Mirza Yawar Baig – Know yourself
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AI: Transcript ©
Beautiful advice of
He
We talked yesterday about the importance of developing
ourselves
because at the end of the day
we feel our own pain,
we have to deal with our own disappointments
we have to deal with our own difficulties
and challenges.
Like you said if you hold down
you know somebody might give you a hand
up.
That's not usual but can happen
but
at the end of the day the the
effort has to be made by the person.
I have
personal experience of this which is
I had a motorcycle crash and,
I
ripped off my ACL
and did a push in Leeward and I
had to go into a major orthopedic surgery
on my right knee
and
the result was after the surgery and after
2 months of the leg being in a
in plaster, thigh triangle plaster,
The leg was reduced to
bone and skin on the bone. The skin
was black
and scaly.
I took one look at it when the
orthopedician
removed the,
cast and I thought to myself, I'm gone.
I'm I'm I'm going to be lame for
life.
And then he said he told me what
kinds of
exercises to do basically to
rebuild the entire leg, the whole thigh muscles,
the quadriceps,
the hamstrings,
the calf muscles and so on.
And,
it looked like a completely impossible thing to
do. Now I had a
absolutely fabulous friend
called Bertie Swaras
and Bertie had the same
accident in a different way I crashed the
bike he
had this on the
football fields
but effectively the same thing
and at the end of that,
Bertie
literally sort of picked himself up and he
came back to the point where he was
playing soccer again.
Now he came and he would sit with
me and he would make me do the
exercises.
He was not a professional
physiotherapist,
he
was just a dear friend of mine.
And
he did that and
it was intensely painful to do that but
I stuck with it. Alhamdulillah
It
took me almost a year,
but I was able to build my leg
back to where it was to begin with.
So
like in the says
it's your determination, it's your ability to stand
up and carry on
and that is your responsibility.
Nobody else can do it for you.
It's
the beauty of
the truth is that it's
evident, it's clear, it's simple.
The complexity is in
living by it, the difficulty of following it
but there is no other way.
He continues, do not look for your self
worth
in the eyes of people. Look for your
worth from within your conscience.
If your conscience is at peace, then you
will ascend high. And if you truly know
yourself,
then what is said about you won't harm
you.
Baba's Imam Shafar Abdulale
used to say
that if you don't want to be harmed
by
unwanted, I mean
unfair. If you don't want to be harmed
or feel pain or hurt,
by unfair criticism,
don't feel happy when you get unfair
praise.
He said, if you do not want to
be harmed
with
unfair
criticism
then do not feel happy with unfair praise.
Now just think about that how
many of us are willing to say to
somebody, please don't say that about me. That
is not true.
Right?
How many people say that? But that's very
important.
It's important to say to them. It's important
to say to even more important to say
it to yourself.
The
tendency
is that
we like to believe
all good stuff that is said about ourselves,
whether
it is deserving or not
but when it comes to critical stuff then
we get very upset.
So therefore
and the reason for that is what he
says, he said it's because
your self worth is in
is in the hand of others.
So therefore,
you are the
you
are
a hostage right you are a hostage in
the hands
of other people
now
that's a very dumb situation to be in
that's
not something that we
you know
that you want to be
in.
So do not give yourself hostage
into somebody else's hands because
then you are opening yourself up to to
being manipulated.
And if you open yourself to manipulation, you
will be manipulated. I mean there's no two
ways about that. So,
be very clear.
Now how
can we do that?
By knowing yourself,
by knowing your strengths and weaknesses
and by working on those strengths and weaknesses
to maximize those strengths
and to overcome the weaknesses.
It's very simple. All of this stuff is
simple to talk about, simple to think about
but not so simple to do but it
has to be done. It has to be
done.
So do not look for your self worth
in the eyes of people. Now the other
issue is we are also we live in
an environment which
is completely externally focused.
We are constantly comparing ourselves to others
consciously
or unconsciously.
We have icons,
who are icons of
physical strength, of
body shape, of,
endurance,
of sports,
of wealth, of style, of money, of what
not
constantly being bombarded by these so called standards
and we spent our whole life trying to
be like them.
That is the one of the most stupid
ways of living your life is trying to
be like somebody else
Knowing also that though somebody
are not people who are even doing what
they
you know, what they are promoting. Right?
If you, the other day I saw,
for the first time in my life literally,
I saw a very good
Hindi film and one of the lines of
that
is this person says
actor
He says, you know, is this very,
very very horrible
form of chewing tobacco which literally causes
mouth cancer and god knows what else.
But this is advertised by some big Bollywood,
field actors,
who are promoting that. Obviously, they're doing it
for the money.
So this person says, do you think the
person who is promoting that actually
eats it himself? Do you think that person
is so stupid that they actually eat
that good good cover themselves? They're they're promoting
it because they're getting money. They're getting paid
for that. But if you think that they
eat it themselves, then you need a you
need to have your head examined.
That is the reality.
If you think about the people who are,
these icons and whatnot, who we are trying
to be like,
What sense does it make? I mean, you'll
be like yourself. Right?
Be like yourself.
So know yourself
and maximize
your own goodness
and
try to overcome
your faults as you see them.
Not try to
judge yourself
by what others think of you.
One very important thing to understand in this
is that most other people including I mean,
even even some of your closest people,
for the most part, they see only what
you want them to see.
Number 1. Number 2, nobody but nobody sees
you through your entire life.
Through all your ups and downs, through all
your sadness
and your joys,
through all your difficulties.
They see you where you are today. Maybe
if you are very successful, they don't see
the struggle that you had to
overcome the struggle that you had to go
through to get to where you are where
you are now.
If they see you fall down they just
see that you're falling out. They don't
see the aspiration that brought you to a
place where you could actually fall down in
that place. Imagine somebody who's running
an Olympic race, right, falls down and all
people see is, oh, he fell down. You
don't see the years years of practice and
years years of effort that took him to
even to get on to that course.
You can't run on that course. They won't
let you on to that course because you're
not fit to run on that course. So
somebody who's running on that course is showing
that they have put in all of this
effort to run on the course. It so
happened they slipped or something happened to them
and then they fell down. You don't just
look at that falling down. You look at
my god, this person is even on this
course and then imagine the kind of struggle
they had to go through and they are
they they are even though they have fallen
down, it doesn't matter. There's somebody there is
somebody I I I aspire to be like.
Right there's somebody who inspires you. Now this
is the reality people don't see people don't
know so if you are going to look
at
look for yourself within the eyes of people,
you will never be able to,
you will never be satisfied. You will always
be disappointed. Instead of that, look for your
words from within your own conscience, your own
self. Because all said and done,
Allah
knows what we do and why we do
that and we know what we did and
why we did
There's nobody else. No one is that close
to you and me who knows
our reasons, who who knows what's in our
heart, who knows what's in that, what our
conscience is telling us. Only Allah knows and
I know. So look at the conscience
and if the conscience is at peace doesn't
mean that sometimes people are happy doing negative
stuff. No, you're talking to be saying here,
doing the right thing and doing it for
the right reasons and then your conscience is
pleased with that because
you have given yourself a good frame of
frame of reference
of the right kinds of values. And then,
if you are if you if that's where
you are, then what people say will not
harm you what people say cannot affect you
negatively
and inshallah then you know you you are
your life is is happy you you're not
you haven't given yourself hostage to somebody else
we ask Allah to make us into confident
individuals who are positive contributors to society
and from whom only goodness flows.