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Welcome to Islamic Life Code School Podcast. Apply tools that you learn in this podcast and your life will be unrecognizably successful. Now your host, Dr. Donald Abdur.
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Hello, hello, hello everyone. Peace and blessings be upon all of you. Today I'm gonna be talking about the topic of devotion. And this has been on my mind for a long, long, long time, and I'm surprised it's just making it into a podcast topic now. But here we are. I think the language and the concepts I'm about to give you around devotion are absolutely life-changing, so be prepared. The first order of business is just a simple, plain Google definition of devotion. It's defined as love, loyalty, enthusiasm for a person, activity, or a cause. To me, devotion is a high vibration emotion. It is a commitment born from love, loyalty, sincerity, and above all it's born from conscious choice. So for me, I define devotion as both an internal state of emotion and a behavior. You feel devoted and dedicated to a cause and you act devoted to that cause. Both an inner state and a behavior. Devotion means both. So as an inner state, it's your purpose, your direction, your meaning, your intention. It is a high energy state that's felt in the body that activates your nervous system into action, steadiness. It gives you consistency and it gives you purpose. It is a chosen form of relational and personal loyalty that elevates your life. Now the unfortunate state of events is that the colonized form of devotion looks like weakness for a Muslim woman. Most of your negative internalized beliefs about devotion come from hyperindividualism and toxic feminism of the West. All of that says that devotion as it relates to being loyal to your marriage, to your kids, to your deen, to your community, it says that somehow that devotion proves that you're oppressed or incapable of independent thought. Like a woman enjoying the freedom of choice would never choose to have obligations towards her family, which is obviously not the case. What I want to tell you is that your devotion is a choice, and you're making it on a daily basis, and that it's the most powerful, expensive, high demand currency in the world. And it's entirely possible that everyone else around you knows that except you. Your devotion is what employers build companies on. Your family survives because of it. Men marry you for it, and it's entirely possible that you're walking around subconsciously believing that it's some sort of a tragic burden because it causes a lot of mental and emotional pain. So what I'm here to do is to expose to you how your devotion got colonized. How if you're feeling burdened by your obligations, it might be because you've absorbed the lie that obligation being same as devotion, you don't have a choice in it. Obligation overall is something that you're entrapped by, that your nervous system goes into survival mode around, and your devotion is something you choose. And the moment you see that difference, your entire life immediately starts to feel lighter. You might have had a tendency to confuse devotion with obligation, but there is absolutely a need to differentiate between the two because one implies choice and the other one doesn't. Devotion is intentional, energized, it's chosen. Obligation is forced. And yet somewhere along the way, especially for Muslim women, devotion was repackaged as a burden. All of your acts of loyalty, cooking, caregiving, praying, showing up, constantly trying, became something that you have to do instead of something that you're choosing to do. Because of this colonized lens, you stop seeing the strength behind the devotion. The world is benefiting from your devotion while you're labeling it as oppression. You're doing the hard work and handing away the credit by calling it pressure. Devotion is your power, and reclaiming that power begins with the understanding that you always have agency of who or what you choose to devote yourself to. Somewhere along the lines of intellectual colonization, devotion was rebranded as something inferior to independence. As if loyalty, faithfulness, and consistency are somehow signs of your weakness, when they're actually signs of incredible emotional intelligence. Western thought teaches you that real power looks like radical individualism and total detachment. Doing everything for yourself so that the moment you as a Muslim woman show devotion to anything in your life, your husband, your religion, your family, it gets interpreted as a lack of freedom instead of presence of purpose. That's what devotion is, your purpose, if you choose to accept it like that. So if you think about it like this, devotion is a high currency emotion that sustains long-term relationships that hyperindependence can't do. If you have internalized the idea that devotion equals weakness on a subconscious level, you will be mistrusting that very part of you that is responsible for your deepest strength. You'll start to shame yourself for qualities that make your life meaningful. And that is exactly how colonization works, by making you doubt the brilliance of your own emotional architecture. Sometimes colonization also works by taking your land and your resources, but here I'm talking about intellectual colonization. Devotion is one of the highest vibrational emotional states a human being can access. It moves you, it gives you stamina, it gives you direction, purpose, internal power, it makes you get up day after day and show up for your purpose. When devotion is chosen, it energizes you, it organizes your priorities, it sharpens your intentions, it creates a strong sense of meaning that random bursts of motivation can't even come close to. This is why the woman who devotes herself to the purpose she's chosen is extremely powerful, purposeful, and anchored. The biggest tragedy of intellectual colonization is that it teaches women to interpret their devotion as suffering. You could be showing up every day with sincerity, loyalty, intention, but instead of seeing it as strength, you label it as self sacrifice. Not because that's what it actually is, it can be self sacrifice, especially when it's extended really far, but mostly you're labeling it devotion as toxic self sacrifice because colonized mind is trained to mistrust anything relational, anything long term, anything that's communal and looks like commitment. So when you're staying committed to the people you love, to your marriage, to your children, to your Deen, a point comes when you stop seeing your devotion as a conscious choice and you start seeing it as stuckness. You are gonna be waking up early to care for your home. You're going to be making continued dua for healing your relationships. You're going to be dedicating yourself to the people around you, but you're going to see it as burden, but you're not going to see it as purpose. You're going to start seeing all of it as burden. The colonized lens of devotion says effort is suffering. When effort is what gives you the beautiful outcome of relationships, love, nurturing, it gives you the outcomes of the values that you embody. Once devotion gets mislabeled as suffering, you lose access to the pride and honor that you give to the family, that you bring to your society. It washes away your effort into nothing and makes your effort sound meaningless. So reclaim devotion from colonization that will help you retrieve your own interpretation of your life. There's going to be an interpretation that the worldview gives you, and that worldview doesn't understand your emotional architecture, and there is an interpretation that you have available to you how you define your own devotion. And this is where you're going to start to reclaim your agency. When you recognize yourself as a devoted woman, you immediately put your choice back into the places that were otherwise looking like inescapable obligations. Obligations say I have to stay. Devotion says I am choosing to stay. It's the same action, the same routines, the same responsibilities, but they feel completely different because there's a different mental load. The emotional framework is different. It's like when you say I have to take care of my home, your body will feel burdened, versus when you say I choose to take care of my home because I'm devoted to the life I'm building, your body will feel purposeful and energized and lighter at the same time. Devotion as I want you guys to see it is what gives you the internal authority to reinterpret your life through the lens of meaning instead of compulsion. And once you understand that your devotion is a chosen emotional power, you will finally get to see why everyone around you depends on it. Your devotion is an absolute commodity. Your employer, your business, your family, your religion depends on your devotion. It depends on your consistency, your reliability, your willingness and agreement to show up with excellence in Hassan. Your husband depends on your devotion for emotional intelligence that you bring, the way you handle conflict, the way you keep the home regulated. Your children rely on your devotion for their stability, their identity, their sense of being held in the world. Your parents, your extended family, your masjid, all of the people in your life depend on your devotion as a currency to sustain themselves. And connection is the natural product of this level of emotional labor of devotion. When you subconsciously believe that your devotion is a burden under the unrecognized beliefs of colonization, then you don't get to find out how valuable your devotion actually is, and you don't protect it. You overgive, you overfunction. You let people take it as a default setting instead of the profound gift it is. This awareness alone is a strong boundary. When you understand that your devotion is a resource, not an obligation, you begin to allocate it very intentionally, and you stop pouring it into people who don't honor it. You stop letting other people treat it as a bottomless supply. You start to give your devotion to places where it actually elevates your life. Recognizing that your devotion is a commodity does not make you less loving. It makes you wiser about where you pour your heart. Interdependence in relationships is the most beautiful outcomes of devotion. It means your life is connected to others in ways that create support and shared meaning, and this is a healthy interdependence. Devotion naturally feeds this ecosystem of give and take, but when you allow your devotion to be taken for granted because you don't value it because you've been believing the colonized version of devotion, that's when you fall into the trap of enmeshment. That's when you lose all personal boundaries where your responsibility ends and someone else's responsibility begins. So what I want to be clear about is in your choice of devotion, you don't choose enmeshment if you're coming from an empowered definition of devotion. Enmeshment and devotion are definitely not the same thing. The real definition of devotion is extremely powerful. It's love, loyalty, enthusiasm for a person, activity, or a cause, and it is your choice. And through that choice, devotion becomes an emotion that produces a large amount of energy in you, that creates aligned action. Muslim women excel in their devotion, but they don't recognize it as a power. Every Muslim woman feels deeply responsible for how she shows up for family, work, and her commitments, but she rarely celebrates it as a strength. Devotion is only a high vibrational energetic emotion if it does not cross over into self abandonment. I describe devotion as energizing only if you're devoted to yourself as well. Devotion does not mean that you don't set any personal goals or you don't rest or you are only about a hundred percent self sacrifice. A frame of healthy balance is fifty percent devotion to yourself and fifty percent devotion to the world. So I said it just now and I'm gonna say it again. Muslim women excel in their devotion, but they do not recognize it as a strength. Also partially because they think devotion is only external and always to be given outwards. But when you apply the same framework of devotion that you've been applying externally and you start to apply it internally, devotion is an absolute unshatterable power. Through this level of devotion, you're gonna stay committed through difficulty, through discomfort, through uncertainty, and your survival-based nervous system is gonna want to tell you that you're trapped, but you're devoted through this long-term cause because you care, because you've chosen. So if you've been taught to downplay this quality and you don't recognize your devotion as a strength, then it's time you internalize the message in this podcast and start to recognize how strong of a power devotion actually is. Under the colonized definition of devotion, this power is going to be invisible to you even while everyone around you is going to be benefiting from it. The colonized interpretation splits your devotion from yourself. You love showing up, but you feel guilty for loving it. You value your family, but you feel embarrassed for valuing it. You want to nurture, but you are afraid that you're going to be labeled as a trad wife. You want connection, but you worry that you're going to lose your independence. So you live in this mental tug of war. Your highest values want to find meaning in devotion, but your primal mind that is conditioned by external narratives will keep labeling it as weakness. This is why so many Muslim women feel absolutely exhausted in their commitments, because they are doing the hard work of commitment to a relationship and a cause that it requires, and they're fighting the endless mental tug of war. The mental burden does not come from showing up and doing the hard work. It comes from believing that showing up means that you're not free. Reclaiming your devotion as your choice is your only path to spiritual and psychological healing, especially since you're already devoted to so many causes in your life. Reclaiming devotion the way it was meant for you as a successful Muslim woman is one of the fastest ways to regulate your nervous system and reclaim your spiritual authority. In that case, devotion becomes a signal to your body that you're living in accordance to your values. That way you can stop living from survival. This reclaimed definition of devotion gives you an immense sense of freedom, because freedom is not defined by the absence of responsibility. It is defined by your ability to choose the responsibilities that matter to you. And most importantly, above all, reclaiming devotion returns you to your spiritual authority. Devotion is an act of your bada, your worship, the level of sincerity and the alignment you bring that has been Allah's design of your soul for you. When you choose this devotion, you're choosing to center your values instead of external noise. Protecting your devotion is one of the most important skills you can learn as a Muslim woman. And it begins with boundaries and self devotion rituals. Devotion is powerful, but it is not infinite. It has to be protected, allocated wisely. And this is what we learn inside my coaching program. We treat devotion as a valuable currency, something that is sacred and not being handed out recklessly. And boundaries are the gates that guard this sacred trust. When you set boundaries, you're not withdrawing love, you are preserving the integrity of your devotion. A boundary simply says I choose where my energy goes and I choose the rhythm of my giving. I choose the terms on which I show up. Because without boundaries, your devotion is gonna leak. Remember, this is valuable currency. You don't want it leaking, you want to preserve it. And as I've already described, self devotion is another aspect that is supremely important here. Because devotion to others cannot be healthy unless devotion to the self is established first. And this is what we practice inside my program. Women learning strategies that anchor their nervous system into reconnecting to themselves in their own devotion. When a woman practices this level of self-devotion, she knows where her limits are. She recognizes when her devotion is becoming self-abandonment and she quickly adjusts. And inside my coaching program, this is a lived practice, something that we do every day. Women learn to hold devotion and boundaries as a pair, not as opposites that are competing with each other. If devotion is the emotional power that gives your life purpose, boundaries is the power that give your devotion structure. Devotion gives your relationship meaning and integrity. Boundaries give your relationships balance. They both go hand in hand. A woman who protects her devotion becomes unstoppable. With that I pray to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, Yallah, return me to the devotion that is mine by design. Anchor my heart in what you love. Protect my energy from being misused. Give me the wisdom to choose where I pour my devotion and the strength to honor myself as I honor others. Yallah, fill my life with intentional devotion that regulates me and draws me closer to you. Make my devotion a source of spiritual authority and uplifting. Amin Ya Rabul Alameen. Please keep me in your du'az. I will talk to you guys next time.
