“I stopped everything a month ago and I am ashamed to start again.”

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

• Returning to it after you have forgotten it for a month 2 min, tonight
  How to start again, without shame and without a ceremony. — Section 2 — Dhikr
• Setting the minimum floor The prayers you already pray, plus ~90 seconds
  One absolute minimum you do not go below, for as many years as it takes. — Section 13 — When Nothing Works
• The ledger for a man who cannot face it 30 sec – 5 min
  What to do when opening the account is the thing you cannot do. — Section 6 — Muhasaba
• What to do in the hour after you have fallen 15 minutes, in the hour it happens
  Repent at once, in a fixed short form, and then put it down and do not pick it up again. — Section 4 — The Nafs
• The hundred istighfar About 4 minutes, in pieces
  Seeking forgiveness a hundred times a day, in three words, spread across the day. — Section 2 — Dhikr

Where the first one comes from

Bukhari and Muslim narrate from ‘A’isha that the deeds most beloved to Allah are the most constant, even if they are few — read by the tradition as a mercy on those who cannot sustain intensity. Ahmad and others narrate that every deed has a period of zeal and every zeal a slackening, and that whoever’s slackening falls back onto the sunnah has been rightly guided. Ibn al-Jawzi returns repeatedly in Sayd al-Khatir to his own periods of slackness and how he came back from them. Ibn al-Qayyim treats futur in Madarij al-Salikin as a stage passed through, not a sentence passed on you.

Other sentences

• “I am on my phone more than I am anywhere else.”
• “I cannot stop looking at things I should not look at.”
• “I have a sin I have quietly decided is just how I am.”