March 10, 2026 • 22 mins
What if your strongest reactions weren’t flaws but the echoes of an intelligent system that once kept you safe? We dive into the consciousness set point—your SQ—and trace how fight, flight, freeze, and fawn begin as wise survival and later solidify into identity when left unexamined. From there, everyday life narrows: neutral moments feel loaded, money and work spiral into scarcity or shutdown, and faith swings between intensity and burnout. The shift begins when we separate state from story and reclaim authorship inside emotion.
Across this conversation, we show how worship functions as regulation. Salah, fasting, and dhikr become training that refines perception, widens the gap between stimulus and response, and helps you assign meaning deliberately rather than reflexively. Ramadan offers a daily lab: fast not only from food but from impulsive interpretations and victim narratives. Ask better questions—Is it still needed? Is it proportionate?—and watch your inner arena expand. That’s taskiyah made practical: small, consistent inputs that raise SQ and restore clarity, humility, and steadiness.
We also unpack how unhealed trauma shapes adult patterns: domination as a mask for fight, avoidance for flight, shutdown for freeze, and people pleasing for fawn. Underneath, a wounded sense of worth keeps yesterday’s alarms running today’s life. Responsibility isn’t about blame; it’s the choice to update the operating system. There is no neutral cruise control for the nafs—without active stewardship, it drifts downward. Healing honors what protected you then while refusing to let it define you now, so you can give from wholeness and lead with discernment.
Listen if you’re ready to upgrade your inner OS, pair devotion with nervous system wisdom, and move from automatic reactions to conscious authorship. If this resonated, subscribe, share with a friend who’s ready to heal, and leave a review to help others find the show.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
SPEAKER_00 (00:04):
Welcome to Islamic Life Coach School Podcast.
Apply tools that you learn inthis podcast and your life will
be unrecognizably successful.
Now your host, Dr.
Kamal After.
SPEAKER_01 (00:16):
Hello, hello, hello everyone.
Peace and blessings be upon allof you.
Today is part three of the fourpart series during Ramadan
around your baseline energeticwavelength, what I call your
consciousness set point.
In part one, we discussed thedefinition of your consciousness
set point, what I measure in myprogram with an SQ score.
(00:37):
This is your operating level.
It is the baseline from whichyou interpret reality.
Two people can face the samecircumstance and live completely
different internal realitiesbecause their set points are
different.
A low SQ score is a state ofchronic dysregulation.
This is your nervous systemliving in prolonged survival
(00:59):
mode.
At this level, your access tochoice is very low.
The gap between stimulus andresponse is next to non
existent.
You don't feel like you'rechoosing your actions.
Your actions feel automatic,very justified, and always
urgent.
Inshallah, I have shown you upuntil now not to treat this as
(01:19):
moral failure or a weakpersonality, and I've shown you
that this is a skill you canuplevel.
Because with that up levelingcomes a high SQ score, which is
regulated perception.
It does not mean that you don'tfeel anger, fear, or sadness, it
just means you have access tochoice inside of those emotions.
You can assign meaningdeliberately instead of
(01:42):
reflexively, and you're able toseparate an event in your life
from your identity.
In part two we talked about howworship elevates your set point
salah, fasting, dhikr, quran,all of that as regulation
training.
Worship being one of the primarytechnologies that Allah
subhanahu wa ta'ala has givenyou to recalibrate your nervous
(02:03):
system and refine yourperception.
When you engage in worshipconsciously, it widens your
inner arena.
And Ramadan as a part of thatworship is then about operating
from a higher SQ level.
So now we move on to what keepsthe set point low in the first
place, and that's today's topic.
In this episode, we're going toexplore how raising your SQ
(02:26):
breaks the cycle where traumanarrows your perception and
perception keeps recreating thewound.
How your temporary protectiveadaptation becomes a permanent
self-concept.
Adaptations in your psyche arecreated to deal with trauma, and
these adaptations protect you.
They're not your sign ofweakness, they're a sign of
(02:48):
inner intelligence.
When you were overwhelmed, youfelt unsafe, you were unheard,
you felt powerless.
In all of those scenarios, yournervous system made decisions
faster than your conscious mindcould keep up.
All because that's what thesituation called for.
The situation called forsurvival, and your subconscious
mind provided that for you.
(03:09):
It activated what needed toactivate.
It shut down what needed to shutdown.
And that in itself is not lowSQ.
That is a very high SQ, meaningthat is a high consciousness set
point.
Your mind and body'sintelligence did what it was
supposed to do to keep youalive.
This is your body's inner designdoing exactly what it was
(03:30):
created to do, to preserve life.
At that point adaptation wasnecessary.
It came from a sophisticatedinternal intelligence.
If you fawned in the presence ofsomething threatening, that was
your system calculating thatcompliance will increase your
safety.
If you dissociated or frozeduring an assault, that was your
(03:51):
nervous system protecting youfrom psychological harm, when
physical escape was impossible.
Even your fight response, anger,sharpness, dominance, may have
been the only way to carve spacealong the chaos that you might
have been living with.
In these moments, your bodymakes the right choice, even
(04:11):
when your conscious choice wasnot intact.
Again, what I'm trying to tellyou is that this is not
weakness, this is a very highconsciousness set point.
Even when this is survivalstate, because this was
physiological, this isintelligent, this is responsive
to you in real time.
And still to this day, incertain situations it might
(04:31):
still be necessary.
High soulful intelligence scoredoes not mean that you never
activate survival.
It means that your survival isused proportionately.
Interpreting that you might haveacted from survival once has
been moral failure, that iswhat's low SQ.
That is a low consciousness setpoint.
(04:52):
The problem begins when atemporary adaptation becomes a
permanent self concept.
When what once protected youbecomes who you think you are
now.
I'm just anxious, I'm justavoidant.
I'm just a people pleaser, Idon't know how to come out of
it.
I'm just someone who gets walkedall over.
Trauma is when your protectivemechanisms are something that
(05:16):
you stay in perpetually longafter the threat is resolved.
An identity level attachment tothese survival patterns comes
from a low SQ, and that keepsthe SQ well below fifty.
Your consciousness set pointdetermines if your trauma, which
was once a well adapted survivalresponse, becomes your identity.
(05:38):
It remains in your past where itbelongs, or it dictates your
present and your future.
Survival response initiallyreflects a high intelligence,
but living in perpetual traumacomes from low intelligence, and
it lowers your set point evenfurther.
There's a difference between youexperiencing harm, trauma, and
(05:59):
you having the responsibility toheal from it.
That comes from an elevated setpoint.
You can be a woman who mighthave experienced harm at one
point, that's history.
But when you attach to the harmthrough a defining lens, when
every disagreement with somebodysomehow signals abandonment, or
every delay from a text becomesrejection, when every authority
(06:24):
figure signals to you some sortof danger, this is harm
remaining active in the present.
And this doesn't happen becauseharm is still happening.
It happens because your low setpoint keeps you in a cycle where
you reinterpret neutralsituations through old survival
coding.
The harm occurred in the past,attachment through low SQ keeps
(06:47):
it recurring even in differentforms across your life.
This is a difference between asurvival state that you might
have been in at one point toyour benefit, and a survival
story that keeps writing yourlife.
The state was physiological andnecessary.
The story is psychological andunnecessary.
The state was what was needed tokeep you alive, but the story
(07:11):
now says that this is who I am.
Your trauma survival strategyitself does not mean that you
have a low SQ.
It means your body that wasbrilliantly designed did the job
it was supposed to do.
The low SQ begins when you stopquestioning whether that
strategy is still necessary.
When you stop updating theoperating system, when you allow
(07:35):
your protective response todefine your personality, your
marriage, your faith, your qadr,that is when you're operating
from a low consciousness setpoint.
A persistently high set pointhonors your adaptation, whatever
the survival mechanism bodyoffered.
And in the future it asks, is itstill needed?
(07:56):
Is it still accurate?
Is my response proportionate?
Is this what I need in thismoment?
Low SQ fuses with the adaptationand it says this is just me, and
what was once temporary becomesa permanent ceiling that limits
your life.
And luckily for all of us, thatceiling can be raised, that set
point can be raised.
(08:17):
You did not choose the injury,you do choose the upgrade.
Whether the harm was direct orsubtle, cultural, relational or
generational, you did not designthe environment that shaped you,
and you did not choose yourinitial imprint, but you do
choose the upgrade, and this iswhat the series is calling you
(08:38):
to do.
Even if your wound was passeddown from generations, and even
if it predates your memory,you're not meant to stay
configured around it.
The harm might have beenimposed, but the refinement is
your choice.
And through this refinement itdoes not mean that you deny the
injury, it just means that youallow it to exist in the past.
(08:59):
If you live at a low set pointas the effect of trauma,
responsibility of your upgradegets misinterpreted as self
blame.
This is why healing takescourage.
Staying low keeps the gates opento repeated harm, which becomes
a cycle and you are here tobreak the cycle.
(09:19):
Upgrading your operating systemdoes not erase the wound.
It prevents the wound fromorganizing your future.
And this Ramadan is yourstructured invitation to do this
level of taskya, thisself-refinement.
Taskiya is the leadership ofyour internal system, and
Ramadan gives you conditions topractice this leadership daily,
(09:41):
where you restrain your impulseand you regulate your hunger,
you observe your reactions.
Through that you are well onyour way on how to learn to
reassign meaning to yoursituations.
Ramadan is a month of operatingsystem upgrade.
What keeps you stuck at a lowerlevel of consciousness set
point, and another name for thatstate is unhealed trauma.
(10:03):
Unhealed trauma keeps thenervous system into survival
mode, which then solidifies intoadult pattern behaviors.
Fight response often shows up asnarcissistic or dominating
behavior, flight becomesavoidance, freeze manifests as
depression or shutdown, and fawnis what grows into people
(10:23):
pleasing.
Beneath all of them is the samecore wound, a lack of
self-worth, a low consciousnessset point.
So what keeps you as a womananchored in a low SQ has not
been weakness, it's not evenignorance or lack of iman.
It is your unhealed traumarunning the nervous system.
Trauma pushes the body intosurvival mode, and the survival
(10:47):
mode does not just end on itsown just because time passed.
When survival becomes chronic,it hardens into adult behavioral
loops, and we end up calling itour personality.
Sometimes women even startconfusing it as your Islamic
duty, meaning at some point mostwomen confuse their suffering
with the life of piety.
(11:07):
This is a huge trauma in itself.
What happened to you was notyour choice, what we were
exposed to, deprived of, orforced to endure, but when
trauma is left unhealed, it doesnot stay in the past.
It takes over the present, andthe survival patterns become the
operating system of your life.
By definition that is aconsciousness set point below
(11:31):
fifty.
So in this sense, what hasotherwise been taught to you as
a woman as your cadr is thelived outcome of your low
consciousness set point.
If you grew up in instability,financial chaos,
unpredictability, constantstress, as an adult, you might
struggle to earn well, or youmight earn well, but you live in
(11:54):
chronic scarcity.
You hoard money, you doubt yourmanagement skills, you
compulsively overwork.
You might find saying toyourself that this is just how I
am with money.
If as a woman you wereemotionally dismissed growing
up, your feelings were minimizedor mocked, as an adult you might
not be able to toleratefeedback.
(12:16):
Every correction feels like apersonal attack.
You either become defensive orshut down completely.
And this type of behavior isgonna plateau your success at
work, and none of that isbecause you lack intelligence,
but because your nervous systeminterprets growth as danger.
You might find yourself blamingthe politics or timing or having
(12:37):
a horrible boss, when in realityit is your low consciousness set
point from unhealed trauma thatis limiting your leadership
capacity.
Or if you look at worship, ifyou experienced religion as
pressure or fear or a controltactic, as an adult you will
oscillate between intense burstsof religious effort and complete
(12:59):
burnout.
If this is happening, trauma hashijacked your relationship with
Allah, and you leaving itunrefined will keep your faith
trapped in obligation.
Trauma itself does not ruin yourlife.
Unexamined trauma does.
And this is where responsibilitybegins.
Healing will never come fromblaming yourself for adaptations
(13:22):
that once kept you alive,because blame turns on yet
another trauma pattern.
Healing is you recognizing whatprotected you then is now
preventing you from living.
And refinement of the nafs isthe process of reclaiming
authorship over your internaloperating system, so survival
management no longer dictatesyour behavior.
(13:44):
You could have been a victim ofharm, but you don't have to be a
victim of your dysregulation.
Trauma was not your fault, butit is your responsibility to
heal from it.
Staying at the low set pointkeeps the gates open to repeated
harm, self sabotage andgenerational transmission of
pain.
(14:05):
When you heal, you stop beingavailable for all of these
dynamics, and this is a part ofyour purification.
Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is notinherently punitive, but reality
has laws.
When wounding was not yourfault, but you don't take
responsibility for your healing,you will stay in chronic
(14:26):
dysregulation, low level energy,resentment, victimhood, and this
survival mood will recreate avery constricted life.
This is not a punishment fromAllah.
When the nervous system remainsunrefined, it stays open to
repeated harm.
You keep choosing environmentsthat feel familiar even if
(14:47):
they're damaging, and you mightcall it bad luck or fate, but
all it is is unhealed patternsreplaying themselves.
When you heal, you becomeunavailable for dynamics that
depend on your self abandonment.
You function at a level ofservice because you want to,
because you love to.
You stop participating in cyclesthat feed only into your
(15:09):
exhaustion, and all of thismight feel threatening to others
because your fragmentation iswhat is functional for them.
They will label your healing asselfish because all of this time
they might have benefited fromyour dysregulation.
But your healing is not selfish,it is purification, it is the
skia in its truest form,removing what does not belong so
(15:32):
that you can stand as a whole.
And when you give your love fromthat wholeness, when you devote
yourself to a cause from thatcompleteness, it is so abundant
that your reserve of givingnever runs out.
I want us to go through thisRamadan with a different kind of
intention, not just for moreacts, not just for more
(15:53):
recitation, more hunger.
I want us to promise ourselvesthat we are going to engage in a
conscious elevation of our setpoint.
We're going to consciously tryto get our SQ closer to seventy
five.
That way we will treat thismonth as intentional diskiya, an
inward refinement, and we'lltake that just as seriously as
(16:15):
we take our outward acts ofworship.
Allah has never asked you tostay wounded to prove your
goodness.
And in this month we're not onlyrestraining our appetites, we
are restraining our distortedmeaning making.
We're fasting from impulsiveinterpretations.
We're fasting from our victimnarratives.
(16:45):
The Quran says He has succeededwho purifies it, and he has
failed who corrupts it.
And this is with such ruthlessclarity that there is no middle
ground hidden between the twooutcomes.
The cruise control of neutralityis a lie that the nafs itself
tells you to avoidresponsibility.
You are either purifying yournafs or you are corrupting it by
(17:09):
not engaging in active healing.
There is no cruise control.
This is why the language of I'mnot doing anything wrong is
extremely spiritually dangerous.
Not doing anything wrong is notthe same thing as doing what is
required.
One of my teachers, Um Zakia,and I want you to check out her
work on Instagram, she once saidto us if you stop bathing your
(17:33):
body, you're going to startsmelling.
You don't say I didn't roll indirt today, I should be fine.
Well she didn't say the rollingin the dirt part, but you get
the metaphor.
Even if you're not doinganything to make you dirty, if
you don't shower long enough,people won't want to be near
you.
The same thing happens with thenups.
When you postpone yourpurification, when you delay
(17:56):
actively participating inhealing your nervous system,
your consciousness set pointautomatically drops.
The inner agitation becomesnormal.
Low relational standards feelextremely justified and normal.
So the moral of the story isthat we all have to take a bath.
Think about the internaloperating system you are
running.
(18:17):
If you stop updating it, youdon't get a stable system, you
get glitches, you get unexpectedcrashes.
And the primal nuffs is exactlyhow that is.
The primal nuffs has a built-indownward gravity.
If left unattended, it defaultsto survival logic, a lot of
times as entitlement, a lot oftimes as resentment, it's
(18:39):
victimhood or urgency.
This is why people might swearthat they're quote unquote good
people while living in chronicunrest and relational chaos.
They might be going throughspiritual numbness and think
that it's normal.
You might not be choosinganything evil explicitly, but
the corruption itself will comefrom non stewardship of that
(19:00):
nafs, from letting the systemrun itself.
Purification of the nafs isactive resistance against that
decay.
It is applying upward forcewhere otherwise gravitational
force exists.
You're engaging in your lifeconsciously instead of
compulsively.
And for some people, theuncomfortable truth might be
(19:21):
that choosing not to work onyour nafs is still a choice.
It is a choice to let the lowestset point level take command.
And just like every choice, thisalso has consequences.
It shows up in yourrelationships, in your psyche,
in your spirituality, in yourmental health.
And this is not Allah'spunishment, it's just simple
(19:42):
cause and effect.
When you tend to the nafs, thecoherence becomes possible.
If you abandon it, thecorruption does not need your
permission to move in.
Trauma was not your choice,survival was your body's
intelligence in that moment.
But remaining configured aroundyour old survival coding is not
your destiny.
(20:03):
This Ramadan, your invite is toupgrade your operating system,
to move from automatic reactionsto conscious authorship.
We are not doing this work toerase your past, we're doing it
to prevent it from organizingyour future.
And that work in itself, thatelevation of your set point is
the skia.
(20:24):
With that I pray to AllahSubhanahu wa Ta'ala, O Allah,
you are the one who created mynervous system, my soul, my
capacity to survive.
Do not let what protected methen imprison me now.
Ya Allah, help me honor mysurvival, raise my consciousness
set point so I respond to lifefrom clarity.
(20:44):
Expand my inner arena sohardship does not define me, and
the past does not organize myfuture.
O Allah this Ramadan make myTaskia real, refine my nafs, and
allow me to trust the strengththat you have given me.
Amin Yarabul Amin, please keepme in your draas, I will talk to
you guys next time.
Welcome to Islamic Life Coach School Podcast.
Apply tools that you learn inthis podcast and your life will
be unrecognizably successful.
Now your host, Dr.
Kamal After.
SPEAKER_01 (00:16):
Hello, hello, hello everyone.
Peace and blessings be upon allof you.
Today is part three of the fourpart series during Ramadan
around your baseline energeticwavelength, what I call your
consciousness set point.
In part one, we discussed thedefinition of your consciousness
set point, what I measure in myprogram with an SQ score.
(00:37):
This is your operating level.
It is the baseline from whichyou interpret reality.
Two people can face the samecircumstance and live completely
different internal realitiesbecause their set points are
different.
A low SQ score is a state ofchronic dysregulation.
This is your nervous systemliving in prolonged survival
(00:59):
mode.
At this level, your access tochoice is very low.
The gap between stimulus andresponse is next to non
existent.
You don't feel like you'rechoosing your actions.
Your actions feel automatic,very justified, and always
urgent.
Inshallah, I have shown you upuntil now not to treat this as
(01:19):
moral failure or a weakpersonality, and I've shown you
that this is a skill you canuplevel.
Because with that up levelingcomes a high SQ score, which is
regulated perception.
It does not mean that you don'tfeel anger, fear, or sadness, it
just means you have access tochoice inside of those emotions.
You can assign meaningdeliberately instead of
(01:42):
reflexively, and you're able toseparate an event in your life
from your identity.
In part two we talked about howworship elevates your set point
salah, fasting, dhikr, quran,all of that as regulation
training.
Worship being one of the primarytechnologies that Allah
subhanahu wa ta'ala has givenyou to recalibrate your nervous
(02:03):
system and refine yourperception.
When you engage in worshipconsciously, it widens your
inner arena.
And Ramadan as a part of thatworship is then about operating
from a higher SQ level.
So now we move on to what keepsthe set point low in the first
place, and that's today's topic.
In this episode, we're going toexplore how raising your SQ
(02:26):
breaks the cycle where traumanarrows your perception and
perception keeps recreating thewound.
How your temporary protectiveadaptation becomes a permanent
self-concept.
Adaptations in your psyche arecreated to deal with trauma, and
these adaptations protect you.
They're not your sign ofweakness, they're a sign of
(02:48):
inner intelligence.
When you were overwhelmed, youfelt unsafe, you were unheard,
you felt powerless.
In all of those scenarios, yournervous system made decisions
faster than your conscious mindcould keep up.
All because that's what thesituation called for.
The situation called forsurvival, and your subconscious
mind provided that for you.
(03:09):
It activated what needed toactivate.
It shut down what needed to shutdown.
And that in itself is not lowSQ.
That is a very high SQ, meaningthat is a high consciousness set
point.
Your mind and body'sintelligence did what it was
supposed to do to keep youalive.
This is your body's inner designdoing exactly what it was
(03:30):
created to do, to preserve life.
At that point adaptation wasnecessary.
It came from a sophisticatedinternal intelligence.
If you fawned in the presence ofsomething threatening, that was
your system calculating thatcompliance will increase your
safety.
If you dissociated or frozeduring an assault, that was your
(03:51):
nervous system protecting youfrom psychological harm, when
physical escape was impossible.
Even your fight response, anger,sharpness, dominance, may have
been the only way to carve spacealong the chaos that you might
have been living with.
In these moments, your bodymakes the right choice, even
(04:11):
when your conscious choice wasnot intact.
Again, what I'm trying to tellyou is that this is not
weakness, this is a very highconsciousness set point.
Even when this is survivalstate, because this was
physiological, this isintelligent, this is responsive
to you in real time.
And still to this day, incertain situations it might
(04:31):
still be necessary.
High soulful intelligence scoredoes not mean that you never
activate survival.
It means that your survival isused proportionately.
Interpreting that you might haveacted from survival once has
been moral failure, that iswhat's low SQ.
That is a low consciousness setpoint.
(04:52):
The problem begins when atemporary adaptation becomes a
permanent self concept.
When what once protected youbecomes who you think you are
now.
I'm just anxious, I'm justavoidant.
I'm just a people pleaser, Idon't know how to come out of
it.
I'm just someone who gets walkedall over.
Trauma is when your protectivemechanisms are something that
(05:16):
you stay in perpetually longafter the threat is resolved.
An identity level attachment tothese survival patterns comes
from a low SQ, and that keepsthe SQ well below fifty.
Your consciousness set pointdetermines if your trauma, which
was once a well adapted survivalresponse, becomes your identity.
(05:38):
It remains in your past where itbelongs, or it dictates your
present and your future.
Survival response initiallyreflects a high intelligence,
but living in perpetual traumacomes from low intelligence, and
it lowers your set point evenfurther.
There's a difference between youexperiencing harm, trauma, and
(05:59):
you having the responsibility toheal from it.
That comes from an elevated setpoint.
You can be a woman who mighthave experienced harm at one
point, that's history.
But when you attach to the harmthrough a defining lens, when
every disagreement with somebodysomehow signals abandonment, or
every delay from a text becomesrejection, when every authority
(06:24):
figure signals to you some sortof danger, this is harm
remaining active in the present.
And this doesn't happen becauseharm is still happening.
It happens because your low setpoint keeps you in a cycle where
you reinterpret neutralsituations through old survival
coding.
The harm occurred in the past,attachment through low SQ keeps
(06:47):
it recurring even in differentforms across your life.
This is a difference between asurvival state that you might
have been in at one point toyour benefit, and a survival
story that keeps writing yourlife.
The state was physiological andnecessary.
The story is psychological andunnecessary.
The state was what was needed tokeep you alive, but the story
(07:11):
now says that this is who I am.
Your trauma survival strategyitself does not mean that you
have a low SQ.
It means your body that wasbrilliantly designed did the job
it was supposed to do.
The low SQ begins when you stopquestioning whether that
strategy is still necessary.
When you stop updating theoperating system, when you allow
(07:35):
your protective response todefine your personality, your
marriage, your faith, your qadr,that is when you're operating
from a low consciousness setpoint.
A persistently high set pointhonors your adaptation, whatever
the survival mechanism bodyoffered.
And in the future it asks, is itstill needed?
(07:56):
Is it still accurate?
Is my response proportionate?
Is this what I need in thismoment?
Low SQ fuses with the adaptationand it says this is just me, and
what was once temporary becomesa permanent ceiling that limits
your life.
And luckily for all of us, thatceiling can be raised, that set
point can be raised.
(08:17):
You did not choose the injury,you do choose the upgrade.
Whether the harm was direct orsubtle, cultural, relational or
generational, you did not designthe environment that shaped you,
and you did not choose yourinitial imprint, but you do
choose the upgrade, and this iswhat the series is calling you
(08:38):
to do.
Even if your wound was passeddown from generations, and even
if it predates your memory,you're not meant to stay
configured around it.
The harm might have beenimposed, but the refinement is
your choice.
And through this refinement itdoes not mean that you deny the
injury, it just means that youallow it to exist in the past.
(08:59):
If you live at a low set pointas the effect of trauma,
responsibility of your upgradegets misinterpreted as self
blame.
This is why healing takescourage.
Staying low keeps the gates opento repeated harm, which becomes
a cycle and you are here tobreak the cycle.
(09:19):
Upgrading your operating systemdoes not erase the wound.
It prevents the wound fromorganizing your future.
And this Ramadan is yourstructured invitation to do this
level of taskya, thisself-refinement.
Taskiya is the leadership ofyour internal system, and
Ramadan gives you conditions topractice this leadership daily,
(09:41):
where you restrain your impulseand you regulate your hunger,
you observe your reactions.
Through that you are well onyour way on how to learn to
reassign meaning to yoursituations.
Ramadan is a month of operatingsystem upgrade.
What keeps you stuck at a lowerlevel of consciousness set
point, and another name for thatstate is unhealed trauma.
(10:03):
Unhealed trauma keeps thenervous system into survival
mode, which then solidifies intoadult pattern behaviors.
Fight response often shows up asnarcissistic or dominating
behavior, flight becomesavoidance, freeze manifests as
depression or shutdown, and fawnis what grows into people
(10:23):
pleasing.
Beneath all of them is the samecore wound, a lack of
self-worth, a low consciousnessset point.
So what keeps you as a womananchored in a low SQ has not
been weakness, it's not evenignorance or lack of iman.
It is your unhealed traumarunning the nervous system.
Trauma pushes the body intosurvival mode, and the survival
(10:47):
mode does not just end on itsown just because time passed.
When survival becomes chronic,it hardens into adult behavioral
loops, and we end up calling itour personality.
Sometimes women even startconfusing it as your Islamic
duty, meaning at some point mostwomen confuse their suffering
with the life of piety.
(11:07):
This is a huge trauma in itself.
What happened to you was notyour choice, what we were
exposed to, deprived of, orforced to endure, but when
trauma is left unhealed, it doesnot stay in the past.
It takes over the present, andthe survival patterns become the
operating system of your life.
By definition that is aconsciousness set point below
(11:31):
fifty.
So in this sense, what hasotherwise been taught to you as
a woman as your cadr is thelived outcome of your low
consciousness set point.
If you grew up in instability,financial chaos,
unpredictability, constantstress, as an adult, you might
struggle to earn well, or youmight earn well, but you live in
(11:54):
chronic scarcity.
You hoard money, you doubt yourmanagement skills, you
compulsively overwork.
You might find saying toyourself that this is just how I
am with money.
If as a woman you wereemotionally dismissed growing
up, your feelings were minimizedor mocked, as an adult you might
not be able to toleratefeedback.
(12:16):
Every correction feels like apersonal attack.
You either become defensive orshut down completely.
And this type of behavior isgonna plateau your success at
work, and none of that isbecause you lack intelligence,
but because your nervous systeminterprets growth as danger.
You might find yourself blamingthe politics or timing or having
(12:37):
a horrible boss, when in realityit is your low consciousness set
point from unhealed trauma thatis limiting your leadership
capacity.
Or if you look at worship, ifyou experienced religion as
pressure or fear or a controltactic, as an adult you will
oscillate between intense burstsof religious effort and complete
(12:59):
burnout.
If this is happening, trauma hashijacked your relationship with
Allah, and you leaving itunrefined will keep your faith
trapped in obligation.
Trauma itself does not ruin yourlife.
Unexamined trauma does.
And this is where responsibilitybegins.
Healing will never come fromblaming yourself for adaptations
(13:22):
that once kept you alive,because blame turns on yet
another trauma pattern.
Healing is you recognizing whatprotected you then is now
preventing you from living.
And refinement of the nafs isthe process of reclaiming
authorship over your internaloperating system, so survival
management no longer dictatesyour behavior.
(13:44):
You could have been a victim ofharm, but you don't have to be a
victim of your dysregulation.
Trauma was not your fault, butit is your responsibility to
heal from it.
Staying at the low set pointkeeps the gates open to repeated
harm, self sabotage andgenerational transmission of
pain.
(14:05):
When you heal, you stop beingavailable for all of these
dynamics, and this is a part ofyour purification.
Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is notinherently punitive, but reality
has laws.
When wounding was not yourfault, but you don't take
responsibility for your healing,you will stay in chronic
(14:26):
dysregulation, low level energy,resentment, victimhood, and this
survival mood will recreate avery constricted life.
This is not a punishment fromAllah.
When the nervous system remainsunrefined, it stays open to
repeated harm.
You keep choosing environmentsthat feel familiar even if
(14:47):
they're damaging, and you mightcall it bad luck or fate, but
all it is is unhealed patternsreplaying themselves.
When you heal, you becomeunavailable for dynamics that
depend on your self abandonment.
You function at a level ofservice because you want to,
because you love to.
You stop participating in cyclesthat feed only into your
(15:09):
exhaustion, and all of thismight feel threatening to others
because your fragmentation iswhat is functional for them.
They will label your healing asselfish because all of this time
they might have benefited fromyour dysregulation.
But your healing is not selfish,it is purification, it is the
skia in its truest form,removing what does not belong so
(15:32):
that you can stand as a whole.
And when you give your love fromthat wholeness, when you devote
yourself to a cause from thatcompleteness, it is so abundant
that your reserve of givingnever runs out.
I want us to go through thisRamadan with a different kind of
intention, not just for moreacts, not just for more
(15:53):
recitation, more hunger.
I want us to promise ourselvesthat we are going to engage in a
conscious elevation of our setpoint.
We're going to consciously tryto get our SQ closer to seventy
five.
That way we will treat thismonth as intentional diskiya, an
inward refinement, and we'lltake that just as seriously as
(16:15):
we take our outward acts ofworship.
Allah has never asked you tostay wounded to prove your
goodness.
And in this month we're not onlyrestraining our appetites, we
are restraining our distortedmeaning making.
We're fasting from impulsiveinterpretations.
We're fasting from our victimnarratives.
(16:45):
The Quran says He has succeededwho purifies it, and he has
failed who corrupts it.
And this is with such ruthlessclarity that there is no middle
ground hidden between the twooutcomes.
The cruise control of neutralityis a lie that the nafs itself
tells you to avoidresponsibility.
You are either purifying yournafs or you are corrupting it by
(17:09):
not engaging in active healing.
There is no cruise control.
This is why the language of I'mnot doing anything wrong is
extremely spiritually dangerous.
Not doing anything wrong is notthe same thing as doing what is
required.
One of my teachers, Um Zakia,and I want you to check out her
work on Instagram, she once saidto us if you stop bathing your
(17:33):
body, you're going to startsmelling.
You don't say I didn't roll indirt today, I should be fine.
Well she didn't say the rollingin the dirt part, but you get
the metaphor.
Even if you're not doinganything to make you dirty, if
you don't shower long enough,people won't want to be near
you.
The same thing happens with thenups.
When you postpone yourpurification, when you delay
(17:56):
actively participating inhealing your nervous system,
your consciousness set pointautomatically drops.
The inner agitation becomesnormal.
Low relational standards feelextremely justified and normal.
So the moral of the story isthat we all have to take a bath.
Think about the internaloperating system you are
running.
(18:17):
If you stop updating it, youdon't get a stable system, you
get glitches, you get unexpectedcrashes.
And the primal nuffs is exactlyhow that is.
The primal nuffs has a built-indownward gravity.
If left unattended, it defaultsto survival logic, a lot of
times as entitlement, a lot oftimes as resentment, it's
(18:39):
victimhood or urgency.
This is why people might swearthat they're quote unquote good
people while living in chronicunrest and relational chaos.
They might be going throughspiritual numbness and think
that it's normal.
You might not be choosinganything evil explicitly, but
the corruption itself will comefrom non stewardship of that
(19:00):
nafs, from letting the systemrun itself.
Purification of the nafs isactive resistance against that
decay.
It is applying upward forcewhere otherwise gravitational
force exists.
You're engaging in your lifeconsciously instead of
compulsively.
And for some people, theuncomfortable truth might be
(19:21):
that choosing not to work onyour nafs is still a choice.
It is a choice to let the lowestset point level take command.
And just like every choice, thisalso has consequences.
It shows up in yourrelationships, in your psyche,
in your spirituality, in yourmental health.
And this is not Allah'spunishment, it's just simple
(19:42):
cause and effect.
When you tend to the nafs, thecoherence becomes possible.
If you abandon it, thecorruption does not need your
permission to move in.
Trauma was not your choice,survival was your body's
intelligence in that moment.
But remaining configured aroundyour old survival coding is not
your destiny.
(20:03):
This Ramadan, your invite is toupgrade your operating system,
to move from automatic reactionsto conscious authorship.
We are not doing this work toerase your past, we're doing it
to prevent it from organizingyour future.
And that work in itself, thatelevation of your set point is
the skia.
(20:24):
With that I pray to AllahSubhanahu wa Ta'ala, O Allah,
you are the one who created mynervous system, my soul, my
capacity to survive.
Do not let what protected methen imprison me now.
Ya Allah, help me honor mysurvival, raise my consciousness
set point so I respond to lifefrom clarity.
(20:44):
Expand my inner arena sohardship does not define me, and
the past does not organize myfuture.
O Allah this Ramadan make myTaskia real, refine my nafs, and
allow me to trust the strengththat you have given me.
Amin Yarabul Amin, please keepme in your draas, I will talk to
you guys next time.
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