Healer Q&A: Sufism and healing with Salima Adelstein
The following interview is a transcript excerpt from The Heallist Podcast episode. Listen to the full audio version or watch the video below and subscribe to get notified of new episodes.
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.
Sufism: A Path of Love and Heart Wisdom
Salima Adelstein: 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. 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.
First we have to start with connecting to our heart. 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 what we call that deep dive into the wisdom of your heart. Now, interestingly enough, when you bow your head, in making a prostration, 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.
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, and we know when we say “ah”. Just feel the “ah” and just notice. You can start to feel the heart opening with 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”. 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.
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?
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. 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.
Purification and Beautification Process
Salima Adelstein: 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. Those perceptions sometimes are the perceptions that we have of ourselves that aren't true perceptions of who we really are.
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. 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.
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. That's the second aspect of Sufism: it's a purification and a beautification. 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 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.
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. 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. 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.
Healing Root Causes Through Sufism
Salima Adelstein: 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, our self. 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.
When you hear truth, sometimes you can get goosebumps on your arms. 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.” And then the lesson comes, and then the beautification through a quality. Perhaps the anger needed more gentleness, more mercy, more forgiveness. 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.
Remembering Our Beautiful Essence
Salima Adelstein: 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. Look in the mirror and remember. You 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, every hospice patient that I ever worked at, in their last dying breath, used to say to remind people, “all there is is love. All there is is love.”
