In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful, and all praise be to God who gave us bodies, minds and hearts along with wondrous worlds to experience through all of our senses. Peace and blessings upon His Messenger Muhammad, who was sent only as a mercy to all the worlds, and upon all of the prophets who came to guide us to goodness and to save us from misery.
ألا بذكر الله تطمئن القلوب
Is it not with the remembrance of God that hearts find rest? (Quran 12:28)
We have all heard of the benefits of mindfulness for helping us to free ourselves from worries and compulsive thoughts and to be present to the moment. In this article, I make the case for heartfulness, which involves a shift from the head to the heart, along with the expansion of the circle of awareness from presence towards Presence.
English has many phrases referring to the heart to explain emotional and spiritual states: “my heart went out to him”, “she is hard-hearted”, “he has a warm heart”, “it touched my heart,” “my heart is broken,” “listen to your heart,” “let’s have a heart-to-heart,” “Don’t be heartless,” “that was heartfelt,” ” Yet when it comes to “mental” health, the heart is by definition excluded, mental of course meaning , “of the mind.” It is as if the internal activities of the human being takes place only inside the head.
The heart is the place where we are present to other people, and where we feel love. It is affected by the things which we do and say. It is a sensor with which we can feel the world and each situation, just as sense receptors in our skin tell us of hot and cold, rough and smooth, the heart feels pleasure and pain, guilt and joy. It is healed and expanded and made peaceful by beauty and goodness. If we listen carefully to it, it can guide us to do the right thing. Our Prophet told us, peace be upon him, that we should take rulings form our hearts, and that if something disturbs our hearts we should avoid it, but something which makes our heart feel at peace is good.
We are often suspicious of emotions, and rightly so, but we need to distinguish between the feelings of our heart and the feelings of the ego. The heart is the seat of our higher selves – of loving and noble impulses, whereas the ego is associated with the lower self, which is usually inclined towards desires and can make us greedy or corrupt in the pursuit of them.
The spiritual heart is very sensitive, and when damaged, does not work properly, and that means that it has given itself up to the control of the ego and the following of selfish desires and the carrying out of bad deeds. In Muslim tradition, it is as if the heart has become rusted over, like a mirror that has corroded or a pot blackened by the fire. Such a heart is sick and does not reflect the rays of divine light. Shaikh Nazim says that Allah pours his knowledge into the hearts, but this knowledge is like pure milk, that must be poured into a clean pot.
Hearts can be healed by remembrance of God, by attachment to God through worship and acts of obedience and reliance and gratitude and patience, and it is clenched and harmed by sin and disobedience and ingratitude. A thousand years before the development of psychology as a discipline devoted to the internal states of the human being, the Muslims developed a science of the self, drawn from teachings about the heart and the nature of the human being in the Qur’an and the sayings of the Prophet, peace be upon him. This has come down to us through various forms of Sufism. It prescribes various forms of practices to help people to remember God in each and every moment. They encourage people to sit with good people who are close to God, because hearts can be opened by sitting with people with good hearts.
The Qur’an tells us that the purpose of life is for us to know and worship Allah. To this end, He shows us His signs on the horizons and in our own selves. The heart is the part of us which longs for and should always be present to Allah. The heart is very special for this reason. In a hadith, Allah says, “The heavens and the earth cannot contain me, but the heart of a believing slave can contain me.” Heartless religion becomes at best a system of ethics, mere ideology or polemics, or at worst – well, heartless! Let us be heartful in each moment. To learn more, you might like to listen to this talk by Abdullah Rothman.
