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Spiritual fitness is a crucial part of a having a holistic wellness practice. It’s aim is at cultivating a meaningful and fulfilling life experience, adding to overall wellness. It involves building a unified belief system that supports collective well-being.
It’s about developing the ability to find purpose, meaning, and persist in life despite its challenges. Moreover, it enables us to maximize the life we have and live with intention.
Building spiritual fitness can be easier than you might think. But it’s an art that also requires practice and consistency to master. In this post, I have listed 11 practices that I have found helpful in enhancing spiritual fitness.
If you’re just getting started, don’t know what spirituality is, and need a quick 101, please visit: Spiritual Fitness: How To Make A Conscious Link
Set Intentions To Achieve Spiritual Goals
When you start building spiritual fitness, the first thing to do is set an intention. This can be anything from wanting to be more grateful in your life, to desiring deeper connections to others. Setting intentions will help you stay focused, have a form of reference if things get confusing, and remind yourself of why you embarked on this journey to begin with.
1. Physical Fitness Builds Spiritual Fitness
As we embark on a spiritual journey, it’s important to stay actively engaged in improving or maintaining our physical health. We use our body in a way that can significantly influence our ability to master the art of spiritual fitness. In fact, our body is the vessel we use to connect, communicate, and process information through its five senses and beyond. So it’s of upmost importance that our bodies are optimized for processing information.
Additionally, improving our spiritual abilities involves focusing on mental fitness. Our bodies and minds are connected, so approaching both aspects of ourselves with care is of utmost importance. We can achieve this by eating nutritionally and exercising physical and mental strength activities regularly. These activities will provide our body and brain with the power to function appropriately. It will also prepare the body’s ability to receive and process information from a spiritual perspective.
Furthermore, enhancing our ability to connect spiritually involves eating mindfully. An example of mindful eating can involve taking a few seconds before you eat to express appreciation for what you’re consuming,
Practicing gratitude for the food we have and the people who helped bring it to our plate helps us stay connected to our spiritual path. Another way to practice mindful eating includes trying to focus on what the food tastes like or how it makes us feel.
2. Having a Purpose Develops Spiritual Fitness
Having a profound purpose in life is an excellent quality for building spiritual fitness. Before diving into how purpose is tied to spiritual fitness, it’s important to note a few things;
First, without belief in what we do, we are prone to getting bogged down by the daily grind and losing sight of the goals that are more important to us.
Second, when we are not deeply invested in what we do, it can lead to burnout and even contribute to problems like depression and anxiety. Connecting to and pursuing our purpose provides us with a source of motivation and a sense of direction.
Connecting to a strong sense of meaning in the things we actively participate in not only helps us persist through tough times, it’s a gateway to connecting spiritually. The ability to seek a deeper connection can significantly influence our ability to connect spiritually and build spiritual fitness.
There are various ways you can connect to your purpose, here are a few:
Finding a mentor – Having a mentor who can guide you through your journey and help you side step common mistakes is an excellent way to find your purpose and ultimately, build spiritual fitness.
Embrace your passion – Passion is what drives us to persist resulting in success. In order to have success in cultivating spiritual fitness, you will need to learn to embrace your passions.
Create a purpose statement – Your purpose statement can include a general summary of your core values and why’s. It’s something you can refer to in times of distress or uncertainty to remind yourself of why you embarked on the path.
3. Keeping a Daily Practice Develops Spiritual Fitness
Incorporating spiritual practices into our daily routine can help us connect better and transform our life. There are so many different spiritual practices that you can start. What matters most is that you choose a practice (or multiple practices) and commit to it. No two people will have the same practices, but many can help connect us spiritually. Here are a few spiritual practices that can be helpful:
- Yoga
- Inspirational quotes, stories, or talks
- Walks in nature
- Deep breathing exercises
- Meditation
4. Cultivating Gratitude Develops Your Spiritual Abilities
Cultivating gratitude and incorporating gratitude practices into your everyday life is one of the best ways to develop spiritual fitness.
Gratitude puts us in a state of appreciation, a condition we are typically in after gaining spiritual insights about both good or bad things. Learning to have gratitude, even when things go wrong, can be a powerful skill. Because even when we experience things that we don’t like, we learn how we’re connected and hold space for them, appreciating the indirect way they offer value.
A simple way to incorporate a gratitude practice can involve writing down three things that you are grateful for each day, no matter how small they may be. The more you practice gratitude for the smaller things, the more you build an ability to have even more meaningful experiences.
When you acknowledge the positive and express appreciation for it, you avoid getting bogged down by life’s negativity. This can help you avert creating chronic pessimism which can reduce your enjoyment in life and impact your ability to cultivate gratitude. An inability to feel gratitude can hurt your physical, mental, and overall well-being hindering your spiritual fitness.
Developing a more positive outlook on life can help you avoid these issues, cultivate gratitude, and ultimately enhance your spiritual fitness.
5. Practice Emotional and Mental Hygiene To Build Spiritual Fitness
Encountering negative thoughts and emotions is not an abnormal part of the human experience. But if we find these patterns of thinking and feeling obstructing our overall wellness, we should further explore why we have them in the first place.
Constantly being bogged down with negative thoughts and emotions can get in the way our spiritual growth, limiting our perspective.
Learning to understand the root causes of our negative thoughts and emotions is a crucial step in transforming them and developing overall wellness, which includes spiritual fitness.
This process may sometimes require the assistance of a professional. They have the expertise to help us move forward and work through these challenges.
6. Building a Strong Support System Enhances Spiritual Connection
Healthy relationships are an important part of a holistically fit lifestyle. They provide us with a sense of support, encouragement, and make us better people.
Strengthening our bonds with others enhances overall well-being and boosts spiritual fitness. A helpful way to form healthier connections with others is by reducing the number of people in our inner circle.
This helps us prioritize those who are a better fit for us. Proper relationship management can go a long way to enhancing connections to others and boosting overall spiritual fitness.
Equally important to forming healthy bonds is making an effort to form a healthy connection with ourselves. Cultivating self-awareness, self-acceptance, and self appreciation is a crucial part of a well-rounded routine essential to living a spiritually robust life.
When you learn to accept yourself better, warts and all, you become better at accepting others. This connection can even help you avoid unnecessary drama and confrontations, conserving your energy for quality experiences.
7. Helping Others Amplifies Spiritual Fitness
Helping others is one of the best ways to connect spiritually. When you volunteer, you’re focused on connecting with others and their needs. You’re also experiencing gratitude for the ability to help them. In addition to that, you are in a state of appreciation for the ability to help others which reminds you to also acknowledge the unique advantages you abundantly possess.
8. Regular Outdoor Activity Boosts Spiritual Fitness
Getting outdoor activity in regularly is one of the best ways to connect with your body to maintain an overall physically, mentally, and spiritually fit state.
For example, outdoor workouts are an inexpensive way to reap the benefits of overall fitness. Another advantage of exercising outdoors is that you can include activities that may easily be modified to fit your level and needs.
In addition to that, outdoor workouts simultaneously allow you to connect to nature and reap the benefits of sunshine, moon light, bodies of water, green grass and hugging trees. This activity does wonders for overall wellness including facilitating a spiritual connection.
9. Meditation Builds Spiritual Fitness
Meditation can be one of the best practices used to improve overall wellness, including spiritual fitness. In fact, meditation has been shown to help reduce stress, achieve greater clarity, and improve emotional well-being helping us get in better spiritual shape.
Most people think that meditation is just about clearing the mind of all thoughts. However, this is a misconception and can cause people to give up on it too soon. Meditation is actually a practice of cultivating greater awareness from our experiences.
What this means in relation to thoughts is that meditation is surprisingly about connecting to our thoughts. By connecting to our thoughts we develop a deeper understanding of them. Yet, the way in which we need to connect to our thoughts is from an observer perspective- without judgement.
After exploring our thoughts, without labeling them as good or bad, we develop the clarity needed to choose the best response to them. The idea is to cultivate a stronger sense of awareness that helps us understand our thoughts, emotions, and resulting behaviors to intentionally transform the quality of our lives.
There are many forms of meditation techniques that can help us connect spiritually and build spiritual fitness. For example, breath work, a deep breathing exercise, can enhance our spiritual abilities when incorporated to meditation.
As a beginner mediator, you should try a guided meditation for best results because instruction is offered throughout the exercise.
10. Connect to Other Worldviews To Build Spiritual Fitness
If you’re serious about building spiritual fitness you need to learn to connect to other worldviews. Yet, before connecting to other people’s perspective, you need to develop a strong sense of awareness for your own. This involves attaching a filter for the type of information being consumed by all of your senses, including your mind.
Once you get a sense of how different pieces of information gets processed through your five senses you realize how it influences different aspects of your life. This clarity helps you begin to understand others a lot better.
Start by reading books, watching YouTube videos, or listening to podcasts about different philosophies or religions, the human psyche, or metaphysical theories. Learning about these topics will help you connect to different people, cultures, and their ways of thinking. Additionally, exposure to other worldviews can help you learn to form your own unique viewpoints on life and build on the ones you have.
11. Forgiveness Builds Spiritual Fitness
The ability to forgive is a value that is deeply linked with spiritual fitness. Forgiveness is powerful for improving our mental, physical, emotional, and overall health.
On the flip side, holding on to resentments towards others can have a devastating impact on overall wellness. And it’s equally devastating when holding resentment towards yourself. Learning how to forgive and be forgiven can have a significant impact on your overall well-being including spiritual fitness.
Worthy of mentioning, forgiveness is not the same as accepting the actions of another as correct. Forgiveness is about going through a transformative healing process. This journey involves learning to process, reshape, or release the negative emotions we have developed by our response to the actions of others.
These feelings can include deep resentment or grudges we are holding onto. Forgiveness can be an emotionally difficult process to go through, but it has profoundly positive physical, mental, emotional, and overall health benefits.
When practicing forgiveness, do not expect it to happen overnight. We will always encounter disappointment with others. So, it’s a lifelong process that takes commitment and practices in place to achieve.
Conclusion
A stronger sense of spirituality can have a positive impact on overall wellness, contributing to better spiritual fitness.
Finding a sense of purpose, practicing gratitude, and fostering meaningful relationships with others are all important aspects of overall wellness that can help build a more robust spiritual experience.
Finding balance through exercise and meditation, as well as learning when to forgive and be forgiven, can also help enhance spiritual fitness, contributing to a better overall quality of life.
Daily Planner: How To Get Organized & Achieve Harmony
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