 Bismillahirrahmanirrahim, Alhamdulillahirrahmanirrahim, Wa Salatu wa Salam ala Ashraf al-Ambia wa al-Mursaleen, Sayyidina Muhammad wa al-Ali wa Sahabati Ajma'in. Allahumma alimna ma yinfa'una wa infa'ina bima al-lamtina wa zadna al-man. Today we talk about people. So last week we talked about things, setting ourselves up for success, people, places, and things. And last time we talked about getting rid of things in our environment. Sometimes what happens is recovery can be kind of not a planned thing. So we end up in rehab, we end up in jail, we end up in a sober living home. Wherever our backgrounds are so varied, but there's always some sort of unpredictability that happens. Sometimes it's people end up in the hospital. From the hospital they end up in a rehab. So like we always say, the best principle is to try to see what relates to you and resonates with you and just let the rest fly because there's certainly a shared experience that we all have. So I wouldn't get turned away if I say things like jail or other things. But sometimes we fall into recovery and it's not a planned thing. And so we go from the hospital to the rehab to the sober living home to another place. And then because it wasn't a planned thing, we didn't have an opportunity to plan out getting rid of all the stuff at our home. So sometimes what happens is we still have things at our home, like paraphernalia. It can be anything, pipes, pills, prescription bottles and even other things that aren't paraphernalia but kind of remind us of using. Sometimes it's like jeans or pants with cigarette burn holes in them. It's always good to plan for removing those things even when we're in a safe place as opposed to kicking the can down the road and worrying about them later. So like calling people and saying, hey, I have an old bottle. I have an old whatever stashed away somewhere. And if you can get rid of it, that'd be great. Or planning for getting connected with somebody who could help you get rid of that thing. So you're not doing it by yourself. It's really hard to get rid of stuff by yourself. That's a really difficult thing. So that's something to keep in mind. So that's things. And then we're gonna talk about people. People are a double edged sword. A lot of times we think about people it's staying away from certain types of people. And on the other end, people are so important in our recovery and our spiritual growth and our progression. So, it's so important to on one end identify the types of people in your lives and become more aware of it. And how that's helping your sobriety or how that's helping your using. Last time we talked about how every decision we make should be for our recovery or should be keeping in mind our sobriety. Like every decision you make, you should think, how does this serve my sobriety in recovery? How does this not serve it? And that's an easy thing because that's what we've been doing with our using. Like every relationship, every move we make is how does this serve my using or how does it not? How does this person help? What angle do they have on helping me use and how do they stand in the way of that? How do I navigate around them? So it's almost like just taking that it's all sort of been gathered upon one focus and change it from using to recovery. A lot of times you hear in the rooms like you would do that to use. So like we have a meeting at eight o'clock in the morning you would wake up at eight o'clock in the morning to use you got to bring that same type of energy into recovery. And that's a good mantra to kind of constantly check yourself in regards to the amount of energy. And if it's an appropriate amount of energy that you're bringing into your recovery like did I bring that amount of energy? Did I wake up early? Did I go to sleep at night? Did I put the effort in in order to use? Perhaps that's the amount of energy that I need to put into recovery as well. And that gets it becomes really clear like am I doing it enough for my recovery? That really in a lot of ways makes it clear. So with people it's the same thing. A lot of times our personal relationships that we decided to invest in had to be in relationships that would help us use. And the relationships that we would kind of tap dance around they would be relationships that would stand in the way of us using. So we'd have to kind of just tell them things to pacify them and keep them out of the way. Now we start thinking about recovery oriented relationships. So now we think about people and how that serves our recovery and our sobriety. And there's a huge emphasis on this in the 12 step program and rehab and so on and so forth. And by the way, these sessions are best suited for people who are in early recovery and have a little bit of understanding of addiction and recovery what it entails. And it's best used as an adjunct. I know we've mentioned this in the past but it's worth mentioning again. It's best used as an adjunct maybe a place where people can check in on a regular basis. Best used as an adjunct to other recovery work or whatever that may be. All right, so then the Dean also puts a lot of emphasis on people. If you read books on spirituality, there's a lot of emphasis put on the relationships that you choose to make not just kind of fall into or fly into or get set up with. You don't wanna just bounce around life just sort of letting other people decide that they want you as a relationship. You want to go through life and consciously intentionally choose relationships that are good for those people, good for you and good for the greater cause. So the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam in a well-known hadith said, Ar-Rajul Ala Deen-i Khalili Fa-l Yan-Zur Ahadukum Man-Yu-Khalil. So this is a really interesting statement because it says an individual is on the Dean of his companion. So look, be mindful, examine. One of you should examine who he makes as a companion. Here she makes as a companion. So first of all, it starts off with, first of all, Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, his mission, his goal was Dean, spreading Dean, teaching Dean. So now he's telling you how to get that Dean and that Dean is gonna be based on your relationships. So first of all, he just makes a statement. He's letting us know how the game works. He's saying that an individual is on the Dean of his companion. So it's like a metaphysical connection. He's letting us know how the world works. One plus one equals two, this is how the game is designed. You're gonna be a product of your companions. He's not saying that you should become companions with anybody. And when you become companions with them, then you try really, really, really hard not to let them affect you. What he's saying, he's making a statement. You are gonna be a product of your companionship. And then number two, there's nothing, no ask there. They're just letting you know, letting us know that you're gonna be a product of your companionship. And then there's an ask. It's actually a command. Then he says, fall yamvo, look, examine, take account, pros and cons list, think about it. One of you should think about, first of all, one of you should think about who you make as your companion. So there's two actions here. One is taking consideration who your companion is. And then the second action is making companions. So it's an action verb. You are in control of making your companions. It's not, you should look at what companions were made for you. It's you should look, that's in your control. You should look and examine. The second thing in your control is you should make companions. So you should look at who you're making as your companions and you should conscientiously intentionally have goal-oriented companions that you choose. So really when you talk about, you know, I was talking to a brother some time back, maybe within the last six months, you know, beautiful brother in recovery. And really just amazing and very like, I get a lot of spiritual wisdom when you talk to him. And he said, like the rooms of recovery for him were like spiritual kindergarten. And he said, what it kind of like cultivated within him was this understanding of spirituality. And then Islam was just a natural next step to refine that. Cause once you get a taste of it, it's like, oh, if I live a life based off principles, I can be happy. Oh, recovery, I can lose the desire to use drugs and alcohol. Like it can just go away eventually. And then you're like, I want more of this. Give me the potent stuff. Give me the stuff where it's just like, let's get to it and not slowly introduce it. Anyway, so we want to take account of our companions and then we want to intentionally choose our companions so that the locus of control is not in the fact that companionship is something that we can stop its effects. Cause companionship has effects. So our locus of control is not in, I'm going to spend six hours with this person that's not healthy for me and I'm not healthy for them. And then in those six hours, I'm going to just close my eyes and concentrate on not having those effects affect me. That's not our locus of control. Our locus of control is recognizing that there's this principle that your companionship is going to affect you. And then number two, then your locus of control is deciding who your companions are going to be. And then there's a whole other aspect of how do we do that? And then that's what we'll go into in the recovery skills workbook today. I'm going to pause for a moment and check in with everybody, but that's what we go into. And it goes into quite a lot of detail like recognizing who your safety net is in exercise 4.4 versus your risky relationships. Then it talks about relationships that you just straight up avoid. Then it's a relationships that you can't avoid so you limit contact. Then it talks about a third group of people where you set limits because you can't avoid them and you can't limit contact. It's not within your values or your life circumstance where you can just avoid them or limit a contact. So you set limits while you're in that relationship. And it talks about that in detail. And before I wrap up, it's so interesting because Imam al-Ghazali in one of his books when he talks about spiritual reformation, he goes into categorizing relationships like different types of relationships. Relationships you have with your teacher, relationships you have with co-students, relationships you have with your parents, relationships you have with people that are like your associates. And then he talks about how do you interact with these relationships? How do you get the most out of these relationships? So this isn't an idea that's foreign to our tradition. It's very much a part of our tradition to be mindful of our relationships. Although we talk about in recovery skills about what relationships to avoid, it's also incredibly important to recognize that making the right relationships are also gonna be a determinant of our success. So everybody that's made it to a year, two years, three years, they're gonna attribute that to somebody or some people. They're gonna say, this person came in my life, these people came in my life, this is my support system, this is how I made it. Just like when we start using, you can say, look, this is somebody who kind of showed me how to, this is the first person I used with, this is the person that started using every day with, and this is the person that, these are the people that showed me how to take it to the next level. And if you're honest about and can chart that history, you see that it was people that were not necessarily responsible for us using, a lot of times we seek them out, but people are important for the process of both keeping us stuck and getting us unstuck. So, I wanna also pay homage to the fact that people are important to get us out of our situations. And then the third thing is, it talks about solitude in our Dean as well. And that solitude may be better than being in bad company, and being in good company, being better than at times being in solitude. So isolation is also an important thing to avoid in early recovery. And we can talk about that at another time. I'm gonna go ahead, pause, open it up, questions and check-ins. Okay, so we left off it, exercise promotes addiction recovery on page 63. I'm gonna skip this and come back to it because there's a lot that can be said about exercise in recovery. Exercise in early recovery is incredibly helpful. Exercise has been studied a lot, and it's been shown to have incredible benefits for recovery and addiction. I'm gonna go ahead and present this at another time and we can talk about it. I'm gonna go over the next section, which is taking stock of your social support network. So regardless of how your support system may seem right now, there are ways to build and adjust it, such as making new friends in recovery, breaking or limiting contact with friends who are triggering, leaning on your existing friends and family who are the most helpful, going to family therapy. But the first step, the first step is to take stock of the social network that currently exists in your life. So like looking at your companions and figuring out which people you spend the most time with and who the people are that are triggering in your life and helpful, and maybe it's not even people that are using but are just toxic or lead us back to using drugs and alcohol. It's not necessarily something that we need to look at simply to cut people out of our lives. That's not what we're doing here. You don't have to cut anybody out of your life. Everybody's situation is incredibly different. What simply being asked of here is becoming aware. Of your relationships and how that impacts your recovery. So I'm just gonna go over this for five or 10 minutes and then we're gonna stop there. So exercise 4.4 talks about safety nets versus risky relationships. So you can always think of things as two sides of the equation. Do I have a recovery mindset or am I having a using mindset? And in this way they're saying, are my relationships part of my safety net or are they risky relationships? So what they define as safety nets are people who are supportive of your recovery and who won't do things to jeopardize it. Like you don't even worry about them being a difficult person in terms of your recovery. So they won't offer you drugs or alcohol or kind of like hint at offering you drugs and alcohol. Maybe they won't do it. Maybe they're very quote unquote supportive but somehow it's almost like they're testing you to see if you are game to use drugs and alcohol again. So safety nets are people that won't jeopardize your recovery. Risky relationships on the other hand are the opposite. These are relationships of people who are gonna tempt you, try you to use drugs and alcohol. Okay, now what type of people are we talking about? Think of everybody. If you wanna make it really concrete, think of everybody in the last three months that you've interacted with. Friends, family members, co-workers, sponsors, anybody that's in your social network and take inventory of all of them. Are they a part of your safety net or are they a risky relationship? So what they offer you here is an exercise 4.4, they allow you to just kind of write down who's part of your safety net and then writing out who's in your risky relationships. I would recommend you doing that or at least taking a mental note. So that's the first step. If you wanna be the expert at addiction recovery, that's the first step. What are your risky relationships? Sometimes it's not just human beings that you interact with face-to-face physically, but it can be personalities and people that you interact digitally. So keep that in mind as well. Sometimes old songs will just set us off. So keep that in mind. All right, so once you recognize the safety people versus the risky people, then there's three courses of action that they talk about that you can go into here. Number one, there are certain risky people that you will have to or want to avoid altogether. Your strategy with them is just gonna be avoidance. Again, it's not cause we're judging them or we're criticizing them or we're saying they're bad. It's mostly because we're judging ourselves. It's about a deficiency within ourselves or a weakness within ourselves or an allergy within ourselves that we are recognizing here and that interacting with them is gonna be difficult or harmful. So those are obviously people who are dealing drugs, people that are drinking alcohol, so on and so forth. The second type of person is you don't wanna avoid them but you wanna limit your contact with them. So these are people that you can't avoid. Maybe because you go to work with them like coworkers or other contacts, you wanna limit your contact with them. And then the third type is people that you can't limit your contact with. Maybe they're family, close friends, a spouse and you can't limit your contact with them or avoid them. That's just not part of who you are. It's not part of your values. Then you set your limits with them. It's not for me to tell you who those people are or somebody else to tell you who those people are. You wanna get feedback from people if you're serious about this, you wanna get feedback from other people. And then what you wanna do is you ultimately make that decision because you ultimately have to live with that decision either by the result of putting some sort of new rules on that relationship or the consequences of relapsing maybe due to that relationship. So those are the three things and we'll wrap up here. You wanna look at are these relationships part of my safety net, my support network or is it a risky relationship? If it's a risky relationship, how am I gonna take action for my recovery in that? Am I just gonna avoid this relationship? Am I gonna limit contact with that relationship or am I gonna interact but set limits of what we can talk about? What can happen while I'm interacting with that person? So on and so forth. So why don't we go ahead and pause here and then we can open it up.