Feed Your Hungry Soul
Awaken Your Loving Heart
Filled with metaphorical twists on familiar ideas, Feed Your Hungry Soul is a piquing spiritual essay collection.
Victor Acquista’s spiritual essay collection Feed Your Hungry Soul is about shifting worldviews, love-fueled actions, and consciousness-raising.
About unity and universal love that transcends religion and dogma, these essays are rife with suggestions for connecting to the divine, being joyful, and living as a beacon of love and compassion in a world of suffering and chaos. Ways to love everyone all the time, transform one’s thoughts from negative to positive, align with the soul’s essence, and focus on gratitude are named, all to usher audiences toward states of “embodied spirituality.” Each section of the book ends with approachable reflection questions and suggested practices to help put its principles to use.
Symbolism-heavy illustrations accompany each essay, inviting new visions of mundane objects including a cup, a shell, and a raindrop on a leaf. Likewise, metaphors lead many of the essays. Some are clichéd and dated, though all aim to foster appreciation for simple truths. For example, the image of an egg becoming a chicken is used to invite musings on the human struggle to break out of one’s shell and the seeming miracle of a few cells turning into a sentient life. Elsewhere, the wearing of sunglasses is extrapolated into a reflection on hiding one’s authentic self behind a wall of fears, and a snake shedding its skin is used to suggest that letting go of what’s unneeded is a necessary component of growth.
Spiritual insights and ideas about the everyday recur, made provocative with inversions of the expected. Indeed, notions of hope and patience are turned on their heads, both argued to be anathema to living in the present; and herein, goods and services are about doing what’s good and being of service, or desirable ways to structure society. Elsewhere, the fable of the lazy grasshopper who fiddles all summer while industrious ants work to store food for the winter is also re-envisioned, with the grasshopper treated as the hero for living in the moment and trusting that the future will take care of itself.
However, the book falls short on accounting for nuances in human experiences: While acknowledging that the world is a mess and that daily life is busy and full of distractions, its generalized recommendations gloss over challenges such as living with chronic stress, depression, lack of support, financial difficulties, and other real-world issues.
A contemplative essay collection, Feed Your Hungry Soul aims to speak to a range of spiritual seekers.
Reviewed by
Patty Sutherland
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
