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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. Gamal Abdur.
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Hello, hello, hello everyone. Peace and blessings be upon all of you. Today I'm going to be talking about how healing is preceded by a great unlearning. The nervous system cannot reorganize while it's defending an old story. If you as a woman say, I'm too much, he's difficult, I am failing as a wife, my kids are not religious enough, money is hard to come by, these are not facts, they are old stories. They are typical learnings formed inside a dysregulated nervous system. Healing does not mean that you replace these thoughts with more and more affirmations. That doesn't happen. Healing is like pouring into an empty cup. If you have a full cup and you're asking for it to be filled more, healing cannot have its own space. You have to empty the cup for you to replace it with healing. The question I'm going to ask you in this podcast is what are you willing to let go of so that peace and joy can take its place? And more often than not it will include unlearning. Unlearning of beliefs like if I'm placing a boundary against somebody else to protect myself, then I must have hate for them in my heart. Or if they are placing a boundary against me, that must mean that they have hate against me. Trying to create boundaries from a cup full of dirty water of beliefs like this will not work. Healing is always preceded by an unlearning. Healing cannot begin when something already is existing in its place. It begins when something false loosens its grip. If you're having a hard time healing, it is not because you do not know. It is not your lack of knowledge, it's because you're already full of opinions and conclusions you've already arrived at. The cup is already full. There's no room for healing in the nervous system that is already molded to a design of self sabotage that has to be unlearned before success can take its place. Initially, unlearning will feel like loss. It feels very discombobulating. It's going to be uncomfortable, it's going to be confusing, because your mind has to let go of stories it's been hanging on for years. Unlearning has a potential to be a great unraveling. The cup loves to hold on to the dirty water. The cup does not want to be emptied. It is afraid to let go because it cannot exist in emptiness. It wants to be filled. It wants to be filled at all times with something, anything. It is in the cup's nature to be filled. But the silly cup doesn't know that once the dirty, smelly water is poured out, it will be filled with clean, fresh water. It does not know that unlearning is safe. Nervous system wants to hang on to the old smelly thoughts just like the cup, because it is in its nature for it to be filled with something at all times. But the foolish primal nervous system does not know that unlearning is not a loss. Emptying dirty water is not loss, it is a part of completion. All you have to do on your path to mental health is calm your mind with the notion that unlearning is not erasure of your painful experience. It is not a forgetting. Unlearning is acknowledging the past and seeing it with another possibility, emptying the dirty water from the cup and filling it with clean, fresh water. Your mind is under the impression that if it unlearns its current relationship with the past, it is somehow condoning it, it is somehow encouraging it. That's why it wants to hold on to the made up story. The cup wants to hold on to the dirty water. But unlearning is knowing what effect the past has on you and giving yourself grace for it, resources to recover from it, and letting it go. Filling your cup with clean, refreshing water. Unlearning is not becoming empty handed or religiously passive. Unlearning is not replacing hate of the circumstance with victimhood of the circumstance. Unlearning is a different kind of completion. The body cannot heal without unlearning. The body is a vessel. It is a cup. It can only hold that much. It has to give something up in order for it to be filled with something else. If the nervous system is calibrated to detecting danger, as is the aftermath of trauma, that has to be unlearned. If the body is loyal to outdated meanings in the name of efficiency and familiarity, that has to be unlearned. Healing feels unsafe because it threatens the identity that is built around survival. This is why healing only follows a great unlearning. Before you can tolerate happiness and success, your nervous system must unlearn some key beliefs. It has to unlearn that rest is irresponsible, or that pleasure is dangerous, or that safety makes you weak, or that devotion requires self erasure. It has to unlearn stale old beliefs. Now there is a possibility that the ideas that I just mentioned are not your conscious beliefs, or you didn't know that they existed until I point them out to you in this podcast. It is likely that these exist just at the vibrational level in your body, as your subconscious beliefs. My job as a coach, as a guide is to show you that these vibrations exist and how they're existing in your system. It is not my job to heal you. That is your job. My job is to show you what is causing this interference, what is blocking you from your path. My job as your coach is to not copy and paste my experiences to your life. Because if I do that, I'm making an effort for you to unlearn your limited patterns, but I'm replacing them with my patterns that work for my life. So my job as your coach is to hold you during your unlearning. Because if you're a member, the process of unlearning is somewhat unsettling. My job as your coach is to show you how to observe yourself. My job is not to transfer my experiences to you. It is absolutely critical that you understand this detail for your healing. Healing is not something I do to you as a client. It happens once the effort of unlearning has been made by you. It happens once the interference is removed. The cup wants to be filled with clean, refreshing water, once it has learned to let go of the dirty water. This great unlearning happens for all of us. Unlearning of interference, noise, jargon, garbage, the overload. Interference looks like over interpretation, rumination, shame and guilt learned from spiritual abuse, internalization that you've learned of external authority that replaces your inner knowing. Once these layers are loosened, the system automatically does what it has always known how to do. It returns to regulation, softening, expanding, it returns to harmony. This is why my coaching does not feel overly instructional. I do teach you, I do provide you information and instruction. Overall my coaching feels revealing, intuitive, returned to the light. I'm not instilling the truth, the truth has always been there. That is your r that was breathed into you by Allah. You have had the healing inside of you all along. I am just removing the noise that blocks it. Unlearning is the nervous system letting go of false authority. Many women do not resist healing because they don't want it. They resist it because healing requires somewhat terrifying admission. An admission where what I learn to survive is no longer what I need to thrive. While this sentence sounds simple, it is seismic to your nervous system. What you learn to survive is not neutral. It was learned inside hierarchies, power imbalances, misogynistic systems that reward compliance and punish self-trust. So in order to survive all of that, you learn to stay quiet, even if something felt wrong, you learn to override your body's signals just to preserve harmony. You confused endurance with righteousness. You made yourself smaller in order for others to feel safe around you. You learned all of these things, and they have to be unlearned. And because these patterns were learned in the larger system, the unlearning of these beliefs are gonna feel like moral failures, but they're not. These beliefs helped you survive. They were brilliant adaptations, but they become maladaptive beliefs if they are hindering your growth. Letting go of these adaptations might initially feel like betrayal to the system, and that is okay, that is completely natural. To an untrained mind that is burdened by misogyny, the admission of these beliefs sounds like my mother was wrong, my elders failed me, my religious education harmed me, the woman I was proud of surviving was built on something untrue. And if this feels like a large reckoning, this is because misogyny teaches women that loyalty is proven only if you don't follow your own voice. So when healing asks you to release self erasure, the nervous system panics because now the question you're asking is no longer how do I heal? The question becomes who am I if I stop proving my goodness through suffering? This great unlearning is at the very level of your identity. So no wonder that the nervous system chooses familiar pain over an unknown healing. The primal nervous system does not seek happiness, it seeks safety and predictability. Familiar pain is still familiar, even though it's pain. So the healing and the unlearning is going to introduce a level of disorganization before it introduces relief. When you unlearn the old survival strategies, your mind is gonna ask, who's gonna protect me now? Whose rules am I gonna follow now? What happens if I take up space? What's gonna happen to my safety if I become visible, if I follow my goals and my vision? So if the cost of your unlearning feels existential, it's because your survival has depended on it in the past, but it no longer does. In misogynistic spiritual environments, women are taught implicitly and explicitly that their silence equals spiritual maturity. So when healing invites embodiment, pleasure, regulation, and especially when it invites your choice, your freedom as a human being, it is experienced as danger. It is sometimes even confused with sinfulness if you're not careful. But these are not against the religion. These are just contradicting the version of a religion that kept you safe. So if your nervous system wants to cling to rigid interpretations of the inherited guilt, even when they hurt, it might be because it's too much for your nervous system that has always survived by false attachments, that has survived in a primal mind's narrative of safety. So emptying your cup of this dirty water is going to take some strength, some courage, some effort, some work. Healing asks you to admit that the woman I was as I was surviving cannot take me where I am going. Letting go of her will feel like saying that she wasn't enough. She was enough for your safety. She helped you survive all this time. She more than did her job and did it beautifully. So you are honoring her by evolving. You are honoring her by unlearning those patterns. What allows your nervous system to release familiar patterns is reminding it that you're completing a cycle. Your survival strategies were not sins, these are seasonal adaptations that your mind provides you to keep you safe. Just like your winter clothing is gonna become harmful if you wear it in summer, your survival based identities are suffocating once safety is possible, once you're reaching for healing and success. It begins by simply allowing yourself to believe that you are allowed to outgrow what once saved you. This is why your work with coaching with me is gonna focus on regulation before reasoning, because only a regulated nervous system can afford to loosen its loyalty to suffering. Your healing is not rejection of culture, family, faith, or even yourself. Your healing is the acceptance of all of them. Healing requires unlearning the idea that suffering itself is sacred. What is sacred is only harmony, and believing that is what accelerates healing. What I am saying and why I'm saying all of this is just to make it extremely clear that healing is only followed by an unlearning, and this process feels like chaos way before it starts to feel like peace. So you are welcome, because you're going to be thanking me for letting you know that healing is not a gentle or linear process. There is a struggle, there is an internal conflict, it requires a reorientation, a different language, a different practice of relating to the self and relating to the people around you. Unlearning destabilizes an identity, your identity before it stabilizes truth. This is why healing sometimes feels worse before it gets better. I mean what do you expect? Your coping identity is dissolving, you're entering an uncertain territory, and the brain hates nothing more than uncertainty. So if you thought that healing's going to be all flowers and daisies, don't be surprised. You have some uphill climb in front of you before you get to enjoy the peace at the peak. So knowing all of this, do not make the mistake of confusing the pain of uncertainty with regression. You are not regressing. You are progressing just not in a painless, smooth sailing way that you expected. Here, your embodied awareness is going to make this path much smoother and much easier, because that way you can bypass arguments in your mind and speak directly to the vibrations in your body. And these are all somatic healing practices that we also use in my coaching program. So what I'm asking you is to empty your cup, which does not mean that you blame your parents, your culture, or your religion. Although it might seem that way, especially with the uncertainty of the new. But what it actually means is that you're making room for the new. So if things feel shaky right now, if certainty is dissolving and old meanings no longer fit, do not call it regression. It is the great unlearning. And this is exactly where healing begins. With that I pray to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, Yalla, make the great unlearning easy for me and all of us. Help us release the beliefs that once protected us but now keep us in pain. Grant our nervous systems the safety to unlearn and the wisdom to keep what is true. Fill our emptied cups with harmony, peace, success, and trust in only you, O Allah. Amin Yarabullah Amin. Please keep me in your du'as. I will talk to you guys next time.
