Salima Adelstein

Oh, thank you so much.

It's really an honor.

Thank you for doing this.

You have a beautiful service that you're offering.

Appreciate what you're doing.

I was an energy healer before I got involved in Sufi 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.

I worked with adolescents 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

Okay.

They just needed somebody to understand that they learn 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.

Our goal was to bring them back into the public school arena.

What 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.