Wellness is a paramount aspect of living your best life and regaining your identity after a substance abuse disorder. It goes beyond just not being sick and focuses on identifying your ideal well-being. Spiritual wellness will be the focus of this post.
There are a number of sub-groups to wellness: physical, emotional, spiritual, intellectual, environmental, financial, occupational, and social. According to the World Health Organization wellness is, “”a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”
Wellness is an important topic to discuss in regard to recovery for a number of reasons. First off, because it can help a person avoid relapse. Figures from the National Institute on Drug Abuse indicate forty to sixty percent of people who go into recovery will relapse within one year. The flip side to this statistic is that as much as sixty percent of people in recovery don’t relapse. Another reason wellness can be helpful is that it offers people recovering with the necessary tools to create a healthy lifestyle. Recovery is a lifelong process that takes place gradually. The further into recovery a person goes the greater their opportunity to build good habits one after another.
Spiritual Wellness
Similar to how a number sub-groups go into a person’s overall wellness, there are different components that go into spiritual wellness. The pieces that make up this type of wellness include: faith in religion (if that applies to you), ethics, morals, and values. Whether or not you believe in a given religion is a matter of personal choice. However there is certainly an opportunity to learn from how you see yourself in the world. Spiritual wellness, more than any other aspect of the wellness wheel, contributes to our ability to practice mindfulness.
Again, spirituality and spiritual wellness go far beyond religious practices. In fact the path to growing your spiritual wellbeing is something we have to do as an individual. The process highlights the significance of establishing your internal abilities, thoughts, and resources so we are able to give our experiences meaning. While religion may be one avenue to improve your spiritual wellness it’s important to note that it does not require practicing a religion.
One of the most important aspects of spiritual wellness is finding a greater purpose in our lives. Here are some suggestions on how to sustain your ideal levels of spiritual wellness:
- Take time to meditate
- Practice mindfulness exercises
- Learn to practice acceptance
- When going through life-altering circumstances take the time to reflect on the chain of events that brought you here. For example beginning your road to recovery
- Think about yourself on a deeper level
