Keeping your soul alive in the contemporary workplace is an arduous challenge. In this paperback, David Whyte offers some salutary suggestions on how to do this. The author, an English-born poet, consults corporations on the importance of honoring the soulful lives of their workers.

What does he mean by the term soul? Whyte describes it as "the indefinable essence of a person's spirit and being." He sees the soul's signature in our deepest desires, passions, struggles, and changes. While most of us are still apt to think about the soul in more ethereal realms, Whyte sets out in this book to show its imperatives and activities at our jobs.

There are chapters on the ways the soul is evident in our struggles with power and vulnerability in the workplace, our creativity, our attempts to speak out at the office, our handling of innocence and experience in corporate actions, our midlife career challenges, our facing what is sweet and what is terrible, and our quest for an ecological imagination. Whyte helps us see that our souls are at stake when we wrestle with meaning, assess money's importance, relate to our co-workers, and express ourselves.

Using illustrative material from poetry, myths, and his own career experiences, the author makes it clear that silence, contemplation, self-doubt, the waters of the unconscious, grief, and personal renewal are essential to the shaping of our souls. We must pay attention to what is going on around us and what is happening inside us. This means making a special place for imagination in our lives — especially in our work. The Heart Aroused by David Whyte is poignant, poetic, and practical in its treatment of the preservation of soul on the job.