The battle against the nafs (lower, egoic self) isn’t a joke.
Your eternal life and worldly life depend on it.
Fortunately, in my travels I have come across some weapons that have aided me on my personal spiritual journey of being much more aware of the tricks my nafs is trying to play on me.
As a result, I’ve dropped a load of psychological suffering, much of which I wasn’t even aware existed, until it was gone. I never realised it’s possible to go for hours and even days with virtually no thoughts – certainly none that create anxiety, anger or depression.
I remember a few years ago having a coaching session with a client and realising that I hadn’t experienced guilt for literally years. It used to be a part of my daily experience.
Same with stress – it used to be an everyday thing that got worse over time (unless I tried removing responsibilities, which often isn’t a good idea). Now, it hardly ever crops up and when it occasionally does, it dissipates as quickly as it appeared.
Here are the weapons I’ve been using to increase my awareness of Allah’s Presence, and thereby catching and dropping ego-based thoughts and feelings. (If you have better ones, go for it. I’d love to know what’s been working for you, too.)
- Prophetic Presence
This is perhaps obvious to some, but I experienced a huge shift when I realised that the thinking mind requires ‘time’. In other words, when you ‘eliminate time’, you’re left with a totally quiet mind. When you intentionally quiet your mind, you become totally present.
This puts you in the psychological state of Zikr Allah (bringing Allah to mind) – which makes perfect sense when you realise that Allah is, by definition, beyond our ability to conceive of or imagine.
With practice, we can intentionally, deliberately go more deeply into this state and prolong the amount of time we’re blessed to live here.
- The Inner Salam Method
This is perhaps the most powerful way I’ve ever encountered of ‘dissolving’ negative feelings. It’s very simple and very intuitive. We simply direct our awareness, attention and presence into the feeling or sensation in our body as it is occurring. Turns out, negativity can’t exist for long in the light of presence and it dissolves within a few seconds or minutes.
- The Psychological Switch
This removes an endless amount of mental clutter. We are ‘forced’ or compelled to think about anything that we believe has the power to cause our feelings. The moment we discard the idea that the outside world, our circumstances or our past have the power to dictate our current-moment feelings, our mental clutter suddenly disappears.
It’s as if we’ve slain the mental idols that we were pretending or imagining had power, and they’re replaced with the blissful silence of an awareness of Allah’s eternal Presence.
Now, it’s one thing to have a weapon.
It’s another thing entirely to master your use of the weapon.
If you want to begin the journey of mastering these weapons that can be used against the nafs, then your training starts here:
