 Whenever I have asked to talk about the topic of stress, I often really reflect on how it's important that we think about how this is dealt with from a prophetic lens. We look at the seerah of the Prophet ﷺ and see how he in his Mashallah as the human who was able to have the most perfect form of emotional intelligence. How the Prophet ﷺ dealt with every form of emotion in his lifetime, and stress was definitely not something unknown to the Prophet ﷺ and unknown to his Sahaba and his companions whom we learn quite a bit from. And so the story that I'd like to start to share here is one that I've shared often and that I really enjoy from the hadith literature. And it's a young companion of the Prophet ﷺ young when this story takes place. He was a young boy and his nickname was Eba Aumayr. And Eba Aumayr was a young boy who was very close to the Prophet ﷺ, him and his entire family. The Prophet ﷺ would often go to their home and visit and was well acquainted with the parents and the other sibling. And Abu Talha, a father and Um Sulaym, the mother of this young boy, were very close to the Prophet ﷺ as was his brother who was probably more famous than this particular companion Eba Aumayr and he was done other than Anas ibn Malik. And because of this closeness to the family, the Prophet ﷺ was well acquainted with the emotions and also the everyday happenings of this particular family. And on one day, on one occasion, the Prophet ﷺ entered into their home to visit them and he found Eba Aumayr isolated, taken a corner and was tearful. And I remind us how the Prophet ﷺ is always somebody who is very, very busy and has much, much to do. And then the affairs of the Ummah, way on his shoulders, his blessed shoulders, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, yet he acknowledged and made, it was clear to him that there was something happening even with a young boy. It would have been very easy to dismiss this incident or to say to oneself, I have a lot to do. I don't have time for this, right? But the Prophet ﷺ made note of this and wanted to sort out what was happening, but also didn't want to go directly to the young boy and ask him so that he does not trouble him further. And here's we learn so many different lessons in emotional intelligence of the Prophet ﷺ. The first thing the Prophet ﷺ did is he asked the family members, he asked the others, what's happening with other Hamid? What is happening here with him so that he understands the backstory before trying to give any advice, especially in a way that of course any advice coming from the Prophet ﷺ would be fully welcomed. But think about us. Think about us who are not divinely inspired. We often will give unsolicited advice to people without fully even understanding what's happening with them. Clearly, he saw that this young boy was distressed. He was crying. He was in distress. But he didn't immediately go to him and try to sort it out. He talked to the people around him. And once he sorted out what was happening, then he thought to himself, this is what I need to do next and look at this beautiful story and how it plays out. He then approaches the young boy, Aba Al-Mair, and he said his very famous statement that we now have in the Hadith of how it is, we know this story because it's part of the Hadith literature, and he said to him, it's beautiful. It's a beautiful thing. Just even the eloquence of the Prophet ﷺ that he literally rhymed the name Aba Al-Mair to the story at hand. So here's what the story was. The story was the Prophet ﷺ learned from the family members that the little boy Aba Al-Mair was crying and tearful and sad and distressed because his pet bird had passed away, had died. My children recently had a pet who passed away or a quarantine, you know, or COVID, a pandemic pet that we had upon one just the other week. They were so distressed over the death of their pet. And I thought to myself, Subhanallah, this is so similar to the story. And in the kind of angst and emotion in their world, in their world, this is a big deal. Whereas in our adult world, maybe it wouldn't be as big of a deal, although certainly there are adults that are very, very close to some of their pets, right? But here's Aba Al-Mair really in distress. And the Prophet ﷺ goes to him and he says to him, And Nughayr is the translation of this word is a small bird. It's a play on the word bird. And it rhymes. He could have used many other words for bird, but he uses this one to rhyme his name, just the eloquence upon all the Prophet ﷺ. And it was just a short phrase. That's it. It's a short sentence. There's not this long hadith that follows. And we think about this too is from emotional intelligence. When a person is in a state of distress, in that moment, in that acute moment, they don't need a lecture. They're not ready to hear a lecture. They're in a moment of distress. So as light as you can tread, the better. And we don't see a whole hadith that follows this. It actually was a playful, just full boy of the Prophet ﷺ talking to this young, very distressed boy. And understanding at the boy's level, coming down to his level, and understanding that in his world, this is a big deal. So he also doesn't brush it off, like some of us do with our own family and friends. And even to ourselves, we do this. We brush off distress. And sometimes we say things like, well, at least I don't have a bomb falling on my head. May I protect all of us, including our sisters and brothers, that in fact, you have bombs falling on their heads. But that's not your reality. If you're not in a war-torn situation, and maybe your reality is comparatively smaller, but in your world, it's a big deal. The Prophet ﷺ would go to people at their level, and meet them at their level, and this was part of his emotional intelligence. And then look at the way in which he asked the question. It wasn't just that it was playful. It was also very purposeful, because there's nothing that the Prophet ﷺ says except that it is said with accuracy and that it is said with purposefulness. And so he asks him, not, what did you do, accusatory, what did you do to the bird? He asks him, what did the bird do? In a playful way, as in to say, what did that bird do? And in that way, he was able to get made, to kind of not feel that level of stress, to kind of bring it down and be able to engage with the Prophet ﷺ and understand that he was there to comfort him. There was no accusatory peace. Sometimes we do this to our friends and to our loved ones, our family members. We kind of, they're going through a tough time and we say, well, you know you brought that upon yourself or things of this nature, right? But that's not from emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence of the Prophet ﷺ from his Sunnah is to meet people where they are, to understand their level of stress at their moment of distress. Empathy. Empathy is putting yourself in the shoes of someone else in order to feel, huh, what would it be like, what they're feeling? You know, Ibn Hajar has said about this hadith that there are at least 60, 60 rulings of Sharia derived from this one little hadith. That is how weighty this hadith is. It's phenomenal. There are so many lessons to be derived here. And I start with it because whenever we think about the Prophet ﷺ and the kind of guidance that he was able to bring us and the kind of emotional intelligence he was teaching us, and then people ask questions like, how do I deal with stress? My first answer is always, look at the best of all of examples. Look at the best of all of humanity. And you will find your answers there. We can come up, of course, with all kinds of other discussions, which we will talk about today here, inshallah, we'll talk some biology, we'll talk some genetics, we'll also talk some techniques, right? We'll talk about therapy, all kinds of things will come up today, inshallah. But first, we must start with the best of all examples, the example of the Prophet ﷺ. So when I think about this, I think about how we often do this thing where we do launch into that large, you know, lecture about what people should do or shouldn't do or how they should feel or shouldn't feel. We'll say things like, you know, to people, you know, get over it. There's more fish in the sea, more birds in the sky, inshallah, because it was a pepper. Or we'll say things like, have patience. Now, there's nothing wrong with reminding people of sub-it and patience. But you also have to balance it because in that very acute moment, can they, are they even hearing you out or not? And then up to yourself, because if you're kind of giving your own self advice, sometimes we get really hard on ourselves, really hard on our harsh, harsh ways of dealing with ourselves, but we don't allow ourselves to have the room to even breathe or to acknowledge that what just happened here is a big thing, right? I meet people all the time and in counseling all the time, I find people who are, who really guilt trip themselves for even having emotions like stress. And I'd say, why? It is a natural human emotion. It is a natural response that God has created our bodies to have when things are not going right. It's literally an alert system for you. And I'll talk about this in a moment and show a little bit more, but just think about this. Think about the emotional intelligence of the Prophet ﷺ and always ask yourself, what would the Prophet do? What would the Prophet say? How would he react? And how did he react? Because we already have those examples. We just need to learn them more. Subhanallah. And so this is the son of the Prophet ﷺ. And if we really want to follow the prophetic example, we also have to be holistic in the way we deal with each other, with the world around us and with ourselves, right? Masha'Allah. And so I'm very happy to be having this conversation because I think it's very, a very useful conversation, masha'Allah. Now, I'm going to tell you, but I'm shift now from the time of the Prophet ﷺ and shift just a few more hundred years a little later to the ninth century where we're going to talk about a Muslim scholar who contributed immensely to the field of what today we call psychology. And you may know that this is someone I talk about quite often because I find that his work is quite phenomenal, masha'Allah, and that I've published and written about him extensively as well, because I think his works are so excellent. And his name is Abu Zaid Al-Balkhi. Abu Zaid Al-Balkhi is in the ninth century. And he wrote a very beautiful book, small, but very weighty book. And it's called Masalih al-Abdan wal-Anfus. Translated, the only half of the book is translated now. The part that's called Sustenance of the Soul. But the title would be translated as Sustenance of the Body and Soul. It's a two-part book where he writes the first half on body-based or physical medical conditions. And in the second half of the book, he writes about essentially mental health conditions, ninth century, mind you, masha'Allah. And a lot of the papers that I've written about him that have, you know, sparked actually a lot of the work we do at the lab, the Stanford Muslim and Islamic Psychology Lab, was initially sparked by my work on balkhi. And then, masha'Allah, so many other studies and research lines have followed since that period of time. But some of the papers that I published on balkhi was showing how what would, in fact, the translator of the book, his book, Dr. Malik Badri, Rahmatullah Ali, who just passed away earlier, the syrups who's made a lot for him, our mentor and predecessor in the field. And he would call Ali balkhi from the ninth century. He would call him somebody who was a, had precocious genius and a genius of way ahead of his time. And it's so true. And I bring your attention on the topic of stress today to Ali balkhi, because in his book, in the ninth century, mind you, he's talking about how to deal with distress. How do you deal with being stressed out? So that's why I'm going kind of chronologically here and showing you from the Islamic tradition what's been so phenomenal about our tradition. It is the sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ. It is our Qur'an and hadith that sparks so much of what the scientists and physicians and other forms of scholars contributed to this understanding of the human self. Essentially, today we call this psychology. And Ali balkhi was one of these main people who contributed in his amazing book. And his book, if you usually listen to the title, sustenance of the body and soul and mind body medicine. Right? And you think about this term mind body medicine, it sounds like something new age. It's not new age. It's been part of our tradition forever. It's been part of our Islamic legacy forever. And in Ali balkhi's case, a lot of what he was writing when I was published one about him, he found he was writing in the 9th century, things that weren't discovered until the 19th century. Not just some hundred years of a difference, a millennium of a difference. I have papers about him and OCD obsessive compulsive disorder and balkhi and phobias, for example, and some other writings. And in these papers, we have proven, Alhamdulillah, that things like OCD weren't discovered by some, you know, European scholar and the psychologist in the 19th century. It was a balkhi in the 9th century. And the historians of medicine have had to correct. And inshallah, a process of rewriting history that has excluded the Muslims out of it, either purposefully or inadvertently. But it's not until we as Muslims start really taking our own history, that's inspired by the sunnah initially, seriously, and writing about ourselves for ourselves and for others to learn, as opposed to allowing others to write about us and literally write us out of history. Right? Subhanallah. I dragressed a little bit, but I'm very excited about the balkhi, inshallah, and to show you a little bit about some of his work. And it's important to see because it's when you hear what he has to say about this, it really will be kind of amazed, inshallah. When he writes about stress, he says that the human soul can either be healthy or unhealthy, just like the body can be healthy or unhealthy. We know that we don't want a person get sick, health wise, they're, they're physically unhealthy, but you can also be emotionally and spiritually unhealthy. And he says, just like you go and get attention, medical attention for any bodily health issues, we must have the same process if a person is having any emotional or mental health issues, ninth century. So when people start saying this, this, this psychology stuff isn't for Muslims, I say we were the people who were at the forefront of the field who created the whole conversation in the first place. Subhanallah. Right? If we were to just know our traditions. And so he was the Balchi says, so if a person has it becomes unhealthy, mental health wise, then we have to return ourselves back to health. It is part of our God given rights upon us that our body has a right upon us ourselves and our families and our Lord has a right upon us. Right? So you begin the whole process of well being by making sure that we maintain that health. And if it goes out of health, we bring it back to health. Right? And then he gives examples, he says the body, just like the body, and this every time you try to explain something mental health, he, he gives you an example of the body. He says, okay, maybe people are it's easier for them to understand how the body reacts. So let's give you an example of that. First, I'll explain the mental health. Right? It says, look, on the body has gets cold, for example, has an external hazard. Let's say like cold, they get cold, right? Extreme cold or extreme heat. You all know, we all know and understand it's an imbalance. There's an imbalance. And that's an example of an external imbalance, heat or cold. But there is also internal imbalance that can happen. So we all know, right? Like if a person doesn't take care of what they're eating, their diet, internally, there can be an internal imbalance of health. Right? And so he says, either internal external, you have to take care of it, you have to take good care of it. And then he says, similarly, it is just like that and the soul. Right? Your emotional and mental and spiritual well being, it's exactly the same. It has both internal and external factors just like the body. And he gives examples and he says externally, protecting your soul literally from the elements. Right? It's like when you are experiencing distress. So here comes the conversation on stress. He says that this distress, right, can either come from an arousal of emotions like anger or sadness or fear. Right? And it could be caused externally, you hear bad news, you see something terrible on the news. Right? Or it can come internally, internally, because you're constantly have negative thinking. You keep on going over and over and over in your own head. Nobody else can see it or hear it. It's happening inside of yourself. Right? Negative cycle of thinking over and over and over. So he says, and exactly like this, just like there could be internal external methods, then there also can be internal external treatments in order to reach a more peaceful and tranquil state. How do you do this? That's the question. How do you do this? So he gives us a really example, a really interesting example and wonderful formula. Or he says, it actually takes the importance of self talk and talk with those who are trained to talk to you. Like Dr. Balik Badri in his translation of Balchi's work, he calls Balchi probably the first cognitive behavioral therapist. Because Balchi literally champions talk therapy. And he goes through his whole book talking about different forms of therapy. Talk therapy. I know I meet so many Muslims who say, that's such a Western thing. Only non-Muslims or Western people go to somebody's office and talk to a shrink or talk to a therapist and tell them, tell some stranger their problem. That's not a Muslim thing to do. Yes, Subhanallah. Yes, Subhanallah, do we know our tradition? Here is Balchi in the 9th century explaining and literally outlining what talk therapy would be like. And he literally says, if you are experiencing the cycle of negative thinking, then A, number one, you start to form positive ways of self talk. And if you can't do it on your own, then you need to go to those who can help you figure out positive self talk, which is the role of a professional, the role of a therapist, somebody who's trained, who Balchi calls a person who you trust and is trustworthy and knows how to do this work. They're ahl ad-dik. They are the people of knowledge on this particular topic. It's amazing. It's amazing, Subhanallah. And so he says, we have to protect our soul, our self from the internal and external negative thinking that harms us and stress can definitely do that for us. And part of the healing is in one of two ways, that when, number one, that when we start, when we have a good day, when we have a good day, we're in a good moment, a non-stressful moment, right? You're feeling peaceful and tranquil. You're doing all right. This is where he says you need to be able to take, to seize the moment, literally seize the moment, okay? And put this good moment and this good day, give gratitude, give shukr. By the way, that, you know, Western psychology has co-opted so many of these things, this concept of gratitude, there's gratitude journals, you know, you go to therapists, they tell you to write about and talk about your gratitude. And I'm thinking to myself, this is shukr. This is exactly from our tradition, right? Al-Balkhi's talking about this in the ninth century, give shukr when the day is good, like the hadith that talks about, where's he getting it from? It comes directly from the hadith. Remember me in times of ease, right? I remember you in times of hardship. Seize the moment. Al-Balkhi talks about taking these happy and tranquil moments and putting them into a treasure box, like literally a treasure trove that later in the rainy day, when it's difficult and it's stressful, you pull it out and it helps you. SubhanAllah. These are all techniques that we practice as professional mental health professionals in the modern sense, but it's been talked about by our scholars and traditions of old. These are not newer, modern phenomenon. There's certainly not Western phenomenon, subhanAllah, right? And so Al-Balkhi's talking about in when it's a peaceful and good moment and when it's not. This is where he talks about number one, taking on that monologue of self convincing. You have to do some self talk, right? Before you do the professional, have somebody help you. What is the self talk he's referring to? He talks about when you come to a realization that the inherent nature of this world, this dunya, is a world of tribulation. It's a world of difficulties, of tests and trials. Then, at that point, you don't put expectations onto it that are unrealistic. I have this conversation all the time with my, with my clarifications. Muslim or not, all the time we're having conversations of, is that a realistic expectation or not? Because some of the stress that's coming up, some of your carrying the stress is because you have unrealistic expectations of either the people in your life, the situations in your life, right? They give the world itself and how it functions, subhanAllah. And so here, you know, we really have to remind ourselves that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala already explained this to us in the Quran, right? Surah Al-Ankabut, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says, أحسيب الناس وإن يتركوا أن يقولوا آمننا وهم لا يفتنوا. Do people really think that they're going to be left alone? And he left alone, as in to say, not tested? Because they merely say, we believe, آمن. And that they're not going to be tested وهم لا يفتنوا. Right? It's a rhetorical question. Allah subhanahu ta'ala is telling us, you will be tested in this world. It is as the scholars have called it. It is the abode of trials and tribulations. It is. Don't expect it to be anything other than that. Right? Because we, as Muslims, as believers, we have the akhirah hereafter. And we understand that all ease and full tranquility only comes in the akhirah. So you already have a frame that isn't, that's pragmatic. It's realistic. You don't have a very rosy tinted glasses on in this dunya. And you also don't look at it as totally bleak and terrible. Right? You have a very balanced middle way, especially our prophetic middle way. And Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala literally answers the rhetorical question that is asked in Surat al-Ankabut about do people think they're going to be left alone only because they say we believe and they won't be tested? In Surat al-Baqarah, Allah subhanahu ta'ala explains it more clearly to us. Right? He says, And certainly we shall test you with something of fear, hunger, loss of wealth, lives, fruits. It's going to happen. And if this pandemic has taught us anything, it has taught us exactly all of those things wrapped up in one subhanahu wa ta'ala. How many loss of lives have we seen in this pandemic and sickness of ourselves or our family members and people close to us, loss of jobs and finances, people in distress, either marital distress or isolated at home with their children or figuring out how to transition between hybrid models of learning and working. It's really hard. It is hard. And if you go about thinking that you're, one time I heard a spiritual, one of my spiritual teachers, somebody, one of her students was saying how, you know, something really difficult had happened to her. And she was saying it in a way that was somewhat complaining. Like you can state facts, such and such and such difficult thing has happened. But there's a way in which we sometimes speak that is complaining. Why does this have to happen to me? How come it happens to you? Why me? Right? Which is not okay. And so she just looked at her and said, why do you think your tribulations are worse than other peoples? He hasn't to say all people will be tribulated. And if you go about this world thinking, otherwise, you will always be in a state of distress. So, he's basically telling us be pragmatic, right? When things are going well, pause, remind yourself that this world is not meant to be an easy place and hold on to the happy thoughts, right? Carpe diem sees that moment. Subhanallah, put it in that treasure trove for a rainy day, pull it out when you need it. To remind yourself actually, you know, sometimes it's good. Sometimes things are going well, but also be pragmatic to remind yourself that trials are right around the corner. Not that the world is, you know, just bleak, but rather that there will be trials and the trials could be right around the corner. And he's incredibly astute, really. I really think it's incredibly astute because what he's doing is essentially giving us techniques to protect ourselves from stress, to teach us how to be more resilient and how when the time comes and we need to draw upon that inner strength, we know how to draw upon it. And when we need help externally from ourselves, that it's not a shameful thing to do. Because in the Qur'an, and yes, in the Qur'an, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says, and ask the people of knowledge if you do not know. If you've hit a roadblock, seek out a person of knowledge. And in this instance, that person of knowledge is a trained counselor. To really think about that. And someone's going to walk away from the structure saying, Dr. Rania said in the Qur'an, go to therapy. What it does say in the Qur'an is seek out the people of knowledge if you do not know. And who are the people of knowledge who know how to help you with cognitive and behavioral techniques to help you through moments of intense stress like this or other forms of difficulty. They are, in fact, a trained professional therapist. And better yet, if they are, of course, from your own faith tradition, so that they can help with the parts of this that are spiritual in nature. Now, let's go back to Al-Balkhi and some of his stress reduction techniques, right? He says, for example, that as a, you know, this is something subhanAllah, even a moderate CBT cognitive behavioral therapist will advise you as subhanAllah, right? But it's right in Al-Balkhi's work. He actually says, he advises us to be fully relaxed and tranquil and remind ourselves that the worldly troubles are only natural and to be expected. And whenever it feels like it's too easy, then it's too good to be true. And he's deriving this from the ayah that's telling us that I mentioned earlier that tests and tribulations are part of this dunya. And don't fool yourself into thinking otherwise, because the believers will be tested. All people will be tested. But the people who will be tested the most are the people closest to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. And who is that? Who are the most closest people? They are the prophets. And if you look at the stories of the prophets that are all throughout the Quran, it is one test after tribulation after another test after another tribulation to no end. That's a lot of Allah. Really, you want to talk about stress and grief and sadness and un-loss. These are the stories of the prophets. It's every single one of them. SubhanAllah. Now Al-Balkhi also in his book very astutely talks about something that's very interesting to me. It's essentially what today we would even call like a modern technique. Something in today's terms we call reciprocal inhibition. Reciprocal inhibition is basically where you take something that's like a difficult, like a noxious stimulus. Really is how you say it scientifically. What it is is kind of like a very difficult emotion, okay? Like stress. Let's use stress as the example. And you repeatedly connect it with a relaxing response until you create a bond between these two things. The painful, stressful stimulus, and the relaxing stimulus. And you keep pairing them, pairing them, pairing them together until finally something called systemic desensitization happens. Yeah, and you desensitize yourself from that stress. And you see people like this. The people, SubhanAllah, that are connected to God, that know Allah, the Arafin Billah, that when something very heavy or difficult happens and we're taught this and all of us know this, I'm just going to remind us we all know this, that when you hear terrible news, not just the passing, or you know, somebody passes away, but any terrible news, if the immediate response that should come with it is From Allah we've come and to Allah we shall return. Always reminding us this isn't this jinnah and all the stuff and it isn't actually ours. It belongs to Allah. And when he wants it, he will call it back. He'll call it back. Right? SubhanAllah. And so when you, when you, and so the people close to Allah, SubhanAllah, you'll see as soon as they hear the difficult news, it's immediately like no might. There is no might except for Allah, SubhanAllah. No might or ability except for Allah, SubhanAllah. They have bonded, they have literally bonded these things together. And so there was a sense of relaxation because you realize that Allah, SubhanAllah, is actually the one who is in charge. He is actually boss with a capital B. SubhanAllah. Right? So, Al-Balkhi very masterfully is explaining these techniques to us in the ninth century. Mind you, mashaAllah. Right? And he's trying to explain to us that if you consistently remind yourself that when you're feeling positive and you're in a positive mind space, the life is tough and it's not easy, that later on when you do come up with struggles and distress, that you don't have this high-end level of anxiety, high-end level of stress because you have already trained yourself to expect that struggles are part of a normal life. Like, like my teacher said, you know, why do you think your difficulties are worse than other people's? SubhanAllah. And so Al-Balkhi very masterfully uses kind of a psycho-spiritual, religious, cognitive approach to remind us that this world is truly a place of expected distress. And it is they hereafter where we will really experience full happiness. And this application that I'm referring to, right, is part of, you know, acceptance. It's part of hurtfulness. People like to say mindfulness. We like to say heartfulness. It's much more in line with Islamic traditions, mashaAllah. And he's saying all of this in early Islamic understandings derived from the understandings of the Hadith and the Quran. And this is not it. This is not the only thing. And Al-Balkhi also teaches us another wonderful technique that he tells us about, you know, the basic tenets of social interactions with the different people is that we should know that there are going to be anxiety or stressful provoking elements in these experiences, meaning that when you deal with people, whether they be your family members, your spouse, your children, and people in the community, there are going to be times that whenever you interact with another person, there is bound to be stress. That too is part of normal life. And so in counseling, I find people say, you know, my in-laws are the most stress-provoking. And I think to myself, you know, most people would say the same thing. Again, why is your situation different than others? You know, when I have to deal with my kids, they drive me up the wall. And it's like, yeah, that's part of, part and parcel of parenting. And so part of this is to normalize the conversation, to say to ourselves, stress is something that is part and parcel of this life. And it helps because then when you start to realize that there is, it's yes, it's your stress, and it's your life, your difficulty that's happening within it. But it's also not so abnormal. All the time, I, you know, people say, yeah, that's pretty normal in parenting. Like, really? Really? Yeah, it's the problem. And it helps. It helps people to understand that they're not the only person going through what they're going through. Right? So Benekhi tells us back to what he's saying. He says, you know, train ourselves, train ourselves to not overreact to minor incidents, train ourselves to tolerate irritating experiences, right, until it becomes a little more habitual that these minor inconveniences, right, are not going to have us completely wig out. You meet people who like, it's relatively small, but they have like lost it. They've gone from zero to, you know, and so he's basically saying, train yourself. It comes with the discipline that Islam teaches us to tolerate some of these more painful effects. Just like, and again, he always gives examples to the body. He says, look, look like, like when it gets really hot or it gets really cold, what do you do? It gets really cold, you put on a jacket. It gets really hot, you take the jacket off, right? You know what to do for your body when you're hot or cold. Why is it that we don't know what to do with our emotions when we feel this way? Right? Just the same way you would train the body, you would train your soul, you train your emotions, you train your cognition. It's a preemptive technique. And it requires thinking ahead of time, planning ahead of time. It requires having this reservoir reserve, a reserve that he's referring to, of good and healthy and positive thoughts and good and healthy techniques. So they're preemptive in nature. And then he qualifies, he qualifies everything he's saying. And he says, a person who's going to use such techniques, right? When they experience problems or difficulty, they should be aware of the degree of forbearance that their soul can bear or not bear. It's very important. Wallahi, this point is so key. Because everything I said stands. But how it applies to each and every one of us here differs. Because each one of us is different. And how much each one of us can bear is different. Subhanallah, if you're somebody who grew up and had traumatic incidents in your lifetime and in your childhood or came from a war-torn country with lots of trauma that you have witnessed and seen, maybe small things add up for you and just pile up on top of already still open wounds that haven't been healed versus someone who hasn't experienced all that and maybe can tolerate more. So you need to know yourself the degree of forbearance that your soul can bear. And that's how we figure out different people's levels of endurance. And this is why working one-on-one with somebody who is trained and professional is very helpful because they know how to modulate this based on your level of endurance. It's not just general advice, such as we're talking about here. It would be much more custom tailored to your experience and your history and your background. So the solution is really for the person to know themselves and to work with someone who gets to know you and help you, right, right, person of knowledge to do so. And that brings us to the conversation of knowing our souls and knowing to the degree to which we can tolerate stress and protecting ourselves from the things that trigger those stress. You know, for example, that every time you go to a social gathering and you sit with people who just talk on and on and on about the newest thing that they bought and the newest place that they went and the coolest thing that they did triggers you. They avoid such situations to the best of your ability or show face for a bit and then get out of there. But people do this thing where they stay at social settings that they know aren't healthy for them. They know they're triggered by it and out of a sense of obligation, they were there for these extended periods of time. Whereas the obligation could have been fulfilled in a shorter period of time and out, but it takes some discipline. It takes some knowing of the self, right, of knowing how to in and out if you need to. SubhanAllah, right. This is what the modern therapist would call boundary setting. And some people don't like this term because they think, oh, what is this term? It sounds to Western and Allah, you know, this is part of our tradition too. Because in Islam, we learn that you should never put yourself in a demeaning situation or befriend or put yourself, even people who are blood ties to you, who will demean you or have you do something that goes against or contradicts Islam. So SubhanAllah, going back here now, we're talking about kind of Balfi's solutions for knowing ourselves, right. It comes with knowing the nature of our soul and no comes with knowing the degree to which we can tolerate stress. It comes with deciding based on our knowledge and maybe with the help of a professional if needed, what kind of problems we're ready to face, or what kind of problems we need to avoid at all cost, right. This kind of knowledge really helps us, you know, and it helps everybody. It doesn't matter what level of education you have, what level where you are social economically in society, everybody needs this, right. SubhanAllah. And so we recognize when we reach out for help, when help is needed. And if there's anything that I can say in kind of closing this conversation today and really helping us think this through is knowing where and when to get help and support. Because SubhanAllah, we have reached a point in our ummah and our society, particularly those who are in the US, but really even globally. I was talking to international students from across the world globally who are all going into this profession to help their fellow, you know, Muslims kind of talk and become professionals. We're able to do professional talk therapy, hopefully integrated with the Islamic approach, right. We have many more resources than we ever used to. You know, my own organization that's connected with my lab in Mattistan, Mattistan, the name by the way, people always ask what is Mattistan. And Mattistan is the English word which is shortened from the original version of Be Mattistan. The Be Mattistan, the Be Mattis, the ill person. And Stan, as you know, is the place of. So it's the place where the ill person, the sick person, would go to get help. It was a hospital. A healing center is even better translation than a hospital. In Arabic it was called the daughter she thought. Again, same translation. The place or home of healing, center of healing. And Mattistan is something that was such a beautiful heritage in Islamic history. It is the trademark of everywhere and anywhere Islam went, the Mattistan's follow. Mattistan sprung up in every which way. And they were healing centers that were holistic. Mind, body, soul. And that is why Muslims were the very first to our knowledge in Islam and in history, in the history of humanity to have psychiatric boards, mental health boards, sections of the hospital, the healing center dedicated to mental health. They didn't have an issue because mind, body, soul, it was all connected. You broke your leg, you need to go get it set. You go to this section of the Mattistan, right? You're having a hard attack. You go to this section of the Mattistan. You're having a mental health condition. You go to this section of the Mattistan. Holistic healing. It was all there. And the modalities they used were talk therapy. Yes, talk therapies. Yes, they had many, many talk therapies, types of talk therapy in the Mattistan's. They had a forms of art therapy to forms of sound therapy and forms of aroma therapy. They had medications. Yes, medications, medical medication concoctinants that they would make in the pharmacies that were part of the Mattistan. It was phenomenal. And then they had, of course, the religious or spiritual healing. They had teams of people that were doing all of these things, mind, body, soul. This is our tradition. The tradition we have lost. And we have attempted to replace by the colonial powers and their backwards ways of dealing with things and isolating it in just biological ways of thinking, as is the modern way of thinking today. My lab is within a school of medicine because psychology and psychiatry by and large has become a medicalized field. But that is not how it was understood by the Muslims. It was understood as holistic. It was interdisciplinary. So many disciplines contributed to the field for the elements that today we roughly translate into psychology. And this kind of very interdisciplinary way of thinking had in it, the theologians had the people who are the muhadithi and the people of Kalaam, the people of the people of medicine, the people of philosophy, all of them contributed to what became randomness. And therefore, their theories, their ways of treatment, their modalities, and their institutions like the Mattistan were holistic and interdisciplinary in their healing methods. So it is no surprise, and this is what I'm going to end with, that when you look at someone like Balikhi and in his section where he talks about stress, which we've been covering today, and then you look at his steps, it is no surprise that he has three steps in the mental health disorders. He says, certain of these conditions need medication. Literally, he says, take the medicine, and he himself actually writes out recipes of, you know, certain, you know, kind of, you know, pre-modern recipes of medications for different things, you know, for when you have depression and when you have anxiety, it's a problem. And then he says, number two, talk to the trust where the person who can help you, the person of knowledge like it says, essentially today we call this person a professional, like a therapist. And then number three, he says, and better your spiritual state, work on your connection with Allah, knowing how and when to rely on him after you've tied your own count. Ghani, how more holistic of a prescription do you want than that? And I remind you, this is in the ninth century. Our tradition is amazing and excellent. What we need to do is really revive it, to understand it. This has been so much of my work in these many, many years now, SubhanAllah, of going back to our tur'af, our original primary texts, and pulling out the gems from them, SubhanAllah, because I'm not so convinced that the modern mental health system is going to be enough for the people of faith. I do believe wholly that it's going to have to bring back what psychology lost. See, psychology lost its soul. But for the Muslims, their alim and nafs, which is literally knowledge of the self and soul, has never been lost. We could actually help the modern field by reminding them to bring the soul back, this whole concept of bring your whole self into therapy. Yeah, well, your whole self for a person of faith includes their soul and includes their spirit and includes their faith. SubhanAllah. So we need to do this. We need to be people who are at the very forefront of this. And you're just enclosing, you know, I've shared with you a number, a number, but I want to kind of remind us and help us kind of comfort us, to remind us that Allah, SubhanAllah, said to us in the Qur'an, right, in Surah Al-Baqarah, He said, that Allah is not going to burden a soul more than it can bear. And it's really important because sometimes you need to take a step back and look at the whole picture because you're feeling this distress. You're feeling really stressed out with why what's happening with you. Always remember to take a step back, reflect, take in the whole picture and realize that when you're stressed out, like we said at the very beginning of the talk, that this is actually a natural human reaction. This is something Allah has created in us. You know, in the Mayo Clinic, they did some really wonderful research and they showed how stress is a normal physiological reaction to the ever-increasing demands of life, that the brain has in it an alarm system. We're hardwired that if things become too distressful, what happens? Our brain is literally hardwired to sound the alarm, sound the alarm. That's what stress is. It's sounding the alarm. So when your brain kind of perceives a threat, okay, it signals your body to release a burst of hormones that fuels your capacity to respond. This is what we call the fight or flight response because it tells you danger, right, run, or it tells you danger, fight. And if you do not have this normal reaction inside of you, you would always be in harm's way. And when the threat is gone, then the body goes back to normal, the hormones go back to normal, right? And you are able to deal with the rest of your day and the rest of your life. The problem in the modern lifestyle though, unfortunately, is that this alarm rarely shuts off because we are constantly under a state of stress. We are constantly plugged into the news or we're doing doom scrolling all throughout on our feeds. And it's always lots and lots of bad news. Or we do escapism and just watch all the funny stuff. But it just, that's not dealing with the problems either. And because we've juggled so many multiple responsibilities, work and home life and caregiving and relationships and all kinds of things that we have to do, it is really important to have very good stress reduction techniques, like the ones we've been talking about all day today, right? And to make it an ongoing goal of our life. And so you take a step back, remind yourself that Allah is not going to burden us more than we can bear. And so if he brought a substressable situation in our life, the first question you ask yourself is, Ya Allah, what is the wisdom behind this? What is it that you're trying to teach me or show me? What am I meant to learn from this? And you remind yourself that whatever trial comes your way, it's something Allah has already planned for you. And because of that, he already guaranteed you can handle it. That's why it's come to you and not to someone else. He guaranteed you can handle it because it's in the Qur'an and it says so. That he's not going to burden you with something more than you can bear. And I know that's really heavy and hard to be because people have, well, I lost, I have this, you know, this person, my loved one is lost or now I'm widowed or I have a special needs child or I have, yeah, it's a pattern of law. And for whatever reason, Allah has determined in his divine wisdom, you can handle that. You know why it's comforting these verses as hard as they are? They're comforting because the faithful believer is the one who understands that Allah in his wisdom, deep down in their heart, knows that they can never really, truly be overwhelmed because Allah has given them the means. And sometimes that means is going to be outside of themselves. It's going to be that professional care. Right? That Allah can take a step back and you take a step back and you remind yourself what Allah says in the Qur'an, where he says, Allah has not going to let anything happen to us, except that it's already been written for us. And we remind ourselves like the Hadith, the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, that these things in our life, it's already been written and the pens have been lifted and the pages have dried. And so it doesn't matter if you think or perceive people are trying to harm you. They can't actually harm you except by the will of Allah. Maybe he has sent this harm to you as a wake-up call, as a reminder, as a lesson, as something that as a way to like help expiate your sins to get you closer and better, to make you stronger. Right? All these are possibilities, but they can't actually harm you unless he rules for it. And like the rest of the Hadith says, and if all the people of the world gather to help you, they cannot help you except with Allah, with what Allah has willed. The pens have been lifted and the pages have dried. So we try, we try, we really try to understand this. And it's hard sometimes to understand, but you have to remind yourself SubhanAllah, then this is what I'll end with, kind of the three main things that kind of a, you know, somewhat of a reminder, almost like a over and over, you tell yourself this, right? You say to yourself, Ya Allah, these times are tough, but you made me tougher. Ya Allah, whatever you've set my way, inshaAllah you have the ability to make it go away. And ya Allah, if you brought me to it, inshaAllah you can bring me through it. You will bring me through it. And ya Allah, that when I face you, inshaAllah, when we are, you know, when, in that moment, SubhanAllah, in the Akhirah, when I'm standing for my peace, salaf, for my judgment, and no one is with me, no spouse, no father, no mother, no child, no friend, no sibling, nothing, nobody, that you are pleased with me and I, inshaAllah, pleased with your pay to Allah that you have given me. And so when we go to these difficult situations, say this, say this, the times might be tough, but I am tough. Whatever comes my way will go away. And if Allah brought me to it, he will bring me through it. Allahumma amin. Ya Allah, may Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala bless all of us, allow us inshaAllah to understand the wisdom of the stress that he has given us in our lives, lessons learned. Remember the hadith that says that even the prick of a thorn, we receive expiation of sins. But even a prick of a thorn, let alone a massive, you know, stressful thing that's happened to you. Allah expiates our sins, he forgives us, and he blesses us, even for small inconvenience, let alone a big one. Remember Allah is there, remember that he's in charge, remember that he will see you through, and remember that he's given you the means through other people, potentially, to meet them, to help you through. So seek out help when you need it. And I pray inshaAllah, this has been a useful conversation, and I'll wrap up here reminding us very similar to where we started with Abba Al-Maid, the story of the young sahabi who the Prophet Sallallahu alaihi wa sallam consoled at the death of his pet bird, and he was feeling distressed and overwhelmed and upset. And so if you are feeling distressed and overwhelmed and upset by things that are happening to you are Abba Al-Maid. You are Abba Al-Maid, but know that help is around the corner. Humble, let's humble ourselves to seek it out when we need the help. And I encourage you inshaAllah to please keep in touch with us at Mattistan, check out the resources that are there, and please support it, the work, the campaigns, and of course inshaAllah the work that comes out of our lab, the Stanford Muslim Mental Health and Islamic Psychology Lab, my aim and inshaAllah sincere intention is to be able to pull out from our giraffe, revive our heritage of Islamic understandings of the self and techniques that are in line with the Quran and the Sunnah, and modern of course scientifically backed techniques of healing. And we pray inshaAllah that all of this coalesces into something that is helpful and useful. May Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la forgive you and me and accept from all of us inshaAllah the good and protect us and heal us and our families. Allahumma ameen wa rasulAllahumma ala Sayyidina Muhammad wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa salam. Take good care wa salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh. This is your sister, Dr. Ania Awad, signing off.