30 lessons in 30 years

I turned 30 last week! Since being a teenager, I’ve had an infatuation with being 30 after watching the film 13 Going On 30. It follows the story of Jenna, a 13-year-old girl who wanted nothing but to be 30 after seeing a magazine article titled “30, flirty and fabulous” and she woke up as a 30-year-old.

And here I am, 30. Thirty, flirty and fabulous. Haha. I’m really excited and grateful to finally be at this age and I feel a lot of energetic upgrades already. It almost feels like everything took place to heal old beliefs, reprogram my mind and learn some serious lessons the hard way so others don’t have to.

Here are just 30 of the things I’ve learned:

1. Everything is a reflection of your inner state. When someone acts a certain way, it’s a perfect opportunity for you to slow down and tune into your heart centre to see what it’s telling you.
2. Feel your thoughts. Always.
3. The path of spiritual enlightenment comes with giving yourself up to God. Doing things for God is the ultimate way of “letting go” to receive.
4. Surrender, surrender, surrender. Take it all to Al-Noor (the light).
5. Wake up for tahajjud (the last third of the night) to pray and meditate.
6. Straight and frizzy is not an actual hair type! You have waves or curls that you don’t know about and don’t know how to take care of.
7. If you start by wanting to “manifest” something, that’s an invitation to clear your subconscious mind.
8. Visit your inner child frequently, daily if you can.
9. Trust the process while feeling your feelings.
10. Starting a boundary with “I feel” and describing your feelings in simple words is the best way to solve issues with others.
11. Forgive, forgive, forgive. Forgive from your heart. If you want people to show up differently, forgive them with your heart. If you want clarity on a situation, forgive with your heart and be grateful. Gratitude and forgiveness don’t take from the gravity of the situation and don’t take your rights away.
12. Taking responsibility does not mean it’s your fault.
13. Approach scenarios and people with curiosity, not assumption. This is how you become an alchemist.
14. It’s okay to let things come to an end. Say goodbye gracefully.
15. It is possible to send healing energy to a situation that isn’t in your control or has nothing to do with you. Pray about it and speak with gratitude.
16. Money is energy. When you spend it wisely and give generously, it will want to run back to you. This is why charity doesn’t decrease wealth.
17. It’s not a bad thing to admit to being wrong. It’s healthy.
18. Men aren’t trash.
19. When someone comes with “love and light”, make sure that it’s projecting the energy of Al-Wadud (name of Allah: the most loving) and Al-Noor (name of Allah: the light) and if they aren’t, chant those names in your heart to project them and disarm the ego that comes with those powerful words.
20. Regulating your nervous system is more important than regulating your emotions. Feel your emotions and calm your nervous system to regulate your reaction to having them.
21. Cleaning your energy field/aura is just as important as brushing your teeth.
22. Don’t chase high vibrations, chase God. Put God in the centre and pray for your life energy to reflect this and watch how you will become the vessel that raises the vibration in low-vibration places. It’s important to remember that this isn’t you doing it, it’s God.
23. People will forget what you know, but they’ll never forget how they made you feel.
24. Ho’ponopono.
25. Keep your space clean at all times.
26. Carry prayer beads with you to chant, even if it’s silent.
27. Not everyone whom you resonate with is your friend. If they aren’t being nice to you, speak your truth and if they let go of you for it, they weren’t your real friend.
28. Not everyone has narcissistic personality disorder. Don’t dissect people and don’t hunt for red flags. Take things one step at a time and when they do hurt you, understand how you feel and approach them about it by starting by talking about how you feel as opposed to what they did. You’d be surprised how often people’s actions are unintentional.
29. It’s okay to watch trash TV!!!!!!!! BINGE ALL YOU WANT! This need to be intellectual all the time is draining you and it comes from a space of people-pleasing.
30. Treat life as a game.

I love you all xx

Social media detox is already changing my life

Hi my loves! Here I am hours into my new social media detox and I have an immense urge to write about it.

I had a really low evening last night and it led me to deactivate my Instagram account, the only social media platform I consider myself addicted to.

As an overview of what happened, I woke up at 8am feeling really groggy, but instead of meditating, leaving my bed and doing some stretches, I went back to sleep and then woke up and scrolled through YouTube shorts and Instagram reels. For someone who aims for such a healthy lifestyle, I find myself fighting my mornings for reasons like this.

Two hours had passed and I was still laughing at harmless videos of cats and babies and learning life hacks that I don’t even remember. I ended up starting my day late, it felt shorter and it was not really doing me justice, despite getting a lot done in the time my laziness compelled me to ration. Come 10pm, I was feeling really crap and began to journal. Instagram came up while I was writing and I promised myself that I’d deactivate the following morning, but my heart just told me to deactivate on the spot. Here I am writing this.

I have Facebook, but I rarely post and I only check it every few days for the purpose of being on one group that I need to be active on. I’ve limited my use of Clubhouse to once a week because I host a room every Thursday with Rumi’s Cave (check out their story and fundraiser here). I deactivated Twitter a while back and returned because I had beef with Uber Eats, but then I deactivated it again. Now that I’ve removed Instagram, I’ve let go of the only platform that I’m addicted to.

I already noticed a huge difference. I woke up feeling drained (I hate mornings lol) so I did dhikr (remembrance of God) while I was half asleep and meditated on gratitude. I forced myself out of bed and started my day. I began cleaning the kitchen before I even started work! I love cleaning, but I can’t stand doing anything in the morning.

My issue is I’ve always hated mornings. As I write this, I realise it’s because I used to associate waking up early with going to school, which I deplored. Instagram was sort of like my cartoon time before heading off to learn and now that I realise this after deactivating Instagram, I think I have a solid base to work with to restructure my mornings.

My ego tried to talk me out of deactivating Instagram. How else will I make content to compliment my blog? The blog that I neglect because I procrastinate nourishing because I’m too addicted to Instagram? How else will I build a business strategy without social media? The strategy that I haven’t worked on because I’m so anxious about starting extra small due to subconscious comparison by being on Instragram? There’s no excuse. My spirit needed out and it sent me a window of a depressive episode to give me a massive kick.

Ergh, even the word Instagram is making me feel anxious.

Now that I’m away from social media, I realise how it was a bit of a culprit in putting me in my masculine energy. I was doing nothing but scrolling, which ultimately, is doing. The absence of doing isn’t the feminine state of being, it’s just empty doings. To be in the state of being, you need to be in a state of rest, surrender and trust — all of which takes immense practice and discipline in a world that does so much to hyper stimulate our nervous systems.

When I really think about it, there’s also an element of greed. I’m taking all of this morning time and keeping it for myself so I don’t give it out in service of the Divine, whether it’s doing extra prayers, meditation, exercise, getting extra ready for work, etc. I feel like having this morning gluttony makes me fight with what I really love and want for myself, which is happiness, peace and success and it’s time to hold myself to account, starting with something as simple as reaching for prayer beads to do dhikr instead of my phone.

Greed is the antithesis of feminine energy because the underlying feeling is being unable to trust and receive. I don’t trust that the time I put in to nourish my mornings will come back to me and energise me tenfolds. A social media addiction is pacifying and reflects the energy of doing, whereas immersing myself in my spiritual practice is active surrender and allowing the spirit to roam and be.

I’m already feeling better and in more alignment. Moving forward, I’m filling two simple intentions into this detox to make it more meaningful and productive.

1. To fulfil my dream of becoming a morning person, I will do some inner child healing on morning work through EFT, reiki and self-hypnosis and I will set an alarm to wake up at a set time to start my day every morning. I’ll gradually aim to wake up at 6am.
2. I will actually work on the stuff that I need Instagram for and create a content schedule, business plan, etc.

This is also a sign for us all to honour our low feelings. I sat with feeling upset yesterday and honoured my state with compassion and curiosity and it gifted me with a revelation that is uplifting me into the vibration of abundance and joy.

This is the beauty of life and the wonders of God. Everything is a message. It’s all telling us something, but are we willing to listen? Some days we are, other days we aren’t. Regardless, we got dis. We’ve got it all.

Peace, love and light to you all

Diana xox

I’ve let go of my old self… and having Covid helped

When people ask me to explain reiki to them, I usually tell them that it works by healing your aura, which affects your emotion body and then affects your physical state. It’s kinda weird because I actually saw this play out in catching Covid-19 last week.

The start of 2022 was really interesting and not like other years. Ever since 2018, I’ve been doing yearly vision boards to mark what my year would look like. This year, I felt uninspired by my little tradition and decided not to do it. Instead, I did some releasing by clearing out my whole room, my car and burning a piece of paper of all of the stuff I want to let go of. My reiki master Chetna Halai also did a release and calling in ceremony for the end of 2021 and the start of 2022.

So, yeah it was a very deep start to 2022, which uncoincidentally (we don’t believe in coincidences on this blog) is the year I turn 30.

I’ve had a few of my friends turn 30 before me and there was a lot of panic around the idea of entering this new decade. When I responded with calm, I was told to wait until I’m counting down the final weeks of being in my 20s. Here I am and not only am I calm, but I’m actually excited to turn 30. Really, it seems like a new way to let go.

Without realising I was doing it, 2021 became the year I let go of a lot of things. A crazy amount! I didn’t really set a full intention make it the year of letting go, it just happened by doing lots of energy work and finding myself in situations where I had to say bye to a lot of places, people, habits, thoughts and hobbies.

I will say that I set the intention to call in new things, so maybe I had to take out the old first 😉.

This time last year, I was doing some hypnotherapy sessions with my babe Sotoda Saifi and in one session, she noticed that I’ve been carrying a lot of ego connotations with my Palestinian identity, so she challenged me to do a session to let go of my Palestinian self. I was nervous because does this mean I would be obnoxious and forget my roots or stop being active? Regardless, I trusted her and I still cleared out the generational mess that naturally comes with being from one of the most volatile places in the world. It didn’t make me ashamed of who I was at all, but it cleared out some of the root chakra issues that come up when you or your ancestors have experienced different types of trauma such as war, siege, colonialism, slavery, etc.

Months later, when the massacre on Gaza happened and when my own neighbourhood, Silwan, was (and still is) being under threat of demolition, I didn’t feel distanced because I had let go of what I thought I had to hold on to be Palestinian. I still did everything that I do in my activism and journalism and felt all of the raw feelings that came with such a tragic situation, but I was able to manage the emotional effects of watching all of this unfold in a much more healthy way, which made me of more service.

In other words, my subconscious mind and aura were decolonised.

Then, I just spent lots of time doing other classes, sessions and courses with other modalities just for fun. At that point, it was less about achieving something and more to pass time and feel good. In that way, I let go of the outcome of the purpose behind doing all of this stuff and did it all because it’s fun… most of the time.

Fast-forward to January 2022 and I was having a very busy month, until I caught Covid-19 and had to cancel all of my plans and slow down to recover. Because I got rid of so much stuff around me, but most importantly, because I was already clearing out my subconscious mind, having coronavirus allowed the “letting go” process to continue.

On Tuesday, I spoke to Chetna about having Covid and she told me that it came to clear me out. At that point, the virus in me was at its peak and even though I felt weak, I did feel like I was doing a vibrational clearout. Now that I’m coming towards the end of my time in isolation, I really do feel like so much has energetically shifted and I am finally ready to be the next stage of who I am meant to be.

Treating every cough or sneeze as a physical release of trapped energy really sped things up. When your body releases through coughing, sweating, yawning, crying and other natural functions, you’re naturally releasing energy. This release is magnified in ways we can’t imagine when we note that our body is releasing energy and intending for such functions to be a release.

I look back at my 20s and I realise while I became a full-fledged adult, on an energetic level, my 20s were at times an extension of my teens in that I was purging all that did not resonate with me. I’ve chosen to release all of that now. I’ve chosen to stop identifying with everything that I used to identify with, but that doesn’t mean forgetting who I am.

Think of a certain identity that you may have. It could be ethnic, religious, social, political, etc. You’ve had experiences surrounding them. For example, you may have experienced racism. Letting go of your ethnic identity doesn’t mean no longer being what you are, it means you’re not identifying with the experiences you’ve had and connotations your ego creates.

Everyone jokes about the restrictions many Arab girls live with because parents tend to be more restrictive towards their daughters, whilst babying their sons. Letting go of being Arab doesn’t mean you’re no longer an Arab woman, it just means you’ve let go of limiting beliefs surrounding your personal freedom that has been fed to you by the story of coming from a certain ethnicity. By doing this, you’re becoming an energetic match to the vibration of freedom that you’ve always wanted but thought you could never have. As you keep this up and purge from years of being restricted by unrealistic cultural ideals, your reality will change.

Sometimes it’s not about keeping your vibration high. It’s about letting it sink when it needs to and using it as a chance to release and purge. Don’t hide from these low states, become curious about what they’re trying to tell you. What is your inner child saying to you? The secrets to healing and climbing up the vibrational ladder are actually in these low moments.

Without burning bridges, I’ve energetically tapped out of communities that no longer serve me and hold me back. Everyone is on their path and that’s okay. Not resonating with something doesn’t mean you need to demonise it.

By letting these identities and communities go through viewing them with neutrality and love instead of zapping them with emotional charge, you’ve put yourself in a powerful position because it means they don’t own you anymore. Anger and resentment will come up that will stop you from viewing things through unconditional love. Own that anger and work with it to heal it and rise above it. If you fight your negative patterns and feelings, they’ll fight you back, so just be neutral about an emotion and allow it to pass.

For me, everything is now starting to add up and make sense. Now that I’m looking back at the last few years of my life, I realise that nothing was a coincidence. I was meant to meet who I met, go through what I went through, read what I was meant to read, all of this to take me to this point. When? Just before I turn 30 years old. That doesn’t mean I won’t have more layers to unlock; life is beautiful that way.

I am in awe. My ego tells me I was supposed to achieve so many things I haven’t at this age and so does my community. I remember my dad telling me to hurry up and start my PhD so I don’t have to finish it into my 30s. Here I am without even a proposal and I honestly don’t mind because I realised that the PhD dream wasn’t even mine to begin with. It was just something that came with the reputation I had of being academic.

The most hilarious part of this is that even my old gym where I started my fitness journey closed down. This was the Virgin Active in Cricklewood which was right next to my old school. I remember going there feeling very nervous and intimidated when I first got my membership there as a teen when they had some special offer for us and I just wanted to leave. Minus the times I was working with a trainer or doing a class, that branch of Virgin Active was always the one where I had my worst workouts, even just days before it closed. While I miss the convenience of it, along with the reformer pilates and spin classes, I’m so glad it’s gone because I subconsciously still identified with the earliest memories I had of my fitness journey every time I walked in there.

The bottom line is that nothing can control you if you don’t identify with it. I have a vision for my future and a lot of it goes against all of these “identities” that I had to release. I think about this vision and I am at peace, in a state of joy, having so much fun and not tied down to anything that doesn’t serve me. And because I’ve let go of so much, there isn’t much weight holding me down to stop me from flying.

Here’s to 2022, here’s to turning 30, here’s to letting go and here’s to life. I’m so grateful.

And in the words of the amazing film that is 13 Going on 30, here’s to being thirty, flirty and FABULOUS!

Life is a mirror, but there are seven of them: The Seven Essene Mirrors

My loves,

Today, I want to talk to you about something from mystical Judaism that blew my mind. The Essenes are a mystical sect who flourished between 2nd century BC to 1st century AD. It is said that they resided in Khirbet Qumran, which is south of Jericho in Palestine.

Their lifestyle hailed spirituality and God consciousness and they believed in communalism as a way of life. They (like Muslims) believe the soul is eternal and death is just a channel to the higher self.

They were a very tight-knit community and forbade marrying those outside of their sect. Those who wanted to be an Essene had to enter a three-year conversion introductory period.

They had many teachings, but one of them that blew my mind is the concept of the Seven Essene Mirrors.

When I started my spiritual journey, I remember reading that life is merely a reflection of who you are. Being low on consciousness and high on anxiety, I couldn’t rationally fathom it, nor could I quieten my mind enough to realise how everything truly is a reflection of the self.

As I expanded my awareness, I saw myself in others and I saw oneness in individual acts and circumstances. If there are infinite ways to look at a circumstance or a person and if no two people interpret a situation in the exact same way, that means much of our interpretations come from within.

The Seven Essene Mirrors teach just this, but with seven different levels. My mind immediately went to the seven main chakras, the seven levels of heaven and seven gates of hell in Islam, having to circulate the Ka’abah seven times, throwing seven stones at the devil, etc etc. My mind is running away from typing right now as it starts to lose control of what is coming out of my fingertips, but I think we should just sit and appreciate the significance of the number seven and all of the mysteries that come with it.

If we look at the seven mirrors, we see that each of them have their own guide to see how something may be a reflection of what is happening in your subconscious mind. You use these to unlock your thought patterns to let them go and achieve God consciousness (taqwa) and ego death (fana). In other words, the deeper you know your ego self, the faster you will be able to peel its layers to discover the true higher self that has unconditional connection to the Divine.

Even if you aren’t a believer, you can still benefit by coming to your higher self and releasing the limiting beliefs that hold you down. The less weighed down you are with attachment, the more you ascend.

Use these as a guide to figure yourself out when you have questions, or when you want to figure out the clutter of your mind.

The first mirror reflects what you are at the present moment

If you’re finding it difficult to gage who you are at a specific moment, look around you. How do things feel right now, at this very moment? You can be in the same situation twice, but notice different things based on your present mood. Are you more likely to notice the birds flying together, or their droppings on the floor?

The second mirror reflects what you judge

There’s an old saying of when you point one finger, three fingers point back at you. When you find yourself judging someone or something, there is something you haven’t forgiven within yourself or your past experiences. For example, if you’re judging someone for going out too much, you’re resenting a feeling of restriction either within or around you.

In order to manifest better for yourself, release the judgement by releasing the resistance.

The third mirror reflects what was taken away from you

When we see a quality in another person that we want for ourselves, that means we lost it. It could be a sense of femininity, masculinity, joy, confidence, self love, abundance, etc. At our essence, we are whole, but as we go through life, we lose our sense of complete self because of traumas that created limiting beliefs.

When you admire or envy something within someone, that means you need to go on a journey to find it within yourself. We need to enter a space of neutrality and release the limiting beliefs that stop you from remembering that you are one with your desire. The Qur’an does say that we were created from a single being after all (39:6).

The fourth mirror reflects patterns of a lost love

You know that feeling when you’re in a new situation and you keep comparing it to the old? Whether you’re comparing every new person you meet to your ex, or that feeling when you start a new job and you’re trying to draw parallels to your new colleagues and old ones? This is it!

When we look at ourselves through this mirror, we’re able to see our patterns of addiction. This gives us great spiritual power because recognising such compulsions give us an instant trigger into the shadow self when we foster a sense of curiosity about our patterns. When did this pattern start? Why do we feel the need to do what we need to do? Which relationship do we need to make peace with?

Keep in mind that when it comes to relationships, you can get closure without contact through meditation, understanding the deeper meanings and lessons, therapy, journaling, reframing, prayer and cord cutting. Please don’t text your exes or put yourself in a dangerous position with anyone else to clean up your fourth essene mirror!

The fifth mirror reflects your relationship with your parents

Our parents are our first window to the world and are the vessel of our soul’s incarnation to the earthly realm. This is the first relationship we have. As we grow, we find ourselves seeing the world through their eyes. This is why generational healing is so important, because much of the traumas they have are passed down to us.

This can range from our beliefs on money, God, our self identity and self worth, the environment and even politics. If we look deeply and access our subconscious mind, we can even see how our relationship with our parents manifests into relationships we have with others as adults.

How did you feel when you interacted with your parents as a child? Get to know the good and the bad aspects and this will give you a very deep an insight. Just as we’re human, so are our parents. We all view things from very limited scopes, even if we’re spiritual.

Then, you can practice some inner child healing and reparenting and rise above what may be limiting you.

The sixth mirror reflects your dark night of the soul moments

Our darkest moments, our most traumatic experiences, our struggles with mental health and the cloud over our head. When do we view the world through the sadness that lives within us?

Here, we’re talking about trauma. By definition, trauma is an experience that causes shock to the system. This manifests in physical, emotional and spiritual pain and leaves our fight or flight mechanism on. When we become aware of how we see the world through our traumatic experiences, we’re able to use discernment and question if things are the way they are because they truly are this way, or if it’s our trauma that’s talking.

When we become aware of how our trauma affects our perception, we unlock a new level of power — if we’re willing to overcome. Go easy on yourself because healing is nowhere near linear and we can get triggered at random moments. When this happens, we just need to ask ourselves what this moment is trying to teach us.

The seventh mirror reflects our ultimate self perception

So, this mirror is different to the first mirror because the first one talks about our state of being at any particular moment. You could be feeling happy and see roses and butterflies one moment, and then see fire in a few hours if something changes your mood.

Despite our shifting moods, we have a basal vibration, which is what this mirror talks about. Rather than asking what your mood is, you ask how you view yourself in the ever changing circumstances around you.

Using money as an example, a mood is feeling incredibly abundant after a payment. This can shift based on your current financial circumstances. Your self perception, however, is your ultimate relationship with money. Do you believe money flows through into your bank account easily? Or do you believe you’re a poor person?

The latter two are part of your self perception because they come from subconscious beliefs that you identify with.

This mirror is where we do the most exploration when we’re trying to manifest using the Law of Attraction. We can script, visualise, etc about being abundant, but if we don’t try to work on this mirror and understand the deep imprints of our subconscious mind, we won’t be able to rewrite and manifest.

I love this philosophy because it really breaks down how life can be a mirror to you. During your healing journey, you can use these mirrors as a reference point. What I like to do is write one aspect of my life down and pick a mirror that I feel relates the most. Then, I just speed write everything that comes into my mind, without even thinking about what I’m writing. When you’re writing very fast, you access your subconscious mind. Then I move to the next mirror.

Each mirror gets deeper, so if you want to do it with all of the mirrors, do it in the order that was written by the Khirbet Qumran.

I love you all so much,

Di xox

I’ve been doing hypnotherapy and here’s my honest experience

Yes, you read the title properly. I have been doing hypnotherapy. It started mainly out of curiosity because I saw the amazing Sotoda Saifi offering a free session, which I took up. I found it so insightful that I ended up buying a whole package of sessions with her, which I found amazing.

I did some group breathwork and hypnotherapy sessions with Sotoda in the past, which I loved and found similar to a very detailed guided meditation. But with 1-1, the experience is more personal — you’re asked questions and you have to work with what comes up to go deeper into the planes of the subconscious mind.

The session started with Sotoda giving me a consultation, which I found helpful. It made me feel less nervous during my first time because I wasn’t going into the unknown. I am used to doing shadow work by myself and with therapists and healers, so I dealt with fear of the unknown when it comes to my mind years ago, but it’s always good to have that reassurance when you’re starting out something completely new.

My first experience was the one I felt the most change in my body. I remember my speech slowing completely and feeling really, really relaxed. I was emotionally connecting to the experience. The closest feeling I can describe is from childhood – when an adult tries to reason with you after a tantrum. You can rationalise, but you’re not holding back.

Other times I remember speaking fluently, but most times I was in between. Honestly, it doesn’t matter much because I’ve had breakthrough sessions in which I felt were perfectly normal conversations after the hypnotherapy, but after a few days, the magnitude of what we worked on dawned on me. When you work with the subconscious mind, it actually guides you and reveals what you’re ready to hear. This is why it takes a few sessions because when you rip one layer, another one is ready to come out.

What happens during session?

This, my beautiful friends is where I warn you that the hypnotherapist you work with must be someone you trust. I’ve (virtually) known Sotoda for a little under a year and from interacting with her and seeing how she treats her work with such love and care, I felt more than comfortable with choosing her as my hypnotherapist.

Read reviews, check their credentials and most importantly pray about them and trust your intuition.

With Sotoda, I discuss my week and how I felt after the last session and we choose something to work on. Sometimes, she suggests things like letting go of a certain pattern that I didn’t realise takes such a toll on my spirit, but most of the time it’s very free flowing and we work with where my mind takes me.

After having a chat, I’m guided into a state of deep relaxation, which is the key to effective hypnotherapy. If you’re feeling extra tense, let your hypnotherapist know and they’ll do more to put you into relaxation. It’s also a pretty good idea to breathe, meditate or to wind down in some way before hypnotherapy.

During the hypnotherapy, you’re fully aware. You are in control of what you say, but you’re also relaxed enough to allow yourself to listen to your mind and higher self freely. There was one time I had to open the door and I was able to fully get up and do it. But because you’re already relaxed, it’s easy to quickly transition back into accessing your subconscious mind.

The feeling after is subtle, but surreal. Depending on what you work on, you leave slightly amazed at what’s going on in your mind. Sometimes, you already consciously knew what the deeper issue may have been, but it becomes more apparent when you’re in that state of relaxation. You’re able to speak openly about it and understand it so you can let it go.

For me, the session itself never felt intense, but I felt it in the hours and sometimes days that followed. It’s nothing scary, or anything to be ashamed of. I felt them in pangs of epiphanies which I would try to feel along with. When we feel, we’re actually allowing our mind to flow freely.

But what next?

Sotoda’s hypnotherapy really elevated my spiritual journey. She took me to some truths that I wasn’t ready to admit to on a conscious level, but was deep down ready to let go of. I attribute this to her experience and intuition, but also the way in which she really reads the person in front of her with an open mind and kind ears.

You feel a transformation after doing a few sessions of hypnotherapy, but it’s a gentle one. I initially expected it to be a bombshell of realisations and rationalisations, but it was the opposite. You’re shedding beliefs that bring you to your truth and the light from within. It’s an avenue to get to know yourself at your essence as you create a distinction between your higher self and the stories of your ego. The fact that I had a hypnotherapist who helped me explore the reasons behind my expectations at the beginning really helped me because that in itself taught me a lot about myself!

Right now, I’m letting my sessions sit and I’m observing myself through my transformation. I’ll be doing a course with Sotoda on generational healing in a few weeks, so I’m giving myself as much of a break as possible. I practice gratitude every day to raise my vibration, I journal, I do yoga, meditation, prayer, reiki and breathwork but I’m only doing self-discovery when I feel called to.

Love you all SO unbelievably much and I promise, no more hiatuses on this blog. I realised that I go on a hiatus when I am working through something, but that’s because I take so much pride in my writing that I put pressure on myself to produce the best content. I’m finally ready to let go of this and trust the process and to rest in my unique expressive element.

I write because it’s my passion and God-given form of creative expression, which brings me closer to myself and closer to him. Alhamdulillah.

Lots of love, light and healing,

Di xo

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

Here’s why you’re burning yourself out and what to do

This age has been categorised by identifying ourselves with our careers. Our whole childhood education has trained us to do and contribute as opposed to just be.

Take, the innocent question of “what do you want to be when you grow up?” and the way we were trained to by well-intentioned adults to use childhood as a building ground to serve capitalist ideals. We went to class for a “future”, did homework so we could pass and go to university and then went to university, or training for a job. We were told to have realistic expectations and to not pursue dreams that could land us in financial trouble in the future.

We may have had creative outlets, but our identity was first and foremost, how we could contribute to capitalism and how we identified through its lens. Unless our passions were profitable, we were told to choose between what we love and what would let us lead the lives we love.

For me, writing was always my passion. I loved expressing myself through writing, but judged myself based on my grades, which naturally were fluctuant. I then went on to study politics and war at university and I identified myself as a student. Then I identified as a journalist and my highs and lows became dependant on how my career was going.

Little did I know, those perceived ebbs and flows were one single meander that is life and I was just navigating whilst plastering my identity to one tiny aspect of it.

Learn more about my distance reiki healing sessions via Zoom

After realising this, I stumbled upon an article that said adults should identify with their health goals as opposed to their careers. It seemed legitimate, so I started to do it. I became Diana, the health conscious person and my fitness definitely improved… until I had days it didn’t.

Then came the same feeling losing your sense of self, but based on a different hurdle. I soon realised that the problem wasn’t what I was attaching my identity to, but the fact that I was identifying with temporary aspects of life, full stop.

Really, there’s no step-by-step to stop burning yourself out. We all do it in different ways and for different reasons, which change throughout our lives. Sometimes, it’s a necessity, other times it’s a survival instinct and then there are times we become addicted to the feeling of success. What we can do, though, is identify with something else.

Identify with your higher self, your soul. It could be too much to comprehend for some, especially for my readers who are new to spirituality, so think of it as identifying with your breathing.

“I am my breath. I am how I breathe.”

Take yourself there. How fast are you breathing? How deep are you breathing? Does your breathing come from your chest, or are you taking deep, belly breaths? Without judgement, focus on your breath, slow it down, put your hand on your heart centre and just say “I am”.

The rest of those identities will change. Success is relative, material is temporary. Even the body we have doesn’t stay with us forever, but our soul self, the self that was created in a completely dimension, will forever be ours and us.

Just coming to this realisation is enough. When you find yourself drifting with stress, overworking and identifying with success, just know it isn’t you.

Yes, life gets stressful, things get in the way of us doing what we want, but those are things that happen to you — they are not you. They do not need to become a part of you.

Don’t judge yourself for how well you’re connecting with your breath or identifying with your soul. Just do it. Allow negative thoughts to pass. They are not you and they do not stay forever. That extra sale may boost your confidence and dissolve those disturbing thoughts, realising your home is within lets you take a step back, allow you to feel how you want to feel, reminds you your thoughts aren’t you. Your thoughts are thoughts that affect you, but that doesn’t mean they become latched to your identity.

Get comfortable with stripping yourself of all of those labels and not identifying with the temporaries around you. Meditate on yourself, let go of the world and view yourself as the raw ethereal being you are. This is the purpose of spirituality and spiritual practice. You honour where you are, but you identify with yourself on a spiritual level to clear the material clutter in your mind.

Yes, you may need to do it more than once and yes it may take a while to retrain your brain to change the way you identify yourself, but by just having the simple awareness, you’re doing more than enough.

Baby steps, small wins and lots of gratitude and love.

I love you all.

Diana xoxo

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

How to let go of attachment patterns and reclaim your life

Attachment is the route of all suffering –

Gautama Buddha

Hello, my loves!

Again, this topic is very important to me. Throughout my life, I measured my success based on my ability to control. If I could control outcomes of situations, I was victorious. If I had a goal in my mind, I used to measure success to how close I was to achieving it, or what actions I’m forcing myself to take that will take me a step forward. Laying back felt like failure and sitting out felt like rejection.

That was no way to live and I thank God every day that I’m out of this pattern.

It’s always good to have motivation to take inspired action to get to where you want, but sometimes, you need to slow down and ask if you really are acting out of inspired action, or anxiety? Are you putting a certain outcome on a pedestal and only allowing emotions to release and express themselves under specific circumstances? Do you deny happiness because you don’t feel worthy because you somehow don’t think you accomplished enough to deserve happiness? Do you suppress disappointment and dismiss negative feelings because you want to avoid confrontation with others?

It’s good to regulate how we react, but when we regulate how we feel, we begin to deny who we are. We deny our past, we deny our present, we deny a better future, and most importantly, we deny that sweet, innocent child that continues to live inside us that has the same wants and needs as that child did in its physical form, years and years and years ago.

Attachment patterns govern our relationship with other human beings. If you felt abandoned as a child, and internalised that feeling, you will always feel a sense of abandonment in your relationships until you address your issue with being abandoned. You may feel anxious at any inconvenience in your interpersonal relationships, only for the source to be hidden trauma or a suppressed memory. The memory or trauma could have been from a small event, or as a result of being mistreated by (most of the time a well-intentioned) adult, but it’s not the memory or the event that matters. It’s how it made your cute, innocent, baby self feel as a child.

That innocence will never go away, which is one of the best things about life. We were born a blank canvas with the world as our oyster, feeling like we can do anything. Those limiting beliefs we have were all learned behaviours. The fact that we still have childlike innocence buried in us in some way is a blessing, because we can tap into our infinite potential and unlearn all of that stuff that no longer serves us. This goes for attachment patterns, beliefs on money, beliefs on self, beliefs on what core school subjects you’re good at, whether you’re clean or messy; the list is endless.

For attachment patterns, the first thing you need to do is figure out what your attachment pattern is. There are countless books and videos to watch to learn about the different one. You can even find an online quiz to help you decipher if you need help. With awareness, comes power.

Then, you need to find your way of calming yourself when you’re in a state of stress, because your triggers to your attachments show up. When this happens, our mind starts to race and it feels like our thoughts are running around at 10000 mph. When this happens, you need to slow down by asking yourself how you feel. When this happens, you narrow the focus from the many thoughts that you can’t fully identify, to the few feelings that your thoughts are rooted in. These feelings don’t have to be related. You can feel a mixture of things and that is a perfectly normal part of the human experience.

Take a few deep cleansing breath, and ask yourself: “How do I feel?”

You’ll feel drawn to be more actively curious about one of the feelings. Pick it and try to unfold. Questions to ask yourself are: Why am I feeling this way? What experience does this remind me of when I was younger? How does this remind me of my relationship with my mum/dad/guardian? What memory does this feeling invoke? Here, you’ll find some answers that will put your current thoughts and feelings in reaction to something very recent into context.

Once that happens, you open your mind to the possibility that there are many more reasons behind another person’s actions. Thoughts like: “Okay, maybe I’m not being ghosted and ___ just needs some space”, “maybe ___ didn’t like what I said and told me because they want a better relationship with me because they like me, as opposed to wanting to humiliate me”, “maybe I overreacted, but I still felt like ___’s behaviour was unfair. I’ll admit to my overreaction, but stand my ground when defending myself because they were wrong”.

When you do this, you also find boundaries. You realise that maybe that person’s actions may not have been personal to you, but you would prefer that they clarified their intention. That is a boundary and an expectation of open and honest communication.

Meditate on your inner child

Diana is not Diana if she doesn’t talk about meditation 😉. Seriously though, meditation is one of the best things you can do for yourself. I found that “visiting my inner child” through meditation really helps me. I see baby Diana as someone who is still living inside me and sometimes needs to be soothed. Things happen in adult Diana’s life and baby Diana gets triggered and needs to be calmed down.

Scientifically speaking, up until the age of 6, our brains were functioning on theta brain waves, which means we were absorbing the world in an almost trance-like state. This is why our infancy is so crucial to our development, because that’s when thought patterns that stay with us for the rest of our lives are formed. If we can’t understand this, we can’t unlearn the negative ones.

Inner-child work (I’ll write a whole post about it and my experience in practicing it in the future) is one of the most important things we do as adults. We need to find our scars and re-parent them. It’s a normal part of life. It doesn’t mean your parents were bad parents (for those who didn’t grow up around abuse, our parents are human after all and obviously made mistakes), or you are so “messed up” that you need to start again, re-parenting is about taking responsibility.

There are many guided meditations to follow on YouTube, just do a search and go on the best one. The intentions of meditating on your inner child are to recognise that your inner child still exists, to have empathy with your inner child, really internalise how sweet and innocent you were (and still are) as a child and how you deserve the absolute best and to tap into that part of yourself, befriend it and to heal the child that is hurting.

When you tend the needs of that child, you heal yourself. From personal experience, this works! If you’re not used to meditating, find a good guided meditation that you can listen to throughout your practice. Especially if you’re new to meditating!! Read my blog post on meditating for beginners if you need help. For my Muslim readers, I also wrote a post explaining why meditation is not haram, because I always get people asking.

A quick guide to the meditation of healing your inner child would be to:

1. Take 21 deep breaths or do whichever breathing exercise you’re familiar with to calm you down
2. Picture a beautiful forest or beach or playground and walk barefoot, familiarising yourself with the area
3. See a child playing by themselves, sitting alone with their head down, however you feel best
4. Walk closer to the child and realise that child is you (it helps to picture yourself as a 4-year-old)
5. Look into its eyes and understand what this sweet child is feeling
6. Hug the child, hold their hand, etc and say “I love you” – really show this child love until they feel better
7. When the child feels better, take the child by the hand, start to play with them until you feel the innocent laughter in your heart
8. Keep saying I love you, affirming what the child needs to hear (you’re valid, you’re beautiful, you have amazing hair, your emotions are amazing, your boundaries are precious, you’re allowed to cry, etc) and really make that child as happy as you can
9. When you’re ready to leave the meditation, look into the child’s eyes and see its happiness, hug the child tight and say you’ll be back. Take them to a nice place that they’ll love and they feel safe.
10. Take your focus back to your breathing, start to wiggle your fingers and toes, your hands and wrists and slowly bring yourself back to this dimension

Do this meditation as much as you want. I find that the more I do it, the better I feel and the more my inner child trusts me because I keep my promise to her. This has REALLY helped me with my own attachment patterns. If you want to feel the meditation more deeply, put your hands on your heart whilst doing it.

I barely scratched the surface on this topic so please take advantage of this introduction and go and do lots of research, or comment below/contact me on my socials with questions and comments that I’ll address!

I love you all so much!! Good luck!

Instagram: @flowerknafeh
Twitter: @superknafeh

Too anxious to meditate? I got you. Here are some tips

Hello lovely people.

I’ve had some people ask me about mediation and visualisation. Last week, I tweeted that I managed to treat my PMS cramps with visualisation when I was tucked into bed and was too tired to get pain killers. Since then, people have been wondering how to tap into this energy themselves.

Honestly, I didn’t know I was capable of doing this. I practice yoga all the time and I love meditation and mindfulness. I also believe in the power of the mind as a mechanism of healing, but I didn’t think I was spiritually awakened enough to to see results of pain relief if I tried it at this so-called “stage” in my spiritual journey.

But here we are. God really showed me the power of my own mind right there.

Before I do a deep dive, I want you all to understand the difference between fight or flight and flow state. If you don’t understand this, you won’t understand mediation.

The ability to meditate is our birthright. Naturally, we find adventure in the unknown. We’re able to close our eyes, allow our bodies to fall into sync with our higher selfs and trust. The reason so many of us find it so difficult to meditate is because our fight or flight is perpetually on and we can’t reach flow state.

Living the lives we do, we’re conditioned to be in a perpetual state of anxiety. We always feel as though we have to defend ourselves from something. This is when our fight or flight is on. It’s supposed to be a temporary state to get us out of extreme danger. But in this day and age, it’s the default.

Naturally, our default is supposed to be flow state. Rather than fearing the unknown the way the human body, humans are supposed to find adventure in the unknown. As opposed to associating the unknown with anxiety, we are supposed associate it with peace and enjoyment. Naturally, we’re supposed to trust it as a process and trust in the benevolence of the destination.

So where does meditation come into the picture?

If you cannot enter flow state, you cannot meditate. If you find yourself in your state of anxiety/fight or flight, all you need to do is recognise it for what it is and observe it.

How does this feel? Which parts of my body are tensing up? Am I shaking anywhere? How fast am I breathing? What may be happening?

Approaching your anxiety with a sense of curiosity calms it. Focus on how your body is feeling and be aware of the sensations. When thoughts come through, simply be aware of them too. Don’t fight your thoughts because they will fight back. Let them sit. And breathe. They can’t defend themselves when you’re flushing them out with breath-work.

There are many breathing techniques out there. One of my former yoga teachers taught me the 4-7-8 breathing technique, which I used when I had anxiety.

Breathe in for four seconds, hold for second seconds, out for eight seconds. Repeat until you feel better.

Breathing is core to meditation.

When you focus on your breath, you’re focusing on the energy that is connecting your body to your soul, thus keeping you alive. You can simply meditate by closing your eyes and focusing on your breath.

You can also look up different meditations. In kundalini yoga, there’s a plethora of meditations we use (if you belong to a religious faith and you feel uncomfortable with some of the chants, you can omit them or do a different meditation).

If you want, I can make a list of different breathing techniques.

Okay, but how do we visualise?

I taught myself visualisation through using guided meditations. Look them up on YouTube, Spotify or even yoga/meditation websites and find videos for different occasions or feelings.

When I visualised my PMS cramps away, I put my hands on my belly and imagined a warm gold ball loosening my muscles just because I felt like it. I could have imagined a red ball, I could have imagined massaging hands, the only restriction was my mind.

The trick is, I entered flow state through my breath. This is where beginners may need help because they need to be guided into relaxation. I still use guided meditations when I can’t seem to relax, want a fresh visualisation or want to do a yogic meditation.

See it in your mind’s eye/third eye

You don’t have to, but you can also use your pineal gland. Close your eyes, breathe and focus your eyes between your eyebrows. This is a very powerful state because you’re opening your third eye chakra.

Use healing/relaxing sounds

If you want relaxing sounds in the background, but not necessarily a guided meditation, you can use healing frequencies. I made playlists for each chakra you can use. You can even use playlists to time your meditation.

Most importantly, don’t worry about the amount of time you meditate. Just do it. Even if it’s for a few minutes. Progress is key. The last thing you want to do is stress about a mechanism we use to intentionally help us relax, heal and manifest.

Good luck and don’t hesitate to contact me on my socials if you have any questions xox

Instagram: @flowerknafeh
Twitter: @superknafeh

Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay