“I am ill and I cannot keep any of my practice.”

If this is your sentence tonight, you are not the first to say it — and you are not being told anything is wrong with your iman. The tradition wrote down, in detail, what a person does about exactly this: not the theory of it, the treatment of it. Named masters, named books, numbered steps, and how long each one takes.

Two rules before any practice, and they are the tradition’s rules, not ours. First: one practice at a time, kept for two weeks, before you consider a second — the rush is the problem, not the cure. Second: do the practice and leave the result alone. Do not take your own spiritual temperature afterwards; the checking is itself a turning away.

The practices the book sends you to

• What the masters did in illness As long as the illness lasts
  Ghazali’s own collapse, and the rules for practice when the body fails. — Section 11 — Sabr and Hardship
• Setting the minimum floor The prayers you already pray, plus ~90 seconds
  One absolute minimum you do not go below, for as many years as it takes. — Section 13 — When Nothing Works
• Witr as the anchor 3–5 min
  The prayer that survives on every night you do not wake. — Section 5 — The Night
• The night before a hard day 15 min (or 5)
  Keeping something of the night without wrecking tomorrow. — Section 5 — The Night
• Dhikr in the ten minutes before sleep 7–10 minutes
  The last words of the day, in a fixed order, with the phone out of reach. — Section 2 — Dhikr

Where the first one comes from

In al-Munqidh min al-Dalal, Ghazali describes his own breakdown at the height of his career in Baghdad. For roughly six months he could not decide whether to stay or leave; then, by his account, the choice was taken out of his hands: his tongue seized so that he could not lecture, his appetite failed and he could not swallow or digest, and his strength went. The physicians concluded that the trouble was seated in the heart and would not lift until the anxiety at its root was relieved. He gave up his teaching chair and his income, left the city, and spent years in withdrawal in Damascus, Jerusalem and the Hijaz before returning to teach.

Other sentences

• “My wife is suffering and I cannot fix it.”
• “What happened to me has become who I am, and I cannot put it down.”
• “I am afraid of dying and I push the thought away.”