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Essence of the One

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3 Steps to Return to Love in Times of Pain

3 Steps to Return to Love in Times of Pain

Last updated on: August 10, 2016 at 6:45 am by Mastura Debra Graugnard

3 Steps to Return to Love in Times of Pain 2016-08-10T06:45:20-05:00 Mastura Debra Graugnard

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With so many troubling events occurring in the world, it’s hard to write about the pure love at the heart of Sufism. However, this is the time when we need more than anything to connect with love – with a divine All-Knowing, All-Encompassing, Unconditional Love.

This Love is always with us and in us. We access it through our own hearts, through our sincerity and through our yearning to know the Real.

This deep yearning is in each of us. It’s accessible at all times, and it calls to us over and over again to pay attention to it and answer its plea.

That pain and discomfort we feel when we see our brothers and sisters in conflict fighting and hurting each other, when we witness the divisive rhetoric that is penetrating the media channels, and when we ourselves fear another because of their race, religion, country or sexual orientation without a desire to know their hearts – these are all ways that the yearning from within is calling us to return to love.

When we recognize the yearning, how do we return to love?

It’s simple. However, it’s not always easy, because it involves letting go of your fears, forgetting about what you think you know and letting your deep heart lead you.

Here are 3 steps that can help.

Step 1: The Deep Sincere. Our beloved guide and teacher, Sidi Shaykh Muhammad al-Jamal, used to speak a lot about “the deep sincere.” This is the yearning we carry deep in our hearts that yearns for a world of love and peace. It’s the place in the heart that feels compassion. It’s the knowing of love inside you that calls to you to return to it.

Acknowledge and feel the deep sincerity in your own heart as you move through the next 2 steps. Feel the internal calling and let it draw you like a tractor beam into the world of love and connection you desire.

Step 2: Remembrance. The practice of Remembrance is an ancient heart-centered meditation practice that is designed to cleanse the heart of the clutter that covers over the yearning of the deep sincerity. The clutter comes from the busy-ness of this life and the fears we take on as we concern ourselves with the necessary basic survival needs.

The practice is simply repeating the Name of Allah into your heart center. You can also use the phrase le illaha illa’llah – there is no god but the One God – or any phrase that you are comfortable with that invokes the divine Essence.

The intention with this practice is to use the sound vibrations, the breath, your intention and, of course, the response from The One to wash through your heart and clear away the beliefs and stuck emotions that keep you from knowing love for yourself and all of your fellow humans on this journey.

The poet Jalal ad-din Rumi said, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers you have built against it.” The practice of Remembrance helps you to release your barriers to love so your heart can reflect the truth of God’s light and love in this world.

For help with the practice of Remembrance, access the 7-day Sufi Spiritual Renewal & Healing Course here.

Step 3: Tawba. Tawba is the returning. The name for “heart” in Arabic is “qalb,” and “qalb” means to turn. It is the nature of the heart to turn between the material world we live in and the world of the Real, the unconditional love, the One.

It is a part of our human journey to forget our connection with the Real Love, and to look for that love in the world through our human senses and perceptions, eyes and ears and hearts.

Tawba is a means of seeking forgiveness for the mistakes of, as the song says, looking for love in all the wrong places. It helps us to return from the seeking of love, connection and protection in the outer material world and turn our hearts back to The One, the love and connection we know in the innermost depths of our hearts, the one true Provider and Protector Who knows best what we need for our souls on this journey.

The phrase we use for Tawba is astagfir Allah al-Athim, which translates to I ask forgiveness from Allah, The One, The All-Mighty.

For more on Tawba, here’s a video by Dr. Wadude John Laird that can help.

As a human collective, we accepted the trust and challenge of free will. In order to actualize free will, we have to forget that we are connected to and made of unconditional love, and that there is an eternal Source that breathes life force into our bodies, that breathes our breath and beats our hearts. As long as we exist, It exists within us. We are not separate from It.

Allah, The One God, wants for us to return our consciousness while alive in this life in the physical realm to know the divine realities and the Truth of the One God. When we return our hearts from our own free will, there is a doorway that is opened. Through this doorway, God is waiting to give us everything, to pour the knowing of His Essence, the Essence of the One, into our vessels.

The world is full of signs that are meant to guide us to the returning. The more of us who can return and open our hearts to be a reflection of God’s Light in this world, the brighter and more peaceful the world can become.

I invite you to try this 3-step process and share your reflections in the comments below.

If you’d like to put this into practice in an intentional way to bring more peace into the world, you are invited to join me and my colleague Shams Tara Wesley for an exploration of the subtle and not-so-subtle inner messages that keep us in separation and judgment of our fellow travelers on this earth journey. We’ll use these healing practices to cleanse away the beliefs we’ve taken on and return to love.

We’ll be beginning in the next week, so if you want to join us, enter your information in the form below. I’ll get back to you with details.

You can read more about what we’ll be doing in this post – click here.

Wishing you love and peace for your heart and your life. Our world depends on it.

With love and gratitude,
Mastura Graugnard

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