic, whether you have mental illness, or whether
you quote unquote or a normal human being. Right, most
people have gone through experiences in their lives. At some
point in their life. They've been hurt, or they've built
up a defense, or they've been wounded, or somebody has
teased them or made fun of them to make them
forget who they are in truth. And that's how I
got interested in it. It was like a natural evolution
of my own growth and development.
Sure that makes sense. Let's say you have someone that
comes to you. Let's say they're autistic, they've been picked on,
they've been bullied, they've gone through a whole lot of
difficult times in their life. They just don't understand what's
going on. How do you work with them to get
them to a level where they can understand. This way,
hopefully they can continue working for their goals of being
able to live the life that everybody wants to live.
Like any human being in our society today, most of
how we see and perceive the world is through our mind.
What I do and what I help people do is
take a journey from your mind, which is going to
tell you all kinds of thoughts, into a deep wisdom
in your heart. We say that the heart carries treasures,
the heart carries a divine love, and the heart also
carries wounds. So part of the work is how do
we identify what those wounds are and how do we
become aware of what's needed so those wounds heal The
majority of time, what is needed in those wounds is love, compassion, caring,
and what I would call the washing away of the
stain of that wound in the heart.
Okay, yeah, so don't take this wrong. They want this
world is a very harsh world.
Absolutely won't take that wrong at all. It's very true.
Thanks for saying it, Tony. It is so true.
You have people out there that will hear this and
what you're trying to do. The first thing they're going
to have is very negative thoughts.
Absolutely deal with that all the time.
You're going to have those that will just doubt it.
They're going to say, yeah, wash away my pain. Right,
They will question everything that you're talking about.
That's why I say experience as the best teacher. Yeah,
it's like back in my special ed days. One of
my students, you know, they were in so much trouble
in school that they didn't have the wherewithal to actually
learn anything. So many of them at thirteen, fourteen and
fifteen didn't know how to read yet. So I was
teaching basic phonetics. You know this sound, the a sound,
it's ah. And one of the students raised their hand
and said, miss A, I don't like that sound. And
I said why And they said when I say ah,
it opens my heart and I've got all this pain
in my heart and I don't want to look at it.
That's pretty deep.
My kids were very smart by what what their old
teachers may have said about them. And I said, okay,
let's just stay with it instead of running away from it,
let's just stay with it for a moment and keep
bringing that sound into the heart. And what we now
know research wise that sound has a vibration, and that
vibration has an effect on our vibration. Those hurts and
pains are at a lower vibration as we say sacred sound,
and ah, it's one of those sacred sounds. As we
say a sacred sound, it's raising the vibration. And when
we take a big sigh, right, oh yeah, feel a release.
That's the start of the healing process.
Okay, that's good. However, there is just so much going
on in this world right now, and it seems like
every time you try and be positive, there's always a negative.
Sometimes there's two negatives. It's just a really really hard
world out there right now, and it just seems like
everyone is living on the edge. There's more pressure, there's
more stress. How do you get past that stress that
they're feeling from the world every day they have to
go out and live in that world. Your world is
a great place, it's a nice place. It makes you
feel good. Yet when they're out there in a job,
trying to make a living, trying to make a life
of their family, it's tough. How do you help them
get past that.
For me, it's not a matter of getting past the feeling,
holding the feeling in a completion. On one hand, we
have the goodness right on the other hand, we have
what we're seeing a lot in the world now, a
lot of evil going on in the world. Both of
those opposites exist within each person as well as being
out into the world. We have light in us, we
have darkness in us. There's a middle road that's in
between those two. That middle road between those two is
where we find in our peace, is where we find
what I would call divine love, which transcends the opposites,
and it's helping people reach and understand and have spiritual
practices that support that middle ground so that when something
happens in the world that's in the negative side of things,
they know how to balance it to achieve wholeness.
Okay, what would you like to tell people about what
they need to know on what you're doing, what you
are trying to accomplish, what you are accomplishing, and what
your goals are for the future.
So the important thing for me is for everybody to
remember the essence of who you are. The essence of
who you are is pure life and pure love. We
have been brought up with a variety of different experiences
that cover over that. What we're trying to do is
uncover all of that to get to truth, the truth
of who you are in that essence. That's why the
offering I want to offer your audience is called the
Five S's of Inner Truth. It's a video series as
well as workbook exercises to help people find that and
then to find Oh, I have, for example, jealousy within
my being because I look at somebody out there that
doesn't have the same maybe disability that I have, or
the same difficulties in navigating life that I have, or
has more money than I have, and those kinds of
things prevent us from living the fullest life that we
can live. So in this video series, we're teaching people
how to move beyond that, to find that inner truth.
Yeah, those are good words and they have a lot
of great meaning behind them.
There's a cute story I can tell you that I
were sharing with somebody else earlier today. Okay, there's a
story of the river fish and the ocean fish, the seafish.
The seafish bright colors, beautiful colors, and he meets the
river fish, who kind of is brownish, sort of dull colorfish.
And the river fish looks at the seafish and it
is a little bit envious and jealous of the bright
colors and how beautiful he looks. Ocean fish says to
the river fish, Oh, come come into my world, and
I'll show you my world and all the beauty in
my world, and you'll get to see all the wonders
of this world. So the river fish says, oh, yes,
I would love that and starts to follow the ocean
fish towards the ocean. And as he gets closer to
the ocean, what he notices is his guild start to
get tight. He's having difficulty. He feels himself starting to
fade away. And the ocean fish realized, Oh, the river fish,
his home is in the river. That's where he thrives.
It's not for him to be like me. That's what
we're talking about when I talk about finding the inner truth,
and when you do, it makes your outer world easier
to manage.
Yeah, that's a great story and it's got a great
meaning behind it.
I used to meditate, and when I meditated, my world
was beautiful when I meditated, and closed my eyes and then,
like you said, I had to go out into the
world and it wasn't such a great place.
Yeah. I get that.
Now in these spiritual practices, right that start with it. Ah,
In these spiritual practices, I now can do with my
eyes open. I don't need to close my eyes and
be quiet. I can do while I'm walking. I can
do in the car while I'm driving. I taught my
niece when she was eight years old and she was
fighting with her four year old sister, and she says
to me, Auntie, this works. I did it, and my
sister stopped crying and stopped aggravating me. Right that The
reason why I loved this work so much and why
I'm so dedicated to wanting to share it, is because
it helps us in the world.
Right, I can disagree with you, great philosophy give us
the information on how people can contact you and follow you.
They can contact me through the Sufi University and it's
www dot sufiu dot org s u f i U
dot org. We also have a link I'll share with you, Tony.
It's a free offering of the five ce's of Inner Truth,
and you can take that on your own time. Whenever
you have a chance, listen to the videos. My two
colleagues are on there as well, and then do the workbook,
then the exercises, and then we'll take you on the
journey with us.
Yeah, that sounds great. In closing, is there anything you
would like to tell people that you really think is
very important that they hear and understand about what you're doing.
Sometimes when we're a able to look at the world
through different eyes, what can appear as difficult and as awful,
we can sometimes see beyond and to see that it's
helping us build something within us that's important for our
own growth and our own development, and to help us
create not only the best life for ourselves, but make
us even better people. And the more that we can
understand each other, the more we can get along with
each other, the more that we can be more compassionate
towards each other, the better world will be helping to create.
Yeah, that's true, no doubt about that. This world needs
all the help that we can get.
Right now, you got it, absolutely well.
This has been great, great information, great conversation. I've really
enjoyed this. I really appreciate you taking the time to
join us today.
I appreciate you having me on your show and look
forward to sharing more with your audience as they get
to experience the five seeds of inner Truth.
Thank you so much, it's been my pleasure. Thanks again.
Thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule to
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