This is continuation of part 1. If you haven't read that yet, read it here.

I also want to be straight up for a sec: I haven't been emailing because 1) a lot of things went wrong behind the scenes with Eternah and I was in shambles for a bit 2) as the businesses grew, it became very clear that my old systems were no longer sustainable so I had to pause and fix the foundation and still am 3) a lot of life updates. i'll share those with you when I get the green light to do so :-)

I didn't want to show up half-present or send chatGPT emails or outsource my emails because I could neverrrr let someone do that for my personal brand. I'll outsource everything else but my writing? Yeah, don't come near it. That's mine.

Btw ad below but I’ve seen mad people on X talking about how all these AI human content make $30,000/month which is insane. This seemed related to it so if it’s something you’re into:

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So over 120,000 of you guys saw my story yesterday and my DMs went crazy.

For context: We just launched a custom GPT that creates posts and carousels for you in any niche. It's been fed on all my courses, data, content, and other high-performing content.

We rolled it out to TMC members first. But I thought why not open it up for everyone? I know how hard it is to create content. And content creation is hotttt now.

So you guys can get 50% off until February (Feb 1 will be the official launch date).
If you get it during the pre-sale, you get the bonus Reels GPT too.

Early users get to input feedback and shape the GPT so it's in your best interest to get it now if you want it even more customized!

If that sounds useful, you can access it here.

2 things that change how I experience Ramadan:

Ramadan planner. I been using this one for over 5 years. I do not wing the month and it's completely changed how I show up for Ramadan. Over 10,000+ Muslims trust us with this. You can find it here.

Juz 30 Quran Journal. This is for anyone who recites the same Surahs daily but wants to understand what they're really saying. This is not a pretty book. It's a working journaling system that helps you sit with contemplation. You can get it here.

Just sharing what's been useful in my own life and work as we head into Ramadan.

May Allah allow us to reach the blessed month! Ameen.

Every redesign begins with diagnosis.

Before you change what you do, you must locate where you are.

Most people skip this part. They change the surface and leave the source untouched. They install productivity systems on corrupted software, then wonder why everything crashes when life gets hard. When what you believe and what you do stop matching, the nervous system goes into stress response. You can't focus if you're fighting yourself.

The Foci Matrix shows you not how to add more but how to remove interference.

Every soul oscillates on two frequencies: iman (faith) and focus.

Faith is compass.
Focus is engine.

When they fall out of sync, you experience lag. It's like trying to run Windows software on a Mac. It still runs, but inefficiently, full of friction, draining energy that should go towards clear thinking and actions.

To forget Allah is not just to forget your Lord, it is to forget your own coherence.

The Foci Matrix gives you 4 states to locate yourself and the moves to climb out. We'll map each quadrant, the science behind it, and the minimum viable actions that restore coherence.

Ghaflah (heedlessness)… the most warned state in the Qur'an (7:179).

This is the baseline sickness of the modern soul.

It's not necessarily evil, just asleep.

The Qur'an describes it with precision:

Inputs keep streaming but meaning doesn't land. That is the fog.

I call it heart fog.

You wake up tired. You check your phone before you check in with your Lord. The day fills itself: messages, errands, small demands. You're "busy" and at the end of the day a lot happened but nothing moved. Prayer feels heavy. The Qur'ān feels distant. Days blur.

3 systems are breaking under the surface:

Most people in ghaflah try to get disciplined by adding more – more routines, more books, more apps. You can multiply 0 by any number and it will still be zero no matter how high the number is. That's what happens when you try to optimize a forgetful soul.

The Prophet ﷺ said: "Renew your faith."
They said: "O Messenger of Allah, how can we renew our faith?"
He ﷺ said: "Say often: Lā ilāha illa Allah (There is no God but Allah)." ^{_{[Ahmad 8695]}}

Everyones iman will have high and low days. Remember when you first began taking Islam seriously? You couldn't wait for the next prayer. You counted down until the adhan.

You ran toward it.

You fix a ghaflah state by remembering Allah until the fog lifts.

To exit the fog:
— Start with 1 salah on time, every day. Then 2. Then 3. Work your way up to all 5
— Read 5 mins Qur'ān every day in both Arabic & English (or your native tongue)
— Move your body: 10 min walk everyday
— Replace music/podcasts with Qur'ān recitation
— Eliminate dopamine traps (no screens after 'Ishā) with istighfār

You really need to detox yourself.

Do this before optimizing anything.

After 7 days, you'll notice: Your thoughts slow down. Fajr feels lighter. You start wanting to clean your space and fix your schedule without forcing it.

That's the first pulse of coherence returning.

This is the burnout of the believer.

You love Allah. You want khushū‘. You watch Islamic reminders. But your tabs are open in 20 directions. You live in spiritual adrenaline. The heart is awake but the focus is scattered.

Ibn al-Qayyim warned against "zeal without discipline" when the fire of the heart burns fast but dies young. Attention residue is a psychological phenomenon where parts of your focus remain on a previous task, making it difficult to fully concentrate on a new one. The fragments of the last one follow you.

It's like when you move from prayer to phone before the heart has even finished saying ameen.

To fix this state, reduce inputs:
— Unfollow & mute → reduce inputs
— No scroll until 12PM or Dhuhr
— Journal before action. Like write everything down. Pick one
— Pray 2 rak'ah of istikhārah when unsure where to focus
— Learn from 1 book or 1 course at a time
— Qaylulah nap or 5 min dhikr walk in the afternoon sun

The one most high-performers in the West in. This is the danger zone of high-functioning heedlessness where worldly success hides the spiritual decay. You're disciplined, structured, optimized but your work feels empty. Life feels great. Nothing feels fulfilling.

I felt like I was in this state during my early years of a 9-5.

Here is the illusion of progress… activity without awareness. You've mastered consistency, but forgot why. You've built a system that obeys the clock, not the Creator.

Don't forget everything you do at work become worship when intention leads it.

To reconnect:
— Inject Qur'ān into your morning block
— Pray on time, with presence
— Watch or attend 1 islāmic lecture/week
— Donate something before starting work
— Reflect: Is this work for Allah or for something else?

Discipline is meant to protect worship.

This is what I imagine the Prophet ﷺ lived. A heart aware of Allah. A mind disciplined by dhikr. A schedule structured by prayer.

Every part of your life faces the same direction. When you reach this state, time bends. Tasks take less energy. Rizq comes with less stress. And the world bends to divine order again.

That's quantum barakah.

The state I aim to be at all times.

To sustain it:
— Guard Fajr → work starts after
— Recite Qur'an everyday, no excuses
— Create before you consume
— Monthly fasting (Mon/Thurs + 13/14/15 white moon days)
— Serve before self
— Sit in dhikr and silence after all the prayers
— Ongoing istighfār & salawāt

The purpose of the Foci Matrix is to locate you.

If you're in ghaflah, remember.
If you're overstimulated, simplify.
If you're stagnant, redirect.
If you're in flow, guard it.

That's why the next step isn't more planning.

It's resetting the system itself.

Modern life runs on the solar calendar: straight, linear, mechanical.

Islam runs on the lunar calendar: cyclical, reflective, alive.

The Qur'an anchors time not in human scheduling but in the changing face of the sky.

The Islamic calendar is a lunar calendar.
A year is 355 days, not 365.
And each month is either 29 or 30 days.

And that length is determined by actually sighting the crescent.

One of the subtle miracles of the Prophet ﷺ is the way he ﷺ indicated with his fingers that a month is 29 nights even though lunar months are never exactly 30 days.

Astronomically, they average around 29.5 days.

A lunar month begins invisibly when the sun and moon line up perfectly (conjunction). The moon is invisible at this moment because its lit side faces away from Earth. Sometimes it passes directly in front of the sun and you get a solar eclipse. Most of the time it is completely hidden in the sun’s glare.

To see a crescent, you need separation. The moon must move away from the sun (elongation) by at least 9 degrees.

Rule of thumb: Every degree of separation takes about 4 minutes. So to see the hilal (crescent) it’s about 36 minutes under ideal conditions. But conditions are rarely ideal.

There are recorded earliest sightings of the first crescent (after conjunction):

The first visible crescent appears within 3 days of the new moon.

What’s really neat is that Arabic itself encodes a self-correcting mechanism for this.

The new crescent is called hilal only for the first 3 days.
After that, it is qamar, the moon.

If you do not see the crescent on night 1 or 2, you will almost certainly see it on night 3.

The Prophet ﷺ tied worship directly to that sighting.

"Fast when you see it and break your fast when you see it. If it is obscured, complete thirty." ^{_{[Muslim 1081b]}}

The beginning of the month is not based on what might be there in theory but what you actually witness.

If the sky is cloudy or hazy, you simply complete 30 days. He ﷺ did not even specify why it might be obscured. The point is: you submit to what Allah shows you, not what you insist must be there.

The day before this uncertainty is known as Yawm al Shakk, the Day of Doubt. Some people feel tempted to fast "just in case" Ramadan has begun, but the Prophet ﷺ forbade fasting that day out of doubt. It is like locking doors before the fire alarm goes off and trapping people inside. It feels cautious… but it is disobedience to the process.

Over centuries, scholars developed 2 positions to start the lunar month:

Both have their evidences. I lean toward the wisdom of local sighting because it honors the idea that each horizon has its own sky but I also recognize how messy that has become in a hyper-connected AI age because we now deal with things like:

1) Misinformation: high-speed internet can spread false "sightings" instantly.

2) Political pressure: national announcements sometimes prioritize government schedules over actual astronomy *cough cough

3) The Argentina Case: There once was a sighting by only two people from a Shi’a masjid that led some North American communities to change their calendars, while others refused, causing lots of community confusion.

To prevent these errors, schools like the Hanafi madhab say a valid sighting for a month like Ramadan or Eid ideally requires tawātur. This is mass witnessing where enough people see it that fabrication becomes impossible.

But you know there are also admin mistakes. Apparently there was a case in Saudi Arabia over 11 years ago (before the rise of social media) where Muharram 1 was printed twice in a row because they incorrectly announced it. People read it in the paper and carried on. Lol, can you imagine sipping on your morning coffee and seeing the same data twice? The incident is a reminder: the sky does not bend to the newspaper. Our systems are fallible but the moon is a perfect clock that we must humble ourselves to witness.

It's time to look up again.

I think it's safe to say most Muslims have no idea what phase the moon is in today. Do you know? We follow app notifications and social mediaunnah that reconnects us back with the natural world.

I remember deliberately planning to go out in the wee hours of the night in Iceland to catch the Northern lights but why do I not do the same here in New York to practice a Sunnah from the Beloved Messenger ﷺ?

Now, I am not naïve. I know it is nearly impossible to detach from the solar calendar now. It governs school years, payroll, travel, everything. There are even attempts to permanently fix the lunar calendar so that Ramadan and Eid dates are announced and locked in advance… which would erase the Sunnah of sighting.

My goal here is not to make you throw away your wall calendar. I want you to start using the clock Allah gave you. At the very least, to be aware that one exists.

Looking for a crescent moon turns you into what one would call a phenomenological astronomer: someone who is interested in the experience and observable phenomena of astronomy, not the math.

You are stepping outside to witness a sign of the Creator.

A Scottish Christian astronomer (yes Christian, not Muslim) once said that one of the most important issues in the Muslim world is determining the start of Ramadan and other sacred months. He pointed out that Muslim communities often begin on different days because of their differing locations and sky conditions. Places further west often have a better chance of sighting because the moon has more time to separate from the sun's glare before it sets.

Weather adds another layer. Humidity, dust, pollution, and cloud cover can decide everything. Under excellent conditions, the crescent can be sighted in under 24 hours from conjunction. There is a recorded sighting as early as 13 hours (super rare). More commonly it appears around 30 hours.

Traditionally two independent witnesses are required for a valid sighting. The Ottoman Empire allowed those witnesses to use telescopes in addition to the naked eye but the standard remains human observation. Technology is kept as a servant, not master.

There are current efforts to standardize the Islamic calendar so that Ramadan starts globally on the same day.

The same Scottish astronomer argues against this.

The relationship between the heavens and Earth is a living system. Each place has its own sky. It makes sense that religious festivals begin on days specific to particular locations.

The modern mindset prefers generalization and abstraction. It sounds sophisticated but often it means we ignore reality. We average the length of the solar day to make the clock neat and call it 24 hours. In reality, none of the celestial bodies move in perfect circles. The true solar day is closer to 23 hours and 56 minutes. Our system works but it is an agreed-upon simplification, not the actual sky.

That is his criticism and mine: you can average everything out, build your models, and make them function, but that is not nature. People forget that what they call a "24-hour day" is not the true passage of time. It is a human construct. Observing the moon pulls you back to real natural routines.

And in the current state of mass deception, we need more real.

The more you look at worship as a system, the more you see the pattern.

Islam insists on contact with the physical world.

Before prayer, you wash with water.
If water is unavailable, you touch earth for tayammum.
In prayer, you stand, bow, prostrate.
Your face meets the ground.
In Hajj: walk, sweat, dust, crowds, thirst, stone, fabric.

You are commanded to touch the elements, not only to think about them.

Children understand this instinctively.

They love mud. They want to get dirty, to jump in puddles, to feel textures, grass, sand, snow. As we grow older, we leave that behind. We sit behind desks, look at screens, and live our lives so boring.

These practices like washing, praying, fasting, watching the moon: they bring you back into your body and reconnect you to the elements.

Even animals remind you of this.

My family got a cat 5 months ago:

What I noticed in these 5 months? They cannot stand still! Oh my goodness. They stretch, move, sharpen their claws, jump on counters, play with boxes, strings, plastic. If you watch them closely, after eating, a cat will wipe over its head with its paws in a way that almost resembles the wiping of the head in wudhu. If you have a cat, watch them next time when they lick themselves! Subhan al-Khaliq!

The Prophet ﷺ kept goats and would go out and milk them himself. He drank milk fresh from the udder. There is something different about that contact. It is not romanticizing "the trad-life" as you so often see with Nara Smith and the rich Ballerina girl with 8 kids and a farm.

It is pointing to a way of being that is rooted in nature. Props to those online creators for bringing this lifestyle into awareness though.

Ask yourself: have you ever drunk milk straight from a live animal? Most of us have not. I include myself in the criticism. The raw milk I buy in bottles from New Jersey is not the same as straight from the udder.

We are far from the realities that feed us.

This is why moon sighting matters.

To stand under a sky, to look for the moment of wulud, when the new crescent emerges from what looked like nothing, and to feel awe rise in your chest. To say Subhan al-Khaliq as a direct response to what your eyes just saw.

Allah tells us to observe these signs because the world was created for human consciousness to witness. Fasting, worship, moon sighting: they are not abstract rituals. They are ways to return you to the position of a conscious creature, aware of the universe and the One who created it.

The beginning of the lunar month depends on a moment of awareness. Not so much giant million dollar telescopes and machines to predict the moment.

Using math alone is like trusting a lab report about food and never tasting it. The numbers might be accurate. But the human experience is missing.

Why are we so obsessed with control? My theory: the Satanic humans are now trying to create a god with AI. Don’t even get me started on all the Dajjalic things happening right now. It’s insane.

This hadith is starting to become more and more attractive…

Standing under the sky… waiting… observing… accepting uncertainty…

Let Allah reveal the time.

Even birth, in its natural form, follows this logic. The baby comes out when it’s ready, not when it fits a schedule. People at my workplaces would actually prefer scheduled C-sections over natural birth for the convenience. Like someone might want to go get their hair done in the morning, have a meeting, then go in for the scheduled C-section at 2PM. Whatever it fits their timetable.

I went to my dermatologist last week and my doctor was asking me out of curiosity if Botox and fillers were allowed in Islam because she has many Muslim clients get these treatments (even in Ramadan while fasting) and they even try to schedule them out before they get pregnant but then call in crying cancelling the appointment because they got pregnant.

I was shooketh.

Children are meant to be come into existence when God decrees it.

You see the same contrast in how humans build.

Cities untouched by the modern world grow like organisms.

Medellin:

Yemen:

Chefchoaen:

Curved paths. Uneven streets. Adaptation to terrain. Organic pathways. Like a whole living organism.

Modern cities are so rigid, flat, have super straight lines and perfect grids (hello Manhattan). Straight lines might feel orderly but they’re not part of the natural world, they’re mental abstractions. They rarely exist in nature. This is the modern mindset attempt to impose its version of reality onto an already existing, organic one.

We are out of sync with true reality.

The religion is all about experiencing reality as it is.

اللَّهُمَّ أَرِنَا الْحَقَّ حَقًّا وَارْزُقْنَا اتِّبَاعَهُ
allāhumma arināl-haqqa haqqan war-zuqnāt-tabā’ah
O Allah! Show us the truth as truth and give us the ability to follow it

A du’a from the commentary of Surah al-Baqarah 213.

Everything has an outer form and an inner reality.

Ask for things not as you want them to be, not as you filters or biases distort them to be, but as they truly are to be.

This is the core of Islam: the pursuit of truth and clear perception.

Before artificial lighting, the full moon literally changed human life. It made nights bright enough to travel, to hunt, to gather, to misbehave. In the deep parts of the desert, I remember the full moon literally being like a sun. People stayed up later. And we all know nothing good happens after 2AM amongst the uncivilized…

Ancient and medieval Europe turned that unease into stories. Wolves howl at night, their calls carry farther in clear air, and people projected their own restlessness onto them. The English word lunacy comes from luna, the moon, reflecting the belief that full moons cause madness.

As Christian Europe absorbed older pagan tales, the image of a man transforming into a beast under the full moon became an easy metaphor. A person giving in to their animal self when the moon is bright. Temptation. Loss of control. Sin.

The werewolf legend is not pure fantasy. You can say it is an allegory about the moon's effect on human and restraint. When people stayed up under brighter nights, drank more, fought more, or acted impulsively, it was easier to blame the moon than to confront the self.

Islam does not romanticize or demonize the moon.

It treats it as a sign.

Did you know bodies and moods subtly mirror the moon's phases?

People fall asleep later and sleep less on the nights before a full moon^[1]

Women's menstrual cycles average about 29.5 days.

The same as a lunar month.

In natural light conditions, women often ovulate around the full moon and menstruate around the new moon^[2]

Purification and renewal lines up.

So where folklore saw frenzy and superstition, Islam recommended fasting. The Prophet ﷺ encouraged fasting on the white days, when the moon is full, not because the full moon is dangerous but I reckon because it is a time of high brightness and subtle energetic intensity.

When the nafs feels most inflated, you are asked to restrain it.

And Allah knows best.

The lunar system reminds you that the physical and spiritual are not separate arenas.

Ok we finally get here.

This is what I call it the Lunar Reset System. It synchronizes your internal state with the sky across 4 layers of time: nightly, weekly, monthly, and yearly.

I have found this to be a natural way to detox the soul, the mind, and the heart.

Why reset?

Because nothing that is alive is meant to run indefinitely without release.

For exampe: if you neglect lymphatic drainage, the body does not immediately collapse. It accumulates. Fluid stagnates. Waste lingers. Inflammation builds. You feel heavy, puffy, sluggish. Not because something dramatic happened but because nothing was cleared.

The same things happen internally.

So use this as a way to prevent buildup within the nafs before it becomes numb.

What this reset is for: clearing the day.

In Islam, the new day begins at Maghrib. Not at midnight.

This is the first shift in perception.

The Prophet ﷺ would pray ‘Isha, rest early, and wake up again for Tahajjud.

This was his version of "shut down complete."

Neuroscientists now call this process sleep-dependent consolidation. During deep sleep, the brain reorganizes learning, detoxifies stress hormones, and repairs emotional circuitry.

The Sunnah built this in 1400 years ago.

What you can do:

Let darkness do its work.

What this reset is for: direction.

Just as the moon orbits the Earth in phases, the believer orbits the week toward Friday.

Jumu’ah is the weekly summit.

Once a week, you are commanded to stop dunya & provision and remember Who provides it.

Jumu‘ah is the Eid of the week.
Jumu’ah is a day of recalibation.
Jumu’ah is a recurring summit between servant and Lord.

Modern gives you weekends for distraction.
Islam gives you Jumu‘ah for perspective.

The ummah comes back into orbit and all the scattered attention flows toward one point.

Allah.

What you can do:

What this reset is for: regulating excess.

Ayyam al-bīd are the white days. The 13th, 14th, and 15th of the lunar month.

These days coincide with the full moon.

I find this to be the perfect time to do a monthly reset.

What you can do:

What this reset is for: identity-level renewal.

The master reset.

Ramadan.

The Hijri year itself is a migration of time. The months move through all 4 seasons instead of staying fixed. Ramadan does not belong to winter or summer. It travels. That alone is a teaching: worship is not bound to the comfort of a particular climate or culture.

Each year, the crescent opens and closes the month. You cannot fast early to get it out the way. You cannot delay because it is inconvenient.

You fast when Allah shows you the moon.

Fasting was prescribed so that you might attain taqwa (2:183), not so that you could optimize your health or productivity. Those may be side benefits though.

The main outcome is God-consciousness.

What you can do:

Treat each crescent is a micro-hijrah.

There’s a saying that the wise person is the one who knows his month before it begins and his end before it arrives.

Modern life will keep calling you to optimize your calendar.

Islam will keep calling you to synchronize with the sky.

I hope I have somewhat convinced you to be more aware of the lunar calendar and to attempt to schedule your life around this.

Coming next (Part 3/4):

Thank you for reading it this far.

Talk to you soon.

مع حبي (with love)

Saufiyah ♡

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References:

^[1]Moonstruck sleep: Synchronization of human sleep with the moon cycle under field conditions, 2021

^[2](Synchronization of women’s menstruation with the Moon has decreased but remains detectable when gravitational pull is strong, 2025)