Heallist Podcast

Sufism and healing with Salima Adelstein

• Yuli Ziv

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In this episode of the Heallist Podcast, Salima Adelstein, a Sufi spiritual guide with over 35 years of experience, explores the power of shifting from the mind to the heart. With teachings that have touched 40,000+ people, she shares how Sufism helps uncover the divine secrets placed within the heart.

Unlike mind-focused meditation, Sufism works through the heart center to open pathways of connection.  Salima highlights how true healing begins with wholeness, not illness. By addressing root causes rather than symptoms, Sufism provides both emotional purification and the beautification of human qualities into their divine form.

Key takeaways:

  • Sufism focuses on heart wisdom, not the mind or chakras.
  • Shift from head to heart using sound vibrations like “ah.”
  • Connecting to the heart reveals inner light and guidance.
  • Practice purifies blockages and transforms human qualities into divine ones.
  • Addresses root causes of illness, not just symptoms.
  • The heart contains three voices: divine, ego, and outside influences.
  • Sufism transcends culture and religion by uniting the heart.
  • Healers can see patients as whole and holy.
  • True progress comes from depth, not breadth, in practice.

Explore resources and upcoming programs at www.sufiuniversity.org. As Salima reminds us: “All there is is love.”

Receive 5 free short Sufi wisdom videos re: Consciousness, Connection, Clarity, Cultivation, Commitment—to help you tune into your heart’s deeper guidance on a daily basis. (It’s FREE!)  https://sufi.net/5C

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Yuli:

Welcome to the Healist Podcast, where we unpack the many layers of holistic health. I'm Yuli, founder of Healist, your portal to holistic healers worldwide. Now let's go deep. Hello, dear friends, and welcome to another episode of the Healist Podcast. Today's guest is Salima Adelstein.

Yuli:

She's a Sufi spiritual guide, master, healer and co-president of the University of Sufism. She is named as the only female spiritual guide in the US in the Shadaliya Sufi tradition. She has spent over 35 years helping over 40,000 individuals heal from illness and lifelong emotional pain. She is the founder of Farm of Peace Retreat Center and co-author of A Drop in the Ocean of Love. She offers seminars nationally and internationally where she loves to help people with the healing that comes from embodying the deep truth of their beauty and essence. Wow, what a mission. Such a pleasure to have you on our podcast, Salima. I can't wait to dive more into Sufism. It's actually a new modality and tradition for me to learn, so I'm excited to be a student in this episode and learn your wisdom and then talk about holistic healing and how that fits. This beautiful tradition can fit into that process. So welcome. Well, thank you so much.

Salima:

It's a pleasure to be on your show and to work with your audience today and to share just a little bit drop in that ocean of Sufism. It's quite a big ocean, so I'll do my best to give everybody what we call a taste and experience of Sufism today during your podcast. So thank you.

Yuli:

Amazing. So can you just give us a little bit of background on Sufism and what it really, how it may be different from some other traditions? People might know what is the core principles and philosophy.

Salima:

Yeah. So Sufism is a path of love, and when I say love I'm really talking about divine love and unconditional love. Different than other paths, sufism works with the heart Meditation I was on a meditation path for many years before I discovered Sufism and meditation works mostly with our mind, our chakra systems, our energy systems. Sufism looks at the wisdom of the heart and Sufism says that we're a hidden secret, that desire to be known. So God placed his secrets inside of our heart. So it's a treasure hunt, if you will, in finding out those secrets that God placed inside our hearts that not only make us uniquely who we are, but also transcend that into the unity and the oneness of all of creation. So it builds our consciousness into a sense of oneness and unity. With all that, there is understanding that love is the foundation of that creation. Beautiful.

Yuli:

And how do we hunt for those treasures inside our heart?

Salima:

First we have to start with connecting to our heart, right. Oftentimes. I grew up in Cambridge, massachusetts, where the mind is king and it takes a while to shift your focus, to shift your consciousness from your mind to your heart. And that's the first step in Sufism is taking that, what we call that deep dive into the wisdom of your heart. Now, interestingly enough, when you bow your head, in making a prostration, you know, in bending down and surrendering, your head is actually lower than your heart, so it's giving us a bodily signal of the importance of the heart.

Salima:

Sufism works with vibration and sacred language, and in our tradition that sacred language is the Arabic language because of the vibration of it. To access the heart, we start with something that we all know, which is a syllable right, and we know when we say ah, and just, everybody can do it with me and Yuri you too. Just feel the ah and just notice. Put your hand on your heart and just notice ah, you can start to feel the heart opening with the ah, just with that simple sound, and that's one of the first practices of making that connection from the head to the heart is that ah right. Many different syllable sounds have different aspects of the body and as we study more about the healing that goes with Sufism, you'll see what those different sounds have different effects on the body and how those sounds can create healings in the body. But in the beginning it just starts with that. That allows us to connect with the heart through our breath.

Salima:

So we put our hand on our heart and we just listen to our breath, right that in and out of our breath, and all of a sudden there's a relaxation that starts to happen in our body. And that's the first step of what we call the connection or the alignment. And it's in that connection and alignment that we begin to access not only those treasures in our heart but also a light within our heart that every single human being has. Sometimes it's covered over, Sometimes it's what we call veiled, but we're trying to find that light that's connected to a greater light. Some people call that God, Some people call it the divine, Some people call it the creator, Some people just call it something greater than myself. And what we're doing in Sufism is making that connection to the divine, so that the divine begins to guide us in our journey home, in our journey of self-discovery, in our journey of understanding those age-old questions of who am I, what am I doing here on earth and what is my purpose here? And Sufism gives us the answers to those questions from deep within our own heart. Wisdom not from somebody else telling you what that is, but from discovering that within ourselves. The unity we've all tasted. We've all had an experience in our lives of what we call unity, where we have that connection to all that there is. We have that sense of oneness. In my own experience I discovered it long before I even learned about Sufism, when I went scuba diving and when I was on the surface of the ocean. It's really wavy right, and as I slowly went down there came a point of what in scuba diving we call neutral buoyancy and the first time I ever experienced that I had that sensation of everything around me is connected and all is one. And I know most of your audience if they're at all spiritual, they have had those experiences in their lives. Sufism gives you the opportunity to not have it as a one-time experience but as a living reality in your life, and that changes how you view the world, how you see yourself and how you know what it is that God, the divine, is asking of me to make a difference in this world. And those are the fundamental principles.

Salima:

It requires two things. It requires first a purification process, because we've all gone through different hardships, different difficulties in our life that have created, if you will, either defense walls in our heart or what we call stains on the mirror of our heart, right? I don't know if you've ever gone to an amusement park where they had those funny mirrors and if you look in one mirror you look very tall I always like those because, if you don't know, I'm very short. And another mirror where you know if you're thin, you look very fat. Those perceptions sometimes are the perceptions that we have of ourself that aren't true perceptions of who we really are.

Salima:

And the process of Sufism begins to polish what we call the mirror of our heart so that it becomes a true reflection, for us and for others, of that divine nature, that spark of light within our heart. So we start to bring light into the world. So it's not like meditation, where we just sort of close our eyes and meditate and then come out and have to live our life. In Sufism we're learning this purification of our heart to then live our life from a more purified, a more light-infused state where we're being guided by a voice, by a light, by a love that makes everything okay, no matter what's going on around us. And in a world today, that is such a blessing because there's so much going on in the world that is creating anxiety, frustration, illness, right? So here is a tool and here is a technique and here is a way of living that allows you to not get caught up in that and to remember the essential light of who you are, so that that carries you and brings you into an inner peace, so that your being becomes beautified. And that's the second aspect of Sufism it's a purification and a beautification. So we all have different qualities that make us who we are. Some people have a lot of kindness, a lot of generosity in their being. Some people have a lot of jealousy in their being. We have both these positive and negative qualities, if you will. In Sufism, what we're doing is taking these qualities and looking at what is the divine nature of the quality and transforming our human quality into our divine quality. And that process is a process that requires us to look deep into who we are, what's working in our life and what's not In terms of illness or healing.

Salima:

It's a wonderful way of looking at what is the root cause of a disease or healing. Many of us maybe treat a symptom of a disease, but Sufism is always looking at what is the root cause of it. So it's not just a branch that the disease can grow back, but we're really getting to what is the root of it, and that's generally through these divine qualities that's trying to come out in our being. So we're looking at, for example, what is God making with us? What is the lesson that this disease is trying to teach me in my life? Maybe it's to be more compassionate, Maybe it's to be more loving in places. Maybe it's to find another job, because the job that I have isn't working.

Salima:

I was working with a man who had colon cancer and he went through all the traditional medical things to work with the colon cancer. But when we were talking and when we were doing the spiritual healing piece, what came through was how unhappy he was in his job and how he wasn't getting along with his supervisor, and that was creating an everyday feeling within him that he wasn't good enough and wasn't adequate. And what the colon cancer was actually helping him recognize at the root cause was I need to get out of this situation. It's not healthy for me, and that's part of what Sufism will do is have you take a deeper dive into what is God really or what is the divine. If you don't believe in God, what is the divine, other creator, whatever the word that you use for something greater than yourself, it's going to really make a difference in your life.

Yuli:

It's so beautifully said and have so many follow-up questions. First of all, how do we make, how do we find divine and some of those issues like you mentioned, like jealousy or maybe anger, right or frustration, whatever it is what is the process for you to take that kind of lower vibrational quality and that beautification process that you mentioned?

Salima:

How does it work exactly, yeah, Well, it starts very simply with that sound that allows you to connect to the heart, because it exists within the heart. So the first thing that we do is start with that sound and once you've established that peace within your heart, what you then do is look deep at what's present in my heart. Weird is that, for example, anger. Where does that anger live within my heart? And then, using a sacred name for God in our tradition, in the Sufi tradition, we use the name Allah, because it means the one or the all and the nothing. And from the a sound, we then move into the Allah, which helps identify that connection and that alignment with the divine. And then the divine points you literally to where that jealousy lives within your heart, or that anger lives within your heart. And then you go through a process of inquiry. Will you ask, will you say well, what's causing this, what's at it, what's starting? And you may find what we call an image. When I was working with this colon cancer patient I talked about when we were doing this process, he found a picture, if you will, of his boss criticizing him all the time. So that you see these pictures or images within your heart, and then you begin to bring the sacred name to those images and to those pictures. And just like a TV screen, you know when it starts, and remember the old-fashioned TV screens. When you turn them off, you know the picture starts to fade out and all of a sudden it starts to turn white. You'll see the same thing starting to happen within your heart. The picture starts to fade out, it starts to literally erase from your heart and then you start to go deeper into the next question or guided feeling of well, what is the divine? What is God making here? What is the lesson for me? How do I resolve this? How do I have some resolution to this anger?

Salima:

And we have something called three voices that exist within our heart. One is the voice of God or the voice of the divine. The next is the voice of our ego, ourself, and the third, or the voice of an outside supervisor, saying you're no good. And what is the voice of God or the divine within me saying to me, about me? And once you hear that voice, it's like truth dawns.

Salima:

You know how, when you hear truth, sometimes you can get goosebumps on your arms. Or you know, we all know, when we hear truth right, there's something that we have an automatic sensation about it. But when we hear the voice of God within us through this process of Sufi healing, it resonates. There's an inner truth that says, yes, this is the truth of who I am. It says yes, this is the truth of who I am. And then the lesson comes, and then the beautification through a quality. Perhaps the anger needed more gentleness, more mercy, more forgiveness. So then that divine quality starts to enter the heart, to bring more mercy, more love, more forgiveness into that place of anger. And that's the transformation.

Yuli:

So beautiful. I can totally picture that process. However, I also want to bring potential voices that might question this process and say, well, this works well for somebody who's already intuitive, maybe, and they can access those deep feelings and then work through them energetically. This is too advanced for me. I can't connect to that. That's one potential objection. And another one, the connection to a specific culture and tradition. Right For people, for example, you know whether they're born Christian or Catholics and they really, even though they're maybe on a spiritual path, but they pretty much maybe still connected to that tradition, they might have a hard time understanding tradition that comes from different culture. They might have internal resistance. So how do you address those two potential objections?

Salima:

Yeah, it's beautiful and I can say from my own experience, having grown up as in the Jewish tradition, this was very foreign. It really took me out of my comfort zone, right, and sometimes coming culture that I grew up in and because of the relationship between my culture and the cultural spectrum of even the name Allah and what it represents, right, and one of the things that's beautiful about the Sufi way is it begins to erase all of those places of separation within our heart. Remember earlier I talked about the unity, that oneness. Those were all separations within my own heart.

Salima:

I remember when there was a Hindu man who was in one of our programs, our foundations program, and we were introducing this process that I was just talking about is called the remembrance, because it's a remembrance of who you are right, and we were walking him through this remembrance and as a Hindu in his culture, he had a lot of resistance to this saying the name Allah and I asked him you could say any name, it's okay you know, but then I said are you willing to just try and see what happens and go through what would happen if you just continued to say the name and go through that resistance?

Salima:

And he said to me I'll try it. Right, and sometimes we just need to try something new. And as he tried it, remember those pictures that I talked about in your heart. And as he tried it, what he saw was when he was a child, there was a Muslim boy who he had gotten into a fight with in elementary school and that scared him. And as he continued to say the name, that fear that he had in his heart, that picture that he was holding in his heart, lifted from his heart and then his heart filled with compassion and love. So what I say, yeah, what I say to people is try it.

Salima:

You know, when I was at a temple doing the prayer for peace, some of the old Jewish men came up to me and said your brother tells us that you're a Sufi and we know that's from an Arabic tradition. And I said, well, it's actually a universal tradition, but yes. And then they said to me well, we have a question for you. And I said, okay, universal tradition, but yes. And then they said to me well, we have a question for you. And I said okay, when you were doing that prayer for peace that we've heard every Friday for 50 years, they were old men. We never felt peace when you said it, we finally felt peace in our heart. How is that possible? That's the difference, and that's what I would say to people who might have that cultural resistance, because what it does is it actually brings you closer to your roots and to your tradition, because you're not making any separation. And that's why we say that Sufism is actually a universal tradition for anybody, even atheists, who don't believe, it still works.

Yuli:

Incredible, and I'm curious to hear if you can give us a short story of how you, coming from a Jewish background, got involved with this tradition, how did you discover it and if you had any resistance initially.

Salima:

Yeah, I discovered it purely by mistake. I was doing energetic healing and I happened to be in New Mexico doing a workshop in New Mexico and a friend of mine I'd come back from India. I was studying with a bunch of spiritual healers in India and a friend of mine said there's a Sufi master healer who's in town. I think you might like to meet him. I was up for a good adventure, so I said sure, and I went over to the person's house who was hosting him and he greeted me in a way that broke all of the images that I had of holy men right and their relationship with women, because he gave me this big hug and he was a big guy and he said my holy daughter, I'm so happy to see you. And I was like whoa, that's different, I don't expect that.

Salima:

And then sat down and started to listen to his teaching Sufi teachings that were all about this journey from separation to unity, this journey through the dissolution of our ego self into our divine self and living the world, living in the world from what is a blessed place and living in the world and inner peace. And at that time I was pretty. My third eye was pretty open, so he had the most beautiful white light I had ever in my life seen. And you know how you have one of those moments where you don't think and you just say whatever he has I want. And that's what I did. I just said whatever he has I want and he asked me to come and study with him at his retreat in Palestine, in Jerusalem, and I spent months with him studying Sufism and went through all kinds of resistances.

Salima:

I mean, for me I was in enemy territory because I grew up with that belief and was afraid somebody was going to come and find out and come and murder me. I mean, I had a lot of fear when I first got there and each time, through the practices that he gave and through what we call walking of these stations, walking of these steps into unity, each of them just got washed away and washed away, and washed away. And the more that I did the practices, it's like the more I saw the essence of who I really was. And my name Salima means the one who carries peace right. And it was like when he first gave me that name, I was like, no, you've got the wrong person, because my world is all about fighting and activism and justice. And then I realized no, my being really is about peace and that's why I was doing all that fighting, because I care about peace. It's the essence of who I am.

Yuli:

It looks like you found another way to bring the peace into the world.

Salima:

Yes, Because I really believe that to find peace outside, we have to find it inside first, absolutely.

Yuli:

And I'm curious, what year was that that you studied?

Salima:

That was 35 years ago and then I said everybody needs to learn about this. So I came home and said this is it. This is now my life. He asked us to set up a university. So we set up a University of Sufism and Spiritual Healing, which has been going on now for about 30 years in my house, so that people could experience what I experienced in Jerusalem and took people through a series of different Sufi practices in retreat so that then they could experience something different in their life and then go out into the world and carry that. And then set up a Sufi community at the Farm of Peace in Pennsylvania so that people could be together, learn together, study together, pray together and raise their children together. So we now have kids who are in college, who all grew up together in this tradition and are very close.

Yuli:

What a beautiful journey.

Salima:

Yeah.

Yuli:

So for people who just get inspired by the piece you carry, how can they get involved? Maybe try, maybe dip their toe into Sufism, or maybe study more deeply.

Salima:

Yeah, well, a couple of things. We have a free video and audio series that comes with a little workbook called the Five C's to Inner Truth and want to invite your audience to sign up to get that. We have an opportunity also to come and do what we call a foundations program at the university, which it's a weekend program. A lot of both practitioners and people that need healing and people that are just interested in their own spiritual growth come to that foundations program and just learn the basics of what we do. I believe there's one coming up next month, so you can find out more about that at the universityofsufismorg sufiuniversityorg website.

Yuli:

We're going to put all of that in the show notes and the pre-offering as well.

Yuli:

And since you touched on practitioner, I'm curious if you can talk a little bit more specifically from a perspective of holistic healer how this beautiful tradition can be incorporated maybe into other modalities.

Yuli:

Because what I'm seeing in this space and this beautiful process that's been happening is that a lot of different modalities and traditions are merged and there's so many practitioners that get certified in multiple things and they bring their own unique touch and all those different beautiful teachings to really serve the client for at whatever point they need, whether they come with a physical challenge, mental, as we all know it's all connected to spiritual body as well.

Yuli:

So, and I'm personally really passionate about bringing more of the spiritual path into any type of healing, because it happens so much like you mentioned the colon cancer story, which is a perfect example that we find we look for the root cause even in holistic healing, not to mention traditional medicine. Right, we sometimes look at the wrong places and the spiritual body is not always bought up into that healing process, but it seems to me me from what I learned just in the past 30 minutes, which was so fascinating that this is something that can be layered into a lot of other modalities as that spiritual layer that allows you to serve a much deeper healing for the person you're trying to help.

Salima:

We have a lot of medical doctors who are in our program and what they find is it's really easy to integrate the spirituality into their medical practice, not only just by doing a questionnaire on what people's spiritual background is, but actually introducing them to some of these techniques that will really help and support them in, for example, in their cancer treatment, or whether or not they need a medication or not, whether there's a different way of looking at the disease pattern and what's happening within the disease pattern to see how else can we approach this. So they do a lot more investigating, if you will, and I remember I was with a group of physicians down in Florida a few years ago and I was talking about imagine what if you started seeing your patients as holy rather than seeing them as sick, and the doctors were like whoa, whoa, whoa, no, no, no, no, no. We were trained to see our patients as sick. How are we going to heal them if we don't see what's going on with them? And I said, yeah, but just imagine for a minute, where are you taking them? Where's the road? If you see them as sick you're going to. This is what I ask you to consider.

Salima:

Right, if you see them as sick. How are you going to take them on the road to health? By starting by seeing them as whole, by seeing them as healthy, by seeing them as holy beings that they are, by seeing their innate goodness rather than what's wrong with them. Then they've got a roadmap to take them from one to the other. The acupuncturists that come to our program find that it's not just putting the needles where the needles need to go, but knowing what is the divine showing them about what needs to happen when that needle goes in, what might be the divine quality that they might invoke when they're putting that acupuncture needle in. Invoke when they're putting that acupuncture needle in, Cardiologists are finding it's not just giving somebody a heart monitor or a pacemaker. Maybe we need to look at what some of the anxiety or stress that's creating this heart murmur. And those are some of the ways that Sufism is incorporated into traditional medicine.

Yuli:

It's so beautiful and I love that you actually have physicians and doctors exploring those practices and bringing them in. I personally haven't met one, but I would love to meet that. I trust you, but from my experience and I'm curious to hear your experience as well do you find with these types of practitioners do they have the need to have a deeper scientific proof or they just kind of believe in it because they see their personal transformation?

Salima:

I think what happens for the physicians that are in our program, that they see the transformation in themselves and then, like my own story, a little difficult, because we're talking about taking your ego self and putting your ego self in right relationship to your divine self.

Salima:

And our ego self likes to be in charge and likes to be the boss.

Salima:

Taking that process of what we call fana in Sufism, which is literally the annihilation of your ego, is not an easy process for most human beings and it takes courage, it takes commitment and that's why one of the five C's of Sufism is commitment. There's a great Sufi story, if I may, about a man who was trying to dig a well and he kept on digging these like one inch holes all along his property and was getting really frustrated because he couldn't get to the water. And somebody came along and said instead of digging 10 shallow holes, what if you dug one hole really deep? And that's what the path of Sufism requires is to take that deep dive into yourself. And some people are willing to do that and other people would rather just taste a little here and a little here, and either way is fine. But to really get to the essence, to get to those beautiful questions. To get to those treasures that I talked about in the beginning requires a commitment to take that deep dive.

Yuli:

Yes, so beautifully said, and I have to say that you definitely bring peace to this podcast with your stories and your journey. We're running out of time. I feel like I could let you talk forever and just die. It's one of those healing episodes. You know, some of our episodes they're just talk and it's great. Some of the episodes are healing. So I feel like this is one of those. So I really appreciate your being here, your energy, and I wanted to give you an opportunity to say any few last words for our beautiful listeners.

Salima:

I just want to remind. Remember that Sufism is a path of remembering and being reminded, and we're remembering in our essence who we are, which are holy beings, which are beautiful beings. We have a beautiful saying in Sufism when God created you, god created beauty. I want to invite your listeners to look in the mirror and remember. Remember that they are beautiful and don't let those other voices get in the way. Remember that you were created out of love and love is the essence of existence. When I worked in hospice just a last story every hospice patient that I ever worked at, in their last dying breath, used to say remind people, all there is is love. All there is is love.

Yuli:

Beautiful, so beautiful. Again, really grateful to have you with us and sharing your beautiful stories, and I can't wait to dig deeper into Sufism myself.

Salima:

Great.

Yuli:

And I think peace is definitely something that is on the top of the list in terms of what's needed in the world right now. So thank you for spreading this beautiful mission.

Salima:

Yes, thank you for having me. You're a wonderful host and beautiful questions, thank you.

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Yuli

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