Sometimes it looks like staring blankly at your phone, watching your kids from a distance, feeling nothing. Not sad exactly, just - nothing. Like the signal went out.

I know that feeling. I’ve been in it recently, and I want to talk about it, because I think you might have been in it too, and I think neither of us has been given the language for it.

I’m a therapist, Islamic Psycho-somatic practitioner in training. I study Islamic Psychological concepts. I know the frameworks, the concepts, the practices. And still - there were days where I couldn’t fathom how to put something in the air fryer for the kids’ dinner. Where worst case scenarios pinged off each other inside my mind, one after the other, spiralling. Where guilt sat heavy on top of everything - guilt for feeling this way, guilt for still having the audacity to make du’a to Allah whilst my faith was wavering, guilt for the recurring thoughts I didn’t know what to do with.

My appetite disappeared, (and I love food). But all thought of eating went out the window. My body knew it was hungry, and I still couldn’t allow myself to eat.

I was constantly on the verge of tears. Every time I heard a bit of the Qur’an, every time I saw a du’a. Every time I felt an ounce of gratitude, I’d instantly cry - because how could I be feeling this way with everything I had to be grateful for? The thoughts would rush in: make it go away, Allah please make my heart content, ease the fears within me, bring peace to my heart. All of it at once, pinging off each other, spiralling.

And the dread. The physical dread sitting in my chest like a stone. I’d put my hand on my heart and try to breathe through it. Every time my hand made contact with my chest, I’d just cry. Streams of tears, silently begging Allah to ease it, to keep guiding me, to not leave me in this.

This is what healing looks like from the inside. Not the aesthetic. But, the air fryer I couldn’t switch on. The hand on the chest. The tears I couldn’t explain.

There is a name for where I was.

The liminal space. The in-between. Not where you were, not yet where you’re going - but the doorway itself. It’s characterised by disorientation, by the rules of your old life no longer fitting and the new ones not yet formed. It looks like fog. It feels like losing yourself.

The wellness world will tell you to push through it. To trust the process. To move past it. To post your breakthrough. But you can’t rush the liminal space. You cannot optimise your way out of a threshold. It holds you there until the holding is done.

Our Islamic tradition doesn’t just name this place. It transforms it…

Barzakh.

Also the in-between, and also the threshold. But not neutral. Not empty. Not abandoned.

Held.

Barzakh is the space where transformation happens under Allah’s direct care. You aren’t suspended alone in the fog. You are suspended in His mercy while something is being built in you that you cannot yet see, cannot yet name, and are not yet ready to carry. The fog is not the absence of Allah. It’s the condition under which He does His most precise work.

“And He found you lost and guided you.”
Surah Ad-Duha, 93:7

This ayah was not written for someone who had arrived. It was written for someone in the middle of the most disorienting season of their life - someone who couldn’t see what was coming. Someone exactly where you might be right now.

The dread in your chest. The tears you can’t explain. The du’a made from a place of feeling nothing. The salah held together when every part of you wants to let it fall apart.

That is not you failing. That is you in the Barzakh. Being held. Being prepared. Being guided - even when it doesn’t feel like anything at all.

What nobody tells you about this season is that it gets darker before it lifts. The healing work stirs things up before it settles them. Feeling worse doesn’t mean something has gone wrong - it often means something is finally moving that has been stuck for a very long time. The stirring is the sign. Not the failure.

And the fog does lift. Not dramatically. Not all at once. One morning you wake up and the headache is gone. You notice the breeze. Your three year old calls you a princess and something in your chest - the same chest that held the heaviness - softens.

That’s the Barzakh doing its work.

That’s it. That’s the whole list. Because that’s all any of us can manage when we’re in it - and all of it, every single item is enough.

If you are in the Barzakh right now - if you are in the fog, the threshold, the in-between - I want to say this directly to you:

You are not broken, and you are not losing your mind. You are not failing in your deen, nor are you too far gone, too inconsistent, too complicated for Allah’s mercy to reach.

You are in the in-between. The held space between who you were and who Allah is turning you into. And that making - that slow, uncomfortable, fog-filled making - is one of the most sacred things that can happen to a human being.

“Verily with hardship comes ease.”
Surah Ash-Sharh, 94:6

Not after, with. The ease is already present inside the hardship. You don’t have to wait for this to be over to be held. You are held now, in this, exactly as you are.

The fog is not the end of your story. It’s the part of the story that makes the ending true.

Keep going, with the full conviction that you have. He has not left you.
He never does.

I write as a student, not a scholar - formally trained in Psychology, endlessly curious about the Islamic tradition, and aware of how much I do not yet know. What follows are reflections, not rulings. Read them as such, and correct me where I err. Any goodness here is from Allah; any mistake is entirely my own.

I am writing this in my luteal phase, slowly coming out of a three day low. I almost didn’t write it today. But I think that might be exactly why I should.

Because this essay is not about motherhood at its most photogenic. It is not about the softness of small hands or the way a child’s laugh can rearrange your entire nervous system in an instant - though both of those things are real and I am grateful for them beyond articulation. This essay is about what motherhood did to me before I knew it was doing anything. The quiet, relentless, Allah-ordained work of it. The cracking open that had to happen before anything true could grow.

I want to be honest from the beginning: I do not know if I can fully answer the question of what motherhood broke open in me. I am still finding out. I am, right now, in this very season, still in the middle of understanding it. And I think that is perhaps the most honest thing I can offer - not a tidy retrospective, but a live account from someone who is still being shaped by the very thing she is writing about.

Before motherhood, I was certain of very little - though I did not know that at the time. I moved through the world with a quiet, sincere belief that people would meet me where I was. That if I gave generously enough, loved openly enough, showed up fully enough - the world would respond in kind. I wasn’t naive exactly. I was just hopeful in the way that people are before life has had sufficient opportunity to instruct them otherwise.

It had opportunity. Plenty of it.

I poured myself into people who did not have my best interests at heart. Who used me, and then abused me, in that order. Who took advantage of a woman who believed - genuinely, stubbornly - that everyone deserved another chance. And another. And another after that. You would think, after enough of these encounters, that the lesson would have landed. It did not. I kept going back. I kept giving. I kept believing that this time would be different, that my consistency would eventually be met, that love offered unconditionally would eventually be returned.

It took motherhood to break that open. Not gently.

The moment I remember most clearly is not dramatic in the way dramatic moments are supposed to be. There was no scene. No raised voices, no cinematic confrontation. There was just me, with my son in my arms, making a decision that felt like it was coming from somewhere below thought. I chose to walk away. Not because I had run out of love - I had’nt. But because I had finally understood something that no amount of trying had taught me: you cannot give someone the version of themselves they need to become. Not for you. Not even for their child. That has to come from them, for themselves, in their own time and their own way. And I could not stay in the rubble waiting to see if it would.

I felt it in my chest and my throat. The chest because even though it hurt - and it did, it really did - something in my Qalb knew it was right. And my ‘Aql simply followed, almost gently, with: it has been a long time coming.

That is what motherhood did first. It gave me a reason to choose myself that I could actually believe in. Because I couldn’t do it for me - not yet. But I could do it for him.

I have three boys. And each one of them, in his own way, has taught me something about myself that I could not have learned through any other means.

My eldest arrived into the world during one of the hardest seasons of my life. I was deep in postpartum depression and anxiety, trapped - or so it felt - in a marriage marked by abuse, trying to make the best of something that was never best for either of us. I spent the first years of his life in pure survival mode. And for a long time after, I could not forgive myself for that. For the mother I was not, in those years, able to be. He has taught me - slowly, and he doesn’t know he is teaching me - that it is possible to forgive yourself. That the beginning of a story is not its definition. That what matters is not how you started but that you kept going, kept returning, kept trying to become more than what the circumstances made of you.

My middle son is autistic. He has taught me patience - but not in the way patience is usually described. Not as gritted teeth and white-knuckled endurance. Every time I feel the rise of frustration in me, something stops me. A reminder, quiet but insistent, that he is a gift from Allah. That he does not need my agitation - he needs my regulation. My calmness. My softness. Because he can only be as regulated as the person holding space for him. He has, without a single word of instruction, made me a more present and more deliberate human being. He has taught me that patience is not something you perform. It is something you become.

My youngest is three. And he is, in many ways, my softness made visible. The cuddles and kisses he offers so freely - the way he loves without condition or calculation - has shown me something I did not know I needed to learn: that I can be loved. That I do not have to earn it through endless giving or relentless performance. That it is safe, actually safe, to be soft. To receive. To let someone love me simply because they do.

They have taught me more about myself than I have learned about them. And I say that with full sincerity - because each of them holds up a mirror, and what I see in it is still, sometimes, difficult to look at. But I am looking. That is new.

And then there is Allah. Who was there through all of it - every dark moment, every negative thought, every season where I could not find myself. Waiting. Not impatiently. Not with conditions. Just waiting, the way only the Most Merciful can wait, for me to put down what I had been trying to carry alone and return to Him.

I have come to understand - gradually, the way the most important things are understood - that none of what I was carrying was ever mine to carry in the first place. That the weight I took on in the name of love and loyalty and not giving up on people was weight that was never assigned to me. And the irony is that trying to carry it, and eventually breaking under it, is what led me back to Him. The wound was the door. Again.

He shows up in ways that still stop me in my tracks. Just today - and I share this because I think it matters to say it out loud - I was anxious about fuel for my car. A few days from payday. The kind of small, practical worry that can feel enormous when you are doing this alone. And then my mother called to say my father had received fuel from someone he knew at a lower price and wanted to fill my car for me.

How does something like that even happen?! I mean that genuinely. When Allah says He will provide from places we would never think to look - that is the epitome of it right there. Rizq arriving not through the channels you planned but through the ones only He could have arranged.

It is, each time, a reminder that there was never anything to stress about. Not because life is not hard - it is - but because the One overseeing it is not limited by the same constraints I am. And slowly, over many such moments, many such reminders, I have begun to actually feel that. Not just know it. Feel it.

I am still in the middle of this essay in more ways than one. Still in the middle of the season it describes. Still learning what motherhood broke open in me and what, by the grace of Allah, is growing in its place.

But I know this much: the cracking open was not an accident. The people who disappointed me, the marriage that broke me, the postpartum years I can barely look back on, the moments of choosing myself when I did not yet know how - none of it was random. All of it was, in some way I am still tracing, engineered by a Lord who knew exactly what I needed to become and exactly which pressures would get me there.

That is not a comfortable thing to sit with. But it is a true one.

And sitting here now - coming out of a low week, a weak and imperfect human typing these words - I find myself understanding once again, in a whole new light, that Allah has my back. No matter what. His mercy encompasses even this. Especially this.

Alhamdulillah. For all of it.

I write as a student, not a scholar - formally trained in Psychology, endlessly curious about the Islamic tradition, and aware of how much I do not yet know. What follows are reflections, not rulings. Read them as such, and correct me where I err. Any goodness here is from Allah; any mistake is entirely my own.

Somewhere along the way, the wellness industry decided that presence was something you could learn from an app. Ten minutes a day. A guided voice. A streak to maintain. Mindfulness, they called it - repackaged, rebranded, and sold back to a generation that had forgotten it ever belonged to them in the first place.

I want to be direct about something: the practice of cultivating inner presence is not a modern invention. It is not Californian, it is not Buddhist in its origins as presented to the Western world, and it did not arrive with a subscription fee. It is an ancient human practice - and within the Islamic tradition, it has been a living, breathing, carefully transmitted science for over a thousand years.

It is called Muraqaba. And it is, I would argue, the most misunderstood and most needed practice available to Muslims today.

The word Muraqaba derives from one of the names of Allah - Ar-Raqib: The Watchful, The All-Observing, The Witness. So engage in Muraqaba is not just to practise a technique. It’s to orient yourself toward a divine reality that is already, always, and without exception present. Allah is watching. Not in the threatening, surveillance sense that the word sometimes carries in a secular context - but in the sense of complete and total witnessing. Nothing you are, nothing you feel, nothing you carry is outside of His sight or beyond His care.

And here is the part that stopped me completely when I first understood it: the practice of Muraqaba is not about achieving a particular state. It’s about actively submitting to the One who is already there. Islamic contemplation is an art, not a technique. The goal is not to feel a certain way. The goal is to surrender - to become aware, in the body and the heart, of what has always been true.

Ibn ‘Ajibah, the great scholar of the soul, defined contemplation as “the journeying of the heart to the presence of the Lord.” Not the mind. The heart. And a journey, by definition, requires movement - a turning, an orienting, a willingness to leave where you are for somewhere closer to the truth.

There are two dimensions to Muraqaba worth sitting with. The first is outward — cultivating Divine awareness, being in a state of witnessing (mushahada) and surrender (Islam), while monitoring your intentions and actions. This is the Muraqaba of the servant who walks through the world conscious that every moment is held within the gaze of Allah. The second is inward - observing within ourselves, understanding what lives there, and removing whatever stands between us and full surrender. This is the Muraqaba of honest self-accounting. Of sitting with the self without flinching.

Both are necessary. Both are, in a very real sense, the same movement approached from different directions.

And both of them, I want to gently suggest, are not particular pathways reserved for the spiritually advanced. They are natural to what it means to be human. We’ve just become so distant from the traditions that taught us how to live this - so distracted by noise, by screens, by the relentless pace of modern life - that what should be as natural as breathing has become a discipline we have to consciously re-learn. That is not a failure of the tradition. It is a consequence of how far we’ve drifted from it. From Allah.

The first time I engaged in Muraqaba practices during my training, something happened that I have struggled to fully articulate since. I felt, for the first time in a long time, genuinely grounded in myself. Not performing groundedness. Not thinking about it. Actually in it. I became aware of my true reality - of being a soul, held by Allah, witnessed by Him, connected to something that the ordinary pace of life had been quietly drowning out. It felt like a full circle moment. Like coming home to a room I had always known existed but had never been shown the door to.

That experience is why I believe this practice is not optional for the Muslim woman who is serious about her healing. It is the terrain on which healing actually happens.

Let’s go into the framework. Because the tradition doesn’t simply tell us what to do. It tells us how and why - with a precision and a depth that puts any wellness app to shame.

Imam Al-Ghazali, drawing on the Quranic ayah in Surah Al-Imran (3:191) — “Those who remember Allah while standing, sitting, and lying on their sides, and reflect upon the creation of the heavens and the earth” - laid out five stages of contemplation that map the entire interior journey of the human being:

STAGE ONE
Remembrance (Dhikr)
The journey begins not with emptying the mind but with filling it - orienting consciousness toward Allah through active remembrance. This can begin as purely cognitive. Simply bringing Allah to mind. The intention is to become conscious of Him before anything else can open.

STAGE TWO
Contemplation (Tafakkur)
Deep, focused reflection on the signs of Allah - in nature, in creation, in the ordinary miracle of existence. SubhanAllah said not as a reflex but as a genuine response to seeing. Tafakkur begins with the mind and moves toward the heart - it uses the rational faculty as a doorway, not a destination.

STAGE THREE
Understanding (Fahm)
Insight that is not merely rational but felt - the heart beginning to perceive what the mind has been reflecting on. This is not understanding as information. It is understanding as illumination. The heart has the capacity to perceive; this stage is where that capacity begins to activate.

STAGE FOUR
Illumination (Nur)
Light entering the heart - deepening perception beyond what our own effort can manufacture. This stage is beyond our capacity to produce through technique. Our orientation opens the heart; what enters is from Allah. We prepare the vessel. He fills it.

STAGE FIVE
Transformation (Tajdid al-Hal)
A fundamental change in physical and spiritual state. Not a mood shift. Not a temporary feeling of calm. A genuine renewal of condition - to be in illumination, in presence, in submission, and in witnessing. This is the goal. Not a destination arrived at once, but a state returned to and deepened over a lifetime of practice.

What strikes me most about this framework is that it begins where we are - with a single act of remembrance, however cognitive, however thin - and ends in transformation. There is no prerequisite of spiritual perfection. There is only the willingness to begin, and to keep beginning.

Al-Muhasibi - whose name itself became synonymous with the practice of self-accounting - gave us something even more practical: actual steps for how to enter this state. Drawing on the Quranic ayah in Surah Qaf (50:37) — “Indeed in this is a reminder for whoever has a heart or who listens while he is present” - he identified three essential components of the practice: the heart as the centre of deep perception, attentive listening with the hearing of the heart rather than the ears, and witnessing - observing the self without interference, in order to witness Allah.

And from these, a structured practice:

1. Still the body - Find a position of stillness. Not because the body is the enemy, but because movement carries the mind outward. Stillness begins to draw it inward.

2. Close the eyes - Remove the visual stimulus. The eyes are the primary channel through which the external world enters and occupies the mind. Closing them is an act of turning inward.

3. Release the ears - Do not busy the ears with sound. Allow what is external to recede. The hearing you are cultivating here is the hearing of the heart - a different faculty entirely.

4. Release the hands - Do not busy the hands. The body's habitual need to do, to hold, to engage - let it rest. You are not producing anything here. You are receiving.

5. Be sincere - This is not a performance. Not for anyone watching, not even for yourself. Sincerity - ikhlas - is the condition that allows what follows to be real. Bring only what is true.

Five steps. No app required. No subscription. No streak to maintain.

What is required is something far more demanding and far more rewarding than any of those things: your actual presence. Your willingness to be still, to be honest, and to allow yourself to be witnessed by the One who has always been watching - not to judge you into smallness, but to hold you into wholeness.

That is Muraqaba. That is the practice of being watched. And it is, I genuinely believe, the most freeing thing available to us - because the moment you truly understand that you are already, completely, and lovingly seen by Allah, the exhausting performance of being human begins, very slowly, to fall away.

You do not have to manufacture presence. You only have to return to it.

Begin there.

What it cannot explain - what it has never been able to explain, despite centuries of trying - is the thing that is doing the experiencing.

The part of you that reads these words and knows it is reading them. The part that feels the weight of a loss and knows that it feels it. The awareness behind the awareness. The witness inside the witnessing. Science calls this the hard problem of consciousness - and it remains, to this day, unsolved. Not because scientists are not clever enough. But because the answer does not live in the material world they are equipped to measure.

The Islamic tradition has a name for it. It has always had a name for it.

It is the Ruh.

"And they ask you about the ruh. Say: the ruh is of the affair of my Lord. And of knowledge, you have been given only a little." (Surah Al-Isra, 17:85)

This ayah has always struck me as one of the most quietly radical verses in the Quran. Not because of what it says - but because of what it refuses to say. Allah does not explain the ruh. He does not give us a definition, a mechanism, a formula. He simply says: this belongs to Me. And you do not have the capacity to fully know it.

In an age that believes every question has an answer and every mystery a solution waiting to be unlocked, this is a profound act of divine restraint. The ruh is not a puzzle to be solved. It is a secret to be held - by the One who placed it in you.

And yet - and this is what I want to sit with - the fact that we cannot fully know the ruh does not mean we cannot experience it. The fact that Allah has kept its full nature as His own affair does not mean He has kept its effects from us. Quite the opposite. The ruh is the very thing that makes experience possible. It is the animating breath, the divine trust placed inside the human being, the part of you that is oriented toward Allah not because you chose it - but because it was made that way before you arrived in this world.

This is the fitrah. The innate disposition. The original nature. And it is the ruh that carries it.

Now - here is where I want to bring in something that changed the way I understood almost everything about Islamic psychology, about healing, and about why so many of us walk around knowing the right things about Allah and still feeling spiritually hollow.

The nervous system.

I want to be clear: I am not saying the nervous system is the ruh. It is not. The ruh is immaterial, divine, beyond the reach of any biological system. But the nervous system is the instrument through which the ruh experiences embodied life. It is the interface between the soul and the body. And when that interface is dysregulated - when the nervous system is stuck in survival mode, flooded with unprocessed trauma, or chronically operating from a place of threat - something happens to our capacity to receive.

We lose access to the felt sense of Allah’s presence.

Not His actual presence - He is always near, always and without exception. But our ability to feel that nearness. To receive it in the body. To let it land.

This is the thing that nobody tells us, especially Muslim women. You can know, with every cell of your intellect, that Allah loves you. You can have memorised the ayahs, read the books, heard the lectures. And still feel nothing. Still feel the distance. Still reach for Him and find your hands closing around air.

And then carry the weight of believing that the emptiness is your fault. That it is a deficiency in your iman. That if you just tried harder, prayed more, felt more, it would finally click into place.

But what if it is not your iman that is the problem? What if it is your nervous system - carrying wounds it was never helped to process - standing between you and your own capacity to feel what you already know to be true?

You can know Allah loves you. And your nervous system might be exactly why you cannot feel it yet. That is not a failure of faith. It is an invitation to go deeper.

I came to understand this not through a book, but through experience - my own healing, and the work of sitting with others in theirs. There is a moment that happens, when the nervous system begins to settle - when safety is established enough that the body stops bracing - where something opens. Not dramatically. Not in a flash of light. But quietly, the way a window opens on a still morning. And what comes through that window is not new. It was always there. It is simply that the body, for the first time in perhaps a long time, is able to receive it.

That opening - that moment of settling - is, I believe, the nervous system coming into enough regulation to allow the qalb to do what it was always designed to do: turn toward Allah. Feel His nearness. Rest in His mercy. Exercise genuine tawakkul - not as an intellectual position, but as a lived, embodied, felt reality.

Because tawakkul is not a thought. It is a state. And states are experienced in the body, not just the mind.

I shared some of these ideas recently on Instagram - and I want to bring them into the essay here, because I think they form the bridge between where we started and where I want us to land:

FROM THE INSTAGRAM SERIES - “WONDER WHERE YOUR ANXIETY IS REALLY COMING FROM?”

On the nervous system and the soul
What appears on the surface is almost never the whole story. The behaviour, the racing thoughts, the restlessness - these are symptoms. Not the source.

On knowing vs. feeling
You can know, intellectually, that Allah is in control - and still feel terrified. The aql has the information. The qalb has not yet received it. That is not a failure of faith.

On where the work happens
The heart carries what the mind cannot process. Unprocessed grief. Accumulated fear. Old wounds not yet named. And that pressure has to go somewhere.

On the Ruh
The anxiety is not evidence that you have lost your way. It is evidence that something in you is still trying to find it.

The nervous system, then, is not separate from the spiritual life. It is the terrain through which the spiritual life is lived. A regulated nervous system is not a luxury or a therapeutic nicety. For a Muslim woman trying to draw close to Allah - trying to feel His love, to trust His plan, to rest in His decree - it is the ground on which all of that becomes possible.

This is why the Prophet ﷺ prescribed dhikr. Why salawat lifts the heaviness in the chest. Why the Quran describes itself as a healing - shifa’ - for what is in the hearts. These are not metaphors. They are, in the most precise sense, nervous system interventions. Practices that signal safety to a body that has forgotten what safety feels like. Practices that regulate, through the breath and the tongue and the heart, the very system that determines whether we can receive what Allah is always offering.

The ruh knows. It has always known. It was oriented toward Allah before it entered this body and it will return to Him when it leaves. The nervous system is simply the instrument it has been given for the duration of this life - and like any instrument, it requires tuning.

The work of Islamic healing - the tazkiyah, the dhikr, the muhasabah, the salawat, the surrender - is, among many other things, the work of tuning that instrument. So that what the ruh knows, the body can finally feel.

So that you can know Allah loves you - and feel it too.

I write as a student, not a scholar - formally trained in Psychology, endlessly curious about the Islamic tradition, and aware of how much I do not yet know. What follows are reflections, not rulings. Read them as such, and correct me where I err. Any goodness here is from Allah; any mistake is entirely my own.

I want to tell you about something I have been doing since I was very small - something that was woven into my upbringing so naturally that it became like breathing. Something I did without fully understanding what I was doing.

And then something shifted. Gradually, the way most real things shift. Understanding began to catch up with practice (only now in my late 20’s). And when it did - when I began to comprehend even a fraction of what I had been doing all along - it added a sweetness I cannot quite put into words. The closest I can get is this: It felt like finally tasting something you had been eating your whole life without really tasting it.

I am talking about Salawat upon the Prophet ﷺ.

Now - I can already hear some of you thinking: that’s not a du’a. And I understand why you’d say that. We tend to think of du’a as petition, as asking, as the raised hands and the specific ambitious requests. But Ibn al-Qayyim - one of the most towering scholars of the Islamic tradition - is explicit in his masterwork Jalā' al-Afhām: Salawat upon the Prophet ﷺ is itself a du’a. It is, in fact, one of the most complete acts of worship a person can offer. And once you understand why, it becomes very difficult to stop.

There is a constriction - qabd - that I know well. A heaviness that settles in the chest or the throat. Not always dramatic. Sometimes just a tightening, a sense of weight, a dullness that sits where there should be lightness. If you know it, you know it.

My first port of call, almost without thinking now, is Salawat. Not because I read it somewhere and decided to try it. But because the experience of it, repeated over time, has become its own evidence. There is something that happens when the tongue begins to move in blessing upon the Beloved ﷺ - something that loosens what was tight, that lifts what was sitting heavy, that brings the chest back to itself.

I want to be honest about something though: this does not happen automatically. It comes with practice and consistency. You cannot expect to remember it in a crisis straight away - when the nervous system is flooded, when you are in fight or flight, when the situation is acute and the mind is scrambling - air it has not already become habitual in the ordinary moments. That can however, be a good place to start. If by the will of Allah, it does come into your mind at that moment - then Bismillah.
The practice has to be laid down in the quiet so that it is available in the storm. That is the nature of any spiritual disciplines worth having.

This is the part of why I have begun incorporating the Dalā'il al-Khayrāt into my daily Salawat.

The Dalā’il al-Khayrāt - meaning “Guides to Goodness” - is a celebrated collection of prayers upon the Prophet ﷺ compiled by the Moroccan scholar Imam Muhammad al-Jazuli (raḥimahullāh) in the fifteenth century. It became one of the most widely read and beloved texts in the Islamic world, used for centuries by Muslims across traditions as a daily practice of devotion. Its recitation is associated with immense spiritual reward and a deepening of love for the Prophet ﷺ - which is, ultimately, a deepening of one’s connection to Allah.

If you have never encountered it, I hope this is the beginning of that encounter. And if you have, perhaps this is a reminder to return.

Ibn al-Qayyim (raḥimahullāh) documented forty benefits of Salawat upon the Prophet ﷺ in Jalā' al-Afhām. Forty. I’ve been sitting with this list for some time now, and I want to share the ones that have stopped me almost completely - because I think when you see them laid out, something happens in the chest. Something uplifting.

1. It is the direct fulfilment of Allah’s own command - you are not doing something extra. You are doing what He asked.

2. Allah sends 10 blessings upon the servant for every single Salawat. 10 for 1.

3. Ten good deeds are written. Ten sins are erased. Ten levels are raised - all for you.

4. A du’a that starts with Salawat is more likely to be accepted. So if you have something you desperately need to ask for - begin here.

5. It is a means of closeness to the Prophet ﷺ on the Day of Judgement. He will be closest to those who sent the most Salawat upon him.

6. A means to repel poverty and fulfil needs. A means of blessings not only in the akhirah, but in this life. Right now.

7. A means for the servant to remember what he has forgotten.

8. It protects against hardness of the heart - that creeping calcification that comes when the remembrance of Allah grows thin.

9. Abundance of light on the Sirāt (bridge). Firm feet on the path. Glad tidings of Paradise before death.

10. The Prophet ﷺ himself responds to the one who sends Salawat upon him.

11. It is a means of guidance and a living heart. Not a metaphor. A living heart.

12. The Servant’s name is presented to the Prophet ﷺ. He knows you sent it.

13. It comprises gratitude to Allah. And it is, itself, a du’a.

I’ve shared only a selection here. The full list, documented with care and scholarship by Ibn al-Qayyim (raḥimahullāh), contains forty. Forty reasons. And I find, the more I sit with them, that I need fewer and fewer reasons to begin - because the practice itself has become the reason.

I was raised with Salawat. But I didn’t truly understand it until now. And now that I do - even partially, it has a sweetness I cannot manufacture with anything else.

There is something I want to leave you with. The Salawat doesn’t have to be long. It doesn’t have to be the Dalā'il al-Khayrāt - though I hope, if it’s not already in your life, that it finds its way there. It can be the shortest form, said once, sincerely, with the heart even slightly present. Allahumma salli 'ala Muhammad. That is enough to begin.

Begin there. Especially on the days when the chest is tight and the throat is constricted and the world is loud. Especially then. Not because it’ll instantly fix everything, but because it turns the heart, even by a tiny amount, toward the one whose intercession we will need the most. And that turning, done consistently, done imperfectly, done even when it doesn’t feel like it’s working - is its own form of healing.

Allah send His blessings and peace upon our Prophet ﷺ - and upon all of you reading this.

I write as a student, not a scholar - formally trained in Psychology, endlessly curious about the Islamic tradition, and aware of how much I do not yet know. What follows are reflections, not rulings. Read them as such, and correct me where I err. Any goodness here is from Allah; any mistake is entirely my own.

The difference between the two will change everything about how you heal. And I’m so excited to share this!

Let me tell you what anxiety looked like for me at its most acute.

I was facing eviction from my home. Three children. The youngest not yet of school age. I didn’t know where we would go, how the school runs would continue, how I would see my clients, how we would eat, where we would sleep. I didn’t know what the next chapter looked like - only that the current one was ending, and not gently.

That is anxiety in its rawest form. Not the low-level hum of everyday worry. The kind that sits in your chest like a stone and makes ordinary life feel like an act of defiance.

And here’s what I want to tell you about that season: the goal was never to control any of it. Because it couldn’t be controlled. What I could do - and what I chose, imperfectly and repeatedly, to do - was to keep worshipping Allah as if His plan was already unfolding. To continue as if the outcome was already written and was already good. To keep Him as my lifeline, because He is. And looking back now, with the clarity that only hindsight and gratitude can bring: it was the best thing I could have done. For me and for my children. He came through. As He always does.

But I didn’t know that in the middle of it. And I think it’s important to say that - because what I am about to share with you is not a formula for making anxiety disappear. It is a map for understanding where it lives, and what it is asking of you.

The Islamic tradition offers us a remarkably sophisticated map of the human soul - one that contemporary Islamic psychology has begun to articulate in ways that are both clinically rigorous and spiritually alive. At its heart is this understanding: the human being is not one-dimensional. We are layered. And what often appears on the surface is almost never the whole story.

What is visible externally is only a fraction of what exists internally. And it’s the same with anxiety - or any presenting struggle. What you see, feel, and experience on the surface is real. But it is not the source.

There are four layers to understand. And I’ll be moving through them with you from the surface, inward. Because that’s the direction healing travels.

Nafs (The Self - behaviour, impulse, motivation) - Visible
This is where anxiety first becomes visible - in behaviour. The restlessness, the inability to sleep, the irritability, the compulsive checking, the avoidance. The patterns that those around you can observe and that you yourself can feel most acutely in your body and your actions.

The Nafs is the part of the soul most closely associated with our temporal, human experience - our impulses, our desires, and behavioural tendencies. When the Nafs is untended or under pressure, it manifests in ways we can see. Anxiety at this level looks like behaviour that has lost its anchor.

This is where most people - and most conventional therapeutic approaches, stop. They see the behaviour, they address the behaviour. And that is not without value. But the Islamic framework insists that the behaviour is not the source. It is only the symptom. To treat only the symptom is to clean the surface of the mirror without asking what is casting the shadow.

‘Aql (The Intellect - cognition, thought patterns, perception) - Below the surface
Just beneath the visible surface lives the intellect - the cognitive layer. This is where the anxious thoughts reside: the catastrophising, the worst-case narratives, the inner monologue that convinces you nothing will be okay. Cognitive approaches to therapy work here, and they work well - identifying distorted thinking patterns and offering more grounded, realistic alternatives.

But here is something the Islamic tradition understood long before modern psychology articulated it: the ‘Aql is not located only in the head/mind. It is understood to be a function of the Qalb - the heart. In other words, the thoughts driving your anxiety are not originating in your mind alone. They are being shaped by something deeper. The intellect is processing what the heart is holding.

This is why you can know, intellectually, that Allah is in control - and still feel terrified. The ‘Aql has the information. But the Qalb has not yet received it.

Qalb (The Heart - emotion, spiritual centre, the seat of consciousness) - The source
This is where the anxiety is actually living. Not in the behaviour. Not in the thought. In the heart.

The Qalb is the spiritual centre of the person in the Islamic framework - the seat of consciousness, the place where faith either takes root or fails to land. It is also where emotional blocks reside: the unprocessed grief, the accumulated fear, the old wounds that have not yet been named or released. When the heart carried a block - an unresolved pain, a deep disconnection, an unacknowledged loss - it creates a kind of pressure within the whole system. That pressure surfaces as the behaviour and thoughts we identified in the layers above.

When I was facing eviction, the anxiety I felt was not primarily a thought problem or a behaviour problem. It was a heart problem - in the most theologically precise sense of the word. My heart was holding something it couldn’t yet make sense of: the terror of uncertainty, the weight of sole responsibility for three children, the desperate need for safety that I couldn’t manufacture on my own.

And the only thing that could reach the heart at that depth was not a coping strategy. It was Allah. Dhikr. Salah. Du’a. Not as techniques for managing symptoms - but as genuine acts of turning the heart back toward its source. Because the heart, in the Islamic understanding, has the potential to turn in one of two directions: toward the lower, worldly pull of fear and ego - or toward the higher, Godly nature of the soul. Remembrance of Allah is what tilts it toward the latter.

This is where the real work of healing happens. Not at the surface. Here, in the depth of the heart, where the block lives - and where it can be released.

Ruh (The Spirit - the divine breath, connected to Allah) - The mystery
Beneath even the heart lies the Ruh - the spirit. The pure, immaterial soul that Allah breathed into the human being and which remains, in the words of the Qur’an, the affair of the Lord alone: “And they ask you about the ruh. Say: the ruh is of the affair of my Lord. And of knowledge, you have been given only a little.” (17:85)

The Ruh is not something we can fully engage or analyse. Even the scholars of the tradition approach it with reverence and restraint. What we can say is this: when the block at the level of the heart is cleared - when the emotional weight is released and the Qalb turns toward Allah - something opens. A connection is restored. The Ruh, which has always been oriented toward its Lord, finds less obstruction on its way home.

That is what tawakkul at its most mature feels like. Not the absence of fear. Not the certainty of a good outcome. But the Ruh finding its way back to Allah even while the heart is still in the process of healing. Worshipping as if His plan is already unfolding - because at the level of the Ruh, you know, beneath the noise of everything else, that it is.

So when anxiety arrives - and it will arrive, because you are human and this life is heavy - I want you to resist the first instinct to silence it, fix it, or feel ashamed of it. Instead, ask: “which layer is this living in?”

Is it in my behaviour - am I avoiding, overworking, over-controlling? Go deeper.

Is it in my thoughts - am I catastrophising, spiralling, unable to find ground? Go deeper still.

Is it in my heart - is there something unprocessed here, something I’m carrying that needs to be named, grieved, or surrendered?
This is where you do the work. This is where you bring it to Allah.

And underneath all of it - underneath the behaviour, thoughts and the held grief - your Ruh is waiting. Already oriented. Already His. The anxiety is not evidence that you have lost your way. It is evidence that something in you is still trying to find it.

Keep trying. Keep turning. Keep Him as your lifeline.

Because He is.

So let’s press.

The word nafs comes from the Arabic root for breath - which is itself significant. It signals that the nafs is not separate from the soul (ruh) but entirely reliant upon it for its continuity, the way breath relies on the lungs that draw it. The Quran establishes in Surah An-Nisa (4:1) that the human being originates from a single soul - nafs wahida - affirming that the nafs is fundamentally immaterial. It cannot be located in the body. It is not your brain, your personality, or your mood. It is the seat of who you are.

According to the Islamic model of the soul - drawn from the tradition of Ilm an-Nafs (the knowledge of the soul) and Tazkiyat an-Nafs (its purification) - the human being is born with a fitrah: an innately pure and good nature, directly connected to Allah. But life in this world - its wounds, its distractions, its losses - gradually covers that fitrah over. Not destroys it. Covers it.

Think of it like a mirror. The light the mirror is meant to reflect has never dimmed - it is divine, and therefore constant. But the mirror itself accumulates dust. Grime. The residue of everything we have lived through and held onto. The work of Tazkiyat an-Nafs - the purification of the soul - is essentially the work of cleaning that mirror. Not to create something new. To uncover what was always already there.

This is not abstract theology. It is a practical map for the inner life. And at the centre of it is the understanding that the nafs is not static - it moves. It has stages. And knowing which stage you are in is the beginning of knowing what work is being asked of you.

The classical tradition identifies seven stages of the nafs - drawn here from Maratib al-Nafs by the scholar ‘Abd al-Khaliq ‘Abd al-Salam al-Shabrawi, a master of the Khalwati path, and informed by the research framework of Islamic Psychology and Psychotherapy. Today, we will sit with the three you will encounter most - in the literature, in the discourse, and if you look honestly enough, in yourself.

Stage One
Nafs al-Ammārah bil-Sū' - (The Commanding Soul)
Locus: the chest · State: inclination · Invocation: Lā ilāha illa Allāh

This is the nafs in its most untended state. Not evil in the way we typically imagine evil - not scheming or malicious - but anchored in the self rather than in awareness of God. The classical tradition describes it as individuation: a kind of spiritual myopia where the self becomes the entire horizon. Everything is filtered through appetite, comfort, and desire. Allah is not necessarily denied - He is simply, and dangerously, forgotten.

This is what the tradition calls Ghafla: heedlessness. A forgetting that is less a decision and more a drift. Its qualities read like a list of things we would rather not recognise in ourselves - greed, arrogance, envy, voracity, anger, lust, mockery, and the tendency to involve oneself in what does not concern one. Its realm, notably, is the realm of witnessing - the purely material, the visible, the immediate.

I want to be careful here, because this stage is easy to weaponise. It is not a verdict. It is a description of what happens when the nafs is left without tending - and the tradition is clear that the remedy is not shame but dhikr: constant, forceful remembrance of Allah. Lā ilāha illa Allāh. There is no god but God. Said enough times, with enough presence, it begins to loosen the nafs from its grip on the self.

Most of us have visited this stage. Some of us live here for seasons without realising it. The question is not whether you have been here - it is whether you are awake enough to notice.

A moment to sit with:
Is there an area of your life where you are operating on autopilot - where Allah feels distant not because of doubt, but simply because you have been too busy, too distracted, or too comfortable to remember? What does your heedlessness look like - and what would it mean to interrupt it, even once today, with a single sincere remembrance?

Stage Two
Nafs al-Lawwāmah - (The Self-Reproaching Soul)
Locus: the heart · State: love · Journey: Towards Allah

This is where most of the work happens. If the first stage is sleep, this is the moment of waking - and anyone who has ever woken suddenly knows that waking is not the same as being rested. It is disorienting. It is uncomfortable. It is, at times, painful.

The nafs al-lawwamah is the battleground. It is the soul in the thick of the struggle - pulled between the dunya and the akhirah, between the lower self and the higher, between what it wants and what it knows. The classical tradition describes it as the realm of the Barzakh - the in-between - and that feels exactly right. This is the nafs that knows better and does it anyway, then reproaches itself afterwards. Sound familiar?

Crucially - and I want to sit here for a moment because I think this is where many of us get confused, and where I certainly did - some traits of the commanding nafs can still remain in this stage. You can be in lawwamah and still struggle with arrogance. Still feel envy. Still catch yourself doing things you know are beneath who you are trying to become. The difference is that now you see it. You recognise truth as truth and falsehood as falsehood. The light is on, even when the room is still messy.

This distinction matters enormously for those of us who have lived through trauma or abuse. When you are carrying high levels of pain, self-criticism can feel indistinguishable from spiritual awareness. I spent a long time thinking my relentless self-reproach was a sign of spiritual development - that because I could see my faults so clearly, I must be in lawwamah. But there is a difference between the self-reproach that comes from clarity and the self-criticism that comes from a wound. One is the nafs holding you accountable in love. The other is an old voice - perhaps someone else’s - that learned to live inside you. Healing from trauma made that distinction clearer for me. It might for you too.

The qualities of this stage include self-admiration, subtle ostentation, and love of recognition - which is why the tradition warns that even those who reach higher stages are liable to fall back here if discipline slips. This is not a stage you pass through and leave behind. It is a stage you learn to navigate with increasing skill.

Its state, notably, is love. The nafs al-lawwamah is oriented toward Allah - it is journeying toward Him - even when it stumbles. That is not a small thing. That is everything.

A moment to sit with:
When you reproach yourself, what does the voice sound like - is it loving and corrective, like a wise friend holding you to your own standards? Or is it harsh, relentless, and impossible to satisfy? Can you locate where that voice came from? And is there a difference, in your experience, between the moments you have felt genuinely accountable to Allah and the moments you have simply felt bad about yourself?

Stage Four
Nafs al-Mutma’innah - (The Tranquil Soul)
Locus: the inner secret (interior of the Ruh) · State: true tranquility · Journey: With Allah

The Quran calls to this soul directly: “O tranquil soul, return to your Lord, well-pleased and pleasing to Him.” (89:27-28). It is the only stage the Quran addresses by name - which tells you something about its significance.

But I want to be honest with you about what this stage is and is not, because I think it is often misrepresented. The tradition does not describe nafs al-mutma’innah as a destination you arrive at and unpack your bags. It is described as more of an ideal - a north star - whose importance lies not in being finally reached but in the orientation it gives the entire journey. It is conceived as a station of firm establishment, of the eye of certainty, of complete faith. Its qualities are generosity, reliance upon Allah, forbearance, worship, gratitude, contentment with Divine Decree, and patience in the face of tribulation.

One of the signs that a person has entered this station, according to the classical scholars, is that they do not depart from the obligations of Divine Command by even a handspan - and that they find delight only in the character of the Prophet ﷺ, and tranquility only in following his words. This is a soul that has been so thoroughly oriented toward Allah that the separation between what it wants and what Allah wills has grown very thin.

Its locus is the inner secret - the interior of the spirit itself. Its journey is not toward Allah, as with the previous stage, but with Allah. That shift in preposition is the whole journey.

Most of us will spend our lives in the territory of lawwamah, glimpsing mutma'innah in our best moments - in the depth of a sincere sujood, in the aftermath of genuine tawbah, in the rare and precious stillness that descends when the heart is fully present with its Lord. Those glimpses are not failures. They are the work. They are what we are here to do.

A moment to sit with:
Have you ever experienced a moment - however brief - that felt like genuine tranquility? Not the absence of difficulty, but a stillness underneath it? What were the conditions of that moment? And what does it tell you about what your soul is capable of, and what it is ultimately seeking?

The classical tradition identifies four more stages beyond these three - each one a deeper station of proximity to Allah, each one with its own qualities, its own locus, its own incoming influence from the Divine. We will explore those in detail for subscribers - because the map, once you have the foundation, becomes a very different kind of reading.

For now, sit with the glossary below - and with the questions woven through each stage. Not to diagnose yourself. Not to rank yourself. But to begin the practice of honest self-witnessing that the entire tradition of Ilm an-Nafs is asking of you.

Because here is what I want you to leave with: you are not broken. You are not stuck. You are, in all likelihood, in the thick of lawwamah - which means you are doing the most important work a human being can do. The fact that you can see yourself clearly enough to reproach yourself is not a sign that you are failing. It is a sign that the light is on.

Keep it on. That is the whole instruction.

KEY TERMS

Nafs - the soul/self; from the Arabic for breath, signifying its reliance on the ruh for continuity.

Ruh - the spirit; the immaterial, divine breath blown into the human being.

Fitrah - the innate, pure disposition of the human being; the original nature connected to Allah.

Ilm an-Nafs - the knowledge of the soul; the Islamic science of understanding the inner self.

Tazkiyat an-Nafs - the purification of the soul; the practical work of clearing the mirror to reflect divine light.

Jihad an-Nafs - the struggle of the soul; the inner striving against the lower self.

Ghafla - heedlessness; the forgetting of Allah that characterises the commanding soul.

Dhikr - remembrance of Allah; the primary remedy offered to the nafs al-Ammara.

Zuhd - renunciation; the disciplining of the soul away from what it inclines toward for the sake of purification.

If this found you at the right time, stay. Subscribe for weekly essays, letters, and reflections from The Olive Branch Writes - InshaAllah, see you next week.

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I wasn’t going to write about this.

I had other things planned - something more composed, more considered, something that didn’t require me to open a door I usually keep firmly shut. But the Nafs has a way of refusing to be managed, and this morning, it is refusing quite loudly. So here we are.

I am a single mother to three boys. The youngest is three years old. The house is rarely quiet, the to-do list is never finished, and the love - the love is enormous and relentless and it fills me up in ways I could not have anticipated before I became their mother. I would not trade a single one of those unwarranted, sticky-handed hugs for anything in this world.

And yet…

There is a particular kind of loneliness that descends at the end of the day, when the boys are finally asleep and the house goes still and there is nobody to turn to. Nobody to say - you won’t believe what happened today. Nobody to sit with in comfortable silence. No loving, comforting embrace from a spouse, rooted in nikah, in something faithful and soulful and ultimately oriented toward the Divine. Not a performance of love. The real thing.

I don’t think I’ve ever had it. And yet I know, with a certainty I can’t entirely explain, that it is missing. You can grieve something you have never held. It turns out the heart does not require prior experience to know what it is longing for.

You can grieve something you have never held. The heart does not require prior experience to know what it is longing for.

I am a romantic. I say this without embarrassment. I want to be understood, to be loved for exactly who I am, to be listened to, to be cared for - and to give all of that back in return. I want the kind of love that doesn’t shrink you. The kind that points us both back to Allah.

And so, during these spells - and they used to come once every few months, but lately they have been arriving every few weeks, settling into my chest like an uninvited guest who has somehow memorised the layout of my home - I find myself in sujood, making du’a with a fervour that surprises even me. (And that takes a lot!)

“Ya Allah, grant me a spouse who can be a good role model and father figure for my boys.”

“Ya Allah, prepare my heart for the most beautiful, halal, soulful love that brings me peace - and ultimately brings me closer to You.”

Sometimes it’s a long list. Every quality, every hope, every quiet want I have carried for years - because honestly, who else am I going to say it to? Allah is the only one who has heard the full version. And I think that is perhaps the point.

I know what I am supposed to say here. I know the tradition. Rizq is written. A spouse is part of that rizq. What is decreed will come. And I believe this - I do, in the part of me that is settled and certain. But in the part of me that is human, that is tired, that sits alone at 10pm when the children are asleep and the quiet is almost too loud - belief and peace are not always the same thing.

And then there is the advice. Oh, the advice. “It’ll happen when you stop looking.” “Divine timing.” “When you least expect it.” I say this with love and without malice: these things do not bring comfort. They bring the same comfort as telling someone who has just lost a beloved family member that their loved one is in a better place now. True, possibly. Helpful in the moment? Absolutely not.

My personal favourite, however - and I say this as someone who genuinely loves the sunnah - is the classic: tie your camel, then put your trust in Allah. Wonderful advice. Truly. Except - and I say this as a single mother who is inundated with three boys, a household to run, clients to see, and a Substack apparently - where, precisely, is the camel? Where does one go to find it? I am not being rhetorical. I genuinely want to know. Because between the school runs, the therapy sessions, the bedtime routines, and the laundry that has been sitting in the machine for two days, I have not located the camel. If anyone has seen it, please do let me know.

I have been sitting with a question lately that I do not have an answer to: what is Allah trying to teach me in this season?

Is it patience? Is it something in my subconscious that needs to surface before I can receive what I am asking for? Is there a block I haven’t yet named, a wound that hasn’t yet fully healed, a version of myself I haven’t yet grown into? I don’t know. I genuinely don’t know. And I have made a decision - tentatively, imperfectly - to sit with “not knowing” rather than force an answer that doesn’t fit.

I know that Allah answers du’as in one of four ways: by granting it, by delaying it, by granting something even better, or by saving it for the hereafter. I know this. And I know that if He had not wanted to grant it, He would not have inspired me to ask. But knowing something and feeling at peace with it are two very different things, and I think it is important to say that out loud - because I suspect I am not the only one living in that gap.

So tonight I am not offering you a resolution, because I don’t have one. I am offering you this instead: the honest, unpolished truth of a woman who is learning, and struggling, and making du’a anyway. Who believes in the rizq that is written for her, even on the nights when belief feels more like a muscle she is straining than a place she is resting.

The nafs will not always be managed. Sometimes it just needs to be witnessed.

And maybe, just maybe - that is enough for now.

If this found you at the right time, stay. Subscribe for weekly essays, letters, and reflections from The Olive Branch Writes - inshallah, see you next week. 🫒

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Let me paint you a picture…

A Muslim woman walks into a therapy room. She is carrying, conservatively speaking, a lot. She shows up every week. She is honest. She does the worksheets and exercises. She learns the vocabulary - cognitive distortions, attachment styles, the window of tolerance - and she deploys it earnestly, because she is, if nothing else, an excellent student.

And yet, session after session, she leaves feeling strangely hollowed out. Not because the therapy is bad. But because something keeps getting bigger, not smaller - a gaping hole at the centre of her, growing with each appointment, as though the more she excavated, the more she unearthed the one thing the room had no language for.

That woman was me. And the thing the room had no language for was Allah.

I was buried under so much abuse, hurt, and sorrow that I could no longer see myself. I didn’t know who I was. What I did know - dimly, stubbornly, in the way you know things you can’t yet articulate - was that whoever ‘she’ was, she was a Muslim. And the further I drifted from that, the wider the hole became. Therapy was giving me tools. But you cannot use tools when you have forgotten what you are building.

I want to be fair to the process. It offered me real things. But there is a register of the self that secular frameworks were simply not designed to reach - something beneath cognition, beneath even emotion, that for a Muslim woman cannot be addressed without also addressing her Lord. You can restructure your thoughts all you like. You cannot restructure your soul with a CBT worksheet.

Deep down, I knew I had to get back in touch with Allah to break out of the season I was in. I didn’t know how. But my soul was telling me - quietly, persistently - that, that was where my answers were.

And so I began…

Not dramatically. Not in a single revelatory moment soundtracked by something cinematic. Bit by bit, the way most real things happen. A du’a returned to. A Surah re-read. A small act of worship that felt, for the first time in a long time, like it belonged to me rather than obligation. The return was gradual, and it was not linear, and some days the hole still gaped. But something was shifting.

What I didn’t expect was what happened when I began to encounter the Islamic intellectual tradition in earnest - the classical scholars of the Nafs, the masters of Tazkiyah, the teachings of Tasawwuf that I had never been formally introduced to. I expected to be learning something new. What I found felt like something else entirely.

It felt like remembering.

Language I had never encountered before landed in me as though it had always been there, waiting. Concepts I had no prior exposure to - the commanding Nafs, the tranquil Nafs, the stations of the heart, the idea that the soul has a nature and a trajectory and a longing that precedes all of our experiences - these things did not feel foreign. They felt like a homecoming. Like someone had reached into the dark and flipped a switch, and the light that came on was not new. It had simply never gone out.

This, I later understood, is what the tradition calls fitrah.

The innate disposition, the original nature, the covenant the soul made with its Lord before it was ever born into this world. The Qur’an speaks of it: “So set your face toward the religion, as a hanif - the fitrah of Allah upon which He has created all people.” (30:30) There is a knowledge woven into the soul that the mind has not necessarily caught up to. When we encounter truth that resonates at that depth, we are not discovering something. We are recognising what was within us all along.

I thought of Rumi’s line - the one I had read before and nodded at intellectually, filed away with all the other beautiful things I hadn’t yet earned the right to understand: “The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” It had never made more sense. Because it was precisely through the breaking - the abuse, the loss of self, the gaping hole that no amount of therapeutic processing could fill - that I found my way back to a tradition that had always held the language for what I was living through. The wound was not a detour. It was the door.

So who am I, and why am I here?

I am a Muslim woman, a mother, a therapist in the making, and a seeker - in that order, and sometimes all at once, which is as chaotic as it sounds. I am formally trained in Psychology and I have spent years sitting with people in their pain, which has only deepened my conviction that the Islamic tradition holds something modern frameworks cannot replicate. I am not a scholar. I am a student - constantly learning, constantly up-skilling, constantly humbled by how vast this tradition is and how much of it I have yet to touch.

But I believe, sincerely, that knowledge is not meant to be hoarded. Whatever I learn, I want to share. Not as verdicts. Not as preaching. But as an open hand extended to anyone willing to take it - because if something I have understood brings even one person a single step closer to their Lord, that is more than enough reason to write.

Why now?

Because my Instagram carousels, as much as I love them, are not enough. There is only so much you can say in slides. Many of you have told me to write a book - and I hear you, I really do - but this felt like the more honest first step. A space to think in longer form. To explore without the constraint of a caption. And, truthfully, because something has shifted in me recently. I am coming more fully into my own identity - as a therapist, as a mother, as a woman, and as an ‘abd - slave of Allah. This feels like the right moment to stop drafting in the margins and start writing in full.

Here is what you can expect from this space:

WHAT’S COMING

ESSAYS - Long-form explorations of tasawwuf, ilm an-nafs, the fiqh of the inner life, motherhood, and mental health through an Islamic lens. These are the main event - rigorous, personal, and written with care.

LETTERS - Shorter, more intimate - a hadith I’ve been sitting with, something from my week, a moment of reflection I want to share before it passes.

CONCEPT UNLOCKED - One classical concept, made vivid and applicable. Riya. Muraqaba. Tawakkul. The vocabulary of the tradition, brought close enough to actually use.

HOW OFTEN- Once a week, minimum. Enough to be a consistent presence in your inbox without becoming noise.

Subscribe if you are a Muslim woman who is serious about her inner life - who wants more than a wellness reel and less than a fatwa. Subscribe if you are navigating motherhood, mental health, or modernity and you suspect the tradition has something to say about it that you haven’t yet been offered. Subscribe if you are, like me, still finding your way - and would rather not do it alone.

Disclaimer - These writings are not scholarly verdicts. They are the notes of someone thinking out loud - through Islam, through Psychology, through lived experience. I hold my interpretations loosely, welcome correction openly, and ask only that you read with the same generosity with which they were written. Mistakes are mine alone. What is true is from Allah.

Welcome to The Olive Branch Writes. I look forward to serving you.

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