Claire Robbie
Meditation teacher and founder of The School of Modern Meditation, New Zealand s first multidisciplinary meditation centre. Runs The Reset Program, a 90-day paid programme for changing your relationship with alcohol, and hosts this conversation.
Meditation and awareness practice • habit change • alcohol reduction coaching • lived experience of addiction and recovery
About the expert
Focus: Argues that the hard part of stopping drinking is not the substance but the belief system underneath it, and that meditation works because it brings subconscious drivers into awareness. Frames alcohol as the opposite of meditation: one fragments awareness, the other builds it.
Claire Robbie is a meditation and yoga teacher and the founder of The School of Modern Meditation, New Zealand s first multidisciplinary meditation centre. She came to the practice while struggling with depression and self-medicating, and has been sober for ten years. She runs The Reset Program, a paid 90-day programme for resetting your relationship with alcohol, and founded the alcohol-free events series No Beer Who Cares. She is not a clinician and does not present herself as one; her contribution here is lived experience and habit-change practice rather than medicine. She sells a 90-day alcohol programme and this episode recommends a three-month alcohol holiday. This does not invalidate her account of what stopping actually felt like, and the two are worth judging separately. It is still worth knowing that the recommended length and the length of the product are the same number.
Why this matters
Ten years sober after what she describes as a serious drinking problem, and the value of her contribution is that she has been the person she is describing. She is specific where clinicians are usually vague: the two years sober that ended with a beer and a feeling of leaving her body, the fact that returning to drinking took effort, the loneliness and identity crisis of the first two months. Her framing of alcohol as the opposite of meditation is a genuine idea rather than a slogan. What she is not is a source of evidence — the conscious/subconscious split she describes, the ten-percent-ninety-percent figure and the theta-state claim are popular psychology rather than established neuroscience, and are presented in the same register as the physiology beside them. She also sells a 90-day alcohol programme while the episode recommends a three-month alcohol holiday, which is worth knowing without assuming the recommendation is insincere.