I’ve had to expand my own heart in order to be able to live in it and be safe.
That may sound strange, but I don’t know how else to describe it.
People sometimes talk about expanding the heart as though it is a spiritual practice they chose. As though one day they decided to become more compassionate, more spacious, more able to hold life’s contradictions.
That has not been my experience.
What choice do you have when you don’t have the capacity, resources, knowledge, support, respite, community, or roadmap that other people seem to have? What choice do you have when your child cannot walk the paths that everyone else assumes are available? What choice do you have when the systems designed to help become another thing you have to navigate?
You expand because the alternative is to break. Not because you are wise. Because there is nowhere else left to go.
For years I thought I was searching for answers. Now I wonder if I was searching for somewhere to live. Somewhere large enough to hold all the things that did not fit. The grief. The confusion. The injustice. The faith. The hope. The exhaustion. The love.
Why the heart? Because eventually nobody can carry you. Not your parents. Not your partner. Not your community. Not the systems. Not even your faith in the way you think it should. There comes a point where you are sitting in the reality of your life and there is no rescue.
And that sounds bleak, but it wasn’t. It was liberating. Because if nobody is coming, then what remains? The relationship you have with yourself. The relationship you have with Allah. The relationship you have with life itself.
And that is where the heart appears. Not as a metaphor. As a home. A place large enough to hold you when nothing else can.
Perhaps this is one of the ways Allah holds us. Not by coming down Himself. Not by removing every hardship. Not by sending an army. But by expanding our capacity to remain in relationship with life when life becomes difficult to understand.
The trouble is that we can only see the limitations. We cannot always see the larger story. We feel abandoned. Sick of the world. We wonder where Allah is.
This is how I knew I was no longer well. Not because I had stopped believing in Allah. Because I could no longer access the beauty I knew was there.
As I wandered through nihilism and its neighbouring places, I discovered something unexpected. When all the answers had gone. When all the tools in my toolbox had stopped working. When life felt pointless and hopeless and no amount of faith, knowledge, or belief could pull me back.
Something still remained. Choice. Not the choice to be happy. Not the choice to pretend things were okay. The choice of where to place my attention. The choice of what to look for.
And for reasons I still do not fully understand, I chose beauty.
Not grand beauty. Not miracles. Not certainty. Small beauty. A flower. A conversation. A shaft of light. A beautiful sentence. A moment of truth.
Each time I was present with beauty, the heart lifted a little. Just a little. Then a little more. Then a little more. Not enough to solve my problems. Not enough to remove the hardship. But enough. Enough to stay. Enough to remain in relationship with life. Enough for the heart to continue expanding.
Over time that practice became this place. This zawiya. Not because I set out to build it. Because the heart kept lifting towards beauty until it manifested somewhere for me to live. The gold I found in the dark needed somewhere to rest. And so I built it a home.
My son found a different lever. For years he was housebound and burnt out. Life had become very small. Then came Transformers. One Transformer. Then another. Then another. Over two years he collected more than one hundred of them.
People looking from the outside might see a collection. I see a heart expanding. I see a life expanding.
The Transformers gave him something to talk about. Something to share. Something to search for. Something to connect through. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, his world became larger.
Today he is beginning to sell parts of that collection and invest in his next heart project. The collection did its job. It expanded his life.
Beauty was my lever. Transformers were his. Yours may be something entirely different. Birds. Poetry. Gardening. Football. Trains. Mathematics. A shaft of light through a winter window. The thing itself is not the point.
The question is: What keeps calling you back to life? What helps your heart lift, even a little? What allows you to remain in relationship with life when everything inside you wants to withdraw from it?
Find your lever. So together we can expand access to this place. A place where the heart becomes large enough to hold us when no one else can. A place where we remember that Allah is often present in the smallest of things. A place where we discover that what looks insignificant may, in fact, be the very thing that helps us stay.
Turn to look at the world. This one is for everyone whose world went small. The world did that. Not you.
Zawiya Discussion
The Wide Lens — Somatic, Intersectional & Systemic
Resilience is one of the most weaponised words in the English language. In the context of disability, poverty, and systemic exclusion, it is frequently used to place the burden of an unjust situation back onto the person experiencing it. Resilience, in this distorted usage, means: endure more, ask for less, and do not make your suffering inconvenient for the systems that caused it.
Genuine resilience is something entirely different. It is not the performance of strength. It is the slow, painful, often involuntary expansion of capacity that happens when a person has no other option. It is not a virtue to be admired from the outside. It is a survival mechanism. And it comes at enormous cost.
What the research on post-traumatic growth tells us — carefully, without romanticising the trauma that precedes it — is that human beings are capable of finding meaning and even expansion in the aftermath of devastating experience. Not because suffering is good. Because the human nervous system, given enough safety and enough time, has a remarkable capacity to reorganise itself around what remains.
The lever — whether beauty, Transformers, birds, or mathematics — is not escapism. It is the soul’s most intelligent response to an uninhabitable world. The body knowing what it needs before the mind has words for it.
The collection of over one hundred Transformers is not a symptom. It is evidence of a young person rebuilding his world one figure at a time. Every clinician who has ever written a report about this child’s needs would do well to understand what that collection was actually doing.
The Devotional Lens
Every tradition that has understood suffering has also understood expansion — that the heart forced to carry more than it thought possible discovers a capacity it did not know it had. The names for this discovery differ. The territory is the same.
The Qur’an asks directly: Did We not expand for you your chest? The Arabic word — Sharh — carries within it the sense of opening, illuminating, making spacious. It is not a question about comfort. It is a question about capacity. Allah is asking: did We not make you larger than you were? Did We not give you a chest big enough to hold what you were asked to carry?
This expansion — Inshirah — is the spiritual answer to systemic constriction. When the outer world shrinks, Allah expands the inner container. Not to make the suffering acceptable. But to make survival possible. And within that survival, sometimes, a zawiya. A place the heart built for itself because it had no other home.
Al-Latif — the Subtle, the Gentle — works through the small things. The flower. The shaft of light. The Transformer on the shelf. The beautiful sentence. These are not distractions from the Divine. They are the precise instruments through which the Divine reaches a nervous system that has been too overwhelmed to receive anything larger. The lever is not secular. It is grace in the register the soul can currently receive.
Because the soul that finds its way back to life — through a Transformer, a shaft of light, a beautiful sentence, a gentle hum — is already living beautifully. The lever is not the point. The returning is.
Questions
What keeps calling you back to life — and have you ever allowed yourself to take that seriously as a spiritual practice rather than a distraction from one?
Where has your heart been forced to expand — not through choice but through necessity — and what did it find there that it did not expect?
What would it mean to trust that Allah is present in the smallest, most ordinary details of your day — in the thing that helps your heart lift, even just a little?