Challenging the Status Quo: A Fresh Perspective on Healing

I’m Dr. Rose Aslan and I’m a transformational life coach, breathwork teacher, and scholar of religion who supports helpers, rebels, misfits, marginalized and spiritual and spiritually-curious folks.

Welcome to "Rahma with Rose," where I create a bold space of warmth, understanding, and pluralism in a world that often feels chaotic, polarized, and judgmental. You are not alone and the stories I share here will reinforce this.

Each episode will delve into inspiring stories, practical tips, and thought-provoking and heartfelt conversations with thought leaders, healers, coaches, mental health professionals, and other individuals who are part of the quiet revolution of women healing around the world.

Listen to Rahma with Rose for: inspiring stories of personal growth and healing; interviews with women on their unique healing journey; insights into spirituality and self-awareness in real-life contexts; explorations of diverse healing modalities and their impact; critical reflections on religion and its role in spiritual growth; embracing compassion, love, and acceptance for ourselves and others

So, join me on this podcast exploration as we explore what happens when we allow compassion into our lives, one story at a time. 

If you resonate with the podcast, share it with others who might find solace and inspiration on their healing path. Don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, and join the conversation on Facebook and Instagram. Let's empower each other and pave our own paths of healing and spirituality.

Transcript

Welcome to Rahma with Rose, the first episode of a podcast that's going to be a long winding journey. We'll see where it ends up. I've created this podcast because, for so long in my life, I've been silent; I've not spoken up. I've been studying, teaching, thinking, writing. My voice has been mainly silent, especially because I come out of an academic background where even if I had a voice, an academic voice, it wasn't my authentic voice.
It was the voice of an analytical scholar who is studying other people and their perspectives. The time has come for me, and perhaps for many of you as well, just to say what's on my mind as an individual. Based on my life experiences, training, skills, and qualifications, I'm just tired of being quiet.
And this podcast is aimed at people, men, and women, but especially women who need to hear the stories of people on the healing path. I'll be speaking about my own journey, and in the future, I'll be interviewing other women. And asking them about their own healing journeys, their healing paths. This is a podcast that will inspire you, show you that you're not alone. Show how other people work on themselves, what the work is. How do people navigate the challenge of being a human in this material world? It's not easy to be human in this world. In this podcast, we're going to end grappling with the big concepts, challenges, thoughts, ideas, and practices that are often troubling.
If we're going talk about things like fear, guilt, and shame and how they hold us back in ways in which we can overcome them and connect deeper to the divine and to ourselves. What does it mean to be a woman in the 21st century? A woman who finds herself longing for the divine, who identifies as spiritual of some sort, who might even identify as a member of a religious community.
Being a woman in the 21st century is not the same as being a woman in the 20th century or any time earlier. We're at a momentous time in our history of humanity. Women are thriving, trading, and contributing to society more than ever, but we have more obligations and more burdens than ever as well.
We're trying to do it all. It's not always easy. Some of us are mothers raising our children, and many of us are working outside the home or working from home. We have activities, and extracurriculars we like to socialize. Many of us who are spiritually inclined are working on ourselves in whatever way that means for so many years.
As I mentioned before, I've spoken from an academic perspective. I'm done with that. I just want to speak from my subjective experience as an individual, offering analytical critique and approaches and understandings. Informed sometimes by peer-reviewed research but often by anecdotal stories and narratives.
For others and me, they're just as valuable as peer-reviewed research, in my opinion. Got a lot of degrees, way too many degrees. I don't think they qualify or disqualify me from making a podcast. They inform me. The way I see the world is very much informed by my solid academic training. With my bachelor’s degree, my master's degree, and PhD, in the realm of religious and Islamic studies. I’ve been studying humanities and religion and Muslims specifically for many years, and teaching, thinking, writing, and reading about it for so long. So, my perspective is unique. I'd like to think this intersection of spirituality, religion, and the healing path is something that academics often steer away from because they speak or they claim to speak from an objective analytical lens.
And life coaches often don't have that background of academic training. So, in the work I do as a life coach, an aspiring healer, a Breathwork teacher, a thought leader, an author, and a podcaster. Now I seek to bring these together, these different perspectives. I don't see any conflict between them, and I want to find a healthy way of having dialogue and talking about hard topics in a way that's healing. In academia, often, we deconstruct the subjects of our study, but we don't rebuild after that. So together, I'd like to sometimes deconstruct ideas, practices, and movements but then figure out how we can learn from that deconstruction. And if they affect us directly, how can we build off that. How can we create meaning in what's left after deconstruction, after deep analysis?
I've met a lot of people in my life. I've been really blessed and privileged to go to travel to many countries, to visit universities around the world, to encounter mystics, to encounter spiritual journeys, people on the healing path. Many academics, many people who claim leadership in different religious and spiritual communities. I’ve learned a bit from all of them, sometimes in a positive way, sometimes in a negative way. All of those encounters helped inform me. To develop my own worldview. I used to always adjust my worldview based on what people told me. At this point in my life, I trust myself, and I know myself enough that I can find and for my own worldview that I'm comfortable with.
It used to be scary to have thoughts and beliefs that were different from the mainstream, but I'm here to tell you that it's normal; it's okay if you feel different, marginalized from the mainstream communities around you that you are part of in different ways.
Let's take a breath.
I'm making this podcast. Because I've finally given myself permission to do so.I've been thinking and talking about making a podcast for years now, thinking about sharing my ideas, uplifting the ideas of other women who I absolutely adore and love because of who they are and the ideas they have.
They're so incredibly deep and empowering and beautiful. The only thing that was missing was I didn't give myself self-permission, so now I give myself permission. I'm ready because more than enough. I used to think I wasn't. I know now I'm more than enough. And ideas I have are valid because they exist.
They're one of a multitude of ideas. And if this interests you, then follow along and keep listening to other podcast episodes. Most importantly, this is a woman-centered podcast. I'll be speaking from my own perspective and interviewing other women. I'm going to do my best to primarily drop on the teaching and inspiration from women who are also on the healing path and from women in our different traditions and cultures.
For almost my entire educational training since I was a little girl, I feel that primarily we read the works. Male authors, male thinkers, philosophers, historians, and most of my professors, all throughout undergraduate up to my Ph.D. program, were almost primarily all men, and I learned a lot from them. Deep wisdom from these male mentors and teachers. But what I realized is I was lacking strong female mentors and teachers. So now I have no issues drawing upon learning from men. But I find it important to also create spaces where we can draw upon and learn from. Other women in a space that elevates and uplifts other women. Not to the detriment of men, but just because we don't have enough of that, and we need that space in our lives. Socialist topics will be explored in Rahma with Rose's spirituality and various manifestations of what the healing path is. What is self-awareness? These are lingo that people always talk about. What is it?
What does it look like in people's actual lived experiences? Different kinds of healing modalities. I've experienced many healing modalities on my path of getting to know myself better religion. Now I'm trained as a religious scholar from a secular academic perspective, and despite identifying as a Muslim woman, I also have a very critical approach to understanding religion because of my academic training.
I want to explore how religion can hinder or encourage our spiritual growth. I maintain that there's a multiplicity of religions, and when we focus and talk about Islam or any other tradition, there's not one true Islam in my perspective. There are many ways to be Muslim and many ways to approach Islam. Mine is one of infinite amounts of ways of being Muslim and understanding Islam. Now, the mainstream narrative doesn't agree with me. I have a perspective that can be seen as controversial, and I'm perfectly fine if people disagree.
But I see religion hindering many people, preventing people from having a true connection with the divine because that's the purpose of religion to teach us an ethical way of life and to help us connect with the greater sense of creation with our creator. I also see religion being able to encourage our spiritual growth depending on how we interpret and apply it.
There are so many ways to interpret and then apply religion in our lives. What are ways that we can find that are beneficial and fruitful rather than harmful and fear-inducing? And as a life coach who focuses on compassion, I want to explore what does it mean to have love, compassion, acceptance for both us and for others around us, in our community, in our society, in our global context.
I hope you'll come with me on this journey of Rahma with Rose
what does it mean to speak your truth? For so much of my life, I did not speak my truth. Yes, I asked questions, I was curious, and I think I even shared my opinions. But speaking my truth, especially speaking it publicly, I withheld because every time I tried to, or I did a little bit, there were negative consequences, especially within the context of religion.
I've just gotten to a point in my life where not speaking out hurts more than speaking out. There are so many things I want to say, and I don't want to say them because I don't want to make anyone mad. I don't want to upset anyone, but it's going to upset people, really. Why I want to say the things I'm going to be sharing going forward is because I speak to so many people who don't see their opinions their perspectives being supported out there among Muslims, for example. There's very little out there from people with alternative perspectives and interpretations, and applications of the tradition. There are so many ways to be a Muslim to interpret Islam, but what we see online in books, in mosques, and in lecture halls is quite limited.
I just want to add my voice to one of a huge number of voices out there. And there's also a lack of women's voices, so I will also be adding my voice as a woman. This isn't easy. I'm going to say things that upset people. That's how it is. I'm not speaking to those people. If whatever I say upsets you or challenges you, you can say and listen and be curious, or you can just turn it off. I don't mind. I'm speaking to those of you who are fed up with a status Quo. You’re fed up also being in places where Muslims and others are trying to heal, but through this healing process, they have a lot of unresolved traumas, and they might hurt, be hurting themselves or other people around them by trying to understand and make sense of religion and spirituality in harmful ways.
In the context that I support, that I nurture. This is a healing-centered, trauma-informed context, knowing that we're all trying to do our best; we're all trying to heal that. Many of us come with a lot of heavy baggage, a lot of traumas, and we need to walk carefully and sensitively as we process this trauma to find and pave our own passport. That might not necessarily coincide with mainstream normative perspectives of religion, spirituality, but if you want to remain in our respective traditions, then we've got to pave our way forward. That doesn't necessarily correspond to those mainstream traditions. It's a little bit scary.
It's lonely, but the reward is immense. The reward is connecting with a divine in a way that makes sense for us, not doing what other people tell us because that's what; that's the only way to do it. All I am trying to say here is that just because someone told you there's only one way to do something doesn't mean that's true, and I want to open the possibility that there are many ways of doing something that helps you reach the same end. The most important thing is that we live an ethical life where we live good in this world, and we try our best to not harm others in the process.
It happens, we seek forgiveness from those people, from the divine along the way because we're humans and we make mistakes, but we try to leave some goodness behind to leave some smiles behind. You're not alone. This is what I tell so many people. You're not alone. The thoughts you're having, the questions you're having, you're not the only one I know.
It's just hard to talk about them openly. It's hard to broach these questions with others. In the same tradition as you. I want to start that discussion from a loving context. I'm not going to bash anyone. I'm not railing against anyone. I'm not a man basher, I'm not a religion basher, but I just want to find ways that we can coexist.
They do their thing. We do our thing gently, quietly, subversively, but privately as well. Keep on listening to see if this interests you as well.