Feel Your Prayer Again
The Complete Sufi Practice Manual · 120 practices · 14 sections · 418 pages
“You have repented. You have listened. You have understood. And by Thursday it was fog again.”
Because here is what nobody says plainly: the tradition you belong to has spent a thousand years on exactly your problem. Not on the theory of it — on the treatment of it. What a person does when the prayer has gone cold. What to do when you keep returning to the same sin. What to do at three in the morning when you cannot feel anything and do not want to get up. They gave instructions, and durations, and warnings, and the order to do things in.
Almost none of it is available in plain English, in one place, as a set of things to do. That is all this book is.
How every practice is written
- Where it comes from — the master and the text, named. Not “the Sufis said.”
- What to do — numbered steps, so you can work straight from the page.
- How long it takes — in minutes, or days.
- What may change — described plainly, never oversold.
- An honest note — what this practice does not do, where it is hard, and who it is wrong for.
- The shariah note — confirming nothing here is invented, and marking the few practices that traditionally require a teacher’s permission.
Find your problem, not your page number
The Index by Problem routes you from your own sentence — “I cannot concentrate in salah,” “I keep going back to the same sin,” “I feel nothing and I have not for years” — straight to the three or four practices for it. The Index by Time sorts all 120 by what they cost you: two minutes, fifteen, half an hour, forty days.
What it will not promise you
This book will not tell you that you will feel something — not by week three, not by day forty, not on any schedule. What a person feels, and when, is Allah’s to give. Anyone who sells you a timetable for it is selling you something that is not theirs. What we can tell you is that these practices are real, that they come from people who did them, and that what they do is not shown to you on a dashboard.
The sections
- Seeking and Praying for Your Shaykh 10 practices
- Prayer 10 practices
- Dhikr 11 practices
- The Diseases of the Heart 12 practices
- The Nafs 9 practices
- The Night 8 practices
- Muhasaba 7 practices
- Silence and Khalwa 8 practices
- Dua 8 practices
- Reading the Qur’an Inwardly 7 practices
- Adab With People 9 practices
- Sabr and Hardship 7 practices
- Remembering Death 5 practices
- When Nothing Works 9 practices