“My heart feels like stone.”

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

• 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
• 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
• Tongue first, heart later 5 deliberate min a day
  Move the mouth. The heart is not where you are able to start. — Section 2 — Dhikr
• The hundred istighfar About 4 minutes, in pieces
  Seeking forgiveness a hundred times a day, in three words, spread across the day. — Section 2 — Dhikr
• Serving without being seen Monthly + weekly
  One act of service a month that cannot be traced back to you. — Section 10 — Adab With People

Where the first one comes from

Qaswat al-qalb (hardness of heart) is named in the Qur’an: has the time not come for the believers that their hearts should soften at the remembrance of Allah (57:16), and, of those whose hearts hardened, that a stain covered their hearts from what they earned (83:14). The Musnad of Ahmad records a man complaining to the Prophet, peace be upon him, of a hard heart and being told to feed the poor and wipe the head of an orphan. Ghazali and Ibn Qayyim both build on this: hardness is treated by contact, not by argument.

Other sentences

• “I keep going back to the same sin.”
• “I have no time. I work twelve hours.”
• “I cannot wake for tahajjud.”