“I cannot be alone with myself for ten minutes.”

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

• The hour alone One hour, once a week
  One hour a week, by yourself, with nothing in it to do. — Section 7 — Silence and Khalwa
• The drive home in silence 15–25 minutes, five days a week
  Twenty minutes of the commute with nothing playing, five days a week. — Section 7 — Silence and Khalwa
• What silence does to a talker No extra time
  The sequence a habitual talker goes through when the noise stops. — Section 7 — Silence and Khalwa
• The phone fast One to two hours a day
  A fixed block of hours each day with the device off and out of the room. — Section 7 — Silence and Khalwa
• The short i’tikaf Three hours, or one night
  A few hours or one night inside the masjid, with the intention made. — Section 7 — Silence and Khalwa

Where the first one comes from

Bukhari narrates from A’isha, in the account of the beginning of revelation, that solitude was made beloved to the Prophet before he was sent, and that he would withdraw to the cave of Hira’ and worship there for nights before returning to his family. Al-Qushayri gives a chapter of al-Risala to seclusion (’uzla) and retreat (khalwa). Al-Ghazali devotes a whole book of the Ihya’ to the proprieties of seclusion, concluding that the right amount differs from person to person.

Other sentences

• “Something has gone wrong this year and I cannot bear it.”
• “I am ill and I cannot keep any of my practice.”
• “My wife is suffering and I cannot fix it.”