 Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim, Alhamdulillah, Al-Rabbi Al-Alamin, Allahumma salli wa sallim, wa barik ala Sayyidina Muhammadin wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa sallim, Rabi Shahi Sadri wa salli, Amri, Wahl al-Uqtaat al-Malissani, Yaqa al-Qawli, Wa sallallahu wa sallim, wa barik ala Sayyidina Muhammadin wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa sallim, Wa alhamdulillahi, Rabi Al-Alamin. All right, so we are going to be talking today about gratitude, shukr, one of the, one of my favorite topics and something I think that we as a community and as a society can really benefit a lot from practicing more of. And it's one of the secrets of the Muslim is that we can gain an increase in nearness to Allah from practicing just a very simple portion and practice of gratitude every single day that Allah gives us and then he just wants us to be grateful for it and then he gives us more and then we're grateful for it and he gives us more and he gives us more. And so that's what we're gonna be diving a little bit deeper into. And so we've been covering this book, The Book of Assistance by Muhammad Haddad. We're approaching now the end of the book. We're in the final few chapters of it. So we'll go ahead and touch base on gratitude today and then try to see how far along we can get, inshallah. So he begins by just mentioning that how important it is to thank Allah for everything that he's favored us with that we have to realize that in life we couldn't have anything if it wasn't for the mercy of Allah and for the bounty of Allah. And every good thing we have is in reality, we have it because Allah gave it to us. We don't, sometimes we think we earn something ourselves but if you dig a little bit deeper, right? We say, oh no, I got this because of my hard work but you couldn't have done the hard work if you didn't have your health or if your eyes weren't working or if your nerves had a problem or if your liver wasn't working or if your legs weren't working. I mean, there's so many things that need to work in order for us to just wake up every day and exist, let alone for us to be able to accomplish mentally the things we wanna accomplish or intellectually the things that we wanna accomplish. So in reality, everything we have, every blessing that we have, every gift that we have is from Allah because the most fundamental blessings that we have, we see as them being from Allah, right? And then we're able to add on more things and quote unquote accomplish things on top of that. So we start with this idea of really, really getting deep into reflecting on the blessings that we have that are from Allah. And then we begin by starting to actively thank him and begin by actively saying, ya Allah, thank you and thank you Sidi for this, for the help with the mic. I think it should be fine, just in a minute. And begin to actively thank him for the different blessings that he has, that he has given us. So there's different ways to thank him and we'll get into some of the different ways. But let's first talk about why it's so important to thank Allah for the blessings that he's given us. We could just live a life where we exist and we see everything everyone else has around us and we say, you know what? I don't have that much to be grateful for. I have less than what everybody else has. And that's not the mentality that God wants us to have. In our religion, shukr is a core part of worship. Gratitude is a core part of worship because Allah wants us first and foremost to just recognize that we wouldn't even be able to do anything if it was not for the blessing and the existence number one and then the blessing guidance number two and then the blessing as we mentioned of all of our physical limbs, our organs, our faculties working. And the more and more someone reflects on that, the more and more you start to gain a little bit of a realization that, hold on a second, if this is all from Allah and I am being ungrateful for it, then I'm actually being ungrateful to Allah and then I'm actually potentially opening myself up to the removal of these blessings, right? Versus one of the concepts we have in our religion to tie down a blessing is to be grateful for. So you get a blessing, a gift, some good news or something that you reflect on and begin to be grateful for and the way to secure that is to actively express gratitude. There's two parts to this. One is to actively say, Ya Allah, Alhamdulillah that you gave me this. And then number two is to use that blessing in the obedience of Allah. Gratitude is not fulfilled until both of those conditions at a minimum are met. We can't just say Alhamdulillah for the blessing and then we have the blessing of eyes and we go and look at all this, something impermissible and haram with our eyes, right? We can't say Alhamdulillah for the blessing of our tongue and Ya Allah, thanks for giving me speech and then we go and we curse someone out, right? Or we can't say Alhamdulillah for the blessing of our limbs and then we go and we beat someone up unless it's for boxing or something like that. But just for the sake of seeking revenge or letting our anger out on somebody, right? So we have to say Alhamdulillah, Ya Allah, thank you for them. And then we also have to say or we also have to practice worship and obedience with those blessings that we've been given. Now someone starts to get near and near to gratitude. And then one of the other amazing things in our religion about gratitude is Allah says, La'in shakartum la'azi danakum that if you are grateful and you say thank you, I will increase you in favors. If simply by saying thank you for the blessings and by expressing gratitude and by practicing the obedience with those blessings or at least not disobedience with those blessings, Allah says I'm gonna give you more. Nobody else, and if you think about any human being, they would never say, hey, you told me thanks for the blessing. They'll say, yeah, I deserve to be told thanks for the blessing, right? They're not gonna say, oh, I give you a car and you say thanks for the car. And then they're like, oh, I just appreciate that you said thank you. Here's another car. And then you say thank you again and they're like, oh, here's another one. That's not how the human mentality works, but Allah, he is al shakur and he is al kareem. That he is the one who wants us to appreciate him and he is the one who's the most appreciated and he is the most generous. So what he does is when someone begins to express gratitude for their blessings, a few things start to happen. One, you start to see an increase in blessings. Number two, you start to have more subtle blessings come to you in life. More things that are more subtle begin to happen, right? It's not always that there's a material blessing. Sometimes we think of a gift as only being material. No, there's spiritual gifts as well. There are gifts in terms of nearness to Allah. There are gifts in terms of intellectual openings that someone might go through. And the gifts are limited. There's gifts in terms of health. There's gifts in terms of barakah and time. There's gifts in terms of our relationships with other people and making sure we have healthy and positive relationships and so on and so forth. They continue to expand. And so when someone starts to express gratitude for blessings, Allah gives them more things to be grateful for. More things to be grateful for. And we see that in the example in the Quran of Suleiman alaihi salam, that when he began he was a very, very grateful servant and he had been given the ability to communicate with many animals. And when he expressed gratitude for the ability to communicate with the birds and to be able to communicate with one group of animals, then Allah gave him the ability from there to also communicate and understand the language of the ants. And then there's a whole Surah in the Quran, Surah Nammal, the ants, which plays out this dialogue that Suleiman alaihi salam can actually hear the ants, the Prophet Suleiman alaihi salam. There's him and his army are marching and the ants are saying, we gotta move. The army is coming of Suleiman alaihi salam and he's able to hear what they're saying, right? And he's able to actually, the communication channel opens up between them and one of the scholars, they mentioned that it's because he was grateful for one blessing and Allah opened up the door for another more subtle ni'ma, another more subtle spiritual gift to be given to him. So that is one example of blessings that are mentioned. And the Quran is full of this practice of gratitude. You see that when the bunny Israel, when the children of Israel are rescued from Pharaoh, so they had lived a life of oppression, they had lived a life of slavery, of servitude, of where the men were being killed, the women and children were being oppressed under Pharaoh, one of the world's most corrupt rulers ever. And Allah rescues them from this through Musa alaihi salam. And what happens, Musa alaihi salam takes them, right? We know that the sea is parted for him and they eventually exit that oppressive land. And when Allah rescues them, he tells the bunny Israel that at some point, Udkul, remember the blessings of Allah upon you when he saved you from Pharaoh, when he rescued you, and when he established you, right, in this other land. And then he gives them more and more blessings after that. You get, they get food, food, manna and salwa from the heavens, right? And quail from the heavens. They get different types of food and Allah is regularly trying to teach them to be grateful for it. Now they go wrong. Why? Because there's a lot of ingratitude. They say, well, hold on a second. We want this food and that food and we want onions and herbs and we know all these other things. Why you, this isn't enough. I mean, they were getting food from the heavens. What better food could you have? But they didn't see the blessing. They instead saw what everybody else was eating and they're like, well, we want that. Why don't you give us that? Ya Musa, tell your Lord to give us that. And they would always want what they didn't have. And Allah was always calling them to gratitude. And in the Quran, there's a lesson for the Muslims, the Ummah of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. There's a huge lesson for us when it comes to the stories of Bani Isra'il. There's a lot of lessons for us because we're very, very similar to that, to that Ummah. The Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam is being taught that this is how people of the past were. Now here are lessons for your Ummah to take to not repeat the same mistakes that this huge nation, that this huge nation made. So blessings are of all categories. The first thing that we should do is we understand, okay, why do I have to be grateful for my blessings? And sometimes it's not that obvious. There might be some people who are like, well, it's so obvious. I mean, of course you have to be grateful. But there's some other people like, hold on, I don't really understand. Like what's the big deal? Like everybody else has it. That's a common thing that we might hear, right? Everyone else has this blessing. So why do I have to be the one to express gratitude? So the first thing is to realize that blessings are worth expressing gratitude for and that Allah is the one who is the most praised. When we say, Alhamdulillahi Rabbil Alamin, we are praising Allah. We repeat that more than a dozen times a day. And as part of properly praising Him, there's one thing to praise Him with our tongue and with our mouth. And there's another thing to praise Him with our being and with our reality. And as Muslims, as we try to ascend in the stations of spirituality, we wanna praise Allah with our entire being. We wanna be in a complete state where we're always praising Him. And the way to always praise Him is to always have an eye of gratitude. And the way to always have an eye of gratitude is to start with the fundamental blessings of life that all of us, Alhamdulillahi, have been given. And we start from there and we have a regular practice of being aware of those. Not just counting them off, but really reflecting on the fact that these blessings exist. So that's the first step. The second then is to actively make a list of the different categories of blessings that we might have. So again, you have the blessing of existence in and of itself. You have the blessing of Allah sustaining us. If you've ever met somebody or heard of someone or had a family member, anyone who just all of a sudden passed away in their sleep, no health complication, nothing. They just one day they're awake and they're around and the next day they're gone. That happens to people. And the blessing of Allah sustaining our life is often not thought about. If we've ever been close to a near-death experience or been in a car accident, had something gone one way, I remember a year and a half ago I was driving, I just took the exit on 51st and MLK and I was driving and I was just at the light waiting to take a U-turn. It was a red light for me. And I was just literally sitting there. And next thing you know, boom, a car hits me from the front and the red light pole, the traffic light pole falls and collapses on my car and on me. And had it been like a foot or two more that the pole would collapse that luckily it didn't hit me directly, damaged the car, the front of the car completely. A little bit more, it would have fell on me. Likely I would have had major injuries or I would have been gone. And at the time I was like, I didn't even, I was just sitting there and I was just like, what just happened? You're like in a complete state of shock. But you realize, oh SubhanAllah, Allah is sustaining me in every moment and Allah could decide that it's my time to go. Or Allah could decide to test me with something difficult. And we ask that Allah always protect us from that. But that's a blessing we have to be grateful for. It may be it's hard every day, but at least once a week or once a month we just have to be like, Allah, thank you for protecting me from all the things that could have harmed me. And thank you for sustaining me, right? Anyone who lives in Oakland knows a lot of crazy drivers, right? They give people, run fast, they're hitting people and are running through crosswalks, right? Like it's very, very easy to get hurt, but Allah's sustaining us or someone has children. It's miraculous the way Allah just keeps children protected. And we have to be grateful for that. That's from Allah. We can't think we're the protectors. We can only do physically and financially a few things we can do, but at the end of the day Allah is the one who is going to protect from the seen and the unseen forces. And so that's another blessing, the blessing of sustaining existence. Then you go even deeper and then there's the blessing of guidance that Allah guides some people and he doesn't guide others. We were just talking about this. What did we do to be Muslims? I mean, we don't deserve to be to have been guided to this faith. Like not like there's anything inherent that any one person, Allah chooses who he guides. He says in the Quran, he chooses who he guides and he chooses who's not guided. And we have to be great. As an ummah, we have lost sight of the blessing, the true ni'mah of Islam and Iman. We've really lost sight of it. We want to be like everybody else, the Muslim countries, many people there just want to be like the Western countries, right? We don't want to, we want to follow the same practices, the same innovations, all these types of things that people in other countries are doing or other cultures are doing. But we forgot the gift that we have to offer to the world. This gift of Islam, this gift of guidance, this gift that has saved people from being in the most just difficult and terrible circumstances to being beacons of light. Like looking at the life of Malcolm X and the darknesses, the levels of darknesses that he was embedded in, self-admittedly that he mentions. And then the way that he's guided to Islam and then how he transforms from somebody who used his skills that he'd been given for doing something wrong and spreading wrong in society to becoming a beacon of light and spreading goodness and purity in society. And it was through the gift of Islam. And people who've been in like deep, dark, difficult situations, they know what that gift is when they're saved from that. And maybe they convert or they have a reversion experience and then they're like, Alhamdulillah for this blessing. But we have to be really, really be grateful. Even in Islam, how easy it is to do things, it's a huge blessing. People of the past, it was so difficult for them to make repentance. They couldn't just say astaghfirullah and cry and ask Allah for forgiveness. It wasn't possible. There were personal sacrifices and physical things that had to happen in order for repentance to be accepted. It wasn't as simple. That's a huge blessing that the Ummah of the Prophet, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, has been given. The fact that we've been given little acts of worship that are worth, the five prayers are worth 50 prayers. It's amazing, right? And we have to just marvel at it and then say, Alhamdulillah for those blessings. So that's the next level, is blessing of Islam and Iman. Yes. And I say the defense. So they say Islam suffices them for blessing. Yeah. You don't get anything. It's bigger than Islam. Alhamdulillah. Al-Neeqmat al-Islam wa kafa bil-Lahi-Neeqmat that think that we praise Allah for the blessing of Islam and it is sufficient as a blessing. Right? And we could just spend two hours just saying Alhamdulillah for 1% of the blessings we've been given to be guided to Islam and we wouldn't even be scratching the surface. There's so many things. So we just have to have time to reflect on it. One tip that helps here is as soon as we're getting into a little bit of a negative spiral or we're starting to look at the glass of life half empty, just pull back and go on a walk and say Alhamdulillah and just count. Take one tasbih and a hundred times just count all the blessings that you have, the blessings of Islam, the different subtle blessings of Islam. You could count the physical blessings someone has been given. Sometimes you can even count like you think Alhamdulillah that I have this finger and this limb is working. I mean there's people who don't have limbs. Who don't have certain limbs or they were born without them or they don't have them anymore. There's people who were born without eyesight or who were without one eye working. I mean there's so many things and Allah regularly mentions the blessing of eyesight, the blessing of hearing, the blessing of understanding. And then he says, few of them are grateful for it. Few people actually express gratitude for this. And so this is a way that it really doesn't even, it's not even an exerting form of worship. Sometimes there's worship that it takes a, it's physically heavy, right? Like you waking up at the Hajj can be difficult, right? Fasting can be difficult and there's certain things but the practice of gratitude, it's just expansive because you just like go from being in a maybe not the greatest mood to just being on like kind of on a high because you're just like, oh wow, this is all so great, Alhamdulillah. And we have to then manifest that internally and then we spread that to other people, right? Especially in a culture of a lot of negativity and there's a lot of difficulty out there in the world right now. We wanna be beacons of positivity and beacons of gratitude and beacons of light, right? So we then get to the more subtle blessings of, so we go a blessing of existence, the blessing of Allah sustaining us, the blessing of Islam. You get then into the blessing of all the parts of your health that are working, everything that's working. Instead of looking at the one of two things that doesn't work, count the number of days and the number of years that everything has been working, right? And we get subtle. If anyone ever has like a stomach ache or a stomach issue or anything, you'll notice that if one part of the system isn't working, the whole body just is out of whack, right? Oh my God, the stomach's on the head starts hurting. All these things start happening, right? So Alhamdulillah, thank you that my liver's working and my kidney's working and my stomach's working and my intestines are working and my nervous system is working and all the different aspects internally of our body, right? It's all flowing, it's all working. If anyone's ever pinched a nerve, one little nerve and oh man, you're in trouble. You're whole, everything's in pain in that area and there are so many things that could go wrong and yet Allah's not making them go wrong. And so we have to then sit and we have to reflect on that and we have to express gratitude for it. One of the secrets of expressing, one of the fastest ways to express gratitude for these things is the known as the mid-morning prayer, the prayer of tuhah, where the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam said that every morning people have, I believe it's 360 or was mentioned limbs or so that are due, that gratitude is due for. And he then said, shall I not suffice, shall I not tell you what will be sufficient as essentially expressing gratitude for everything it is that you have physically, right? And I'm paraphrasing the hadith here. And he said, praying to Raka, a mid-morning prayer. This is the prayer that is done any time from about 12 minutes after sunrise, any up until about 10 minutes of the dhuhr, or 10 minutes before dhuhr, right? Known as salat al-dhuha. Allah mentions this time in the Quran, wad dhuha. He swears by the mid-morning. So it's a sunnah prayer that the Prophet Alaihi Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, he would do this prayer every day and he would, in many narrations, even when he was traveling, he would still offer it. So he's done in sets of two. They make the intention of sunnah of dhuhr. And you pray this prayer. It's also a prayer that will attract risk. So if someone is trying to, is struggling with their job or wants to succeed more in their job or have an expansive risk, whether that's physical risk or have more children or whatever else it is, or is struggling to get married or any of these types of things that are forms of risk, it's a good practice to do this prayer regularly. Then you'll start to see blessings come in, right? And it's a time where the people who are always striving to worship Allah, there's a long gap between, if you think about most of the other prayers, they come in, I mean, in summer right now, so they come in at very long gaps, but most of the other times of the year, they come in fairly quickly, every two, three hours. But between Fajr and Lohar right now, it's about 6 p.m. until 1.30, right? You have seven and a half hours. And so for the people who are trying to get closer and closer, they're like, that's too long for me to go without a prayer. They want to do that. So the Doha prayer, it's not far, it's an optional prayer that someone can do. So these are ways of expressing gratitude to Allah, expressing gratitude to Allah. Alhamdulillah. So again, as we get into the heart being aware of these favors, then we get into reflecting on the favors and then we actively say, Alhamdulillah, for the favors. Then there's like particular blessings that individuals have been given, right? That we also start to express gratitude for. So these could be material blessings or the blessing of family, the blessing of a spouse, the blessing of a home, shelter, whatever type of blessings. And the blessing of transportation, right? All these different blessings of having a job, blessing of having food on the table, like not every single person around us, maybe many people don't have these blessings. So we start to express gratitude for the particular blessings as well. Ya Allah, thank you for this. And thank you that you gave me two meals today or three meals today. And we actively say that the dua, the Prophet ﷺ, minimum would begin food of Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim and would end by saying Alhamdulillah. But there's a longer dua, Alhamdulillah, that you actually say, Oh Allah, thank you for this food that you gave me. Like we couldn't get this food if it wasn't for God. It wouldn't be possible. And someone goes a little deeper and if they eat like rice and chicken and vegetables for a meal, the amount of work first that went in to cultivation of that rice, then the rain that Allah had to send down in order for it to be cultivated. And then the amount of work that had to go in for the chicken to even be born and then for the animal to be sustained and then same thing for the vegetables. And you're talking so many things have to go right just for food to exist. And people of the past, they would make, they would cultivate their own food. So they would be very acutely aware of these blessings. Now we go to, you know, Safeway or Berkeley Bowl or Door Dash or Costco, whatever else. And we just, the food just shows up and then we just eat it. And then we just keep moving about our day. We have to pause and say, Oh Allah, thank you for this blessing. Thank you for the blessing of food. And for this Nama and for this Nama and we continue to express gratitude for the different blessings. So sugar is something that has no limit. It's amazing. It has no limit. There's no limit to sugar. And it's one of those things that the more someone is grateful, the more gratitude that someone practices, the more things Allah will make them aware to be more grateful for. You're just gonna, it's just like a level that someone keeps ascending and keeps ascending and keeps ascending. On the opposite end of this is the tribulation of complaining. So complaining directly contradicts gratitude, right? So as we just went through extensive discussion on how we should praise Allah frequently that we should be regularly thanking Him that we should be trying to notice all the blessings that we have. When someone complains, it is, it's very, very, very at minimum very bad manners with God. Very bad manners with God. If someone who's aware that Allah is watching them and that Allah is all present and that everything that comes to them is from Allah and it couldn't happen without Allah and it's directly manifesting as Allah's will. They now to complain about that thing to human beings, not to Allah directly to human beings is considered very bad manners with God, right? That's at minimum, at maximum, it can get into a lot worse than that, right? That's the blessings that someone has. There's a metaphysical law that applies with blessings. The more someone is grateful, the more Allah gives them to be grateful for. So Allah will keep giving them blessings and keep giving them blessings and it doesn't again only mean physical and material blessings and more money and things like that. We're talking about all types of blessings. The more someone complains, the more Allah gives them to complain about. It's a direct law, metaphysical law. So you have shukr as Allah says, لَاَنْ شَكَرْتُمْ لَاَزِدَنَّكُمْ If you are grateful, I will increase you and if you complain, I'll give you more to complain about. So you can essentially manifest your own, whatever worldview someone has or whatever things they want to manifest, someone can manifest them by how grateful they are. And someone will create more problems for themselves by always being ungrateful. And you'll usually see this, that when we get into moments of ingratitude, everything starts to tumble. We go from one thing to noticing this thing to then getting upset about it. Then next thing you know, we're finding flaws in this family member, we're finding flaws in this part of our house, we're finding flaws in our job, we're finding flaws with our manager, we're finding flaws with our car, we're finding flaws in every little thing. And we just become an unpleasant person to be around because we're just complaining all the time. For the majority of us that are living here in the West, that we have security, Alhamdulillah, there's not a war being waved over us. We have food being given, we're given multiple meals a day to eat and we have the blessing of shelter. Three core blessings. Allah says in the Quran in Surah Quraish that but worship the Lord of this house, the one who that the one who gave you fulfillment from your hunger and he gave you then he gave you security and protection from fear. Those are the two fundamental blessings. If someone has those two fundamental blessings, the blessing of security and protection and the blessing of food and being saved off from like extreme hunger, then they are obliged to worship Allah. Allah says, tell them to worship the Lord of this house because he's suffice them from these two, right? So if we have those two, at minimum, we gotta move towards being, stop complaining as much and start to shift more towards God too. If someone doesn't have those two, their standards of worship can be a little bit more different because of course, if you don't have security, you don't even have food. It's very difficult to get in the zone, right? But if we've been given those blessings, then we need to make sure that we restrain them or sorry that we hold them down by expressing gratitude and by not complaining. Complaining has different categories. Someone might complain about little things that happened to them throughout the day. This happened and this happened and this happened and this happened. And that just means we have work to do to just kind of refine instead of looking at the few things that went wrong, we focus on the 95% of things that went right. Or maybe there's a day, 40% of things that go wrong, okay? 60% of things still went right. It's highly unlikely every single thing will go wrong. There are days we wake up on the wrong side of the bed and things go south. And even in that day, on the believer for the one who's trying to ascend spiritual levels, again here what we're not talking, what we're talking right now is not fard. It's not like obligatory to do. This is for the person who wants to get closer to God, right? That there's a limit at somewhat someone will reach that they cannot ascend closer if they complain. Because it's just not part of a spiritual practice, right? And so then we just have to decrease the amount. And what we should do is we should try to develop some type of dynamic with our, whoever we live with our family to catch each other when we start getting into complaints about something, right? And we start to remind each other hold on a second, let's shift the direction of this conversation, right? Let's shift the negative mentality and let's move it more towards an optimistic mentality and a mentality of gratitude, right? And then the complaints can get much, much, much more expansive. If someone often complains about their job, be very careful about what's gonna happen with that job, right? Because you're not holding down the blessing. Allah gave the job and he gives tests in the job. He says, I'm gonna test you with your job. I'm gonna test you with your wealth, right? If someone often complains about their spouse or their family members, that can be a risk, right? There's a lot of different things that we often complain about. So we just have to try to reduce that amount slowly. And the way to do that is by focusing, as we mentioned on the five steps of Shukr and of gratitude. Alhamdulillah. Okay, so we'll go ahead and move on unless someone has questions before we move on to the next section. I think we have two questions online. Did anyone have questions? No. Okay, we have... Okay, if someone was gone through significant trauma, abuse, assault, et cetera, how can we still have gratitude when we went through something horrific done by other people? It's a great question. So Allah addresses that question in the Quran in the story of Bunny Israel that he doesn't discount when we were talked about when the Bunny Israel, they are saved from Pharaoh. Allah reminds them of the blessing of being rescued and saved from it instead of telling them to remember the oppression that Pharaoh put them through. Now there's a balance here. It doesn't mean that someone just discounts the trauma that they have. That's not what we're talking about. In that case, there are ways that we have to seek out assistance and help psychological assistance therapy to actually work through the traumas that we might have. This isn't discounting those, but it's the view that we have moving forward. We have to look at all the things that Allah has saved us from and that are positive moving forward. So if someone was in a war-stricken country or which many of us might have families that have been in those countries, many Muslim countries have gone through occupation, colonialism and partition and so on. And then someone was rescued and saved from that or someone was in an abusive relationship and then someone was rescued and saved from that. We have to, number one, do the work to heal from the difficulty and from the trauma that we went through. And then we also have to express gratitude to Allah from getting us out of that situation instead of being upset with Allah for putting us into that situation because the situation can come as a test. The situation can come as a test. The Prophet, alaihi s-salatu was-salam, went through over one dozen assassination attempts in his life. He went through having to flee his homeland while being chased out and again in an assassination attempt. He went through multiple children dying in front of him. He went through having to fight wars and losing his best friends and family members in front of him. He went through even having to fight wars against his own family members and against his own tribe, which is like having to fight a war against your best friend. He went through all of these things and he modeled to us how to be grateful to Allah while also seeking Allah's assistance to be healed from those difficulties. He was always asking Allah for assistance that for the difficulty to overcome the difficulty. And at the same time, he was expressing gratitude to Allah for all the blessings that he had been given. And so it's kind of a balance between the two and to be very, very focused on an approach of accepting the decree of Allah while seeking his help and being grateful for what we have and without expressing discontent over his decree. Okay, how do we suggest friends and family? Will you remind friends and family to be grateful and not complain without being self-righteous or with showing compassion for what they're dealing with? It's a good question. So it cannot be done in the middle of something if that person isn't ready for it. If you're someone really close to you is discussing a problem with you and they're getting into now the realm of complaining but they're hurting and they're having issues and you don't immediately say, hold on to stop complaining. Don't you know we have to be grateful? You have to be very, very subtle about it. You have to start to, number one, see if they're open to the advice at that time. Not everybody's open to all types of advice at all moments. And we might be going through a very difficult time. We're not open to certain type of advice. So number one, we see if they're open to that type of advice. Number two, based on the advice that they might be open to we subtly point them in the other direction. We subtly point them in the other direction of, you know, I understand it's, there's a lot of, it sounds really tough and I'm really, really sorry that you went through that. And then you try to point them towards a few things you notice in what they mentioned that were actually positive or part of the experience that, you know, sometimes you'll say, at least this didn't happen. That's actually a positive thing. When you say, you know what? It definitely could have been much worse. And Alhamdulillah that all this didn't happen. Allah really protected you from something. It could have been much worse. And so we try to gently guide them into the next, into a different frame of mind. And if that still doesn't work, then over time, we have to just have discussions with people we love about the importance of gratitude because sometimes in the culture we live in, these things are not talked about enough. And so we just live in a mentality of, it's very normal to complain. It's very normal. It's practiced all over the place. The majority of wide percentage of what we see activity on the internet and forums and social media is just complaining about something or another. There's a lot of complaining. And so it doesn't mean that we are immune to it just because we say, La ilah illallah Muhammad Rasulullah, we have to actively learn these concepts and then work on them. And that takes time. It might take someone five years to get to the point where they complain a lot to actually shifting the mentality towards being grateful. I can stay in gratitude temporarily, but long-term I find it very difficult. How do you be truly content? Yeah, this is like a jihad. This is a struggle. It's not like one day we're grateful and we just moved to the station of gratitude and now we just got it mastered. No, no, no, we are gonna fluctuate. The human being, we fluctuate and Allah gives us seasons of life. And you might think, oh yeah, now I'm being grateful and then boom, a difficulty happens and we're just like humbled and we're like, I still got a lot of work to do, right? Because we can't bear it. And it's very difficult for us to notice or to practice gratitude during some of those moments. So the way to think about it is by you staying in it temporarily, you are building the spiritual muscle to eventually make it a semi-permanent station. You have to like work at it and then you fall back a little bit and you work and as long as the general trajectory is a positive one over a certain period of time, that means that you are starting to develop the station. But the way to do that is to consistently every night, if someone can make it a practice, every night we can, or once a week, but ideally every night, two raka of shukr, two raka with the intention of a supra-gatory prayer and extra prayer of gratitude. And we just, in the Sajda, we recount all the blessings that we can recount, there's too many of them, but that we can recount, we just say, thank you Allah for this. So in our minds, in Sajda we're not supposed to speak out loud, formally unless it's in Arabic, but just in your mind, in your heart you're recounting it. Thank you for this blessing, this blessing, this blessing. And just, you do that and now you'll start to establish the practice of gratitude. This is a sunnah of the Prophet, alaihi salatu as-salam, that he would often pray at the hadjad and he would pray at the hadjad just out of gratitude, not even asking for anything. Most of the time we pray when we need something. Yeah, like give me this. And that's great. Alhamdulillah, Allah wants us to ask for him. Every now and then, we should just pray a prayer of gratitude. We just say thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. And then we ask, we're always asking and every part of the da'a hasn't asked to it, but we just try to focus that prayer on gratitude. So that would be one way to hold it down, to consistently do it. If we can't do it every day, every Friday, every Jumma, if we can't do that once a month, whatever amount that we can do. But usually we can try to make the time for it. Okay, we'll go ahead and move on. Any questions? Yeah. I wanted to just add, I wanted to kind of reinforce the message, right? Especially in response to like some of the questions about the da'a, because I could see people, some people listening, they can, well, this sounds kind of harsh. You know, like you first said, I've been traumatized, I've been through so much and you make me feel like I've lived for something different. We're crying out for it, right? And we know that Allah said that things got so difficult that even the messengers cried out for a little bit of help from Allah. And as humans, we are vulnerable, we're subject to that. I think the key point that you made was that it's not for everybody. This is for the ones who want to get at highest nearness to Allah. It's not hard, but if you want to get that, reach that highest level, it's for them. But for the common people, a lot of people just ain't going to reach that. And that is okay to be vulnerable, it is okay that you're not being judged as long as it's not that harsh. Like just have sugar, just not being like, not being able to stand this, but you're speaking to someone who want to reach that highest level, to be non, this is more so that it's on them already. Yeah, thank you for mentioning. There is a number one, it definitely is, the book that we've been talking about is the book to reach a station of Wilaya. Wilaya is friendship and sainthood, right? It's a very, very, very high station. That after the prophets, the highest level are the most truthful saints. It's a very, very high station. And so when we try to practice these things, we practice them, we work on these traits. So eventually we become people who are just completely loved by Allah and completely in love with Allah. Everything we see is Allah, right? We just, and it's, that's not required, right? It's just, it's like extra credit, but people want it and they want to attain high stations and they want to grow. And so that's a very, very good point. And the second thing is we embrace vulnerability in our religion and a kind of brokenness before Allah. We embrace that. It's a good thing to have, but it's before Allah, right? When we are completely broken and we have no one to turn to, Allah may bring us to those moments because only he can help us in those moments. He wants us to turn to him. And it doesn't mean that we have to be in a state where we can't have those moments. No, no, no, those moments are gonna happen. That's part of the seasons of life that we go through. Allah says, I alternate between the night and the day. And as some of the commentators say, that means expansion and contraction or the night being contraction and day being expansion. So contraction will happen and those moments are moments where we're just like, ya Allah, I need your help and we're just begging him. In those moments, we have to be on guard for complaining to human beings, but we can complain all we want to Allah in the form of the, but not in the form of why is this happening? Oh my God, why me? Didn't happen to this person. Everybody else's life is great. I'm scrolling on Instagram and they're all having a great time in Hawaii and I'm over here being tested. Like I got COVID, but we don't do that, right? But we, in our vulnerable states before Allah, we say, ya Allah, this is really tough. Please help me. I need your help. That is the sunnah of the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam that to beg him. And then when in moments of expansion, when like where things are going well and we're feeling really, really good and think we're in a state of, you could say elation, rather than attributing that to something we did, right? Oh, I did this. I did this. We said, Allahu Akbar. Alhamdulillah, the blessing that Allah gave me that today I'm able to experience this na'amah and that I'm able to experience this type of health and all the things that lead to the moments of expansiveness. And the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam, that's what he said, the affair of the believer is all good. When he or she is afflicted, they are patient. Patience and when you're patient, you usually have to ask Allah for some assistance, for some strength with the patience, because it's not easy. And when they're given blessing, they are grateful. And they say, alhamdulillah for the blessing. And he said, that is the affair of the believer. And really it only is like that for the believer. That that's, so it's part of it. So it's a very, very good point that you mentioned. It's part of the experience of believers to go through this. We can never expect to always just be on a high and everything is just easy and flowing and our natural inclination is gratitude. And we can never expect for, we don't want to expect for everything to always just be like difficult. And we just always have to be patient with everything. And that's why the chapter before this was on patience, because those are the two things the believer needs. You need patience and you need gratitude. And then there's a class of people, a spiritual status, that they become grateful even for the difficulties because they see them from Allah. That's a very, very, very, very high station that's, we don't have to worry about that right now. But there are people who'll be there just like, this is from Allah, Allah loves me. I'm praising my trust in him. If it's happening to me, it must be good for me. Alhamdulillah. But if we can just be patient through the tough times, that's sufficient and grateful through the good times. The challenge is right now, we are ungrateful for the difficult times for sure. And we're also ungrateful for the good times. We're just like everything is good and we find things to just pick apart. And that's what we got to work on at least to get to that next level of nearness. Alhamdulillah. Any other questions? And so the last thing that we'll mention is implementing the gratitude through obedience of each of the limbs. So we were talking a little bit about this earlier and we'll just, inshallah, end with this, that when someone is grateful, we have to be grateful by actually putting what we think and say into practice. There's the gratitude of the tongue and there's the gratitude of our actions, right? And we wanna work towards a point where everything that Allah gave us, he only sees us using that blessing in his obedience. He only sees us using that blessing in his obedience. So we count, we think about, okay, he gave me this blessing and he gave me this and he gave, for example, if he gave us the blessing of a car, car is not supposed to be driven to the wrong type of place, right? That car is not supposed to be driven with we're doing something wrong while we're driving it, right? There's a lot of different things and if we do that, we can't say we're grateful for the car properly because we're using the car for what it was not intended to do, right? If he gave us the blessing of our bodies and of our feet and of our limbs, right? We're not supposed to use them to go to the wrong place. We're not supposed to use them to hang out in circumstances or in conditions or environments that we know are gonna corrupt our soul, right? They're not, that's not what the purpose is. So we can't be grateful for it if we don't use it in the right way. Same thing when it comes to relationships, right? That if we are in a, we wanna have healthy positive relationships, but if we're in a haram or impermissible relationship, we can't, you don't wanna be grateful for being in a haram or impermissible relationship. That would be us using the faculties of building camaraderie and building closeness and nearness to people in the wrong way, right? And we don't wanna be in that type of relationship. So it gets more and more subtle, right? And we just have to make sure that we don't use the blessings that we've been given. We'll always have sins that we're doing, but blanket disobedience and major disobedience, we don't wanna do with the blessings that we've been given, right? And it starts with the first one, we always wanna be on guard for is the tongue. The tongue is sacred and the tongue, the prophet, alaihi s-salatu was-salam says, the one who can guarantee me what's between his two lips and what's between the two legs, right? Your tongue and your private parts, I can guarantee for them, Jannah. Because those are supposed to be used for mentioning the favors of Allah, for doing the vicar of Allah, for engaging in polite and kind conversation. The tongue is not supposed to be used to lash out at people. That's ingratitude, it's disobeying Allah. The tongue is not supposed to be used to curse people out. The tongue is not supposed to be used to lie, right? That's not the purpose of the tongue. So we can't, we will always be held back from gratitude if we're just like, it's possible because it's being done by the hands and by the eyes. What shows am I watching that Allah wouldn't appreciate me watching, right? What haram am I ingesting? What am I listening to? What lyrics am I listening to that are foul and vain that Allah would not appreciate me listening to? What am I, we already mentioned, what am I saying that Allah wouldn't want me saying? How am I making people feel with this tongue that in a way that would hurt their feelings, right? And that Allah wouldn't want me to do that. And it gets more and more deeper and more and more subtle. And it doesn't mean that we never express gratitude for the things we have when we're in some state of disobedience, we always will be, but that we realize we cannot perfect our gratitude until we focus on using those entirely for obedience. All right. Does anybody have any questions before we wrap it up? Yes. Yes, definitely. So the first was to recognize, it starts with recognizing at the heart level what the blessings are, okay? Then you, and you begin the second part of it is you begin with the blessing of existence. You then go to the blessing of Allah sustaining you, right? That we talked about how it's possible to sustain you, right? That we talked about how if Allah didn't sustain you, you could just collapse and die all of a sudden. And we might have, we talked about how that could, might have happened to people we know and just pass away and they're asleep all of a sudden, right? The blessing of sustaining, of sustenance. From there, then the blessing of Iman and the blessing of Islam and Iman, the blessing of guidance and belief that we, and we talked about, we just take it for granted that we feel, or that, sorry, that we have been guided to this religion and we don't always feel how big of a blessing it is to have this, this, we actually have a direction in our life. We actually know where we're supposed to be going. Like I was just actually decided to sidetrack but I was checking my email the other day and some email came and it was like some summarized quotes that people were talking about, I guess it's in some form or something like that. And it was basically someone was like, is anybody else, you know, in their 20s completely feeling aimless and not knowing what the purpose of their existence is and having like just completely feeling down and having no idea what to do with their life. And the thought occurred to me that, you know, we're gonna always have down moments, or all will, we'll have moments where we're depressed, or we're sad, but at least at the macro level, we know the purpose of our existence. We might not practice it, we might be struggle with it, we might not even recognize it fully, but we know the purpose. There's millions of people in society who have no compass to where they're going because if there's no God, then whatever we want become God, right? So the blessing of Islam and Iman. And then the blessing of all of the kind of unique and individual blessings someone has been given, right? Be that financial blessings, blessings in their family, blessings with their risk, whatever other types of blessings that someone has been given. So those are the first few steps. And then from there, you actually, you actively say Alhamdulillah for them. And you can do that by counting them and saying Alhamdulillah, ya Allah, thank you for this. It doesn't have to be in Arabic, it can be in English, ya Allah, thank you for this, thank you for this, thank you for this. And then to really, really finish it to make sure to use those blessings in obedience, right? So those would be the kind of the few steps with the sub steps in there of the types of blessings that we wanna practice. And then we keep going on from there's a lot of other ones we can count them. They mentioned the importance of gratitude journals and that's like the research that's been done to just list out everything you have that you can be grateful for, but at least those minimum categories and we kind of write those down, yeah. Does that help? I think we have time for one or two more questions. Anybody have anything? I was gonna add, you know, just throw a allele to you. No, no, no, no, no. I bought the person that said like, the relative of somebody that complains to them and about like telling them, you know, to be grateful or whatever. It could be, couldn't it be a cover or a lie that for you to earn blessings, like you said, you know, to give you the opportunity to use your tongue, to give more blessings, right, to give this person advice, we can pass away, but if I got somebody that's always complaining, it could be a good opportunity for me to gain my good deeds, right? That's a really good point. No, alhamdulillah, alhamdulillah. And the point that was mentioned was the question that came earlier that how do you give advice to someone who maybe in our family or relatives that is really struggling with gratitude and maybe is often complaining and that actually it's a form of Allah giving us an opportunity to do that one and to guide them. And then when some, if you guide someone towards a good deed and then towards a trait more importantly and they implement that trait, you get the reward of that trait every single time they practice it, it's amazing. It's why whoever taught us how to pray and do like the first few basic things be that our parents or grandparents, I mean, they're gonna cash that in and plus a lot of other things. If you can ever find these moments where you're like, hold on a second, I got a major spiritual reward opportunity right here. And we find the right way to guide somebody and the right way to mention it, we'll just be cashing that in, you know, dividends and dividends upon in this life and the next it'll just completely pay out. Inshallah, that's a good point. Yeah. Alhamdulillah, alhamdulillah, alhamdulillah. Alhamdulillah, alhamdulillah, alhamdulillah, accept it, alhamdulillah, alhamdulillah. And so, yeah, no, it's definitely a big blessing when Allah gives us those types of opportunities. Any questions on the sister side? Okay, any other questions online? Is it okay to ask for help from Allah in difficult situations? Yeah, no, no, of course it's okay and it's not just okay, it is you must ask help from Allah in difficult situations. That He's the only one you should turn to, first of course, in difficult situations and that our religion, Allah will present difficult situations to us so that we can turn to Him and so that we can ask for help. And it's one of the fastest ways to get close to Allah is to sincerely and humbly beg in front of Him, break yourself in front of Him, we be alone with Him, turn to Him and say, Ya Allah, only you can help me in this moment. And He will put those difficult situations into our life so that we can do that. So, yeah, it's a very, very good thing to do and it's highly, highly recommended and it's part of the Sunnah of Prophet ﷺ. The whole Qur'an is full of encouragement to seek Allah's assistance in difficult situations. I think, okay, alhamdulillah, I think that's it, insha'Allah. All right, we'll go ahead and end with the Tua'ab. Alhamdulillah, theupuH. Given us with a blessing of Eman. existence and the blessing of our health and the blessing of family and community and security and food to eat and water to drink and and a safe place to live and shelter and all the other blessings that you've given us Yadav al-Adami. We ask that you not take us to account for all the blessings Yadav al-Adami. We ask that you increase us in blessings and increase us in nearness to you Yadav al-Adami and we ask that you make us people of sugar and people of gratitude and remove any negativity in our hearts or any complaining that we might do subtly or outwardly Yadav al-Adami. We ask you to align us on the sunnah of the Prophet alaihi salatu wa sallam inwardly and outwardly in every aspect of our life. Just one last point that just occurred to me that one of the other things we should do with regards to our blessings is we're grateful for them but we should ask that Allah never take us to account for them because we can't we just couldn't do it. Just don't take us to account for what he's given us because as is mentioned by the Prophet sallam Allah takes everybody into account for everything and there's a whole that's why they say that there's nothing wrong with wealth but to know that when someone has a lot of wealth that they will be taken to account for all the wealth and for everything that every little detail every shoe that we get and shirt that we get and so on and so forth and so we should ask that Allah Allah I appreciate all the blessings I also recognize that I'm incapable of giving account for these so please don't take me to account and then we ask that we enter jannah without any hasab and without any reckoning inshallah from the left. So we have just you chapters left and just the class schedule is going to be a little bit inshallah we should have class next week but if you're in the whatsapp group just look out for it that there's a chance we might have to just move or move it around just slightly and if you're not in we have a whatsapp group where we've been mentioning the class timing it's maghrib or 730 into maghrib if you're not in the group and you would want to know the timings just let me know and we'll add you but just one or two things are kind of moving around on my schedule that I might have to just adjust it a bit but the intention is to finish it the class out with the few chapters that we know we have left alhamdulillah