Haifaa Younis – Jannah Gems #03 Mourning is Natural

			Bismillah your Walkman you're watching
		

			human beings we like to sort of write stories and scripts and narratives for ourselves. So we write
these stories for ourselves in terms of Yes, I have a timeline where I'm going to get married to the
handsome prince, and have this wonderful sort of education and career and beautiful children. And
this very kind of, like storied existence. Right? That's the, that's the the script that we write
for ourselves. But then something called Allah to Allah, Allah and other is going to intervene.
Right, and this is just this is this is part of being human.
		

			And then all of a sudden, we're experiencing different kinds of different types of loss. And then
we're experiencing the realities of maybe being a refugee or having to go into exile. Right? Or, and
this is the reality of so many Muslims because of war and conflict and famine, for example. Or maybe
it's the experience of someone had their dream job, they lost their job, or going to reality with
COVID, the Pamela you know, or loss of health, that that person enjoyed robust health, and then all
of a sudden, they didn't have that anymore. And or in a more general sense, like I said, we write a
script. But then and we have these aspirations, expectations, but then we deal with the reality,
		

			what happens when our expectations are thwarted, right, there's a disappointment, a tangible or
palpable disappointment there. It could be in the form of a marriage ending, say, as a divorce,
right? If you want to talk to people that that are divorced, they would probably think that they
envisioned life as a fairy tale at one point, right?
		

			It could be in the form of loss of a pregnancy. And then finally, loss of a loved one. And the
reason why I mentioned this is that one of the things that that was very helpful that I learned from
the therapist, with whom I worked, was that he explained to me that we as human beings, even though
these look different, these appear to be very different forms of loss, ie, not getting into my dream
college, for example, is definitely a far cry from say, from somebody that's that's lost, for
example, a loved one, someone that was close to them, right? So please, I want you to understand,
I'm not I'm not minimizing any anyone's loss. But in terms of how we respond psychologically, and
		

			emotionally, it's interesting in terms of that we actually respond to these in similar ways, even
though they're quite different. We respond to them in similar ways, in the sense of, we look at
this, as this is a form of loss, we feel a sense of sadness, sorrow, disappointment, and I know it
sounds strange, like maybe maybe for the person that didn't get their dream job or getting their
dream, the dream college or whatever. However, we actually go into, like a sense of mourning over
this is actually how we're going to respond cognitively. emotionally, psychologically, we actually
mourn
		

			this as a loss, even though of course, they have a different kind of ranking in terms of the
hierarchy here, right, in terms of the severity or the immediacy, so I want you all to understand
that and the reason why I'm saying that is to say that you should never think that you are a bad
Muslim, or you're ungrateful or that you're a man is lacking. If your response to a disappointment
is to, you know, experience a sense of mourning over that it's actually quite natural, quite normal.