"death"

I was watching the film Bab' Aziz and thoroughly enjoyed it... this movie is beautiful I suggest all of you watch it.... you can find it on youtube the first link is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuuWNxAtv84&feature=related

Come be the witness of my death
Why me? Im afraid of death.
Exactly. If the baby in the darkness of the mother’s womb was told: “Outside there’s a world of light, with great mountains, high seas, undulating plains, beautiful gardens in blossom, brooks, sky full of stars and a blazing sun.. and you facing all of these marvels stay enclosed in this darkness...”. The child knowing nothing about these marvels wouldn’t believe any of it. like us, when we’re facing death. That’s why we’re afraid.
But there can’t be light in death because it is the end of everything.
How can death be the ending of something that has no beginning? Hassan, my son, don’t be sad on my wedding night.
Your wedding night?
Yes. My wedding night with eternity.

Brownie points

I’m kinda baked right now... I rushed this project together and had a work meeting today but now I’m sitting here and I had a bit of an epiphany.

I realized that when you do something for someone, whatever it may be you should do it with the intention of pleasing God and not the person that you’re aiding. When you do something with the hopes of pleasing that person you inherently begin to have expectations of that person. Often times, expectations of people are what allow our egos to grow and cause us to become upset. However, when you do with God in mind; you’re only intention is to grow.

I brought this up with Umar and he raised a valid point... to paraphrase, he doesn’t believe in asking for “brownie points” from God. I second this statement to the fullest, I’ve heard on multiple occasions “If you do ______ you get *motions hands as far apart as humanly possible* this much sawab(blessings)”. Hearing this as a child, I would always question people’s intentions at that point. So you’re telling me, that you’re only committing this “good” deed because you want sawab so that you may go to heaven. So basically, you don’t really care about doing good things, you only care about doing what you need to do in order to get what you want; paradise. I think that’s pretty selfish in it’s own right, but anyway; I told Umar that I agreed with him and shared a little verse from one of Outlandish’s songs..

“If I worship you in fear of hell, burn me in it.
And if I worship you in hope of paradise, exclude me from it.
But if I worship you for your own being,
Don't withhold from me your everlasting beauty”


Remember, the final analysis is between you and God, so why not just please Him by taking care of His creation without having expectations. PEACE.

The three gates.

I found this little tid bit and I think it's very important everyone read it:



The Three Gates of Right Speech

"The words of the tongue
should have three gatekeepers."
- ARAB PROVERB

Before words get past the lips, the first gatekeeper asks, "Is this true?" That stops a lot of traffic immediately. But if the words get past the first gatekeeper, there is a second who asks, "Is it kind?" And for those words that qualify here too, the last gatekeeper asks: "Is it necessary?"

With these three on guard, most of us would find very little to say. Here I think it is necessary to make exceptions in the interests of good company and let the third gatekeeper look the other way now and then. After all, a certain amount of pleasant conversation is part of the artistry of living. But the first two gatekeepers should always be on duty.

It is so easy to say something at the expense of another for the purpose of enhancing our own image. But such remarks, irresistible as they may be, serve only to fatten our own egos and agitate others. We should be so fearful of hurting people that even if a clever remark is rushing off our tongue, we can barricade the gate. We should be able to swallow our cleverness rather than hurt someone. Better to say something banal but harmless than to be clever at someone else's expense.


source

Breath, stretch, shake, let it go.

Over the past couple weeks my spiritual growth has been on point and I felt on top of the world... what a set up...

Last week I ran off to NYC cause I felt like it. It was a great time, but that’s besides the point. On my way to pick up my mom from PA (she was at her cousin’s house while I was in NYC), I had a bit of a traumatic experience and I really haven’t been the same since... I was following this slow driving heifer on a single lane road when I decided to pass him (in the dotted area). I didn’t realize that a huge truck going in the opposite direction was a lot closer than it appeared at first... long story short I’m happy I’m in the physical condition that I am (although I do need to go to the gym).

Ever since that moment I’ve been moping around cause I felt inept in the worst way. I almost felt as if though I wasn’t worthy of living after making such a stupid mistake which could have thrown away my life so easily. All of it because of some impatience.

After a good talk with one of my buddies I realized that I that I was doing myself a disfavor beyond belief. “Duh” I’m sure some of you are saying, but it’s very hard to pull yourself out of these situations when you don’t detach yourself and look at the situation from a different perspective. I needed to detach my self from that and let it go but I was so caught up on the fact that I could have died that I forgot to live the present that God gave me. Now this is very ironic because if we go back to the original situation it was exactly the same case then... Anyways, I will be in a class room from 8am to 5 pm tomorrow so I’m gonna hit the sack.

Here is a clip of Ekhart Tolle that I feel is very relevant. He is the author of The Power of Now, if I know you, I probably mentioned this book to you. His voice is creeperiffic but look beyond it. Just don’t do acid.

Be.

Hello kiddos, hope your Ramadan is going well and that you are fasting and not starving, I need to talk about me because I want to stroke my ego. About 3 weeks ago I had noticed that my patients at work had been genuinely pissing me off. To the point where I wanted to straight up slap em’ across the face. Although the some of you may not know me, I assure you, this is completely out of character. I’m not one to become irate but that’s what was intriguing about these situations. They continued to repeat over the course of the next couple weeks and I was eerily aware that it was happening… just that it felt that someone had paralyzed me from acting appropriately. Granted, these patients are not in anyway respectful or remotely show any kindness. Still, I was so shocked that these angry thoughts were so easily streaming into my head.

It was almost as if though being angry with these patients was “cool”. Although these patients are down right nasty from time to time, I pride (for lack of a better word) myself on being able to maintain my cool and not fall into the anger. In retrospect I realized that my pride was taken and thrown right back into my face. Beautiful. We are often presented with situation where we’re supposed to do the “cool” thing, and often times the “cool” never gets us anywhere. Anyone who listens to Lupe knows that.

So I thought and thought and thought and thought some more about what I was doing to allow these ridiculous situations control me. All of this thinking came to no avail. I really had to dig down within and realize that I wasn’t grounded at all to figure out my answer. It was all right there in front of me like the answer key for a test. I needed to reaffirm to my self that I was doing this for God and nothing else. When you confirm this to your self everything becomes much clearer as we realign our selves with God.

After all of this sorted itself out, Ramadan started… and of course I already had a roadblock set up. I had a case of sinusitis and was set to take antibiotics for the first 7 days of Ramadan every 12 hours… Finally after finishing my course of antibiotics I got two fasts in a row… feeling as good as ever. The second day I fasted I was at work… with the same sort of patients, but with God’s grace I didn’t even get phased and was able to give love throughout the day. I’ve noticed that in order to truly appreciate what we are given we should only give a single object, person, or idea our attention at a time. This may sound extremely basic but it’s very true. Your appreciation for your food goes down the drain the moment you pick up that tv remote. Anyways, after these two blissful days of fasting I got sick again. After contemplating on it I realized Allah was forcing me to figure out other ways to grow closer to him by taking away my ability to fast which in itself is beautiful but at the same time stinks cause I love fasting. This situation seems to perfectly fit into my current state as my best friend, who is the only person that spiritually gets me rolled out to Montréal for the semester. So now it’s just me and I’ve decided that I’m going to use this time to focus on my connection with God (so you might not see me as much this semester).

In any case, today as I was on my way home I decided to put my iPod on shuffle and out came one of my favorite songs of all time. So many things about this song struck me right after another to the point where I had goose bumps all over. Being able to be content with what we have is beautiful, however being content spiritually is a disease. Don’t stop growing.

“We got arms but won't reach for the skies
Waiting for the Lord to rise
I look into my daughter's eyes
And realize that I'm gonna learn through her
The Messiah, might even return through her
If I'm gonna do it, I gotta change the world through her”



Lyrics

Why don't you rebel?

Hello kids.

I’ve been thinking a lot about ways to grow further spiritually cause I felt like I hit a brick wall. On what felt like the 48 hour trip back we decided to peep the Lauryn Hill unplugged album, which is always a amazing album to listen to (if you’ve never listened to it… you need to). It seems as if though every time I listen to it I always have a new thought pop up in my large sized dome piece. In the midst of these deep songs I’ll often zone out in my own thought and during one of these moments I came back to reality to hear Lauryn repeat “why don’t you rebel?”

This sent me off into another thought which really got me going off on my mental tangent which fit right into another idea that had been stuck in my head for the past few days: In order to grow the most we must detach ourselves from worldly things. Definitely a “duh” kind of moment cause one can just say “Ramadan” and its all right there in front of you. But what this really means to me is being able to let go of the attachments to all material things even people (to an extent). Often times we base our happiness on a person or a situation when really we just need to look within to find our true happiness. You can say that’s cheesy but you know it’s the truth. God created us out of His love and so we have a part of Him within us. Therefore if we are able to focus on that inner self then we will have our own divine happiness.

Of course this is easier said than done but one of the ways of going about doing this is through removing our ego. Ramadan is a blessing in itself that we often take for granted… rather that we don’t take at all. Many of us are often thinking about how hungry we are as opposed to how much closer to God we are getting. By taking away material things from our daily lives we are shown that we really have our own “remedies within us… if only we reflect”.

Back to the main discussion: So when I listened to this song I heard rebel over and over again and then she asked are you satisfied? It really made me think about my present connection with God. At that moment I knew I needed to change something… after meditating about it, I realized that I’ve grown to comfortable in my day-to-day life. Knowing that it’s when our soul is in the hardest of situations is when we grow the most.

I really don’t want to post this blog cause I think it sucks. However I get a feeling that I should.

Why don’t you rebel?

Down to the board.

It’s 12 am, I’m on my way back from a terribly tiring day at work and I can’t stop thinking about how much my head hurts. As I drive home and I see a water tower and a smile suddenly comes to my face. I like water.
However, in this case, that’s not the reason why I smiled(if it was this would be a pretty amazing blog… but its not that amazing). I had a 59ish year old patient today who was having/had an heart attack and had to have been one of the funniest patient’s I’ve had in a while. He was what you would imagine of an “angry old man”… cursing just enough to have you on edge and not being able to hear you to not. When I first met him I walked into his room and he’s on the phone with his friend and I tell him I’m about to set up an IV for the meds the nurse needs to administer and so on the phone he goes “ahhh shit I think I’m having a heart attack or something… I’ll talk to you later”. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a patient phrase it quiet like that. I was having a bit of a time holding my laughter. As I started talking my nonsense he told me “I’m not trying to go down to the morb”. I thought about it for a second and then I started laughing and began busting his chops. At that time I thought it was his stuffy nose that caused him to talk like that. Then later he started laughing because he thought that I thought that he said “down to the board”. (incase you haven’t figured it out we’re talking about the morg). Anyway we continued to trash talk one another throughout the day and then we started talking about where we grew up… turned out that he lived right by the water tower which was a mile away from my old house.
So as I approached this water tower I couldn’t help but to think of the old man who even in the most critical of times in his life was able to make someone else laugh and not even be worried with his predicament. There is no real “punch line” to this story… it’s just amazing how in such a crappy mood the entire way home from work all I had to see was a water tower that immediately changed my mindset.

What a blessing this life is.