The Signs of a Healthy Heart

For the heart o be healthy, is should depart from this life and arrive in the next, and then settle there as if it were one of its people; it only came to this life as a passer-by, taking whatever provisions it needed and then returning home. As the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said to Abdullah ibn Umar,

“Be in this world as if you were a stranger or passer-by.” (Al-Bukhari, Kitab ar-Riqaq, 11/233). 

The more diseased the heart is, the more it desires this world; it dwells in it until it becomes like one of its own people.

This healthy heart continues to trouble its owner until he returns to Allah, and is at peace with Him, and joins Him, like a lover driven by compulsion who finally reaches his beloved. Besides his love for Him, he needs no other invocations are needed. Serving Him precludes the need to serve any other.

Yahya ibn Mu’adh said “Whoever is pleased with serving Allah, everything will be pleased to serve him; and whoever finds pleasure contemplating Allah, all the people will find pleasure in contemplating him.”

This heart has only one concern: that all its actions, and its inner thoughts and utterances, are obedient to Allah. It is more careful with its time than the meanest people are with their money, so that it will not be spent wastefully. When it enters into prayer, all its worldly worries and anxieties vanish and it finds its comfort and bliss in adorning its Lord. It does not cease to mention Allah, nor tire of serving Him, and it finds intimate company with no-one save a person who guides it to Allah and reminds it of Him.

Its attention to the correctness of its action is greater than its attention to the action itself. It is scrupulous in making sure that intentions behind its actions are sincere and pure and that they result in good deeds.

As well as in spite of all this, it not only testifies to the generosity of Allah in giving it the opportunity to carry out such actions, but also testifies to its own imperfections and shortcomings in executing them.

Taken from "The Purification of the Soul",  compiled from the works of Ibn Rajab al-Hanbali, Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawziyya, and Abu Hamid al-Ghazali.