“I feel nothing when I pray, and I have not for years.”

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

• Naming qabd Two minutes tonight
  Learning the classical name for the state you are in, and what it is not. — Section 13 — When Nothing Works
• Never judging yourself by feeling Nothing added to the day
  Feeling is not the measure, and it never was — in either direction. — Section 13 — When Nothing Works
• Why you should not increase when you are dry One month of restraint
  The instinct in dryness is to add. The counsel of the masters is the opposite. — Section 13 — When Nothing Works
• Two actions against a hard heart An hour across a week, plus five minutes daily
  Feed someone and touch a child’s head — the classical prescription for numbness. — Section 3 — The Diseases of the Heart
• Slowing the recitation Adds under 2 minutes
  Deliberately halving your speed, so the words have room to be words. — Section 1 — Prayer

Where the first one comes from

Al-Qushayri gives qabd (contraction) and bast (expansion) their own chapter in al-Risala al-Qushayriyya, treating them as a matched pair of states that come over a person and are lifted from him. He takes the language from the Qur’an, which names both as acts of Allah: “Allah contracts and expands, and to Him you will be returned” (al-Baqara 2:245). Ibn ‘Ata’illah returns to the pair again and again in al-Hikam, always as two hands of the same care.

Other sentences

• “I cannot concentrate in salah.”
• “I pray five times and it is just a thing I do, like locking the door.”
• “My heart feels like stone.”