Wellness

Most substance abuse/addiction rehabilitation plans focus almost entirely on the mental and spiritual well-being of the addict. While these are obviously foundational elements of recovery, the whole person needs rehabilitation. This means nutritionally and physically working to repair the myriad traumas to which we have subjected our bodies. In my experience it is all-too-common to find buckets full of cigarette butts outside every door of a treatment or regular meeting facility while inside gallon after gallon of coffee is consumed ravenously.

We addicts aren’t exactly awesome at moderation (how else did we end up here?!?) and we most often substitute one seemingly less-harmful addiction for that from which we are trying to recover. In the course of our active addiction we necessarily put our bodies through hell and that might not stop upon our earnest attempt to get clean and sober. While we work to change our “stinking thinking,” we don’t often work to make ourselves truly, wholly healthy.

There doesn’t seem to be a very typical occurrence of even the most basic of attempts within the recovery community to educate folks on the necessity of overall wellness; we will literally spend hours at a time talking through our “spiritual malady” and our diseased thinking but not often do we touch on taking care of the bodies that we have driven to terminal velocity for years. It is a very rare person who has the opportunity to carry the message forward when dealing with constantly ill health.

We must start to emphasize for ourselves a bit of physical health if we want to do all of the living that we haven’t done over the years or decades of addiction. Just like getting sober, sometimes we have to take it 10 minutes or one hour at a time. Start small and then progress towards a place of balanced, healthy living for our bodies, minds and spirits.

As humans we are that total package of mind, body and spirit and the neglect of any aspect of our heath is us doing ourselves a grave disservice. I am not advocating that everyone in recovery from an addiction or compulsion become an ultra-marathoner or Iron(wo)man triathlete; I do know that we must start slowly and being to take care of our bodies in the way in which we were intended. We must be as kind to our physical selves are we are to our spiritual.