One of the most important messages in Sacred Recovery by Paula Butero is wholeness in healing—body, mind, and spirit. It’s easy enough to become bogged down in working with one part of recovery, for instance, working with addiction’s psychological impact or working towards healing in a physical sense with trauma. But sustained, effective healing takes into consideration the interrelated character of all three parts. By working with mind, body, and spirit together, in harmony, we have a balanced, whole-person model for healing.
Recovery isn’t about freeing oneself from addiction’s chains, healing one’s inner wounds, and nothing else. It’s about getting life in tune and in touch with one’s purpose in life. It’s about healing all parts of oneself—the body, the heart, and the soul. Until one is healed, it can hinder the others, preventing real recovery. That’s why one must have in one’s journey of recovery, spiritual practice. That’s a bridge that brings together mind, body, and soul.
In Sacred Recovery, Butero invites one to permit a consideration that healing can become deeper at both a physical and an emotional level. As one attunes to one’s spirituality, a peace and calm settle over one, and one is then able to navigate challenge with ease and dignity. By prayer, through meditation, through simply thinking about purpose, spirituality brings mental sharpness and emotional strength to confront challenge head-on. All of these permit a cleaning out of the garbage in one’s psyche, a reduction in tension, and a build-up of emotional fortitude that can undergird and nurture the flesh. Moreover, spirituality helps in developing awareness about oneself. It helps in providing a safe environment in which one can confront trauma and hurt, in many cases, concealed in oneself. With guidance through spirituality, one can gain a deeper level of value and worth, and such value and worth is a necessity for healing one’s mind and soul. Prayer, meditation, and awareness are not development tools alone; they provide one with inner fortitude to confront agony, tension, and anxiety, and in the long run, a healthy state of mind.
But spirituality isn’t necessarily about healing for oneself, alone. It’s about connecting, as well. In Sacred Recovery, Butero places a strong value in community in healing. By uniting with one another at a spiritual level, through prayer together, for example, or through group therapy, we become a web of encouragement and support. There is no reason healing ever must ever be a journey alone. By uniting with one another in purposeful, meaningful ways, we become accessible to healing not only in ourselves but in our relationships, as well.
The key message in Butero’s book is that healing occurs when working with all aspects of ourselves in a manner that we could not have even imagined. Healing in a whole-person model invites us to move beyond our wounds and grasp the potential of a cooperating mind, body, and spirit.