Sonya Syed

“ On no soul do Allah Place a burden greater than it can bear. It gets every good that it earns, and it suffers every ill that it earns. (Pray:) "Our Lord! Condemn us not if we forget or fall into error; our Lord! Lay not on us a burden Like that which Thou didst lay on those before us; Our Lord! Lay not on us a burden greater than we have strength to bear. Blot out our sins, and grant us forgiveness. Have mercy on us. Thou art our Protector; Help us against those who stand against faith." Surah Al-Baqarah) verse 286- the Holy Quran. “Every soul gets every good that it earns, and it suffers every ill that it earns.”  These lines from the Holy Quran are echoing in my mind today, and after a bit of investigation I found the following information, I will connect the dots later but for now please bear with me: According to Wikipedia: Augmented reality (AR) is a shared experience of a real-world environment where the objects that exist in the real world are enhanced by...

Planning, organizing and time-management were the skills that I used to hear in my business management class and never truly believed in their significance in order to have a productive and healthy life, until recently.  And oh boy I have become obsessed with organizing and managing time efficiently, would you believe I have three separate planners for my daily, weekly and work life. Plus I am using reminder apps, evening shopping list app on my mobile so I don’t have to memorize the grocery list or paying bills or doing errands. It gets even better, because there are Namaz/prayer and even present-moment reminder apps and all we need to do, is install them all. I recently bumped on Google calendar and it is Amazing . I simply put all my work schedules, including breakfast, lunch, afternoon nap, dinner and prayer timing, it then colour codes/time blocks that period giving me a precise track of my daily and weekly activities. Before using Google calendar I thought I was wasting my t...

Today’s post ‘planning time and setting goals 1’ is greatly useful for everyone who is trying to efficiently manage time and balancing their life, work and family. The last paras are especially written for people going through depression or anxiety yet they are bravely trying to cope with life. It is quite amazing to survive another year and so many years till now, it is such a blessing to be able to breath into a new year. Life is beautiful, it’s a gift from Allah but the real challenge is to live it fully. I learnt a great deal in 2019, my students and my colleagues have been wonderful and as usual they inspired me to become and learn more as a person. In order to accomplish my goals I realized that I needed to manage my life effectively.  So with 2020 I would like to share with all of you some thoughts and ideas of what worked for me and how I plan to utilize the new information this year. I have never been a planner because planning entails studying and organizing tomor...

Should I say that I am a different person today? I guess not but I am definitely exploring various aspects of my personality that I never thought have existed earlier. I am so happy that all of you have given your beautiful feedback on my earlier posts but there has been a special reference to the post “3 January 2019”. It took a while for me to figure out the priorities in life but when they have been sorted out nothing seems impossible now. There has been an immense interest in my following up to the January 3 post, so I will try my best to talk about the picture which I uploaded with that post. Whether you call that amazing power God or Allah or Universe or remember Him with any other name it really doesn’t matter, what really matters is the regular, moment-to-moment connection which you make with the Omnipresent, the Merciful God. So even when I am done with my prayers I make sure to involve God in every decision, every problem that I encounter daily. For instance, if I ...

In my earlier post (Day 579) “Migraine” I wrote about exercising, so I have to explain it a bit further because few weeks ago my doctor came to know that one of the major cause of my frequently occurring migraine is, in fact, Exercise. Since 2003-04 I have been regularly working out, except for the two-years gap that I had while I was completing my research work, and after the break I restarted exercising. My routine always had two alternate days for strength/weight training, 2 days for step aerobics and 1 day of very basic yoga. In my weight training after few initial weeks I used 4 kg – 8 kg free weights and in gym it got 5kg to 20 kg varying on different exercises. To have strong abdomen I did 45-85 crunches, and used around 20-25 cm aerobics bench height. Throughout these years, within 24- 36 hours of exercising, I got regular migraines. Until recently when I started to maintain my “daily meals & headache diary” I noticed a pattern. Some people learn lessons the hard wa...

What a life it has been for the last few months. Just kidding! Thankfully nothing new has happened-it’s all same old but definitely the work load has increased for me and I am pretty sure that it is going to take its momentum in the upcoming weeks. So first of all, thank you so much for all your lovely comments on the blog. Many people have asked me if I am really the one who write all my posts/ articles or is there a ghost writer. To tell you the truth that I am apparently the one who is writing all the material yet I know for sure that it is only possible by the orders of God and His creativity to enter my mind and express whatever there is to spoken to the world. Whether we write, act, draw, sing or even take a superb business decision or get a brilliant idea it is never possible without the divine intervention. So how to have that intervention, though I don’t have any precise guidelines in this regard I believe to have some pointers. I believe it is imperative to have a ...