Most of us are walking around all day long, tuned in to Radio Station NST (Non-Stop Thinking).
We’re constantly playing a soundtrack and watching mind-movies in our heads. Some of these mind-movies and day-dreams seem innocent enough… but they often turn dark and soon become nightmares that fill us with anxiety, worry, sadness, anger, guilt and other forms of negativity.
Trying to out-work, out-pray or out-recite your nafs-based thinking is a losing battle, because your nafs is right there with you as you do those activities – trying to sabotage and distract you at every turn.
(Ever have your mind wander aimlessly during prayer…? That’s a classic case of the nafs sabotaging your noble efforts.)
But to make things worse, trying to replace one mind-movie or soundtrack in your head with another more ‘positive’ one, is a temporary band-aid solution that never works long term.
The reason it doesn’t work is so obvious that for many years, it completely escaped my attention:
You Can’t Out-Think Your Thoughts…!
Trying to reason with, write down or analyse your thinking is a fool’s errand. It only results in more thinking and a noisier, more cluttered mind.
It’s a bit like trying to clean yourself by rolling around in mud.
To make matters worse, sometimes our negative thinking has a point:
Maybe I’m not good enough. Maybe I shouldn’t risk it. Maybe it won’t work out. Maybe I will be disappointed. Maybe the world would be a better place without me in it. (Okay, maybe it doesn’t go that far for most of us… but you get the picture!)
All this negativity isn’t confined to living in our heads.
It soon shows up in the outside world too, by creating never-ending conflict in our relationships, sabotaging our attempts to improve ourselves and achieve our goals and worst of all, keeping us spiritually disconnected from Allah, the Most Loving.
Most personal development books and programs try giving external how-to solutions to achieve your goals, improve your relationships and create positive behavioural change.
The only problem with that, is that they tend to give you more to think about and amplify the voice of your nafs, which ultimately wants to sabotage you to keep you small and ‘safe’… and keep you thinking about yourself.
A much better way forward is to clear your mind and make abundant space for being mindful of Allah’s magnificent presence.
With a clear and quiet mind, you take small, inspired actions that don’t seem like a big deal… but compound over time to transform your life – without you even giving it much thought.
If you want a quiet-minded, presence-focused, nafs-mastery-based approach to personal transformation, check out this program:
