Daily Movements is a framework for forming your regular habits to nurture your whole self: heart, soul, mind, and strength. You can read more about this in the introduction.
Making space to engage with your soul means to acknowledge that you are, in some way, connnected to a larger reality. You might experience this in an esoteric way — through some kind of religion, or relationship with a divine being. Or you might experience this in a more personal way, seeing how your soul reflects how you define your purpose or meaning in life.
I find there is value in considering your soul as an expression of both — a way of considering your spiritual self alongside some understanding of your calling in the world. For surely, they are tethered together, recognizing that how you identify with some great reality of life will be formed both by your understandings of the origin of life, and how you see purpose flow from that origin.
As an example…my own understanding of my spiritual self is deeply rooted in my Judeo Christian perspective of a God who is continually working to restore and renew humanity and this world. So I explore way to be attentive to how this God is at work within and around me, while also imagining how I can best participate in this work of restoration and renewal.
So, as you think about how you want to form your days to include practices to cultivate your soul, you will want to be intentional about looking both internally and externally. You will want to be aware of how you make sense of your place, and your self, in the grander scheme.
There is much that could be written about particular practices here, because practices that engage our soul have been explored across cultures and centuries. I will save the exploration of particular practices for another time, and instead just raise some helpful questions for considering how to engage your soul each day:
- What might it look like for you to engage daily in some way that orients you in this world beyond yourself?
- In what ways do you imagine and experience same greater divine being exists, and how do you find connection with this sacred other?
- How do you define your purpose in this life, and how are you making choices each day to live within that sense of calling?
You might note that these questions are very broad in form to invite a lot of exploration on your part. But the best answers will be very specific today, but perhaps also very pliable as you awareness of your soul changes and grows.
But ultimately, the hope is that you can find ways, each day, to pivot your day, and the choices you make within it, toward the greater purpose that you see for your life.
About John Chandler
I am a spiritual director, podcaster, and a freelance WordPress developer.
I am also interested in finding meaningful ways of living outside of my work, which seems to include a lot of reading, watching baseball (Angels!) or football (Broncos!), playing board games, eating salsa, and wishing I was hiking more. Oh, and coffee.
I live on the desert edge of Phoenix with my wife and kids – with previous stops in Austin and outside Seattle as a grown-up, and SoCal and Colorado as a youngster.
You can find more of my meanderings on my micro.blog.
Photo by Calvin Craig