One has lost hope, the future looks bleak, one is stuck in the cycle of Eating Disorder and feels depressed.
Without emotion, man would be nothing
but a biological computer. Love, joy,
sorrow, fear, apprehension, anger,
satisfaction, and discontent provide
the meaning of human existence.
Arnold M. Ludwig—1980
Dear Readers,
I receive many emails where people question where is God, especially when they are going through cycle of despair and pain. As promised please find below a fabulous video by Ihsan Alexander: Where is God? Eating Disorder is a despair. In depression and agony, so many people question their faith and often feel Allah has abandoned them. They feel their prayers are unanswered and Allah does not love them. They feel abandoned and alone and question where is God? Ihsan Alexander answers this question beutifully in a video below. I’ve added a transcript of video below. I encourage you to watch this video carefully and use it as one of the motivational and healing tools in your journey to recovery. Don’t forget there is always hope. Eating Disorder blinds us to that fact. Hold on to your hope and you’ll Inshallah find a way to get through any obstacle challenge in life. Over the years, I’ve learnt one thing, Allah is always there, always present with me and understands how I feel — especially when no one else can.
WHERE CAN WE FIND GOD?
The direction is inward and often times we think of the travel or the journey and we think that we need to travel outward even on the spiritual path we begin to equate the journey to God as some sort of journey, but the reality of the spiritual path in it’s a journey within, a journey deep inside of us and God’s spiritual presence cannot be found anywhere in heaven or on earth but can only be found only in the heart and the soul of the believer. So, how do we reach God? Which way we go is inwards, not outwards and this is why in Islam, it is so important to understand why there is a direction for prayer, a direction to which we face. When we pray, we were supposed to face Mecca the only holy place. Every Muslim in the world is supposed to be facing in that direction to pray.
Also, what is a Kabah? It is the house of God. It is known to be the house of God. Of course, God doesn’t physically reside in the Kabah. It is a place, a symbol, a focal point for every believer to realize that they should be facing is towards God but where can God really be found?
Although someone else has also said in the hadith articles that the prophet SAW also said something related that “neither the heavens nor the earth can contain me, I can only be found in the heart of a believer” so where is God? He’s not out there and not in the Kabah. The reality of God can only be seen within, down deep in your soul, in your heart.
And this is the realization that Rumi awakened to when He began to whirl. We have all heard of the whirling dervishes that have originated with the memory of the order and it is a very beautiful dance where the dervishes are essentially doing this whirling dance around their own circles, fulcrum or pivot. It is one of the most powerful and spiritual exercise there is, and the reality that came to Rumi when he realized that God was within himself, in his soul and he realise that a fundamental, not just intellectually but actually experience the divine presence at a very real and fundamental level, he began to Ṭawāf (طواف), he began to make a revolution in circum-emulation around the core of his very being; he began to whirl repeatedly until he literally dance around the axis and center of his own being, at the secret of the whirling dervishes.
That is a secret of the whirling dervishes and on the spiritual path known as the power of sophism in Islam. It is designed to lead a person to the deepest realization -which they truly are and that deepest experience of Divine Presence so that is the real purpose of the divine presence.
So this is the real purpose of meditation.
A meditative spiritual practice is to withdraw from the world of formal appearances which normally occupies all our attention and then to be present within, to be still and to become observant.
To Sign up For Emil Ihsan Alexander’s Islamic Meditation Program, Please Click Here
