“It has been six years of nothing and I have stopped expecting it to end.”

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

• When the dryness has lasted years A 20-minute audit, once
  For the one in year six, who has stopped expecting it to end. — Section 13 — When Nothing Works
• Staying as a station in itself Years
  Constancy is not the consolation prize. In this tradition it outranks the prize. — Section 13 — When Nothing Works
• Never judging yourself by feeling Nothing added to the day
  Feeling is not the measure, and it never was — in either direction. — Section 13 — When Nothing Works
• 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
• How sweetness returns Not yours to schedule
  What actually happens when it comes back, and what to do in the hour after. — Section 13 — When Nothing Works

Where the first one comes from

Ibn al-Jawzi, in Sayd al-Khatir, writes about his own long stretches of slackness with unusual honesty for a scholar of his standing — not as a young man’s phase, but as something that recurred across a working life. Ibn al-Qayyim treats futur, slackening, in Madarij al-Salikin as a stage on the road rather than a sentence passed on a person. Ibn Maja narrates the Prophet’s likeness of the heart to a feather on open ground, turned over and over by the wind. Nowhere in this literature is a duration promised, and nowhere is long dryness treated as proof of rejection.

Other sentences

• “I felt something once, years ago, and I have been chasing it ever since.”
• “I want to stop entirely.”
• “I do not know where to start.”