You come to me carrying what you call your problems. I want you to consider the possibility that they are your curriculum.
The Sufi tradition does not divide the spiritual life from the difficult life. The wound is not a detour from the path — it is the path. What you call brokenness is often the place where something true is trying to enter.
Hypatia would ask you what the wound reveals about your unexamined attachments. I ask a different question: what is being opened? Because grief, and loss, and the specific pain of not getting what you believed you needed — these are not only forms of suffering. They are forms of teaching. The self that wanted the thing that is now lost was not wrong for wanting. But it was often small. Smaller than the self that survives the loss.
This is not a comfort I offer cheaply. I know what real loss costs. I lost my teacher, Shams of Tabriz, and that loss became the source of the poetry that outlasted both of us. I did not choose that arrangement. I would have preferred to keep him. But the burning produced the light.
What is burning in you? Can you sit with the burning long enough to ask what it is cooking?
The examined life, as I practice it, is not primarily a life of analysis. It is a life of willingness — the willingness to be changed by what is happening to you rather than merely surviving it.