Coffee shops and prophetic sayings on travelling

My loves,

I pray you’re blessed. I’m writing this with a cup of tea and a beautiful qasida in the background after spending a whole day in contemplation, meditation and life. It’s funny, life can be turbulent but the moment you have that warm mug of tea in your hands, you just forget. God’s mercy, eh?

This concept came to me last week. I’ve been waking up to pray tahajjud more than usual and it’s become my almost daily routine, just because I love how it makes me feel. I asked God a question at 4am and as I was about to go to sleep, I had this image of a coffee shop in my head. Simultaneously, the hadith “Be in this world as if you were a stranger or a traveller along a path” (reported by Ibn Umar) came to mind.

(For non-Muslims, a hadith is a saying by the Prophet Mohammed peace be upon him)

I’m no stranger to coffee shops. I love them. I love sitting alone and reading or blogging, I love having random conversations with strangers that take a very deep and spiritual turn (Coffee Plant on Portobello Road is the one for this) and I love the memories I make with friends.

Nothing warms my heart more than sitting with my best friends in a toasty cafe, with an oat milk americano on a winter evening, talking about life’s crazy affairs, whilst simultaneously watching people on the other side of the window passing by in their toasty coats and scarves.

Talk about Gilmore Girls vibes. Thank God for a woman’s ability to multitask, eh?

Back to my mini 4am visualisation. I started to really think about the way coffee shops are really the unsung heroes of society in the way they allow us to sit back and be present. Every single person who walks through that cafe would have been coming from somewhere and will be leaving to another place when they’re done. But for the moment they’re there, they’re just strangers having a nutritional, emotional and spiritual pick-me-up with a hot drink in their hands, flavour on their tastebuds and a whiff of humidity coming from the evaporation from their mug.

When I first came across the aforementioned hadith as a child, I was told it was a warning to me that this world doesn’t belong to me and I have no right to enjoy it. I was told that we must travel through this world with a hardened heart, because the enjoyments of life are only for those who disbelieve. It’s their world to enjoy and ours to suffer, as we enjoy paradise whilst they endure hellfire.

My heart knew that this wasn’t Islam and not the example of our beloved Prophet Mohammed, but I never felt into the hadith to really figure out what it means to me.

The dawn of my prayer, I realised the value of being a believer that is travelling. Our hearts are open to God and His creation, but from our ego’s perception, we detach. We travel through this world instead of taking ownership of it because our spiritual purpose is much higher than what is material. Just as my innocent younger self suspected, this Hadith is merciful advice to Muslims and non-Muslims alike. I took a sigh of relief as the truth came to me.

In a way, coffee shops are a modern depiction of travelling and pausing to find inner peace. Picture walking in a desert and seeing someone building a fire after walking a parallel path to them. They start off as a dot on the other side of the desert and they become bigger and bigger as your paths narrow to meet. You see what they’re doing and you help them, speak to them, and absorb the light and warmth they created as they share a drink with you. As you get up, you may find that your paths may continue together, or maybe not. Or maybe they do for a while until they get wider and you walk further away from each other until you become dots in each other’s sight again.

To me, coffee shops serve the same purpose as those fires. We gather somewhere warm to take a break from life and we allow ourselves to embrace the present. Everyone’s welcome, everyone’s taking their own space and everyone will leave to go back to travelling this sweet, crazy, raw dunya (world).

Weirdly enough, I got this image when I asked God for help because I was starting to fear losing something in my life. I found myself growing into a reality that was peaceful to me, especially after I gave up something for His sake. With this, came something beautiful, but I wasn’t sure if it was in my head or just a lotus waiting to sprout. I still don’t know. Sometimes I’m okay with not knowing, other times I’m not.

At one point, my heart became attached and it was starting to make me nervous. I hate uncertainty. I just wanted direct instruction and by praying, I wanted a definitive answer from the Divine. I wanted God to give me an answer in the way a fortune teller would. Sometimes this happens but now is not the time. It’s annoying, but look at what came out of it instead. Alhamdulillah.

I’m still confused and it’s making me feel sad. What I did get, however, was something better. A gentle nudge to the Islam I knew in my heart existed inside advice to relax, wrap my arms around the present and surrender to the unknown.

Allah told me to travel through this and to not worry about this potential loss because he is ar-Razaq (the provider). He told me to treat the moment as if it’s a chill out session in a café and to use my faith as a clutch that I cuddle between my palms the way I cuddle my oat milk americano as I laugh with my girls.

What’s meant to be will always come to be. Waiting can be uncomfortable and can invoke feelings of melancholy, but we’re passing by in this beautiful journey that is life.

Bismillah.

Is it too much to ask for a good man? On subconscious patterns and healing trauma

Disclaimer: I use the Qur’an as an example because rather than telling Muslims how spirituality can be compatible with Islam, I like to show by using what is inherently embedded in our system of faith due to perceived controversies surrounding spirituality and Islam. These teachings are universal and can be applied to all or no faith systems.

Hi my lovelies!

I’ve had many conversations this Mercury retrograde and a lot of them have revolved around pressure, standards and whether it’s too much to not settle for anything less than what we want/desire/deserve. So many people are going from within and revisiting their standards, but it’s coming at a time of heightened anxiety and inner child triggers.

What I’m seeing from the majority of these conversations is that people are allowing trauma to dictate what is and isn’t possible. In a world of infinite realities, it truly is our subconscious mind that dictates our life. A particular feeling or vibration we may be stuck on actually comes from an unhealed part of our inner child.

This explains why you’re stuck in the same relationship pattern even after you change your circumstances or people in your life. There is unhealed trauma that keeps manifesting in different facets of your being and the only way to stop this to yield different results is to change your habits.

In terms of romantic relationships, one of the ways we look at this is through the ratio of masculine and feminine energy that is playing out within us. This constantly changes but seeing where we are can give us a more defined view of where our traumas lie.

A woman who describes herself as feminine that desires an alpha man may have some deep-seated trust issues from childhood which stops her from trusting and allowing the masculine to show up in his service. She may think that men are useless and not to be trusted, so weak men pop into her reality.

The wounded feminine will attract a wounded masculine, which creates an unequal polarity and dwindled attraction. This explains the “ick”: an incomplete energetic polarity that kills attraction.

Does this mean we manifest or deserve abusers? Absolutely no, but not understanding our karmic footprint and attachment style makes us realise how we may be vulnerable to letting in leeches, vampires and abusers. Understanding red flags in others is one thing, but understanding where we’re vulnerable to overlooking them is another. When we do this work, we create a space for inner child healing, deep spiritual growth and a transformed life.

Sometimes it isn’t about what happened to us to create our attachment style, it’s what happened around us. This is why we tend to replicate patterns of the relationship of our parents and/or closest guardians. We grow up thinking that what is around us is normal. If your dad was controlling, you’d subconsciously manifest controlling men because it’s what is normal to you, even if you consciously dislike controlling men.

The key is to free yourself from the normal that was imposed on you, through the way you were treated and the energy of others that your subconscious mind absorbed as a child. This is why I’m so passionate about reiki, because it can really help to supplement the work you’re doing by moving and releasing trapped energy that create traumatic feedback loops. As the energy moves, the resistance to doing the work weakens.

Read my post: ‘How to let go of attachment patterns and reclaim your life’ to learn more about inner child healing

If we take quantum theory into consideration, possibilities are endless. When we look at qadr/predestination, we see that even that can be changed. In Islam, we are told that qadr can be changed through prayer. “Kun fa yakun”, be and so it is, it says in the Qur’an.

We’re told that prayer is the weapon of the believer, but what does that really mean? When we think of prayer, we think of just connecting to and asking God for help. This is true, but it entails leaving the material world and going from within to the very source of existence to change things. This means we need to foster deep spiritual connection to see a change in our circumstances.

It’s why Allah doesn’t change our condition until we change ourselves (Qur’an). Yes, there is an element of sin and deeds, but another overlooked element is to do with our subconscious mind and how our underlying beliefs shape our reality.

So as we heal and become open to trusting and receiving, our reality changes because we’re opening ourselves up to freedom and happiness. What happens within controls the outside because our subconscious mind always looks for confirmation.

This is why healing can take time and is a lifelong journey. For the first eight years of our lives, we were operating on theta brain waves and some children operate from their theta brain waves up to 13 years old. This means our subconscious is actively absorbing, which is why our patterns tend to replicate the ones we’ve had since childhood until we decide to do deep intentional healing.

This is why without healing, what is healthy is either scary or boring, because it’s not something we’re used to. Our brain seeks to replicate what we know, which is why toxic situations can seem like “home”. To the brain, it’s safer because it’s familiar. As we release what is familiar, we’re able to rise above the toxic patterns that we find ourselves entering over and over again.

When we release our trauma, we become receptive to a dimension we don’t know of and then start to yield different results. We have access to blessings that we kept blocking because of our beliefs, programming, attachment to people, places and things; and refusal to accept better.

When we find peace, foster self love and close our energy field, we begin to say no and do so from a space of pure self love, because once we finally feel that love from within, we’d do anything to protect that peace in our heart space.

We then realise that when we expect men to be providers and protectors, we’re not asking for too much. We’re just entering relationships on autopilot, crossing the boundaries we didn’t even know we have and then asking whoever is in our life to be someone they are not. If we accepted a tie with a toxic person and were attracted to them from an unhealed space, how can we ever expect a healthy outcome?

Say no to toxic patterns, say no to stagnation, say no to unhealthy relationships and say no to having to fix someone to “grind and heal together”. Say yes to boundaries, yes to standards, yes to calling yourself out and yes to healing. Things will naturally fall into place because you’re releasing the conditions that created these unhealthy patterns in the first place.

Be unashamed of your standards and expectations. The only ones who will shame you are the ones who can’t meet you on your pedestal so they try to knock you off yours for a chance. Think of the times you said yes to something you weren’t comfortable doing. You ended up paying a price for it in the long run. So why set yourself up for paying for a price that you could avoid by saying no and staying true to yourself?

Discernment is key to answering this question, which is something we can only grasp when we’re connected, grounded and setting on to our lifelong healing journey.

I love you all.

Instagram: @flowerknafeh
Twitter: @superknafeh
Learn more about my distance reiki healing sessions via Zoom

Becoming a reiki healer and ways to heal with Sotoda Saifi

My loves, I missed you all. I took a small break from blogging to calibrate and I feel so much better. I had an intense few weeks and I needed to go within to write to you all from a space of love and purity. One of the lovely things that happened was I became a reiki healer and can officially do physical and distance healing!

A couple of weeks ago, the amazing Sotoda Saifi and I did a podcast episode on healing. She’s a wonderful hypnotherapist who works with feminine energy and the breath. We had an amazing conversation discussing our personal healing journeys and how we used the power of tapping into an energy higher than our bodies to find peace and enter a state of flow.

What really struck me in that conversation is we both took very different paths, but led us to similar outcomes. Despite both of us immersing in prayer, healing our bodies and minds with our yoga practice (shoutout kundalini yoga – foeva my love) and really holding ourselves to account, her journey took her to breathwork and hypnotherapy, whereas mine has taken me to writing and more recently reiki.

What does this mean? Yes, you will cross paths with others and there will always be parallels between your healing journey and others, but ultimately your journey is yours. You can be guided to the same healing methods, but for different reasons.

One thing that really stood out when I used to go to kundalini yoga regularly before lockdown is we all started the practice to heal in some way. In my class, we were all there for different reasons. I befriended recovering alcoholics, people recovering from physical injury/disease, people on an emotional healing journey, people trying to find spiritual peace or simply try something new; you name it. We all took out our yoga mats, did our practice and drank a yummy vegan yogi tea straight after — sometimes discussing our life journeys if we were comfortable, other times just focusing on how good the practice was.

My journey taught me that very rarely you can fully relate to a person’s story or journey, but feelings are universal. Feelings are the key to empathy and they’re the hallmark of the shared human experience. You may not know what someone is saying, but when you try to understand how they feel, you’ve unlocked their essence at that moment.

The fact that healing is a journey that helps us elevate mentally, emotionally means we’re all on the same path to peace. The fact that there are so many avenues to it, holistic and modern, shows that our life journeys matter in the way we heal ourselves and the avenues we take to reach fulfillment.

This is why it’s important to honour your journey thus far. When I started my spiritual healing, one of the things that frustrated me was that there was no recipe to follow. You learn through trial and error whilst accepting support and unraveling your life. I see the wisdom behind this now. If we’re all so different, why must we find peace the same way?

Be gentle with yourself when you’re on this journey. Try different things. If you’re in a situation where you need to take antidepressants/mood stabilisers, don’t jump to the holistic way and ditch what already works for you — don’t feel pressured to be fully holistic from the get go either. Learn gently and slowly. Enter the spiritual world gently and honour where you are right now.

If you feel overwhelmed or don’t know where to start, start with this question: What do I love?

And just go from there.

Click here to listen to the podcast episode for more detail.

I love you all

Diana xoxo

Instagram: @flowerknafeh
Twitter: @superknafeh

Wanting others to ‘awaken’ says more about us than them. Here’s why

Awakening is a funny concept.

Often, the journey to enlightenment comes after going through a particular trauma and studying to find life beyond your egoic self. You go on a deeper life mission to find out about yourself and the rest of the world, you realise the beauty in oneness and you seek to share it with the rest of the world because “oh my God! If my life is so much better, imagine how everyone else will feel when they hear about this!”

Then you realise the process of healing isn’t linear. You realise there’s a plethora of healing methods and coping mechanisms as you enter a phase of trial and error. You try to unlock the shadow self, which gets messy and painful. You manoeuvre around the mess trying to clear it whilst walking towards the light of your “true” self outside of the ego.

Then you start to make peace with life and its ebbs and flows. You begin to view things from a higher perspective, but allow yourself the space and time to allow your emotions to process how you’re feeling. In fact, your feelings become your priority and something you honour as opposed to something to suppress in a bid to achieve this utopia of rationalism that we were conned into buying.

Ahh, it feels so good! We’re free, we’re awake, we’re spirits with bodies and egos, but we’re no longer bound by the myth that they are all we are!

So why isn’t anyone else awakening? Why is everyone around me suffering and I’m not?

It’s frustrating, I know. You see people suffering and you want to snap them out of it so they can live their best lives.

The real question is: What does their lack of spiritual awareness represent to you and what does it say about your journey?

Let’s be real. Who even said your awakening is done? If your ego is telling you to pressure others, you’ve got some more digging to do. Not that it’s shameful, it’s human.

Life is a mirror. Everything around us that causes us to emotionally react has a root in how we view ourselves and how we view the world.

Don’t just ask yourself why you want said person to awaken. Start off simple. What does this person represent to you? What emotions do you feel when you think about them?

Write them down. Happiness, hopelessness, frustration, anger, your need for acceptance, your need to be loved, your need to fix people/things, etc etc.

You may, or may not see patterns right away. Meditate on them and continue to do soul searching work to figure out what these patterns are and where they came from. Every day, you observe and release. When the inclination to try to control another person’s awakening comes, observe it.

You may realise that yes, you do love this person, but they spend all their time judging you that you want them to awaken so you feel accepted. You may realise it’s a part of your martyr/saviour complex where you don’t feel worthy unless you attach your happiness to the happiness of someone else. The reasons and possibilities are endless.

Path of least resistance

One of the laws of the universe is the path of least resistance. This means energy is more likely flow in the direction where there’s lots of tension. It’s a pretty beautiful law, but it’s also amongst the reasons people stay in toxic cycles throughout their lives because so many of us are afraid of the unknown and don’t take kindly to change. So the path of change tenses up.

It’s hard to see our loved ones suffer, but when we force people to leave their natural spiritual route, we make them suffer more. A spiritual awakening should never come from an interventionist stance. It causes more resistance and those unawakened will continue their path because it has the least resistance.

Our energies are intertwined. When you see someone enjoying a dish at a restaurant and you become tempted to try it not because of the dish itself, but because of the emotional and energetic reaction it invoked.

So really, even stressing about someone else’s journey is toxic. You need to find what it is within you that is causing your body and spirit to tense up and let it go.

Situations are different. Of course, when someone is harming themselves or others, direct intervention is needed to actively stop someone from doing something dangerous. Matters of the spirit are different. The most you can do is show the that there is another way, make them feel safe and let them be. Seek to inspire through your inner glow as opposed to pressuring from your ego.

You’re all beautiful. Sending you all love

Instagram: @flowerknafeh
Twitter: @superknafeh

Navigating loss is hard, but here’s how we can make things easier

My recent loss was something I felt deeply. In practical terms, it wasn’t a real loss — it was a change in dynamic. That didn’t make it hurt less though.

I put myself in a situation where I had to be true to myself and ask myself what it was I wanted and if the situation in front of me added up. In many ways yes, but in many ways, no. I had to do the right thing and talk it out. It was a relief, but once it was over, I was overwhelmed with pain even though it wasn’t technically a big deal.

Usually, I do this very unhealthy thing of rationalising my emotions. This time, I honoured my emotions and felt them. These emotions aren’t a part of me, they’re simply visiting me. They need no rationale. They just need to be so I can let them go.

Don’t gaslight yourself

Honour your emotions. When it comes to feelings, rationalising can help, but it can also destroy. Rationalising may help you understand why you feel how you feel, but it can be your inner gaslighting tool.

A rule of thumb is if you’re making yourself feel worse, you’re not doing the rationalising properly. If you’re learning about why you’re feeling how you’re feeling whilst still processing, you’re doing it right.

What is gaslighting though? It’s a manipulative tool that makes you doubt your experience and sanity. You know when someone makes you feel a certain way and you express it to them and they blame you for feeling the way you’re feeling? Or they make you think you’re crazy? We can very well do this to ourselves by denying our right to our emotions.

Examples?

So, imagine you’re friends with someone and they’re moving to another city that’s an hour away. You know deep down you’ll see each other all the time, but you’re still feeling a huge sense of sadness and loss.

Honouring your feelings will sound like this:

“I know it may not make sense, but my heart has chosen to react like this and I’m going to allow it to go through this. If I need to cry, I will. There’s a reason I’m feeling this emotion more intensely than I thought I am but that’s okay.”

Self-gaslighting will sound like this:

“Wallah it’s not that deep. I’m being silly, I shouldn’t be feeling like this. This person is only an hour away and I’m clearly being stupid. I’m just going to take my mind off this whole situation because I can’t be a weak little sh*t and start crying.”

It’s okay to feel how you want to feel and it’s okay to honour your feelings. Sometimes, these feelings come from our subconscious making links to our past that we have forgotten about. Maybe it’s a symptom of borderline personality disorder, a condition which heightens our emotions. There are so many reasons.

Let through and let go

The only real way you can actually let go of your emotions is to let them pass through. It sucks feeling the pain of loss, sadness, uncertainty and a break in what became your new norm, but these feelings must be felt.

If you bottle them up, you will break down. It may feel like your world is crashing down at the time of letting your emotions passing through, especially if you haven’t done any shadow work prior to understand childhood triggers, but that’s a sign to go on a soul-searching mission. Start small by allowing your emotions to pass through. The cloud will pass and you will start to see the light.

Then in baby steps, continue and keep log. Revisit your emotions and understand your triggers. I know loss is a feeling I feel very intensely because as a child, I had a phobia of my parents leaving me at school. That’s the furthest I can consciously remember. Just knowing this has helped me understand myself so much more.

I feel better now. Stay blessed.

God bless xoxoxox

On loving unconditionally – is it really as ridiculous as it seems?

Loving unconditionally is an ideal that always felt unfair to me. It has always felt like an unrealistic ideal that only delusional people could attain through living in a bubble and being grossly naive. It seemed to me that to love unconditionally, one would need to live in a bubble and shut out all of their feelings, opinions and most importantly: standards.

I’ve always been told that loving unconditionally is emancipating. I’ve heard time after time in the plethora of self-help books, videos and podcasts that unconditional love is the way forward. The concept irked me because to me, loving someone is giving them a part of me. It’s sacrifice.

That was until I realised it’s my actual definition of love that’s warped, rather than the concept of loving unconditionally (I think I grew up listening to waaay too much Amr Diab, haha).

Last weekend was my turning point. I went to a vegan yoga festival and was supposed to get there for 3pm for the kundalini yoga class. My friend and I arrived late and missed the class so we went to the talk instead. We entered at a point and I heard something that I’m sure God planned for me to hear it.

He defined unconditional love in its truest form:

“When there’s someone who comes into this room, you obviously don’t feel love for that person the way you feel towards your closest friend, or partner, or family member.”

This one comment annoyed me so much that it forced me to think. How do I actually look at people when they walk in? I judge them. I look at what they’re wearing, how they carry themselves, what they say, etc. In other words, I attach myself to their experience and emotionally invest in their presence.

So, if the opposite of doing this is to love them, I must detach. How do I do this? Empathy.

Even empathy seems like extra work, but that’s only because we’ve associated with loving someone and having empathy with a form of martyrdom. In order to love, you must be willing to sacrifice and give a part of yourself to someone else. We only love if we’re able to, it’s never natural — or at least that’s what we’ve been conditioned to believe.

It all starts from within

I don’t believe self-love is to absolutely feel amazing about yourself at all times. It’s to detach from what you think of yourself to know the outside stuff is a fraction of who you really are.

It’s to allow yourself to view yourself as a whole being, not through the lexicon of your face, acne, lips, hair, body, financial situation, career etc. You don’t try to love yourself regardless of your perceived flaws, you simply don’t identify as a part of yourself as if it’s your whole self.

So really, to love yourself unconditionally is to detach and observe. Same with loving anything and anyone unconditionally. The same way you don’t attach yourself to the person who just walked into the room. You give them the space to be themselves without injecting judgement into their aura. That’s love.

Loving your lovers

With those whom you love in a more intimate way, the same rule applies. You love someone because of who they are in their whole true selves.

Naturally, we attach ourselves to people because of certain qualities we see in them that mirror what we have, or what we want. A man may love a woman because he projects a maternal standard that he has, which she seems to meet. The moment she stops being his version of motherly, his love for her ebbs.

To love unconditionally is to love regardless. This isn’t to say you become a doormat — rather it’s the opposite. You love someone enough to want to act upon it, but you have enough love for them and yourself when you realise your relationship is getting unhealthy.

With a strong sense of self that can only come with learning to love yourself unconditionally, you can draw boundaries or just let go.

Even after you’ve let go, you still love them unconditionally. Let yourself feel your feelings towards them, but don’t attach your worth to their presence. It’s that simple and that bloody emancipating.

PS: I know I’ve abandoned this blog for a year, I’ll get back to blogging again. I just need to develop a routine.

Trust your gut. Protect your energy.

I’ve been speculating a lot on gut feelings recently. For those who know me, I am a very spiritual person. I am also quite emotional. I hated this about myself for the longest time, but I’m learning to love my emotions as a part of myself. After all, they are our God given GPS guide, right?

It’s hard. We want to listen to our gut feelings and we want to just sail through our emotions, but egos, blockages and residence don’t allow us sometimes. There are times our egos take us into a whirlwind of emotions that we fake a gut feeling. There are other times that our gut feelings are so strong but we stomp on them because we are so insistent on getting what we want at that time in that place.

You know what? This shit is completely normal. It’s completely understandable and it’s completely human. Desire sweeps us off our feet. We think we want something without studying the reality of it and without wondering if we’ve created this placebo to pretend to fulfil our innermost deepest desires, or whether we want it.

This happens a lot in friendships and relationships. We idealise people and scenarios because we feel like they’re our saviours from a room within ourselves that we treat as a dumping ground which we don’t want to dive into and sort out. We plaster it with what we think are fulfilling interactions, but are simply just avoidance mechanisms.

We quickly build dreams on hopes that have no real foundation, because our ego at that time tells us it’s what we want. The whispers of our ego are so strong that we convince ourselves it’s a gut feeling. I’ve made this mistake a lot and I’ve paid some pretty heavy prices.

With gut feelings, they just come. One time, I was with someone I really cared about. Some things from this person that I used to see were more apparent to me. This person’s anger, emotional distance and somewhat dubious behaviour jumped out in my face. Before we had even managed to sit down, one reaction from one tiny instance stuck with me and I had a feeling that I would never see this person again in the context in which we were.

We sat down and I was quiet. I didn’t realise I was quiet until this person mentioned it. I looked at my orange juice and I realised it was almost finished within minutes; something I almost never do.

“You’re very quiet today. Usually I’m the one who’s quiet and you’re always talking and today it’s the other way around.”

I laughed and I tried to make an effort to speak, but something wasn’t right, even though the situation was completely normal. I just knew this wouldn’t last and I was grieving something that hadn’t even ended yet. An hour later, came the beginning of the end.

When your gut is telling you something, your senses are alive. You don’t know why and how, but they’re alive. You feel your internal space open up.

When you’re coming from a space of anxiety and “this just has to work out because I need it to” or “watch this bullshit will manifest – I’m so sure of it” or “I can’t function without ___ so it has to come back into my life”, these thoughts aren’t a gut feeling. Such thoughts are accompanied with desperation and panic. There’s an attachment to these thoughts that make us believe it’s the end of the world if they don’t manifest, so they must manifest because that’s how our lives have to be led.

Introspect saves us a lot. I’ve dealt with these by learning to enjoy my own company. I’ve fostered a sense of curiosity to battle my ongoing anxiety. Rather than needing things to turn out a certain way, I look at what this thing represents to me and I try to hold on to the underlying feeling.

For example, if you need to get into a certain academic institute to feel adequate, try replacing it with feeling proud of yourself for all that you’ve achieved to capture this adequacy you crave. That way, you’re detached, but you’ve also got enough energy to invest in actualising your dream rather than depleting it with stress.

Introspect also stops us from dragging on a friendship and relationship way after its expiration date. If you need to put in more energy to keep a spark, consider if it’s something that is meant for you or not. Yes, rough patches pop up. Yes, we must overcome and we must communicate, but if you feel like something is draining you and you’re jumping through hoops trying to fix what can’t be fixed, let go.

There’s a huge difference between giving up and letting go. Giving up is allowing things to crumble and breaking them so they shatter before your eyes. Letting go, however, is different. When true colours show, when problems arise that weren’t sorted out by communication, when toxic habits are far too deep, etc etc. You just know. Trust the feeling and peacefully move on.

If something is meant to be in your life, trust it will. People come back when they’re supposed to be and friendships rekindle at the right time. Breathe, trust yourself, love yourself and listen to yourself. Know that you’re self sufficient and nothing in this world that leaves you can make you less of who you are.

Just as I was writing this, an old friend messaged me. Turns out we had both been thinking about each other at the same time for the past few weeks. We really do communicate on an energetic level. Trust this communication happens and there are conversations our energies have had that we need to actualise in our physical lives. This includes gut feelings before goodbyes.

Trust your inner light because it’s guided by God.

Peace and love and light and all things amazing to you all.

Love you all xoxoxox

The 3aib-ness of being female, happy and single

I was on holiday recently visiting family and naturally, being in my mid-20s, marriage was on the table. More than ever, people would politely pray I find a “good Arab man” so I can move back to the Middle East and live happily ever after with 46 kids and cook a pot-full of rice every day.

Even in the UK, my parents are growing increasingly impatient, asking what is “wrong” with me, bringing up proposals I’ve rejected and fearing my lifestyle, which is basically almost vegan will deter a suitable husband.

“You need to start eating meat because your future husband will not accept your diet”

“It’s good you go to the gym, but don’t expect your husband to want to be healthy too”

“I don’t understand how ….. is engaged/married and you’re not! You’re so much prettier than her!”

“If you didn’t reject …. you’d be in a different situation right now” [I know, which is why I don’t regret following my gut instinct]

“You have until the end of this year to find someone or I’ll get involved and make sure you marry the next person who comes to you”

I’ve noticed not caring about our relationship status as such and leaving everything to God is something that scares elders. They feel as though us being happy with where we are is a form of us getting too comfortable with our single-ness. We’re building our lives so much that we may be unable to accept just anyone.

For them, marriage is central. I understand why. I feel sad when I see my mum genuinely feeling worried that it hasn’t happened to me yet. I look at myself and I see myself getting fitter, stronger, happier each day. From our discussions, however, she looks at me and sees me getting old. It’s a mentality that is so deeply rooted in our culture that you can’t really blame them when they see us going against the grain.

We do things differently. Yes, some get married early and some get married late. Some get engaged or married early and then break it off only to realise it’s not worth marrying the wrong person and then start to take their time when they are ready (me). Generally, the anxiety of getting married was very much prevalent in our early 20s, but as women reach their mid-late 20s, the concept doesn’t become less appealing per se, but we learn that life can be enjoyed because God has blessed us in the best way for us.

Our society refuses to accept this and want to pile the pressure on us not because they want to see us happy and settled, but they want to make sure we’re “normal”. We’re supposed to accept God’s decree to prove ourselves as women of faith, but at the same time we’re supposed to drown in misery because we’re not conforming to societal norms. It’s not our situation that is threatening, but the way we deal with it; when we’re not worried, we’re transcending normative cultural expectations of us, which is deemed threatening.

Follow your own path

It must be understood that being put in this environment doesn’t encourage us. It’s counterproductive because they want us to feel enough guilt and shame until we somehow get married, creating negative correlations in our heads. Whether we realise this or not, shame is subconsciously internalised and it needs to be fixed with inner work. While you may not back down from your principles, the ongoing “what is wrong with you?” comments do whether you like it or not have an affect on you. That’s completely okay.

It’s fine to recognise that certain comments can make you question your path because when you bury the effects of them, they internalise in ways that become difficult to reach. I remember when I put on weight in my early 20s, I was always told to lose weight or I would never get married. This piled onto my self esteem issues and is one of the reasons I’m still fixated on the illusion that I am overweight.

It’s okay to realise that when people say “why not you?” triggers your insecurities, even if it’s not insecurities on your relationship status. While I laugh “why not you?” comments off when people discuss marriage with me, the “why not you?” mentality in other aspects of my life.

Get out of your way and trust your instincts

Allowing the negativity around you to internalise stops you from manifesting what you want. If you refuse to commit until your needs and standards that you’ve set for yourself and your S/O are met. If someone tells you that your standards are too high and you don’t actively counteract that, you’re not going to find someone to meet your standards because you automatically have your mind set on the negative.

You don’t need to be ignorant of your worth, you can very well know your worth, but if you don’t focus on your worth, knowing your worth will do nothing for you. Knowing your God-given gifts will take you nowhere if you don’t focus on trusting yourself and walking your own path securely, rather than because you have no other choice.

Don’t shut down the criticisms you’ll get because they’ll build up in your unconscious mind. Remember, your mind records absolutely everything without you realising. Bring the criticisms and comments to the surface and counteract them with affirmations and prayer.

Ignoring may do wonders for the ego, but we’re trying to break that shit down here. We’re here to be proud of who we are, love the paths we’re on but understand that we’re human. It’s okay to be sensitive. Being in touch with our senses is what our bodies have been programmed to do.

Their 3aib-nagging comes their ego, which is why it’s so toxic to hear and absorb. Don’t fight their ego with your ego. Rebel by flowing with God’s plan from your heart instead.

Peaaaaaceeee xox

Painful truths: Our love is our mirror

“And you became like coffee,
In its deliciousness, its bitterness and its addiction”
وتشابهت أنت وقهوتى فى اللذة والمرارة والإدمان
Mahmoud Darwish – Palestinian poet

I’m tempted to talk about how this is not a love quote, but it is. I’m tempted to talk about how “real love” is not supposed to harbour toxic codependency, addiction and despondency and is smooth when you find the right person, but that’s a load of crap. Nothing in life comes easy.

Love is one of the most simple but misunderstood feelings we feel. Love is something that is engraved in our emotional fabric, but can be something that destroys us if we don’t learn about our relationship with it. We learn to love through our experiences. We lean towards what is familiar, even if it’s painful, it’s what we know.

The way we love is a mirror of our experiences throughout our lives and how we handle them.

Me? I recently realised that I feel loved when people allow me to prove myself to them. I set myself to a standard that I don’t set others to because to me, asking someone to prove being worthy of love is painful. Yet, because it’s what I know – being loved because of my credentials – without realising, I allow people to love me this way.

In my mind, it’s foreign for someone to love me simply because I’m an awesome person. I realised this days ago when I was in the shower. It was a strange revelation, but one I needed to admit to myself.

If someone downplays my career, I don’t get offended if I care for you. I actually feel the need to justify myself and feel satisfied when my justification is accepted.

This revelation took me back to all of the things I knew about love. That love is not supposed to hurt, that love is patient and it’s allowed to make mistakes. I forgive people, but I hardly ever forgive myself. I carry resentment from the actions of my past and forgive people their role when in reality, I should forgive myself before I forgive the other person.

False love-hate paradigms
I’m sure we’ve heard “the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference”. It’s true. We love and hate with the same amount of energy. To add an extra layer, this means indifference is the opposite of both love and hate.

Therefore, we need to manage ourselves not based on the emotions we feel, but based on the energy we invest.

This is why after a disappointment of some sort, our emotions are everywhere. We focus too much on regulating our emotions when it’s really the energy we should be keeping an eye on. We go through hoops of emotions with the same amount of intensity, punishing ourselves for feeling a certain way and fearing feeling the opposite.

No matter what, no feeling we have is invalid. This is because first and foremost: we’re human. It’s also because we can view the same situation in many ways – it’s only our mood that is shaping our interpretation at that time.

But the more energy we put into an emotion, the more intense the feeling is. When you feel a huge rush of sadness, know it isn’t the sadness that is overtaking you, it’s the energy within you that has manifested itself into sadness.

Accept that a part of you is sad about the situation. Accept that you’re allowed to feel sad. But be careful with the amount of energy you put into the sadness. It’s amazing because the less you fight your sadness, the less energy you put into your sadness and the less overwhelming the sadness gets.

I’m still upset about a certain situation that I was subjected to, but for the most part, I put all of my energy in thanking God for the experience, because I know if I didn’t go through that, I wouldn’t have understood how important my boundaries are.

It’s something that even though I’ve moved on from, but I sometimes still shed a tear when I remember. I cry less often and the cries are less intense, but I still cry. I cry when I remember. Crying is healthy. Emotions are healthy.

The thing that’s stopping me from crying now that didn’t stop me then? Time is healing me, which is evident from the amount of energy I’m putting into my thoughts and feelings. I get a slight tug at the heart, to which I say a prayer for the person and myself (I like to think God is reminding me of this person because they’re in need of prayer) and I go back to what I was doing.

I allow myself to feel how I feel, but I don’t put energy into my feelings. I don’t try to not put energy, I’m just moving on. But for those who need to remove energy from their feelings, take your energy somewhere else. But make sure you take it somewhere healthy.

I did this naturally as I moved on and realised God’s will was more powerful than mine and his plan was wiser than mine; but if I knew this a few months ago, I wouldn’t have blocked my feelings until I broke down and cried myself to sleep until I was out of breath, I would have allowed myself to feel the feelings and would have utilised my energy elsewhere.

Focus on what you deserve
The Qur’an explicitly tells us that we may love something that is bad for us and we may hate something that is good for you. Yes, a lot of faith in God’s decree is needed, but one of the ways to understand it is by focusing on what you deserve.

If you know you deserve someone who trusts you, then remind yourself of that. If you know you deserve someone who will want to work things out, remember that. If you know you deserve an employer who appreciates you, keep that in mind.

Attachment isn’t bad. Neither is love. It’s okay to feel and question. Loving something “bad” doesn’t make you a bad person, same with loving something “good”. It’s all about the way you love that becomes a mirror to your being and exposes your soul.