Sisterhood & Spirituality Ft. Saleha

This one is just me sitting down with Saleha, the founder of behenchara, a healing collective for South Asian women around the world. She is a breathwork practitioner, a sound healing practitioner, an NLP practitioner, and a spiritual teacher. But more than any of those titles, she is a woman who has walked through fire and come out the other side with a deep, grounded wisdom about what it means to truly free yourself. This conversation is about the sister wound, the social entrapments we are born into, and the small, sacred practices that can bring us back home to ourselves.

The social entrapments we are born into

Saleha was born in Lahore, the seventh child, and grew up on farms all around Punjab. She talks about growing up with a lot of animal instincts, feeling deeply connected to nature. When she was thirteen, her mother passed away, and her father moved her to Los Angeles. She did not return to Pakistan for seven years. In LA, she was the first person in her family to be thrown into a Western society, and her siblings were fiercely protective in a way that quickly became controlling. She started having anxiety at fifteen or sixteen. She could wear shorts for varsity basketball and tennis practice, but the moment she came home, she had to change. She was living in two worlds, and neither one fully allowed her to be herself.

When it came time for college, she had to fight for it. Her brother said there was no way she was going to university. The concept in the family, as she explains it, was that the woman is there to support the men. Her sisters had worked to support her brothers through college, cooking and cleaning for them. But Saleha had a curiosity she could not shake. She says, “From birth I’ve just had this sense of curiosity. I’ve always asked questions. It never settled for me how my sister was behaving and how things were different.” That curiosity carried her to UC Berkeley, where she arrived with a backpack, not a van full of food and parents. She picked up furniture from the streets, saved up for a bicycle, and found a place she could afford at a distance from the university.

At Berkeley, she was engulfed by the knowledge she suddenly had access to. She had been journaling since childhood, and she took all her questions with her. She started studying everything: the beginnings of Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, economics, psychology. And a rage started to come up. She realized she had been lied to in so many ways. She says, “I started to realize oh my gosh I’ve been lied to in so many ways. And so this rage started to come up for me which was like wow I have the capacity to look and understand this knowledge. Thank you Universe, thank you God for giving me the ability to read and understand and comprehend and have the curiosity to do so. But so many others don’t. My own sisters don’t.”

The sister wound and the moment of freedom

Saleha’s story takes a sharp turn when her sister found out about her first boyfriend at Berkeley. Her sister gave her a list of rules, and then she told their conservative brother. He drove from Los Angeles to Berkeley in a fury, grabbed her from her room during dead week before finals, and drove her back to LA where they locked her in a room. The only way she was allowed to return and finish her degree was if she agreed to get married. At nineteen, with no mother, no father in the country, and no support system, she said yes. She describes her own wedding as being a tourist at it. She had no interest. Everyone else was invested, and she was just watching it happen.

The marriage lasted ten months. She was living with what she calls multiple personality disorder, a different version of herself for her husband, her in-laws, her parents, her friends. She was trying to please everyone because she thought this was her life now and she had to survive in this society. Then one day, her husband went back to India, and she was alone in their apartment in Miracle Mile for the first time since getting married. She put on music, she was dancing, she was doing the dishes. And an epiphany hit her. She says, “There’s nothing wrong with me. I’ve been trying to fix myself to please everybody in this marriage, to make sure that I am a good daughter and a good wife and a good perhaps mother to be. But there’s nothing wrong with me. What is wrong is all these relations that are surrounding me.” In that one moment of solitude, washing her dishes, she heard her intuition clearly. She called her husband, called her father, and said it was over. She filed for divorce and never looked back.

But freedom came at a cost. Her family abandoned her. Her friends abandoned her. Every central relationship she had was destroyed. She describes it as an equivalent of being burned at the stake. She was left with nothing but ashes. And from those ashes, she had to figure out who she was without all the identities that had been placed on her. She says, “We are who we are in relationship to everybody around us. So if you burn all the relationships, who do you become? Who are you at that time? Nothing but ashes.”

Cleansing the titles we carry

After the divorce, Saleha started to feel the weight of all the titles and stigmas on her body. The galiyan, the names, the labels. She started to embody them, and it led her into really risky behavior. She felt heavy and dirty. Then a dream came to her: go and sit under a waterfall. She started driving to the Escondido waterfalls in Malibu and sitting under the water. She began to hum with the water, and the water started to speak to her. She says, “The water actually is a really really great powerful element that cleanses us.”

She explains that the first step to reviving sisterhood and the connection between women is to cleanse ourselves of all the titles, all the identities, all the words and names and associations we have been told to carry. Solitude alone is not enough if you are still stained and polluted by other people’s perspectives. You will be at war with yourself. She recommends a daily practice with water. In the shower, place your hands on your chest and belly, speak kind things to yourself, or just hum a beautiful rhythm. Ask the water to wash away all that is not yours. She shares a prayer you can create for yourself: “Hey dear Divine water that gives me life, please wash away all that is not mine. Wash away all the names I’ve been called, wash away all the titles that I’ve been given, wash away all of the things that I was asked to be. Because I am just me. Just let me be.”

She references the famous study by the Japanese doctor Masaru Emoto, who spoke loving words to one glass of water, hateful words to another, and neutral words to a third. The water crystals that received love formed beautiful diamond garden shapes. The water that received hate became dark and sharp. Our bodies are seventy percent water. The Earth is seventy percent water. The way we speak to ourselves and the energy we carry matters on a cellular level.

The heart as a daily medicine

Saleha offers a practice so simple it almost feels too small to be powerful, but that is exactly the point. Every morning, in that split moment when you know you are awake but you are not fully awake yet, place your right hand on your heart. Find your heartbeat. When you find it, say thank you. She says, “Thank you heart. I didn’t ask for you, you were given to me for free. Thank you heart for beating with me every single day and every single moment that I live, in my triumphs and in my trials.”

The more attention you give your heart, the more it will open. And in the presence of an open heart, no pain can exist. When your heart is fully open, there is no more sorrow, sadness, regret, or vengeance. She explains that disease in the body, whether it is stress about work, a friend not understanding you, or a husband who does not get it, comes from a heart that is kind of closed. An open heart is the biggest blessing and the biggest medicine. You can do this practice multiple times a day, anytime you feel anxiety, anytime you feel unable to speak, anytime you feel attacked or timid. Find your heartbeat, connect to it, and be alone with it for a moment. She says, “The more that I give attention to my heart, the more it’s going to be like this is what I need, Saleha. This is what I want. And the more it’ll open up and speak to us.”

Reawakening the feminine

Saleha talks about how first-generation working women often live heavily in their masculine energy. We want to be disciplined, controlled, on top of things, making sure our careers and finances are secure. That is beautiful and necessary. But we forget to nurture our feminine parts. The feminine energy has the characteristic of softness, love, compassion, fluidity. The masculine is order, protection, resilience. We need both. She says, “If you have the discipline of the masculine and you have the seductress, the attraction of the feminine, you’re unstoppable.”

To reawaken the feminine, she recommends free movement and dance. Put on your favorite song and dance like no one is watching. Dance alone, dance with a mirror, dance completely bare if you want to. Move your body in ways you have not moved before. Do not follow a routine. Just let the music move you. You will start to see emotions come up. You will cry, you will hold yourself, you will fall to the ground and start to pray. There is no right or wrong way. Another practice is to hum together with your girlfriends. The feminine thrives through the voice. Hum to yourself as if you are mothering yourself, as if you are calming your own inner baby.

She also leads a simple affirmation practice. Take a deep belly breath and repeat: “I am loved. I am enough.” Feel the vibration of the sound carry the meaning into the cellular memory of your body. You can adapt this for anything you are manifesting. If you want to be a mother, you can say “I am a loving mother.” The more you affirm it to yourself, the more it becomes your reality. She says, “We hear so many things, but where do we take out time to really hear good things about ourselves?”

How to gather in sisterhood

Saleha shares the structure of the sacred sisterhood gatherings she holds through behenchara. Gather in a circle, whether on Zoom or in person. If you are in person, everyone brings something of meaning and places it in the center: a flower, a stone, a lipstick, a bottle of water from a sacred place. Sit around the altar. Start with a few deep belly breaths, breathing all the way down into your womb. She teaches a three-part breath: breathe deep into the belly, pull it up to the chest, and exhale through the mouth with a sigh. This activates the womb and opens the heart.

Then, set three rules for the container. Rule one: listen compassionately and mindfully. When a sister is sharing, you are not thinking about your reaction or what you want to say. You are fully present, facing her, hearing every word. Rule two: do not give advice, feedback, opinions, or even a facial gesture or body language reaction. Just hold space. Rule three: confidentiality. You can take the stories with you, but leave the names behind.

A beautiful way to check in is to share your rose, bud, and thorn of the day. The rose is the happiest, most beautiful moment. The bud is something you are looking forward to. The thorn is something that was uncomfortable or hurt. Each sister gets five to ten minutes to share, and all is welcome. If someone does not want to share, they can simply say they are only listening today. Saleha says, “Each one of us has so much to give, has so much to share. And the reviving of the sisterhood happens in the listening. Because at the core of it all, you want the same things that I want. The same things hurt you that hurt me. The differences start to dissolve.”

Why this conversation matters

This episode is for any woman who has ever felt trapped by the roles she was handed, who has ever felt the weight of log kya kahenge, what will people say, pressing down on her chest. Saleha’s story is a testament to the fact that you can lose every relationship, burn every bridge, and still find your way back to yourself. And when you do, you have a responsibility to turn around and hold the door open for other women. Not by telling them what to do, not by correcting them, but by living as an example and asking one simple question: how can I support you? If you take nothing else from this conversation, take the practice of placing your hand on your heart in the morning and saying thank you. Start there. The rest will follow.