Bright Lights: Salome Raheim Advances Integrative Body-Mind-Spirit Social Work

In the 1990s, at the age of 38, Salome Raheim started on a path to become a tenured professor at the University of Iowa. She quickly learned that to achieve her goal, it was best to keep quiet about her interest in various forms of energy healing.

“My mentors made it clear that spirituality was not a legitimate topic for academic exploration,” she recalls. “I didn’t want anything to jeopardize my employment. I had two children to feed.” As the only African-American faculty member on the tenure track in the School of Social Work, Raheim felt she had to be careful about anything that could threaten her professional credibility.

Though she didn’t talk about her spiritual practices with colleagues, Raheim engaged in them to support her well-being in the “publish or perish” environment of higher education. She also found a place where she could fully express herself: Unity Center of Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

“Unity was a wonderful spiritual home for me because there was openness to all of those things I was engaged in,” Raheim says. “So, I was living in alignment in that way, but being in the closet at work.”

Raheim, who turns 71 in December, became a tenured professor at 44. She served as director of the School of Social Work and senior associate to the university president before leaving in 2008 to take a position as dean of social work at the University of Connecticut (UConn).

Roots in Poverty, Racism

While Raheim was “hiding out,” other academics like Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., were conducting research on the same topics Raheim was personally involved in. Kabat-Zinn, for example, focused his research on the health benefits of mindfulness meditation, which Raheim had first began practicing in the early 1980s.

“I wasn’t connected to the research because my academic and scholarly interests were different,” she says. “I had no interest in searching for evidence that the spiritual practices that were so dear to me worked because I already knew they did. I also knew that some of them couldn’t be quantified using the available research tools.”

What she did want to research was how people change their lives.

“I was interested in the concept of empowerment,” she explains. “My focus was on small business development, or microenterprise, as a path out of poverty for people with low incomes, and particularly people who were receiving public assistance.”

Raheim had firsthand experience with poverty. Raised by their grandmother, she and her two sisters grew up on public assistance in Baltimore, Maryland. “I knew the effects on self-esteem of living in poverty and the challenges of getting out. As an African-American growing up during the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, I also experienced racism’s assault on my sense of worth and abilities.”

The civil rights and other movements “offered an alternative way of viewing the circumstances of those like me,” Raheim says. She began asking how people “resist the dominant narrative that says their own inferiority, bad morals, and lack of effort were the causes of their poverty rather than systems of inequity.”

“The compelling question for me became what enables people to create a counternarrative that defines them as valuable, capable, and powerful enough to change their lives and their world,” she adds.

Although Raheim’s field is social work, her doctoral degree is in communication studies. Her dissertation focused on empowerment and the rhetoric of Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition, inspired by her experience as a field organizer during Jackson’s second presidential campaign in 1988. Raheim says she was intrigued by how people transitioned from political disengagement to active participation—interested in “what helps people to shift from a sense of powerlessness to a sense of being more powerful.”

“Those were just the beginnings of me looking at how people can awaken to their own power,” she says. “Not just political power, but power as spiritual beings on the planet.”

Merging the Spiritual and Professional

As a girl, Raheim didn’t know that going to college and becoming a professor were possible. But in high school, she participated in a program that provided jobs for youths from families with low incomes and went to work in an elementary school office. There, she worked alongside people of color who were educated and in professional positions. These school administrators helped Raheim to apply to Bowie State University in Maryland, putting Raheim—a first-generation high school graduate—on the path to earn both a bachelor’s and then a master’s degree in social work and ultimately a Ph.D. in communication studies at the University of Iowa in 1990.

While she was dean at UConn, she earned a second master’s degree, this time in integrative health and healing. Her motivation was to study developments in holistic healing. Finally, in her mid-50s, she decided to stop hiding her interest in the subject and merge her spiritual and professional lives.

“There was a moment when I was sitting in my office and I had the thought, I’m dean. I’m a tenured professor, which means my job is guaranteed for life. What are they going to do to me? What are you afraid of?”

She was also well-known and respected in the social work field, having served in national leadership positions such as the Council on Social Work Education board of directors, including cofounding the council’s Commission for Diversity and Social and Economic Justice.

“I had national credibility,” she says. “I no longer needed to protect myself.”

Helping Others Awaken

Raheim would go on to work with a UConn colleague to develop an integrative body-mind-spirit social work course, bringing some of the spiritual tools she had embraced personally to help the next generation of social workers integrate this knowledge in their practice and support their own self-care.

When she retired from UConn in 2016, she’d planned to settle into life in her native Maryland and into her new role as a grandmother. But the University at Albany-State University of New York recruited her to join its school of social welfare. Raheim agreed—as long as she could continue her work in integrative body-mind-spirit social work. She officially retired in 2020, teaching her last semester online when the pandemic hit.

Today, Raheim is a dean at One Spirit Interfaith Seminary, where she was ordained in 2022 as an interfaith interspiritual minister. She also works as an organizational consultant and trainer, retreat leader, and spiritual coach. She has helped organizations across the United States and internationally implement practices to create more just and healthy environments.

“Addressing the suffering of humanity is an important part of my path and my purpose,” Raheim says. “We suffer because we don’t know who we are. We suffer because we don’t know that we are divine beings wrapped in mortal clothing. We suffer because we believe that we’re not connected to each other and to everything on the planet and in the universe.

“I’m here,” she continues, “to engage with my fellow travelers on a spiritual journey of awakening to our divinity and connection.”

This article appeared in the Nov/Dec 2024 issue of Spirituality & Health: A Unity Publication®. Subscribe now.