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Yourself and your limits
When worship stops feeling like anything
Fatrah, the difference between the feeling draining and the practice draining, and how to set a floor.
One question before you start, because the whole course turns on it. Has everything gone flat, or only worship? If the flatness is everywhere, in food, in people, in work, and in the things you used to look forward to, then this is not the course for it and setting a floor will not reach it. That picture is what depression looks like from the inside, it is common, and it goes to a doctor rather than to more worship. The course called When you are told it is weak faith is written for exactly that. Nothing here is a diagnosis and nothing here is scored. And if you are having thoughts of ending your life, or of harming yourself, that goes outside a course today. Tell someone, and contact your doctor or an emergency service.
What this course teaches
Behavioural activation, borrowed and kept honest
The same move as for low mood: a floor of small, regular action held steady without waiting to feel like it. What it says about your state is deliberately little, because the flatness may be a season, may be depression, and may be scrupulosity, and those are different things.
Why this one
The trials behind this method were run in depression and not in spiritual dryness, so this is a borrowed method and the course says so rather than implying otherwise. It is borrowed because the alternative is nothing, and because a floor is safe whichever of the three you have.
What this course will not do
Any verdict on your state before God. This course does not tell you what your dryness means, and nothing in it should be read as a diagnosis of your faith.
Six short lessons for the state where you still pray and it returns nothing. It separates four things that feel identical from the inside, explains why the feeling attached to an act fades before the act loses its value, and puts the slackening back where the sound reports put it, which is inside the expected shape of a religious life rather than outside it. Lesson four teaches one change, and it is a floor rather than a target.
Who this is for
Anyone whose salah has gone flat, anyone who has dropped a wird and taken it as a verdict on themselves, and anyone who came out of a Ramadan or an intense stretch and found nothing left in the tank. It assumes no clinical background and no training in the sacred sciences.
What this is not
This course gives no fatwa and no diagnosis, and it replaces neither a scholar nor a doctor. It does not deliver treatment for religious obsessive compulsive disorder, which is a real condition with a specific treatment that belongs with a clinician. It will not ask you to sit deliberately with a feeling of absence in order to work through it. And it does not prescribe more worship as the cure for dryness, because for a depleted person that is the thing that produced the state.
The lessons
6- Where you left off. Naming the drynessFour different things feel identical from the inside, and they go to four different places.7 min
- Why the feeling drains before the practice doesHabituation, depletion and flatness. Three ordinary mechanisms, none of them a verdict.6 min
- Fatrah is inside the sunnahThe slackening is built into the pattern the reports describe. The question is where it lands you.7 min
- Set the floor, not the ceilingThe smallest amount you could still do on your worst day, and why that beats a target.7 min
- What feeds it, and what to stop addingOvercommitment, comparison, perfectionism about khushu, and the all or nothing after one missed day.6 min
- When the dryness is something elseThree other things this can be, and each of them goes somewhere different.5 min
What this course is built on
- Qur'an 2:286, 57:16, 65:7, 94:5 to 6. Translation throughout: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004. Qur'an 23:1 to 2 is deliberately not used in this course. It is the verse most often deployed to imply that prayer without felt khushu is not accepted, and its use is held for a scholar to adjudicate.
- Lally P, van Jaarsveld CHM, Potts HWW, Wardle J (2010). How are habits formed: modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40, 998 to 1009. Crossref returns an issued date of 2009 for the online version against volume 40 and pages 998 to 1009. The standard citation year is 2010 and that is used here. The widely quoted upper bound of the range is an extrapolation from a fitted curve rather than an observation, and it is not published anywhere in this course.
- Sahih al-Bukhari 39, 43, 1150, 6464; Sahih Muslim 782, 783, 2750; Jami' at-Tirmidhi 2453. Only reports graded sound or good are used. Sahih al-Bukhari 1152, on the man who prayed at night and then stopped, is not used, because a reader in this state reads it as a threat unless a scholar frames it against the concession reports. The widely quoted line about hearts rusting is not used, because no sound chain for it was confirmed.
- Al-Ghazali, Ihya Ulum al-Din, Book 10 on the arrangement of litanies and the divisions of the night vigil, and Book 22 on disciplining the soul and refining character. Ibn al-Qayyim, Madarij al-Salikin, on the alternation of qabd and bast as ordinary stations rather than failure. Ibn Ata Allah al-Iskandari, al-Hikam al-Ataiyya, on the same alternation. Al-Ghazali book numbers confirmed against the ghazali.org listing. Ibn al-Qayyim volume and station, and the specific hikam numbers, await a reviewer. Ihya Book 4 on the inward dimensions of prayer is not cited here, because al-Ghazali's position on presence in prayer is stronger than the mainstream juristic position and the two must not be blurred.