Self Recognizing

by Abdullah Gymnastiar

“Truly in the body there is a morsel of flesh (mudghah) which, if it be whole, all the body is whole, and if it is diseased, all of it is diseased. Truly it is the heart”

(Bukhari and Muslim)

How beautiful our life is when we live with a pure heart. Heart purity creates peace and harmony. The purity is resulted from our efforts to clean our heart. SO, the question is how to purify our heart?

The effort to clean our heart begins from understanding ourselves and others. Without deep self-understanding and self-recognizing, it’s impossible for us to avoid dirtiness of heart. Thus, we can say that the first thing to do is managing our heart is self-recognizing.

Someone who can control his emotion is a person who can understand who he is. We can control ourselves if we know ourselves as well. People who sometimes cannot control themselves are people who are not able to recognize themselves. As a result, they may commit bad deeds or sins while they do not realize that what they have done are wrong.

The key to self-understanding is in our heart. Our heart can clearly reflect who we are and what our character are. Our clean and pure heart InsyaAllah can reflect our clean and pure personalities.

Knowing ourselves is certainly begun from our innermost heart. This is what we call as Muhasabah or self-introspection. So, someone can know himself through a thoroughgoing process; he can not know himself suddenly. This process of self-introspection will be effective if we have ability to manage our heart; for example, managing our heart to stay calm while facing problems. We must believe that it is we, ourselves, who can help ourselves, certainly with our best effort. And Allah SWT, The Only, who always helps us go through the efforts. Wallahu a’lam bisshawab.

Adapted from: Jagalah Hati by Abdullah Gyamnastiar. MQS Publishing-Bandung 2004