about
Meet Sameera
How can I help?
From a young age, I knew I wanted to grow up and be someone who helped people.
For a long time, I assumed that meant becoming a doctor — shaped by watching my father practice medicine and knowing my mother had studied nursing. But when I look back now, what stands out are not grand ambitions so much as quiet instincts.
I remember buying a hot meal for someone who was homeless, without quite knowing why it felt important; choosing to spend recess with children in a special education program, drawn by something I couldn’t yet name; and volunteering in hospital hallways throughout high school, feeling oddly at ease in spaces others often braced themselves to enter.
Even now, I notice people who seem to be holding more than they let on, and something in me turns toward offering presence, warmth, and a soft kind of companionship. I didn’t have the language for it then, but I was already learning how to witness pain rather than rush to resolve it.
Over time, I realized that these instincts shaped not only my professional path, but the way I learned to turn toward my own inner world. The compassion I offered outward eventually became the compassion I needed to offer inward, especially during the seasons of life that felt heavy, tender, or disorienting.
My Own Struggles
Not long ago, my therapist said something that landed as both affirmation and invitation: “Sameera, I don’t know if you realize that you’re now able to work through what you once found very difficult.”
It named a truth about how I’ve grown — not by avoiding hardship, but by meeting it. Throughout my professional life, I’ve sought the same kind of compassionate witnessing I now offer to others: trauma therapy, couples counseling, mental health coaching, inner child work, somatic and body-based approaches, and spiritual and emotional resources that carried me when I needed support most.
Over time, I’ve come to understand that the way I move through my own struggles directly shapes how I sit with others in theirs. Healing, I’ve learned, is less about “getting rid” of pain and more about learning to stay with yourself in it — steadily, gently, and with God present.
This inner shift is what makes the outward path possible. It’s the kind of change the Qur’an points to when it says:
“Indeed, Allah will not change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves.” (13:11)
For me, this verse has always been a reminder that tending to what lives within us — our pain, our patterns, our fears, our stories — is not separate from spiritual work. It is the work. When we meet ourselves with honesty and compassion, we create space for God’s help, ease, and transformation to enter.
And truly, all of us struggle. Often quietly. Often while carrying far more beneath the surface than we ever name.
The Evolution of My Work
Many people know me publicly as a Muslim sexual health expert — a role that grew through years of education, therapy, workshops, and eventually the publication of my book in the summer of 2025. That work mattered, and it still does. But as that chapter expanded outward, something inside me began to shift.
My energy for outward-facing sexual health content softened. I started to feel a growing gap between the identity people associated with me and the deeper, more layered work happening in my therapy room — work rooted in emotional processing, relational attunement, somatic awareness, and a spiritually grounded understanding of the heart (qalb).
Completing a Trauma and Somatics practitioner certificate, alongside deepening my Islamic Psychology training through the Shifaa Method, clarified what I had already been sensing. In the fall, I allowed myself to pause — to sit with the discomfort, to honor the dissonance, and to listen carefully for what my work was becoming.
Through that pause, something essential became clear:
A struggle is a struggle. Whether it is sexual, emotional, mental, or spiritual. Whether it lives within us or between us. Whether it is visible or hidden, loud or quiet.
Within our Islamic tradition, we are not asked to minimize these struggles, nor to meet them with shame or avoidance. We are called to meet them with compassion and accountability — with truthfulness, tenderness, and responsibility for the soul entrusted to us.
Witnessing the Soul
As I reflected more deeply, I began to see a familiar pattern — in myself, in my clients, and in our communities. We live in a time saturated with inspirational Islamic content: reminders, lectures, quotes, reflections about patience, trust, surrender, gratitude, and faith. These messages can be beautiful and nourishing — and we often assume that if we just shift our mindset, our emotional experience will follow.
And when it doesn’t, we quietly wonder if something is wrong with us.
With our faith.
With our worthiness.
With our relationship with God.
But nothing is wrong with you.
What’s often happening is simpler and more human: we are trying to think our way out of pain that can only heal by being felt, witnessed, and understood. No number of reminders can substitute for tending to what hurts. Our emotional lives and spiritual lives cannot be separated, and when we attempt to bypass one through the other, we remain stuck — often with more self-doubt layered on top.
This space — between what we believe we should feel spiritually and what we actually feel humanly — is where my work lives now.
Witnessing the Soul is both a framework and a posture. It is the practice of turning toward the inner life with compassion, curiosity, and accountability — rather than judgment or urgency. It is learning to notice what struggles within us, to understand why it struggles, and to meet it in a way that honors both the heart and the soul.
My approach is grounded in the Islamic tradition and shaped by universal human truths: compassion as a Divine attribute, self-accountability as a path to growth, struggle as an inherent part of life, and the deep comfort of being seen by God exactly as we are.
My vision is simple and deeply felt: A world where personal struggles are no longer sources of shame, but openings to healing and a deeper relationship with God — allowing people to live with courage, compassion, and wholeness.
And my work is this: to witness people in their pain with compassion, and to support them in cultivating the dignity and courage needed to meet life as it truly is.
Where We Might Go From Here
If you’re seeking a space to understand your struggles with more honesty, compassion, and dignity, you’re not alone. We all struggle for a reason. Often, what feels confusing or overwhelming on the surface has deeper roots — patterns shaped by our histories, our bodies, our societies/communities, our beliefs, and the stories we carry about ourselves and God.
My work focuses on practical, grounded approaches that help you uncover those roots and gently transform them. It’s support that goes deeper than coping — toward the kind of inner shift that changes how you meet yourself, your relationships, and your life.
If you feel called to begin that work, you’re welcome to explore:
Therapy & Guidance Sessions — individualized support for the struggles that feel tender, persistent, or unmoving
Soulful Journeys Courses — guided intimate small group journeys centering faith-rooted pathways into emotional clarity, spiritual grounding, and embodied healing. These journeys are about being accompanied as insight and change emerge naturally, in community.
Online Learning Community — a shared, living space for learning and connection, where teachings are offered through recorded reflections and downloadable guides, and where smaller, guided communities gather to walk through specific journeys together.
Wherever you choose to begin, I’m honored to walk alongside you with presence, softness, and a commitment to your wholeness.
About Sameera
Sameera Qureshi is a leading voice in Islamic soul-centered mental, emotional, and sexual health. For over seventeen years, she has supported individuals and communities through life’s tests and trials—working across Islamic schools, universities, community institutions, and clinical settings at the intersection of faith, psychology, embodiment, and relational healing.
Trained as an Occupational Therapist and Islamic Psychology practitioner, Sameera brings advanced expertise in trauma-informed and somatic, body-based healing, grounded in Islamic traditions of the soul. She is currently pursuing advanced training in the Shifaa Method under Dr. Abdallah Rothman, deepening her clinical and spiritual integration. After years in the nonprofit sector, she launched her private practice in 2020, expanding her work globally through therapy, education, and professional training. Her specialization in sexual health culminated in her debut book, Soulful Sexual Health for Muslims (Routledge, 2025).
Today, her work reflects a broader vision: helping people understand why they struggle and how to meet those struggles with compassion, responsibility, and faith. Drawing on Islamic principles of Divine mercy, accountability of the soul, and the inevitability of struggle, Sameera supports individuals in moving through what once left them stuck—offering clarity, presence, and guidance toward healing and a deeper relationship with God.
Sameera lives in Virginia with her husband.