Why Fitness Is a Spiritual Practice: Shuli Goldstein of Studio Soul

First of all, the fact that you named a gym with the word soul in it, and we're obviously on a soul growth in Israel, but how do you even, because a lot of people draw a line in the sand and say, okay, this is spiritual and this is physical.

That's fitness.

That's holy.

It seems that you want to merge the two.

Can you speak on that? 100%.

Um, so I'll speak on a macro level for a minute and then we'll bring it to a micro level.

A lot of, a lot of things in Yiddish kite, uh, we speak about like these big concepts talking about God and talking about the world at large.

And then we're able to see within ourselves also micro versions of that to make it very personal for us.

So according to Hasidus, there's this idea on a macro level that Hashem craves Adira.

which means a dwelling place in, literally means dwelling, dira, betaktonim, in the lower realms, which if you aren't watching the video, I'm doing air quotes right now, lower realms.

But this world is supposedly like the lowest realm.

And rather than thinking that we want to ascend and leave this world and go up towards God, in reality, really, the biggest desire is for this space to become a kli, a vessel for godly energy.

Yeah.

And so you have this, like what you said, seemingly you have this spiritual and this physical and the two don't go together.

But in reality, God doesn't want us to try and ascend and leave the physical, rather make that physical a space where he's comfortable.

Adira is an apartment.

It's a place where you feel comfortable.

So making this world a space in which godliness feels so comfortable, feels so aligned, feels so... true um and that's what we're trying to do on a macro on the micro because we're made we're in in the image of god so man is actually a micro version of the macro that's happening on this world and a personal dear i would say is your soul in your body so our soul is a piece of god it's literally a piece of god and the more that we make our body a proper vessel and a cleave for our soul, the more that we feel embodied and the more our soul feels comfortable in our body.

And the less scared our soul is to then go and interact with the physical world because it's not coming into our body from a place of fear.

It's

coming into our body from a place of alignment and connection.

And then we're actually able to bring going back to the macro.

We're able to create a dear bit for the rest of the world because we're coming at it from a place of already having that embodiment and And ideally, when the entire world becomes a deer, which we're in the process of doing, that's what Mashiach is.

What's Mashiach? There's not really a separation between the physical and the spiritual because we don't have this false presumption that physical is going to pull me away from connecting to God.

You'll see physicality and just