How to Conduct Oneself during Fasting

Take your notebook and pen and write some notes on how you might do these things:

• Re-arranging the more demanding activities til after fasting if you can. Ask for help from family for a few of the chores.
• Restrict yourself from things which the Nafs is naturally drawn to. Social media, TV, entertainment without any educational value.
• Be unmoved by thoughts of eating. Try to avoid being around food or when others are eating. If you can’t, or if your mind wanders towards food, simply accept this limitation. You will find it far easier to just accept that you are a bit hungry and carry on, rather than making frantic attempts to distract yourself from the thoughts.
• Reflect on and enforce your rules of good conduct. Grace through difficulty, prefer the avoidance of conflict, seek and grant forgiveness, appreciation of the smallest provisions of Allah. Avoidance of idle chatter, being pure and simple in duties and motives.

Conducting yourself more honourably and gracefully is much more easy when you take out the difficult or unnecessary complications wherever you can, and where you deal with the remaining complications in a way that accepts them as noble opportunities to simply do your best while admitting you cannot control everything.

These are the aims and benefits of fasting with the right type of approach.

• Better emotional awareness.
• More stability of mind.
• More able to deal with temptation by a simple ‘no thank you’.
• More in touch with emotions which seemed previously scary but turn out to be fairly tame when you just face them without acting on them.
• Emergence of inner strengths. Many of our gentler strengths emerge when we put ourselves in a position of slight difficulty. We develop self respect.
• Greater sense of purpose and confidence in being in control over our environment

In your notebook, take each one of these points and for each one, write how it might directly benefit you in your day to day life. For example 'Better emotional awareness' might mean for some people that they are more aware when they are getting anxious about the day, so they sit and make du'aa that Allah help them find peace and refuge from their restlessness. As a result, they react more calmly and instead of cleaning restlessly for 3 hours, they only clean for 2 hours. And so on.

Notice how these benefits are not guaranteed, so you should not become worried if you don't get them. In fact, the less you look for them, the more they come. You gain them by making the effort to simplify your life, to become more accepting of the fact that life can be stressful. It's not about being free from stress. It's about being less frightened of it, by breaking the day down into little steps. by making it clear what your jobs are and what your limits are. These things come slowly, and we are never fully on top of them. Be merciful to yourself!

What makes for a successful result from Tayyib?

Tayyib is a way of looking at life more holistically. These elements all have influences on each other, meaning each one of them can help, or hinder, each of the other ones:

Emotions

Health

Diet

Relationships

Confidence

Faith

Contemplate how these things interact, and write down 4 aims that you hope to change in your Tayyib journey:

Aim 1:

Aim 2:

Aim 3:

Aim 4:

Now consider things that you can and cannot change, and consider how you treat yourself. In this next exercise below, you will be looking at understanding how to be more accepting of your value in the eyes of Allah.

When you have thought about this,

a) write your answers down in note form because they help to clarify your thoughts much more than just thinking about them.

b) bring the answers up with someone you confide in, or someone from the support group, asking for ideas or feedback if maybe someone wants to share answers.

c) Make your answers into a du'aa that you pray to Allah for help with. He is the only one who will grant them to you, and you need have no concern whatsoever when you have asked Allah for something.