“I look down on other people, and I know I do.”

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

• Carry your own things Ten minutes a day
  Break arrogance with physical acts of lowering, done daily. — Section 3 — The Diseases of the Heart
• Assuming the good opinion 15 min once
  Making the charitable reading your standing default with three named people. — Section 10 — Adab With People
• Find him seventy excuses Under a minute, at the moment it happens
  A fixed procedure for the moment you assume the worst about someone. — Section 3 — The Diseases of the Heart
• Serving without being seen Monthly + weekly
  One act of service a month that cannot be traced back to you. — Section 10 — Adab With People
• The graveyard visit 15–20 min, once a month
  Going to a Muslim cemetery, alone, and standing there for a quarter of an hour. — Section 12 — Remembering Death

Where the first one comes from

Ghazali gives kibr (arrogance) Book 29 of the Ihya’, the Condemnation of Pride and Conceit. Muslim records the Prophet, peace be upon him, defining pride as two things: rejecting the truth, and looking down on people. Ghazali’s treatment is entirely physical — he does not ask you to think humbly. He asks you to place your body in low positions repeatedly until the soul stops expecting high ones.

Other sentences

• “I want more money and more things and it never stops.”
• “I go through whole days and remember none of them.”
• “I cannot face looking at my own day.”