The Evil Eye and the Good Eye

People don’t decide how they feel around us based on our best lines. They decide based on our state, the invisible atmosphere we bring into the room through our eyes, our timing, our voice, and the quality of our attention. I’m digging into energetics from an Islamic life coaching lens and giving it language that feels concrete, not woo woo: what you call “energy” is your nervous system meaning paired with your emotions, and it gets transmitted long before you speak. 

We break down a simple framework (circumstance, nervous system meaning, emotions, action, results) to show how one moment can create two totally different inner worlds. When someone else is thriving, the meaning we assign can quietly produce jealousy and contraction even while our words stay polite. Shift the meaning toward trust in Allah’s provision, and the emotional state changes into openness, generosity, and genuine joy. That inner change is not just personal growth. It’s purification of the heart in real time, shaping how we interpret people, how we respond to family, and how our presence lands. 

Then we connect this to a concept that deserves more attention: the good eye. We’re so careful about the evil eye, but what about becoming someone whose gaze, expectations, and dua carry barakah for others? The good eye isn’t empty praise. It can include hard truth without hidden satisfaction, correction with high regard, and a presence that leaves people feeling more dignified and peaceful after being with you. If you want practical spiritual tools, emotional regulation, and deeper Islamic character work, press play, then subscribe, share with a friend, and leave a review so more people can find it.

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Transcript

Why People Feel You First

SPEAKER_01 0:04

Welcome to Islamic Life Coach School Podcast. Apply tools that you learn in this podcast and your life will be unrecognizably successful. Now your host, Dr. Gamal Abdur.

SPEAKER_00 0:16

Hello, hello, hello everyone. Peace and blessings be upon all of you. Today I'm gonna be talking about the topic of energetics, and I've spoken about this before in the context of evil eye, and this is building up on that topic with the new concept of the good eye. What I want to emphasize today is that people meet your state before they meet you with your words. And this is a form of communication that happens between you and another human being before either of you say any words. We usually call this a vibe, an energy, a chemistry. It's much more at an intuitive level, and you know it in your body as just something about her. But we do not have a very precise everyday language for what is happening. And as always, I want to give you exactly that. I want you to be able to understand better and produce it in your life. I'm going to be talking about the state. The state is what is happening inside of you that is already showing up outside of you, with or without your knowledge. Your face communicates it, your gaze, your timing, your posture, your tone, your attention, everything communicates it. And this state is the reason why your spiritual development cannot only be about learning with words and having more knowledge. At some point what you know has to become who you are. Because the people closest to you specially are not primarily living with the information you give them, they're living with your state. And this is very prominent in the teachings of the Prophet, peace be upon him, where he conveyed to his companions not just information but realities, character, presence through companionship. And there's something very profoundly Islamic about the idea of transformation that occurs in Surba, in the right company. Communication that is happening at the embodiment level. This is the state of the heart, or your kalb. And language matters because learning happens with the level of the language, but the state, the kalb also matters because this is the state of being that you transmit. What I'm calling this energy is what begins with your nervous system. We use the word energy as though some mysterious substance is floating about you, and as per usual, I'm on to define this non dual experience in duality by giving it language. Because that's the only way our minds make sense of things. I want to define energy and presence in words, so once this idea goes from being woo woo to having some concreteness, you can then translate it into your life and benefit off of it.

Defining State And Energy Clearly

SPEAKER_00 2:55

So I describe this algorithm C-NIR, C dash N E A R that stands for circumstance, nervous system meaning, emotions, action, and results. The emphasis right now is on the nervous system meaning that you give to what is happening. That N, the meaning, the sentence that you think creates your emotional state, the E. This is the emotional state with which and from which you encounter the other person. So when I'm describing to you what energy you carry, what state you're in, what I'm actually describing is your nervous system meaning and your emotional pair, the mind and the feelings. This bond is fundamentally inseparable because as soon as your mind creates a meaning, your body produces an emotion, and all of this happens before you get to your behavior.

How Meaning Creates Jealousy Or Joy

SPEAKER_00 3:48

Okay, so let's imagine for example a woman walks into a room looking beautiful, successful, and confident, and your circumstance is simply that she walked into the room. But the meaning you might be assigning to the circumstance, the language you might be thinking is that she thinks she's better than everyone. Everyone's going to notice her. Why does everything come so easily to her? I wonder what is she really going through in her marriage? Nobody's life is that perfect. And based on these sentences that your mind has generated, your emotions might be insecurity, suspicion, contraction of your inner energy, jealousy, irritation. You might behave perfectly on the surface level. You might hug her, you might say, Masha'Allah, you look beautiful, but you're saying all of these things while internally resenting why she has those cheekbones. The internal state affects your nonverbal communication. So now let's consider in the same example that we change the meaning. She walks in the room and this time something completely different happens. You think to yourself, Allah gave her this beauty and success. Her provision does not remove anything from mine. I love seeing a Muslim woman flourish. Ya Allah protect what you gave her and increase her in what is good, and give me what is good for me. Now notice what happens to the emotions that follow the meanings you've just made of the same situation. There's generosity, there's openness, there's genuine delight, there's admiration. And all of these emotions change your energy that you emit. The quality of your attention changes. This attractive, successful woman standing in front of you is gonna be encountering the same physical person that is you, but she is no longer encountering the same state. And this is the thought and emotional pair. This is the qalb. This is the energy that you give off. This state is built in the heart, it is transmitted through you as an energy, as vibrations generated in your body, that is then picked up by other people's nervous systems, like you're emitting some sort of a radio frequency and their antenna picks up on these frequencies. And before you or the other person acknowledge any of this with words, before you can recognize with language what is happening, before these radio waves are converted into sound or language, you are still picking up on this energy.

Purifying The Heart Changes Everything

SPEAKER_00 6:14

This is why the purification of the heart is not some abstract spiritual hobby for a select few people. Purification of the heart, this Gia The Nuffs changes perception, what we experience the world through and how the world experiences us, all of that is according to the state of the heart. If your lens is colored with resentment, you will continually discover evidence that people are disrespecting you, and your energy towards others will be of disrespect, which will prove your original belief to be true. If your lens is colored by envy, then other people's blessings are going to look like evidence of your deprivation, and that deprivation is going to come around full circle in your life. But when that lens becomes cleaner, your energy level becomes of a higher caliber, and you start interacting with the world at a whole new level. You begin to see another woman's success without turning it into commentary about yourself. If you see your husband making a mistake, you don't instantly decide what it says about his entire character. The purification of the heart changes the meanings you generate, and those meanings change the emotions with which you meet your life. And that of course changes the energy that you emit into the world, and this changes the way people interact with

Raising Your Energy With Intentions

SPEAKER_00 7:39

you. How are you going to raise that energy level? How are you going to refine the meaning that you're making about the world? And that comes through with the pyramid of intentions. Think of it as a pyramid, kind of like the food pyramid. At the basic foundation are intentions about you. In the middle are the intentions about other people, including the global majority, like the community or the world or the Ummah. And then at the top of the pyramid is Allah. Putting Allah at the top of the pyramid of intentions. And that is because once something else occupies the top, every level underneath is going to become distorted. So at the foundational level, you might be trying to improve your intentions as they are related to you. You might be asking questions like how do I want her to perceive me? How do I want to be perceived? How do I make sure I am protected? I'm respected? How do I make sure that my child knows to follow the religion? How do I become a good Muslim, a good mother, a good wife, a good professional? And as you can see, there's nothing wrong with this level of intentions, it's just that this is rooted around you. And this is the level of identity work that you need to do sometimes because you are living in this world. As we move higher in the pyramid of intentions to the second level, we go up a notch. We start asking different questions like how do I want to serve others in this world? How can I be more generous, more receptive, more courageous? How do I emit a character that helps others? How do I tell the truth without being cruel towards others? How do I remain loving and respectful and don't abandon my own boundaries? The second level of pyramid of intentions has every language has to do with other people. Now the third and the topmost tier of the intentions has to do with Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala and how your intentions are related to Him. And again, we're doing all of this because we want to elevate ourselves, we want to elevate our energy that we're operating in the world from. And this is one of the most concrete methods that I can teach you to be able to

Putting Allah At The Top

SPEAKER_00 9:53

do that. Now at the topmost level of intentions, your energy reorganizes. You ask questions like, Ya Allah, how do I want to stand before you during this interaction? What would sincerity for your sake look like? What would mercy for your sake look like? What would justice, what would beautiful character for the sake of Allah look like? How do I want to receive this woman and how do I want to be received by this woman because me and all of us belong to you? Now the meaning your mind gives to the situation through the lens by centering Allah is a completely different level of vibration. That's gonna bring such abundant emotions that it's gonna become really hard for you to be constricted. It's gonna be really hard for you to be in a low vibrational energy. When Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is genuinely at the top of your intentions, the purification of the emotions follows seamlessly. And instead of desperation you start to feel trust. Instead of competition you feel generosity. This is an entirely different state that you carry with you in a room and into the world.

From Evil Eye To Good Eye

SPEAKER_00 11:04

Now how is all of this connected to the original point that I made about evil eye and the good eye? One of my teachers, Baraka Blue, said in one of his videos People always talk about the evil eye, but people don't talk about the good eye. And I'm using the phrase good eye in a spiritual sense that is intended in this teaching, which is the possibility that the state of a purified heart becomes perceptible through another person's gaze and presence. And I think this whole idea deserves so much more attention than we give it. Because as Muslims we are remarkably sophisticated when it comes to worrying about who might give us the evil eye. We know when to say Mashallah, we know when to do Adgar. We know not to post the pictures of our vacation because we don't want to attract somebody else's evil eye and we're constantly conducting this risk assessment, which are all good things. But I also want you to consider a much more profound question. What about the good eye of the people? What about the people that are carrying good energy towards you? And what about you becoming a person that's carrying good energy towards the world? The conversation about the good eye forces us to look at the other side of the coin, which is much more interesting. This good eye is the state and energy that you carry that transmits abundance from you to others and from others to you. These are again the radio waves that are of a very high caliber. It is being emitted from a person who can see something beautiful in your life and sincerely ask Allah to increase it. It is a mother who looks at her daughter and communicates without giving constant motivational speeches. She says I see capacity in you, I trust what Allah has placed in you. Your mistakes do not frighten me into controlling you. It is the face of that spouse who tells you I am not collecting your weaknesses for future litigation. It is a teacher that looks at a student and makes them feel very comfortable and peaceful. All of this happening because of high caliber energy vibrations. And this is the foundation of the good eye. And this good eye is not flattery. It is not you just needing a friend to tell you that you're amazing all day. That is not what it's about. Sometimes the person with the cleanest heart towards you will tell you something that you don't want to hear, that's uncomfortable for you. The difference is that her correction does not contain the secret satisfaction of seeing you being brought down a notch. And trust me, you can feel this distinction. There are people who correct you from their sense of superiority, and there are people who correct you while holding an extraordinarily high regard about you. And this is the difference in the internal state that I've been trying to describe. This is the difference between evil eye and the good eye energy. Imagine becoming the person who is the vehicle of the good eye for everyone around

How The Good Eye Travels

SPEAKER_00 14:12

her. The good eye travels between people. It travels through very ordinary pathways, which is a part of why we underestimate it. It travels through your eyes when you look at someone, it travels through your behavior overtly. Otherwise, very covertly and very commonly it travels through your facial expressions when someone tells you good news or bad news. It travels through whether you lean in or emotionally withdraw into discomfort or into pleasure and joy. It travels through the warmth and the coldness that's carried into your voice, how quickly you interrupt, how much you're able to actively listen, whether you become curious or whether you become opinionated, whether you make space for the other person to finish her thought, or whether you remember what matters to her and what doesn't. If you encounter being around somebody with a high vibrational state, you will feel more dignified, more peaceful, more joyful, more courageous just after being with them. And the same needs to be true when other people are around you, that they can say the same things about them when they're around you. The good eye also travels through your expectations. Human beings are remarkably sensitive to what other people expect of them. If a child repeatedly encounters a mother's state of something is wrong, why did you do this? I have to fix it immediately. This child is going to experience something very different from a child who is encountering something different. A mother that is saying, I believe you can learn to handle this, I believe you can do difficult things, and I've got your back. It's possible that both of these mothers will hold identical vocabulary, but they're going to be giving off completely different energies.

Dua And A New Response To Fear

SPEAKER_00 16:01

The good eye also travels through dua, which is one of its purest forms. You ask Allah for the other person to be successful. There's no need for performance here, there's no requirement of reciprocity. You just do it because you genuinely want blessings in their life. You turn towards Allah and ask Him to protect them and increase Baraka in their life. This is you training your heart. This is you elevating your own energy. So when you fear the evil eye, ask Allah for the good eye as well. And the next time you're afraid of the evil eye, I want you to experiment with a completely different response from you. Take the Islamic protections seriously. Make dua, do your atkar, say masha Allah, seek refuge in Allah, and don't unnecessarily flaunt your blessings if you don't want to. But then instead of allowing your mind to spend hours scanning the world for people who might secretly resent you, elevate your own energy into what you would want to see the world respond to you with. Pray for the good eye. Give off the energy.