“Something has gone wrong this year and I cannot bear it.”

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 first strike One minute, then one hour
  What you do in the first sixty seconds and the first hour after bad news. — Section 11 — Sabr and Hardship
• The dua of Yunus Fifteen seconds each time
  A single sentence from the belly of the whale, and what it does to the one saying it. — Section 11 — Sabr and Hardship
• Complaining only to Allah 5–15 min, once a day
  Ya’qub’s rule: unlimited complaint upward, disciplined speech sideways. — Section 11 — Sabr and Hardship
• Gratitude in the middle of loss 4 min a day, for a set number of weeks
  Naming what remains, without pretending the loss is not a loss. — Section 11 — Sabr and Hardship
• 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

Where the first one comes from

Bukhari and Muslim narrate from Anas that the Prophet passed a woman weeping at a grave and told her to fear Allah and be patient. Not knowing who he was, she said, “Leave me — you have not been struck by what struck me.” When told who it was she came to his door and apologised; he said: patience is at the first strike. The Qur’an gives the words for that strike: “those who, when a calamity strikes them, say, indeed we belong to Allah and indeed to Him we are returning” (al-Baqara 2:155–157).

Other sentences

• “I am ill and I cannot keep any of my practice.”
• “My wife is suffering and I cannot fix it.”
• “What happened to me has become who I am, and I cannot put it down.”