Beyond its role in defining Sufism's place within Islam, ihsan generated specific spiritual disciplines designed to cultivate the state the Hadith of Gabriel describes, and two of these, muraqaba and muhasaba, became standard elements of Sufi training.
Muraqaba, watchfulness or vigilant awareness, is the practice of maintaining continuous consciousness of God's presence throughout ordinary activity, a direct behavioral application of "worship God as though you see Him; for if you do not see Him, He sees you." Sufi manuals describe graduated levels of muraqaba, from a beginner's periodic recollection to an advanced practitioner's sustained, effortless awareness, and the practice is frequently paired with dhikr, the repeated remembrance of God through specific formulas, as its verbal complement.
Muhasaba, self-accounting, complements muraqaba by directing attention backward rather than to the present moment: a disciplined nightly or periodic review of one's actions, words and intentions against the standard ihsan sets, aimed at identifying lapses in the awareness muraqaba is meant to sustain. The practice draws on the Qur'anic injunction that "every soul should look to what it has sent forth for tomorrow" (59:18), and Al-Ghazali treated muhasaba as an indispensable check without which spiritual progress could not be reliably assessed, since a person's own sense of their state, unexamined, is an unreliable witness to it. Together the two practices operationalize ihsan as an ongoing discipline of attention rather than a state attained once and thereafter simply possessed.