Through the meditation community that’s grown up over the last 30 years, I’ve come to meet some wonderful recovering alcoholics who have found in meditation, a way of putting the Step 11 into practice and really understanding what that means.

I’ve always felt that in the right moment in their life, the alcoholic understands the meaning of meditation better than most people. It’s a hard one – understanding to hit bottom maybe more than once to get to that point. But with it comes an insight. It can be a destructive disease. It can be a fatal disease. It can destroy your life, destroy your relationships. But it also has the possibility of leading to a remarkable breakthrough.

I suppose what the whole Alcoholics Anonymous movement is all about maximizing the potential of this disease and this addiction to lead to that enlightenment. There’s a potential in it. The program is remarkable by using that potentially destructive set of circumstances and that potentially destructive disease to lead to spiritual growth. Actually to lead to a deep integration and fullness of life.

The times I’ve been to AA groups the word I would use is ‘grace’, the feeling of grace at work.

What I’ve always found at these meetings is that there’s no small talk. There’s friendliness, intimacy, and honesty but the normal divisions or barriers or suspicions that we have about each other and the social filters that we communicate through normally are not there. By being there, they’re admitting and confessing and opening themselves and to others. The fact that there has been no small talk means that people can get down to important issues. People in these groups are telling my story and as they tell their story. They’re discovering the mystery each time they tell it. They’re adding something to it or they’re understanding it more deeply.

What is the meaning of my story? What is the mystery of my story? That sounds a little egocentric. And I think there is quite a lot of egocentricity in the program. By the very nature of it, there has to be. There has to be a concentration on self. I don’t think that it is actually egocentricity. I think it is more a transformation of the ego. It’s a healing of the ego, but there’s a lot of ego there. It’s me, isn’t it?

There is nothing wrong with that, provided there is a transformation going on. There’s nothing worse than getting stuck in oneself. And that, of course, is exactly what addiction is: getting stuck into a repetitive cycle and you end up hating yourself. You just hear your own voice and you get stuck in your own patterns of behaviour. So telling your story opens you to a mystery.

It’s something that I cannot put my finger on. I cannot explain fully, rationally. I can experience it, but I can’t even control it.

What I’d like to do is share with you an understanding of meditation that might just resonate with you. Really the most important way to learn about meditation is to just do it. Practice it together.

There is a group dynamic to meditation just as there is in recovery from addiction. The two are very interestingly comparable or complementary actually.

I think in a 12-Step program one is learning to break a habit, a deeply ingrained physically and chemically conditioned habit with very complicated and strong psychological and physiological forms and patterns. So what is breaking out of that? Breaking a habit in learning meditation? One is learning a good habit. There are difficulties on both sides. There are different kinds of difficulties: giving up drinking or taking up meditation.

Both are difficult. Both require strength, more strength than we have in our own meagre resources. So we have to open up to a higher power. We have to open to others. You call it fellowship. Meditation seems to me to be, in that sense, grace. Something that is a gift, something that is genuinely free. It doesn’t cost anything. And there is no bargaining about meditation.

To find meditation in one’s life is grace. It’s something unexpected found in an unexpected moment, in an unexpected way, something that might just change the world for you. It changes patterns that we, for some reason or another – because of our own mistakes or because of bad luck or a combination of the two – have gotten into. It breaks these patterns.