“I have a sin I have quietly decided is just how I am.”

If this is your sentence tonight, you are not the first to say it — and you are not being told anything is wrong with your iman. The tradition wrote down, in detail, what a person does about exactly this: not the theory of it, the treatment of it. Named masters, named books, numbered steps, and how long each one takes.

Two rules before any practice, and they are the tradition’s rules, not ours. First: one practice at a time, kept for two weeks, before you consider a second — the rush is the problem, not the cure. Second: do the practice and leave the result alone. Do not take your own spiritual temperature afterwards; the checking is itself a turning away.

The practices the book sends you to

• The sin you have stopped calling a sin 10 minutes, once every few months
  Find the one you have quietly reclassified as a personality trait, and put it back on the list. — Section 4 — The Nafs
• The sin ledger Ninety seconds per entry
  A written, dated, private record of one sin — kept for information, not for punishment. — Section 4 — The Nafs
• Opposing one habit for forty days Forty days, under five minutes a day
  Pick one small habit of the self, go against it every day for forty days, restart if you break it. — Section 4 — The Nafs
• The weekly review 15 min, weekly
  Reading seven days at once to find the pattern. — Section 6 — Muhasaba
• Preparing the character before the meeting One to two minutes nightly, for forty days
  One fault, named by someone who lives with you, worked on for forty days. — Section 0 — Seeking a Guide

Where the first one comes from

Ibn Mas‘ud, in Sahih al-Bukhari, described the difference between two men: the believer sees his sins as a mountain above him that he fears will fall, and the other sees his as a fly that passed his nose and was waved away. The Qur’an names the mechanism — rust has covered their hearts from what they used to earn (al-Mutaffifin 83:14). Ibn al-Qayyim returns often to this: repeated sin does not only accumulate, it dulls the instrument that detects it. Ibn al-Jawzi, in Sayd al-Khatir, writes with unusual directness about the sins of the pious that the pious have stopped noticing.

Other sentences

• “The adhan goes and everything in me refuses.”
• “I have no one to teach me and I do not know how to find anyone.”
• “I have found a man who says he is a shaykh, and something is wrong.”