Healing
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Step by Step: Healing Through the Sunnah & Forgiving Yourself for Being Naive
By [Hind Silkan] | Personal Essay
I want to start with something nobody said to me when I took my shahada.
Nobody said: "The journey doesn't end here. In some ways, the hardest part starts here."
They gave me dates. They gave me hugs. They gave me a prayer mat and a list of duas and a warmth I had never felt in any circle of women before. And I am grateful for all of it, genuinely, deeply grateful.
But nobody told me about the weeks that would follow. The ones where I'd lie awake cataloguing every tarot spread I'd ever done, every Reiki session I'd booked, every full moon intention I'd burned into the night sky, and feel a shame so heavy it sat on my chest like a stone.
Nobody said: "That shame is not from Allah."
So I'm saying it now. To myself, first. And to whoever finds their way here.
Before the Steps, The Thing That Has to Be Said First
You were not stupid. You were not broken. You were not spiritually reckless.
You were hungry. You were searching. You were a person with a heart that had always been reaching for something real, and you reached with the tools you had before you had better ones.
Tawbah, the Islamic concept of repentance, literally means "to turn." Not to flagellate. Not to spiral. To turn. And here is what I have had to teach myself, slowly, in the quiet: you cannot turn toward something while you are still bent double in shame over where you came from.
The naivety was not a character flaw. It was a chapter. And chapters end.
So before any step, before any practice, before anything do this:
Give yourself permission to have been a person who didn't know yet.
That is the foundation everything else is built on.
Step One: Understand What Tawbah Actually Is (It's Not What Shame Told You)
For a long time, I thought repentance meant convincing Allah to forgive me. Like I had to make a good enough case. Like there was a threshold of remorse I needed to reach before the door would open.
Islam dismantled that completely.
In a hadith qudsi, Allah says: "O My servants, you sin by night and by day, and I forgive all sins, so seek forgiveness from Me and I will forgive you."
Read that again. Not some sins. Not minor sins. Not sins committed before you knew better. All sins.
The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) described Allah's joy at a servant's repentance as greater than a person who finds their lost camel in the desert, overflowing, joyful, beyond measure.
This is the God you are turning toward. Not a judge waiting to list your failures. A Lord who is glad you came back.
The practice: Sit quietly, not to perform remorse, but to be honest. Say Astaghfirullah not as a transaction but as a conversation. I know. I didn't know then, but I know now. And I'm here. That's enough. That has always been enough.
Step Two: Stop Treating Your Past Self as the Enemy
This one took me longer than I'd like to admit.
There is a version of the revert experience where you become almost violent toward who you were before Islam. You speak about your past self with contempt. You distance, you mock, you perform disgust at the crystals and the cards and the Bali retreats, as if punishing her will somehow sanctify you faster.
It won't. And it isn't honest.
The girl who burned sage and pulled tarot cards and cried at full moons, she was doing the best she could with what she had. Her longing was real. Her need for meaning was sacred. The direction was wrong, but the hunger was always pointing somewhere true.
If Allah is willing to forgive us, we should be willing to forgive ourselves too. That is not a soft, self-help platitude. It is Islamic teaching.
Forgiving your past self is not excusing what you did. It is acknowledging that you were a person in process, and that process brought you here. Every detour was part of the road.
The practice: Write a letter to who you were. Not a lecture, a letter. Acknowledge what she was looking for. Tell her you understand why she looked where she looked. Tell her she wasn't wrong to search. Tell her you found it.
You don't have to send it anywhere. You just have to mean it.
Step Three: Replace the Ritual, Not Just Remove It
One of the hardest things about leaving the New Age world is that it leaves a practical gap in your daily life.
The full moon ritual wasn't just spiritually misaligned, it was also a structure. A monthly rhythm. A reason to pause. The tarot wasn't just forbidden, it was also a daily practice of self-reflection. The Reiki wasn't just theologically problematic, it was also the thing you turned to when your body hurt and your soul felt heavy.
If you remove all of that without replacing it, you don't become more Muslim. You just become more empty. And emptiness is where old habits wait.
The Sunnah does not leave you empty. It fills every slot.
The five daily prayers function as regular therapeutic sessions that fulfil both spiritual and psychological needs. The rhythmic nature of dhikr produces a meditative state, soothing the nervous system and deepening the believer's spiritual connection.
What the moon rituals tried to give you, pause, rhythm, intention, sacred time, salah gives you five times a day, built into the structure of daylight itself.
What the tarot tried to give you, reflection, guidance, a sense of being known, dua gives you in every moment, to a God who actually knows you. Not a shuffled deck. Him.
The most beloved deeds to Allah are those that are consistent, even if small. Not the most dramatic. Not the ones that involve the most suffering or the steepest learning curve. The small ones. The ones you show up for every day.
The practice of building your Sunnah rhythm:
Morning: Wake with the morning adhkar before you touch your phone. Even three minutes. This replaces the journaling-by-candlelight energy of your old practice, it's still intention-setting, but anchored in something real.
Prayer times: Let them structure your day the way the lunar calendar used to. The day has a shape now. You don't have to create one from scratch.
Evening: The evening adhkar. Ayatul Kursi before sleep. This is your new wind-down ritual, and it's more powerful than anything you burned a candle for.
When you're in pain: Instead of reaching for a healer or a card, reach for "Hasbunallahu wa ni'mal wakeel", "Allah is sufficient for us and He is the best Disposer of affairs." Say it until your nervous system believes it.
Weekly: Sunnah fasts on Mondays and Thursdays if you're able. They give you the same feeling the full moon rituals once did, a recurring sacred practice that marks time and invites reflection.
Step Four: Sit With the Grief Without Calling It Weakness
I need to say this plainly: leaving this world is a grief. It deserves to be named as such.
You may miss the community. The aesthetic. The language. The way "Mercury retrograde" made your chaotic neurodivergent life feel like it had an external explanation rather than just a brain that works differently. The way Bali retreats promised transformation with a return flight and a plant-based menu included.
Missing those things does not make you a bad Muslim. It makes you a human being who built a life around something and then had to rebuild.
The belief that everything that happens to us is part of Allah's just, wise and compassionate plan shifts our thinking from agonizing over "Why me?" to more self-empowering frameworks that offer hope and solace.
You were not led to those practices by accident. And you were not led out of them by accident either.
The grief is part of the story. Let it be part of the story. Cry in sujood if you need to. That is what sujood is for.
Step Five: Reframe Naivety as Proof of a Searching Heart
Here is the reframe that changed everything for me.
I used to see my years in the New Age world as evidence of how far I had strayed. A debt I was paying off. A mark against me.
Now I see it differently.
The girl who tried everything, tarot, Reiki, energy healing, crystals, Bali, was not spiritually reckless. She was spiritually relentless. She would not settle for a life without meaning. She would not accept that there was no guidance, no connection, nothing beyond the material world. She kept searching even when the search cost her time and money and clarity.
That relentlessness? That is the same thing that brought her to Islam.
The searching was always the right instinct. The map was just wrong. And now you have a better one.
Surah Al-Furqan reassures us: "Except for those who repent, believe, and do righteous work. For them Allah will replace their evil deeds with good. And ever is Allah Forgiving and Merciful."
Not just forgiven. Replaced with good. The same years that you're ashamed of, Allah can make them part of your testimony. Part of how you help someone else find their way out.
Step Six: Let Your Story Be the Healing
You have something that a born Muslim who grew up in the faith does not have, and I say this not to create division but to name a genuine gift.
You know what it feels like on the other side. You know the language of the woman who is still in it. You know why she stays. You know what she's afraid of. You know what she needs to hear.
Your naivety, your journey, your detours, they are not liabilities in the service of other people. They are your qualifications.
Every woman who reads your words and thinks "that was me", you are already her healing. Not because you have it all figured out. Because you were honest enough to write it down.
A Daily Healing Framework From the Sunnah
For the neurodivergent, structure is medicine. Here is a simple one rooted entirely in prophetic guidance:
Upon waking, say Alhamdulillah alladhi ahyana ba'da ma amatana wa ilayhin-nushoor (Praise be to Allah who gave us life after death and to Him is the resurrection). Your first thought belongs to Him.
Fajr to Dhuhr, your most protected hours. Guard them. The Prophet ﷺ made dua for barakah in the early morning hours for his ummah.
After each salah, SubhanAllah 33 times, Alhamdulillah 33 times, Allahu Akbar 34 times. This is your dhikr practice. It takes four minutes. It replaces a thousand tools.
When anxiety rises, Hasbunallahu wa ni'mal wakeel. Say it until your body settles. This is not spiritual bypassing. This is trusting the One who holds the outcome.
Before sleep, Ayatul Kursi. Al-Ikhlas, Al-Falaq, An-Nas. Blow into your hands and pass over your body three times. You have a bedtime ritual now. It came from the Prophet ﷺ himself.
When you fall short, Astaghfirullah. Not as punishment. As returning. The door is never closed.
To the Girl Reading This at 2am, Feeling Like She'll Never Be Clean Enough
You will.
Not because you've suffered enough or apologised enough or proven enough. But because "Indeed, Allah loves those who repent." (Quran 2:222)
He loves the turning. Not the arriving. Not the perfection. The act of turning toward Him, again and again, however many times it takes.
You are not too far gone. You were never too far gone.
You were always just on your way here.
I write about faith, neurodivergence, clean living, and what it actually looks like to rebuild yourself from the inside out. If this found you at the right moment, stay a while.