#073 The Negative Thinking Solution

This article is all about negativity and we want to flip it on its head. 

Most of what we struggle through in our lives are factors of the external and internal. 

I know many of you are always trying to change your situation. 

You’re trying to deal with the relationship challenges you’ve got. Maybe it’s mediation, maybe talking to family and friends.

You’re always trying to deal with those relationship challenges.

But sometimes our relationships are fine. And the problem is how we feel every single day.

We wake up in the morning and we don’t want to get out of bed. It’s as if we want to crawl out of our skin because of how we feel physically in our bodies.

Because of the stress that we find ourselves under. 

What it does is it disrupts your life. 

Most people, most of my students, especially the people going through the Nafs transformation programme have been going through this.

Many of us get stuck. At times things are great and at times things are not. But what we do is normalise it.

Those experiences that we have, waking up and being anxious, or being afraid to go out into the world, being so cautious about how we live and how we interact with people impacts our relationships.

Even if the relationships are good, the people around us are impacted by our way of living and our way of thinking.

The way we are and how we show up in our lives determines how our relationships turn out.

The Determining Factor

How you show up in your life determines how much success, physical health, in terms of your business, your career, all the opportunities that come your way, raising your family, raising your children, how much success and how much achievement you have is determined by the state of our mind. 

If you’re forever in this state of incessantly trying to get out of the feeling that you’re in or get out of the situation that you find yourself in. 

You feel as though the world is closing in on you and there doesn’t seem to be another way.

Sometimes we get into that moment and feeling. Then we drop out of it and we’re back to normal. 

We oscillate between the two. We’re in and out of it and we normalise it.

We think it’s normal because it’s been going on for so long.

The problem with this is that it impacts you in the long term because the human body, the human mind, and the soul have not been designed to be under a chronic state of stress, a chronic state of anxiety or fear, anger, or sadness.

We haven’t been created to be in a continuous state of this.

And what that does is that it impacts us physically. It drains us of our energy. This is what I wanted to focus on. Because at the root of this is our thinking. 

The negative thinking that we find ourselves in sometimes, especially those of you who have sought some sort of training in theology or psychology know after years of studying and practising your skill, we get to a point where we think that nothing works because you’ve tried everything. 

But this is the difference between the Science of the Nafs and just about everything else.

If this is the first time you’re reading our blog, just so you understand, the Science of the Nafs is a psychology model based on the Quran and Sunnah. 

It’s not psychology, Freud, or any other contemporary.

The psychology that we practise is only 150 or 180 years old, but the psychology through the Quran, and Sunnah was revealed with Revelation.

For many years, while I was searching, researching, and studying, I never found the solution to mental health or emotional health. 

The ability to thrive depended on your ability to maintain your state of mind and maintain your emotions. 

And when you’re not able to maintain it, because your environment triggers you or your family triggers you, your kids trigger you or just the society at large, having to interact with it on a day-to-day basis. 

Many of you struggle with this and we go through the struggles, and we’re always trying to find a solution. We go back to Islamic studies, we go back to what we learned as youth, and we find that things are missing.

We go back to traditional education, and psychology and even if you study PhD level psychology, you find that it’s not always working. 

The difference is that all of this amazing education, has been helping us, the human race, to get through these challenges to some degree but they’re not based upon revelation. 

The difference with it being based upon revelation is that it’s the design of the Designer. The designer is Allah (swt).

Let’s take it back to you and me. When you understand yourself through Revelation, through the Quran and Sunnah, it’s a completely different understanding.

I’m not talking about Fiqh issues.

I’m referring to understanding the human mind.

Understanding why you feel the way you feel. Understanding why you behave the way you behave.

Why you can’t stop being a certain way. Why you can’t change and make that change stick. 

If you can understand that, by understanding how Allah (swt) designed us, then you have a far greater opportunity of success in making those changes happen. 

Negative thinking is at the core of much of our struggles and as a result of it, we’re fearful, anxious, and overwhelmed. 

Or we’re sad, in a state of turbulence, and constant highs and lows because of the way we think and feel. 

Therefore the greatest thing that any one of us could do is to figure out how to change that, manage that, control it, and transform it. 

That’s exactly what I’ve spent my life doing. 

Simply put, I’ve struggled with this incessantly, throughout my life.

I can go back to as early as seven and eight years old.

And I’m not that much older, but I can go back. 

I can tell you of moments when I was distraught emotionally, not knowing what was going on, not knowing how to handle it, and I just shut down.

At times you shut down and at times you explode.

The thing is, we carry this throughout our lives. This is a behaviour that we learn as young children. And we carry that throughout our lives.

Regardless of what model of psychology or what model of understanding or Fiqh you follow from theology, it doesn’t change.

The human factor doesn’t change the way that the mind works.

it doesn’t change any of this stuff.

This stuff is universally true, regardless of age, gender, location, the times that we’re in, regardless of any of that, it’s the same. 

So the best way to understand yourself is always going to be through Divine Revelation. 

Because Allah is the One that created us. So He knows how He created us. 

If we can figure out how to understand ourselves the way that Allah has created us, how do we do that?

Go back to Revelation, if we can figure that out, then we have the solution.

So the Science of the Nafs, a psychology model is a human behavioural science.

It’s how we work. And we learn this directly through Revelation. 

We’re not going to any third party, any other modality, or anything of the sort.

Now, of course, there are similarities in the core fundamentals because human beings don’t change the way they work just because they have one set of beliefs or another. We all work the same. 

So of course, we figured out that if you collectively look at all of the different modalities of psychology, or you look at the different philosophies in the world,  throughout the ages, you find, it’s almost drip-fed throughout all of them. 

Pieces of it.

But if you want it holistically, we’re going to find it in the Quran.

And that’s exactly what the Science of the Nafs says. 

The Science of the Nafs is a psychology model where we learn how to understand ourselves, and we go beyond that because it’s a behavioural science, so we learn to make those changes happen.

My whole journey was an intense journey of searching. I spent my life trying to understand the human mind, the human being, what we feel, why we feel it, and many turbulent times.

I struggled with many things throughout my journey.

Regardless of all the things I learned along the way, I picked up lots of little bandages, lots of little ways to help myself, mindfulness, and different stuff.

But that didn’t stick.

If you’re someone who’s been doing it for a long time, you know it’s hit and miss. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.

The best way to make it work is to not just keep on doing what doesn’t work, but go to what works.

That’s exactly what the Science of the Nafs is. 

So the way that we dealt with it and I come back to negativity, because that’s at the core of all of this, your whole life experience, everything is being created in our lives through this.

To understand this and to be able to change this effectively we go into thoughts, feelings, the way that we show up in the world, our behaviours, our habits, and all of those things.

But all of those things are secondary.

The foundation, your mind and the way the mind works, your thoughts, the feelings, the emotions, all of the feelings that we actively feel or we think we’re not feeling, all of those things determine the way our lives turn up. 

They determine the way that we show up, whether we wake up anxious, or happy, it all determines that.

The Nafs Transformation Project is a project that I’ve been working on for many, many years.

And the fruit of that project is the transformation programme that I take my students through.

These are people who are clinicians, and trained therapists, they’re some with no link to any psychology, homeschooling mothers, and they’re teachers, and you name it, everyone comes from a different background.

But we have one thing in common. We’re human beings, we have a mind, a heart, intellectual capacity, and energy, and we can think and breathe and live. 

That’s the common factor.

As I take any one of you living, breathing people through this journey, what happens is that you align yourself to divine principles and divine truths. 

Eternally true principles.

When you align yourself with that, then all of a sudden, the anxiety disappears, and you get it under control.

You’ve got two ends of it. One end of the spectrum, where you learn to deal with it completely. 

Another end of the spectrum is that you manage yourself. You’re able to function and do well and you’re happy in your life.

You’re able to live a life with contentment and enjoy it. You want to bring joy back into your life.

Most of us, when we’re struggling with all of these negative thoughts, the negative experiences that come out of that, it sucks the joy out of life.

It sucks the joy and fun out of relationships.

Ask yourself, Is your relationship fun? Or is your relationship intense?

Do the people around you feel like they have to be on edge around you? Or do they feel as though they can have fun with you? 

Is there joy? 

NORMALISATION ISN’T NORMAL

The funny thing is, most people who have an interest in psychology, who go out and study and research and train, most of us struggled with our mind. 

And we didn’t want to just sit with it.

Many people just sit with it. They normalise it and learn to live with it. 

But it physically impacts their health. Things like fibromyalgia, and physical pain all impact us mentally.

FIX YOUR CHALLENGES AND FLOURISH 

I understand where you’re coming from and what you’re going through. When you’re trying to do all of these things to control the situation, just so that you can feel okay, it’s not the solution.

All of those things that I picked up along the way, the skill sets, they helped to a degree, but it’s not real change at a core level.

It’s not real change from the inside. 

I’m talking about real change that comes out of your mind, into your life, into your relationships, into your world, and you’re able to flourish.

You’re able to build amazing relationships and live a joyful life.

To do that, you’ve got to go back to the core and fix the misunderstandings that we have because that’s what they are.

Misunderstandings. 

A lot of times I hear people talking about how broken they are.

You’re not broken.

You’re not a table, you’re not the chair, and you’re certainly not a doormat so you’re not broken. 

This, ‘I’m broken theory’ is an erroneous belief. It’s a myth that is spread. 

We’ve been misaligned to a truth, a divine principle of healing and flourishing. You can’t have one and not the other. You need both.

When you realign with them, then all of a sudden, everything starts to change.

You start living a very deliberate life and how you feel in your day-to-day life starts to change.

The point is you’re not broken. There’s nothing wrong with you. 

There’s a misalignment somewhere in your life, otherwise, you wouldn’t be constantly struggling with this. 

You wouldn’t be having the ups and downs.

In my search throughout my life, I have found, over and over again that throughout the Quran and Sunnah, we have the answers.

It’s always been there.

The Science of the Nafs is, effectively your thinking. It’s new to you because you’re hearing about it now. 

Generally, in our days, it’s new for everyone.

Because what we’re used to is out there in the marketplace, whatever the mainstream health and mental health and the mainstream coaches are doing.

But what we do at the Muslim Life Coach Institute is not mainstream coaching, nor is it mainstream therapy or counselling.

We work to realign every human being with divine principles that encompass not just your thinking, but it encompasses your behaviour, personal growth, and development.

It encompasses your relationships, flourishing, achieving great things in your life, and all of it. 

It’s a complete human behavioural science, based on the Quran and Sunnah. It encompasses your connection to Allah. 

Many of us struggle with that connection because of all the challenges we have in our lives.

When you learn to understand yourself through the Science of the Nafs, your life changes forever. You’re going to love your life.

THE SCIENCE OF THE NAFS SYSTEM

We’re a Muslim Life Coach Institute, we practise the Science of the Nafs.

This is a complete Tarbiyah system. The Science of the Nafs system teaches you to maximise and optimise your being and life. 

It contains the principles and foundations to help you become the best version of yourself and live the best life. 

You have psychology and spirituality.

By spirituality, I mean, how you connect to Allah, your relationship with Allah.

We have your behaviour, all of the challenges that we face, and whatever condition you think about, under the banner of psychology, Allah (swt) has a solution for all of it.

In the Nafs Transformation programme we deal with all of it.

So whatever the case, ask yourself this question, what’s your challenge?

Do you have negative thinking behind those challenges? 

This is not about taking blame. If you were to write those thoughts down and send them out in the post, would everyone receiving them think that these thoughts are negative?

If the answer is yes, then you know there’s a causal factor there.

That’s what we solve.

You don’t need to have a problem to do this. But you do need to have a life that you want to create.

If you want to create the life that you want and you’ve got obstacles, procrastination, maybe you’re going into burnout or whatever your challenges are. 

These are just human challenges that we face. We cover the foundation of all of it.