About the Centre

Saleemeh Meaning: Saleemeh is an Arabic name meaning healthy, peaceful

The Saleemeh Wellness Centre For Women is envisioned as a peaceful welcoming place where women can come together to connect, to share stories, to find their inner peace and strength. A place where they can share their insights, their hopes and their dreams. A place where they can thrive and be who they want to be.

Who We Serve

The Centre serves immigrant, refugee, racialized women dealing with a range of issues including:
Family and relationship issues
Anxiety
Depression
Trauma

As immigrant, refugee, racialized women living in a settler colonial space and occupied land, we share common histories, stories, and face challenges on a daily basis. In our many roles as women, mothers, grandmothers, aunts, sisters, daughters, lovers, and friends, we share many stories of survival, strengths, resilience, hope, love, friendship, healing, and growth.

Much of the work of healing, therapy, and counselling is about human connections, healthy relationships of trust, caring, and support where we feel heard and accepted for who we are, where we are given the space to discover and reconnect with our whole selves, where we can ground ourselves in our own histories, centre ourselves with our inner strength and resilience, and be guided by our own vision and possibilities for growth.

At Saleemeh Wellness Centre for Women, we aim to do this together, by being alongside you in this journey.

Inspired by the past

The name and vision for the centre are inspired by the memory of my late mother Saleemeh Al-Imrani (1925-2008).

My mother was born in Basra, Iraq. She was married and moved to Iran at the age of 14. Due the history of political conflict and war between Iran and Iraq, my mother was cut off from her family for most of her life. I grew up watching my mother’s pain from not being able to see her family, not speaking the language of her husband’s community, and being isolated raising her twelve children and maintaining a huge household.

She hardly ever left the house. She spent endless hours doing housework and tending to her children. She was most at peace when she was praying or sitting with her female friends, sharing their day-to-day life stories and experiences. Her faith and her friends were her main sources of support.

She seemed happiest when her friends visited in the late afternoons, early evening, when they sat together in a circle drinking tea, sharing sweets and fruit, knitting or crocheting, sharing stories about their children, husbands, mothers, and sisters, giving each other hope, and encouragement to persevere and be the strong figures that they were.

Although my mother’s life was full of hardship and suffering, she was always calm and seemed at peace with herself. She was an endless source of love, kindness, warmth, and generosity to everyone around her.