ļ»æSpeaker 1: 0:05
Welcome to Islamic Life Coach School Podcast. Apply tools that you learn in this podcast and your life will be unrecognizably successful. Now your host, dr Kamal Aftar. Hello, hello, hello everyone. Peace and blessings be upon all of you.
Speaker 1: 0:19
When Allah SWT says, don't cut ties of kinship, it's not about other people, it's about you. He's talking about your emotional evolution. Allah SWT is handing you a personal development curriculum on how to love when love feels impossible. You are not being asked to tolerate abuse, which is how most of these teachings are being misused right now. You're being asked to develop a surgical precision in your emotional responses, to learn how to feel fury and still act from faith. To be surrounded by people who misunderstand you, minimize you, maybe even mistreat you, and still choose boundaries over bitterness. All of that is not for them. That's for you. Keeping ties of kinship is for your emotional and mental health, and that's what I'm going to describe to you today in this podcast. If you hold on to your dignity in a room full of people who only want chaos, if you can stand in your values when someone else is doing everything in their power to make you feel worthless, that's when you know that you're growing. That's when you know your emotional intelligence is real, not performative, not convenient, not Instagrammable, but real, revolutionary, something that's for you In the Quran, surah 47, ayat 22,.
Speaker 1: 1:44
It says so. Would you perhaps, if you turned away, cause corruption on earth and sever your ties of kinship? The Messenger of Allah said the one who severs his family ties will not enter paradise. A sahih hadith in Bukhari and Muslim. When Allah says, don't cut ties, he is not trapping you into toxic dynamics, which is our binary, black and white thinking brain thinks. It says. Allah is refining you. He is giving you the chance to access parts of yourself that you've never met before. And every time you choose compassion over contempt, every time you're not letting anyone walk all over you, you're proving that your soul is stronger than your ego. You are refining yourself.
Speaker 1: 2:30
To define this soul refining work, I created a term, what I call affectionship. It's almost spiritual technology, a high frequency kinship that's rooted in affection, not performance. When you choose to love someone, not because they're easy to love, but because you are grounded and elevated, connected. That's when you're entering into a state that upgrades you. This is a state when your body is secreting oxytocin, serotonin, dopamine. Your nervous system learns to shift from survival to safety. You're doing something righteous and you're doing something that's regulating for yourself, something that's healing.
Speaker 1: 3:11
You might think that this affectionship is for their benefit, but the real transformation is happening inside of you. Your thoughts get clearer, your heart softens, your sense of self expands, and the irony is that the more you love, the more you receive. The more affection you give, the more ease your body is going to feel. Affectionship is your divine feedback loop. You give out what you wish existed in the world and in doing so, you become the proof that it exists. This is why I believe Allah commands you to keep the ties of kinship, not to fix them, but to feel what love does to you, what kind of healing it provides, and this kind of healing especially happens when you think the other person does not deserve this affection. Keeping ties of kinship is absolutely an act of obedience, of course, as we can see from the direct commandments from Allah SWT, from the Prophet and the Quran. But it is also your curriculum, a divine syllabus on how much love you can create for someone inside your heart not theirs, yours.
Speaker 1: 4:22
That's the real test, because most people think relationships live outside of them. They think that relationships is what someone else says about you or what they do around you, but your relationship with anyone your mother, your child, your spouse, your colleague is inside of you. It's a story, a thought that your brain is telling you about them on repeat, and every feeling you have towards a person that you are in a relationship with is manufactured in your mind. And as a consequence of those thoughts that are manufactured in your mind, you feel the emotions Love, resentment all come from thoughts. Disappointment, anger, closeness, warmth all of these are thought generated and these thoughts that build emotional patterns get stored in your nervous system. That's why, when someone you love walks into the room, your body responds before your mouth or your mind does. And along the same lines.
Speaker 1: 5:21
If you want to improve your relationships with people, and along the same lines, if you want to improve your relationships with people, stop trying to change them. Start changing your internal story, your narrative, start upgrading your thoughts, not for their sake, but because toxic thoughts cost you. They cost you your peace, your presence, your oxytocin, a very healing hormone. It costs you a lot more than you know. When you change the quality of your thoughts about that person, the emotional tone of your relationship also changes the state that your body lives in, around them, when thinking of them changes. And all of this happens even if the other person never gets the memo, even if the other person never finds out what you're doing. This almost feels like magic, but it's not. It's neurobiology, it's your own spiritual mastery, because in cases like this, you've gone from reacting to creating.
Speaker 1: 6:19
When you feel grounded in love not performative love, but real, anchored love you gain access to things that most people never even know exist, which is clean boundaries. Boundaries that don't come from anger, boundaries that don't reek of punishment or control, boundaries that say I am protecting myself. This is why I'm doing this. I am not doing this to punish you. This level of love and affection does not mean you excuse their disrespect. It does not mean you condone their behavior. It just means you don't let their behavior drag you down into disrespect with them. Because if you're standing in love, especially if you're trying to guard your own peace, when you speak and when you lay your boundaries, you say if you talk to me like that, again I will leave the room, I will pause the conversation, and your thought process behind this can be that it's not to punish them but to protect you. You can say this out loud or never tell them, it's up to you. But that's the power, that's the clarity, that's the self-respect and self-love in action, which is why keeping up ties of kinship is a divine order.
Speaker 1: 7:33
All of this falls apart the minute your boundary turns into a way to control someone else's behavior, a way to give an ultimatum, kind of like if you do this, then I'll make you pay. This is not a boundary. This is a game of weaponizing your and their emotions, and then you attempt to heal from that which is never going to happen. Boundaries from anger are just explosions waiting for a target. Your boundaries from love are sacred and they're very architecturally sound. They create safety, they teach people how to treat you and, most importantly, they remind you how to move into your own growth. So, no, you never let anybody speak to you in a disrespectful way. You never let anybody cross your personal boundaries. But you also don't burn the house down to prove your point. You build a gate. You let certain people walk through it.
Speaker 1: 8:29
When you truly realize that boundaries don't require punishment, but a certain side of love, you realize how energetically efficient it is. That's exactly what happened to me in my life when I started creating boundaries from love and respect for myself and humanity at large, it became extremely easy. When you create boundaries from hate, resentment, judgment. They are very expensive emotions. They burn out the person who's holding them All the while. If you're the one holding them and you think that it's going to hurt other people, it does not. You are the one who gets depleted, trying to set boundaries from the place because they turn into punishment rather than protection.
Speaker 1: 9:14
I personally reserve this kind of emotional labor for the people that are closest to me, and even then it's not out of obligation. It's because I've trained myself to choose love as a form of clarity. This energy of love is what lets you create boundaries that don't cost you your peace. Now, before setting a boundary, I always ask what is the emotional fuel behind this boundary? If it's exhaustion or revenge, then it's not clean. But if it's love and respect, starting from myself and for the other person, if it's a form of affection, then it's going to be a very clean, strong boundary and it's going to be sustainable. It's going to leave me with a sense of well-being and, yes, I've done this more than once in the learning process where I called something a boundary.
Speaker 1: 10:06
But if I'm being completely honest, it really wasn't. It was just a silent ultimatum, a behavioral contract, a subconscious rule that said if you don't change, I will suffer. So I definitely need for you to change so that I can finally feel okay, and that I labeled as growth and boundary and healing, but really underneath it was still an attempt to control All of it, just dressed up in a nicer language, in a spiritualized way. What helped me realize the truth is that I was emotionally hooked. I wasn't free. I was constantly checking for their response during my boundary setting process, ruminating if they understood or not, feeling resentful when they didn't act differently, and it was completely exhausting. This is the type of energy that I'm trying to bring your attention to Something that's going to drain you versus something that's going to uplift you, empower you and help you feel at peace.
Speaker 1: 11:02
Fake boundaries are so much more draining than no boundaries at all. They keep you in hypervigilance because your peace still depends on other people's actions. Real boundaries feel like peace. You don't need to defend them. You don't need to watch how they respond. You don't need to defend them. You don't need to watch how they respond. You don't need to argue with yourself about whether you are right in setting them or not. You just know that this is what I need for my own emotional safety and I choose it from love, not from fear, not from manipulation.
Speaker 1: 11:34
Some of the common thoughts that are angry, that masquerade as boundaries that you might want to pay attention to. He should know better. I shouldn't have to explain this. She's old enough to understand. These thoughts sound very mature and reasonable and especially they sound justified. But they are just resentment in disguise. They don't come from love. They're very energetically costly for you as a person. They come from an innocent looking belief that if someone really cared, they would read your mind and behave accordingly. And when they don't, or even if you verbalize what you want and they still don't behave accordingly, you use that disappointment as a license to withdraw, to snap or to hold a grudge.
Speaker 1: 12:19
And then you try to call it a boundary. And then you come to coaching and you say I can't set a boundary. I don't know what's wrong. What you're doing. There is not a boundary, it's a power struggle dressed up in self-respect. The problem with these types of power struggle boundaries is that they come from thoughts that aren't necessarily untrue. All your thoughts are true because they're there. What makes your thought true is if you decide to believe it or not. So it's not about gaslighting you. All of your thoughts are valid and maybe even correct, depending on what you choose to pay attention to.
Speaker 1: 12:54
The problem is that some thoughts shift your energy from correction to control. They create bitterness, and bitterness is expensive. It drains your nervous system, it clouds your judgment, it erodes your ability to set a boundary from love, because you're already swimming in judgment, and judgment is not a strong foundation of any action. A real boundary does not sound like. You should already know this. It sounds like here's what I will do to stay safe, regardless of what you know or don't know, regardless of what you do or don't do. You don't have to wait for them to get it. Through this curriculum of keeping ties of kinship, creating boundaries from love, you are rooted enough to walk your walk without needing them to change, because they are going to be responsible to the answer to their actions. It's not your responsibility. So keep yourself clean from that energy. If your quote-unquote boundary leaves you emotionally spinning, ruminating or secretly hoping that they feel bad, spinning, ruminating or secretly hoping that they feel bad, you are not free. You're still hooked. Your freedom is the whole point of this divine order.
Speaker 1: 14:09
So how do you feel love for someone, or affection for someone who's disrespected you, without gaslighting yourself, without pretending it didn't hurt, without dissolving into people-pleasing or spiritual bypassing? You do that by start telling the truth. You don't minimize their behavior, you don't excuse it. You name it clearly. That was disrespectful, that crossed the line, that hurt. You give yourself full permission to feel the pain of it, because ignoring it doesn't make you stronger, it just makes you disconnected from yourself. But this is what the real shift is. You don't stop at naming it. You also choose not to attach to it. You don't victimize yourself in it. You don't make their behavior reflection of your worth. You don't use it as evidence that you are unlivable or small, because this is the trap people fall in after they acknowledge the other person's disrespect. You see their behavior for what it is A wound in them, not a wound in you. And this is what most of my clients are missing.
Speaker 1: 15:14
Feeling love does not mean you deny the reality of hurt and danger. It means refusing to be ruled by someone else's emotional immaturity. It means you can hold the full weight of someone else's shortcomings and still choose to pee and still choose peace. It does not mean you don't retaliate if that's what you need to do. It does not mean you don't tap into appropriate resources to be able to hold them accountable. It just means that you don't lose your peace over it. And this is not weakness, this is spiritual strength. This is the part of you that trusts Allah to balance the scales, regardless of how you want to pursue the outcome of their mistreatment and their behavior. If you want to forgive, if that's available to you, or if you want to hold them accountable, do that through clean boundaries. And this is not you excusing them. This is you elevating yourself.
Speaker 1: 16:12
Sometimes what helps me is that this person is struggling. They've forgotten who they are. They're operating from pain, not from principle, and sometimes these thoughts are enough to create some empathy in me. And with that empathy comes my emotional oxygen, just enough for me to stay grounded so I can start to take the appropriate actions moving forward. Maybe that enough emotional oxygen is going to be you remembering that their behavior is not evidence of your inadequacy, it's evidence of theirs. And my favorite anchoring thought is that this has nothing to do with my worth. That one sentence shifts the entire point of view. It reminds me that I can witness harm without absorbing it. I can call accountability without internalizing harm. I can respond from clarity instead of reacting from pain. And when I respond from that place, I don't just protect the relationship, I protect my nervous system, my dignity, my connection to Allah and my spirituality.
Speaker 1: 17:19
There's a big difference between excusing somebody's behavior and creating compassionate understanding around it. Excusing says it's fine, it didn't matter, I'll let it go, it wasn't a big deal. This is you gaslighting yourself because you don't want to admit that this was hurtful, or you don't know what to do with that hurt, or you're afraid of the consequences that the other person will face. If you do decide to follow through, no matter how much you try to gaslight yourself, your body will still know. Your body holds the truth. It will let you know at some point that you're engaging in spiritual bypassing. That's a survival mode dressed up in spiritual language.
Speaker 1: 18:00
But when you choose to love someone while still holding the truth that what they did was painful or wrong, the most radical thing that happens is that your identity starts to shift. You become someone who doesn't need to erase the pain to hold peace. You become someone who can hand people their emotional baggage, hold them accountable without picking all of that weight up yourself. You begin to trust your own perception more than you're trusting their interpretation of you. You stop flinching at their opinions. You start walking with softness. That's not naive, that's rooted like steel.
Speaker 1: 18:40
Because love does not require closeness always. It doesn't mean access. Keeping ties of kinship does not mean physical proximity. It does not mean that you have to stay in the room if your spirit is being crushed there. Keeping ties of kinship means that you're elevating your thoughts about the other person and in that case, sometimes, especially in the face of abuse, distance is the most loving boundary you can create. And in that case, honoring Allah's command not to sever ties of kinship means that you stay in prayer, prayer for yourself, for them, to ask for your forgiveness for theirs. You try to create quiet empathy. And if that happens when you're not in proximity of the other person, then that's not failure, that's not cutting ties of kinship.
Speaker 1: 19:33
So if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you already know that I don't believe in shallow fixes. So far in this episode, we've covered nervous system regulation. We've talked about how your body carries your boundaries before your actions show it. But I also want to give you a reminder that might land differently. Your pause is more powerful than any pressure. That moment of pause, right after somebody says something triggering, dismissive or downright disrespectful, your nervous system will try to hijack you. You'll feel the surge, the urge to snap, to defend, to say the thing that finally will make them understand. And you can do all of that. But what actually protects you in the moment is not perfect comeback, it's your pause, and that five seconds sometimes is all it takes for you to shift from survival to sovereignty and freedom. That pause might be exactly what breaks the generational cycle. It might be what you need to create clean boundaries around that behavior, just so that doesn't become another trauma.
Speaker 1: 20:39
Keeping your ties of kinship is a religious teaching, because it is your emotional gym, a divine training program of mastery in the self. This is where Allah sends you the exact same people who you need in your life for that emotional refinement. This is not to punish you, this is to strengthen you and hopefully in this podcast so far I've made a case in point to convince you of that. This curriculum is to stretch your heart, to widen your capacity, to show you what it means to love for Allah's sake, not for your convenience. You, as a human being that is evolved and is working with your soulful intelligence, does not cut ties. Your ego cuts ties, and this Dean is not a path of ego feeding. It's a path of ego training, a path that turns this pain into wisdom and even into profit. Hopefully this podcast gave you enough material to turn distance into your dignity and boundaries into worship.
Speaker 1: 21:42
When you commit to keeping ties with whatever level of closeness and physical proximity is safe for you, you're saying to Allah, subhanahu wa ta'ala I choose love over ego, I choose elevation over explanation, and I choose you, o Allah, and that is the real win. With that, I pray to Allah, subhanahu wa ta'ala. O Allah, soften my heart without breaking it. Teach me how to love from wholeness, not from obligation. Let my boundaries reflect your mercy, not my ego. Ya Allah, when I am disrespected, anchor me in dignity. When I want to cut ties, remind my ego that you are refining me, not punishing me. Replace my bitterness with wisdom and create profit out of this curriculum that will benefit me in the afterlife. Ya Allah, don't let my soul be heavy with unspoken pain. Let my peace speak louder than my reaction and make my love as a sign of your mercy around me. Ameen, ya Rabbul, ameen, please keep me in your da'as. I will talk to you guys next time.
