 Assalamu alaikum, it's wonderful to be here in the Bay Area and wonderful to see everybody in person and online. We're extremely happy to be present for this program called Presence and the Bay Area is very special for myself and especially for my father. Alhamdulillah it's a place where he started his journey to Islam and it's a place where you know there's been many amazing things happened you know have happened here and it's a place full of goodness and knowledge and so it's really really nice to be back here after I think it's been about 10 years or so that he's last been here so Alhamdulillah it's really nice. We're excited just to be here have this program also some of you may have heard we're launching an online program and you'll hear more about that when as the program continues. So without further ado I'll hand over to my father and I'm missing so Bismillah. All right take him to stand up. Yeah so do you use that for this? No you're good. You can do it right this somewhere. It's solid. I don't know why it's not. I can't see it so. Asalaamu Alaikum Alhamdulillah Alhamdulillah Alhamdulillah I always am forced or insisted from within to begin with Alhamdulillah praise be God belongs to God and for whatever comes and for whatever is especially a gathering like this where people have come all of you have come with an intention of some sort and that intention will be rewarded whatever takes place whatever I say I don't say. So the hopes and the best of what you might expect to get from a program like this even in two days it's already happened if you've come with that intention and that's for me and you equally and I am no different than you in that in that this is something for me in which I will learn simply by your presence and the exchange that we have that is subtextual subliminal that happens between people and between us at all times in spite of the words or along with the words or along with every what we give or take from each other and whatever events take place outwardly physically there's something else more subtly taking place so coming with the intention Alhamdulillah Alhamdulillah Alhamdulillah I say that because that will be the result of this this experience a job. So this is a long day I just come from New Mexico where the fires are raging and where I'm still suffering from both the grass pollens which have come up in the smoke and about 10 days of intense smoke in which my eyes and even finding my my lungs were affected a lot and I'm still sort of recovering from that so if I'm coughing along the way you know forgive me for but you know the fires are pretty serious evacuations and immense destruction and how homes and things like that. So Alhamdulillah good to see you all here this topic of this these two days is presence what does presence mean what does presence mean is something also in terms of what's happening in as we go along through the day I do like to have an interaction and questions comments anything that you misunderstand or any terms that you don't understand please please feel free to say wait a minute what do you mean what does that mean I mean even though there I think most people here are Muslims some may not be and those listening in some may not be Muslims some online because there's a pretty good online presence for this program as well but I like I'm sorry was that a question that was a a phone or something it's a little comment on the day and age in which we live so I'll jump off right away let me say one of the things I always say at the beginning of my presentations is do not expect something linear I didn't even hand that I outline out to you all today and I really if I have an outline that I give out to people I have to refer to it and I have used to have people would say hey you didn't get to the next topic in the outline but really I make this disclaimer do not expect that that's not who I meant and that's not my style my style is primarily more artistic and poetic and so the jumping off right now with that little sound that came from some device I had a student who is in Dubai and she said to me well you're coming to Dubai will you have dinner with us yes and she said would you be so kind just to talk to my daughter who's 14 because she's being bullied at school because she doesn't have a cell phone and I said well what you know I can't what am I going to tell a 14 year old who doesn't have a cell phone and her friends do and she said well would you please do that I said okay I'll do it so you did that we sat down so we sat down I sat down with her and her mother and I said to her so your mom tells me that you get bullied for not having a cell phone by your friends and she rolls her eyes I said yeah and I said well you know why your mother doesn't want you to have it and she rolls her eyes again says yeah I know because she loves me and I said well wait a minute if she loves you why would she not want you to have that and then she didn't roll her eyes this time she got serious rolling the eyes by the way for the teenagers is what I call their bs meter and see no meters meters have have things to go like that if it's a little bit and it goes like that if it's really big you know meter a little needle but the teenage bs meter is rolling the eyes it's like uh you know that's I've heard that all before too many times and uh she was serious after that you know how is it that your mother's love she said well devices divide and I'd never heard and I'd never put those two words together devices divide and so we were both kind of shocked at like wow you know what it's a brilliant thing she said and we waited for a moment and then she said and there will probably be blood we were shocked again and she said maybe even more because device division and divisiveness separation she didn't say this but we know that that's division separation and the inability to see that we are done Adam the children of Adam that we are us the simple ability says wait a minute okay you're wearing a red hat that says trump 2024 or whatever you're doing something else you know you've got a rainbow shirt about the LGBT doesn't matter we're all Danny Adam or old children of Adam it's very hard to stay with that in the modern world especially especially when we have on the social media we have we have mechanisms that will send material and in entertain or in train or bring attention to this group of people and that group of people and they'll be identified and separated and and promoted within their own group and divisions divide and rule is the principle one of my biggest theses that I've always brought is the ability because Hikmah as a Hakeem it means that means that we look at the sort of basic principles and underlying patterns understanding the basic designs and principles that God has created in this creation in every aspect of this creation there's a pattern which we call the sonnet of Allah the pattern of Allah the manner in which Allah has done these things and this is what makes metaphors such a great thing because we can look at something in nature and we can see the way in which it manifests itself and that will teach something about something in ourselves or something about society metaphor is the sort of overlapping and the reflection of all forms and realities and the patterns that we can begin to see Jalaluddin Rumi he talks about the ant that's crawling on the carpet and the ant sees the red the the black threads and the yellow threads and then the green threads and then the ant is smart enough to begin to recognize oh this is the pattern and he begin to get a semblance and understanding of the pattern of it and Rumi says but he does not see the entire carpet or the maker of the carpet so this is what we're dealing with and this is why you know as Muslims we say there is no God except Allah and Muhammad is his messenger but that as a convert I remember one of the remarkable things that when I looked at it closely it was no God no God there is a law and that Allah means is a name for a reality that's beyond anything we can formulate as a concept as an image as a representation of the absolute and ultimate reality that's beyond our hand beyond our ability to know or even conceive of we can't even conceive of this is what makes Islam and true monotheism remarkable and unique God is something greater or the God Allah is something greater so Hikmah is the ability to begin is the principles of understanding and beginning to understand to see to recognize and make use in terms of understanding of the basic principles of the patterns and the design of the creation in us and outside of us so my teacher in you know I look for a teacher excuse me this is the this is the the the fires in New Mexico the fires in the fallings there might be with this all day so please forgive me for that my teacher in Pakistan that I finally met he said I learned medicine in the forest with my grandfather and I'll teach you whatever I know and that was the time I knew he was my teacher because that principle we whatever we learn whatever we learn and wherever we would in whatever form we learn it we will if we're learning in a deep way will that understanding we have of that topic and that particular subject will be relevant to anything else we might want to understand if there's true understanding in terms of the depth or the principles of what we're learning does that make sense anyone okay I usually look for nods out there and nods nods are one of these great communicate some of you've heard this from me and if I reiterate anything please forgive me but you know a lot of these things need reiterating because a lot of the material I present is not typical and obvious and not I don't think something you find often in books not the subtle the subtle realities one of the basic principles but that I teach and I concern with developing amongst the Muslims and amongst anyone who's willing to make the same track which is the development of the principles of Hikmah the principles of these basic when I say Hikmah I also say Hikmah and I can do I'll do this thing and this this gesture that I make represents a principle or a basic Hikmah kind of like a headline or a bumper sticker or something to put on the wall some basic principles I remember I worked with a woman once by email and I said to her I said you know she was very sensitive hyper sensitive person and I said this what really an important that something important for you to learn and discover and learn and understand and discover in a deep way in which you know this not that it's an idea only and that is sensitivity is a strength it's an enormous strength now there's that nod I was looking for right there my teacher one of my teachers said he said he said you know we we believe the wise man nods because he's wise and he said maybe he's wise because he nods and that's a deep principle to deep wisdom there's there's a good that's a good wise person nodding we wise we nod and and we could say that when that person the wise person nods because he's wiser vice versa because what's happening there is the affirmation bodily affirmation of recognition what that person is saying is true I hear you I agree with you I understand it I recognize it I recognize that I know it again from inside we have a common reality that's taking place and that nod connects us it could be they would you know listen or bank I remember sitting with a husband and wife the husband was a great scholar well great scholar a recognized scholar probably great too I that's not the point but he was a scholar was very dry in his nature very much in his books quote all sorts of things from many many books and I was talking to him about a lot of these principles online and he was everything I said he was just there still unmoving face just he didn't there wasn't not even one and she was behind him she was doing that doing that whole time and I thought well who's getting this and and you know I mean some people cannot nod and still be taking it in but that's a dry attitude in it and it's not a collecting this topic of this conference or this workshop is presence being present and the subtitle being better connections in ourselves and then with others and I have a firm belief in this principle that people say well you know I can't meet people and like you know I'd love to meet somebody and you know hook up or get married or blah blah blah whatever some people are very good at meeting people and one while there's tools and there's techniques and there's principles that we can learn depending upon who we spend time with and our you know where we're taught and where we learn these things in what sort of setting some people are very formal but they know how to sail they know how they know how to talk I one of my dear friends uh one of my dear brothers I tell him I'm just sitting this is my jumping off on tangents by the way I was sitting in a coffee shop with a dear dear friend of mine who's deep wisdom great knowledge of Islam but you know he's had problems with his teeth so he's no longer has any teeth and he's gotten overweight so he has you know kind of a belly that shows and he just wears whatever is there he's not interested his his point being I don't care about them it's like I'm fine I'm fine at myself I'm okay with myself so I don't care about other people we were sitting there having coffee and talking and whatever we were talking about the couple the next table when they got up the late leave they came over and they said you were talking about such as a country are you from this country they brought up a conversation and asked the questions about what we're talking about and then they left and then this man who was you know he was just shadowed my love bless him and that's who he is and you know for him that's great but he said to me um he said why did they go up and talk to you they didn't even look at me and I said by name I said look I said look look at what you're wearing look at your teeth look at your hair look at your state you know I could say that to him and he was recognizing it and I had you know I have I was dressed well I had the my bright yellow Moroccan shoes I said you know that people when they meet you on first impression 80 percent I mean this is inside 80 percent of the judgment on who you are and what you are is on your clothing and 80 percent of that is on your shoes now women understand this better than men some some men don't get it my wife my wife if I'm just wearing my clothes it's most relaxed clothes my most relaxed clothes she said so you're going to be homeless today and I I finally started listening to her say yes of course I you know I I mean I'm doing my best but uh but it's not easy so back to this what I was saying in the first place which is connecting the the basic word at one point connecting in ourselves is a key to being able to connect with others why why is connection in ourself going to have anything to do with our connecting outside of ourself with other people can I ask anybody that any why okay if you can trust yourself you can trust others you love others how you would love yourself well I mean those that's a question you know I mean is it possible to know others without knowing yourself connecting with yourself that's another question is connecting the same as knowing well what is knowing any what is knowing I mean we can get into very sort of more subtle complex philosophical and semantics of it but knowing something there's different ways of knowing something you know the principles as Muslims you know the principles of yakin yes people know this term yakin certainty there's one of the traditional ways of describing certainty of knowing is the three three stages anybody know those three stages ilmo yakin i know yakin and hawk yakin and can you describe what what are those three stages what's ilmo yakin means what knowledge knowledge meaning what there's a metaphor that's used for it ilmo yakin is you you learn that there's a fire in the forest this is appropriate for me coming from New Mexico these days there's a fire in the forest i know yakin is what seeing you see it with your eyes you actually there's the fire and then hawk yakin is you're there the smoke's doing this thing through your eyes and your lungs and you're in the fire it's degrees of knowing and degrees of the same thing true for the self we can learn that well I have certain amount of earth air fire and water and in this particular balance and therefore that's my massage which has become a popular catchphrase these days as if that's going to help us know ourselves which it can but one of the things that's important here is the recognition of one of our Islamic principles by a love's design and articulated by some of the best of our scholars and philosophers through these many years which is the self contains an entire universe no more no less when I went to my teacher in Pakistan he said I learned medicine in the forest a love's pure creation without corruption it used to be we could learn so much from the animals a love didn't place those animals there at random the animals and everything in his creation was purposeful and part of this extraordinary perfection of perfection of design with us at the center of it not at the highest point or better than any piece of it but at the center of it as his caliphas and representatives with the mandate to care for it we we have an obligation to care for the stone the horse for the camel for the bug even the mosquito in whatever manner that care is is meant to be so wholeness we talk about health health health health health health health health you know whole foods I remember the whole foods in New Mexico there's a sign as you're leaving whole foods it says the world the the world's healthiest grocery store something like that and someone crossed out the H and put in a W but but the point is we talk about health all the time but what does it mean it means whole it means whole to become whole and how whole do we become do we become whole and then I did in our heads or do we become whole my teacher in Pakistan he used to say the entire whole being the healthy present present being is the one who thinks from his toes to his fingertips his face and his heart and who feels from his toes to his face hands and heart and those two are whole together and that present that means present whole wholeness I remember I was in England and I was at in Glastonbury and they gave me this woman amazing woman her name was zero and zero is this woman convert woman who supplied thousands and thousands of wheelchairs that she designed out of plastic that could be used in Africa for people that need you wheelchairs and she was kind of an unofficial mayor of Glastonbury even though she was a Muslim in Glastonbury is famous for the for the Abbey that was there and the Christian community and the even the people say that Jesus and I his alum visited Glastonbury at some point a while you know but she set up this program in the Glastonbury Abbey and took two days of workshop but the point I want to make here is that I gave a lecture there to a group of people I was the only couple of Muslims is mostly Christians and people from Glastonbury and other people and a woman came up to me afterwards and said you know I really appreciate your presentation and I appreciate your your ease with yourself and I never heard that before I'd never heard ease with myself I do something you know but I realized well I guess I do have a certain amount of ease I mean I can say what I feel I need to say I can be with you know say anything to anyone without sort of hesitation I know I recognize what she said to me was like a revelation revelation that yeah I do have an ease and I remember also I was asked to do something many years before that I was asked to I was asked to give the lecture on Rumi at Harvard and I thought about this I'm not a scholar I've never read Rumi in the original language I know that Rumi's been a part of my life since I became Muslim and before I became Muslim because Rumi talks about in his matnavi talks about making shahada and that you just recite this formula and you become Muslim and I remember I didn't know anything about it and I was walking down the street in San Francisco and I said well wait a minute let me see there is no god but thee god and Muhammad was his messenger and then I waited for something to happen you know like it didn't happen but it did happen a couple of months later that so that was the beginning of it so it happened from Rumi first and then I actually met a Muslim and it did happen but I was at Harvard and there was a group of maybe three or four hundred people and there was this and you know it was the Emerson Hall and was this this what do you call this sort of high sort of scholarly kind of place that what am I doing here I'm an artist I don't you know I've never gotten a degree of any kind I don't have any initials behind my name at all not even an MFA master of fine arts I didn't have that and I thought but wait a minute my heart is true I believe in Rumi and I made and so I began to sing I just but I had this I had this it was the first time that I felt I could do whatever I wanted to do say whatever I needed to say and there was absolutely no fear of any sort and I realized later that that was from the primary the work that I'd been doing that we call somatic work with my teachers working with the body and recognizing that the body how can I say it simply so many ways of saying it Adam when Allah created Adam he placed the spirit in Adam at that time and Iblis objected what are you doing and Allah said I know what you do not know but at that time atoms the spirit was put into Adam's body and that was the beginning of the human experience to this day like all of us with that spirit in this body and that's principle the Hikma a basic principle in the Hikma is the spirit lives in this body this body that goes through all of these details and all of these things and all these ins and outs and all these places and times and events and experiences and all of these exchanges and our body contains the biggest part of our memory of our identity of who we are and what we are for those of you who maybe heard me say this before I'll reiterate reiterate it but the the the rate at which synaptic patterning is taking place in our mother's womb there's anybody here who heard me talk about the thousand and one nights or thousand thousand days for the no okay well I can reiterate it but there's I was there was something I discovered a lot of what the work I've been doing is a lot of it's in the realm of neurology which I've discovered being separate from spiritual things offers a great opportunity to see how neurology can be commentary and proof for a lot of these things that we we have inherited in our traditions and so one of the terms and one of the expressions one of the terms I found them in the neurological field is what they call the thousand days and the thousand days represents the last trimester of our being in our mother's womb and the first two years of life and that period of a thousand days in which our brains are not even formed there's no crevices and crinkles it's just almost smooth but the learning experience that's taking place in that thousand days is the neuro neurosynaptic patterning that takes place at the rate of what kind of speed how many synaptic any numbers can you imagine anyone I mean I'm obviously it's unless you know that it's kind of a it's kind of a nebulous abstract principle 40,000 synaptic connections are made per second that's huge in terms of learning patterning foundational building of a sense of self in a body in a body that continues up until you know the second you know in the in the second years of life now interesting when we when that thousand days is up that's when we learn how to speak that's when we've taken in all this data from that previously built and designed synaptic patterning of a kind of intelligence and being then we begin to speak we learn how to talk that's when at around two speaking starts to come in and that's when we shift a lot from that to more of an outward taking in and learning these words and mimicking and connecting in a different way to the world outside of us the point finally here being the recognition that we have a hard time in the modern paradigm to understand is that our identity and our memories are primarily in our bodies not up here in the brain somewhere along the way we got this idea everything happened here in the skull and that was never in any of our traditional models we believed in character and the perfecting of character the change of character but character has to do with an overall sort of quality of our being so how do we know ourselves you know someone once asked their prophet said to him how do I know if I'm a good person and prophet said to him say ask your neighbor and the truth is from neurological point of view from a scientific point of view from a traditional point we cannot know ourselves without the other we can go into a cave and all sorts of things can happen but to know who we are we need the others and that others that connection with others begins when we're babies and all of us know this thing when we see a baby there's not a thing we read in the book well there's a baby I need to do this thing but we don't we didn't read it but we just go to the baby we say hey how are you we change our voice so the baby and we'll make spaces or gestures and babies within moment minutes can connect and mimic what they see that's the also the beginning of a very human development of what was called the ability to imagine the ability to posit another reality there that being a human being which enables the positing of one of self as well I mean in other words there's a reciprocal reality that's there human and I'm here now that the interesting thing is that ability is not developed with children the many many thousands of children who have been raised by animals because they don't have the same thing of the gays they don't have that same thing of the I mean a lot of the animals don't even have eyes in the project if you think about it but that human quality and there's many examples of that and so children that have not had that gaze early on they're remarkable beings and they have all kinds of sensory and sensibilities that are very developed and extraordinary and it's in the anyone who studies these it's amazing thing to study because it's so interesting so the self is developed in this way and then every instant of every day of every moment that takes place more or less memory is imprinted on our being by our senses that the Hakeems used to say that everything that we sense is written on our blood and then our blood in turn builds you know the bones and the tissues and the organs and all these things of our being physically so the self what a woman came to me once uh one of the things I do with a lot of people I work with I send them it's two documents to fill out one is a timeline a history of their health their life you know from birth to the present with important events and illnesses and things that you know impacted them are meaningful for them some people it's very easy to do some people it's very hard some people will be the long and complicated and then the other one is what I call symptom picture just like what what ails you you know how is these systems how your eyes your head all these different parts and part of the reason I do that is not for necessarily the the data that I'll get and use which I will use for homeopathic medicine but for them to do it themselves it's kind of little kind of seek without them realizing it's kind of little biography themselves and that's helpful to recognize well I did this this this this and I haven't put it in chronological order just so they have this and a lot of people find that healing holding bringing holding us anything that brings connections within ourselves you know the great line Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall and great empty had a great fall and all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put them together again and I know it may sound cheesy but only a lock and put it together again and but the irony of that particular story of that particular poem or there's rhyme or whatever it is that Humpty Dumpty anyone know who Humpty what Humpty Dumpty was where that came from from what Charles the first but what was who was Humpty Dumpty huh no Humpty Dumpty was a cannon was a big cannon and it fell off a wall and shattered and that was it no more Humpty Dumpty all the king's horses on but the point is we get shattered you know I mean you know the great the great line about presence that I have to quote here I feel redundant because I've done so many times like Shakespeare you all know who I'm talking about when I say some of you know what I'm referring to when I say Shakespeare right Tariq sorry Shakespeare there's no P in Arabic so Shakespeare Shakespeare he said to be or not to be to be or not to be simply that is the question and then he said is it nobler to take arms in the face of the slings and arrows of life and that's the point I'm making here the slings and arrows of life it happens at the moment we're coming at the moment we're coming to this realm they used to like smack their baby so they would cry you know as if that was a necessary thing which is obviously not but but you know the saying is that the wise person the wise person there's a one who laughs at death when someone dies because whatever that person however they live they're right they will go to as they say their just desserts they weep at the birth because they know this pure being and this is what we believe firmly as most of we come into this world with absolute purity but and even Freud finally before his death admitted okay I had that part wrong he changed he changed his opinion to something more within the Islamic principle we come in pure they laugh at the death weep at the birth and then they say the wise person is silent at the marriage because Allah knows and that was a good response for the ones that got that way and this is wisdom yes well they're both come together don't they I mean so many people when they're getting well I mean how many times I've heard priests people say I know now especially when there's addictions involved they say I know now I can't be with those people I need to be with different people oh sorry the question was you know what about people that are negative and they sort of zap your energy and are these choices we make or what was the other part of that it's both is it an energy it impacts us or or is that how we respond it's both things but how are we respond can be something we take on consciously and we can consciously make choices to do we do know because the famous hadith and what someone asked the prophet said I'm you know are the this is the great question about free will that people who aren't Muslim there Buddhists can understand it but a lot of people who aren't Muslim don't understand how can we have free will and how can there be absolute command someone asked the prophet said I said I'm you know is this is the story something that's been pre-written or is it something that's unfolding and he saw I said him he said the pens have written it they've lifted themselves and the ink is dry right tariff that's that's absolute it's written but we do have this odd thing that we can't it's hard for us to fathom in terms of a logical understanding of free will we have choices and we can change and another thing that comes up when you say that yes there are some people that zap your energy no question about some people that are negative about everything and there are some people who you know they're positive but it's not obvious positive like my wife refers to respect for any Christians I mean I don't mean it belittle any any group of people or any path anyway but she's much uses term she said you know some these Christians are have kind of euphoric pathology pathological euphoria you know everything is nice and wonderful and a lot of Muslims have that one of the big tasks I've had with the Muslim community which has primarily been my people that I've worked with for now for over 50 years is getting them to be real and not mashallah mashallah alhamdulillah well how are you feeling well I feel like crap alhamdulillah you know and I gotta say that one of my teachers in Morocco he'd say how are you doing kappa how and I say alhamdulillah which is sunnah alhamdulillah ala kulli hal but what's your particular house you know I feel just so excited I can barely stand on my own two feet I feel so bad I just want to go out punch somebody you know alhamdulillah but getting them to be real and it's called spiritual bypassing spiritual and that's a term that came from the Buddhist but it's very accurate and that's one of the biggest tasks I remember man I was playing somatic work with and the somatic work is where you enable a person to go into a journey I call it a visceral journey into the feelings and sensations sensations of all kinds that are in her body and I remember you know when a person successfully makes that journey they begin discovering all sorts of things in their memories and things that they don't even recognize as memories better in their body and I remember he had this state that he was in and and and part of one of the things that you just might see we'll get to that later might see some of you know how many how many of you shared might see with me anybody else few people might see is moving according to making movements according to this visceral sensations and these more subtle nuanced sensations telling and allowing your body and giving it license to move whatever so he was making movements and sometimes when the person's in that state they'll be very very slow movement has to be slow and it might be tremoring but you can tell there's a state of being in what something is happening more than simply lifting the hand there's something deeper because all of our movements are absolutely integrated with the sense of self absolutely how we get up from a chair this is Feldenkrais and Alexander the people know those people Feldenkrais these are body working people Feldenkrais you must know and and Feldenkrais to talk about when you're sitting in chair how you get from get up from that chair is patterned you'll get up in a certain way you always get up the same way you use the same muscles the same shift of center of gravity etc etc Ralph Walder Emerson the American philosopher and writer he said for the one who has eyes and wisdom by the gate by the posture and the gate the person has their being is exposed as if it were a Swiss watch opened up and you can see the inner workings by the way they stand or by the gestures they make etc etc everything the body speaks at all times the body this is one of my hiccups the body speaks at all times awake or asleep from the body to the body and to the self yes come yes so do I need to reiterate that yeah she was saying about you're in coma and and you at some point in some place you had this impulse to walk rhythmically down the street you know actually at the last workshop and and you know a low island we don't know because places have a reality that's much greater than we realize to you hypocrites wrote 20 volumes on water air and places the geography of place there's one amazing researcher who talks about how the geography of play of a place of the environment will affect the speech and the language of the people who live there amazing man Alfred Tomates in the 40s amazing things he he worked with anybody I want to get lost on that because I want to get back to this man who is moving in this state it's the kind of state he got into and he was moving it's something was happening inside him and he was a scholar and he was very erudite but a lot of his Islam was didactic it was wrote it was something that Hamdillah to this day now he's becoming he's making it real but he had this amazing thing in which he did something and and I called him on that later I said you know that session we didn't he just cracked up laughing because he knew it was he very slowly with great difficulty he reached up very slowly like this it was like something deep was happening and you could see and he took his cookie off he left his cookie and so what was the meaning of that he moved from being a dress up Islam Muslim dress up of Muslim to being a real Muslim more genuine in himself so so the connections in oneself and knowing oneself we can say I know myself I I mean I met a man recently who said well I spent a lot of time with with people as a as an attorney and I'm used to them telling lies and telling the truth and I begin I know the difference and I've developed that in myself but I was questioning and you know a lot and but due respect I said I didn't feel that he honestly did know himself but the way I would test something like that about a man back to what the prophet says how do I know if I'm a good man ask your neighbor well the thing one of my basic principles that I use in my practice and I've seen results from this that are remarkable which is ask your wife or ask your daughter or your son we don't have neighbors anymore barely some places if you have neighbors used to be thankful but a lot of men I mean I've had men I've had men sort of recoil at that you know whatever happened to you know the Islamic principles on the patriarchy that you know the the heroic thing of patriarchy we're we're men we're in charge you know that kind of stuff I have to doze men dislike what I say when I say that if you really want to know someone say you do what watch them use an old computer I don't get it you get a what I see I say I say okay yeah my one I one of my one of my things I've done about age how old a person is is I feel and now at 81 I can wear my pants at my waist instead of down there yes please yes more or less yes yes absolutely well what the question was or the comment was wherever we go we're taking in information more or less I added because we also learn how to create I mean the modern term they would use for this is boundaries that is we have a limitation and boundary to our being some things we don't want to take in one of the things I wanted to do with this workshop and I didn't have it set up was create a camera obscura you know what a camera people know what a camera obscura is I've been a science nerd since I was a little kid and when I was like 13 years old I used to build camera obscuras in which you take a room that's completely darkened and you open one hole about this size in one wall and anybody what happens if the sun's sunlight outside what happens a beam of light array of light anyone else what happens in that room like that is the same thing that happens at every moment for all of us which is the eye eye takes in all of the I mean you're seeing me up here carpets walls but what what's happening you know one of these neurologists that I really like I mean he can get a little carried away but I like him because he said something that I really appreciated what she said he said the eye is not like any other part of our body it's like a piece of our brain pushing out through the holes in our skull brilliant because the eye it doesn't the light ray doesn't know everything comes in everything comes in that's why I wanted to build a camera obscura and everybody but when you if we really have this this one of these walls open to a lighted area sunlight better that hole would project onto this wall everything out there upside down that's a camera obscura that's why when I was when I was a little you know 13 year old nerd so I built it for the neighbor kids and said come and look at this and go outside and they go up you know we had great fun I I did it with my kids right because that's what's happening in the eye and the eye is translating everything that's out there as a brain with the break with the rods and the the retinas and it's turning there was a man also at that time many years ago maybe 50 years ago 40 no 40 yeah maybe 50 years ago who created glasses that if you wear the glasses it turns everything upside down and of course that you know walking you're doing anything it's like it's it's hard to do but in time after about two weeks people back normally there so it's all normal but then when they take the glasses off everything's upside down again what we see is enormous everything we see we take into some degree there are a lot of studies that say we remember so much more than what we realize we're taking in and I see in my people that I work with for example I see couples who have distressed between them after watching long episodes of a particular tv series and they have fights afterwards and they don't realize why they're having the fights because they don't realize that it wasn't the words and the plots and the stories there were heroes and there were victims and it was something underneath it the obvious of the discussion the dialogues the style that they were learning we're learning so much from movies television and that's been going on for decades and decades now all right you're well you're absorbing it you know bob dillon how many how many people are familiar with bob dillon's work okay not as many as would be nice to see he said because he won the Nobel Prize for literature and a lot of people said this guy's a pop singer what how can you win an award for literature Nobel Prize and he gave a one hour and it's available on youtube he gave a one hour answer to that question and the one hour thing was he said people people appreciate and they reiterate my my songs not because of the words he said because of the source from which they came and he said the sources of all my songs are from the odyssey moby dick great literature that he read when he's very young and he said he knows all these songs came forth from a poetic right brain part of his being that was not logical that just came you know the uh mr tambourine man that comes you know the muse that comes to him just creates this stuff but he recognized that it came from all of these things that he was affected deeply by in terms of their meaning and the depth of their meaning so right brain left brain so that's how many are familiar with this current concepts of right brain left brain the quran the quran says on the day of judgment our skin and our bones will speak i was going to refer earlier that way back many many years ago there were studies done about how much we actually remember is huge but we don't retain some people are very good some people memory and presence are very connected one of the examples always give is is you know when we have an event that's remarkable we remember things about it there are people i had a young boy i was working with one time and it was so sad because he was one of these people who remember everything are you familiar with that people people who remember everything huh and well that's what they used to call it but yeah it's more than that it's like they you can give them a date they'll tell you where they were that date they can tell you to close it everything they can go on at length there's that young man and these people are considered uh they used to be used the word savants you know and unfortunately they called them idiot savants you know like but because they're not normal people but our capabilities and within us are so much greater than we realize some some are developed in this way some are developed back to your question though we take in everything and what we learn how to do is to create not just boundaries or barriers it's like nowadays this term of boosting your immune system my comment is i do not want to be immune i want to be alive and healthy alive in the way that's i can manage whatever comes but we can look at boundaries as being obstacles in something barriers or we can learn it in terms of sustaining and maintaining wholeness of our locus and being you follow me we don't let that come in but if it comes in we can manage it an example of that i mean my wife and i when we watch we watch a movie we do watch movies we have a we have a we have an automatic fast forward when it comes to the sex scenes that i mean they happen and and it's not it's never incumbent on the plot of the story or the exposition of it but if you take it in you take it in something we used to be this term the term that we used to use in the language was called obscene obscene what's the meaning literal meaning of obscene anyone literally it means obscene i mean you don't you don't you don't look you don't see it you don't want to see it there's no need to see it and what we don't realize is is that all of these things that we take for granted oh hell that's an one example but it's also with people and things the point i want to get to here at some point today is recognize how do we build this locus of being and standing on our own two feet and then another bodily somatic term we use that term he can carry his own weight he can stand on his own two feet or i'm having a lot of difficulties now but i'm going to get back on my feet or rejala law i want to know that term rejala law rejala law it means translated usually as man of a lot but it's actually genderless it's a person of a law but it comes from rajala to stand standing on your own two feet person of god so developing this sense of being and being alright not that i'm hot stuff or better than anyone else at at no way far from that it's the opposite of that i'm at the center of creation by Allah's design by his command to be his caliph but that doesn't mean i'm better than any dog i have a role as the center to speak for the trees for the stones for the waters for the fish and the peoples i have an obligation to stand for them to care for them to to to to be a caretaker for his creation and we failed miserably so we take in all these things and and on one hand we can avoid everything i mean i remember this this is this woman who most of the woman who used to go through the magazines her daughter would get the fashion magazines and she'd go with through with the black felt dependent just mark out all the things what do you think the response to that was anyone what we think a child's response to is blacking out half you know all these things redacted well i mean she would she would go to school in fully job and in her bag she had short you know bare midriff clothing that she'd put on when she got to school i mean that was one example but i'm i'm just saying that that's you know it's it's not it's it's it's developing the positive choice and preference and respect of being who a lot is designed is designing you to be a lot is al cali al bari al musawir and that means that every moment of every day every second of every moment same as in the 40 000 synaptic patternings in the first thousand days from that point on we're building with data coming dated data coming data coming data we're building this sense of self now the problem is so much data is coming in and it's so bizarre if nothing else i mean to me anyone who can't see how bizarre it is to be hurtling down highways in 2000 pounds of metal with rubber wheels at 70 80 miles an hour anyone who can't see this is absolutely totally insane i have to say you gotta wake up there's this is not okay and do not think that it's just part of modern life no it's affecting you your children your answer your boss it's affecting everything how do we do it so we on one hand we can say oh i'm going to go live in the forest which is fine you know there's a uc berkeley professor that goes every month one month he goes into the forest no electricity no no none of that stuff at all and he said if he didn't do that he wouldn't survive one month with his family i remember when my son over there i remember when we had electricity turned off in in new mexico and it was off for three days and when it's time and they my kids said let's why don't we just leave it off we did for a little bit and i remember another time with it with a controversial figure in england of apocata sufi who is a dear man close i was very dear to me i remember one day i said to him you know we were all living as a group in this building four stories three or four stories bristol gardens is how tall three stories four stories four stories and all these people were Muslim who all did vexer together on a regular basis a lot of stories about that place they're pretty remarkable remarkable time and i remember saying to him you know i said you know maybe because we were having trouble with the electricity and the gas because we were rebuilding those buildings to live in them we were fixing the gas and electricity and i said maybe we should just not use electricity and gas we could just use boil lamps and otherwise and just just and he looked at me like some revelation and he stood up and he right out in the hallway started shouting down the thing hello akbar hello and we did it we did it for months we'd cook whole sheep in the basement in the kitchen in the fireplace with wood and charcoal and we'd serve whole whole cooked sheep to the people from the from the central mosque 35 35 countries one day were represented we would feed these people that so i mean one hand we could do that on the other hand what we want to we can also do is develop this absolute integrity of our own being they can walk through anything i like to say i like i believe and i appreciate being with bikers and bankers in massajid or mash pits right some people will laugh that when i say mosh pits that some some people won't even know what a mosh pit is i miss mosh pits and crowd surfing to be honest i've done it anyway i've done raves all night all night raves when my kids are having naps and falling asleep i'm up in the dawn and i'm still but i'm doing hopper with the techno music going we live in a body our souls are in this body and i say to my i say to myself his soul how are you doing in this body where i've taken you what i've done with you and uh how is it and you know it you know the the line there's a line i'm a very i'm a advocate for popular music and popular expression because it's the voice of community and people even however corrupt it might be it's a voice and the voice is speaking and it's a body in the same way that the the body of the community in the world the body of the community the neighborhood the city those bodies and the world all speak in the same way that our body does at all times our body speaks to our body and to our self at all times awake or asleep someone was telling about their dream last night and when we understand these principles and understand what it means for a body to be speaking to itself and things like understanding what what is this dream about i mean he was asking me about a dream and one of the things i learned from one of my teachers is that you know what your dreams are because it's you and it's your elements of existence that are speaking and processing in your dream hopefully dreams are the means by which we process our experiences play is another way that we process our experiences art and expression is another way we express we process our experiences play is a good example children when they play it's not random they play with what has taken place for them and they've taken in and they're processing it because designed into us by a love design is this inclination towards wholeness and integrity and coherence to be whole to be healthy and one of the great secrets and i say secret because some people get it and know this but a lot of people don't and the main group of people that don't get it are the medical doctors and the medical profession in the modern world with due respect the greatest thing they do as healing is probably their intention to do good and help other people that probably has much more effect than any medications they give to be honest but the great basic principle that they don't get is that the the symptoms that we experience any symptom that we experience where does it come from what is what is pain in our body where does pain in our body come from the nerves our nerves in our body why why it's uh it can't yeah it's it's like it basically gets a voice our body speaks it off so how does our body speak at all times to our body and ourself pain so i'm standing on our foot our foot says get that person off there if our back is hurting people have chronic back pain and i try to try to get them to hear your back is complaining it's complaining saying don't do this anymore don't sit in chairs anymore don't sit in the car with your back like that don't sleep on a soft mattress with your back and don't don't sit huddled over the computer whatever we offend our bodies and that's the problem well again it's knowing these things another hikma the other hikma is every single thing takes part in every single experience that we are aren't everything takes part and the on the scene it's so much bigger than the final result it's just the fragments of results the material world it's just the aftermath it's constantly coming into existence at all times every day every moment he is on a new thing but it's discerning that and getting to know yourself it's it's it's not just knowing how much earth air fire and water makes up your massage quote unquote but i was going to say earlier this this two documents that i get out to people the symptom picture some a woman sent back me symptom picture with pages of details about all the things she's experienced and i looked at i thought wow this is really complete and complex and i said to her i said i got your paper your document and it's very detailed and complex alhamdulillah she said yeah well i'm a very complex person i said yes you've got it you got to realize that you're much more complex and i didn't mean this with due respect to how many therapists are there here only one well you know that abla halim mahmood the sheikh al azhar one of the most remarkable of the shakes of azhar he said every every super sheikh is also a psychotherapist that's if they're doing that kind of work because some shariok or not that that's not it's not to transform people or to heal people but shake up be my shake in morocco he said he said the shake is only a midwife it's only there to catch the baby and the baby is you your whole being inshallah this is the work to become all to become who a lot designed us to be and at this point in time i remember being in a in a in a supermarket this was one of those memories forget all i could be my place myself there at this moment this husband and wife are having conversations she was saying well what should we should we eat italian tonight or maybe we should truly eat chinese should we they were trying to have a discussion about what kind of food they were going to eat but it's kind of like but it sounded like they were saying well are we chinese are we indian you know but it was they didn't know what to decide and the point i'm making is we've lost touch with a natural style of life on which we grew our own food in the neighborhood week the average meal in this country has traveled 1500 miles to get there to our table it's not it's it's messed up and it inevitably will bring illness and sickness all these things it's it what 10 minutes uh okay 10 minute break now okay so we can resume okay everything is up the last part mindful yes present it's not necessarily mindful a lot of people they learn mindfulness and they have pretty much mindlessness but there's more than the mind that we want to have present in our being pretty much saying it's not the mind and people say well mind you know mind your body there's one very famous that psychotherapist who's student of someone i do appreciate very deeply he's a student of dr allen shore from ucla who's he understands right brain left brain much more deeply than other people and so but one of the students says and so we mind our sensations we mind our body but he's always went from the mind to the body rather than being there with the body the range here's one thing of the range of sensations available to the body by a loss design is no more and no less than everything he couldn't find in creation that's a lot and that's the material the artist knows about because that's well from what they draw these extraordinary nuances of everything has a reality and all of those realities if we even know of them it has a presence bob villan he took from all those things he wrote and just came out and people would for years and years and years people that's what's the meaning of this song and he says this the song's the meaning of the song and you get upset because they're not getting the point so we take a break thank you i i hope everybody got tea or refreshments or whatever they need so inshallah we'll continue and then we're the next stop will be in an hour for lunch and then the hood and then we'll continue on you know one of the the things that we encounter when we do these programs is we always seem to run out of time is there so much to talk about and you know hakim loves to engage with people but we just continuously run out of time and are never able to cover as much as as we would like to from the participants and hakim as well and so you know one of the things that we've been working on is how do we remedy that and alhamdulillah we've been working on a way for hakim to interact with people and i'm sure some of you have seen in the emails we've sent out or online is that we've been creating a platform to allow for that to happen so i'm sure as we'll see here is no way we can ever cover everything that we'd like to and so moving forward is we're actually going to be able to engage more and there's going to be a lot more content coming out of hakim being able to you know just be hakim and do what he loves to do which is interact with people so just keep an eye out for this stuff throughout the day today tomorrow we'll give you guys more information on what that looks like how to you know sign up etc etc but inshallah again um you know we'll we'll continue until lunch and then we'll pray the hod then continue um alhamdulillah so in respect to what yasin just said the topic what i was saying is in terms of uh in in terms of what he was referring to and since it's my work as a hakim and what i said earlier is my hope to develop the principles of hikmah together as muslims and to discover and bring forth i mean after all we're told and we believe that islam is the last guidance for the people of this planet and with due respect to all people that means it's and also that there's healing in it and and if we're going to honor that we have to do more than imitate what came the things that came before us you know it was the prophet said the muslims will will follow the christians and jews and they're in their path even means going down a lizard hole and uh and with due respect to the islamic psychology movement and the wonderful people that are doing and the good they're doing and and you know i'd like to talk a little bit more about that because a lot of people here when i talk about i try to avoid his psychological terms and psychology they misunderstand that it might my wife is pretty rabid therapist with all the techniques training all the time and but but but i you know i see the shortcomings of that and i think what i would hope to develop is like like yes he was saying there's so much to present because if we're talking about hikmah i mean we're talking about common sense wisdom about everything that's ongoing ongoing and unending i mean i mean even in the scientific world one of the things i mentioned is the vastness of the self i like to point it and i like to frame it like this at some point at this moment probably in some country there's some person a scientist or a medical researcher or somebody and they've just gone ha ha jimmy hendrix aha they've had this aha moment where they discovered some secret about some chemics chemical of the brain or something you know like autophagy how how the cells you know this we get rid of old cells and so forth some point at something and and person saying aha i found the secret of this thing and my studies have proven out and now maybe i'll get the maybe i'll get the nobel prize is what they're but you know due respect that will not end because again the principle here that i pointed to earlier is in it in us is contained an entire universe and the interesting thing it's our own particular point of view of a universe which will have more things in the foreground in the mid ground in the background but it's so vast it's no less vast than everything we can see in the creation and everything we can experience everything we can know about and there's a lot of things we don't know about so having said that that's what i hope for is is to begin and what i've been trying to do in my work is to develop from the model of understanding the vastness of the cell the model of what kind of work can we do besides telling our story and reiterating our story in the psychological manner and like i say but due respect to them i mean there's at least almost the two thousand kinds of psychology and there's tens of thousands of people who will give testimonials for how wonderful it was for them and how changed their life yeah that's true and i'm not like i said i'm not i'm not degrading or saying less about psychology but i'm saying there's something more i believe we can come up with the work and some of you know that how many of you got many have gotten these the three primary exercises from me the the ground sanding and grounding tracking in my chi how many and i've had i'm adding something to the my chi today we'll get to that later because i want to do some interactive stuff with it i'm sorry we can't be more interactive uh we can i would the last the last workshop what you the you back in the corner sorry i didn't hear your name but when you were you were in where you were at home and how you you just felt like walking rhythm rhythmically that's it you got it you know and i remember last the last workshop like i shared with the group how my daughter when she was like i don't know how old she was i'm terrible as far as age this is like four three or four something like that i said and i don't i like to ask children or my wife or any anyone to get something from me i get it myself if i if i possible and i said could you give me such and such from the other room to my granddaughter jenna and she said yes grandpa and she stood on her tip to this way she went into the other room like that and i told people about that and i said and i and so then that what i did is i got this was at the other workshop i won't do it now but i'll just show you i got down on like this and i said so let's do this i got down and fought and then i started crawling under the floor pulling on people's legs and got everyone to play play is something we've forgotten how to do the prophecies and played with aisha you know when they were well into adulthood we forget but we forget and we don't understand the state that play brings play is a unique thing and i like i liken it to play i liken to sleep to make in love to art it's all of these arenas that are not controlled and not done by rote rules there has to be a giving up and submitting to the state you have to relax and play and allow the play to take place it's not random but it's not and it's not controlled and it's therapeutic play is one of the greatest therapies and unfortunately we live in a world now back to what you were saying some of the you know the world now the children will play with guns and when i was a kid we used to play with guns and we'd shoot and from movies and the what we knew about the world that we would we would play you know we'd shoot someone the gun and i mean oh the person would pretend to die and fall down on one hand that's you know parents say no no we're not allowed to play with guns well they're all playing with guns out there and they're killing people and what do you think this natural thing inclination for a child will be to do is to try to process what's going on play is the means by which we process experience sleep is also the means by which we process our experiences someone came in to me this morning telling me about this beautiful dream he had in which someone shot him and i was saying that's a great dream you know and that's processing you know the thing that we don't realize about dreams and with due respect to ibn sireen and you know who knows ibn sireen i know you would know who knows really oh great but with due respect to the to those principles while they're archetypal models and metaphors in creation that are solid like a bear in a dream yeah okay that we could say that typically might mean death or there's there's those correspondences every person's dream is their dream there's a i mentioned uh there's a how many of you see my facebook posts anybody so did you anyone see this recent one i did where i reposted the mother's day a mother's safe home from david white david white is his poet see i'm kidding i'm i'm i'm feeling free just to go up on these tangents david white's a poet who's uh he had this wonderful mother and my wife and i were sharing one time when we heard about his mother's his mother and mother's day and we both shared what must that have been like to have a wonderful mother because someone said well we we hear that your mother was his wonderful person can you give us an example the interviewer he said well i was walking with her when i was about three years old and the son was out and we were walking and she's and he said i looked up at the sun and it was kind of amazing to see son that he looked at his mother and he realized she was more amazing and i was so my wife and i was with him and then we said what must have that have been like because we had difficulties with our mother a lot of us too and he wrote this poem and after she died and she he was sharing it and hit the poem you can find this david white it's i think it's called the letter from my mother that's the poem uh and he the poem is was about a dream he had and in the dream he received a letter from his mother and it was very he was very excited he went to sit down where he used to sit with his mother on the bench to read the letter and as he got into the letter he was reading it and at the middle of the letter he will come and he woke up but i missed that dream you know i didn't finish the dream and he was really disappointed really disappointed and then he realized something and this is the point of trying to make there's a big secret in what he discovered and he said he said i realized i could finish the letter why she was in him this is the truth that we don't understand or recognize or give credence to as much as we might he finished the letter and the person's dream i remember i went to one of my teachers he said he said to me one night he said well do two rockets go to sleep and come see me in the morning and that sounds like well and i had a dream and i had some questions about the dream you know i had a question questions about things that i wanted to buy from him he said do that and i came back to him and he said well and i said i had a dream he said and and i said well i'm not not sure i know what it meant he said yes you know and i knew immediately yeah of course it is there are dreams and to reflect on our dreams we're the best we know ourselves both in the best way and more completely than anyone else and we're hidden from so much as well kind of an equal you know hopefully not equal measures so it's something it's not that we don't see good advice from others even about dreams but so many people i've said to they've said well what's the meaning of that dream i said you know the meaning of that dream and then and they suddenly oh then say yeah well yeah i guess i do because that is if a person has a dream in which they're being and i've had this happen people have a dream people have a dream in which they're being chased by someone and this is a recurring dream over and over recurring dreams are attempts for the self to realize and process completely and finally certain kinds of things does that make sense it's coming up in the dream coming up the dream being chased being chased being chased and then one day the person in the dream stops when they're being chased turns around confronts the person and chases them away and the dream is done they never had a recurring it's done process finished resolved we seek resolution before the break i was getting to this important thing that's missed in most mainstream medicine and that is you know one of the sayings that i love it's a it's a funny thing i love this this expression that opium what a wonderful medicine opium is it has it has saved it has brought the relief of so many doctors and that's the element that you know it's part of the human nature it's not the best part of the human nature to take that tack but one of the thing the most one of the most major things that's important and it's finally becoming a little clear in some of the research now for example in and i'm getting to the point with with what this thing has been missed and in some of the research now there are researchers who are saying Alzheimer's and dementia is the system attempting to heal itself it's not that there's something got wrong it's a mode in which they've gotten into that they're managing what's happened but to maybe get somewhere further in that mode they've gone pretty much it's pretty much gone to a right brain mode left brain is gone the the the the cognitive ordered logical brain is shut down and they've gone to this metaphorical brain which is real we speak in metaphors something some enormous percentage of our language is in metaphors and we don't even realize that i don't know if anybody's done research on metaphors but there's there's several people one of my dear teachers who passed away several years ago he worked totally with metaphor and trauma so so someone would come with trauma of any sort or difficulties and knowing even knowing or not knowing that they had trauma the person the person would come and they'd have the problems and they'd express the problems and he he'd say well what's that like for you and he said and and this i've heard this more than once people say well it's like a wall i come up against so he would say and i've done this with people so tell me about this wall what does it look like imagination we'll get more from imagination but let me get back to what i was saying what was i saying the the single thing i want to get to that think about the doctors the single thing they miss so i can get back to my thread so the single thing they miss so often is it the symptom is the healing the symptom this symptom is the body attempting to heal duh it's like you know someone's standing on your foot it's painful the the mind of your foot and your foot says get that person off my off me my back as i said earlier my back says don't do this to me anymore it's complaining to be able to listen to this body and how does the body speak let me ask you that how does the body speak if it speaks at all times awake or asleep that's my hickman body speaks at all times awake or asleep how does it speak sensations yes what else pain pain is an extreme sensation yes did you say something emotions which is sensations here's another thing sensations are part of the spectrum i mean emotions are part of the spectrum of sensations emotions are part of the spectrums of sensations in the spectrum of sensations right now we're all experiencing a kind of sea of sensations the temperature of the room color the kind of light the ambiance the sound all of these subtle things as well as the more noticeable growth things this is ongoing like a level basis foundational basis baseline emotions is when i say something and it makes you angry or makes you unhappy but it happens in the body and it is as if waves rose from that something that sea well-regulated person with well-regulated emotions they have the emotions but they let them they're like the sea they let the waves raise and settle rise and settle and it's just part of ongoing being alive as my teacher said a whole person is happy sad angry depressed hopeful scared courageous i could go on and on and on and on and on my teacher said that's called being alive and regaining the ability to do that is coming back to life he said back to life is to me healing coming whole again we were all when you know like my granddaughter when she walked to the other room like that that was just being present or when she saw the earth warming she jumped up and down seeing it and then ran to share it was like come on look at this come and look at this that's being alive and we learn how to be stoic we learn to keep every i'm going to keep everything under control god forbid i should submit and let go so when we did that play thing crawling under people they were a lot i mean i'm not we could do it but you can imagine what what happened is everyone they kept doing it and we had to kind of okay okay okay we had to sort of call them together like the you know the the school teacher okay okay class come on you know stop playing we we miss play and we miss having and play is not the reason for being but it has a function and it's an important function anyone who doesn't play it is not playful uh it's it's it's difficult for the serious thing there's a time for playing a time for being serious but one enhances the other one enhances the other period it's the way it works because it's being alive it's allowing the truth of reality to accept its rightful position in the dynamic of the moment it's allowing reality to accept its place with its living and all of its qualities in the dynamic of the moment and the dynamic of this moment right now i am with you and i am taking in what your expressions are you're nodding and when i said some other things laughing and doing these various things that's what brings the life and that brings the connection back to the theme the present and present in ourselves and more whole in ourselves allows the safety to be connected with others and allowing whatever can happen i like you commented sense i like it's your comments comment yeah that's okay but the did so i'll repeat the question more or less two kinds of processing first of all back to one of the things i already said and this is really important it's in that list you've gotten lists of hikmas did everybody get that if if you read through those carefully and if you spend some time on each one they have far reaching they have a lot of implications one of the implications of one of those is all sensation also the the bottom line i said gel already moved me said i am irrevocably bound in this cage of earth air fired water when i was in bahrain at the coran institute there i gave a lecture and i said i asked people in the group in the audience of people i said um you know can anybody is anybody willing to share their very sort of remarkable spiritual experiences and it's specifically said spiritual experiences and four people i chose four people and they told each one told their experience and then i went back to each one i said well you said this and i demonstrated to them that their description of their spiritual which supposed to mean it was all bodily it was all things they felt it's like this that light came in through my arms and i felt this and it was like electric failure but this like you know lifting me it was all bodily expressed spiritual experience back to what rumie says they're being irrevocably bound by earth air fire and water the elemental things of our soul and spirit non-material out of time being here and living in this domain of the body we it's hard to get that because we've been trained that the brain there was a long argument between uh henry james the the father some people call the father of american psychology and walter b canon about where emotions took place and the discussion could go on could have gone on forever they wrote letters back and forth and disagreement but we have to recognize that emotions take place in a body so the right brain left brain now you're familiar with right brain left brain from from what source yeah you said you were neuroscience do you know do you know uh allen and short i'm sure uc le okay you're a biker now right no i'm just joking sorry um well in any case the end the means first of all sensei every sensation is connected to a process a sensation in the body that needs nerve activation nerves and recognition and all the all that that entails and all the subsequent things that take place from that including emotions how the father those things it nothing nothing six in a vacuum alone everything another one of the hikmas on that list is everything in creation is connected to everything else in creation and that's from anatomy you know a lot of the traditional islamic scholars and philosophers amongst other people many people including homey paths and i mean a lot of people who recognize that but i go one step further i say not only is it in connection with every other thing but it's in dialogue with every other thing we look at something we could say that something looks back at us i mean however you want to describe it there is an inevitable connection and when there's connection it means a kind of dialogue now this gets to so back to your thing about processing there's endless kinds of processing there's cognitive volitional processing this is often i found this in the people i've worked with i've done this work for over 50 years now i can say i've seen very very uh advanced professionals quote unquote very good at their work international uh attorneys for corporations and things they've got it down how to control and manage what takes place and the regulation is cognitive they regulate by control if i do this and i think this and i feel this and then i do that and i do this and i do that and all that's going to be okay i can function and i can get the job though although my wife she's not so good with it you get what i'm saying here when those people realize those men for the most part when they realize that you can't control everything it's very clever it's a very clever kind of manipulation of feelings and emotions and physical things this happens a lot in meditation things it's not that we but but we you know there's a final thing of of i mean islam what does it mean how do we start this like hands up like okay i give up you know you know that's the the classic posture you get you get a salt but someone's got a gun on you okay i surrender and i give up it's allowing what wants to take place to take place it's not a control thing and it's not something that i learn in their book and therefore i do this same with adab adab is the way we behave with someone adab thinks comes naturally from good character comes organically from good character one of the models that i've always used i thought was really a great story was about native americans who had their own very particular adab you know in all cultures all high what they call high context cultures and very complex i mean there's some cultures you don't do that with you know in the desi community you don't put your leg up in front of somebody that's not the chief of sight you know that's i'll go over here i had to take care because sometimes i'll say these things and i realize whoops that person talking about being muscle bound and how is that's not a very good thing to be muscle bound and i realized oh my god there's a guy who's really muscle bound it's it's a it's a disastrous thing to get to where you have to have to cut off sleeves to show off here you know i once in mexico i lived in mexico for a long time years ago in the 60s and i used to be at least to be amazed that these truck drivers would come down you're doing down a hill and truck driver would come next to you and hear down and wow make this incredible blast you know and one day i was a truck driver i said how come these truck drivers they all seem to drive up next to you and then shift down and just have this blast i said why do you do that and he said to scare you and i said why do you want to scare me and he says then he got with these things because we're all afraid which is beautiful and afraid and being afraid is an incantation of what kind of iman we have you know that wonderful story i'm sure some even read it there's a book it's popular these days about the woman who's on a ship and her husband is a samurai anybody know that and and the ship is you know it and and the the seas are like threatening to turn the boat over she's on one side of the boat she's going to go to the other side to see how her husband's when she gets over there and he's sitting there very calmly with his sword and samurai you know the great zen kind of master kind of story and he's just very calm sitting there looking at the sea looking at the waves and she says she she said well how can you just sit there he says look what's going on and he draws his sword and goes and stops like this right at the edge of her neck and she starts to laugh and he said why did you laugh she said because i knew you weren't going to cut me and he said exactly and that was the trust i mean it's fine for the scholar to say well if you're afraid that means you have poor iman well okay yeah but we're human beings how do we gain the trust especially if we've lived the life in which everyone that meant something to us did bad things to us and we lost trust in other people this is the modern world this is well i mean they're having fear is a natural quality that we need to have i mean i know neighborhoods i would not walk down the dark alley with on my own at night duh that's a natural healthy fear i know some people that i know i couldn't get you know in gate embroiled with financial matters with them and so on so there's natural balanced fears that we want to have but at the core and this is dr shore alan shore he took into his stuff some time he talks about the early stages of mother being the one who manages our varied affect expressions and she's there for that and how we develop at an early stage or don't develop at an early stage a sense of security in ourselves and then in time we we reinforce that with our dean with our teachings building building you know more for trust and when trust is broken i mean that's one of the biggest jobs i have is people that come to me because their trust has been broken and one of the egregious ones in the modern days is the person that has some spiritual teacher that it's done some things and then they're sort of shattered because they were looking to this person but that's kind of the story of any any you know family member or something like that that that has betrayed us there's so much to talk about and so much to sort out and understand in my opinion in the lens of hikmah in the lens of basic principles of what we want we want to feel safe and it's the closest that safety is the closest thing we call iman yeah hold on i guess yeah going back to yusuf aley salam story like you we are mentioning an embodiment of uh islam like brought up and we talk about everything is uh we are internal internalizing if that story he is a prophet he sees his son seeing a dream he knows the answer of all his uh brothers will one day bow down but still he loses his eyesight in crying for his son the loss of it and and all that in his own life experience of that islam living a prophet suburb embodiment of environment and yes jealousies all of these things so can you explain that please thank you and i kind of missed the final question the question was like the question of the embodiment of our environment affecting us yes and hikmah of utilizing that and how are we to utilize when the environment and the people and the things affect us we are not no prophet but even he ended up losing eyesight yeah so as human being and being in simple terms how do we walk through our life with the stresses and how do we go through our life with well let's back to this what i was saying from shaykh zubair to be or not to be is the question are we going to be present and develop and become who we're meant to become or find our way back to the trajectory where our fitra is taking us to what we're meant to become in this world by a lust design how do we do that i mean yeah we need all these things we need others we need we need all sorts of things we need other people and we need to develop the wholeness within ourselves but nevertheless all those commands will come and the other thing that's important to realize that a lot of people this is aside from the physicians or anyone we don't realize that we say 18 at least 18 times a day bismillah ar-rahman ar-rahim and we koran tells us his ar-rahma is over all things you know i mean but we don't recognize that and we don't know because we're just the lamps on the carpet with certain patterns we can see this we can see and as far as hikmah i'm of the hakeem i have no claim to any hikmah you know and there's hikmah i was sharing yesterday with someone about albert einstein with a hakeem he was he was an amazing hakeem if you if people look at his life and look at the way he lived his life and some of the things he had to say and things he did way ahead of his time i mean from the beginning the first days of israel saying this is wrong and fleeing germany knowing that was going to be wrong and other things one of his saying one of his statements was god may be subtle but he's not mean he's not mean and and in the most disaster i mean how many people have come to me in my career in my life dealing with sick people and they said well i have fourth stage cancer i'm dying and it's okay i've learned something that i'm thankful for in this place that i never knew before how many and i see people nodding because you probably know this experience from other people or yourselves i know i mean i know a man who who went through that he was diagnosed he took this totally had a certain number of this psych there the physician's lot they feel so they're obliged maybe legally to say well you've only got maybe a month two months i know some guy was going through for a month or two months and then he got back to him said sorry sorry we had all the data wrong you're fine what a lesson that was for him it was like really so so yeah all these things happen life happens and to be whole and complete doesn't mean it's easy yeah i i gave that example of feeling ease with myself but that was remarkable for me at that time because i remember growing up for the most of my life i had such fear in public that i my knees were literally shaking i'd lose my voice i couldn't or it just shut up and then all that energy of what i wanted to say could have said all goes in and there's very specific physiological things that happen when it goes in goes to your stomach most typically then it'll go joints anger it's one of the most destructive things we can have but there's a righteous place for it and a valuable good kind of anger you know there's times when we need to be angry and we live in a time where a lot of men have excessive anger and that's often the anger that success in so many men in the modern world women too a bit more men is covering up fear compensating for fear i have to be the strongman i'm gonna have this car that goes you hear me you know i want to go and say i hear you what else do you do but you know people it's like the truck driver said yeah we're afraid and and and so we men we we're expected to be courageous and strong and strong is not sensitive then we have men that go to men's groups there used to be men's group i don't know if they still haven't and the men would go it they develop their feminine properties and qualities and then they come to me and say well my feminine aspect has pretty well developed i cry quite easily and i say yeah well you probably rage pretty easily too right and that's unfortunately the reality that comes with that that that prescription it's becoming whole and it's accepting who you are and what you are now that's for somebody that's hard to do doesn't happen overnight when we experience shame or when we betray ourselves what happens in ourself is enormous when and i say betray ourselves is when when we very young i remember you know i grew up at a time when yeah we get the you know what beat out of us was something if we did anything wrong we'll get our mouthwash i was so literally to know all these things and we were told you know and this is cross the board for most spiritual teachings across the board this is for your own good right spare the rod and spoil the child kind of concepts but inside it hurts and it feels like too much especially when what they thought i did i didn't actually do so i'm getting punished for something i didn't actually do you know all when we betray ourselves and we don't speak out that's a kind of betrayal of the self i know this i believe this but i'm afraid to say it when we don't speak out and we betray ourself that energy in terms of a biological reality it's very unnatural and so it creates a kind of tension that has to be expressed so when men in the classic thing i've seen it i've been able to track this with men when men do things that violate their principles we have in the muslim community a huge uh addiction to pornography amongst the men in countries the biggest group of people and and how many men they feel oh i'm a bad muslim or they they've made excuse for it or they go to a therapist and the therapist says oh it's okay you know in the modern world there's no nothing obscene anymore you don't believe what comes in stays in or needs processing in a deep way in a way that may not be able to be processed in real life but but men who betray themselves and don't speak out from they they then that energy that's inside that's that odds with each other with itself it demands expression and it'll come out in aggression for the family usually is that oh okay i couldn't quite make it out because it looks like five five minutes okay now i are there any threads that i left behind back to this thing from the physicians yeah i think that's an important topic you brought up about um the internet stuff like what do you prescribe for that though for which the pornography thing that how well if you have you treated people with the pornography oh yeah how do you treat it and stuff like that it's hard it's hard because it it gets into the body and into the hormonal system and the hormones and the neurology and and it's not for the most part in the world uh you know it's okay that makes a difference in terms of being able to free oneself from it you know because the whole culture plays into it in so many ways and amplifies it or keeps the momentum of it it's a juggernaut juggernaut yeah sorry um they respond you give an example of the men and how they respond but what do women do when they betray themselves and don't speak out what is their biological response i mean men and women are different and it's important to recognize that i mean in spite of a lot of the movements today there was a woman who wrote a book many years ago called brain sex she gave it that title because she was a researcher who originally started out in her research to demonstrate by her research how men's brains and women's brains were the same and as she went along she realized whoops they're not at all the same and she lost her funding for the book but she got it by calling it brain sex and making it kind of book that could be sold but women i mean all the same things can happen i mean we overlap i mean text i use i mean we look if we look at testosterone and oxytocin right people know that this kind of demonstrates some basic differences but the prophesorism he said the women the women have a realm and a kingdom that is vast and we men have no access to it and that's it's it's really important to get that clear we have as men we have a biological animal dominance by our voice if we raise our voice once to a woman that's a message it says behave yourself because if it comes down to it i will kill you whatever you know sounds funny but we laugh we haven't even gotten into this why we laugh and what we laugh at and what the laughter does i mean it's a it's a really powerful thing because it's back to that first it comes in the thing in the alternation of day and night rising to a peak activation and settling and laughter is when there is compression and contraction come and the brilliant sound of comedian plays works it works it works it works it's and then bam gives that tweak in the punchline in which we don't we don't cognitively see brother in city you know we don't cognitively decide to laugh it happens we can't say oh that's funny i'm in and everybody laughs when i say that what's interesting is they laugh at recognition yeah no it's it's a spontaneous organic it's a kind of orgasm autonomic system release and that's why the the stand-up meetings they know the topics that will always have contraction you know marriage oh and to the jokes about politics family gender nowadays so they know how to tweak it and they're masterful in their it's a kind of therapy the thing is that the release of laughter is not necessarily not necessarily therapeutic and it doesn't necessarily heal although some laughter i've seen people laugh there's a Moroccan joke i don't have the time to tell i told it's a Moroccan the guy fell off his chair and it was on the floor like you know i've seen another in new york man i told a joke about new york and he started laughing it didn't stop laughing until he was crying yeah so that was an example of it going deeper but but really these stand-up you know accidentally have all these stand-up comedians now man it helping us to manage the insanity of where we are at the life we're living right now and they they serve a good purpose you know it's more than the court gesture it's you know but it's it's so uh women do the same thing not the same as men because your your men women's mandates are different although they're changing in a lot of what women are led to believe is well you need to be more like men that was a my fair lady didn't mean how many people really are sticking none in my fair lady great why can't a woman be more like a man that's the song why can't a woman be like and and the outcome of that story because that's from what's what's the story it's from big million yeah because in the end she leaves he's done i'm done with them so women yeah they process differently and they they don't do the same kinds of things that men do there are i believe they're pretty likely more weak what we could call what's the term they use uh narcissists but in in the story original story of narcissists narcissists was a man and the woman was echo his partner was echo and echo could only repeat what he said she couldn't have any creative volitional things from her own self he was only repeating what he had to say so we can continue after thank you for the attention i love the nods and they appear here so as i said in my disclaimer at the beginning don't expect anything too linear but now that you've had lunch you know the pythagoras would not take any students if they've eaten recently and basically but i try not to eat when i'm giving a presentation because i know a lot of my energy will be done doing that and in fact it used to be about any sort of long thing i had to do it i'd sort of live on just milk but i you know i now now it's pretty much like almond milk or coconut milk okay so now that you've had your food how would it be for you all to stand up what i'm going to do i'm and let me just explain something that some of you have gotten what i call the exercises and which are all exercises of awareness and exercises of awareness it means by just consciously paying attention mind is also a verb it became this thing that's up in our people refer to as mind being this brain the brain and mind are different mind is also a verb meaning to pay attention to something mind your elbow mind the gap mind your own business someone's holding you from new york right so the mind when we have pain someone's standing on our foot we can say that oh i can feel pain in my foot my brain's recognizing and there's this loop pain you know get off my foot blah blah blah i said earlier the body speaks so paying attention to something when we pay attention to something we amplify it that may be in that list of hikmahs when we pay attention to something we amplify it it's the hadith kutzi Allah is in your expectations of him if we expect the best and we believe in Allah's rahmah it's more likely we're going to find it bob dillon said if we expect the worst we'll probably get it so we know this clearly we some people look at the world have full have them you know that we know we all know this as a basic truth yes so the mind we you know we could say that the foot our foot is saying get off we can also say the mind of our foot is saying get that person off or the mind of our back my teacher as i said i think earlier we if we ideally we we think and understand with our whole body and we feel whether a whole body from our toes to our toes of finger their fingertips and there are people blind people where's the dentist there are blind people that develop the ability to see red and green with their fingertips i met a mad once that's a longer story i won't go into i met a one man once because he believed in he follows the principle that the arabic language like sanskrit the arabic language is something more than symbols informs on a paper for something else they have life of their own each letter form some of you may be familiar with that concept in islamic philosophy but he actually lived stayed with a man in pakistan who he demonstrated to someone who didn't believe it he demonstrated to this man i stayed with by smelling the sentences the man wrote an eric and could read them by the smell of the letters the ability for us to develop our sensibilities is enormous it's enormous it's so much more than we realize women tend to have it already better than we met by the nature and the sensitive nature um so i had to stand because the exercises of awareness i mean let's just start with this if you're standing on your two feet first of all are your knees locked or unlocked locked who's locked who's locked okay that's an unnatural way to stand we learn to lock our knees when we're children if you watch children that three or four or five years old they don't start locking their knees until usually difficulties in their life because when we lock our knees the dynamic polity and the sense of being on our own two feet and connection with the earth and the ground is cut off so from the hips downward dead it's hard if we lock our knees it's hard to get back to this dynamic in which your legs listen your legs feel the weight of your body for anybody who's in the medical field or know that have you know we we we recommend for women you know in menopause when they're getting older when their hormones have changed for for bone density to take calcium well okay you can take as much calcium you want but if your system is not assimilating and putting that calcium into where it's needed then it means nothing in fact it could be damaging you all for hear that it's pretty important it's not quantity it's effectiveness and the ability to manage something same with what we experience in the world that another one of the Hickamons on that list is a definition of trauma that I don't see many trauma therapists using which is anything that we cannot that you take in back to the questions and discussion we had earlier about things anything we take in that we cannot assimilate into the wholeness of our being or eliminate becomes toxic the greatest the biggest example of that is an arrow in fact the word talks comes from the Greek word for the poison that was on end of arrows the arrow goes in we can't assimilate that if an arrow goes in it's even hard to pull it out experiences can be the same very difficult to so there's a you know there's an art manage how to do this and that's art of like you know healing from things of that sort so anything we cannot assimilate or eliminate that we could call trauma we could call that toxicity and poison for our system so the exercise of the wholeness that I give out to most people I work with are three three stages one is standing and grounding and in grounding how many you're familiar with this film of documentary called earthing anybody earthing earthing to well it's worth watching and one because it's something I've been teaching for years and years and years which is you know the value of walking barefoot wherever you can wherever you can and whenever you can in Pakistan they used to have this they used to say if you have any problems with your liver you walk on the fresh wet grass in the morning with the dew that that goes through the body the body is much more dynamic than we realize what we feel with our feet what we feel with our hands is this research someone just told me about recently that our animal nature is so much more vast than we give it account for in my mind because how they said we do not deny our animal nature we honor it respect it and we go with it we run with it literally or gallop with it if you want to think pounce with it all these things but someone told me recently about a study in which people they were in a situation they had assistance situations set up where everybody was shaking hands and they they discovered with these cameras that most people who shook hands with strangers you know they'd go away and when no one was looking they'd smell their hand like what did I just do there what did I open myself to and you laugh because I mean yeah there's something I mean people it's people are strong you know anyway so the exercises of where and we can develop these sensibilities to very very high degree the man that was could smell by you know when he discovered this man that could smell by reading the Arabic letters by smelling he said to him well how do I develop that sense and he said he said you develop it by doing remembrance of Allah and that of a certain kind la ilaha ilallah over and over and over and the value of doing these recitations whether it's in Arabic or any other sort of uh uh kind of practice in which you repeat a mantra this has rhythm to it the ilaha ilallah it has breath it has sound and if it has meaning for us in terms of our beliefs and our faith it has another power that's very powerful in terms of developing integrity and wholeness within us singing the last workshop I did I got everybody to raise their hand and speak their name like I Akim Archuleta commit to singing as often as I can as I can with my family or with anyone I can find every day if I can do it as much as possible until this from this day on and everybody said yes yes yes actually people did it people I got emails they said I've been singing with my family it's great and and I recommended a book called rise up singing and it's got all these songs of all sorts that you can sing we used to as human beings sing together and dance together every single culture I don't care how rigid spiritually they were or religiously they were I should be better say everybody has singing and dancing as part of their culture no planet on earth is without that because naturally comes forth from us right is there anyone that could disagree with that no I said this in Bahrain when I gave that the thing I was referring to when I asked people to give share spiritual experiences and I just noticed you're having trouble with standing out to stopping I'm sorry we just had a meal too so I said that I said everybody the same group that I demonstrated that their spiritual experiences were very physical that same group a man came up afterwards and that's right said everybody sings and dances and he said excuse me brother but dancing you mean like Michael Jackson and I had this image of this this wonderful you know elderly desi your uncle whatever doing the moonwalk and I said yeah if you can do it go for it movement is one of the most essential things now but these exercises they're not like calisthenics or anything although calisthenics from the greeks had care with it a great deep understanding that learning was also intimately integrated with the body and body movements so one of the basic hikmas that's that I work with for everybody wherever you are whatever you're doing is as is the body this came from my beloved teacher dr. Alexander lowen the way he put it was as is the body so is the self because the self and the spirit the rough lives in this body so a stiff body is a stiff person a weak body is a weak person a flexible body is a flexible person now you I've got you standing still and some of you are going like this that's okay but standing on your own two feet and balanced and with knees unlocked so the ones that raise are your other people who said locked knees are knees so locked because if you unlock it doesn't mean bend at the knees that's that that's a deeper exercise but but but not locking them your body then feels connected and standing and you feel the weight of your body your legs feel the weight of your body more fully yes can you all get that it takes a long time to get out of the habit of locking your knees but basically the energy is shut off from here now the film earthing that I mentioned is about something I used to teach science is it so I'm just you're gonna I'm gonna have you standing here for a while so till we get to the exercise I used to teach science and I was a science nerd from when I was really really young and in science class one of the science classes I did I had one boy take a big thick extension cord and hold the metal ends and he was in a room with synthetic carpet I had him walk around the floor holding this and I had the extension go two classrooms down and another boy was in that room this is my male class holding the the lead on the end of that same extension cord or actually had his finger like this made me half an inch from the end of it and he I had this kid walk around and what happened to the other kid in the other room spark a spark the spark was generated by that kid walking around on the synthetic carpet through his body through his hand through the extension cord to the one of the this film earthing points out this extraordinary thing happened in the 40s the name of one of the Beatles albums rubber soul rubber souls came about and with rubber souls we stopped connecting to the ground and the earth itself in the recent studies to go and stand 15 minutes even 15 minutes on soil or grass and earth earth the bodies these these these electro electro synaptic electromagnetic activities are kind of fire it's electric electrical energy and they do pass through our body that was the experiment for the kids to see the building of those negative ions but the point is we used to be crowded on the earth and even before when we were leather souls there was more connection and more discharge but 15 minutes on the soil or grass will reduce reducing some studies recently will reduce all sorts of in uh inflammations in the body so you know I gave this prescription 20 30 years ago walk barefoot whenever you have a chance on anything and barefoot in the mornings that's the saying in pakistan that you walk barefoot in the mornings so grounding is the first exercise that I give people grounding and standing and the second exercise is what I call tracking but we'll get we'll go through each one of them these are things uh the the grounding exercise hello is that good I don't know why that's funny is that better is that better I'll speak up so the first exercise again from my teacher alexander lowen I did this one at the last workshop I but I don't usually it's not written in my uh documents that I send out to people I work with but this one is just simply when your knees are you learn and develop the ability to stand on your own two feet that means not this one or that one but both the equally and notice how that's different than putting your weight on one notice how much more solid you feel as is the body so is the self if the body feels grounded and strong in itself this is what it addicts people to working out at the gym they feel stronger their body muscles get stronger and then you say hey this great feels great I'm going to do this until I have big huge muscles and I'm a disaster stop because you become addicted to that and and you become addicted to how you look which is unfortunate but the point is if you feel stronger you feel stronger on all levels not just in the body now the way you're standing like this good good go back this this is anybody familiar with this posture come on it's called it's called the the posture of of power the power posture it's like you know that when was something I told you to do such and such it's not the same as I told you to do such and such the body speaks at all times and all gestures and tone of voice we'll get the tone of voice over the ones this time so we have very little time to do all this stuff but again as you see mentioned the programs that are going to be opening after this workshop that will be open to anyone to all of you especially because you're here we'll be more in more detail with all of these things that each other you know you can use up with videos and stuff like that and it's a wonderful team it's people that are doing the same for me because I have not been able to write a book to include all this stuff so so the first exercise from my beloved teacher dr. loan is one in which you keep your knees unlocked when you stand first of all and develop the ability to do that and the habit of doing it when you're waiting in line just notice what it's like to lock your knees what it's like to stand on one leg and then notice what it's like to stand equally on both legs equally divided weight and how that gives you a better sense of strength in yourself no you don't need to stretch in fact levitating your stomach go is the goal at some point but we can get to that at a later time but it's equally on both feet we have another i'll get to another exercise before we finish uh on the on the standing but this exercise is simply one in which you bend and you bend your knees and you touch the floor with your fingertips go ahead so just bend down between your touch but don't rest on your fingertips don't rest on your fingertips but just hold your fingertips there and your legs are bent that's better yeah actually it's got so you've got some stress on your legs keep your feet on the ground flat if you can okay and just hold them there and notice what that feels like if you can't do it it's all right uh but the whole the whole thing is is maybe your legs will begin to tremor a bit any tremoring now you're not remember you're not weight resting on your hands you're just touching the floor you're every all your waist on your feet and your thighs your legs right okay now that's a grounding exercise now if you very slowly slowly stand up keep your knees unlocked and now stand on your toe feet if you noticed how you were before you went into this and how you feel now you should feel more on the ground am i wrong you feel that it's going to be different for all the people now the next exercise the next part of this different endless exercises for grounding when i was doing this at a group of people in uh who were in trauma learning trauma therapy somatic therapy years ago i did this and i said well one of my grounding exercises is what we call salads prayer because our prayer is standing bowing prostrating at seven points one two three four five six seven seven points on the ground and i had the and all of these therapists none of them muslims they said well can you show us how to do it and we and i said well why don't you wind up and so we all did it and we ended up doing rock hats you know a couple of rock hats and at the end of the rock hats it was the time stop for love you know i i hate to even mention this it was the time when we first began it's it hurts me to say this began bombing at gas and one of the women at the end a couple of women started crying said this is what the people were bombing do as a regular practice you know that was a wonderful thing they were appropriately understanding from it so that's grounding now this grounding the other is really simple grounding exercise and this can be done with the hands on the hip the hands on the hip part of this i often give this to young people who are going exams and this is just simply bending at the knees keeping your upper body upright and bending at the knees until you feel pressure on your quadriceps and legs and you begin to begin to either burn hurt maybe even tremor just that any any tremoring any burning tremoring the tremoring is a good thing let me say this one of the things we misunderstand about the body is that tremoring is not a bad thing tremoring is a good thing and it's bringing about a better state the body tremors naturally with stress and it achieves something by the tremoring so this is the basic exercise people to do that going into exams if they want to do it with more for the women more this because the women the ones have been you know pushed down for so many many years centuries or they should say or whatever across the board to do this until you feel the burning and then slowly straighten up notice what your legs feel like but don't walk your knees and then notice what it's like is very simply and carefully make any kind of movements and steps and one of my teachers said if you can make three steps with total awareness of what's happening consciously and with that recognizing and experiencing it immediately and fully and directly three steps would bring some sort of spiritual arrival by that simple act this is a mindfulness principle that some people when they teach mindfulness do teach these things awareness and paying attention to the body and following and tracking the body in the all of these kind of meditative mindfulness all these various exercises and practices but martial arts all these different things can be effective providing they integrated and they're understood and they're taught and the person experiences something so you notice I said experience of something and notice what I did with my body now I don't have to do that consciously I've learned that one day I was giving a lecture in England and I've been studying these things and I realized that I was saying and not only that but you know and I whatever I was saying this represented what I was talking about like not only that I thought what am I doing here I was speaking with my body as much as I was with my voice we'll get to the voice because the voice and the modulation of the voice is huge huge huge and just as a head heads up on that it's not in the words it's in the tone of the voice and women know this because men often don't know it because they have words and parents often don't know it because the children it's just words but it's the tone of voice that tells the message and it's much bigger than the words okay so that's now there's exercise is again from dr. loan in this one you have the knees unlocked you relax your arms you're just there could do it with that too but and you let your body move the weight of your body move forward to the front of your toes the balls and toes of your feet and notice your overall state and the quality of that and hold that and then move back where most of your weight is on the heels and then compare it again forward heels what's the difference what's your experience what's what's the difference in the overall state you have to have more trust on your heels how might that be framed for anyone what did anyone experience the difference you felt on forward you felt you had more control well the forward is both are correct yeah flow what about flow if you move back and forth yeah but the difference between the forward and the back the forward position is an active position you know they they say on your toes ready get ready get sat you're on your toes now we'll get the yawning later that's good that means you're coming more into your body so i'll get to that more later maybe even tomorrow i don't how many i hope you could be here tomorrow because i would like to go more into the yawning and the value of yawning despite of the hadith which is not about yawning to wake up because yawning awakens us one of the overlooked realities of living living creatures all living creatures overlooked okay and now i have to just mention that it starts happening because it's totally involved with social engagements mechanisms of our being connecting in ourselves and then connecting with others okay so this exercise the forward position is active and the heels are passive and if i were down on the ground i would demonstrate the passive when a person's on their heels i would walk up to him and to one of the guys and i'd say to you're on your heels and that means and i'd push him you're a pushover because we can't defend ourselves on our heels you know the martial arts it's like this is yeah i'm on defense i'm ready to go so but active and passing now one of these workshops i did okay so let's do it again forward on the heels on the toes heels of balls and then back now go to the middle one of the workshops like this i did years ago i suddenly there was one one one oh oh she just let out this and everybody turned to she says oh my god she says i just felt peace i just felt this that's this place in the middle that's not going somewhere to do something and not given up when i met mike shake in morocco i met all of his mochadems all the people around him each one of them amazing and i thought was and then when he came amongst them i looked at him and i realized and i saw by seeing him at such total peace i saw in all of these other people highly spiritually involved people so to speak there was degrees of striving for something or defeated by something and in him there was no striving for or defeat he was just there so presence is like that's one of the qualities when we when we ask well what is presence there's many things we can say about presence to be or not to be it was one of the great classic ones that is no accident has been repeated over and over and almost everybody knows that phrase true and we and they say the prophet sort of said was the most present of human beings present why why the body speaks with the body it by gesture by sensation and it speaks of the vocabulary that is regular and consistent for each person when i say something happened back that time i'll make a gesture over my shoulder and i speak about the future i'm likely to do that now it's unconscious but all of these gestures we have i mean very few people if i ever been with in sessions in which if they're doing this if i asked them what is it you're not saying they almost always said well yeah this is what i'm not saying do you understand what i'm getting at now we don't want to get caught up in in decoding and seeing something beneath well that's what i mean no because there's variations and we we want these things to flow organically and naturally and with good good good at that with each other you know with honoring each other but so so she she found this place of the middle now the next exercise is a little more detailed and this are these are things that i send out you know i have written these things out and then the videos that will be coming out available to everybody if you sign up for them they i go in with more detail describing in more detail to do the exercises and kind of the implications the implications are great and the implications of all these simple hikimos that i've listed on that list you know that's what i'm saying i hope we can as a community collectively begin to develop these principles and use them as foundational understandings like one of the ones i mentioned earlier which is anything that we cannot assimilate or eliminate becomes trauma that's established and you know you don't find that principle in a lot of the people who do trauma you know the thousands and how are they doing it they don't they don't try to see that basic under under now that the yawning is good okay and even in this yawning wakes us up i don't want to get to that too soon because later on well i'm gonna have we'll talk about yawning but uh so the the standing exercises so uh this one and you stand it you find the midpoint there's forward back and there's the midpoint and from the midpoint what you do is you put your weight on your left foot and notice what it feels like your foot pressing on the floor with your weight right got it shift to the right put your weight on the right foot pushing down notice the pushing down there and now move to the middle it's less weight because they're they're shared but notice what it's like now to have both feet on the ground pushing and the balance is there or whatever else you notice okay now this next you move to the left foot again feel that left foot once again but now feel the pressure in your knee and the weight pushing on the knee to the foot to the floor got it then the right knee foot floor right got it maybe might be harder there's less nerves in the knee than the foot less active then the middle both knees both feet floor notice what you're feeling inside also generally as you do this now you're off to one side move through the middle because a lot of people at this point they will begin when just by it's grounding in fact you experience that you're on the ground to allow the Dean Rumi said with our feet on the ground and our heads in the heaven planted well planted very often people will experience in these kind of exercises good these they will experience as if they have roots going into ground and the truth of the matter is there is actually a dynamic reality physically between the feet and the ground the roots it's like I won't get too carried away on the details but from a physics point of view we're grounded if we feel grounded there's something happening between our feet and whatever we're standing yeah I kind of avoid those terms because I don't want to get confused with these other ideas you know I mean it's not that they're not true but yeah we have chakras everywhere so this the chalk with middle finger the middle finger chakra that's that sort of came out accidentally I mean fingertips have them I suppose not I mean with due respect I mean yeah you can use that method but but you know at this I'm trying to do is make this very experiential you know grounding as experiences and exercises so now you do the same thing again here left now this time feel the weight and the pressure on your hip to your knee to the foot to the floor can you get that some people it's harder because these are different qualities of nerve sensory nerves and then likewise the right hip knee foot floor and then back here both hips knee foot floor and if you need to take a breath but take a breath nothing wrong with that can you feel that your body has weight on your own two feet that's the goal of this exercise I'm standing on my own two feet equally and if you do this exercise usually there's a little bit more sense of solidity on solid the other term we use is on solid ground you know we say well that person's on shaky ground but we can feel we're on solid ground so those are grounding exercises the other one is what I call bouncing knees and for any of you who might be coming to the dicker tonight one of the practices that we'll be doing is the hadra and the word the hadra means presence and that is done by Sufis across the world not all of them some do some are considered controversial some of it scares them because it's pretty dramatic and but but I think we need dramatic worship and dramatic exercises and practices in a more than dramatic world out there that's facing us and our children and the truth of the matter is when these practices are in place we find young people attracted to doing them and engage with their Islam more that's an important piece so this one is bouncing knees bouncing knees it's just and it can be done this it's good with the hips but every time you every time with the downward thrust you feel push on the ground push on the feel your weight pushing on the floor feel the bottom of your feet feel that feel that weight pushing each time down push push push push push and then the hadra and the exercise and the dance you know with singing we do breathing along with it okay so that you can do that for a while until your legs begin to feel some stress and when you stop and don't walk your knees what do your legs feel like generally speaking what do you feel in your legs now lighter a lot of people feel heavier more typically you feel heavier they feel bigger huh maybe maybe but the stress anyway more typically people feel they're like they have I mean our legs are extraordinary things you know the Moroccans refer to the you know the number 11 bus we don't use it anymore we don't walk we and where I live I mean you know you see people walking in the street you think what's that person doing out there walking so that's the first stage and there's lots of other grounding exercises riding horses is grounding not because you're on the ground but because you need that balance and anytime you're balancing you're away you're aware of your body and your body weight in your center of gravity and all these kinds of things and if you walk something complex on something complex the balance and the maneuvering and the changing of the balance will bring in these so this whole business the feet from the feet all these nerves go up and they reach all parts of our body and the the stibular mechanisms of balance in our ear our feet inform us of where we are at all time and that's how we can walk without you know without falling over walking into a wall except when I'm really really tired and there's been a lot of smoke in New Mexico I have a hard time doing that okay so that's the first thing the second one I guess we could sit down for this how you guys feeling standing up that would invigorate the whole process the hadra but anyway that hadra you know it's controversial but I will say this that one of the local scholars very well known local scholar I won't mention his name but we were walking along and he said to me he said how came you know we should all do hadra and and then he realized there were students his students were behind him and then he said to me he said for our bodies and I don't have to mention his name because you probably think he's the most well-known scholar in the local area a convert that you know and I've seen him do hot drug spontaneous he plays like when we when we went to visit vital veiled falls we climbed to the second tier people know by vital veiled falls and Yosemite this is it's a waterfall all this we got up to the second level climbing where this all the water is all coming down the mist and stuff and and he just started going started this spontaneous other we used to do that used to do it all the time wherever we were in the middle of a supermarket or I was in the back of a truck in Algeria driving down a mountain curving past and all the men in the back of this truck stood up in a circle and started doing the hot dog we need these things in dark times vigorous worship and strong presence in our bodies in our worship that we in turn share with the world and connect with the world through and by so the next exercise that I get is what I call tracking so tracking is this basically my wife had a t-shirt that said what do you notice in your body attention again mind is a verb it means to pay attention to something if I am interested in pw of bugs I'll go out and I'll see everywhere they'll see pw bugs old ones new ones whatever what you're looking for you'll find so this is something we shared earlier and we all know this principle so tracking is an exercise that I give people to do first of all primarily with positive resourceful positive things to begin with until you get good at it and this means if you think like all of you can you remember a time in your life where things were really really good for you everything was on track you were really who you were meant to be just think of the time we're not going to try to remember what was happening that time but just think of that time in the year with how old you were people have that anybody have trouble having finding that remembering any time like that you can't remember a time like that never a time where you're good where things were really great for you now you laughed right you know the worst in the worst circumstances we all have by a lost design we all have times in which we laugh and we have good times and it's okay not not maybe not overall sorry our lifetime the lifetime huh the moment a moment in your life yeah no no not a grid look cold good life no just a moment in your life a time in which you felt like things are great so really positive now take a keep imagine yourself at that time in a picture not try don't go back and try to remember what's happening and doing through the details in your mind well this was happening that was happening and therefore I felt this or didn't feel that whatever but imagine an image of yourself like a photo snapshot and the place you would be in can you do it I've got a few nods hoping if you can do that then go from that image to your body what do you notice in your body from that image here I am five years old on a green grassy field my brother's there sorry sorry electricity you feel in your body where do you feel electricity in your body whole sensation in your body okay anybody else deeper breath okay what gratitude what does gratitude feel like what what's the physical experience of gratitude in your body physically not a gratitude the concept cheers cheers that want to come okay nowhere nowhere to return but there is the face of a law this is a we believe that this is the truth nowhere can return but there is the face of a law with all of this manifestations the good the bad the wonderful the jelali and the jelali yes this is an exercise in which we ground our experience and being where we are we develop the ability to be present with the reality that we find ourselves in at any given time we start with positive things and the reason for that is as we develop this and coming back into the body we're recovering and remembering something that we left behind from childhood because life was too difficult to feel and be present and we learned how to shut down depression depression is not sadness or sadness or melancholy depression is the lack of feeling we shut down feeling because life is too much the things and arrows life Shakespeare said the things and arrows of life we take arms against it to it and that means we recover we equate recovery with spiritual path with healing with becoming whole with finding ourselves with getting in tune with our fitra with our primordial first nature with becoming who we were designed to be by a law one poem a poet wrote in one poem he said we live in a time in which animals don't know what animal they're supposed to be and we're the biggest example of that we're supposed to be human beings and that means all of these things that we know intrinsically and we've learned and we've heard about the prophets that I said and his people his his his lives all of you know we know what it means because it's inherent in our dna and our biggest problem is that we're not being what we're meant to be hello that's why every every psychic and every fortune teller can say well you have a great potential and you're not living it out oh god that guy really knows me you know duh but I promise you this listen if you take this principle and recognize I can become what I meant to be and that is going to be unique from everybody else not different completely because we share all these things as human being but unique we share that quality of Allah of Farid Farid uniqueness because every single thing that happened to us in every moment of every day of every month of every year after year after year after year was designed for that to happen for us to us independently by Allah and that is a Khaliq al-Bali al-Musawir building who we're meant to be and what we are now and our problem is we're not uncovering that truth and becoming what we are inherently by truth and we're still living in the lies that we were taught us we were taught to believe three quarters of this is extricating ourselves and I do this because a lot of people in this somatic work will actually extricate themselves when we're like bombs that hold them getting free from our familial patterns our cultural patterns and all the lies we were taught at school and wherever we were taught those lies and becoming free this is this is my teacher used to say this is the stretch of freedom he used to have me stretch my arms and he'd say okay your arms is far out they go as far as he says now stretch them a couple of inches on both sides further and you can do it and if you take a breath and exhale and stretch them again they'll stretch even further the same with if you if you if you turn your head turn your head as far as it wants to go now take a breath and then exhale and when you exhale move a little bit more and do it again take a breath and move more and it'll keep going point four when we exit when we inhale when we inhale everything in the body contracts even the capillaries in the skin contract when we exhale they want to let go when we inhale our nervous systems charge up and activate and when we exhale they want to rest and relax when the child looks at the mother depending upon what's happening with the mother and the child more or less but even then even the child looks at the mother mother there's a charge up and then when they look away and leave settling if that doesn't happen and the mother is constantly well why don't you look at me why if the mother insists the child would have an aversion to the mother same thing and as time goes on you know the danger and the disaster of of helicopter mums mother must be there to minister for all the things the child goes through the happiness the sadness the anger all this it's okay don't be i'm here so forth but constantly being on them you should do this you should do that we know this yes okay so to learn these things if you learn these things it means the i believe this is the capability of changing and bringing more integrity in yourself if you do this whatever you do in the world will improve if you're doing good things it will improve and one of the principles that i don't know if i mentioned here may have been just a quick discussions is that anything we learn and learning is something we need to look at more deeply and in terms of the hiccups of it learning is engagement and being present means that we're awake relatively awake if we're half asleep you know and we we're awakened by dramatic dramatic things it's like the example i always give is for me it was when kennedy just was shot i remember that day i remember the thing that happened when nine eleven happened most people can say and they'll go reiterate the people say well i was in the tower and i was in this bubble and they'll describe where they were what was happening because that memory is strong by waking up for a moment for that time some people have way a awakeness more often more the greater degree than others they're present but if we develop awakeness in presence it's not a scholarly feat it's not by learning more it's by being present and you'll find people who are very present from the work they do carpenters and car mechanics and whatever they might be taxi drivers they have presence a lot of that presence from is from their learning by being present in a world in which a law is teaching them at every moment in every second of every day and they're awake enough to be able to take it and be changed by it not by oh i'm learning this lesson and this lesson and therefore there's it's not a it's not a left brain now the left brain and right brain principle i haven't gone into that much uh there is a video i have from capetown about three or four years ago i'm not sure how long ago who was which i talk about left brain right brain but the left brain right brain concepts it used to i mean it came became popular in the sixties and then very shortly after that all the science the scientific world said nah this is all myth and they should have shoved it inside and then what came was this neural imaging wave in which demonstrated with the neural imaging of the brain and the body it was demonstrating that yeah there's a right brain kind of thinking and being that is broader and it connects more with the body so so we can say that 95 percent of our memory is though about memory created by feelings and experiences rather than didactic learning left brain with words and principles diagrams graphs this one is an artistic learning it's a learning it's a learning of feeling women are generally stronger at it although people say don't be missed it's not right brain is feminine it's not like that we need all of these things working at once feet on the ground head in the heavens from the sick we need left brain and right brain and part of these exercises are the bringing about the ability when we pay attention to the sensations in the body paying attention to the sensations mean that we cognitively recognize what and where do I feel you said gratitude what does gratitude feel like you see gratitude is a concept and it's this we can be in gratitude as a state but what does the but what does that mean in the body a lot of people say to me well I feel calm well tell me more about calm and that's that's going more deep and into it will calm it's and sometimes it helps them if I say something I will calm it's not metallic and thorny is it warm soft I mean when I first started doing this work with especially with men I'd say well what do you notice in your body and they say oh nothing my teacher my teacher we used to say when men when people would say that he said so you're dead right you're dead because you know that the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of sensory nerves and they're asleep or what what are they because we learn not to and in some cases we consider that I'm a strong man I'm not going to be waved by that it that's okay to get the job done but it's as expensive time of having a empathy and sensitivity to others empathy in terms of the as much as they can accessor can identify the degree of empathy is going been going down every year across the world this is the world we live in duh out there like I say out there on the highway the so-called free ways with 2,000 pounds of metal careening down the road at 80 miles an hour you know one wrong move in your strawberry jam as my teacher used to say you know we can't imagine that doesn't affect us and the fact that you know the again the saying I repeat reiterate over and over is one of the shuyokan morocco said the flood in the time of milk was a flood of water and the flood in our time is separation between us I'm sorry separation from each other and that separation from each other is it's insistent the average size of the the typical the normal the average size of famine in Manhattan 15 20 years ago it was 1.2 people despite of all the people sitting on the steps in the Bronx you know I don't know if you people know they used to have great communities people who have gatherings of all kinds of people sitting on the steps and conversations in real community but that's disappearing disappearing from lack of time and from the just the you know the living together we used to know neighbors I used to walk down the road with my father many many years ago and we'd walk in and say who lives in that house you ever seen it no we'd go to the next house did you ever seen it I've never seen it who listen says are these neighbors we never we've never we've never seen them ever how can we call them neighbors so uh one of the one of my student one of Matt who called himself my student and liked they don't I'm much more he was much more teacher to me uh Dr. author Ali so some of you may know because he's from this neighborhood and he was no author author Ali yeah masha'Allah just one of the best men I've ever known masha'Allah and I went to visit him he became the he became this assistant director of alternative medicine at Yale from UCLA eventually but I went to visit him and we walked down the street with his son Yasin named after with his son Yasin and all the neighbors there was a Saturday and they're all doing things and everybody's out there Yasin how are you doing they all wait because when he moved there he followed suggestion I said what we should all you see all do go to your neighbors and invite them to come in for dinner have dinner and if they don't come go back to the ones that didn't come and ask them again and he said he did it a couple of times and almost everybody finally came and they all got to know the names and they all became friends and they connected with each other now that was deep wisdom and action on author's part and that's who he was but you know to go to make these things happen it's like fighting it's like swimming upstream because everything is asking us to become virtual I mean the great lesson of the COVID period was the way I've said it's kind of like God saying okay you guys don't meet up with each other try this if you don't spend time with you really try this for a while now now what do you think you know and I know so many people who say that now that that's past we want to come together ancestral yeah well there's you know the homey paths have been on to the specifics of what we inherit genetically for over 200 years very specifically and tracking them only in the past say 30 40 40 years the field of epigenetics has come about which identifies again these influences came out of the irish famine mostly you know that they saw that the results that could be tracked and traced if you were part of that that the inherited predisposition for that and and and probably uh you know one of the predisposition was you're going to be real hungry when the time comes you're going to want some potatoes but yeah there is but by a large generosity these inherited predispositions but what we know we were born pure and these are only predispositions that we're not necessarily going to inherit but you know if we if if that was in our family line it probably would be useful to take more care and it's only the homey paths that have got into it in detail and you can address in person what they call the myasms the inherited negative predispositions and the families of those myasms and then they can address them the homey pathogrammities and change change the constitution change the whole trajectory now speaking of trajectory i want to get to another principle here how are you for time so can i reiterate what you just said tell me if that's right during the pandemic about separation the pandemic you were in an industry that in which you had to connect with people and you said you weren't going to stop is that yes i wasn't going to stop okay and uh actually amongst the builders we started to do research immediately and found that we were going to ride around with a piece of paper saying we're essential workers in case we got pulled over because you know everybody's panicking and we're like we got to keep going yeah um but in the time of i guess that span because that span is crazy it's like it's been two years yes um the draw that i felt is that the umma of Muhammad sallallahu alaihi wa sallam has inherited from rasulullah sallallahu alaihi wa sallam yes in a way that is different from everything else in creation in that you know allows sending of that event that final blow yes once you've reached a certain distance from behavior and yet we have the you know the coming of rasulullah sallallahu alaihi wa sallam allowing us to go into the end of time yet us as an umma we're supposed to be an example of this connection that you know you really see it in the earthly series where it's like you think that they were erics the way they see it in the word in the earthly series the uh turkish series okay this tv thing yeah where you know everyone is as if the prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam belongs to them yeah you know and and it's what draws us together so that's you know kind of like what we were saying in earlier so just that that separation thing like we as an umma really got to realize that like we are connected by choice that a lot shows us to be muslim yes and no i mean yes because we should be but we're not we've not taken that lesson as deeply as we might have i mean people used to say to me can you come to our community and talk about islam for the youth or something and i'd say what community you mean the community gets together maybe for joma maybe once a year for aid and you have to drive a half hour to see your friends i mean we have to accept part of what i want to say the reason i say yes and no is this is our mandate as muslims you know to do that but we haven't been knowing it not the way we could have i remember i was in pakistan and the the when i was studying the man who ran the big sugar companies balani ibrahim balani i don't know if anybody knows his famous family uh he invited me to come to dinner at his house in this i just think downtown carachi and i went to his house with him and it was this apartment building in the middle of carachi just the plain old apartment building you know and we went in he was on the like the fourth floor or something like that and i thought what's this guy he's he's a man you know they call magnets right you know magnet no like a economic financial magnet whatever they call you know big big dude and and i thought how can you be living here and then i realized i found out that this entire apartment building would have a common courtyard in the floors where it was all a family one family and that that was all these extended family was like a thousand people all living together all the children could go and play with each other you know that is a community and in terms of i don't know what your project is about you mentioned but my wife when she was in england she joined a co-housing community how many people know co-housing co-housing community nobody you know co-housing co-housing communities are communities of people it's not like hippie communes it's usually professional people who can own a house or be part of a community in which they have common grounds and they all have a kind of they have rules they will live by like the community she was in my wife was in was the oldest one in in england in stout and they no drugs or alcohol or is allowed amongst that community but they all can you know every day communicate with each other they have kids to watch they all know each other and they have common ground every every member of the community has the opportunity to make a meal if they want to for everybody or not and it's very kind of well managed and regulated but you know i know someone who is one of the major people involved in zaytuna she really kept zaytuna running back in the early days and she left and she went to a co-housing community and said she said this is the way we should be living as muslims but no one's doing it well maybe down the road inshallah maybe that's i don't know if that's your project the trees good well they do i mean i think they they do like most people they they manage i mean at the start most of the people are well well enough regulated for being socially you know managing and then they do these things on their own but i mean very few people you find that they're not damaged in some way and they don't need some help i mean i i don't think it exists i don't think it exists and and and the question is always well are in moms there's an interesting study that's done by this man i don't know how useful this is for any of you but i think it's interesting to reflect on and to know that there's a man who did a study on outcomes and he has an organization of therapists mental health workers if you want i don't like use that term mental health i think it's it's pretty short-sighted it's not i mean that's kind of it's it's got a stigma that's you know mental health and and the dsm you know the diagnostic manual and qualifying and naming all these psychological illnesses just a poor attempt to be quote-unquote scientific like the medical field which is disaster because it's not the same the human being has endless unnameable and unrecognizable factors in what's going on their whole beings so uh i lost my track oh and the problem yeah so they deal with individually you know just like people do here but they keep this community part going that it's the thing the thing is traditionally in muslim you know what happened then during coven in morocco people who knows what happened some of you know i know some of you anybody familiar what happened during the coven time in morocco i mean it's indicative of something really really important they all when they were locked down company they couldn't go out they went to the rooftops and they sang poems and calcitas from building top to building top across the cities and the villages i mean well what kind of i mean that's that's a response that's an idea you can't do better than that but it says something about their basic you know they weren't in there getting i mean in this country what are the people who are going out buying as much toilet paper and guns it's like toilet paper and guns like what does that say about the society it's not good and and you know in terms of what houses what i'm giving you is how is this meant to be back to how is this meant to be useful it's for all of us to wake up wake up and recognize that a law gave us a mandate that's extraordinary and by our name get the guidance that if we take it take it on and use it to transform ourselves and serve others it's remarkable and what it can do and and and i i suggest we must do it because it was like many many years ago there was a gathering there was a gathering that's probably 30 years ago or something about with all these scientists and doctors and all these different people and they got together and it was an international gathering and the thing was like what do we do to deal with the future and it wasn't about climate change or anything it was about how do we manage the insanity that's coming about how do we sustain ourselves emotionally psychologically how do we keep balanced in this world is coming because it's going off the rails that was 30 40 years ago and it's not gotten any better one of my teachers in an old old and do respect any therapists in here i can say this to you huh and i don't mean this i don't mean this to do the little therapists because thank god they're filling a gap uh in a in a society international society it's bereft we don't i mean one little one young girl that was my i worked with her from the time she was eight years old and she's about 14 now and her both grandfather both of her grandfathers died during covid and she said to her mom this and this moved me to tears every time i repeat this she said to her mom she said can can i can't be like my grandfather and can we have regular sessions where i just talked to her that's what the therapist has done for people carl rogers carl rogers talks talks about how you know the therapist is this person that a person meets at nake finally can tell their whole story because they know it's going to be kept private only between they can let it out and speak to someone and they can trust that they can kind of spread it they can say whatever that for so many people is like thank god you know and that it's like my teacher in pakistan remember that this what i said earlier is that when we breathe in the nervous system charges up and when we breathe out it's supposed to settle my teacher in pakistan and people used to come to him for herbs and plants whatever they come from germany all over the world and then when they were leaving he if they were the right kind of person to do that he maybe put his hand on their shoulder and say as final after or if it gives the prescription everything as they're leaving he'd say you're going to be okay and they would go oh thank you so much and i look and i think that's the medicine because they gave this great sigh of relief it's trusting that you're going to be upright but really trusting not you know talk we know more than talk because we hear beneath the talk and we believe beneath the talk this is the great advice i get for husbands and wives we have to go uh break sorry oh i left you hanging that's that's for the next episode stay tuned well the problem is all of if i give this thing on the husbands and wives all of the women were you going yeah and all the others okay i don't know about that yeah so inshallah if we're gonna take just 10 minute break just to get outside have some tea if you'd like and then be back at 315 inshallah so we're in the the final stretch of of today and one of the things we're going to pass around is one of these things and for everybody online we actually sent a link but if if for example the exercises you found them helpful some of the things that are coming out on youtube that you know the team that's been basically creating this platform for hakeem will be providing go to here hit subscribe i know that's overused and it's nobody wants to hear it but it seems to be the best method to reach everybody so we're going to pass this around and again just sign up because this is going to be the best way to get the videos that are coming out and we have so far done i think 12 12 there's 20 but 12 or sort of yeah so 12 are going to be ready and a lot of information like i said like the exercises um and other things and information that hasn't been out there before so i know there's a lot of old stuff from is it mecha centric or old videos uh yeah to make those yeah so there's some old videos but alhamdulillah there's new material 15 20 years old yeah 15 20 years old so this is new stuff that's coming out and alhamdulillah it's it's going to be just out there for anybody who wants to but again if you want to you know get the stuff as it comes out and as we edit it and as the team edits it edits it you know i hate to say it subscribe like hey guys it's hakeem hit subscribe um and yeah so so alhamdulillah just just do that and and you know we'll do them as quick as we can and then we'll talk more about the curriculum that's going to be coming out of out of the stuff so inshallah but i'll i'll pass it over to hakeem inshallah okay my energy is beginning to wane a little bit so i'll do what sometimes happens is just sit here i i get very when i speak i like to use my body as i said earlier and uh don't underestimate the level of connection that you make with people when you are embodied so the principle of connecting and being present in yourself the principle it's it's it relates to a huge reality because what i was saying earlier about all the data that we take in we look at that 40 000 synaptic connecting learning connections per second in the first two years that continues as we get older it diminishes to some degree because we begin to you know the the connections have to do with language learning language learning to learning to do more uh involves and more detailed movement because all of these things mean building building patterns and capabilities and memories building memories in ourselves and everything we learn and i i use this thousand and one nights because a thousand or someone mentioned article article these these series they're all designed so you watch one piece ah well i've got to see what happens next ah i got to do it that's life we don't always have the enthusiasm we need to recognize that every single day is a new day there is no such thing as same old same old the amount of new material that comes in at every moment in fact is so much that if we were to take it in appropriately and fully to be honest we probably wouldn't be able to walk down the street we would be so overwhelmed it's like i say to people sometimes i feel like my biggest problem is not depression i mean i this time and i feel depressed there's times when i feel angry there's times when i feel hopeful but we want to feel and be alive and all the things that that implies and that's called what my teacher said that's called being alive and and recovery in that is is called coming back to life depression as i said is the lack of feeling this is in my old videos from 20 years ago and being alive is feeling and feeling is too hard so we shut it down and we learn how not to not to have it but if we could begin to appropriately you know take on being so alive that we experience things some people experience more than others certain types of people in the homey pass have been able to identify those hypersensitive people that when something happens they experience it very deeply fully and then there's another side and these are mizaj these are different kinds of mizaj mizajat you know they're different states and different maqab different constitutions we can say but but we're so much more complex than the constitution of earth, air, fire, and water i mean we're so complex we can't measure and there are so many factors involved and what the scientists have been trying to do for so long the social scientists they've been trying to scientificize their practices and their understanding by doing and using the medical field as an example as a model and then creating the dsm that is the diagnostic manual in which they can name this this this and you've got these qualities you have you know borderline personality disorder you have these these you've got your schizophrenic it's like you know all these names and that was an attempt to become more scientific but through the matters like i said before i believe like carl roger said i believe that the biggest thing the therapist brings to a client how many therapists are i how many kinds of asses i keep expecting to see all all these hands go up usually there's a bunch uh like he said to have that one person that finally hears them you know they finally hear you know someone says well here's someone because one of the big and back to the the men women so we get to that i there's other things i was going to say but we did kind of leave off as the next episode well the prophet said to him he said woman has a domain that is enormous and women have no access or entry to it geology and roomy did a lot of commentary on that and many of the shield through the years have made commentary on what that is a lot of people have gotten upset even one woman top one time you know 15 years ago it's something got upset when i said these things because she was looking to man as being man as being this you know it's a difference it's not one over the other but we have to see realize that the prophet started to them he was honey honey he was honey since that he went to the caves and meditated and he got his revelation and what did he do when he got his revelation he left the cave came back down to the solid level ground and he went to katizia rally low and he didn't he didn't ask to be comforted but she did wrap him up he asked for advice for counsel am i crazy i'm not crazy basically that's a significant beginning to this whole drama we call Islam that was this first day the first day of it and that's why you've been allowed to be the great shea he said the path to god for men is through woman that's not a little mistake the path to god is through one now that could we we could we could see it as mother but i know i mean i could give you examples of stories of men men who have been transformed by their ways holy love and blessing and finally healed of things they were never able to heal with for whatever spiritual practices whatever therapies whatever they might do that was the final missing piece and the what the the wives and the women that are there and they're doing this they know what i'm talking about because you know things and learning to trust what you know is the secret of your wisdom your god given wisdom and hard earned wisdom in many cases if you've been pregnant if you've given birth to a child hard earned wisdom we will never know we will never have a clue of what the experience truly is like to have a menstrual cycle to bleed every month we'll never know that let alone maybe it was nine months and give birth to another human along with all the other things that are involved by a love's design in the creation of man and woman and the differences but we men so when when couples come to me and couples come to me with problems i have had it for years and the classic thing that one of my teacher said he said well of course it's always a couple comes in the man says well she's the problem she says well he's the problem duh it's going to be like that but my teacher said and he's not a boy wasn't a Muslim he said the onus is on men the onus is on men to be able to see to have the sensibility to understand the needs of this person to really hear the onus is on men to be able to hear fully understand and recognize the needs of the person they're in charge of charge of caring for not demanding from there are there are lineages of scholars from the minority the scholars who say to their students never ask your wife even to get to a glass of water if they do without you asking me you know that alone demanding woman get a human i mean it's a sad and i have a great dear libyan friend libyan friend who is a great he's very knowledgeable he said well all of that he said all of that stuff was never in the traditional Islam that was inherited from the misogynistic colonizers it was never part of it i remember there was a man here today i maybe somebody i don't want to mention his name but one of the strongest men i know standing on his own two feet traditional knowledge friends all of the scott all of the shiok used to come to his house when i was in Damascus they all came to visit at his house he didn't go to them they came and i remember what's going into i was staying at their house and what's going in his is delivering him and this strong man with great wisdom and extraordinary family he was sitting he was his mother was in his chair like this makes me want to cry because that's the kind of people he was sitting next to her with his arms around her legs and his head under the lap and i thought paradise he was so this reality to grasp that and i've seen their stories and i could give you examples of more time had more time of men who've had that final transformation come from finding a woman that they're able to hear and listen to the violence is men have to be able to come down from their frightened place of abstraction where's yellow shoes hear me i mean i just wanted i want to be sure you were there men we men have to learn how to come down from our abstracted left brain places of fear and abstraction to be safe from feelings to be balanced on the ground and not to be like a woman and not to be you know on for them to be wearing the pants nothing like that nothing say well yeah that's understatement if i remember yeah i can't argue with that much yeah in one of our lectures way back in the day i said people say about women they're oh they're too emotional and i my comment was oh thank god they've probably saved humanity you know through the years by at least expressing something so my exercise that i give men and women this is in response to that and you can take this to your husbands and some of you men may take it off but a lot of men don't do it they don't even they don't even share it i said well share it with your wife then later i found did you share it with your wife well no it's asking your wife once a week on scale one to ten how am i doing i saw husband and a father have you heard this from me anybody you've heard it some of you heard this and when they say three two five one woman said nine i was shocked then you say why and the men then the instruction because the the balance because of the voice all we have to do is one time as i said earlier one time we raise our voice and we get that voice and in the voice we can carry the aggressive message i'm in charge here i'm alpha that's our animal we have to honor our animal nature imma ma gasali said we honor it we don't deny it we run with it and we reuse it and we recognize it to our to our to our benefit and as we get further in this a little bit more today and tomorrow if you can make it inshallah our animal nature in one of the hikmahs it's our animal that heals our animal and ourselves it's our animal that heals our animal and ourselves and if we try to use this brain this thinking brain it can affect the animal enough to do change and bring change but in the end it will be the animal that changes and a lot designed in this as animals everything we need to heal from the most severe trauma in the same way not all things because we can also reset bones and do all the stuff that we can't do you know when you get a cut we don't have to demand the white cells the blood cells or the granulation of tissue we don't have to order that and cognitively make that happen it happens and the same thing is true of most severe trauma providing we allow it but we've learned mislearned and we're taught to intervene for everything to be in control because we live in a paradigm of the world of control and that is the result of fear and the the response of fear well we have a problem that's in this exit more control and the solve problem will be solved no it doesn't get solved by more control but that's kind of the existing paradigm we have problems in the street well let's get more police out there doesn't work you see he's got to get down to the root you know i'm in the same with all these social problems and all of the social political all of these problems have the same character in that they're their configurations in reality and they all operate under the same pattern of the sonata of a law the the custom of a law and the pattern of a law in ourselves in ourselves jimmy andricks and out there in the world the same we go out there in the world to learn about this and we go in this to learn about that out there that is established principle especially in the world of tesaw but it's the basic wisdom so in marriage men have to come down to earth that's the prophecy that some did women have to and women have to come down to earth and develop the ability to listen and listen and hear and men have women have to learn to trust what they know discriminate and not speak everything but trust what they what they know inherently and have the courage and the discrimination how and when to speak it with him and that's the wisdom of women that must come forth the number of women who are awliah probably outnumber the number of men is awliah way far above all the others and the men are the ones who i'm this i'm gonna shake this shake that shake your booty but women have a natural inclination to just do it not to make a big number out of it not to become sort of you know not to be you know get some aggrandization about you you follow i'm saying i see a lot of shaking heads here it's important yes yes all the time yeah yeah yeah it is interesting isn't it and the truth of the matter is if you learn if a man has a mandate to care for that woman which means he has to be able to whatever they've gone through whatever they've gone through you know and and women have gone through a lot more abuse than men men have done a lot of too i mean but it's different kinds of abuse in different circumstances but even if they know that and that's a history the ability to stand strong with a yakin and with compassion and to have the wisdom to be there for that person and to hear it be all right with it dominated as you said because my teacher my teacher my beloved teacher i always say this about him he was a beloved man i mean the little time i spent with him and everybody that met him he wasn't a muslim but if he'd discovered Islam he would have loved the Habra i was always disappointed that he never had a chance to experience it but something that he told me what was i saying before i said like i'm sorry i lost that thread it was yes so did you all hear that did the people in home hear that just that he was saying and i think you're exactly right i mean we're not it's it's not just that we're not trained but the training that we would hope to have had is to become the kind of people who intrinsically and organically know this to validate what a person's feeling and that it's okay i mean the great the great thing that mothers do to child babies when they were young is all the emotions in the affect dynamics they go through the mothers they're saying it's okay you agree okay it's all right do you hear it it could be angry it's all right to me there's always this whole past and but you know just consult consolation and if we didn't get that and we we didn't grow up that's hard to learn it but it is intrinsic for us to know it i mean it's in our being a lot gave us everything we needed inside what i was going to say from dr lo and i remember now that left off was he said we have three kind of basic basic fears the first fear is being open because it's vulnerable so you know like i said we go to a therapist and we go to somebody and we find somebody i mean how many times and i'm sure all of you have someone who's come to you and said i've never told this to anyone before but and they'll tell you something true because there's a bunch of that's and that's that that's good sign that means you're trustworthy persons for them they'll say that they trust you and he said so there's three basic fears people have is being open because of the vulnerability the second one is reaching out because you may be rejected to be rejected or shunned is one of the most egregious things that happened to the human animal to any mammal to any any mammal when they get rejected by the by the flock of the tribe that you know the herd whatever it might be you know all these different names everything we have all these different names i love that they call a group of lions they call a pride a pride of lions and and when you were shunned and were rejected from that group when i was at UC Berkeley and i was working in the film department their the most popular film was baboon social behavior and it was a long documentary defining and demonstrating all these complicated social patterns these baboons had each generation his father uncle cousin and and then all these things that things they could do and they couldn't do and it was you know they didn't read it in a book they didn't get it from margaret mead who knows margaret mead anybody they didn't get it from margaret mead or any you know sociologists it was in their dna very complicated and if you went to a baboon and you wanted to give them a banana you know some tourists intervening you coming in you know maybe that that first that baboon there was not allowed to have that that they'd have to go to that uncle or that person and the point there being that these structures are so are complex and the same thing with the structures that we've built in the past historically and especially high context cultures when they were intact and healthy were awesome and from them came remarkable things and remarkable people the problem is the modern world came in people with with the locomotives and engines that crashed all these things destroyed destroyed you know when there's the what do they call the people that were the in manchester that the the ones that were against the the machines coming in the what the what the luddites yeah the luddites are still a mystery because there's no there's no ludd nobody knows who who starts that movement you know it says but it's really interesting story because the luddites were not it wasn't they're afraid of losing jobs what they said the luddites they said no this will ruin society to have machines making and doing the work that we used to do by hand it will rent the fabric and that's basically what did those fabric makers weavers and stuff were renting and a lot of those luddites luddites became shunned and excluded and they went east africa and became muslims and pirates but it's an interesting story you know it's an awesome thing to play so being so being open so being open and reaching out reaching out as if we fear because we'll be shunned it's terrible and so children what is this thing that we have in our youth these days in schools of building i mean it's just it's beyond belief it's not okay you know these some things that i if i just speak about it to people and i realize as i'm speaking and how egregious it is how terrible it is it's like the number of people that died from their own hand then died in the vietnam war vietnam war i mean how can i say that without being you know waiting something's really wrong here more died than in actual war same thing how these men and children are bullied and then they source things that can happen to a person to feel shunned and anyone who's felt shunned you know what i'm talking about i mean it cuts so deep because our nature is to be connected and i guess i said to you some people said the opposite of addiction is connection because people that's what they're missing they're missing real human connection with other human beings like themselves you know that they feel part of are we all ready for time let me just finish this no one's third fear his third fear and this relates to what we're talking about his third fear is he said the third fear we have is speaking out and he said and his genius i think he said and we fear speaking out he didn't say not because we're not heard he said speaking out we fear because we feel will be destroyed because not being heard is like a message that says you don't exist i learned in urdu just this last year i probably didn't learn it because i can't remember but the phrase is what do you know you're just a woman what do you know that's it anybody know that or do phrase huh i don't remember but yeah but you notice and it's just yeah what do you know and that says basically because that that message and that exchange and that configuration it's not like you're not very inherent it's like you don't exist that's about validation too i'm feeling and saying oh you'll be all right you have to you just you need to do this you need to do that you have blah blah blah i mean learning like she said we don't we've never learned like what what does it tell me i'm sorry if you know that would be but more that exercise that i give asking your wife on the scale of one to ten then you listen to what she has to say you don't say a word you don't interrupt especially and when she's finished you say what else and then men you take away what happens in your body what do i feel in my body what do i feel how many men have come to me in with that somatic work and i say what do you feel in your body he says there's nothing like i said my teacher said so you're dead then that was dr lonan said that he said so you're dead yeah and a lot of men are dead in terms of nuance of feeling so questions and answers or questions let me just say this one of the secrets of questions and answers is you know the answer to the question if you have it that's a long i don't know if we have time to get into that whole thing but it's uh it's a it's a kind of deep truth about these things yes uh aslan akim oh sorry what's the one i thought what happened to your voice sorry about that um now i was wondering because you were talking a little bit about mental health and stuff like that i was just curious like what would you say is um if it's not scientific necessarily that how would you treat things like bipolar and schizophrenia because those are very common nowadays a lot of people have is how how does the hikma tradition treat those well the hikma tradition has been lost but you'll find it you know where you find a tradition of hikma is usually in in cultures that have not been damaged by the modern world so much it's like uh the story trying to think of who this johan harry does anyone know that name johan harry lost connections he's got a ted talk or something like that but he's got a book called lost connections and it's about connections and losing connections and i probably should have that more details about that but that's a book worth reading lost connections but it's about mental illness and he talks about um visiting uh somewhere in africa where this person was the they something happened or maybe it was india had forgotten all the story but the person's land was taken from and he was a farmer and had this land and uh the land was taken from and he was in grief because he couldn't live his life anymore as a farmer and traditions of farming and he was there for this event and what was happening and so they their medicine you know what their medicine was that healed him from the depression that he had they gave him a cow and he took the cow and he made it into his business and got milk and he got other cows and i mean there were in place ways of dealing with difficulties that we've lost in more and in algeria i stayed with a man who was the he was the warden of a prison high security prison he lived in the top floor of the prison with all the prisoners down below the murderers and all these you know and uh he was dying of a of a fatal illness of some kind i don't know what it was he was he was dying he was been in the tradition there in morocco in some of north africa was they would do what they call the liethl shifa healing night and they go out and they get as many of the poor people as they can the more the poorer they are the more they are they bring them in and they feed them they sing they they sing they make dicker they sing calcitas they do all that they make dicker then they feed them really really well and then everybody makes dua for that person and they and this man i met he was the warden of this prison they all made dua for him and they all these poor people and all these all the friends and you know all all the levels of the people they all made dua not only you know heal him and also give him a really good job for them that was the ideal getting a good job and he became the warden of the prison you know he was there chico abdo cotter was his his name but that there were these things that were in place the therapist a hundred years ago was called uncle auntie grandfather they were people that we can nowadays you go to a therapist and the therapist has a schedule well you week ten sessions you've been in twelve sessions so it's time to let you go this is it and and i and i'm not i'm not allowed to be friends with you it's like what what happened there you know used to be the doctor would come to the sunday dinner in america yeah and feelings yeah yeah well you see i mean there you've got the essence of a good therapist a good therapist i mean therapists you don't give them advice to you then that's any therapist's worth is what is what is a therapist worth worth is you know the expression worth something and you listen and you let them give advice to themselves because their healing is they know we all know what we need inside and you give them the courage to make that journey to what they know they need and where they need that where they know they need to go but that used to be the grocery seller i mean when i used to go to morocco we'd go to these shiokha these scholars and we listen we go oh my god nothing then it would be true it'd be just overwhelming your heart and tears and you know amazing experiences to hear these truths and then we'd go and get the cab and the cab driver on the driver in the cab back he would he would be too bitter on them by the time we got to the thing we'd be even more because he would be talking about whatever happened from the place of wisdom these things used to be in place as a matter of fact in communities and even before the so-called mental illness i don't like that term because i think it's it's misleading especially if it leaves us the idea that we've got something in the brain that needs to be altered with drugs that that book johann harry lost connections it's about his journey when he discovered ssri's antidepressants and tried to convince all of his friends oh this is the greatest thing at all all of his depressed friends ssri this is the answer and then when it stopped working he said whoops wait a minute and then he began this long journey of research across the world and he came up with this book called lost connections that that's what was missing and there's no there's no single it's not like one you know shoe fits all it's not like that but because hikmah is about uh arriving at some place in yourself where you're you trust what Allah's giving you and you use the wisdom that you've gotten i mean no one says in this Quran it says he says Allah will purify you purify you or he will purify you referring to the prophecy i said we'll give you the guidance to purify you you will the kitab the principles in Quran the Quranic principles and the hikmah which is considered by some that meaning some some see the meaning of that is it's a product of those other things they all come together and it's a light living thing it's a living a live thing you know i mean i i mean how many times i have asked myself well what is this person need now and i was once working with a medical doctor and i had proper prescriptions with the license number on it and i just for the six year i did that i wrote prescriptions and i went i wrote this prescription offer this man i said i said i'm going to give you a prescription and will you promise me you could do your best to follow it even as hard as it might be to do this he said yes and i rode out ride horses i gave it to him the guy turned white and he said i've had a terrible fear it's incredible fear of horses my entire life he said i'll do it but that where did that come from Allah is the one that heals whether it's antibiotics even i mean there's even a place for psychotropic you know for those drugs there's a love's mercy is in all things including the antibiotic it's one of the things i teach people who are into natural medicine because a lot of them say no i'm not going to do this i'm not going to do that medicine i'm going to treat it naturally well you know i've been in situations there was one man i mean they call people called me to his house the guy was dying from the perforated ulcer and i knew i said this guy you need to get him to the hospital said no no we want to treat him naturally isn't there something we can do some yogurt or something i had to go and call the ambulance myself and then years later i met the guy up at random and he he was with friends he came running over he said friend come and meet this is how king he saved my life his mercies and and the mercy i months had a conversation with the head the head of the british pharmaceutical association he's the head of it and he said to me personally said well personally i believe 80 of our drugs are useless and i said oh and he said and i'm conservative he said my teacher really but 90 a law is the one that heals and there's much too much confusion about what a placebo is and what what's the other third term people use nice evil no seable is that the other term there's confusion about because people don't understand we'll get to this and i know we may not get to it today there's so much on my list of things to cover on the unseen i mean people most of us we believe in the unseen dalikal kitab Allah says at the beginning of his the beginning after fatihah in the beginning of we believe in the unseen okay let's believe in it let's not become new agey and believe in willy nilly imagination no the unseen is the greater greater realm than this aftermath which is the result of the unseen so Allah's generous and he's generous in the sense that we can recover from all of these things including the medications that become almost like a trap in some way they become independence but i've seen it through the years many people take some time take some time it's some skill and we can say artistry take some artistry to move someone out of an addiction knowing who they are and knowing what will support them and homeopathy as a medicine is it it was developed the whole way in which homeopathy was produced the way the medicines are produced came from the Arabs and the man who developed homeopathy in the modern times pretty definitely was a muslim before he died people don't know that the muslim the muslim doctors don't know that and then you go to wikipedia and the page on homeopathy is closed you can't add anything and it says homeopathy is a pseudoscience period that's the first that's the first beginning of it so there's lots to be done and i believe personally that understanding these basic foundational principles to hickom us that list look over that list and look at each one and say what does that mean what does that imply what are the implications of that what does that mean about anything this that this that like i say the the hickma of anything we cannot assimilate or eliminate that's a deep hickma that relates to trauma food people experiences it it applies to so much everything we take in that we cannot assimilate and remain whole from i mean i remember this terrible experience you've seen where we're driving with some friends and one of the young boy in the car of the family was with us he went out and had to go and pee in the field and he went out there and he found a pornographic magazine stop along and he took that in and his mother's reaction when she discovered the trauma and the drama that came from that i worry for the kid because how does he integrate that you know shake a lullaby who knows shake a lullaby that's good mustapil a lullaby radio low honey he said he said our path is in the estinja it's in estinja and estinja is is a really beautiful practice and it teaches us more than cleaning our butts and washing after being you know people people say to me well don't tell you know don't talk about civilized people there was a recent discussion about you know muslims not being civilized or something and and someone of the muslims said to me well you know the civilized meaning thinking you don't have to wash your use a lot of something you know is that civilized and wearing shoes on the floor in the house no that's not civilized at all but the principle of estinja is whatever you take in the food you assimilate what you can nourish yourself with it can't you let the rest go you wash done with it same thing with all experiences we want to be able to take in and be with whatever not let it overwhelm us or destroy us by toxicity take what we can from it people who have come from uh you know me too shakes and they they come to me and they say oh my you know and i can see they're totally destroyed by by the betrayal they feel i thought this guy's a high spiritual thing and i still haven't gotten over him i still really want to be with him and love him but yeah this other thing you know and they're struggling with that it's a good example of you taking what you can you assimilate and you don't throw the baby out with the bathwater you take because the other deep interest important secret is whatever it is you happen whatever affliction whatever so-called mental illness you have this in the end can be the gift of wisdom or compassion or something that you yourself will discover when you pass through it and come out of it you hear me your purity your beauty your magnificence remains intact people come to me and say there's one man that came to me this makes me want to cry i said to him you can change you can come out of this and he said what's the use i'm going to go hell anyway that's a terrible belief i said only a love only a love knows who's going to hell you can come out of it he told me about a dream he had in the dream he couldn't open his hands he could not open his hands and closed and when in the dream either in the dream or afterwards in a session he was able to open his hands and he realized it was his ability to ask a love make do the first step in the 12 steps which is still one of the best therapies for predictions of any kind so coming to these things you know the hikmah is coming in a deep way to one cell first of all and that means these disparate parts of our being begin to come together a lot of design to take that way and the trouble we have is we want these things to become whole one of the videos i send out to people and you know it is a it's a video of a impala who is caught by a cheetah and the the cheetah has its has its jaws on the neck of this impala and the impala is effectively dead it is in the state of what we call the mammalian diving reflex state which means its heart stops its breathing stops it's eventually it's effectively dead as a protective possum you me all mammals have this capability which is called the mammalian diving reflex because when they discovered that if person drowned and there was no heartbeat and there was no breath they would pronounce them dead and it would be after half hour but now they know it it can be longer you can sustain that longer period if need be and and and so you've got to get the chance for them to come back but we do it in in degrees we shut down sorry oh sorry yeah i'm sorry more questions yes oh sorry um so i'm a person who kind of like overthink things in my mind oh really like the rest of us i don't know what other people are having in their minds but like sometimes if i'm alone i'll have the instinct to be like speak it out loud yes and and i used to like really like not try to fight against that because i'm like that's kind of crazy to like just speak and sometimes i'm like talking out like a story of what happened and it's like okay i already know what happened and i guess i sort of i let myself do that now um because it's it's almost like i'm thinking about it's almost like you're playing like a child will play out a scene or or it's something that i need to say it's almost like journaling but it's like out loud it's not like written so i'm just curious as to what you would think about that or i'm like is this like a sign that i just really need friends and i need to talk to people or it's a sign or what that i need to have more connections with humans so that i can express this that way i don't know but it sounds it sounds interesting to me it's like the thing is here's a principle too i believe everything we feel can and really ideally must be expressed everything we feel can and must be expressed now some things are more bigger than other things in terms of that need but there are big things if it's not if it doesn't come out from us it will destroy us that was Albert Camus the french poet that said that i mean i would whatever else he said that's a principle and everything that we feel can be expressed if it's done with compassion and hold as much as we can and holding to uh which and and done with some hitman there's ways and we can learn this people and some people are better at than others sounds like you're learning a method to express what you feel that's that's that's a great thing to be able to learn and it's an artistic aspect of one's being to be able to express what you feel i mean the artist is the one that expresses what comes from within them and it was Picasso and Freud both at the same time in the world who said if that doesn't happen for the artist they won't survive it has to come out really that's nice i i worked for a while with a with a Jewish doctor under his licensure and we only did homeopathy for years and he was disabled and i helped him with his disabilities so he could learn to walk and stuff like that speak somewhat speak and he was so impressed with homeopathy he said let's open the clinic we had a clinic for years in any case he once fell down when he was trying to walk and he was so angry at god that he gave him the finger and i said david what are you doing can't give god the finger and and then i realized wait a minute there's a kind of very personal intimacy there and that's who he was and i kind of after that i thought well come to think of it yeah i'm not recommending it for anybody but with him you know i i i realized there was something that demonstrated his his being sedic genuinely do you know what i'm saying here so you know artists i love artists my wife always complains that i know artists if she sees some sort of hippie person that's like really new agey she says i know you like those kind of people and say well you know that's not true but i do love one definitely one kind of person in particular the person who is struggling with themselves i have a genuine love for that because i struggle with my own and this is how many therapists how many therapists have become therapists because they had some success in some way and they said i'm going to do this i'm going to do this for others duh but i love the person that has difficulty because i can do my best to help them discover that they can do it themselves and one of the things i love from one of my teachers is his line is his line was of course you can do this of course you can of course you can because you want it and these people these are the special people because like i said in the in my lecture from Cape Town i said when a person comes to me to say they're depressed and anxious have anxious anxiety and this problem in that problem you know what i recognize is that's because they're not accepting the status quo most cases they've been hit and smashed by the world by the family by the culture by the school by whatever and and people who come with addictions you know one of the important things for them to know is their purity and their innocence is not only intact but allows us and when you leave the path and come back you come back at a higher place than when you left this is a deep absolutely wonderful principle it's true and that's true in husbands and wives when you fight and you come back together and friends when you fight and you separate when you come back together the prophet said shall i tell you something better than prayer and fasting you all know the answer to this right maybe not shall you tell me something better but of course he said it's reconciling the differences between people bringing peace between two people or three people or countries or whatever family members if we knew the value of family members and what we can do with them one of the things one of my new approaches to a lot of healing i'm doing is i call it allies and healing for someone who's working to heal in any way to find the ally in their family that can assist them in that journey or more than one my sister god bless her helped me on my journey dramatically and i saw that Allah was with us because i would do something and i'd share it with her and then she'd tell me something that coincidence was so dramatic that i could see it was Allah's hand telling you know affirming yes you do this together and this is the beauty of family systems therapy my wife did family systems for years in which we have she worked with suicidal teenager the suicidal teenager comes in comes in with as many family members as they can and the very first session almost always the first session that suicidal what they call the identified patient not really you know discovers hey wait a minute it's not me it's this it's the whole configuration this is something we have to see and be able to discriminate who we are and what the world is that doesn't mean we become these exiles and you know rebels and all the though but we begin to discriminate and understand how do we how do we work and manage this insanity up there what where we set our boundaries what can we do not do you know i mentioned earlier about my work my wife we used to be you know for watching a television thing and then something happened the other thing is the violence the same we don't watch it you know we just click fast forward and you know and it doesn't it doesn't take anything from the plot but even set your eyes on it we wonder there's you know there's ways to manage this world if it's what i and with children it's important to get that how you debrief them effectively and successfully in the world because they'll go out there and they'll get poisoned and how do you get that you know how do you how do you enable them and teach them in the process because they will be learning in it it's one of the great ways to learn providing their fully debriefed so it's it's not just something why you should do this you're doing this as a good Muslim it's not but no it's got to be real for them so we have a lot of questions online about okay mental health in particular ocd depression adhd what's a holistic approach to these and how do people go about identifying healing from them okay so ocd adhd well all of these how do we go about healing from them i mean the thing i mentioned earlier is a lot of people say that i mean the thing we're missing is connections and the thing we're missing is connections with healthy people healthy on all levels and there was a movement some time ago still it's probably still around in which people would treat these illnesses the so-called illnesses with a setting in which there would be at least five therapists quote unquote therapists five clinicians to one person now that's hard to do but if we look at that thing of genuine connections with and i will add to it not just people with animals real connections in which people begins to feel safe with that other this is one of the things that can bring back a sense of security in the person and bring back balance and a clear and a clear understanding and viewing of the self and it integrate integration our bodies and our beings are driving for resolution and integration in the first place that's why we're quote unquote depressed and we speak or anxious and speak when a person comes to the problem it's better than someone who has no problems on fine then they turn on the tv or take another drug or do another drink i mean we've got to look at this we live in now someone named it this culture we live in the post-alcoholic era when people are surviving by drugging themselves so i mean ocd all of these things can be healed if a person were in and this is easy to say but almost impossible to bring about they were in a healthy environment with people they were loving they connected to them to listen to them they spent time with them and interacted and engaged with them but that's hard to bring about but i will say this the more we look at the things that bring people together this is why i say vicar we need to make vicar in groups we need to make it allowed so that we hear the voices of each other the singing and the voices affect all of the nerves every every pore is a nerve and an ear this is the headquarters of ears that every pore feels that every and all these nerves when we're singing in people and we're singing particular things in which the meaning means something we know the meaning of the songs we're singing the poems we're singing praising god praising that reality and especially in some cases where the things we're singing actually carry the messages from a cognitive point of view that to do what we need what we need in terms of healing whether we recognize it consciously or not coming together being with each other feeding each other drinking together drinking together that's not exactly what i meant roomy well yeah drinking one i mean the suffies refer to this this thing in which we can speak about certain things and if we speak from our heart other hearts respond i mean i remember my shake and my teachers in Morocco they would get discourse about things and people would break down crying you know that's what it's about communicating with another person not communicating connecting with another person heart to heart so these things can heal all of these things and if we i mean there's nothing wrong with with a lot of the techniques that people have come up with for ocd and i mean although the ocd handbook i looked at that thing one time and i thought well i don't even think this is a good idea to go to these exercises it's affirming the fact that you have this thing called ace ocd i mean we have to realize that the the psychological community at some point decided that it needed to be more scientific so they wanted to take on the patterns and the modes of the scientists with definitions indefinite and they created the dsm the diagnostic manual but i've had many people come to me and say like someone said well i have you know i have the add and i said no you don't have the add okay first of all i wouldn't say this to everybody because some people some people a little portion of relief when they told well you have this or you have that that's named in fact there's a term that they use in in psychology they say name it and tame it you know which they go well yeah but sometimes naming it is like fixing it too you know fixing it in place and i said you don't have that you you you're you're full on and you're struggling with this and not in this that's and we all struggle with things and the product of that struggle when you succeed and get past it will be gifts from a lot that's the way it works and they say well i promise you i don't do so well and if you speak with person with certainty like that they believe it because we recognize certainty in another person's voice we know when they're saying they mean what they say i remember a lecture i went to and people are talking about the environment environment one got one one man was this what's the guy that wrote to uh by uh Hedana Shiva does anybody know Hedana Shiva she's a Hindu woman Hedana Shiva i always i'm always pleased with people people yeah Hedana she's a very extraordinary activist i went to hear a lecture with her and the other man was in absence of the sacred you know that they were both talking about the environment Santa Fe has always been in one of these places they were both giving lectures and and the two of them gave their lecture and then she gave her lecture they both some of the things he said was the same thing but when she said it sorry it went to my heart when he said it was like i was he was being read from a book or something do you get what i'm getting at here and that's why the the the Sufis in Morocco the dark kawiyah some of they say there are wine is in our speech it's not in the singing it's in what we have to say heart to heart because that's where we and i've seen people you know fall down from a lecture in those cases when we make dhikr we do dhikr in group and that opens your heart and opens your being so that when you do that after the dhikr in the hadra the very vigorous exercise of expression of how you you're living when you do that and you're hoping then you hear the words your state changes to a place where we can hear that's what i was saying for the husbands it's not that you listen it's that you hear it's a it's a step deeper than that so ocd i mean one of my favorite people i love this man he had ocd he used to wipe his his brother always wanted to borrow his car and he had a car and the brothers didn't they only wanted to borrow his car but he cleaned everything and he was afraid mostly afraid of things that weren't cleaned that would affect his family members so he'd clean his car and he wouldn't let his brother borrow his car because it would never get never get clean enough he would use baby wipes and if he wiped once with a baby wipe it would be dirty so he had to get a new baby wipe and he said the hardest part is around the gas pedal it was hard to clean around that and he was going on for this for a long time and i gave him homey feather homey feather remedies by their way are one of the gifts of the law it's a hikmah of medicine for our times period nothing more to say and that's another whole workshop upon workshop but this things that we've talked about so signing up for these are things in which i talked more at length among these individual subjects and we've got you know a lot we have a lot coming but this man anyway one day i said to him what you know what uh how's the cleaning going and he said all the cleaning he said well i'm not bothering with that anymore excuse me it's been years been a couple years i've been working with him he said in fact i loaned my brother my car today really and he said yeah and he said well what's what do you account for that and he's a really intelligent guy that's the thing people who are really intelligent have some of the worst difficulty they're brilliant and all you have to do is move them out of that place in which their their gifts are available for them and others so he said i said that and he said well you know i think it was that exercise and i give different exercise for different people but one of the exercise they give the people and this one i gave him was he's take two small dumbbells maybe three pounds five pounds at the most he's strong so five pounds each minute and you use these dumbbells not like this to build some muscle or something but you use it in terms of exploring your range of motion back to what dr loan said he says as is the body so is the self okay a stiff body is a stiff person right a flexible body is a flexible you're there you are like flexing stretching i hope some of you can come to me how much more time do we have today well i hope you can come because tomorrow we're going to i want to get into another exercise that's really interesting and basically i don't you'll find it anywhere that's my that's my next episode but a way a body with a wide range of motion is a habitat for the self with a wide range of motion read possibilities does that make sense body guy yeah so he said i think it's that exercise and i he said i particularly like this one where i stretch all the way around here in my body it has a wider range of motion and movement a body that can move in flexible many different directions translates as a person that has many possibilities as is the body so is the self that's a very simple the hikma that describes well how and why that can be effective anyway so there's ways i love this generous that's my answer um so i hear what you're saying about like giving like say that that that um the hekim that would give the herbs and then say i really i think you'll be okay um that concept it makes sense because when someone else kind of has confidence in me and is encouraging you feel like like you can do it more right yes but um so i'm a student midwife and i've been in people's labors and and and have tried to give them that confidence but then you're like i think you can do this and then they can't they end up in a c-section or something and i feel like i've let them down because i didn't know like a law is the only one who knows and it's like i want to say inshallah you can but that almost you know it's talk for a lot like that almost feels like you're doubting in a way like you know so i struggle with this i guess in terms of my care for women in labor because i don't want to like give them false promises and i have no control over if it's going to happen or not well well let me ask you do you know absolutely with some women that they're going to go through fine and they can do it i never know i mean you never know they're not something really that's usually if everything's going fine they don't need encouragement it's happening right yeah um but if a woman's in labor for 12 hours and you're like yeah but i mean that the kind of person do you have is any sense of the women who are supple and kind of in their fitra enough that you can sense they're going to do all right they could be out of the desert and they'd made it may they'd do it no um i probably am not good enough at that yeah well well the the art of obstetrics if you want to use that term the art of midriffery has been my wife my my not my wife sorry my daughter had two births that were half hour 45 minutes and she said it was mostly because she read this the book that i gave her to read with a chapter on the misogyny of doctors and men who convinced socially and collectively women that they couldn't do it without you know there was so that one it was the most difficult pain ever and that and that may be true but that's not the point and and the the overriding and over the overarching belief i have a may i may we didn't spoke about this a lot you know you know i may yeah yeah that concept that you know it's an impossible unnatural thing i mean we are mammals and we've lost our mammalian nature and we will never have full full and our fault we'll never have full animal nature because we're humans and that means we're a very particular kind of mammal and we'll never achieve absolute animal proficiency that's true but that whole business of you know what we believe collectively becomes so powerful you know and you know this if you're a midwife say you know this you know i mean i work my clinic was in a birthing center in a midwifery college for years in tauce and you know there's a woman who is the midwife there i mean i don't think she's i mean because yeah people have been affected my daughter did that but my other daughter didn't do it she had disaster birth you know it was difficult let's say not disastrous so i was like my grand daughter came far from a disaster but it was you know the midwife screwed up you know but in any case it's a hard one because that that thing is so powerful but but basically it's one of those things we have to deal with it the world is really dementia it's it's not only dementia it's diabolic is that all right to say that oh sorry but but every one of us has the capability as muslims and as human beings to muster courage and bring the truth and bring light to all this stuff but recognize it and seeing it for what it is and we see it and we have a more balanced view of it the more integrity have within ourselves the more connections we have with ourselves that all the despair we grow up a lot we have a life of contradictions that we have to live with i love my father i love my mother but they did this and they did that and they did this and they do that okay how do i reconcile that how do i bring that together in wholeness of myself and when we begin to make that kind of wholeness and connecting and healing that's a heal heal means to make whole comfortable from the word whole to be to heal means to be made whole and that was my first workshop was coherence called the first verse of coherence in the self the second one with vibrancy vibrancy in the self the life of being alive fully alive and what i'm we're talking about here is this next step of wholeness in the self and connecting with others as a result so i don't have an easy answer for that you know because i think that's probably a pretty major thing i mean there are a lot of things when you understand the fluidity and capability i mean the fact that a mother a woman can have a baby in the first place is pretty awesome and when we begin to understand the body when we begin to understand the body and the necessity for the equilibrium of the musculature and the structures equilibrium in the sense that we have chronically tightened am i right chronically tightened muscles and chronically lax muscles and this is disparity in this in in in balance gives us posture and and body shapes and all these things you know it was well followed well well followed by emerson again who said the body we he said we can understand the body by understanding a huge tent in which we have a central pole and then we have all of these poles around the side ropes the tie lines and each one of them has to be at the right tension balancing the other one and these people to get in there and the in the gym and they do this and they do so until they have these bulging biceps you know and i feel badly for them because it's not helping it's probably going to damage them because they can become muscle bound it binds their sense of self rather than being the strength i mean one man that i recommend i didn't have this resource is out as a man in australia his name is his name i can't i have trouble with names but he says the strength of the body is in the flexibility and these not the hardness of the musculature but the extraordinary equilibrium of the musculature that's where strength and the and the flexibility and the agility and the grace of that my cat i learned this from my cat i learned it earlier because i've studied the body from i was very young very young and my cat i used to watch my cat jump from the floor to a seven foot loft on her own just and i and i looked and i watched and i realized she did it because she used every hair on her body from her whiskers to her end of her tail and every muscle every part in harmony and in coherence together to do that one thing she did was amazing but that's an animal you know some athletes get that they can get that very highly developed so that's a hard one i used to i learned that i delivered my first son and then afterwards i said okay this is the word for women not for me and not because it was overwhelming because i just realized i'm not supposed to be here they're supposed to you guys are supposed to be there and my one of my daughter's best birth was with other muslim women reciting Quran during the birth allowed clearly allowed and that people in the hospital they were it was often they were just people who don't even know what Quran is they they love it and they respond to it sorry done so there are people who sigh a lot and sorry there are people who sigh sigh a lot so other than it being perhaps a coping mechanism or type of release is there is that an indication of something deeper like why do people do that well i mean it's a style in the homeopathic realm it's a style indicating a particular remedy but that usually means a situation in which there has been emotional something in something that's taking place in which they're emotionally trying to release because the sigh is a sigh of relief when we inhale tension activation when we exhale should be settling should be when there's not settling i mean if we had more time we could do these because the experiment is experimenting with different breath frequencies you know two in eight out four in four out four in two out and so forth all of these will bring different states and so people say well just breathe no it's not that simple breathe for some people if they just start breathing uh and breathing and feeling Dr. Lohan breathing and feeling and sensation come together anyone who's depressed even if they're on meds or not they'll be only breathing slightly very slightly and we we limit we delimit our breathing and we shut down our breathing to manage the world that's too difficult emotionally if you come tomorrow we'll get into some some other things about breathing and breath i was i wasn't i wasn't going to let it out of the bag yet yeah exactly so but the sigh yeah sigh is good yeah a lot of a lot of times i'll sigh my wife will say are you okay and i say i'm sighing isn't that a isn't that sign of being somewhat okay yeah but it's usually a lot of a lot of very high high emotions that are not that need processing need letting go people when they start breathing people when they yawn people when they stretch are coming back into their body coming back into their body we can we this this culture in the world's living out not in so-called undeveloped countries but in the developed countries everybody's outside of their body i mean i mean there's a new thing which is virtual these things to make umrah virtual umrah what excuse me something's wrong in that picture yeah um so you've talked about healing i was wondering if you could talk a little bit about healing through forgiveness about forgiveness in the healing or what yeah healing through forgiveness well um how much time do we have okay let's find this well one of the things it's really important i think to recognize is that Allah is the healer right Allah is the one who is kind Allah is the one who is loving in other words it is a reality that we may or may not take partake in pieces and parts parts of that Allah is all go for is the absolute in terms of forgiveness and he dispenses that and allows it as he chooses our ability to forgive it's not ours our ability to be forgiven is not ours it's Allah's so that's an important piece that we must recognize we can pray Allah give me that ability to forgive but i tell people forgive the people that you did wrong you know ask forgiveness of people that did wrong to you if we knew the value of that and if we knew the value of forgiveness we would be forgiving of everybody but if you've been wronged it's very natural to be angry and to not allow that and not be able to accept the principle that if i forgive it's condoning it's not condoning it doesn't have to be so there's that tricky kind of contradiction that takes place you all with me on this one right and there's a period of time when being angry is useful and valuable there's a valuable point in most cases as people are coming out of being wrong terribly feeling wrong terribly there's a point at which forgiving and but it's not just forgiving because you're a spiritual person you know mashallah but but there are some people if i mean i've seen i've seen people forgive the most egregious things killing of their children i know more than one you know people person who forgave people who murdered their children and it was real and the one man said you know he was he he was at a convention a gathering in which they were making peace between the bloods and the crypts in la and he was a muslim he'd work with gangs and he was living in atlanta and they invited him to come back because he'd been working with his gangs and he went back but with his his intention was to kill these people to kill his son and the thing he got caught up in the what was happening and he got up on the stage and he said he said i want to be honest here he said i came and i wanted revenge on the people that killed my son but he said right now in front of all you i'm going to forgive them for what they did and he said what came to him was peace like he'd never experienced he said from that by saying that he walked outside it was just drizzling rain a little bit he said he'd never believed it was possible to feel such peace in his being but the reality is when people do wrong i mean to be honest i've been dealing with trauma for years and years and years and i've been being being with trauma in which there are people who have mistreated mostly it's been i mean i had some men but mostly women and i honestly in my in myself i've had this image of a it's a metal of wood hardwood club it's about this big like this and i had this image of taking this club to those people that did those things and i make no bones about it you know yeah you know what so so we you know there's a line we want to follow here and we want to honor and recognize our animal nature which is to get angry fight back and to be angry in appropriate ways but not to let it get out of hand and create worse than what happened in the first place i don't know what else like it's a a lot more that can be said about forgiveness so but the first thing i want is i want to underline is this thing it's a quality of a love a kind mother is the quality of a love that is coming through her to someone else and all of these things he is the actor in all of the world all the things whatever they might be he is the the one that acts yalla bring blessings to this group and bring the best of intentions and rewards for the intentions by what everyone came here and satisfy their hopes and efforts and a lot heal us all heal us all and give us the courage to see the ways in which we can bring our our people together and how we can give ourselves the courage to do what's needed to know and discriminate and see what it is that's needed and act upon those things and have the energy and the belief that you can support us in all this and protect protect us all protect our children and protect our children and protect our children and keep us on the path and and show us your mercy by making it even more beautiful and rewarding if you're wonderful then we could ever even imagine the job well thank everybody uh for coming in person and and online um inshallah we'll continue tomorrow 10 o'clock uh here and it'll be 10 pacific standard time for the people online um so just quick question did everybody get the link to sign up to do the subscription for youtube okay um if you didn't let us know and we can get you the information um so uh a couple other things so basically we're looking at unrolling or rolling out a few um you know as as hakim said we indicated some some videos um and some other information that are going to be coming up the other thing that we are working on and it should be available soon are interactive courses so it's something we talked about when we were in socal about unrolling classes um and these are online only courses but they're with hakim in person but also include recorded material and so we're just curious as to if there's an actual interest in that um so if there is you know let us know we're just you know we don't want to be pushing stuff out there on people that you know if like hey we don't want any of this that's fine but if you are you know we definitely want to hear from you let us know if there's an interest um and stuff like that so um you know let us know through however methods we got in touch with you or let us know in person all that stuff um so inshallah we'll meet back here for everybody that's coming for as hakim indicated adhikr um and it should be from around seven to nine thirty and for men it's it's preferable to wear a jalaba or a though or something um you know it's it's a tradition it also helps uh and um what else there'll be food thanks to merchie cafe um the leather always amazing when we come and and have dikr here so we're excited about that um but yeah we look forward to having everybody come bring people if you know again there's absolutely no cost but uh you know we'd love to see everybody here we'd love to have people here to join do some of the things that hakim indicated that are healing so let's get together let's do dikr together let's remember a lot together and uh you know inshallah it'll be something good um yeah so i think that's about it uh we have to again thank our wonderful host mcc i've worked with many many organizations doing you know programs like this and many over the years and years and mcc is always you know one of the best at everything so you know big big thanks to them and hakim please support them if you're local if you're online support them anyway you can and again we just want to extend our thanks to them so i look a lot for you for mental law inshallah so i know i'm not the only one to regret the things i've done i miss my mother i miss my friends oh yeah we planned that that's all i'll just push it out of the way i think i'll just stand this can we kind of converge a little bit in terms of space just because so the uh yeah that's fine no i mean just moving yeah it can move is that all right i don't think anybody's gonna bite i know not not that i know of maybe it's all right so the second day i guess it's inevitable people may show up in time where's me the ideal place for me to be is in the center here well salam aleikum so we have at some point in the beginning of the day here somebody wants to make shahada and they will arrive inshallah but in the meantime the others is a smaller group than we left with yesterday um there are several topics that i wanted to cover yesterday and didn't have time for and we have at least one new person that wasn't here yesterday a couple of a couple of people so um today is meant to be a more relaxed open discussion much more questions and interaction and discussion there are some things i want to do that are very specific uh exercises and kind of explorations for everybody to take away and that i'm hoping there'll be more people for that because i think it'll work better with more people with jobs so we'll wait and save that for a later day but to start with for those of you who were here yesterday questions and commentaries or topics that came up from yesterday that you would like to open up and discuss yeah okay this oh mic okay so yeah i mean last night was just out of this world so i was i felt the collective power love energy um i felt like weight lifted from my heart and i couldn't sleep i was just buzzing i felt the presence of you know the angels and uh everyone's sounds right yeah like if other people were lifting weight or healing it's like i just i felt the the collective relief i think so well that's what it's about yeah i mean it's about waking up and yeah i couldn't sleep and i i well and when you wake up presence was is the topic and i reiterate and come back to this question well what does that mean it means being there being here being present very simple i mean we all know what that means sometimes or nothing in the Quran it refers to the kafirun at some point as propped up blocks of wood that's the other extreme that's the opposite but now we live in a time in which people are basically asleep and in various ways a lot of the ways we're asleep is our bodies have shut down from my teacher beloved teacher dr lowan he said one of the basic things that he's overlooked that's so important is that breathing and feeling or sensation come together and every depressed person will only be breathing that much because the more we breathe the more we feel ah it's a very simple thing very few people sort of put those two together which is again what i'm trying to do is develop these hiccups these principles that are elemental and foundational to understanding so many other things we could we could look at depression i mean that's it's the result that doesn't mean if we're depressed or if a person is depressed it doesn't mean we just simply start breathing like the other that will wake us up that'll be more of a sensation it'll hyper oxidate the blood and all this stuff but we stop breathing and we become depressed because the depression is a survival strategy life is too hard it's too difficult so i'm going to shut down i'm going to eat that much alive or that much more or i'm going to avoid all the things that trouble me and i'm going to avoid and i'm going to do all kinds of things i can to avoid it addictions so many addictions are like that they're they're they're alternatives to being present emotionally for the most part especially with men how many men i mentioned yesterday how many men come to me we start to work the somatic work what do you notice in your body and they say oh nothing and i said well you're dead then you know and that's pretty much just a lot for us men we shut down and we learned to shut down unfortunately at a very early age that you know the young black man community is is noted for at about i think about when they're about eight years old they're kind of taken from being sensitive feeling human beings into these various arenas where you are not required to be human feeling with empathy you know what i'm talking about they're not feeling something it's the fun it's the product that's the end that's significant in their being but i mean we seek alternatives to distract us from things we can't face the elephant in the room so to speak ourselves you know we can't face ourselves men are hard to get more difficult it's much more difficult i mean women are courageous men are cowards for the most part i'm sorry to say that and i know a lot of men would disagree and yesterday i was saying how many men have their final healing through their woman how many men are already remarkable because of their mother or sisters even a lot of me when i said yesterday even a lot of we said the path to god for man is the woman so yeah i just want to clarify so are you would you say that addiction is a lack of presence well addiction this is i we talked a bit i was mentioning a few things which is some people say the opposite of addiction is connection we all have a basic fit for us human beings we come out with purity into this world we seek to love and be love back connection and connection that happens from the very beginning from the birth from every moment of that thousand and one nights that thousand and one days in which the brain is is formed and the beginning foundational memory is established in enormous number 40 000 neural synaptic memory connections per second for the first thousand days or thousand and one nights i use that as a reference so we we all want to love and be loved and we all as human beings as mammals we need the connection with others that's the biggest thing we've lost in the modern world we have no community it's like i like i said yesterday people used to say to me can you come talk to the youth in our community and say what community are you talking about the one that has you know maybe juma you have members that go to the joma maybe eat once a year and then you drive for a half an hour the automobile is a deep horrible curse anybody that can't see the reality in that anybody that can't see that can't cannot connect with some basic principle and elemental aspect of our human nature etc and empathy is going down across the board across the world every year and in whatever by whatever it means that could be measured but we for us we know we know it's going down knowing we never used to have this issue of bullying in schools or we never had this kind of aggressive automobile driving on the highways so-called freeways true i mean you all know what i'm saying i mean i i mean you you live in california if you're in southern california more so but the freeways it's like going into some sort of battleground and if we don't have a perspective and can't see that and feel it but what happens is all these things to feel they're so painful so what we do is we selectively shut down and one of this one of the shutdowns is life that i can find in all the aspects of life that i can find are so difficult so i'm going to alter my consciousness some people may consider a spiritual goal you know i'm going to be something different than what i am i'm going to alter this i remember back in the 60s people were getting high which is altered consciousness on anything anything they could find banana peels you know and i remember there was a thing that happened in which this guy bored a hole in his skull because when the the skull was open to the air there was this altered consciousness i guess he probably had a cork he'd put in there sometimes so the need to do something other than be present with each other in the world is a terrible demand and an unnatural demand because as human this is part of our Islam the community is a reality that we don't have anymore except in some places in the world implications that are huge therapy huge yesterday like we were saying there were no now there's over almost two thousand kinds of therapy there were not therapists a hundred years ago i remember i asked a group of therapists they said well why were there no therapists a hundred years ago and she said rightfully she said because we had aunts and uncles and friends and neighbors and community members and we learn who we are from others so what we did that practice as i said last night the practice we did was who is there who wasn't there who is there last night for the ones who weren't weren't there it was it was the hadras some who do you know the ones who weren't there do you know what how do you know what how it is it's a very intense yeah actually what we were missing was singers you know i'd like to get singers because there's most of these singers that would carry that whole that whole thing that whole practice the singers uplift the spirit and and and it informs the spirit in our our soul like she said this thing out of this world but it's our i mean that's one of our basic dilemmas we our soul is from out of this world and here it is geology room he said it's here in this cage of my body and it would be in this cage of our bodies until Allah frees it from the body so what i the thesis that i'm trying to say we have to meet the modern world and its intensity and its intensity isn't just like a hurricane which it is that sounds and the noises and that that terrible rushing madness of the freeway but it's insidious because it sneaks in under the arms of use of Allah bless him you know he had talked about like you know getting rid of your television years ago and so many people said we got rid of our television because of the thing opposite lectures and then it snuck its way back in through the computers same stuff insidious and i mentioned yesterday that these things that people watch you know that the episodic things you know like here's the first episode and it ends ah that's a thousand and one nights theme thousand and my story people know that story the thousand and one stories are told because each story ends kind of on the edge it was the precursor to all the tv episodes the seasons and episodes or the goal or any of the others and those episodes that we watched that it's like rabbit holes i think everybody knows these terms at this point but we don't realize that you know it's marcia mcluin's marcia mcluin's is people people some of you know him he was he had a book called the medium is the message the medium is the message is basically how are we getting our data i mean there was a man who i've been a science nerd since i was very young and i had subscriptions and i get magazines like scientific american most of my life is a scientific american or new scientist which are just simply for the most part there they were journals that would report the various studies that were happening in the world remarkable studies and uh one of the writers for scientific american for years was a man named martin gardener does anybody know who that is he wrote a book and in that book he did a study himself on the amount of data that is possible to access by television by educational television through documentaries and pbs and whatever it might be and he compared it with the amount of data that the person can have when they go out into a forest right this is this one of our ongoing discussions and there's no comparison and another person i can't remember who it was he compared educational quote unquote educational television to to a situation where the the burglar sneaks breaks into the house and gives the dog a piece of meat to keep him busy so they can loot the place the medium is the problem we know this about our computers don't we even if we were you know and you know blue glasses are empty anti blue glasses or whatever did anyone know this man now uh what's his name huberman forget his first name you know what's his first name andrew huberman he's an interesting guy because he's both a neurologist and he's very on spot and up to date he does his research and and he makes it a part of his business you know to report and have regular podcasts and all that but he's also an ophthalmologist so i mean it's this i mentioned it yesterday he's the one that said this beautiful thing and i i heard that i said well this guy i've got to listen to because he said our eyes and i've known this for decades the eyes one of the most remarkable things that we have as human beings and one of the things i wanted to do here was find a room that was dark and do a camera obscura so we could all recognize how white rays it's not just rays that come in it's the world comes in through the eye and our eye processes he said the eyes are like parts of our brain pushing out through the holes in our skull and why was i saying it why do they even bring that up the medium is thank you and so television i mean i think did i share with you yesterday that the young girl in Bahrain and in dubai with the cell phone i have to remember what stories i could tell my stories my son knows most of my stories he said yeah yeah i know that one and my wife too like i started feeling like an old one of these old people that see and you know this thing and constantly retelling these stories god forbid i'll protect us and uh but i was asked one of my students in in dubai homeopathic student mostly she said i was doing a workshop in dubai and she said could you come for dinner yes i'll come to dinner at your house and she said well and can you talk to my daughter about because she's being bullied because she doesn't have a cell phone in our friends too and i said okay and uh i said what i'll come to dinner but i don't what can i say to a 14 year old who can't have a cell phone and said and she said no please and said okay okay so we sat down and the three of us sat there and i said so you your mom tells me that you're getting bullied because you don't have a cell phone like everybody else and she's and she rolls her eyes i didn't talk about this yesterday because then she rolls her eyes and i mentioned yesterday i'm going to repeat it for the people who are weren't here and that's the teenage bs meter you know instead of a needle is the eyes go like that and she said i said well why is that and so what did i what did i say yeah i asked her do you know why and she said yeah so you jumped ahead yeah she's uh and she said because my mom loves me and i said well if she loves me why she would not and then she got braces that devices get blind and the fact that we have such a thing as virtual umrah where we can put on some goggles and some contraption as if we're doing umrah you can go up to the black stone and things but this is not a little we laugh because we know how we're not just absurd it is but how it's crazy i think i mentioned this guy wanted me to endorse his business uh that had this pill that would keep you from being hungry and Ramadan have i mentioned that yeah he came to me said if you could endorse my project i'd be really happy because i'd really sell good sales if you endorse it and it was a pill that you take so you're not hungry and Ramadanic excuse me what's wrong yeah what i'm not getting so it's a difficult time it's a difficult time and and you know we make a lot of the doing yesterday it was about our children and you know so many people share with me that fear for their children and i mentioned yesterday that it's a very difficult job but we must be on the task of debriefing them that is enabling them to manage the insanity and the perversions they will encounter and the distortions they can't make sense that they can't make sense of because it's not meant to be made sense of you know it's it's too unnatural and we can do it and we can do it and the primary way let me ask you if we're going to debrief our children appropriately and thoroughly and well so they're managing the insanity that is probably going to get worse a lot of ellipses and a lot of hands but what's going to be the most important i'm asking you now what's going to be the most important thing to make that possible make that effective it's not going to be explaining it's not going to be left brain explanations or political commentary or psychological theses it's going to be being and if it takes being there and just simply to be able to say i'm here i know it's difficult always be here for you if you believe that but if it's not true they'll know it especially the 13 year olds especially the 13 year old girls who have an incredible extraordinary high degree of spiritual potential at that point in time but from every age when i was in australia they set up a workshop for me on a natural habitat present preserve so everything in there everything was left wild and they called it the art of living and so the first day i went around and there was about 35 40 people and i said well what is living what is this workshop about because i thought well i love the title it wasn't my title and so we went around one by one asking well what is life what does living mean and people said well something that grows something has a birth and various things come out and we got to this eight-year-old boy and he said death death is an essential part of living and everybody stopped it and the thing i'm pointing out here in terms of this thing of debriefing our children is every generation knows something that the previous generation it doesn't have a clue about you hear me i got some nods what do you think and our love designed it that way it's a beautiful thing when we recognize and this is a thing about all the real true hikmas i believe are things by recognizing them they give us a foundational basis to understand phenomena that we can get confused about complicate over complicate and and then get lost in the details with me the basic things of being alive of being a human being are very essential connection love to love and feel loved back and feel as if you belong i went to one of my somatic therapists at one point in time i grew up in southern california and i considered my my my brother-in-law who married my sister who is a beatnik poet does anybody even know what beatnik poet means anymore there was a period of time where a beatnik poet that you're you're what do you call it you're dating yourself let's try to think of the term the other there will inevitably be old beatnik poets there's still beatnik poets there exactly and and what's his name that had the bookstore further get a yeah who's used to have got a coffee and stuff with him laurence for in getting daniel more of the high more who's part of that and it was it was a wasteland talking about which lulu and greg that was the surfer there was a surfer and that man saved me from southern california the poet and i became a poet that where i love poetry at that time and i used to go to beatnik poet readings in malibu and you know anyway this need to belong i never felt i was a part of that culture for i was going to say i never felt i've like you know disney land being built was the biggest thing in the 60s when i was there you know i thought as an artist i got the thing we used to term mickey mouse to describe something that was really cheesy so i never really but i never felt it was belong to my family and what they were interested in there and the culture of the so-called culture in the culture in the town i grew up in the city i grew up manhattan beach there wasn't a black person that you know if their father was not even an asian there were some mexicans maybe they did gardening that was about a head and that was the school i went to and thank god some of the mexican americans redondo beach nearby became my friends and my protectors so but a therapist i went to the therapist i went to at one point was a somatic therapist who she had worked with in you it's a somatic work and at one point in the somatic work we we kind of got into it a bit yesterday it's it's paying attention what takes place in your body in different circumstances and that's it that's it exercise in being present quite simply the more you do that the more you will develop the ability to be present with the nuanced the vast nuance nuances of sensation in the body and back to this one of the hikmas is the number and the spectrum of sensations available to us by a lost design in the body are innumerable we can't number them because the number of sensations of this into this the number of sensations in our body are as great a number as everything in the entire of a question on that note um i know you were also and i just wanted to understand you know i think you were saying the amount of information or data you could pick up in the forest is yes this was a more than like on a computer or less than way way much more way much more right so i was martin gardener's but he had a lot of data from for scientific americans audience so yes i wanted to i wanted to ask about like i don't have the right word is like ilham or gush but like the idea of openings right as they come and it's some sort of like i guess realization and i don't know if that's a thought that comes but i was also curious what's the time of openings with bodily sensations or and and also our sensations some the second question like are also sensations something you can pay attention to at any point in time voluntarily and learn something from it or it's like an opening thing which would tell you to look into your body perfect good questions i have them on my outlines as something to talk about today so you're so here's part on we're so ilham a revelation or openings we have it all the time um and well not all the time you know but when we have one of my teachers in morocco said something i that i took into importance to which he said a genuine opening has fruit for therapists there's not therapists here except for one that i know of but everybody has it sort of do it yourself therapist oh sorry you didn't but and you're a good therapist because you work with the body exactly exactly and uh and so there's very often the people a person like last night what you were saying about last night you had this out of the world experience now the thing about it that is which is important is how does that blossoming of reality for you bear fruit you know i have a poem i've written poems for years but there's you know what happens with blossoms and fruit is if the if the chill or the freeze comes at the wrong time no fruit that's new mexico all the time we have apricot great the best apricots you'll find anywhere but like only every three or four years do we actually get in many places the apricots because the freeze comes stops it so the key with openings is to capitalize on them and i think a good therapist enables that person and encourages how they capitalize on it and if nothing else that would be and this is true for the for the do-it-yourself therapists with friends and people that have difficulties and they're going through it if you make one tiny step in a beautiful positive direction you affirm it you know you validate it and back to this other print a come up principle if we pay attention to something we intend to it we won't amplify it so capitalizing is okay you've had a hard time doing this and this and this but then suddenly you're able to do this how does that feel that you can do that blah blah blah you know and that these there's the usual therapeutic things or we can say there's usual things from the empathetic compassionate mom or auntie or neighbor that says well that's great i'm so glad to hear that you've come from that point to that point wow how does that feel well it's that like i'm so so happy blah blah blah and it has to be real it has to be real i remember many many years ago a therapist that was one of my clients and i said well what do you try to do in your therapy he said i try to help people get real you know and and i knew what he meant i mean if one of those things be hard to describe from a clinical point of view but we all know what that means some people are just not real now we i spoke a little bit yesterday about this natural thing that happens for us mammalian humans when a baby is very young we we don't no one has said we haven't read that in the book but our inclination in our impulse is to go up and oh hi there how are you kidding and talk with a certain voice and make certain gestures and movements with the expectation and hope that that child will respond and babies can respond within minutes of birth to something like opening the mouth from another that's the beginning of this it's not the very beginning because the really beginning happens in the womb with the sound of the mother's voice that's why we called it what we did the practice i think we call samah hearing hearing the voice of the other ones next to us singing will change our nervous system because every pore and every hair is a nerve that hears we hear with our whole body i don't know if you know uh evelyn glenny to people know this woman evelyn evelyn glenny uh there's a youtube worth watching it is this woman who was deaf at the age of 12 decided she wanted to become a musician she was knighted by the queen or whatever knighted lady she was lady by the queen because she's a deaf woman that teaches music but she teaches it with the shoes off or this young singer angeline adored anybody know that a remarkable prodigy in singing at the age of eight she was singing like a very adept operatic singer or jazz singer at the age of eight but she sings but she at when she first started singing she met someone who was homeless on the street the young girl and this girl had no shoes and so she gave her her shoes and the the homeless person blessed her for doing that and she decided she would never sing with shoes on but it also says something about that thing that we talked about yesterday grounding in her thing barefoot barefoot is a beautiful thing so revelations can come they can come and we can be in and then we can waste it that's the suffies talk about that you may have an evening of vicar and you're uplifted like that and then you go if you go clubbing then you've blown it not necessarily not necessarily but but the point is capitalizing on it protecting what comes in openings and paying attention to how we capitalize on these things the other thing was always the other part of that question relation it'll be one of the hikmas and I have in there is every thought revelation opening insight everything that happens in that way has a physical bodily component connected to it absolutely back to what I said the in the Quran Allah speaks about the creation of Adam the first human he placed the spirit in Adam and Adam became first of us same and we're the same the spirit and that out of time out of this world reality trapped in this body or contained in this body it can be trapped or it could be delightfully contained of course I remember now that the second part of the question was like can you so when should you be listening to your body like at any time or okay good that's a good question so when should we and this whole exercise of what do I notice in my body and paying attention to it it's something that we don't want it to be the kind of thing where we're having a conversation with someone and they say something remarkable and then we suddenly dissociate from them because we're in our body we want to do it as much as we can so that it's not something we're learning this new it's something we're remembering that we forgot that's the key it's recovering something it's already it was there in the first place by Allah and it was there as like I described my my my four-year-old dog granddaughter you know when she saw the the worm she jumped up she did that that's typical little kids I mean anybody who knows you go three or four-year-old kids they jump up and down we jump up and down when we're that age and when she was running around the room and I saw and I was studying this whole principle of how we breathe because we we breathe let me ask you this about to bring back to breathing what do we breathe with lungs we breathe into our lungs and what do we breathe into our lungs with you know these so you're cheating what do we enable space well that's where the where the the breath itself exists isn't it muscles the muscles of our body there's it there's a nervous system autonomic nervous system possibility for the breathing to happen when there's total exhale that will enable without thinking or without muscle the nerves will excite but that's not typically is we breathe so this is my granddaughter when I was looking my because my teacher taught we breathe into the lungs and then we have to the body we have to allow the body for that to go into our body and that's this wonderful meaning this extraordinary meaning between the heart and the lungs part of what we do when we do that here this rhythmic thing that you find in all these cultures is we're bringing together the harmony and the synchronization of our breathing a wave and the heart moment so they're in harmony and when they're out of harmony they're out of sync we don't feel well it's it's it's we don't feel okay you don't feel in harmony the rsa they call that it's this it's this harmony between the breathing so when she was running around the room and she lay down on the floor I looked at her who was studying this thing myself from my teacher and I looked at her I realized she was breathing and as she took a breath in she's been running so as she breathed in I could see her head was moving on the floor her chest was moving her arms even her feet were moving in and out slightly with her whole body was moving my teacher used to say we breathe into the body everything contracts and he said when we breathe out that breath enables a wave to pass through our body from its peak to its letting go and that wave moves through if our bodies are fluid supple enough supple and fluid is one of the greatest strengths we have in capabilities not muscular bulk and strength and you know I say don't look dead nothing do you stretching I hope that's okay okay you gotta agree with that one right suppleness equilibrium equilibrium covering something that we forgot we were alive all that thing that we talked about yesterday we were alive and as life and its slings and arrows assaulted us we learned how to shut down selectively and boys weren't more than more than girls and the girls bodies being generally speaking nowadays it's changing a lot being more soft and and boys you know it's changed a lot now but uh because we need the body to feel a hard body is a hard person doctor lowland used to say don't get don't try to get six packs a round belly is a healthy belly they tell that they're women they don't want to hear it my wife says look i'm getting some abs I don't want you to get abs useless what I say so so what else so anyway we're one so that he left but so it's not something we stop and do we can and whenever we can pay attention to what's happening in my body physically in terms of physical sensation and the more I connect that with the with whatever I experience in the outer world outside of myself the more that that natural connection and being present in the body develops it's pretty important and that practice that's done over time I try to tell people to do those exercises at least four times a week because it's cumulative like I say it's not learning something new it's not some new technique that I've learned and it's now in my procedural memory so it's remembering something was already there in this first place that we avoided and we covered over and we went you know it's an alternative but what else well I think those I mean the question what he said is and I didn't actually say previous generations had more empathy but the fact that empathy was coming down and he was saying the previous generations were also more stoic yes and no and and so how we define that and whether we're recognizing people as being stoic or conservative or well mannered I mean there's so many sort of twists we can put on it you know to understand how what's changed in a healthy community I don't think it was stoic it was very loving and open that means more connection and it means it especially and another thing that you have to look at in terms of the traditional communities is time they had more time in the prophecy what it said time is contracting that's a very deep principle I mean if time is contracting yeah it seems like that I mean I've never been anyone that doesn't feel like it's everything is going faster and we have less time but that's the thing I mean so I mean it depends I mean they're healthy traditional communities and there's variations in those cultural styles of how they connect with each other you know the Native Americans where I am with all of the tribal peoples there there's eight northern major tribes that live around us there and one of the things they like to do and they love to do is spend time with each other but that means I'm sitting here Leroy sitting there Uncle Ben is sitting there and then they say they've one one said to me what do these white people have to talk all the time just the presence they love I mean look at that what is it saying we've lost so much from the fragmentation and the shattering of societies and the implications that are so enormous and the connections so the so the theme of this workshop is connect you know presence first of all being who we are where we are at any given time for ourselves first and then for others and then the connections that is the integrity and coherence in our own self body they will enable that more easily and more naturally and organically with others so I mean we have to look at the whole picture I think that's maybe what I'm trying to say yeah so just to add to what the brother was mentioning um maybe Stoic I I think I see where where where you're coming from yeah um but you know you mentioned like if we look at the last 100 200 years there's a lot of trauma that that humankind has gone through a lot of displacement a lot of generational changes um and so you know when we do look at older generations and we consider them culturally when we look at them as Stoic I would say maybe that they've been now trained to perhaps not show emotions shut off their emotions as a again as a coping mechanism kind of what you were alluding to and you know and it's kind of like well this is the way we're supposed to be and that's not necessarily the case you you're talking about again things hit us in life and we kind of shut down that that can happen to an entire generation or to a certain people in a certain area that have gone through a lot of hardship as well and then that's passed on by curiously or generationally and that's true and and the the high the high context cultures were not Stoic but they had a very precise and detailed behavioral pattern that went with that culture and it often wasn't expressing emotions or over expressing emotions or as people told me as American will you Americans like to let it all hang out but we have to remember too that if there's coherence in the community and there's love in the community there's this connection in a family for example and there's neighbors that care neighbors down the street if that's taking place it's very different in terms of what the needs people have are because they feel held they don't need this sort of acute fire engine kind of need to manage the trauma by the same token you know there's this I can't remember his name he's a philosopher kind of sociologist and he says well it's a mistake to think that we have all this trauma in the modern world there's much more trauma in the past and that we're just you the first world problem kind of we're babing and the only problem with that argument is yes I mean you know hordes rode through cities and had killed everyone we we know this happened historically but people also were there for each other to deal with you know the Vietnam War was an important turning point in the sense that we brought this up yesterday to me I still have a hard time grasping that more people died by their own hand in the war and that's because they were not prepared to go to war they did in the second world war second world war they came back and there was family there for waiting for them there was there was a context of others that changed in the block and what for the people who during trauma work back when I started which is over 20 years ago we all agreed well this is this whole thing with Afghanistan stuff for law and I keep mentioned or all the things that's happening modern it's going to be worse because no one's connected to other people they don't have a context to go back to I mentioned the thing same thing in terms of the traditional samos the traditional Sufism my shake had four generations of students and each of those generations families knew all of the other generations families well the youngest ones were grandchildren you know and there was there was a coherence to all the people in that community and he was just a piece of it a fulcrum or a center of it but he had all kinds of people around him too you know it's like the prophet said a sentence said you know my my any one of my companions can guide you like as if they were the stars solid fixed dependable and you get something different nowadays where you don't get you know that the shake do down you know the important shake you don't find the same sort of level and numbers of people with the wisdom typically I mean that's not across the board because so yeah the modern but the modern world has its own peculiar traumatic realities I mean I consider I grew up in the in the fifties and I went to school in the fifties and I suffered the trauma in school nowadays it's nowadays if you go to school at the certain level they have these shooter right and the shooter drills means you know gives whole protocol that you do and when I was that age you know the teacher would be teaching math and and the long division just and then she said drop she doesn't show drop you familiar with that and we'd all drop put this hand over here I remember this hand here this hand over there under our desk vouched out for the blast for the nuclear blast and we'd never know if it was a drill or we wait we wait we know there'd be a flash of light waiting for the flash of light and then the wind must blow out and God knows what follows and that was a regular ongoing thing so the modern world without a doubt I don't think either individually or collectively we've grasped the extraordinary traumatic reality of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and what happened there so I think it's pretty I think some of these things are obvious you know the black of community how many people have come to me for so many years I just want to be part of the community right I mentioned my wife was part of the oldest co-housing community in in England in Strava and we have a member who went from from a saturn community more or less to a co-housing community and she said the same thing to me as my wife said to me she said you know with due respect I mean the Muslims are still the the best people I know about the planet but not all of them and my wife said the same thing is that she said which was you know there are people here are really nice anyway I'm doing love it's all good so what else would you mind expanding a little on or on a healing and in relation to what you were talking about um rhythmic healing of doing like vicar in a group and in terms of its rhythmic healing as well as I've just heard many different opinions on how we can use that as a source of healing I'm sorry as well as for an chronic healing but as well as in you said in relation to you you were talking about doing vicar as a group and how that rhythm that rhythmic yeah has a natural healing ability well well chronic healing I mean the Quranist this is an extraordinary thing we know this and we've heard it over and over and that is healing for the modern time that's the Hikmah all these very things that it's medicine my teacher in Pakistan he said that the recitation of Quran to simply hear it can heal so many things especially things that break down structures like like snake venom like all cobra venom but it doesn't destroys the structures it's bleeding into bleeding into bleeding and so structure is lost and there is like examples of someone who has had a snake bite and the people recite Quran but vigorously remember that so Quran is a recitation it's to be heard and its hearing affects the ones listening and it affects the one speaking it how many people I tell them I give them one of the prescriptions I give so many people is do you recite Quran yes do you do it allowed well no no you're just honest this is the poet Mary Oliver I would always refer to as a wonderful yes Mary Oliver she's worth reading really worth reading she she has a poem and she said she's out in the forest one day and she finds the spring and she picks the water up with her cup in her hands and drinks this ice cold water and she says then suddenly she hears her bones speak and they say what was that wonderful thing that just happened Quran I have I have been with numerous non-muslims through my years and I've recited Quran they don't know what it is but it heals them and they have amazing responses for acute sort of states and sort of for so forth I get I'm that's long stories and I want to go into those stories but one a whole class of children that weren't muslims from midwest who were studying the right on a lighting journey with their teachers and I got them to do that but the sound of that and the recitation of Quran with Tajweed is the another thing that will regulate this RSA the harmony between the breath because some IS you have to do it's an extended you have enough breath to finish it right it will it will rest it will regulate the that harmony between the breathing and the heartbeat and it will regulate the polyvagal system which is the system nerves that goes from our base of our brain to our heart lungs and our social engagement mechanisms the muskets social engagement is all this thing that happens up here and we'll get to that later because when I want to do with when more people arrive if they do I want to do some exercises in which we explore that social engagement system connecting with others in a very particular way so yeah this is powerful medicine the person and many like I say many people I've recited Fatiha and they've come out of extreme kind of like seizure itself groups of people that are in panic and you know collective or what do you call it like trans states or like fear student group of students and stuff like that so it's powerful by a lot and the example I was giving yesterday about the the Quran and the Arabic language having realities beyond symbols of letters on a page the Arabic letters having meaning and realities to the individual form the Allah all these things and that is part of this thing I mean there are stories about people who have had I had to curse you on the wall and they're not muslims I don't know what it is but you know this subtle influence that is to place we must not underestimate that and so with someone when I meet someone particularly like classic things desi aunties I say recite Quran so your bones here recite Quran so your liver here's a recite Quran so the walls here because they do hear it if it's done audibly because vibration affects the place in Morocco you know one of my dear teachers his name is Colonel Muhammad Atarahim and he took the name he was a sheikh but he never took that nomenclature he never took that on because he didn't like to have that thing of you know sort of and great right and great at grand aggrandizement of the sort of thing he's not special he's just the colonel from the Pakistani army but he was this amazing man I never sat with him I never sat with anyone with him and we didn't have tears and I never sat with him that he didn't recite Rumi in its original form and how I bring tears and he was in London on Edra Road and every time we went to visit him at the end of this he'd make dua for us all and he say and he say and Allah make these people around here muslim anybody know Edra Road in London at this point anyway you know Edra Road in London what's it like today any muslims there well that's true other than that so this is that this is the absolute true reality he said make them muslim he didn't say make them real muslims but the street signs are in Arabic that wasn't the case there was no there wasn't any muslims there hello shops and yahuqa bars okay unfortunately like Colonel Rahim he said that you know that the context this is back to that thing where the my shake had four generations you know the context of things is an important reality it's important the context and the the connections and where we are even the geography I was mentioning yesterday about this man Alfred Traumatis who is he has a whole discussion and some of his research about how the geography of a place affects the language the way they speak so yeah it's powerful and it's underused and it's often misused the one thing uh I had a chance to this Ramadan I was uh like researching sound healing where I saw I was watching some videos and there's people you know who use different like tuning forks and Tibetan bowls and all that and I can't remember exactly but the idea was that something about the right frequency of like using sound you can affect things in your body which would otherwise you use pharmaceutical substances for but it actually has a more greater efficacy or something of the sort um and then it helps I completely forgot what it was but it was something around like some actual sign like mechanism that's happening inside the body that it helps facilitate so in respect to that one of the I didn't get this workshop at one of the things can I borrow this piece of paper one of the things I taught science for several years to high school students and I always wanted to use exemplary experiments they would call it do things to demonstrate certain principles and one of the things that I taught them in one of the classes is this if you hold a piece of paper it's likely it's likely not to be still see how this is going the body when it's our hands when there's still where's our body person thank you even when our hands are still they're not still they're vibrating at 12 hertz more or less 12 cycles per second and then in turn all of the other parts of our body the bones and the heart and all these other things are in harmony or disharmony that's why when we get together and we sing we do all this and we hear each other's voice like you could feel the singing of the people around you couldn't do that's why it's called Samah it's called hearing the practice is much more of one of hearing and the effect when I went to Tunisia I first went to Tunisia and I was sitting in a circle of liquor and these they started singing the facetas I thought my god this is so loud what is this going to do and it was odd to start with but then I realized when I left my body was still vibrating from it was like the singing continued in my body and it was affecting every cell that's the kind of medicine is so that's that's sound healing you know and the gongs with due respect I mean I know people have done that I used to know a man who played music for deaf people in deaf schools and he had big gongs big heavy drums and then there's this thing called the echo locators I always bring that up because it's important people know the echo locators see yeah bats but there was a group of young men there was a young black guy in New York who started this group of people and they're mostly teenagers and he would he would have the he developed the ability to ride his bicycle down in New York City Street in his mind and how did he do it by clicking his tongue and hearing the echo the ability to develop our senses is huge to develop any aspect of our presence of being is so great I mean the prophet said it's him I mean by a law he had coming through him by him by who he was so it's a law that he had one of the stories I love from him is the story about and where the scholar's in here the story about I think a man was fond of law which is named something like that who was sent to assassinate the prophet sort of salmon at the Kaba with a poison dagger maybe to know his name you probably know the story but I think it was something like that but the point here is I heard the story many many times it was Habib Ali that I heard it and he got the message but he told the story about how this man went and he was he was with the prophet sort of saying going around the Kaba and suddenly the prophet stopped and turned and said what is it you're conceiving and he said I'm just making to walk with you now that's an indication of you must know people must know what's his name sorry my normal aphasia the guy that wrote the book on you know his name the the new a new science of life Rupert Sheldrake who was at UC Berkeley and there's a study at UC Berkeley called the sense of being stared back and that study created a book and it was a pretty obvious the studies he did at that time that when someone's staring is we can feel it but we don't notice that sometimes we do sometimes you know but the prophet sort of turned to this man behind him said what is it you're conceiving not a name with what that there was something happening what are you concealing and he said I'm just doing this and they would continue a bit more then this time the prophet says and turned and put his hand in his chest said the girl of what is it you're concealing and he hesitated for a moment and then he said well I came and you know you were the most hated man in the planet in the creation and now you're the most beloved that's connection and every single one of us has that capability with our hearts and genuine true care and concern for another to simply touch someone with that feeling we have that good people he we say about the prophet sort of said like a jackal when I saw little men on physical right that I it is surely there's someone who's come from amongst you he's one of us and all of his qualities we have as our nature and we can either ignore them and do something completely against it or away from it or avoiding it or we can take it on and develop it in ourselves and then it doesn't happen you know one of the unfortunate things is people take these things and go to these things for some kind of aggrandi aggrandi aggrandisement to make themselves something special because they don't feel special because we weren't you know we often so many of us grew up you know with again that statement I said yesterday you know what do you know especially women women were considered unintelligent you know thanks a lot so take a break now so a little more open discussion I hope more people come because I want to get on to this social engagement exercise that I think is pretty fascinating and hopefully meaningful I'd supposed to drop this now right singing but it should be like this relaxed arm I mean there's a there's some of the people who've done that for many times they have more the science of it there is a science to it there's a best way to do it and there's I mean there are people who've taken it on they just do sort of really nearly kind of hippie dancing or something but it's it's meant to be very contained very grounded if you're never meant to leave the floor the body's meant to be sublime relaxed because it's primarily the breast it's grounding Hamdillah well nice to see you nice to see you I want to introduce you to somebody very special okay kopee kopee is a batotic is your chosen muslim name and he's been studying Islam with 15 for a while he's a high schooler 17 years old and hello right beautiful okay so are you all hearing that we've got microphones we've got tons of microphones so I am kopee so I understand that you've shared enough to have a sense to know what means to make shahada to enter Islam and you know the basic principles the foundational things I know that because I've been taking place here so if you want to let's do and just repeat after me okay ashad al sad al in la ilaha la ilaha la ilaha la ilaha ilolah ilolah wa ashad al asad al anna muhammad al anna muhammad Rasulullah Rasulullah okay one more time listen very closely let's repeat as much exactly as I said in la ilaha la ilaha ilolah anna muhammad Rasulullah la ilaha asad al asad la ilaha la ilaha ilolah asad al anna muhammad anna anna muhammad Rasulullah Rasulullah Rasulullah Rasulullah Alhamdulillah As-Salaamu Alaykum We're driving on the way to the high end and then we saw the brakes each and around Yeah good to see you No you don't but you do you are that's good weddings are the one of the best things so Munir she she wanted to tell this story did she want to yeah she asked him yeah once he finished it and and and the and and the name his name is he's chosen the name Tadek Tadek Kobi has given it and uh yes as you like I'm recording it here too Yassin Yassin has been in high school and he's died I wanted to do I think what I want to do after this is I know Idris is saying to translate that's very it's a little bit of time I wanted to do a group shot because he's done his with him you know is that good because most of the people don't do that they remember that once it goes down yeah I know everybody's gonna ask them the same question what was your journey like so it's easier sometimes you find that they just do it what was your experience like Berkeley is it Berkeley it's Berkeley that's a different era very Berkeley in 1669 that was the year of the big people's park that's so people's park that was right before free love that was a lot of change I think that I think that was that was free love that was fun Tadek maybe you did and just tell people your story if you'd like to it might be easier if you tell it for everybody at one time because everybody's got the same question that girl yeah what's the question just you can you know how did this happen how did you I think that's if you like cannot talk without the mic but you don't get to drop the mic at the end it was just a mockery so as I'm growing up my dad it's right there in North Oakland um no one down it's like on Sacramento and market it's like the same she was marked as you go towards no go to back towards Berkeley by Alcatraz coming down it's the one um yeah I just pretty much grew up like that and yeah and that's probably it like just growing up and I just want to take it serious get it together yeah yeah yeah that's that's pretty much all I grew up around like like our black it was just muslims really and black like black muslims huh yeah yeah a little bit Travis yeah you know I was coming today but he had work got bless you too I'm the luck very nice there you go I'm the luck when you probably been saying I'm the luck here and there right and you have seen was a big part of your yeah kind of making the final decision how beautiful like I tried going to Christmas my mom just didn't want it's where I like I fit in and it's like somewhere I fit in the water so yeah you so like that's it we can talk forever about Islam but to make the prayer something else from inside my love if I don't want to you probably may or may not have heard the things like the sister said when you make Shahada the things that are said about how blessed you are you've heard that and these things are true the the thing that makes Islam different from so many other paths said things are true they say they're true we pray for someone and the angels pray if we pray for someone else the angels pray with us and they say for what the person's asking for that person even to do it but but the other one is the Prophet said he said when you make the Shahada that moment since if the sun came for you and all everything is purified we've all we come out pure we're born pure and then you know we all do things we regret Adele but all those things are forgiven but without without without being too new agey one of the things is you have a unique thing I mean you grew up with a father who was Muslim but you weren't from among us but a lot of people here grew up as Muslims and what I discovered as a convert many years ago is the people who grew up as Muslims they never had a chance to formally do a corrective so I'm going to do some I'm suggesting what we do is that we all join hands and the one of the women can join hands with one of the men so we're all connected and we take the barricade if you don't mind we take the barricade from you so can we do can we do that right now complete that sir so what what I'm saying here is Tariq has a blessing from Allah and the gift by this moment and to be you know kind of we're going to take advantage of it we're going to get all the blessings we can from you so by holding hands and connecting with him and by everyone together by everyone together doing the same thing of repeating for those of you who have not done it formally we'll do the same thing for all of us the Prophet said to to improve and increase your iman he said make the simple truth so let's do it again so Rasulullah Ashadah La ilaha illallah wa ashadah Anna Muhammadan Rasulullah Ashadah La ilaha Illallah Wa Ashadah Anna Muhammadan Rasulullah Rasulullah Sallallahu alayhi wa salam alhamdulillah Allahu Akbar Allahu Akbar We didn't see the Shahadah for a long time What? You have? They come from a place where there's people We try to go to the gathering So bring their friends to the gathering So they can gather each themselves Yeah So they try to make it a point to go to the gathering So we're going to the gathering There's someone that's coming Did you repeat it? Hey, didn't you mean to? I'm indoctrinated You got it No, it's too late It's beyond the point of nowhere Sallallahu alayhi wa salam Allahu Akbar Curb your enthusiasm as they say But contain it Don't let it go or leave it back Because this is a blessed moment for everybody But let's come together Because I've been told Allahu Akbar I'm being the high school teacher now Allahu Akbar Come on, you kids I can actually say that to you Because I'm probably twice most of your age At least Okay, I was told that We want to do some exercise So I'm going to do a really interesting Now, let's see The corporations do these kind of exercises Where they instruct you to do something And then they observe how Efficiently or how badly you do it So I'm going to say The first thing you want to do is To Divide yourself into groups of four With people that you trust Then you can be with Which should be anybody here There may be some odd Not quite for And do it as Simply And easily as possible Okay, and now you have your groups of four You have your groups of four Allahu Akbar You have your groups of four Okay, now move forward here more So they come up Yeah, that's okay Move forward here So I can be more With the groups Okay, what about you guys back there? Okay, stand and come up Move up, move up here Okay, now the point in this exercise Is you're going to be able For just four There's four where you've got 25s Groups of four or five And the point of this Is you want to be able To be facing more or less I mean, we can still You know, honor a little bit COVID principles You know, distance But we want to be facing each other In the group, each group of four Each group of four, come on you guys You're going to be fired from the corporation Great, okay, and not hurting hands Or anything, if you keep your distance Here's the thing You want to be able to You want to be able to see The other four people Okay, you hear me? Listen closely, come on you guys You're going to flunk the class No, okay Oh, okay Alright, so everybody Look over here Here's a perfect model example These guys got it You want to be able to see each other's faces Now what I want What I want to do here Is do an exercise Can I see everybody? Now we're talking, we got it You want to be able to see each other's face The two hugging each other You are one, okay I'll buy that Okay, now, this is an exercise That relates to social Engagement You hear me? Listen, listen, listen Please Because we only have limited time And I think it might be worth exploring this a little bit more And then we can have lots of discussion about it afterwards But right now This is an exercise that relates to social engagement Is there anybody that doesn't know what we're talking about The ability to connect with others And this is part of our animal nature Our mammalian nature And I could go on for days Too much, too much I could go on much too much about it Like how a herd of deer The leader of that herd Will turn its head And all the other deers will turn Will turn In unison So this is an exercise about Social engagement And it's about something else That our bodies are designed to do by a law And then all living creatures do Fish Birds Fish, birds Dogs, cats, you name it All of us Living creatures do this thing And we've been doing it For some of us From the time we're in our mother's womb Any comments? What is it that I'm getting to here? Any ideas? Well, yes That is the first thing we do in the mother's womb We begin to listen and hear her voice But no, this is something else So I want you to look at each other's faces Because to see the other people doing The other's doing this exercise You almost did it already It's connecting by Yawning Okay? Now there's something that we'll let Now let me just think very quickly And I'll go to more detail All of my neurology books That are on the shelves If you go to yawning, it'll say Well, this is a mystery This is a mystery But how can there be a mystery When we know so much about all the details Of neurology And yet all these textbooks say Well, we don't quite get it Some new research is coming out And I've been doing it for a couple of years now And I've been following it Across the world But there's a few things that are really obvious Which indicates Or suggests as they put it In that kind of literature That it's a really important thing to do Now there's a hadith Of yawning being from shaitan That that's the yawning in which Is what we're doing is It's an issue of adab We're the person But the primary thing that we Want to discover is I want you to pay attention in your body And to notice what you feel in your bodies And when we go away from this workshop If you do these exercises In which there are ways in which We can begin to promote And elicit yawning Is not something we do volitionally Right? We can't just Okay It's not just taking breath It's because it's taking breath And it's reaching a point Which we could call there as an overflow There's an autonomic Opening of yawn Which we could say is a kind of orgasm In the sense that it builds, builds, builds And then And then it takes place But what happens when it takes place Remarkably Remarkably Effective in terms of What takes place in the body The way we can elicit this yawning Is by First of all It's the collision between our animal nature And our social expectations And The social The social expectations put upon us Does that make sense to anyone? Our animal nature Because yawning across the board is considered Rude And we all do this But we all do something else which you can elicit Which is called polite yawning And polite yawning We can give it more disuse But polite yawning is where When someone's ready to yawn You kind of keep your mouth closed Kind of tighten your lips And then you draw the air in So go ahead, tighten your lips And even arch your neck Now do you yawn? In this case, please Let's see if we can do this Therapeutically Scientifically as an exploration Let that person Yeah, I'll see you yawn You got me? You guys with me? Okay If anyone feels like yawning, I'll start it I'll start it We all did Are you just with me? We all did We all did Are you yawning? Watch the person yawning And don't hold back the yawn But notice what it does Notice what it does in your body If you need to cover your mouth So you can let your jaw go open As far as it can go Notice how that yawn will open And stretch the muscles in the jaw And are on the eye sockets Okay, arch your Yes, yes, go for it Watch her And let it happen yourself We'll get to that I mean, we know it is Let it contain you right now Did any of you guys yawn? There, you covered your mouth That's okay Go for it You don't have to And let them continue And if your body wants to stretch And you want to arch your back Listen, listen, listen, listen Try not to get caught up in conversation Between you because you want to be As much as you can with this Excellent, excellent Jimi Hendrix Okay, arching the back There you go Look at the person in front of you Look at them yawning And see what it does It stills yawning in you Discover the contagion If you watch another person Yes, yes Let it happen, let it happen Notice what happens Are you guys yawning? Okay So in case anybody is doing this online If you guys are yawning Let it happen Let it happen and notice That one, the freedom To let yawning freely come Is It can kind of cascade It can get continuous So again, stay with it See the thing I'm doing In my mouth I'm closing it I'm beginning the polite yawn Beatrice, you hear? You look like you're in your world Yeah, but you have yawned About eight yawns Okay, good, so we've got that So sometimes when there's a Repeated yawning, yeah Hold back, hold back And remember this, the lion The lion awakens With a yawn The child awakens With a yawn And both of them often, not only with a yawn But with the And the lion can be a dramatic war Yes And what happens with the yawn Is awakening The brain activates And endless The physiological things take place From that yawn Anxiety will be Overcome in most people With three or four yawns Notice the jaw Around the sockets of the eyes Pay attention to him Or each other You were yawning Try to yawn, try to avoid Conversation with this because We want the autonomic system To do its job as much as possible Yeah, and if you want to stretch your back Or any other stretching Try not to keep, try not to much talk Talk because What we want to do here in this exercise is yawn And discover what takes place In your body because I'll tell you right now what can go in more detail What takes place in the yawn It's okay Settle down bro That's alright It's good, but I want to focus on this yawn See if you can get A natural thing we want stretching Because We all yawn To wake up So it's not people say we yawn Because we're bored Yeah, but we're yawn in a boredom Because we want to wake up You guys have it going over there? Any yawning? Alhamdulillah Say we've got a We've got a Serious yawn area That means there's a lot of If I may say that It's a release It's a release of muscular Tension that we don't ordinarily have control And if we have social You know oppression It'll be more Like I said In some way we can look at it In the animal nature Meeting The social constraints I mean that's one way I look at it, but That's pretty deep principles Pretty big deep things taking place In terms of our own experiential Discoveries that can happen Beautiful It was just Started out of the best Pumped I don't think I was picked up by the You have my best What does that say about you? Yeah Well, maybe over control Over control? More probably I don't know I'm discovering part of this Is what they call citizen science I've gone to the books And I've gone to the studies But now you guys tell me What do you notice here? What do you discover? I love the principle of citizen science We discover For ourselves Share Is there anybody here Who didn't yawn? Now someone asked me What does it mean I cannot yawn And I said I don't know Probably over self control And Does that feel right to the people Who haven't yawned? I don't know With the pressure to make I don't know Oh yeah, so you've had that Well, but that's other When you don't yawn When you're residing under someone else's Or when you're talking to someone But children Those chained children, when they wake up They yawn And they probably make a sound even But also Right When the sleep comes over In the middle of it That's also entirely When the what? No, what? Comes over? Even while listening to more people The lecture but you couldn't You know, knowing You know what it's like All sorts of things happen in terms of Stage changing Okay, shall we come back together here? We've already got some kind of yoga class going on No, I was asking I only got anybody over there Did anybody that didn't yawn? This one Yeah Anyone else? Two, three You didn't yawn I mean, that's interesting That's alright Some people have had Very strong constraints By practice And reiteration That it's poor at that Or that it's even shaitan You know And if you've heard that over and over And over and over It's hard to yawn But the children and the fish It's not poor at that when the fish yawns Or it's not poor at that When we yawn in our mother's womb Good, good Now that's good That means you've been giving license Your body has been giving license To let it go Falling asleep Is one of those many things It's called falling asleep It's not getting up And then sleeping It's giving up and letting go Falling in love is the same way You have to let go Play is the same thing One has to submit to play Play Genuine, honest, spontaneous Play only comes about With Not control It's spontaneous It comes out naturally And it's processing What's relevant about this The reason I did this exercise That I've seen through these years I have a practice called mychi And we can go into that a little more But some of you have gotten my Documents that I sent out And the mychi is where we track The sensations in the body And then we move very, very slowly In response to what our body is Body tells us That needs to happen Not by imposing, as in Tai Chi, a pattern Or a formula But listening to our body Which always tells us What it needs to do, wants to do And usually must do Now that's the whole principle Of that exercise And it's done by slowing Every movement down, stretching it And letting the stretch that wants To take place Do what it wants to do And that will very often Release Short-term anxiety And it will bring forth With many people I've seen Through these years Bring forth buried memories In this state of process And change for those memories Do you hear me Bring forth Memories that are buried in parts Of the body That come forth in their Processing Of being resolved That's the beauty of mychi Shackling Shackle hand Keeping the contact Yeah Beautiful Beautiful And I have to ask How much of that is Inherited epigenetic memories That have come to us From those times Of course then along with the slaves I think about just generally prisoners But we're all prisoners Of constraints That are unnatural I mean we're the only Creatures I know of I mean I'm not an anthropologist I'm a creature that Lock others up I guess they take slaves Ants take slaves But anyway I don't want to get lost in that The thing I've seen And the reason I'm exploring this Is because I discovered one That if you go to yawning In the textbooks They say it's a mystery still Although there are several studies And some of the basic studies That the scribes take place Physiologically And neurologically in the body It's a big thing Actually flow In this final chord Is increased That's pretty major So there's lots of implications I think there will be a lot more studies You know these kind of things They suddenly burst out in common That's the group of children One person discovers something Coming forth to the same thing The morphic connection That we all have And that can get to one of these other topics That I wanted to discuss Which is the We talk about connections in ourselves One of the higmas I have in the body In that list of higmas Everything in our body is connected At all times to everything else And everything that happens in our body It affects every other thing Are you about to go on? Yeah Well I wasn't getting to that But Rupert Sheldrake spoke about this Morphic resonance We have morphic resonance all the time And the resonance right now For all of you were here yesterday And here today By the things we've done together The shahada, the singing The yawning together All of this increases the common resonance together When we make zikr together There's a particular zikr effect Oh excuse me Jimmy Hendricks Always commenting A particular zikr When we could do this Let's just try it right now Even though we're all standing Listen, this is important To listen to the other Because zikr, come on you guys Come on, you lovey-dovey mother Ta-da Alhamdulillah to see that with mothers and daughters There's nothing I could ever say Let's see if we can The key to zikr is not It's often called samam in listening In other words, we don't just do it Independently There's the pink stuff Orange stuff It's listening and being part Of that whole The whole is always in a Has a reality At any given time that we may or may not be aware of So this zikr It's called the ismul farid It's the name It's the unique name It's the zikr that's done And it's done more or less At the timing of the heartbeat So listen to me to lead But stay with the group And try to make your voice Blend with the group Become part of the whole Yeah, you can do that Good point Come in And again, don't try Take care in terms of speeding up Or slowing down And listen And keep it going So this is The ismul farid And it's the recitation I have to move into my high school Science teacher mode periodically That's alright I have no problem with enthusiasm So this is done It's the divine name of Allah But it's done like this Stay with it And almost like a resonance Hear it like a heartbeat Sharing is the main part of this I was listening And what I was listening for Is what can happen when we do this And I didn't quite hear it I may have missed it From my coffee and so on But there's a point When we do that zikr There's a point which are Our respiration Our breathing and our heartbeat Find harmony They get in sync And if you're good in a group Everybody's heart can get in sync Everybody's heart beating It's the same speed The same pace Depending on what's going on Heart beats can be faster But so it doesn't always happen But it relatively happens And that brings a kind of coherence And it brings a kind of connection From the hearts to hearts And the saying That I repeat over and over Is hearts remain connected Once they connect They remain connected And it's tragic in some cases Because we love people And they betray us And we have difficulties But the hearts remain connected And that's okay It's one of the difficulties Of educating things Of life One of the harder Wisdoms I have a poem I wrote years ago From my wife on Valentine's Day About never diminish love If it's love, it doesn't go away You know, in spite of the fact That we get angry and it's natural To be angry and feel all these things When we feel betrayed by someone But the hearts beating together That moment And this moment And you were doing this together In the same as last night Yeah, the fact That we did that thicker last night For all of those who did that To do that meets A connection that happens At a very deep level That remains I had a friend that I used to be in theater with And we do all these Elaborate, hard work theaters A wonderful practice A wonderful therapy Especially for young people Together And work hard to perform some sort of Do a performance and work the play out Because you work together For this end, even though it's a kind of False, you know Imitation of life in some way Drama, whatever it might be But that working together And the connection and the teamwork That takes to do that Draws one really close And you begin to feel, as you were saying Feeling safe Feeling safe is probably One of the most primary things That we need Just living creatures To feel safe And it's our mother, ideally At some point early on that does that I had a mother who I loved dearly But she was known as the Iron Woman So, you know, that tells a big story In itself But I love her deeply Yeah And I'm saying this, Dr. Spock And others who said don't respond To the baby when the baby cries And things like that Kind of like The kind of craziness that took place It came to a lot of the A lot of the things that were happening We don't have the midway of here today But the connection Is the best you can Reconnect, recognize what was lost And that's why these basic Hikmas They form a guideline of principles upon which We build any kind of healing Amongst other things Yeah Yes Yes, absolutely, got it Let's talk more touch I mean My wife does a therapy called Touch Therapy And it's very simple things I mean The power of like putting your hand On a child's back You're not a child I mean it's twice my height The power of putting a hand On a child's back I mean you can't put your hand on Anyone because a lot of people It's too much touch But the ones that you can And the children and your own children Sorry Who doesn't want to be touched? Adults Some people they don't want to be touched They don't understand Is that like trauma? Well yeah I mean for many people It's important to realize that too Because there's different styles People that need to touch a person To even talk to them But some people Because People who are traumatized In their body or by their bodies Or at their bodies Those people will be hard A lot of people Outside this grounding issues A lot of people that's hard to be in their body And we have to honor that We have to recognize and honor it And be gentle In terms of bringing About a sense of safety I mean safety The thing is I may have said this yesterday once But I'll say it again I mean if there's any single thing That we can equate with safety It's a kind of amount You know a love's got my back I mean we can put our hand on our child's back And make them feel Held and present Powerful, the neck, very powerful My wife does these things She'll use like these little cushions With someone who puts it behind their neck But she knows when and who And what part And they you know It's a great relief So it's another form Touch therapy I don't know if you're familiar with it It's a neuro-effective trotch It's called And I mean because of COVID You know she's not been practicing it But she has all these kind of little pillows And shape things that she Sometimes she'll have someone lying down And she'll put one here and one there And a cushion there and they'll just Ah this is great A sense of safety There was ICU with the baby's ICU One child was completely Just vitals were completely falling Nurse came running Brought the baby, twin baby Put it in the thing And the baby started Picking up So that was a real something That really touched me real deep The touch They were in the ICU Low birth baby Vitals were gone and tried everything And put the baby in So this nurse out of nowhere Did something that she couldn't Do anything else that Can be done So she picked up the Healthier baby from the thing With the other baby And the other baby who was losing All the vitals were going down It just brought everything back And we know the other Similar stories are The great premature babies How they survive and they do much better With any touch of Any kind And you And someone said about That you said something that was very touching You said That story It touched my heart It touched your heart There's touch again I have a question If you had to put the two of them side by side Touch or rhythm Which would you say is more important Touch or rhythm It's kind of a weird question I went the other day I was watching an African Diaspora dance performance And I realized these dancers are not touching Each other at all It's not a partner dance At one point they tried to incorporate a little western move And one of them kind of put their arm A little bit lightly around the other And they kind of changed places But mostly it's not touch based at all The thing with presence With another Which is the primary sense That we develop in our mother's womb First of all Which is the sense of touch Feeling And that includes sound Because sound is vibrations Touch is vibrations And so Even dancing together I used to love raving Whatever came But sometimes it was actually hot They were doing techno music And you know And But I was doing I was just going to ask Did Prophet Muhammad Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam Like do anything that was related To touch therapy during his time Well that story We read that story about father He touched people And they did things One man said He said to one man Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam He said take the Islam you've learned To such and such a place Country And he said I don't think I can do that Prophet Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam Put his hand on his chest You can do it I have one thing I recall Just a quick thing Like I don't know if it's like a pro tip or not But like one time I met somebody I was just saying hey how you doing So I met them and shook their hand And reached out And she was like yeah I'm good And while she was talking to me she grabbed The side of my arm And I just never forgot that It was forever memorable And imprinted on me And then something like that Not like a motion It was the way it was done During that initial Did you feel safe and okay with it But like I mean they had great energies And it was a good setting too But it was just like done in a way where it's like It was so focused and like that person was Like cared about you and it was like very empathetic So I just never forgot that I met a lot of people so That one thing just stands out There's a great book that was written many many years ago By Ashley Montague Called Touch It's a great big thing and it goes through All the things that happens with touch Extraordinary things happen with touch I remember when I first went to Morocco Had a hard time When these men would take my hand And want to walk hand in hand with me You know and like coming from America Was like You know and then someone And that first guy I did that I remember the man, it was Muli Muli of the Salam Muli of the Salam I can't remember his name My son would know him But when he taught me doing that Feeding and security He took his hand And put it on my chest And then we walked like that But yeah people touch Some people touch and some cultures Touch more than others Same with Gays Sorry? Yeah, Arabs kiss a lot Italians The Arabs were The Italians were Arabized It was a great deal You know we forget that the Muslims Talk to Dr. Omar about this stuff You know Dr. Omar Because yeah the Muslims went Everywhere, some countries We wouldn't even switch or they were Mostly Arab, mostly Muslims Things like that But we're human beings And there's things that are common for us And there's things we don't do But mostly because Our cultures have been shattered And the humanity The fabric of our humanity Has been rent For a long time, over and over The first industrial revolution The second one And the third one is on us Regarding the Prophet Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam There was two stories when you said That they came to mind One, both of these are in the Shifa of Qadi Ayyad If you haven't read it, get that But plug There's the story Where He was just walking amongst the people And he saw someone that was looking at him And was trembling And he went and put his hand on the person's Shoulder, and they stopped trembling And he said, I'm not a king I'm the slave of my lord You know, and then there's the Story that they tell where Anyone He touched, they would Smell like him for days So the law was over All of the people would try to Get their children Around the Prophet Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam So he could touch them So they could come home and the house would be fragrant From the fact that Rasulullah Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam Touched the child That's one of those Yes What else? I saw deeply That this was the only thing that could bring And all of a sudden A huge change And I saw the person All the way All the way One of the things I was saying yesterday I'll reiterate today Our Quran says Dali kal Kitab It goes on to say those who believe in the unseen For those who believe in the unseen And we have to remember That the unseen is this enormous Realm Much bigger than this what we can touch and see. It's huge. And we believe in the angels, and we believe that the angels and these energies and all these realities are true. I remember a man who I met and he was studying earth, air, fire, and water from the point of view of Aristotle. And I had been studying it, according to Gibb and Sina, and I met him in a cafe. So we started talking, and we'd have these regular meetings, and one day we were having a talk, and he said, I have a spiritual teacher, and I said, oh, what kind of, and he'd give me some sort of dubious kind of references to the spiritual teacher. With due respect, I mean, it might have been great, but there were some things that I wasn't sure about, and I said, well, does this guy, does it cost you to be his, for him to be your teacher? He says, oh, yeah, it's pretty expensive. I said, and after he told me it was pretty expensive, he had to pay this teacher. And I said, well, you know, in Islam, it's like the teacher is not permitted to take any kind of look at me like, and he kind of went into the state, like, like some realization, wait a minute, this is not okay. And he went into the state in which he kind of had a fit. He fell to the floor, was shaking, couldn't move. And I never, I didn't even tell him I was a Muslim. He didn't know that. So I went next to him and I started reciting, but yeah, and it class over and over and over. And each time I did, he came out of it. And he came out of it crying and said, what do I do? Now, how do I, as it's to say, well, how do I get free from this? Because it was like some kind of magic. But I've seen this more than once. I've seen it many, many times where recitation of Quran will affect people positively, even if they don't have a clue what it is. And they say afterwards, what was that? He became a Muslim, of course, the guy. He didn't know what that was, but he listened to it. So so the power of those words and the power of the heart and intention that we have with anyone is extraordinary. I studied Thai massage. And the teacher I had, he was pretty amazing. He was one of the most severely traumatized people I've ever met. He could never, basically, he'd have a fist fight with someone every day. And he was a Thai massage. But he also had these insights. It's very strange, wonderful, Matt, but trouble. He would, he was born, his mother was born, he was born and his mother was pregnant in the middle of war in Vietnam. But he used to do exercises with us to kind of, it was a great class and Thai massage. But one of the closest things, and they claim that lineage goes back to the Buddha, the Buddhist position, that Thai massage. And he would do these exercises in which we would work on someone with the massage and it's all done on the ground. And then we would do certain moves and then we would ask the person to give a response. And then he would say, now in your heart, in your being, do the same thing with this particular intention. So our attention would change. And we'd do the same thing. And they would report this different thing. It was connected to our intention. I was saying earlier this morning about a man, when I was in Pakistan, there was a man who was, I traveled with, and he traveled, we traveled around Northern Pakistan, actually traveled from Karachi out. And he said, we're going to visit the Mazar's. We're going to visit the, we're going to visit the tombs and the Mazar's, the Makams of the Aulia, of Aulia. But he said, I wanted you to do me a favor. Don't read any of the names of the people. You know, if it's all right with you, don't do that. So that we visit them anonymously, you don't know who's buried there. You know, a boy, this is straight, such and such. And he said, do the things that you usually do, which he's, you know, give salams to your decker, make dua for yourself and for the person that's there, et cetera, et cetera. And we'd do that. And what we did is we went to each one, and each one, I would do that. And then I'd come out and he'd say to me, what did you experience there? And I'd just say, well, I felt this, this, this, this, this. Then he would tell me the story of the person who was buried there. And it would be this, this. It was subjectively spot on. He's following me. That was his teaching. His name was Colonel Wa, another one of these kernels, Colonel Wahid Baksh. I think that means something like the, the one gift or something. And we went to many and it was the same thing. Each place has a reality that's subjective. It's about that person, you know, and the Quran says, do not say they are there. They live. And this is true for all the people that have passed away. Our mothers, they live on within us and they live on in the collective realities of the unseen. I have this wonderful shirt that my son got from one of the tribal peoples. It's called, it's a ghost dance. The traditional natives have something they call the ghost dance. And this ghost dance shirt, it's a particular dance. And it's a dance and a ceremony that the natives developed. And they, they, they did these this ceremony which was meant to make peace between the terrible white Calvary and armies and all the tribes. And so what do you think the white people did? If it's about something to make peace, what do you suppose they did? They, they, they outlawed it. How dare you make peace? And so, you know, so, but I'm that shirt, it's a shirt, it's a ghost dance shirt and that ceremony and I don't have all these different symbols like birds and stars and different things. And all those represent ancestors that we honor and identify. And in the ghost dance, you would then bring in the, you know, the blessings of those ancestors together for the time. And one of the things it's lost in the modern world is not only connections with our ancestors, but the honoring of them and the honoring of that energy that remains in every one of us in our genes, in our epigenetics, if you will, all of that reality that's in the unseen is powerful, very strong. You're going to say Salamu alaykum for all of those online that are not coming back from lunch like the people here. I'm here. Salam alaykum feels funny looking at a wall and saying Salam alaykum but hey, this is the modern world. Alhamdulillah. Well, I'm not sure how long or how many are still coming. It'll take a little while. But any commentary or any quick, what word did we leave off? We were yawning. Touch. Well, actually, so just another couple of commentaries on touch. We can yawn. Please, if you feel like yawning in this session, it's halal. Okay. But if you yawn, notice what's taking place. Notice what you feel in your jaw. Notice what you feel around your eye sockets. Some of the things that happened in yawning that I didn't go into detail, I could go on for quite a long time, even though there's very, very little few studies, and they're all very recent. And people are usually looking in the same sort of area over and over and over and reiterating it. And about a week ago, I found someone who did a survey on the research done in yawning, and he had actually all the good, he had all the points and the things that I'd come up with. Like one of the remarkable things that happens is when we yawn, that there's a, there is something called the keratin body, which is a mass of cells where the keratin arteries, keratin artery splits and goes up both sides of the brain. And at that point, the keratin body sends out all these messages and all these activities take place, including the increasing some degree of flow in the spine. That's a pretty major thing, flow in the spine. It stimulates the production of nitric oxide, which is something, you know, I'm, I don't know if you're familiar with some of the things of all that. It stimulates penile erection. It has signal, it signals social engagements of all sorts of different kinds. Hunger, adversity, awakening, joining, connecting, all of these various things happen. And it's no accident that it is one of the most common social contagious things that take place. So there's lots of other things. I don't have them at hand, but if anyone wants to see any of that research on the studies, it's so interesting. And I'm pretty sure there's going to be a lot more discoveries of the kind of implications of yawning, because it is such a common thing. I've discovered to when I work with people in somatic work, where I get where I'm encouraging to come become president in their bodies. And to talk about being president in your body, all automatically and already brings me enables a lot of people to suddenly become more aware that they have a body. My my beloved teacher, Dr. Lohan, he used to say, you know, some people, some people feel like in the world, there are nobody, they have no body. Nobody is nobody. And he says, then they may make change and feel like, well, now I am somebody. Your father, I'm saying those words are remarkable kind of great direct. And he went so far as to say, we could say we have a body. Or he said, we didn't go so far as to say we are a body. It's the place where our soul lives, and it will live be there until the love freezes from our body. And so it's intimately connected from the time of Adam and all of his successors to us today. When Allah placed that soul in our body. And we asked the question from Allah, am I not your Lord? Allah said the Radhikum and we said yes. And our soul entered our body. So one of the Hikmahs I have in that list is the animal body heals the animal body and the cell. And one of the videos I send out to people is if some of you have probably gotten it, the Impala, anybody else gotten the Impala video? But the video what is this? It's a video of an Impala, like a kind of gazelle that has been caught by cheetah and the cheetah's jaws are on the neck of that. And that cheetah is essentially dead. Did I talk about this yesterday? Yeah, he did. Okay, I don't want to reiterate. But the point of that, that cheetah did not have to listen to a TED talk or go to a cheetah gazelle therapist. The gazelle didn't need to do that. Because what it needed to do was innate by Allah's design. And that what was needed to do innately was to have some means by what time had passed, and that would tell the Impala that it was safe enough to begin to come back. After exiting, being affectionately effectively dead, no heartbeat, no breath for a period of time. You, I and all of us mammals can do that by virtue of the mammalian diving reflex for up to a half hour or 45 minutes, especially in cold water. And there's no damage. That's a protective mechanism in mammals, all mammals. And that so that that gazelle is not breathing, nothing, no movement, and probably no heartbeat. This video. But then at some point, starts to breathe and then suddenly starts breathing lots. Great breathing. And then that breathing starts moving into the body. And it goes through very particular movements. Can't stop me. That's the line. This is what and this is what I've had. This is what brought me to this study of the yawning is I've had people who would have an inclination to yawn. And I said, go ahead and yawn. And then they would suddenly they start yawning and then say, start again, I said, don't don't let it happen. There would be a cascading of this impulse over and over and over. And I mean, in that process of the yawning, very often, there would be memories come up, but it would be interesting in the fact that most when I see these memories, they would be memories that seem to be, at least by my own subjective salvation, they were memories that were being transformed and process as they came forth in the on. Allah gave us everything to you. That, like I said, that gazelle did not have to go to gazelle therapists. It needed to let who was designed in this body to do its work. And yet yawning, well, you all do it in every every year, you find it in every creature, fish, birds, everything, all creatures. It's across the board pretty much socially. I don't know of any. Well, no, that's not true. Probably some very, very earth connected people in forests and jungles in the world, probably don't feel a need to. To stifle it. But that stifling, if you look at that, that is an essential encounter between our man, our animal nature and social constraint. And when we, I mean, for so many of us, that is a, that's a difficulty and a problem in the first place in all different levels. How do we be natural and whole? And, and, and so some people you just mentioned yawning and talk about it, my friend, I was telling him about the research I'm doing, and he's, and on the phone, and he said, you're making me on right now. But it just talking about being in the body, I've seen it makes people begin to yawn. It's natural for us to be in the body and it's natural. So like answering the question the other day, yesterday, which is, we're not learning something new, we're remembering something we lost. So I remember someone that did, it did a lot of somatic, some somatic work with me. And then for a couple of years, she hadn't done any somatic work. She hadn't, and, and we can exit, we can withdraw from our body and, and be dissociated and not present in our body because it's a, it's a strategy for managing the difficulty of being alive. So this woman, I remember one woman who I, I said to her, I've spoken to her for a long time, and she says, I needed to call you because so much is going on in my life, maybe I could talk to you about what's happening. And I said, well, okay, because, and I could tell she was, so I said, well, so what are you noticing your body? And she stopped from what she broke down sobbing. That's all it took. What are you noticing your body? Hello, you remember, you have a body, remember your soul's there in his body, didn't take much. So touch, but let's finish the thing about, so anything else about yawning? How what? Well, I mean, it, it is, one thing we know that it is contagious. And I would suggest that because it's used as a signaling mechanism, amongst many other things. The other thing that happens with the yawn, if it's a successful yawn, and you get a bit of tears with a lot of yawning. There was a study done several years ago, and I can't find it again. But that there, there's a new, there, there is something that's recent kind of articulation of what's called the glimphatic session, the glimphatic system. Anybody know that term? No, glim, glimphatic. Glimphatic relates to the glim, the glim cells, which are primary brain cells. And the glimphatic system is like the lymphatic system, but it's much more refined and fine tuned, it's much more like microscopic. Now there you are tuning your, tuning your polyvagal system. People that do this, if, if, and the advice I give them is, that's all right, your body knows to do that. But the secret of that is doing it as slowly as you can, stretching the experience in time, and feeling and being present every piece of that movement. And that will regulate some of the nervous system and the social engagement system. The following vagal system has to do with the double nerves that go from the base of the brain to the heart and the lungs, and their balance or imbalance to the stomach and the entire body, and then back up to the brain in feedback. And is important in the actual social engagement systems of the face voice. We talked a little bit yesterday about the tone of voice and the melody of the voice, right? How much that says beyond the words. Right? We talked a little bit about that. I could go on that long theme on that. So the social, so, so in the animals, you know, most of the studies on yawning have been done with chimpanzees and monkeys and rats. I mean, that's the scientific world. I mean, which, which is kind of unfortunate in some way, you know, because rats are not humans nor are monkeys. But, but, so there's a lot of signaling that's taking place. Sometimes hunger. People are hungry. Sometimes alpha male with a threat will develop on each other, but that's baboons with these big teeth. Part of that is showing their teeth maybe. So there's a lot that we don't know, but we know it's contagious and the degree of contagion in humans. It's not contagious before the age of five. I'm just in study. So, you know, before you're, not until you're after five years old, this will become contagious. That we can make, you know, have opinions on why that would be the case, I suppose. But we know it's contagious. And I say, yeah, I'm not going to, but it is waking up. That's clear. One thing that's common in all these studies is that it awakens what they, it calls, it says an arousal of the brain. So, we can say yawning is something shows we're bored. On the other hand, we could say it shows that we want to wake up, right? I'm going to do that. It was a nice yawn. So, yeah, I was just mentioning about like connecting like sound, touch, vibration and communal healing and the hadra being an example of that. And I have heard like even some people suggest that this was actually a response to, for example, the trauma of the Mongol invasions, is that you actually have the hadra coming out of that. I don't know the origins of it, but I've heard like some scholars mention that, for example. And then I've heard like more recently, a couple of people, Sheikh Idris Swat's being one of them mentioning like, for our times, do we have to come up with maybe something that's actually new and relevant to our times that actually brings in these different elements, bringing in elements of our sacred tradition, but something that's actually for our times, not just like necessarily hadra, but something else that actually is innovative, group worship, still connected to our tradition. Interesting, yeah. Idris is on it. Okay. I mean, yeah, I know. But I wanted to know your thoughts on that. Number one, like what are your thoughts on it? And then two, like how do we actually go about bringing that into community? Because even the hadra is something that's contested and it's a controversial issue, not even among... I think any sort of objection to the hadra personally, pretty thin, really. It's really pretty thin. And the power of it from anyone who sees it and experiences it, the degree to which it's recognized and it seems right, I think it may fit any time. But that doesn't mean there might not be something else that comes out. We don't know. I mean, at the moment, we're bereft in terms of communal thing, in terms of what happens by the social sound that's common. You know, again, back to my science nerd, nerdism, I remember, because when I was growing up in high school, I lived near this big thing called polywagdon. And it would be thousands and thousands of frogs. And, you know, when the frogs were at night at certain times, you'd just hear this this roaring of all the frogs croaking together. And when I was doing that, all that science nerd stuff, I discovered these studies in which they would take recordings of the frogs and they would amplify them as if there were more frogs and the frogs would stop reproducing. You know, in other words, that was a common thing. There's the murmuration. People familiar with murmuration? Bird? Mermoration of birds and fish? Nope. This is one of the one of the common things. I mean, again, it's really, it's like the Rupert Sheldrake kind of stuff on the assemble level. But it's the fact that the birds, in fact, there's one bird variety, they travel in these great flocks, thousands of them all at once and they all turn at the same time. And they move as a body. They relate to each other. That's called murmuration. And the fish do it as well. And during the study of how they do it, is it the wake of the wings? That's the most common belief. In other words, the movement of one is affecting the movement of the next one and is affecting the movement of the whole. But it's so consistent from the center of the group, all the way to the edge simultaneously, we have to ask what's going on. There's so much that happens that is not directly touch, but it's sensed. It's like there's this story about the sharks. You know about sharks can sense urine in the water from an human, from something like a mile away. Does anybody know that remember that stuff? This is kind of David Attenborough kind of stuff. I'm glad you appreciate that. I like to make these references to people and see who goes, I said over the last one, I said it's kind of a David Kronenberg kind of issue, some woman out their way. And the other thought, who's David Kronenberg? How many of you know quite David Kronenberg, by the way? It's a good reference for a particular, a very peculiar kind of weird weirdness, right? Anyway, so and I want to mention also we're in terms of the touch thing, so I don't know the answer to that. I mean I appreciate Idris and his approach because he has a good solid knowledge and he's also someone like myself because he and I were both present at the beginning of the Islamic psychology where presentations in Istanbul before they started the college and and we both agree because he was you know he calls himself one of my students thank God thank you for that at least because but but you know the shortcomings of psychology but he has a good solid Islamic knowledge and so I'm looking to him always and I always you know say to him that's you know great keep it up go for that because that's what I'm saying I'd like to see this take place in a greater number of us. So I don't know what else it could be but there's endless things I believe in group group music but I believe and like I said some of you may not have heard this yesterday the last workshop I did in Southern California I started it with an example that I learned from Minister Farah Khan that then the million man march in which he had everybody raised their hand it wasn't like that but raised their hand and called their name say I Hakeem Archuleta I whatever their name was and a million man there must have been a million men there was pretty awesome thing he said I and then they spoke their name and they said then he had them repeat I make a vow from this day to never talk or put down or strike a woman in my life from this day on and a long while I'm like that did but it was powerful and people I've spoken to were there with that there were changes the power of that kind of thing together is to do something like that so you know let me just finish that thing because the people who weren't here what I did is I I asked people to vow to sing as often and as much as they could from that day on and to hold to that commitment with their family members with friends with their alone if it's it can be long fine if it's one or two other people even better but to sing because we've lost that part of our humanity and yesterday I said to a man who said I can't sing I said you can sing you are the inheritor of Sidna Daoud the lay salam who sang his message with such beauty that the birds fell from the sky you're a human being and that's your birdness that is your birdness and has built it as all the animal qualities we contain in some degree that's why Allah places the center of His creation with lioness lionishness and birdness and snakeness and so on we could go on and on it's to understand ourself by those forms that are contained within us out there in the creation so yeah we we can recover singing we can recover singing and I don't mean you know I don't believe personally in in that the kind of singing in which we take I mean the beautiful thing about Moroccans the Moroccans, Qasayid and the Arabic Qasidas and stuff that are sung vigorously in harmony with with with strength and power Jalali quality loud the language is not the same as English and the melodies are not the same and the the scales are not the same the scales and from India to Morocco the Makama in Morocco and in the Middle East and the the Raghas in India all of those represent states and the traditional sound someone is talking about sound the medicine of sound the medicine of sound used to be understood by this principle that music at what's it from Shakespeare do you think music has this strength to soothe the savage beast isn't that it did anybody know that Shakespeare line it changed in any words Hamza al-Din loveless his soul did any of you know Hamza al-Din he was in the Bay Area for many years passed away and you know blessed man played the ood and sang and he once I was he came to Mexico and told me talk about how the the music and the belly dancing belly dancing is actually the word belly dancing actually came from ballad dancing and the and the English ballad meaning country dancing and the and the English heard ballad dancing as belly dancing and they turned into belly dancing but he said belly dancing was something in which the movements you know the belly dancing was very specific kind of thing in which the arms would move in accordance to the flutes and the hips would move according to the drums interestingly you know and so on and other parts would move according to the Santor and this is all but he said in those times people have the art in which they could take play music and change someone's state we know this is a technique that was used in Andalusia in Spain in hospitals in the hospitals where they treated so-called mental illnesses with diet activities music theater drama and things that were not talk not talk alone they were activities that changed people and brought people together I mentioned yesterday about therapy that didn't last very long because it's so impractical in which there would be four people to every single person four or five actual people who were well balanced and well boundaryed and contained solid with one person who is not being able to be solid and that they would like by being like proximity to these people they would learn so we learned from each other and we learned from the world around us and we learned from you drive from careening down the highways at 80 miles an hour and 2000 pounds of metal isolated one per driver in what my son used to call isolation pods we learned from those things the medium is the message so yeah we'll see but I'm an advocate for why not do a hugra I mean it's singing and it's the kind of dancing and I mentioned that to some I may have mentioned this now go so far as I mentioned again with the respect shake hands I remember him walking with me in New Mexico and saying you know we should all do hugra and and then he realized his students were behind him and he said for our bodies and I said yes for our bodies that place where our souls and our hearts reside we'll see but I would suggest we bring back singing and I recommend this book I recommended yesterday Rise Up Singing did I recommend that yesterday there is a book I used to have they don't have it right now it's called Rise Up Singing and it's the kind of book it has everything from nursery rhymes to old Irish and English folk songs to Beatles and Dylan songs and traditional it has this amazing collection and it's got the words and it's got the chords and chord changes and things like that you know basic musical but you know you can sing it you can do this with your family and I recommend do it with your friends and family just one of the things we did in Chicago with that thing is we simply we did a little singing here but it's hard to get people to do the Jalal the chorus but one of the things I did in Chicago we had quite a few people how many was at least about 100 people there and I just got people to all and we can do that right now let's just do that okay just make it listen and see if you can find the common note and just do again use my as they follow and listen and do it again this time with more force and more volume and we can make it a lot listen and make it volume a little tiny bit does to your body and your stage if nothing else by breathing with some energy we were designed to sing other ways to send a doubt would not have come in that form and done that thing they say that some people some singers have become so good at singing with such movement that they not only people fall unconscious but some people would die and some of you must know if you've really listened to Gavali or even coke studio recordings you know what I'm talking about the possibilities anyway oh just a couple of years yeah I didn't I mean most most of the people I've worked with since that time are are daisies mostly mostly Pakistanis but I you know what are the inheritance I got there were the two of my teachers were Indian Pakistani and my wife is Pakistani she's Punjabi so I continue to learn Bismillah one of the things that I've noticed is in gatherings when we're reciting Quran or there's a thicker at times you hear voices that are not there singing with you for me how I notice it is because if it's a group of men nobody's hitting that note nobody's hitting that note that note yeah it's a note picking it when it comes you know that you know what genius musical genius is Mozart now how many any of you even familiar with Mozart fond of Mozart music Mozart I mean he was he has a he has a two flute sonata for two flutes that he wrote and he had his genius is he had it designed so that the sound of the two flutes would create a third voice so if you listen and then when you say wait a minute there's a third flute and it's the guy but there's this principle called the it's a circle of fifths does anybody know do you know what who knows what the a fifth is in a in a an octave so you know what so a fifth is what seven semitones sorry seven semitones it's the it's the yeah the fifth of the of the canots well it we could call it the interval between a tonic note one note and the next note that vibrates in harmony with that not the most immediate one but the most common one before it goes on the entire octave so who can sing it who can sing where's mom in the cave something like that the circle of fifths when we're singing together and some people you know say don't sing harm in the traditions they're not singing harmony in kosaid but when we sing together that thing happens automatically the sound of singing three people is greater than one plus one plus one because every so every sound and every vibration that comes from one person's voice will amplify the other ones providing their harmony if they're out of harmony it will dampen it right you all get that so it's the interval between a note because we go up and pick da da da da da da da da da da da that's the 12th tone scale in western music in the arabic world and the rest of the world there's much more tiny more more more notes in that than the scales that are usually used in the ragas in the bakama from the Middle East and chinese music and so forth so a group of five people singing is more than the equivalent of five different voices put together because each one of they're singing in harmony and you know what it's like when you hear people singing in harmony right if uh I mean if I if we'd had the video stuff together one of the things I wanted to present and this could be in the videos that if you subscribe to this next stage of that we were talking about yesterday this is the stage of the stuff I've been producing I produced these videos but a lot of it is listening to the various ways in which harmony is expressed in the world the russian harmonies in the traditional russian virtual that political craziness took place awesome just awesome just like serious pardon me how you how would you search how would you search online for something like oh you can just go to russian traditional russian harmonic singing and you'll find these group groups of men sitting you know and they'll do many different parts that are in harmony different you know so like I guess they do something even five parts different harmonies and then when solo someone will come in and on the top is solo kind of as the the part of a poem it's only poems about the world the nature and the birds and the trees and I mean it's beautiful stuff it's very moving and the africans the africans do the same thing the eastern europeans you know bulgarians singing but the africans are really good at it this multi harmony so that stuff is part of our birthright as human beings that we've left behind for these absurd little plastic discs that we call that we can say about I love music it's one thing to love that and it's the other thing it's the love singing or making some sound even if it's crumbling on a couple of sticks or something okay so what else comments this supposed to be the discussion and I'm just holding forth here and rather than just if I sit down it's going to be I'm going to be a little more passive and even though higher level here what are your thoughts on like shamanism and like what they do who's who's saying that oh shamanism shamanism well I mean there's no way shamanism and there's traditional shamanism shamanism is the natural it's kind of it's kind of people who play a certain role in societies and it's usually around the and rena and realm of the unseen that they bring into their their cultural realities and people who they have had some kind of initiation into an understanding or proficiency in whatever it is they're doing and elected to do the and this brings brings it up something else that I want to talk about and sing is the started to talk about earlier which is the vastness of the unseen that we as Muslims are obliged to believe in Dalekal Kitab we believe in the unseen and the unseen is vast it's much more vast in this material world but in Australia I don't know if people are familiar with the Australians had a Sharia in the past there are ancient peoples ancient peoples and it's only I mean they were someone who visited there in the 30s and 40s tells the story about coming back and how they've been decimated by the modern world and the food from the modern world he said because and he had pictures of these people he said they were like warriors magnificent bodies muscular well formed balanced physique great postures present in the world and then sugar and white flour and all of this stuff came in and wasted the the population but the pictures I mean if you ever look at the pictures of the of the Australian Aborigines in the 30s amazing people and they weren't going to any gym they weren't going to gym but they were no no they were super buff and absolutely beautifully formed bodies that says something about our lifestyle we don't need gyms in fact you know I'm not a I I don't recommend gyms so I do recommend lots of movement we're designed to move like I said the number or I can say the number 11 bus is the starter you know but we don't do that but the Australian Aborigines they had a Sharia and they had an amazing connection to the unseen because they did this they had a practice called the mogul wire and the mogul wire is one thing where if they wanted to communicate and connect with somebody else they would start a fire and they send a message that would be answered by someone else with that fire and then it would just sit down in front of the fire and they connect they would connect somehow the mogul wire and they they would connect with details is that better sound so but also what they would do is if someone had if someone in the community had violated that level of the Sharia in which they would then be uh open to to uh punishment by death it would be done by the shaman they didn't whatever they called it I mean the shaman's a very different name that's that's a sort of catchall phrase for many different things people use their drugs and whatever the Russians would drink you know poison the poison mushrooms and then they urinated out and give it to the next one and they pass it on because it's such a poison it's not assimilate back to our the heck about poison anything we cannot assimilate or eliminate is a real toxin but the shaman in the in the traditional sharia of the aboriginal if a man was sentenced to execution it would be done by the man who had the bag of bones and he would take out of it a one single bone and point at that person done that was the execution and they would die within a period of time so what do you think of that does anybody know the story of the prophet saw the same when he saw the same when he threw a pebble at the man and hid it in his neck and the man turned and said he killed me and the man died what does that say what does that say it says a lot it says a lot about what can happen by imagination and belief and that can happen both in the negative sense and the positive sense I was just sharing with someone earlier about my experience with viruses from many many many years ago long before COVID ever came about in which I would have people would call me from Australia London New York California all within few days of each other and say I have this flu can you help me with it I used to get this kind of I did a lot of that kind of work back early years and they would describe these very specific kind of flu symptoms and they said well it started like this and then this and then this and each one would be so similar my questionnaire came up how can this be so similar and even they described it was sore throats like and then it was subjective description how can they all be so similar it's so spontaneous from such a disparate places in the world did they travel there and it made me question viruses made me question to the point that I was saying I just spoke about this for the first time my friends but I'm speaking about it made me question the whole reality of viruses so much so that when I would hear someone say oh there's this thing going around and my red flags are going red this thing going around okay and then it would start to tell me about it and I would automatically sort of move into this protective mode not dissociation but to protect my own locus and being in which I would hear it but inside it would be protected by the self lack of the law I'm not going to allow this suggestion lack of the law this was was to enter into my being because I felt I felt that that may be the virus itself so I'm just throwing it out as just a suggestion but I will add that that from the scholar's point of view the gin part of gin part of the nature of the gin is that they have qualities they will never know because they are gin they're unseen creatures they are the creatures of the unseen and they are the families of the unseen they have families and they have they have generations and the family and so forth I'll leave it at that but I'm pointing out here how important it is to realize how we are influenced by what seems to be subtle realities back to these things about TV programs that we watch you know I know someone that watched this TV series called the morning show anybody ever watch that yeah and it was very very well done but if you pay attention it's all about backstabbing the theme underlying there's all about backstabbing making something being successful at the expense of anyone and those are the kind of messages that go in in spite of the trauma and the glamour or anything like that the humor humor could be the cover-up for all these things I've never watched Errigal or Errigan or whatever it is huh Errigal I've never watched any of that in spite of the fact that all the Muslims are saying it's about even out of being but I know that these things there are messages that we don't recognize and that we pick up because the subtle influence that we're open to and capable of being changed by are enormous I love the study that happened at one of the universities Midwest universities in which the sociology professor said I want to do an experiment with you all if it's okay and but I you have to bow to keep it secret and private and let no one know about it and don't mention it to anyone and everybody agreed promised prompts yes they all promised and so the experiment was he said I want you when you're on campus if you see anyone wearing red you tell them you look great today you don't mention anything red but you look great today if they had anything red a month later everyone's wearing red if you want to see really another interesting of the influence well the century of the self is people know the century as a self that's a no it's a documentary by Adam Curtis it has a lot about how we are influenced by these subtle realities and subtle things and it's a very so it's an engaging documentary but um what was the other one I was going to mention the other one that's really interesting and someone said and I thought it was a joke they said well you know if you're driving a Subaru what's the likelihood that you would be considered to be what who drives Subarus huh white people with children yeah how about lesbians they're white people not with children necessarily sometimes no but here's it if you go to the Atlantic magazine Atlantic magazine and they have a whole exposition a whole kind of article it's a description of how lesbians were targeted by the marketing world to buy Subarus and the subtle way in which no one knew what was happening but it in the result with all these subtle things like the kind of license but it's kind of color kind of setting it's all psychologically designed so that suddenly became the car for lesbians they were successful it's a really interesting article to read just in terms of the capabilities of that kind of subtle influence healing works in the same way and I say this if they only if there's only only two or three therapists because we're all healers of each other and we have to recognize and be cognizant of the subtle influence we can have even by what we're seeing or thinking inside that may not be obvious and you know in the words it's really important I always say to men I say look assume that your wife knows everything about you knows everything you're feeling and there's no way you can ever be dishonest with her because she knows when you're dishonest and your children the same and your animals the same although the animals are much more flexible in being loyal the dogs and cats they're amazingly forgiving the inside feeling well what I'm talking about let's jump a little bit more and let's see I'm trying to enable it talk about how do we restore wholeness of our being with all the aspects it has from feeling to appearance I have a hard time trying to tell people who address my life if I'm so called comfortable close and I'm going out she says you're going to be homeless today I say no I'm I'll put on some nice clothing you know and how often do I see see this thing where the where the husband is saying yeah my wife that gives me the same thing listen to her now 80 percent 80 percent of judgment is made from one person to another person it's on their clothing and we could say oh that's just materialist and I'm not a materialist and I'm an artist and blah blah blah we could say oh but this is the way we work how it comes dressed and 80 percent of that clothing is on the shoes does anyone notice the shoes I wear yellow we're all comes in I can't go out in public most places without people saying oh I like your shoes but they're just yellows they're out of the ordinary and prophesiesm said and how deep that's the best shoes yellow shoes are the best it's it's a sahih adi so subtle influence can it be related to frequency I think it's it's maybe a little too simplistic way of reading because everything has frequency and everything has combinations of frequencies harmonics and chords chordal realities so you know but because it's very nuanced and one of the things I want to do if we have I've had videos to work with you know presentation was to play certain kinds of music and ask you at certain stages in the music because you know so it happens in the body but when it comes to voice voices I remember recently a man who's a dear dear old friend who was passing through New Mexico he said where exactly are you and I said well I'm in such place he said well we're gonna try to come by when I come back and I knew he was lying I knew he said that but I knew he wasn't gonna come by and he didn't come by but we know so much more and the women know this better by the tone of voice than by the words and it's a pretty important thing and children the same children and teenagers especially they know where you're talking vs or when we're doing that no I this is when I was supposed to say oh yeah this is that's because I'm gonna be a good boy scout girl scout muslim or not and being sedent you know look at the it's important principle here that the prophets notice them his his legacy went to Abu Bakr a sedic not senali who was an amazing thinker and you know insights and deep stuff but of the Bach to be sedic to be genuine this is a goal for us men more than the women because the women were naturally honest and people some people does anybody question that when I say this I'm asking you right now does anybody you know say that's not no it's true I have problem I mean my teacher about marriage and relationships he said the onus is on men the woman can have gone through this was severe trauma and be so so disturbed and wounded but the man if he's going to take on my marriage he has the responsibility to care for that and oversee and care for that person whatever comes and by Allah if he does that he will be transformed but so hard on the age we live in because we all have been wounded it may all have to and that's one of the difficulties with having connection at all anyway what do we you know my one of my teachers dear teachers to say to well you want to let that person in your life vote because we're living at a time you know one of the great metaphors of our time was Titanic which was the film when it came out was the best most popular movie ever was the best biggest box office because it was a perfect metaphor for modern life they all said well this is unsinkable well folks this modern world is sunk it's not sinking it's sunk and there's life boats some are in the wealthier in the life boats some don't get life boats they're holding on to their baggage so to speak somewhere drowning can you repeat what you just said the metaphor well the question was no matter what a woman has gone and gone through does the man have the capability to manage and to be an ally in her healing if you want to look at it from that point of view or or to be her husband husband name is in very specific terms I mean you're taking care of something some men will rise to the occasion and will be and I've seen there are examples I could give you some examples that just spectacular examples of men who have had spiritual practices gone through all sorts of things and it was that woman I mentioned this yesterday it was the woman that in the end provided that final piece they actually needed for that transformation to become a man not all their men in their men's groups with the so-called you know Fatua and then you know being starless shooting arrows and riding horses but they're chopping wood I don't know what it is you know the Prophet said was more like a mother in many ways than he was anything else and he was never he was never accused of being too harsh he was always too soft by others so I don't know I mean it depends on Allah but we live in a very difficult time and there are some situations where a man is not capable of doing that because it is his own wounds usually but we're all so deeply I mean there's some people that are so wounded that you know and I've been doing this work for over 50 years and I've been seeing trauma trauma trauma trauma trauma come to me I'm sick of hearing the term I don't like to even use that term anymore like I say you know I know it's become so overused and watered down nobody understands the essence of it anymore so much so that I expect to be driving down the road and seeing a sign that says trauma informed Sunday branch I'm sure maybe it's already happened somewhere so it's a hard and we have to have the moment we do respect to the therapist they're coming in doing their best but and the shayukh but you know there's a man who studies outcomes therapists Scott Miller do you know Scott Miller it's got an interesting guy isn't he what's interesting is he said the same thing that Dr. Omar said and I heard it from both of them in one week the same thing and I had it just mentioned it to someone too which is the story of Johar and it was about I said it but it's all about the same thing it's about trying to solve things in the wrong way and it's the story of Johar when he's he's under a light lamp and he's going through the ground and the policeman came and I said what are you doing he says I'm looking for my keys oh he lost them did you lose them here he said no I lost them in the house he said well why are you looking here he said because the light's better you know and on some level that's the story of science I mean the science cancer research just it's a juggernaut just continues continues continues and cancer's going up still some cancers are beginning better mental health I mean one of my teachers I saw a video with him at his panel discussion from many many years ago and the first thing he said he started the lecture on he was on the panel and the first thing he said was well it's pretty clear the psychotherapy has failed completely and while there's more and more therapies their self-help books are doubling in publication almost every year it's gone crazy and the number of therapists are now moving into thousands and from that tens of thousands or more of people who are give testimonials for those therapists helping them so with due respect to therapists they're doing their best it's like sinking drowning people yeah you pull them into your boat but we're so wounded I mean there's some cases where I mean I've seen cases recently where I fear the man doesn't have the the presence if he would use that term overused at this particular event the presence to be there for that person and her woundedness or vice versa but it's usually the man that hasn't my teacher taught that in relationships it's the oneness is on men I believe that well and part of it's a chronic injunction about caring from taking care of women but because women already know so much more especially about relationships and feelings and we're trained out of that and we're church and forced out of that into being strong men and various things this this false idea of manhood in charge I mean this across the board thing this orderly this order term where you're and I'm someone mentioned I mentioned this order of term that I learned recently with so many facing women it's primary in Pakistan he's most been most of my people that I've worked with all these years and the and the and the and the expression is what do you know you know what do you know you're just a woman I couldn't know anything so that's why I believe that's the case because women with their balance of more oxytocin and men with their balance of too much testosterone and then men who come to me say how do I boost my testosterone so I can feel stronger and more powerful I said that's not that you don't get stronger more powerful with testosterone you can reproduce and you can make and you can fight but that's not what it's about it's about being the nuanced in insight that informs your heart and makes you a big human being in yourself about about singing so um I was really inspired by the power you mentioned in singing and and the voice the human voice and using it to heal people through the singing so I teach early I focused on early childhood education and I teach children I teach children seven and under and um both in the mommy and me classes along with the preschool classes I try to incorporate a lot of singing and so whether it's um traditional kasaid or the english translation of traditional kaseidas or vikar I really just try to bring that to life through um you know throughout the program um I just wanted to get your advice on what you would recommend specifically for children seven and under in regards to singing what type of songs and any and set you would have to share sounds like you're on it I mean kaseidas but the thing about kaseidas is they're beautifully audibly and they're beautifully written they sound beautiful I mean one of the beauties about the arabic language it's not like english language you know it's like it's no accident that there's more operas in italian because most of the words in italian end with vowels it's ready to sing it's like sign to sing and the arabic language and the kaseidas even if it's mark and singing it's got it's a much more beautiful sound you know people used to people used to listen to Quran that were enemies of the prophet sallat and sallam and they would secretly listen because it was so awesome to hear it we know that last night the party at the end of our session last night that was that was it I mean you know after all the things we did all day we go there and for the asia prayer and this guy and this man he probably lot of mostly you probably know him moroccan I mean I've just gotten to know him recently but that that was I mean that was that's that at all so I'm yeah the kaseid I mean traditional singing tends to be more there's a lot more natural things but even English it's a bit you know I love wash Quran and wash Quran in in group I mean that's one of the things when I became Muslim I heard that to me that was the most beautiful thing I've ever heard and it was it moved me inside I felt like it was my ancestors singing for me reciting for me Quran but then I discovered well not everybody does that amongst the Muslims it's just the Moroccans and the Anilisians and the North Africans so I mean it says sing sing sing sing the Moroccans they start singing you know in the tradition in Morocco is was the was the the tradition in Morocco was to have a Jews of Quran after after Fajr and another Jews after Maghrib but in unison singing so everybody can sit and take part in this collective voice and learn to recite Quran and learn the melodies and learn the style and learn to sing and then they'd I mean you know in the Arab countries in Morocco in Spur and Algeria these you go there and you'll find whole audiences of hundreds of people and they know all these awesome poems long elaborate poems about praise of God and the prophets that I sent him and all this stuff and they know the words to it it's like a whole mass of people singing these spiritual songs there's a similar thing that happens in the in the eastern desi world in Pakistan in those countries from to all that you know in which they're classic poems they don't know them in the same way the Moroccans do it they haven't been singing them for years after years and everybody knows it but it's still based on that kind of spiritual poetry that is absolutely gorgeous beautiful and anyone spent time I mean when I was in Pakistan for those years studying for those two years I had the fortune good fortune to go to lots of Kavali gatherings with very good singers and there's a practice they do there because those songs if you listen to them and you're present and you can understand the words I was with that man that would take me to the take me to the the Makhamat to the tombs of the Aulia I mentioned earlier I don't some of you probably weren't here and he would have me just make becker and then afterwards tell me the story of the out of the Wali without knowing who was there and show me how even by just being there I got something from the nature of his life and someone someone here explain how that happened where? Indonesia in Indonesia where they went with a bunch of several women and the women spontaneously took hands and held hands fell around the tomb with this person just without knowing anything and they all began to cry and they were told afterwards this man was known for his protection and service to women that's who he was as a Wali these things are real and so this man that took me there you know it had a it was the it's the the Quranic truth that they do not say they're die they're alive so this realm of the unseen sorry someone's been wanting to ask a question for you is there a question back there Hamza? yes yes what's that? so the question was when you said the music goes to the tombs what did that actually mean? the music going into the tombs where you said the Islam music what was all about that? I don't remember saying the music went into the tomb but I'm not sure let me I'll repeat this Hamza we a lot designed us naturally to sing and Sidna Dawood one of the prophets he delivered his message in the form of singing and they say that his singing and his message was so beautiful and it was heard because of the beauty of the singing was heard by people with such depth that the birds was so beautiful that the birds would fall from the sky but I say to people when and someone I said to last night I said someone I said sing sing sing out and he said oh I can't sing I said yes you can sing you don't sing but yes you can sing and the only thing that stops most people from singing out and I'll hand it to the Moroccans they don't hold back and I'll hand it even more to the Tunisians who just blast out and when they blast out every pore of our skin acts as an ear and every bone hears what's being sung and if we know the meaning of it it's deeply changes us and has an effect and that's why when we have a powerful vicar we leave the vicar and our body continues to resonate and ring with it so are you going to say something more Hamza? How does the song make the birds fall in the sky? No, fall from the sky because it's so beautiful because birds are the ones they're the ones we think of if you listen to the birds singing they're really beautiful singers I love birds singing there's a woman who used to go to the forest and the east coast with mockingbirds and she used to take recordings of Gustav Mahler's symphonies and play it and the birds would start singing the symphonies so it's the beauty of it Allah gave us that capabilities for reciting Quran with beauty that Qari last night that was the culmination of our whole day of talking about all these things to listen to that extraordinary recitation and it's one of those days I'll never forget that moment so question here sorry John I believe so you know I don't know if you've ever seen young children if you are playing drums or you have a rhythm I had one of the videos I want to have here because how I respond to the world is part of what the second exercise I'm talking about tracking what do I notice in my body what does my body do am I here dead or alive the Quran says the capital and like propped up blocks of wood they don't respond but the human responds and there's eyes of Quran that says for those who hear the eyes and their bodies tremble right Darif and the tears flow Sheikh Habib my Sheikh in one of his Qasidis he said Oh Allah send us that knowledge that will cause our bodies to tremble and our tears to flow you know and open our hearts to that and to that state of being and that doesn't mean a state of weakness it's in its it's a state of greatness and grandness it's a little bigger state than one that's constricted and closed yeah her mother I couldn't even yawn earlier today I still haven't yawn yet but I will I will yawn but my but my daughter is seven and she's just in her in her body much more they have these the the beat going there's bass there's a jimbay drum there's a shaker and she and there's an older woman who is moving and she just went with it and she's like mommy the the music is moving me I can't stop I can't stop the mood and I'm I'm all constricted don't do that it's inappropriate that kind of move is not but she was she just she just naturally you know went with it when so did you all hear that when when the videos that I had tended to play like I said there's several videos I wanted to project them or have a view and then ask you what response to your body but one of is it's a group of african children maybe 15 or 20 young children but I don't know four or three four or five maybe very young and this woman and they never never heard fiddle music you know that kind of fast thing and she starts playing this fiddle music and this is they just go wild they just all respond and it's a whole group of children doing that so and animals it's the same there's a man that used to go there was there was a video I think it was one of these David Addenborough type things I don't know where you know this guy has a piano he takes it out into the jungle and he plays his piano for this elephant that comes in start the movie getting it on with the piano okay so what else how are we yes sorry yeah well that's my my thesis and like I said when I was in when I said Raheel Ray and I said lead design just to move to respond to music well unless you can manage weird places like like I used to go to raves all the time and and and do hot birds during the race I have a quick question if I if I can hello what right here I didn't hear right here I have a quick question to your right right here right here um I'm going back to like where you were talking a little bit more about like the war and you know there's people out here who want to war versus there's people out here who want to have peace perhaps and as Muslims in America in the U.S. you know my experience you know it's been it's been a little bit uneasy to be a Muslim in front of certain you know certain people to be open about who I am and stuff of that nature just curious if anybody else's experience the same challenges before or if anybody has any recommendations for how we as Muslims continue to promote peace in a world that sometimes you know isn't necessarily on the same page yeah well that's a pretty good question and I think it's a pretty common one because we do believe in peace and we believe in making peace and promoting peace and we believe what we believe in fighting when it's appropriate and defending when all that's true sorry for a lot of people even grasp that but it's hard to also to be what I've seen with again like I said most of the people that I've worked with in these over 50 years of work now has been mostly with actually mostly with Pakistanis and Arabs but mostly mostly desis of or Pakistanis Indians and one of the things that's hard for anyone my wife is a Punjabi and you know it's hard for people to understand like white people like me I came out of a privileged white people typical white people Southern California community where there were no black people not even brown people not even you know Asian people there were there were Mexican Americans next door who saved my life as human beings to be honest and where my protractors when I was in high school because I was a foreigner there so I understood that but it was hard for me in time I finally recognized what it means to grow up I have one woman who is a dentist and she was working in the community was with a wide range of of Muslims and mostly Muslims as a dentist and she moved to somewhere else and she started working with a clientele who are mostly mostly white people and she said and she said I couldn't help it but it felt like they were all looking sideways at me and I thought what a good description of something and that's you know people say there's trauma that's obvious and there's trauma that's not so obvious and there's something that I considered insidious trauma which is trauma that takes place in a subtle way but over a long period of time over and over and over and one of those is being shunned and being having being looking looked sideways by other people that is felt and it's felt more by women and it is by men but it will be felt and it will have an effect and an impact and we're you know we're all dealing with that now and it's it's a topic of it's a current topic of discussion you know what that means to have lived through that and these centuries of it and the ongoing quality of it now so but in terms of dealing and being strong in the world there's several you know principles that I personally believe in but you know this is from the people as I came and someone who is whose opinions and views are colored by all the people I've seen but I will say that one can express it's possible for one to express everything one feels it's possible for anyone to express everything everything one feels and my teacher said if you do not express what you feel it will destroy you you must expect and but that expression has to be done with Ekma and ideally it's done with Ekma and compassion at the same time holding to those principles holding to that but recognizing that anything it needs to be said can be said if it's said in the right way but it must be done and he also said anyone who expresses their feelings fully they will not be depressed but so many people they don't have anyone they feel safe expressing anything to and then they say something you shut down that's been applied of women over and over and over and over and over where they express what they feel and their men say no you're not even feeling that that's not even real you all that's because or you need to do this or blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah so its strength is not more testosterone or bigger biceps that you show off by having short sleeve shirts and having big cars or you know anything else the outward show of power big houses strength is by having certainty in oneself and real trust in the law and recognition that he has your back more than yourself or anyone else ever could have and that's not you know that's easy to see say as a good what I'm called Muslim one of the things that disturbs me most these days is I see people who are struggling and they're struggling with whatever it is in the world that has wounded them and given them difficulties in the world and they're making an effort by coming to me to try to come forth from that difficulty and then they listen to a spiritual teacher say well you won't be depressed if you strong him on because a lot of trust in the law and you all you have to do is increase your Iman and have stronger Iman and you won't be depressed or anxious well yeah but how you do that it's a great thing to say and so they come to me and say I guess my Iman I mean or they'll say all you need to do is to sell out to the me all you have to do is sell a lot you do prayer enough on the Prophet and you won't have any anxiety and he says something comes to us well I do it 300 times every night and I'm going to increase it to 500 I'm still anxious so we have to be real about people's condition and we have to honor where they're at for them to move and to come to the next to move to the next stage one of the songs talking about them the art of music it used to be I mean if a person is depressed and sad it doesn't mean you just simply play and they're happy I mean the art of of the Andalusian type of Qasidas was this this this transition from melody to melody to melody to melody and same in in the Maqamat in the traditional Arab music in which you you may start with a phrase the serious minor chords minor kind of quality sad and then move little by little transforming changing changing the influence of you know people ask me to work with their two things that I've been been given tasks to work with our young children or disruptive and in trouble and old people who are in states of dementia and for those people for children one of the most valuable therapies is one of my most valuable therapies for children that I've discovered through the years is well one of I'll just give you one technique that I use which is it's this and things of that sort why why can that be therapy and why should play be therapy it's fun what else saying it it connects you with it's connecting play and play as I said before play is never random play is specifically coming forth because play is spontaneous we don't plan play children come up oh let's play yeah well let's do this first and then let's do this second and oh yeah then the monkey bars it's it has to be spontaneous or it's not play absolutely absolutely the question is can that same kind of connection be made to connect with the inner child anybody who connects with people in any number they will not make it all serious there has to be humor in it there has to be this alternation you know of gelal and jamal of series and and and it part of it so a great degree it was connection I said before that I believed for doctors the man that just I mentioned Scott Miller Scott Miller is a man very interesting it's valuable for us Muslims to hear this Scott Miller is the one that studies you know about his outcomes study right and he's he in a group of people have studied the outcomes of people who are have emotional you know I don't like to use the term mental illness I just don't want to ever use it to be honest but people who have emotional problems and he studied the people who go to psychotherapists or psychiatrists who go to medical doctors who go to clergy that would include in moms spiritual teachers friends and psychics and of those they studied well what was the greatest number of people said that said well I got good results I felt better from this healing is another thing we won't get to the realm of healing we'll talk about feeling better what were the better outcomes from what group of people and what and what do you also put what was the best outcome from what group friends you think friends people think friends is it it's an important thing for us Muslims to hear and therapists to hear the psychics the psychics had better reports of good results over a longer period of time and they made more money on it what does that say I suggest give me five you got it absolutely it's back to what we were talking about earlier we believe in the realm hello well let's do so and let's begin to recognize the nuanced realities that are there in the unseen much greater and more vast than this final result of material things and how much influence that has I've got into that a bit about the subtle influences of things when I went to first went to Morocco I mean again this thing about the eye being a piece of the brain pushing out through the skull we don't want to see things that we don't want to see everything that exists prophet sardis said if you could see what I see you probably wouldn't go out at night you know we don't want to see that we we want to sustain and manage I mean by the same token to see and to be able to feel cognizant and aware of the extraordinary generosity of a law or the kindness of a law or the forgiveness of a law all these positive things we if we could see it in its fullness it would probably overwhelm us we would not be able to contain it because it's too much but when it comes to the unseen we want to keep it we want to keep a modicum of ways in which we can manage it we don't want to see too much but I remember when I first went to Morocco and the Morocco and some people more than other peoples are more open to the unseen and they're more conversant with it on a regular basis and that conversant with it on a regular basis also enables it in many cases to become more present if you believe in miracles by a law they're more likely to see them and recognize them and experience them allows them our expectations of it so when I first went to Morocco and we had this evening of Dikker and I was sitting with all these people you know that I couldn't speak the language and people translating for me and I was all this all new world and it was an amazing Dikker like last night it was this amazing night of Dikker you know it was just all these things happening and I was sitting at the table and this one man said he said it was awesome he said yes it's a Dikker it's true about the Malai the angels he said at one point there were two angels that flew in that window up above and came and surrounded all of us in this such a sense that thing happened at that time and I thought wow, it's gone a lot what an amazing thing that he was able to experience that and I took it as an interesting and more as a subjective experience that he had until at another point I was sitting at another table there was another group of people not from this table and there was a man there he said yeah it was amazing there was one point it was two angels and he said he described the same thing and that's when I said whoa what's happening here that I this I never said this is something I don't know about yet but I didn't say yet I said this is something I don't know about so when we believe and expect in miracles because what's happening right now is a miracle if we want to define any in any sort of way we might define miracles it's something that's so remarkable so remarkable as is seen totally impossible and that is we are existing in Allah's creation that my friend my friend Fatiha Ben Ali dear dear brother he said to me he's talking with him about some some people that were having really difficulties with coming out of their emotional stress and difficulties and he said you know we have a saying in in Libya and he said it's not one of the hundred one of the aslam al-ghusam not one of the beautiful the the most beautiful names of Allah but it's al-mudabir he said and the saying they use is al-mudabir hakim and it means it's all gonna be okay it's one of the most powerful statements we can give to any person it's all gonna be okay somewhere inside we know that truth for reality because Allah is in charge in the end whatever is going to happen Allah is in charge in al-mudabir hakim it will all be okay so alhamdulillah yes okay question online the question is what type of environments or space should we surround ourselves to help with presence what kind of space should we surround ourselves to help ourselves with presence well there's so many aspects to what we find ourselves in to increase presence in ourselves to increase presence because we'll find ourselves in all sorts of easy and difficult surroundings inevitably this is the way it works but to increase that we want to do things we want to be in environments and places we will get good reflection one of the most powerful things is good company to be with people who are honest to be with people who we can trust what they feel about us and what they might say about us I mean that's a pretty obvious one you know people who remind you know there's a saying you know I mean one of the one of the hadith is said hadith is a Qur'an to be with the people who remind you of Allah and that that mandate or that recommendation it doesn't mean to be with people who talk about Allah I suggest that what those people are the ones who behave in a way that you realize they are people of Allah in their behavior in their actions in their attitudes in their feelings what they say when they're adab the way they look the way they greet you their sincerity their honesty all these qualities they have that are only qualities of Allah that they share and they break forth from their beings and so I'm yes I'm not sure what you're I maybe it's it depends depends totally on what happens inside you without a doubt yeah but if you're looking for what's going to make me more present how do I get more present you have to be people with the remind you of the truth whether it's speaking the words of Qur'an or just by being honest yes pure space you know people have come to me over and over and say well this is happening with my son or somebody and they're really gone off off the rails and you know what should I do take him to the psychiatrist and with due respect to the psychiatrist to be honest I say no I would take him out into the forest I mean I'll say my offer myself before I became Muslim I had a period in which I had what would be described clinically as a psychotic break and I was experiencing a thing that I shouldn't be experiencing and I went to all this so-called spiritual teachers I know and said what can I do it was overwhelming I was overwhelmed so completely I could barely speak what should I do and this one said oh well God this blah blah blah and this what is this and you look through this and every bit and these spiritual teachers like and then I went to one man he didn't say a word to me don't talk he took me putting him in put me in his in his camper van got some sleeping bags and we took off and we went to one state park after another and we just stopped he didn't say anything we just built fires we ate books there and we traveled from all the way from California to New Mexico saved my life by the wisdom of being there and giving me this healing of a love's creation so someone called me someone called me I mean one man I know called me I said my son is he's become schizophrenic but what do I do so maybe send him so he sends there's some shake or something he says there's shake I can send him to it didn't sound practical in this case I said just take him to the forest so presence though is another thing I mean you know what we ask for from Allah will get and a lot of people you know I mean I mean becoming present is really becoming more who you truly are we were designed to be present in this world and we were more present in our bodies when we were children and then we went through all the slings and arrows of life in which we learned how to shut down and not be so present not cry when we felt like crying don't cry how many times I was told that was don't cry the Prophet said if you could see what I see you would laugh a little and cry in lots but we learned the social constraints and the social expectations which is part of being civilized human beings but we want to then beyond that come to a place where intact someone once asked me what's what's the picture of a healthy being and this image came to me of these things in California where you go to the redwood force and they they gave you this big cross section of a big tree you know and they date you know this is the time suddenly Issa lies in our mind and says this is when that happened and these rings you know and I said well it's kind of like that we have an embryo that's you know still at the core of our being and then this child that was just born and then this first two years and then the first four years and five years and ideally all of these experiences that we have are integrated and each piece informs each other part so that we now have this savvy adult that can care that can care for that child that was mistreated or felt shunned or rejected or felt frightened when your child if our mothers didn't do it for us enough and successfully we have our own motherness because even motherness comes about from Allah it's from our mother it's only an attribute of Allah that comes to her yes tarif right mama I'll never forget that I'll never forget that I'll never forget mama yeah is it rap o putt good day any last questions one one more here they said the Rasul Sassan would play with children and then and then you spoke about sorry if you could just comment on how we understand the power of play like they said Rasul Sassan used to play with children and you use play as a as a therapeutic quality you talked about spontaneous play and then we're talking about mothers in our day and age who are traumatized at so many levels children and younger and younger ages being exposed to all kinds of harm even everything that's spontaneous is only by Allah's command and anything that comes spontaneously from us we could say it comes from deep within us and for play to take place we there has to be a submissive aspect we can't plan play we have to let control go and let it happen and that's what makes it spontaneous and that's what makes us laugh we laugh because laughter is laughter is also spontaneous it comes forth it's not we say I'm going to say something funny and or that I'm going to or that was funny and now I'm going to laugh ah ha ha ha you know it's autonomic from our inner unconscious subliminal realities and back to I want to remind you all of this and if you were here yesterday one of the things I stress so much is when we connect with each other there is a second and we we have connection and whatever dialogue even if it's a scientific dialogue of sitting with each other like I say the Native Americans do anytime there's a dialogue there is a second dialogue that's taking place subliminally using the words of Bob Dylan subliminally that conversation takes place and that secondary subliminal conversation subtextual below the words has a trajectory of its own my Allah it has a trajectory of its own and that is a dialogue a conversation that will inform both parties if the connection in the the conversation is real so having said that just as a prerequisite play has to be something that spontaneously happens I have seen children recover from severe trauma and part of the thing to recognize is that play is a necessary reality of all animals and all creatures and especially humans who have gone through complex complex dramatic sort of traumatic experiences and I can give you examples of things I've seen in which children are healed by allowing them to play and by seeing and recognizing that the play is very pointed towards them processing their experiences in the world play is what we process what children process what's taking place so I mean one hand the parents have said well you're not allowed to play with guns well that's fine I mean and it can understand why but the thing is why are they playing that because they were traumatized by the fact that there are guns out there killing people or shooting I remember when I was a kid we would have played you know and then we oh we have this dramatic thing before you fall down and die and that was acting out some degree of trauma about the just the knowledge that's how the thing takes place right now I mentioned yesterday for those of you who aren't here I mentioned am I growing up with the drop drills or is that today and and and now they have these shooter drills that's traumatic so how does you know so we play out these things and part of what happens in play is the same thing that happens in dreams we play out the drama and the fearful things and a safe way in which the outcome is good we laugh instead of you know grieve or you know have difficult experiences around so I've seen people I don't I we don't have time but again these videos that can be made available any of you who's do the subscribing who could go into more I could do one whole video on play alone but play and sleep sleep and dream dreams are another way in which we process our experiences and we have to dream and we have to play but if we don't play something else happens yeah well you want to be able to just near body and to begin to develop the ability of how much can you what's my threshold you know what's my threshold in which I I say no I'm not gonna I'm not gonna I won't go there because some people are much more resilient and they can wade into the most difficult dramatic situations in difficult situations emotionally and they can be untouched in the sense that they sustained their ability to stand on their own two feet and their integrity without being without being dissociated but present that's a great quality great quality and it's very much you know it's an admirable quality because present with those and then to bring something positive to that situation I remember I gotta go off on the tangent here but I remember one time we had a workshop in New Mexico we had a workshop in New Mexico with and it was about education so he invited all these people from across the country who were involved in Islamic education and it turned out on the first day there was a contingent of the African American educators and the Arab educators and they were you know they were it was them and us and the person who was there as one of our teachers was Cedro St. Nasser people know what the most most say and Cedro St. Nasser and he waited into that and he you know he just came into the room and he said okay listen and then he took it on put it on the table and dealt with it beautifully and it gave everybody the encouragement to come together it was beautiful and I said well that's Sufism I mean I meant well let's call that Sufism because that's practical action and we will insha'Allah alhamdulillah barak al-feeq thank you all for this again Allah Akbar alhamdulillah I can't ask for anything better city hakeem insha'Allah I want to say something before I I do the dua insha'Allah yes two things the first one for city Hamza Hamza you asked the question how the bird will fall down when they say Dawood will will do the same thing it's been rated that because of the ihsan of said Dawood and his beautiful voice everybody will listen they go to status called Fana that they don't feel themselves so the bird heard they don't want to be disturbed with anything so they stopped moving their wings because of the beauty and actually they they will go down this mean mentioned in the Bida'i Nihayah in the Amika Thea it's a book of history and they fall down and they die the same example if you see the same way of beauty but not in the song now under the eye where the women when they saw Sayyidina Yusuf and they start cutting their hands with from the beauty of Sayyidina Yusuf Nabiullah and that beauty made them that feeling themselves and there's Al-Wariya they feel the beauty of Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la and they don't feel anything around them and this is Sayyidina Hakim he knows what's that this is called the Fana which is you don't feel yourself so the second one is that being present Allah orders us to be witness Shuhadaa it is to be witness and a witness he need to to notice everything around you and Rasulullah As-Salam asked a dua he made said Allahumma Jalna Mimin Yishtabi'una Al-Qawla Faytabi'una As-Salam Allah made her from the people who listen for everything and then follow the best of what you listen to and by this you will be actually present because you want to watch everything around you and try to get everything around you and follow the best now Sayyidina Muhammad As-Salam Allahumma Jalna Mimin Yishtabi'una Al-Qawla Faytabi'una Al-Qawla Faytabi'una Al-Qawla Faytabi'una Al-Qawla Faytabi'una Al-Qawla Faytabi'una Al-Qawla this unfortunately concludes our our weekends and as we said in the beginning of the program that's we always run out of time and so Alhamdulillah we've been making way for a platform for for Hakim to reach everybody and also to have some interaction so anybody who received an email from us basically saying you know come join us you'll consider continue getting emails about the program as it is unfolding and it's there'll be more information about it if you haven't received an email and you came through MCC or another method let me know and we can get your email or you can sign up at care at hicmawellness.com and that will you know just say please add me to the subscription list the second youtube video is up we just uploaded it today so this is in the series of youtube videos that we've been talking about so if you've subscribed to Hakim's channel then you'll be able to see that it's up otherwise just keep in touch and you know keep an eye open and inshallah you'll get to see more information that's coming and stuff like that so Alhamdulillah thank everybody for not soon enough I'm still here he's still present so Alhamdulillah thank everybody for coming it's been wonderful and you know again being here is so comfortable for everybody you know it's been wonderful thank MCC they've like I said they've been one of the best places that we've ever dealt with and you know Alhamdulillah thank Siril Munir he does amazing work if you have any way of supporting this place please come donate this place is amazing it's wonderful do everything you can to make these things possible supporting MCC inshallah so inshallah we have to make a quick exit so we're gonna stow away real quick but you know again questions you know if anybody wants to make appointments with with Hakim his Calendly is the best way to do that you can sign up for for you know one-on-one interactions and of course the courses will be unrolling so if you want to actually have a more in terms of the excess Calendly Calendly it's on your website HakimArchVeleta.com okay yep otherwise you know you can get in touch with myself and or just respond to one of the emails and just say I want to get in touch but you know Alhamdulillah is wonderful and beneficial for us and I hope it was for everybody else and inshallah we look forward to seeing you all soon and I just want to say one last thing which is it's been wonderful and Wallahi anything that you feel like you've gotten from me believe me and I don't mean this to be romantically I've gotten as much from all of you because that's the way reciprocity which is one of the the hiccups the way it works and anybody doesn't realize that well it's a truth inshallah