“What happened to me has become who I am, and I cannot put it down.”

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

• Refusing to build an identity out of your suffering 20 min once, then a habit of noticing
  The slow drift by which hardship stops being what happened to you and becomes who you are. — 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
• Counting blessings before faults 2–3 min
  The gratitude list that comes first, every time. — Section 6 — Muhasaba
• The weekly review 15 min, weekly
  Reading seven days at once to find the pattern. — Section 6 — Muhasaba
• 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

Where the first one comes from

Ghazali devotes Book 28 of the Ihya’ to status and ostentation, and among the forms of riya’ — showing off in religion — he includes display through the body and circumstances: the pallor, the thinness, the visible signs of exertion and hardship, exhibited so that people draw a conclusion. Book 30, on ghurur, self-delusion, maps the ways a person deceives himself using material that looks religious. Al-Muhasibi’s al-Ri’aya is the founding manual of watching your own motives before Allah sees them anyway. And Ibn ’Ata’illah, in al-Hikam, advises burying your existence in the earth of obscurity, since what sprouts without being buried does not come to fruit.

Other sentences

• “I am afraid of dying and I push the thought away.”
• “I have things unpaid and things unsaid, and I do not want to think about them.”
• “I think I have left it too late.”