Reclaim Your Heart: Personal insights on breaking free from life's shackles

Try not to confuse attachment with love. Attachment is about fear and
dependency, and has more to do with love of self than love of another. Love
without attachment is the purest love because it isn’t about what others can
give you because your empty. It is about what you can give others because
you’re already full.
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When Sara met Ahmed, she immediately knew. He was everything she
had always dreamed of. Meeting him was like watching the sun rise in the
middle of a snowstorm. His warmth melted the cold. Soon, however,
admiration turned to worship. Before she could understand what had
happened, Sara had become a prisoner. She became a prisoner of her own
desire and craving for that which she adored. Everywhere she looked, Sara
saw nothing but him. Her greatest fear in life was displeasing him. He was
all she could feel, and without him, happiness had no meaning. Leaving him
made her feel as though her soul was being peeled from her very being. Her
heart was consumed with only his face, and nothing felt closer to her than
him. He became to her like the blood in her veins. The pain of existing
without him was unbearable because there was no happiness outside of
being with him.
Sara thought she was in love.
Sara had been through a lot in her life. Her father walked out on her
when she was a teenager, she ran away from home when she was 16, and
she battled drug and alcohol addictions. She even spent time in jail.
However, all that pain combined could not compare to the pain she would
come to know inside this new prison of her own making. Sara became a
captive inside her own desires. It was this captivity that Ibn Taymiyyah radi
Allahu `anhu (may Allah be pleased with him) spoke of when he said, "The
one who is (truly) imprisoned is the one whose heart is imprisoned from
Allah and the captivated one is the one whose desires have enslaved him."
(Ibn al-Qayyim, al-Wabil, pg 69)
The agony of Sara’s worship of Ahmed was more intense than the
agony of all her previous hardships. It consumed her, but never filled her.
Like a parched man in the middle of a desert, Sara was desperately pursuing
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a mirage. But what was worse was the torturous result of putting something
in a place only God should be.
Sara’s story is so deep because it demonstrates a profound truth of
existence. As human beings, we are created with a particular nature (fitrah).
That fitrah is to recognize the oneness of God and to actualize this truth in
our lives. Therefore, there is no calamity, no loss, no thing that will cause
more pain than putting something equal to God in our lives or our hearts.
Shirk on any level breaks the human spirit like no worldly tragedy could.
By making the soul love, revere, or submit to something as it should only
God, you are contorting the soul into a position that it, by its very nature,
was never meant to be in. To see the reality of this truth, one only has to
look at what happens to a person when they lose their object of worship.
On July 22, 2010, the Times of India reported that a 40-year-old woman
committed suicide in her home by pouring kerosene over her body and
setting herself on fire. The police said it appeared that the suicide was an
"extreme step because she was unable to conceive a child over 19 years of
marriage".
Only days earlier on July 16, police reported that a 22-year-old Indian
man "committed suicide after his girlfriend left him".
Most people could sympathize with the pain of these people, and most
would be heartbroken in the same position. But if having a child or a