For him, controlling his eating became a spiritual exercise.

They are drawings intended as gifts to friends or patrons, or reflective, experimental works, serving the artist's own needs, often in the capacity of a spiritual exercise.

Ultimately, many were swallowed up in the gears of the industrial economy, still holding fast, however, to an after-hours life of spiritual exercise and intellectual enquiry.

What an important spiritual exercise awaited us.

So in a sense it was also a spiritual exercise in self-purging and cleansing.