Is Your Soul Too Tired to Go On? A Sufi Perspective

I have been contemplating something I often notice when there is a public case of someone ending their life. When the person was a beloved celebrity, or someone from a marginalized community, the public conversation often centers around the circumstances that surrounded them:

“Poor them. People failed them.”

“Their loved ones abused them.”

“They never received the love and care they deserved.”

“It is so depressing that even the people closest to you can fail you.”

And sometimes, these observations are absolutely true. Some people endure profoundly painful childhoods. Some experience abuse, neglect, betrayal, loneliness, or relationships in which the very people who were supposed to love them become sources of immense pain.

Islam and Sufism do not deny any of this.

But most people stay at this layer of observation while I believe Islam and Sufism invite us to see beyond, in order to find Allah in all of this.

What happens within a human being when suffering, disappointment, fear and disconnection accumulate to the point where life itself begins to feel unbearable?

Sufism, as the mystical dimension of Islam, seeks to look beneath the surface of human behavior and examine the spiritual diseases that can develop within individuals and societies. It asks us not only what happened to this person?, but also what happened within them?

Because if we want to heal ourselves, and ultimately create a world with more light than darkness, we have to be willing to look at the deeper mechanics of suffering.

This is not an attempt to blame someone for their despair, nor to reduce profound psychological suffering to a lack of faith. It is an attempt to understand, and see how we can help ourselves and others better.

I want to explore what happens when a person becomes so disconnected from the deepest part of themselves that their psyche (to be defined shortly) can no longer see a way forward. How does someone reach a point where life feels so exhausting that death begins to appear like an escape?

And perhaps most importantly: what does Islam teach us about finding our way back?

What follows is a Sufi exploration of how we can become disconnected from the soul, why that disconnection can make suffering feel inescapable, and how the mystical path offers us a way of returning to light.

What is psyche?

There is no perfect equivalent in Islam for the modern word psyche. Islamic tradition has its own rich and nuanced vocabulary for describing the different dimensions of the human being, including the nafs (self), qalb (heart), ʿaql (intellect) and ruh (spirit).

I use the word psyche often because it is a practical modern term for describing our inner psychological world without needing to introduce and define several different Islamic concepts every time I refer to our thoughts, emotions and internal ways of thinking and perceiving.

The psyche can be understood as the inner world through which we experience ourselves and reality. It includes our thoughts, emotions, memories, beliefs, fears, survival mechanisms, conditioned patterns, and the stories we have learned to tell ourselves about who we are.

In Islamic terms, much of what we might describe psychologically as the psyche overlaps with the concept of the nafs, or the self. However, the two are not identical. The nafs has a much broader meaning within Islam and Sufi thought, and can refer to different states and dimensions of the self as it moves through the process of purification and transformation.

When I use the word psyche, I am referring specifically to the part of our experience through which we process what happens to us, construct our identities, develop patterns of survival, and interpret the world around us.

The psyche is not the same as the soul.

Our psyche can become wounded. It can become frightened, overwhelmed, conditioned by painful experiences, and trapped in old patterns of survival. It can forget things that the soul never forgets.

The soul, in the Sufi understanding, points us towards something deeper and more enduring within us. It is not dependent on our reputation, achievements, social position, appearance, or the opinions of other people.

Yet much of human suffering begins when we forget this.

There are moments when life can become so heavy that a person begins to wonder whether they want to continue living at all.

Sometimes this question is born from a single devastating loss. Sometimes it emerges after years of carrying more than the heart feels capable of holding. And sometimes, from the outside, nothing appears dramatically wrong—yet internally, a person feels so disconnected from themselves and from the meaning of their existence that life begins to feel impossible to bear.

From an Islamic and Sufi perspective, these moments are not evidence that someone is weak, ungrateful, or spiritually defective. They may be signs that a person has become profoundly disconnected from the deepest part of themselves: their soul.

The ego commands to evil, but do we truly recognize evil?

For a long time, I thought I knew what evil was: killing, stealing, deceiving, cheating, and things of the sort.

As I walk this path, I have come to realize that the nafs al-ammarah (the lower self or ego) is far more creative and illusory than most of us ever realize. And without learning to recognize what seeds evil, we can remain completely unaware of the ways it influences us.

The ego constantly seeks something outside itself to tell it who it is.

I am successful.

I am respected.

I am needed.

I am admired.

I have this relationship.

I have this career, this title, this reputation, this future.

At first glance, none of us see anything wrong with these statements. The problem begins when we become identified with them—when we no longer know who we are without a particular career or achievement, without the label of mother, father, wife, husband, helper, successful person, or anything else we have come to associate with our worth.

And this is where the nafs al-ammarah can gain the upper hand. Because, as we can see throughout history and in the world around us, human beings are capable of doing—and even justifying—terrible things in order to protect the identities they have built around themselves.

“I hold this position.”

“I have this much.”

“I am better.”

“I deserve this.”

When the preservation of an identity becomes synonymous with preservation of our existence and more important than truth, morality, or our relationship with Allah, the nafs can convince us that almost anything is justified if it allows us to keep believing the story we have constructed about who we are.

When the ego becomes completely fused with external structures, those structures stop being things we possess and begin to feel like extensions of our very being.

And then, if one of them collapses, something frightening can happen within the psyche.

A relationship ends. A career is lost. Our reputation changes. We fail at something that once gave us a sense of worth. The future we had imagined disappears.

The external structure begins to die.

But because the ego has confused that structure with who we are, a profound illusion can occur: if my identity is dying, then I must be dying too.

The collapse of an identity can begin to feel indistinguishable from the collapse of life itself.

Our challenges are signs of tension, not a death sentence

Our challenges reveal the places where something within us has become too rigid. Where we have outgrown an identity. Where an old survival mechanism is no longer serving us. Where the life we constructed around fear, approval, achievement, or control can no longer contain the person we are becoming.

The tension can be excruciating.

But tension does not mean that something has gone wrong beyond repair. It signals that something is asking to change.

The ego often interprets transformation as annihilation because it does not know how to distinguish between the death of an identity and the death of the self.

But they are not the same thing.

Sometimes, what feels like the end of everything is the painful dismantling of something we had mistaken for everything.

Why we must keep filling the soul with Light

This is perhaps why the work of nourishing the soul cannot be reserved only for moments of crisis.

Islam and Sufism teaches us that we must fill our souls with light every single day.

Just as we eat regularly to nourish the body, our inner world also needs consistent nourishment. We need moments that bring us back to Allah, back to ourselves, and back to the deeper reality beneath the noise of the ego.

Islam has always understood this principle of return and renewal. The Prophet ﷺ taught us to follow a bad deed with a good deed, which teaches us something profoundly hopeful about human nature:

We are not expected to move through life without ever falling into heedlessness or making mistakes.

Rather, we are taught that when we notice we have drifted, we can return.

We can respond.

We can add something healing where something harmful occurred.

We can bring light into a place where we recognize darkness has begun to gather.

Islam teaches us the reality that our souls are being constantly fed with something, whether that is darkness or light. And it is up to us to choose what we feed ourselves with, and find balance in it.

For example:

If we spend an hour in aimlessly scrolling (ghaflah), consuming things that leave us disconnected from ourselves, we do not need to condemn ourselves harshly. We recognize what we did, ask forgiveness and follow it with an action that gives you light instead of leaving you in a state of heaviness. We choose to consciously return to ourselves.

Actions that can bring us back to ourselves and into light include:

Mindful dhikr and salawat. Spending time in contemplation, having a conversation with ourselves about what led us into ghaflah. We might journal and get to know ourselves more deeply when something triggers us. We might sit quietly in gratitude for our bodies and our abilities. We might clean our home with the intention of caring for the space Allah has entrusted to us. We might go for a walk and notice the beauty of His creation. We might offer kindness to someone. We might do something that brings us back into presence—or, of course, we can read something Sufiquest wrote. 😄

This is not about keeping a rigid spiritual scorecard, where every moment of distraction must be perfectly compensated for by another moment of worship. That itself can become another exhausting demand of the ego.

It is about understanding that we are constantly being affected by what we give our attention to.

Some experiences leave us feeling more fragmented, disconnected, and asleep to ourselves. Others awaken us. They soften us. They remind us of Allah. They return us to the part of ourselves that is deeper than our fears and external identities.

And so, perhaps, the question we can ask ourselves throughout the day is:

What am I feeding my soul right now?

When life becomes difficult, this question becomes even more important.

Because a soul that has been consistently nourished with light may still feel pain deeply. It may still experience grief, depression, fear, and overwhelm. But beneath that pain, there may remain small threads connecting us to something greater than the story the wounded psyche is telling us.

The soul has survived every previous version of you.

The child you once were disappeared, yet you remained.

Old dreams disappeared, and you remained.

And this is why Islam and Sufism saved me from those moments where I personally did not want to end my life but I also did not see a way forward.

In Sufism, Ahl al-Nur refers to the "People of Light", and we can always pray to be among them. I made a video on this if you are interested. ➡️view here

I believe ending one's life is never the destiny Allah has written for us, it will always be a product of our own free will and through free will, we can also choose to remain long enough to discover who we are when the soul—not the ego—begins to lead us home again.

If you are personally struggling with thoughts of ending your life, please do not carry them alone. Reach out to someone you trust and seek immediate professional or emergency support if you may be in danger. You deserve support through this moment, even if part of you cannot yet imagine that things can change.

I would be so grateful if you explored the Soul Companions Collection or my new course, Remembering the Healer in You: A Sufi Approach.

In celebration of Mawlid al-Nabi ﷺ, the Soul Companions Collection is 50% off until 29 August.

I created them as a calling to feed light into my soul and in return, to provide you with tools that help activate what is already within you and bring a little more light to your soul, one moment at a time.

They are not a replacement for professional support, nor a promise that spirituality alone can resolve every form of suffering. They are simply invitations to pause, reflect, reconnect with your inner world, and feed your soul with what brings you closer to light.

Mawlid Mubarak 🎆🌠