The Recovering Body: Physical and Spiritual Fitness for Living Clean and Sober by Jennifer Matesa
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Who knew that a non-fiction book on recovery from addictions could be interesting enough to be a page turner, helpful enough for me to recommend to many of my clients (I’m a psychotherapist in private practice), and witty enough to be entertaining? I loved this book.
The narrator’s voice is strong, so it’s part memoir as well, taking you along with the author in her own journey to recovery, her ups and downs, her discoveries, and lessons learned. Along the way you meet others – some in recovery, some experts in their field, each of them adding their own wisdom. Matesa covers a lot of material in this book: nutrition, sleep, exercise, sex, meditation.
And all of those topics combine to make the whole greater than the parts. This isn’t just a book about recovery: its really about the mind-body connection, about integrity, about that overused word, wholeness.
As a professional, I gained a lot of useful information from this book; I have recommended it to addicts in recovery, but also to clients who aren’t struggling with addictions who have a deep interest in how the mind and the body connect: yoga teachers, Iron Man athletes, clients trying to find alternative solutions to pharmaceuticals to treat their anxiety and depression, and interestingly, to clients suffering from chronic mental illness.
Recommended!
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