Shaykh Ibrahim's Podcast

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Learning to be a Student

There are many books, paths and guides about how to look for the right teacher. Very few of these assistants explain how to be a good or better spiritual student. Or, shall we say, one who accepts spiritual teachings and learns to apply them.

What does it take to be a ‘proper’ student?

The first thing is to understand, as a student, is that you know all the wrong things, and that everything you have learned and think you know is not going to help you.

As a student you must come in to the classroom naked, empty, and accept that you have made a mess of your life. When you do, you will see instead of having free will, you are a puppet, and your attachments, family, culture and ego are all pulling your strings.

If you think this is free will, well, you are mistaken. You dance to the forces of peer pressure, job security, cultural paradigms and family/tribal protocols. Some cultures tell you that you must get married, that you must Baptise or follow certain naming customs. Free will happens when you face each one of these puppet strings and cut them. Cutting hurts. Letting go, as a concept and wordy-thinky thing sounds nice. Makes a great song. But it is not comfortable. It is not safe to step away from what you know, even though the thing itself might be painful. Comfort is what keeps us dead. Growing is painful but freeing. If you want free will, you have to cut the attachments, one at a time.

Part of this process is to apologise for hurting others because of your self-centeredness.

A student who wants to grow and leave all that ego aside must go through their experiences and determine exactly what they have learned. There are all kinds of tools available to do that, depending on the length and depth of the experience.

If you have studied an instrument or sport for many years, had a coach or teacher who you worked with through all your ups and downs, frustrations and elations, then you begin to understand how this applies to spiritual teachings. If you have not seriously practiced a discipline like music, art, craft or sport for several years, then spiritual training will be a big shock. Because it is exactly like any of those activities: it is about PRACTICE. Practicing every day, and in doing such, getting bored, getting frustrated, crying, laughing - all the while you are transforming into something completely other.

Being a student means surrendering your silly little will and your twisted misconception of what free will is, and alchemizing into someone who is mature, patient, humble, sincere and adept at being a human being.

If you want to grow your spirituality, you need to put on your adult pants, and learn to fail big time. You will need to accept being laughed at, probably crying a bit, dealing with anger and family - whatever it takes for you to start again, but this time with an understanding that it is all about love. Because your heart needs to take root in good soil, and grow deep roots. The deeper the roots, the higher the heart can grow, and brighter it can glow.

Salaam Alaykum, murids, seekers, curious and interested listeners,

We appreciate you, and are happy to share our Sufi Message. Your donation will help support our Sufi Centre in Sydney where we offer Zikr, Sohbet, spiritual counselling and healing services. We believe the message should be free, but it costs equipment, rental, services, software and hardware to get this to you.

Thank you for choosing our podcast amongst all the millions available. If

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Please send your questions to: [email protected]

Send us a text

Salaam Alaykum, murids, seekers, curious and interested listeners,

We appreciate you, and are happy to share our Sufi Message. Your donation will help support our Sufi Centre in Sydney where we offer Zikr, Sohbet, spiritual counselling and healing services. We believe the message should be free, but it costs equipment, rental, services, software and hardware to get this to you.

Thank you for choosing our podcast amongst all the millions available. If

Support the show

Please send your questions to: [email protected]

Send us a text

Emotions and Feelings
Ibrahim ansari

Hey, how are you feeling today? Me? I’m feeling kind of nostalgic today.
We talk about feelings all the time, but what is the difference between an emotion and a feeling? Well, I have my own idea about these concepts.
I tend to think of feelings as a bank of meters, whose needles are gently swaying back and forth between strong and weak. “It’s warm; I feel sad; I feel nostalgic; she bugs me; I like him; this is a nice place; I’m homesick; you make me feel loved...”
All day and all night these little meters are giving us readouts of our world. Sometimes they light up with some joy, sorrow, love, pleasantness, sadness. But they are basically indicators of how things are going.
However, when an emotion strikes, as anger, panic, pressure, stress or fear, the meters are all pinned to the right, red lights flashing, sirens wailing, and there is no longer the ability to detect any more subtlety of feelings. Feelings? We’ve left them far behind. We are emotional!

An emotion, then, is when you are controlled by your drugs that are preparing you to stand your ground and fight for your life, or to run for your life. Any rational, objective reasoning has flown out the window and you are no longer a clear-thinking person. You could be categorised as insane. The temporary loss of reason is due to the flooding of cortisol and adrenaline.

Here’s what happens when fear enters the room: A corticotrophin-releasing hormone causes the release of adrenocorticotropic hormone from the pituitary gland. Adrenocorticotropic hormone in turn travels in the bloodstream to the adrenal glands, where it causes the secretion of the stress hormone cortisol.

The corticotrophin-releasing hormone also acts on many other areas within the brain where it suppresses appetite, increases anxiety, and improves memory and selective attention. Together, these effects co-ordinate behaviour to develop and fine tune the body’s response to a stressful experience.

The corticotrophin-releasing hormone can also be increased above the normal daily levels by a stressful experience, infection or even exercise. An increase in corticotrophin-releasing hormone leads to higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol which mobilises energy resources needed for dealing with the cause of the stress. High levels of stress hormones over a long period can have negative effects on the body.

Abnormally high corticotrophin-releasing hormone levels are connected with a variety of diseases. Because it stimulates anxiety and suppresses appetite, too much corticotrophin-releasing hormone is suspected of causing nervous problems such as clinical depression, anxiety, sleep disturbances and anorexia nervosa.

Every emotional

Salaam Alaykum, murids, seekers, curious and interested listeners,

We appreciate you, and are happy to share our Sufi Message. Your donation will help support our Sufi Centre in Sydney where we offer Zikr, Sohbet, spiritual counselling and healing services. We believe the message should be free, but it costs equipment, rental, services, software and hardware to get this to you.

Thank you for choosing our podcast amongst all the millions available. If

Support the show

Please send your questions to: [email protected]

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Inspiration

To inspire means to breathe in. Not with your upper chest, but with your diaphragm, the part below your ribs. Breathe in. As you hold it, reflect on this miracle. You are filling your lungs with mostly nitrogen, some oxygen, and as you release your breath, you are giving the plants your carbon dioxide. Every breath is a miracle. That should be the first and only inspiration you need. That you keep breathing is a miracle, a blessing, a treasure and gift reserved only for the living. So should you start to feel depressed or disconnected, this is something you can always return to. Inspiration, expiration.

Of course, the feelings, experiences and relationships we encounter will add ‘content’ to trying to stay balanced and may throw us off-kilter.

So, if the breath doesn’t inspire you, fill you with hope and joy, then where else can you go? What can you do?

This is where you enter your laboratory. You may not know this, but you are one. A laboratory. You are an ongoing experiment. But that means you have to keep trying new things, new combinations, new experiments. Now, the thing about science, is that it is mostly about failure. Failure does not mean bad. It's just data. So part of what we are doing in this case, is finding out about what makes you inspired. To do that, you will need to look back on your life, and remember what has inspired you in the past. What does inspiration mean to you? Does it give you impetus, ideas, hope, or just happiness? Perhaps what you first need to do is think about and reflect on what inspiration means to you.

So here we are in our laboratory, and we are going to try and re-create or reanimate that feeling of inspiration. What ingredients do we need to start with? Was it a poem, a motivational talk, a book, a specific person, an unexpected revelation? Perhaps the ingredient we need to start with is Love. Without Love all the other ingredients will not truly inspire.

As Albert Einstein writes to his daughter, “There is an extremely powerful force that, so far, science has not found a formal explanation to. It is a force that includes and governs all others, and is even behind any phenomenon operating in the universe and has not yet been identified by us. This universal force is LOVE.

When scientists looked for a unified theory of the universe they forgot the most powerful unseen force. Love is Light, that enlightens those who give and receive it. Love is gravity, because it makes some people feel attracted to others. Love is power, because it multiplies the best we have, and allows humanity not to be extinguished in their blind selfishness. Love unfolds and reveals. For love we live and die. Love is God and God is Love.

This force explains everything and gives meaning to life. This is the variable that we have ignored for too long, maybe because we are afraid of love because it is the only energy in the universe that man has not learned to drive at will.

To give visibility to love, I made a simple substitution in my most famous equation. If instead of E = mc2, we accept that the energy to heal the world can be obtained through love multiplied by the speed of light squared, we a

Salaam Alaykum, murids, seekers, curious and interested listeners,

We appreciate you, and are happy to share our Sufi Message. Your donation will help support our Sufi Centre in Sydney where we offer Zikr, Sohbet, spiritual counselling and healing services. We believe the message should be free, but it costs equipment, rental, services, software and hardware to get this to you.

Thank you for choosing our podcast amongst all the millions available. If

Support the show

Please send your questions to: [email protected]

Send us a text

Expectation

“Once in a winter time, a King was roaming outside his palace. At night when he was entering his palace, he saw an old man at the entry gate of palace.

When the King got close he saw that he was an old man who was wearing very thin cloths which were not even warm. The King was surprised to see that how that old man was able to keep up in that cold weather even in those clothes.

So he stopped near that old man and said, “Aren’t you feeling cold?”

The old man replied, “I am feeling cold but what to do? I don’t have any warm clothes to wear. For many years I bear this cold weather without warm clothes. God gives me strength to bear this and live through winter time. ”

King Qahhar felt pity and said, “Don’t worry.. You wait here and We will send someone with warm clothes for you..”

Old man felt happy and thanked the King for his kindness.

Once the King entered palace, he forget about his talk with the old man and got busy with his routine.

Next morning, when a soldier approached, they saw the cold, stricken body of that old man. Beside his body was a message written in the dirt by that old man before dying.

Long live the King. I had been living wearing these thin clothes in such cold weather for so long. But last night your promise of giving me a warmth took my life..”

Expectations from Others can become a reason of Weakness if not met. Therefore, One should Learn to Live on his Own Strength and will power.

A saying, “Expectation is the root of all heartache.”

In Search of a Master

A man went in search of a Master. He was ready to go around the world, but he was determined to find the Master, the true Master, the Perfect Master.

Outside his village he met an old man, a nice fellow, sitting under a tree. He asked the old man, “Have you ever heard in your long life — you look like a wanderer...”

He said, “Yes, I am a wanderer. I wandered all over the earth.”

The man said, “That is the right kind of person. Can you suggest to me where I should go? I want to be a disciple of a Perfect Master.”

The old man suggested a few addresses to him, and the young man thanked him and went on.

After thirty years of wandering around the earth and finding nobody who was exactly fulfilling his expectations, he came back dejected, depressed. the moment he was entering his village he saw the old man who had become very old now, sitting under the tree. And suddenly he recognized that he is the Master! He fell at his feet and he said, “Why didn’t you say it to me, that you are the Master?”

The old man said, “But that was not time for you. You could not recognize me. You needed some experience. Wandering around the earth has given you a certain maturity, a certain understanding. Now you can see. Last time you had met me, but you had not seen me. You had missed. You were asking me about some Master. That was enough proof that you could not see me, you could not feel my presence, you could not smell the fragrance. You were utterly blind; hence I gave you some bogus addresses so you could go. But even to be with wrong people is good, because that is how one lear

Salaam Alaykum, murids, seekers, curious and interested listeners,

We appreciate you, and are happy to share our Sufi Message. Your donation will help support our Sufi Centre in Sydney where we offer Zikr, Sohbet, spiritual counselling and healing services. We believe the message should be free, but it costs equipment, rental, services, software and hardware to get this to you.

Thank you for choosing our podcast amongst all the millions available. If

Support the show

Please send your questions to: [email protected]