Centering the wellbeing of my heart has shifted my life completely, both in terms of life quality as well as what I'm drawn to and value.

Surrender to Allaah in tawakul is the true soft life.

a stream of consciousness

As this ramadan has had me focused on healing the heart, I've pondered a lot on the tangible meaning of healing? And i share my musings on how society is set up to break down healing in order to keep you in amygdala hijack (which i explain) and survival and without agency. And how that distances you from Allaah

Taking you through my tawakul journey and how the biggest obstacle has been that the essence of tawakul is ego death and to relinquish control and futurity. Things that feel like the death of all possibility and resigning myself to despair. And what came up as I've tried to disentangle those internalized meanings

I go into breaking down verse 32 in surah al-Furqaan and how the heart is both the organ for receiving knowledge in the form of light but also responsible for inspiring the body in ways that become physical acts of worship, and retain that light through istiqama. And how this shows how the deen is deeply trauma-informed bc it is aligned with the human system. Only what is felt and digested stays, bc what is felt is what is inspired by the voice of God. Whereas the voice of your demands or inner critic only erodes and drains.

I explore the connections between pain, despair and self-hate and how the western hegemony and capitalism turns us against our bodies protests against self-exploitation. This by framing pain as an evidence of innate fault that we need to achieve to compensate for. We need achievement and the pursuit of endless possibilities to redeem our faulty humanity and strive to become gods.

It's something that is socialized in almost a hypnotic way. Psychic malware is installed to alienate us from ourselves and each other. I read from an excerpt of Byul Chal-Han's The Burnout Society in a paper titled Vital Exhaustion: Late Capitalism and the Crisis of Pain published by The Courtald Institute of Art (Nov 2020)

cover image: Daehyun Kim, Face the Whole Martini (2011)

I recount how a trip to Somalia as a teen was formative in my identity and my decolonization by experiencing being unmasked and being celebrated for my unmasked self. The unshaming of weirdness and anger by local Somalis radicalized me in rejecting anything that demanded the conditioning and censoring of my identity.

And how decolonization is rooted in reclaiming what was robbed or suppressed in us by reclaiming our anger.

I talk about how shaytaan uses the inner critic and negative self-perception as a way to manipulate and infiltrate both our conceptualization of Allaah's power in changing our material reality as well as His goodwill for us.

Attacks on self are intended to distort and shrink the inner space that anchors our connection to Him and that calls to Him. It's an attempt at distorting the imaginal capacity of the fitrah itself, and with it our ability to hold out hope.

artwork: Shaun Tan, Head with cave and tree

I continue on the realization of how shaytaan uses subconscious fears to amplify a sense of depravation and lack that I have to compensate for. And that the implication is that Allaah is not going to help me. When in fact, the liberation I needed is something I cannot do for myself and is something I need to receive before I can participate. My sense of agency is weaponized to displace me from my body.

I go into a subtle activation pattern I've noticed that is behind one of the most stubborn behaviours I've been unable to shift. And I take it apart to reveal that the most stubborn complexes do not answer to force. Their root fear that they've been incited to 'protect' against need an alternative solution. It needs to be addressed so that its vulnerability is not used as a backdoor for shaytaan to clinch in order to split our psychic resources and focus.