Dhikr It must be let out it must be called to the multitude from the rooftops to be sung the bewilderment this morning I was greeted by the sun and the trees shook  my hand and the boughs hummed a name that I almost remembered the rabbanna call of my neighbours rooster split open...

The objective of dhikr and of the dhikr that you have just done is if you like, a loosening up or a shaking off of our ideas of who we are, of our chains. It is about re-orientating oneself to the Lord, to Allah.

Shaykh Ebrahim has extended the invite to one and all this evening to partake in a dhikr/hadra session for the remembrance of Allah!

The natural order for the human being is disturbance and disquiet. The state of the heart outside of dhikr is one of agitation. It is with the dhikr of Allah that the heart becomes tranquil.

The qasida that we sing most frequently "Aheemu wahdee" has really three operative stanzas in terms of instructions and its significance that spontaneously this has become the qasida that we sing most frequently because it really, it is a summary of our Path. In those three stanzas the whole of this endeavour is summed up.

As we’ve understood nafs in our tradition, nafs is your individual identity. The sense that you have that you exist as a discrete, separate being. But the root condition of our individual existence – for all human beings is exactly the same.

We have two ways of using our attention. Is there any difference to the feeling in the statements, "He's looking at me" and "He's listening to me"? For most people there's a difference.

We are entering a period or a time where the development of events is overwhelming and, particularly when one experiences a part of that overwhelming development in one's own life, one forgets. One easily forgets that you are not being singled out. You are not being unfairly treated by Allah.

The meaning and the significance of the hadra is that it is like a shaking loose. It is a shaking loose of the things that normally worry you. It is like letting go of the chains so that you can find out who the being is that is there beyond the chains.

The immediate benefit of hadra is twofold. The one is the silencing of internal dialogue and the second is the shifting of attention or if you like the assemblage point of attention from behind your eyeballs to behind your solar plexus. These are the two immediate physiological attributes of a good hadra. That's what hadra...