Laziness in Ibadah & Effects of Sohbat-e-Shaykh

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Q: Why is it that our Physical body becomes often so lazy in performing ibadah?

Gist of the Answer: It is not our physical body that becomes weak & lazy, it is actually our nafs. Our physical body doesn’t have any needs of its own, the physical body only does what its told to do by the person who resides in that body. If the Spiritual heart or the Qalb controls the body, and the nafs comes between the heart and the body – all this laziness that we have for e.g. somebody is working late at night or a women who is taking care of her baby and the baby is crying and not letting her sleep, it gets very late and now she feels a laziness to pray – this is not the physical body’s tiredness it is a laziness that is spiritual and it is coming because of our nafs. We need to make this jewel, our Qalb, strong enough so that it can subdue and overpower the Nafs, and in that way we won’t go into such laziness.

Q. Shaykh, why is it that when we sit in the company of our Shaykh we feel a spiritual high, but when we leave the company of our Shaykh, we feel completely a low?

Gist of the Answer: We can understand it like this that there is something called “hararat-e-qalb’. Hararat-e-Qalb means: ‘The Warmth, Heat, Thermal energy of a person’s Spiritual heart’ and just like when we sit by the fireplace, we feel it’s warmth and as we move further and further away from the fireplace we stop feeling this warmth – just like that a person who sits amongst the Sadiqeen, as Allah swt has Commanded in the Qur’an,

وَكُونُوا مَعَ الصَّادِقِينَ

[9:119]

“…And, be with the truthful.”

When you place your being in front of their being, our hearts will feel the warmth that is present in their hearts i.e. the heart of that person would feel the warmth [that is there] in the heart of the Sadiqeen, just like a person feels the warmth of a fire. But, as they move further away, not just physically but also, sometimes, spiritually…

If you’re physically away from your Shaykh, you will feel less warmth in your heart just like when you move physically away from the fire. However what a person is supposed to do is that they are supposed to set their hearts on fire when they put their hearts in the presence of the heart of their Shaykh

What does that mean? That means they also want to cleanse their heart and pledge to become a person of Taqwa and Shar’iah and Sunnah and then, even if they move physically away from their Shaykh, if they have lived a life of Taqwa, Shari’ah and Sunnah, and they wouldn’t be spiritually away from their Shaykh – they would stop feeling low in their heart

But what we do is that when we move physically away from our Shaykh, we slip in terms of our Ibadah, Dhikr, or adherence to Sunnah or adherence to Shar’iah – by doing that we loose the fire that the Shaykh had put in our heart, which we were carrying and we would’ve continued to carry even in his physical absence or physical distance – i.e we would’ve kept feeling that [warmth in our heart] if only we had kept firm on Taqwa, Sunnah and Shar’iah.

 

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[Gist of the answers given by Shaykh Kamaluddin Ahmed during the CII Tazkiya Talk on 17th March, 2011]

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