Spirituality is not an important value to everyone. However, if you do find spirituality to be a part of your life, it can play a large role in your recovery success. By engaging in spiritual care practices that are meaningful to you, you can develop skills that also align with your needs in recovery.
What Is Spiritual Care?
Spiritual care practices emphasize the connection between your body, mind, and spirit. Similar to holistic treatment approaches, spiritual care can help you to establish a sense of balance in recovery.
This form of care can also help you explore your level of understanding of the world around you and assist you in finding your purpose in life. This is greatly beneficial in recovery, as it allows you to increase your self-worth and motivation to continue recovery.
Forms of Spiritual Care
There are many ways to engage in acts of spiritual care. As you review some of the following techniques and forms of spiritual care practice, you may discover a new method to implement into your recovery.
Meditation or Prayer
Engaging in acts of meditation is a great way to reset your emotions, stay grounded, and improve your level of self-awareness in your surroundings. This practice can help you strengthen your relationship with spiritual energies or increase your awareness and appreciation of your body and mind.
There are many benefits of meditation or meditative prayer for the recovery journey. For example, meditation is a great way to clear your mind of stressors. It opens a space for clear communication within your mind to further your understanding of your needs moving forward in recovery. It can also help you to establish a sense of mindfulness of your surroundings to incorporate your reality into your recovery journey.
Helping Others
Many individuals feel a strong sense of spiritual gratification by helping others. For example, many people who are going through recovery enjoy helping others in their recovery journeys as well.
You and everyone else in recovery have moments where support is needed. If a friend needs assistance in their recovery journey, lend a helping hand to them. This may not seem to be a spiritual care practice. However, many people find a sense of spiritual wellness through helping and bettering the lives of others.
To help others regularly, you can also choose to engage in volunteer work. If you feel you need an activity outside of recovery that helps build your spirituality, engaging in volunteer work with an outside association may be a good alternative.
Benefits of Spiritual Care
The benefits that can be achieved through acts of spiritual care go beyond the realm of recovery. While they do help with the recovery process, they can also help set you up for success in all areas of life.
The following benefits of spiritual care are greatly useful to take advantage of during this time of change in your life.
Alleviates Fears
It is common to feel high levels of fear throughout the recovery process. Through engagement in spiritual care practices, you can further understand what your end goals are and how you feel in your current state. When fear arises, you can use these practices to help create a clear vision of the future and help you live peacefully in the meantime.
Religious practices commonly alleviate many people’s fears as well. For example, religion helps many people come to peace with their eventual death, which is often a scary concept. Using spiritual care practices can alleviate anxiety about the unknown factors within our reality.
Through recovery, you will likely experience moments of uncertainty that can be intimidating. These practices can help you accept reality and understand what you need to produce the best outcome for yourself.
Refocuses Your Viewpoint
Through the stress of recovery, it can be easy to forget about your positive attributes. You may begin to feel a lack of self-worth and develop a negative perception of yourself and your abilities to complete the required tasks in recovery.
Engaging in spiritual care practices can help you to refocus your viewpoint towards your end goal. It can also help you reestablish your confidence in your abilities to achieve recovery success. Remember, you have all of the capabilities within you to be successful. You just have to learn how to apply those attributes and use them to your benefit. Spiritual care practices can help you to do this efficiently rather than attempting to escape your reality in an unhealthy way.
Promotes Forgiveness
After being involved with substance use, you may feel a form of resentment towards yourself or others who were involved in the onset of your substance use disorder. You may find that you blame yourself for your previous actions, putting you in your current situation.
Spiritual care practices can help you to accept your current reality and forgive yourself for the mistakes you have made. Recovery is an opportunity to create a new reality for yourself. Caring for your spirituality allows you to discover what you want your new reality to look like and forgive yourself for your past wrongs.
Spiritual care often lacks in recovery. If you find yourself to be a spiritually oriented individual, engaging in these practices can be highly beneficial for your recovery success. By implementing spiritual care practices, you can obtain various benefits. Some of these benefits include alleviating your fears, refocusing your mindset, and forgiving yourself and others for the resentments you are holding onto. Experiment with different spiritual care practices and try to find ones that resonate with you. These may include praying, meditating, helping others, or engaging in a religious or spiritual practice that you have previously used to your benefit. To learn more about how spiritual care can benefit your recovery, reach out to Dream Recovery at (657) 216-7218.