Sonya Syed

It is best to make no promises, nor to take any vows and just to leave everything unspoken and open-ended. The vastness of unspoken words is immense as well as beautiful. So let us be infinite and silent. The boat is rocking, the tides are quite high and the times are unsure. It is a dream- no probably a scream which has taken away light from the pendant of a stream.  Crying babies, tears of healers, pain of losing, fear of suffering tore the hearts of millions this years. Yet in the despair there appears a glimmer of hope from the steeple of faith, beaming lightly and softly yet constantly- heralding us to hold on...to hold on to the rope of faith even when our hands are bruised and bleeding through- telling us; compelling us; teaching us:                                          “ So, verily, with every difficulty, there is relief:        فَإِنَّ مَعَ الْعُسْرِ يُسْرًا                          Verily, with every difficulty there is relief :          إِنَّ مَعَ الْعُسْرِ يُسْرًا&quo

  I am speaking on behalf of Karachites: “Please Allah, I love you and I love rain but please make it stop. I am okay with a bit of drizzle here and there, dark skies and cold breeze but this city does not have the capacity to endure your divine love, we just can’t handle it.”     After a tornado of chaos, emotional roller coaster rides, Covid 19, isolation, social distancing, masks, sanitizers, pain of losing a beloved family member suddenly and the craziest social media- I have been trying to find my centre the inner place where I can go and dream of anything. Immense struggle of no avail. 2020 has been a very difficult year probably the most challenging one of my life. For the last 9-10 years I have been meditating, praying diligently and life has been pretty good to me however the emotional and financial crisis of the world jolted the best of the spiritual practises. I really believe that corona virus was a three-second trailer of the judgement day. Now on 27 th August 2020 wh

“ 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 time,

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 tomorrow

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