Khushoo' in Other Parts of Your Life, Giving Advice, Stress, Relationships, and Feeding the Soul

Thursday Halaqa Notes

3/7/13
MCA Santa Clara, CA
Sr. Dana Jarrar

This halaqa had a mix of topics: Khushoo' in other parts of your life, Giving advice, Stress & Worry, Relationships, and Feeding the Soul.

Khushoo' in other parts of your life

• Khushoo' is tawadu' lillah: humility towards Allah. Salat needs humility, but also the other parts of our life need humility too.
• We can make ourself humble by accepting everything that Allah decrees for us. 
• In ibadah we need to have khushoo', and in the other areas of our life we need Ikhlas.
• In the book "Al-Ihsan" by Mohammad Hassan, he mentions that one way to get khushoo' is to control your shahawaat- desires. We all have desires. We don't have to eliminate them- no one can do that - but we need to try to control them. 
• We can control our desires by changing our Niyya, intention, before we do it and making du3a and/or thikr while we are doing it. For example if we love shopping, we can say that we are doing this shopping for our family, silat al-rahm. We can also make du3a and thikr while shopping - to keep remembering Allah and being thankful for giving us the ability to go shopping and the money to spend. 
• The other way to turn a desire into something beneficial, is to take this love and ability that you have and use it for a good purpose. For shopping, you could help the schools, or other community project that needs people to do shopping or other things that you are good at.
• For the love of food, we can change our Niyya too. We can say that we are eating this food to be strong to be able to worship Allah. When we exercise we should say that we are trying to lose weight and build muscle to be able to pray qiyam ul layl.
• But the best way to discipline yourself in food, and other desires, is to fast. When you fast, you are developing taqwa - because you know that Allah is watching you.
•  We should train our kids to fast little by little. So that by 12 years old they would be able to open the refrigerator and say no I won't eat. They will realize that Allah is watching them.

Giving Naseeha, Advice

• Giving advise is a part of being humble, having tawadu3, humility. If you see your sister doing something wrong, Islamically, if we don't tell her then we are essentially saying 'let her keep making this mistake so that I can stay better than her' This is arrogance. Or we don't speak up because we are afraid of what people will think about us - our image. Or we don't speak up because we are afraid of ruining the relationship. But these both show that you are caring more about what people think than in helping your sister. 
• We need to train ourselves to accept Naseeha and give Naseeha. We should be like sisters, helping each other towards reaching Allah. We should not be afraid of ruining our image or ruining our relationships. And if that happened, we shouldn't be worried about it because that is their problem. 
• But we need to do it in the right way. We need to make her feel like you are like her and made a similar mistake, and ask her to tell you if you make a mistake too. So when we give naseeha, we should take care to have a good intention, say it in a nice way, choosing the right place and time, and with a humble heart. 
• Remind yourself that she came to advise you because she loves you and wants khair for you. Don't let the shaytan make you upset. 
• One of the causes of depression is 3adam al Ikhlas, a state where you don't think about Allah in what you do - where your whole purpose is to please people. But even if you got praise and attention from everyone from the moment you were born until death, that is not going to help you with pleasing Allah. 

Stress & Worry

• We have to be between hope and fear. Remember that Allah is Ghafooron Raheem, Forgiving and Merciful and Allah is shadeedul 3iqaab, strong in punishment. Use this worry as an opportunity to think deeply about the situation. Check your priorities, and see what you can do more in. We have to check ourselves - what are we doing with the blessings that Allah gave us? Are we using them to take us to Allah? 
• If you did something wrong in the past, ask Allah to forgive you, try to fix it if you can with the people that were affected, and remember that Allah is Ghafooron Raheem. Think about it and see what is the lesson that you can learn from this and try to do better.

Relationships

• Your heart is a treasure, keep it only for Allah. Our relationships with others are getting too deep - to the degree that any small mistake looks huge in your eyes. Your heart has to stay for Allah only. One or the other. Our relationships in this day and age are unfortunately for masaalih, benefits.
• If someone hurt you, remember that Allah is your companion- complain to him, talk to Him. Take a break to think and fix your heart. Then go back and reconcile with her. Make du'a for her. And don't talk about her (or at least don't mention her name).
• These problems between people, sometimes it's because we have too much free time. And because our relationships are materialistic. We need to busy ourselves with good things.

Our Soul, Ruh

• Allah created us with a heart, brain, stomach, and soul and we have to take care of ALL of these.
• When we were growing in our mother's womb, we started with a physical body that was just a lump of flesh. Then Allah put our souls - the Ruh. It was this Ruh that gave the body meaning and made it alive.
• We are spending over 70% of our time on something that is the dead part of us- the body, instead of the Ruh, our soul -which is the alive part of us. 
• We are focusing on our physical body only. What to wear, what to eat, what products to use on our hair and bodies and skin, exercising, dieting, and where to go or what to do for entertainment, etc. But we are forgetting that we also need to take care of our brains, our heart, and our soul.
• BRAIN: The message from the society is - love your body. But if we used our brains to think, all these materialistic things are really just dirt if you think about it. Clothes, food, material objects - all can be crushed to dirt. So we need to use our brains more and think more about what we are spending our time on. But our heart tells us to ignore our brain and not let it ever think. And just like we feed our stomach, we also need to feed our brains with beneficial knowledge.
• HEART: If your heart is not filled with love of Allah, it fills up with love of other things. So we need to check our attachments to other things and our relationships, and change them to be for Allah. Let's try to develop a real love with our spouses, friends, and family - like the love between the Sahaba, where we work together in the path to Allah. And don't think that if Allah gives you something, He loves you, and if He didn't give you what you want then He doesn't love you. Allah gives to us and takes from us or withholds from us - all for our benefit, if you think of the big picture including the Akhirah, hereafter.
• SOUL: this is the most neglected part - the Ruh. We need to take care of our Ruh by worshipping Allah, the One who created this Ruh. Ibadah, worship, builds the Ruh. In our Salat, we have taken out our Ruh - we just go up and down, up and down. We need to put it back in our Salat. 
• May Allah purify our hearts and give us tawadu3 (humility) and Ihsan (perfect faith), and feel the sweetness of faith in our hearts before we die. Ameen.