Cogent Clips

as-Salaamu’Alaykum,

That a specialist would dismiss the link between body and mind was not astonishing. Dualism—cleaving into two that which is one—colours all our beliefs on health and illness. We attempt to understand the body in isolation from the mind. We want to describe human beings—healthy or otherwise—as though they function in isolation from the environment in which they develop, live, work, play, love and die. These are the built-in, hidden biases of the medical orthodoxy that most physicians absorb during their training and carry into their practice.

I am displeased with the company of friends To whom my bad qualities appear to be good. They fancy my faults are virtues and perfection. My thorns they believe to be rose and jessamine. Say. Where is the bold and quick enemy to make me aware of my defects? He whose faults are not told him Ignorantly thinks his defects are virtues.

It doesn't matter how many tasbihs you hold, or how many mawlids you attend, or how many shuyukh you accompany, or how many claims you make, or how many ijazahs you collect - if you look down on any believer and you have arrogance in your heart - you are a false claimant to this path. You're not a person of Tasawwuf. Tasawwuf is nothing but good character and humility. If you think for a second that you are more pious than another Muslim because you do such-and-such action and you sit in the gatherings of so-and-so then you have destroyed your actions.

We are not, as traditional western thought would have us assume, solitary, self-encapsulated beings. Rather, we are porous 'openings' to the world, whose very biology, development and experiencing is interspersed and infused with the beingness of others. And if we are beings who are dispersed across relationships, then psychological healing must also, in many instances, involve this interpersonal nexus.

Love, it turns out, is intimately related to attention...To love is to extend oneself toward another or toward oneself...It so happens that this is also the precise meaning of giving attention to another person or to oneself. The origin of the word attend is the Latin tendere, "to stretch." Attend means to extend, to stretch toward. If we can actively love, there will be no attention deficit and no disorder.

Healing isn't fully healing if it doesn't in some way connect the individual to the community... We heal so that communities can take on healing as part of their everyday ways of being.

In order to fundamentally change one's narratives, hidden loyalties and unhealthy patterns, one will have to be willing to lose much of what is called identity. That is grueling, leaves one empty at times before something new can emerge and one has to learn to sit with the discomfort. But it's worth it, for those who really want change, first within themselves and (only) then in the world.

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.

It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield.

Islam is not an extension of your ego.

Beware of your inner Pharaoh, Who dresses up like Moses. Seemingly outwardly religious, And claiming Aaron's gnosis. We've seen this all before, we have From the time that time forgot. It's the oldest story that we know, Of the devil and his lot.

You may say, “If advice includes mentioning faults, then it includes alienation of the heart and how can that come into the duty of Brotherhood?" So you must realize that alienation only results from mentioning a fault already known to your brother, while drawing his attention to what he is unaware of is compassion itself. It is encouragement for hearts; I mean the hearts of the intelligent, for it does not touch the hearts of fools.

There is no good in a people who do not advise; and there is no good in a people who do not like those who advise.