Exercising Your Soul

A fitness program for the soul that offers simple techniques to recharge your spirit and enhance your relationships with yourself, with others, and most importantly, with God. Jansen's engaging, personal style brings to life each of the practices he suggests as he shares his own growth through the disciplines.

"Exercise Your Soul." It sounds lovely, doesn't it? But what does it actually mean? And how the heck do you even begin to do it? And why does it matter? If you are at all intrigued by the notion of exercising your soul, this book will support you to understand, internalize and personalize the practice, by: learning valuable tools to get started, or keep you moving forward, on your personal growth journey; cultivating personal possibility, passion and peace; increasing awareness of areas of your life that are undone and are asking for special attention; being empowered in your own journey; realizing your power to effect change in yourself and the world around you.This is a powerful opportunity where you are invited to participate in your own evolutionary process and neural upgrading by cultivating space to experience a new reality. This happens as you use your tools and implement the great ideas you read and hear about into your actual real, daily life. As you do this, you wake up anew, knowing the GOOD that is before you, within you, moving through you in this very moment. Come Exercise Your Soul with me!

In these pages, Dr. Bernie S. Siegel offers 101 simple exercises for the soul, a divine plan for healing yourself and transforming your life. With his trademark humor and insight, he becomes your “workout coach,” giving you this wonderful series of short and easy-to-apply exercises to help you achieve your potential and live a more peaceful, loving, and fulfilling life. As Bernie writes in the introduction, “Before you know it, you will begin to notice how your life has taken on more meaning and how much better you feel....The Force is with you. Believe me.”

Bestselling author and personal trainer helps readers learn a healthy approach to faith, food, and fitness through walking.

The author offers one hundred exercises for improving the health of the soul, showing readers how to overcome obstacles, create a positive mental attitude, and foster empowerment.

Both physical fitness and spiritual development are popular topics today. This book puts the two together with 48 stories about real people who discovered, often by chance, a connection between their physical activity and their spiritual awareness. The stories are about ordinary people of all ages, from all walks of life, and with all levels of physical fitness and ability. The stories will inspire and motivate readers to be attentive to the spiritual dimension of their own physical activities.

Using the words soul and workout in the same sentence may seem implausible and stretching artistic licence too far, but in the Soul Workout book, the improbable becomes believable and the only stretching to be done is metaphorical. An imaginary visit to the gym for a workout becomes a metaphor for the spiritual disciplines of Bible reading, prayer, and contemplative reflection. Going to the gym may not be everybody’s cup of tea, but when the idea is transposed into the metaphor, everyone can breathe a sigh of relief: lycra and dumbbells will not be required. What is needed is a willingness to be open to prayer, spiritual reflection, and a desire to look for creative ways to deepen your faith journey: this is what Soul Workout offers. By methodically guiding you through the metaphor, Janice Speddings shows how different aspects of the gym have their spiritual counterpart: so cardiovascular exercise is likened to time spent building a deeper relationship with God (the heart and life-blood of the Christian faith) while spiritual weight-resistance exercise is seen as a way of learning to carry life’s burdens with added strength and resilience. You need no previous experience of contemplative prayer as all the exercises are fully explained and offered at basic or advanced levels. Part 1 includes a helpful chapter for those with little or no experience of planning and running a group event while part 2 works through the metaphor step-by-step, including spiritual reflections as exercises: extra tips are offered for group leaders. Part 3 deals with hanging on to the feel-good factor after the workout is finished. As a tried-and-tested metaphor, this inspirational book provides a down-to-earth, easy-to-read resource for groups and individuals alike—an essential companion for your spiritual journey.