The Sufi path is described as stages: repentance, patience, gratitude, fear, hope, poverty, trust, and love, with the ego (nafs) worked on continuously. The metaphor is metallurgy — the self as ore, refined by heat. This is why Sufi orders imposed disciplines that look severe (retreats, sleep deprivation, silence, service), and why the sheikh matters: the tradition holds that the ego cannot supervise its own dismantling, so someone else must.