 Bismillahirrahmanirrahim, Alhamdulillahirrahmanirrahim, Wa Salatu Wa Salamala Sharafil Anbiya Wa Al-Mursaleen, Sayyidina Muhammad Wa Aalihi Wa Sahabati Ajma'een, Allahumma alimna ma yinfa'una wa fa'na bima alimta nawa zidna ilma. So last week we talked about the gradual nature of change and the gradual nature of the ayat that came down in order to prohibit khama and intoxicants. So I'm going to develop that concept a little bit more. There was a saying from Aisha, the mother of the believers. And what's interesting is Imam Masiyuti puts this in his chapter of how the Quran was revealed. He brings this statement up when he's talking about the khikmah and the wisdom of how the Quran was revealed in piecemeal over time. So the saying from Aisha, she says, Inna ma nazzala awwala ma nazzala minhu suratun minal musfasil. So the first thing that was revealed of the Quran were the surahs, the short surahs. Fi ha dhikr al jannah wa al-naar. And it were the mention of heaven and hell. Hatta idha thaban naas ilal Islam. And tell when the people were inclined towards Islam, nazzala al-halal wa al-haram, then the rules came down. The halal and the haram came down. Walaw nazzala awwala shayt la tashrabu al-khamar. If the first thing that was revealed was don't drink intoxicants, la qalu la nada ul-khamar abadan. They would have said we wouldn't leave intoxicants ever. And so the point being that there's a process, even the best of generations went through a process of change. And so this teaches us a lot. So number one, that changes a process, it's not an event. And Islam is something that assists in that process. So just like anything else you have, let's say you want to get into law school, medical school, anything that takes a lot of work and has a lot of rules, you don't just start with it. You don't just say I'm going to sign up for all this work that needs to be done, all these sleepless nights, this huge curriculum. You first fall in love with the idea of being a lawyer or you fall in love with an idea of being a boxer or whatever it is. And then once you fall in love with that idea and it sort of settles in your heart, then you're willing to go through the immense training and difficulties and impose rules on yourself, a certain diet on yourself, a certain training regimen on yourself in order to make that happen. And the Dean works in the same way. And this is what was the experience of the Sahaba. They didn't just all of a sudden start following a bunch of rules like a checklist. The idea was that they engaged in the Dean. They connected with the Prophet Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam. They had his companionship. They started practicing aspects of the Dean. They started to rectify their thinking and their beliefs. And then the change started happening afterwards. The action started happening afterwards. So it's important to recognize that change is a process. It's not an event that occurs all at once. The second point is to engage in the Dean. It's not a finish line. Like once I stop drinking and drugging, once I start acting right and I'm perfect, then I'm going to enter the Dean or then I'm going to start practicing the Dean or then I'm going to start bringing it into my life. What we want to do is utilize that to help us loosen the grips of the drug and alcohol problem. And so what that means is engaging in learning, engaging in companionship with scholars, with people who can mentor us in the Dean, teaching and learning about the Sira, about Tafsir, about sciences of Islam, things that affect our hearts and motivate us towards change. Engaging in the Dean is incredibly important. The other aspect is that once you focus on your heart and you focus on yourself, then everything sort of falls in place. Afsalsim said, verily in the body is a piece of flesh. If it's reformed, the whole body reforms. If it's corrupted, the whole body corrupts. Verily, it's the heart. So the idea that once we focus on the heart, and again, the heart is the seed of emotion and reasoning. So in Surah Al-Hajjah says, Qulub yaqiluna biha. Oh, adhan yasma'una biha. Hearts that they reflect with or they think with, ears that they hear with. The heart is the seed of our thinking. So once we rectify the way that we think, then our body or our behavior follows suit. So our thinking starts first, focusing on the motivation and the thinking process and sort of the exercises that we're doing here to help with the behavior changes. Once we're able to focus on that, then we're able to really get progress. The other thing that I found interesting here is that Ayushad al-Lilo Anha said, the mention of jannah and now heaven and hell. Once the mention of heaven and hell came, they became inclined towards Islam. So there's this interesting concept. I'll talk about the neuroscience. There's this idea called episodic future thinking. Episodic future thinking, there's a lot of research recently on it where it talks about how you can pre-experience future events. If you project yourself and pre-experience future events visually and mentally, it can help reduce immediate gratification. So the idea of immediate gratification has brought up a lot in addiction. This idea that we value immediate gratification, immediate rewards over future rewards. And what this line of research talks about is they study people who are able to imagine future situations and future selves. And when they're able to project themselves in the future and think about the future, they're more willing to discount immediate rewards and delay their gratification into future rewards. It's really interesting to look at, but it's so interesting here that that's what was brought first, the mention of essentially the future consequences. And when they say in the rooms of recovery, playing the tape out, like playing the tape out and looking at what your behavior is going to look at, what it's going to lead to, not just the reward right now, but all the consequences that come with it. That's a really strong exercise to bring our thinking back. So we can jump into the Recovery Skills Workbook and a lot of what we talk about and the exercises today stem from this. And again, changing your behavior is changing the way we think about things.