Mindfulness and the 12 Steps: Living Recovery in the Present Moment
by Thérèse Jacobs-Stewart
Why You'll Love This
Two recovery traditions — one ancient, one modern — turn out to be asking the exact same questions about how to live.
- Great if you want: a fresh spiritual lens on a familiar recovery framework
- The experience: reflective and unhurried — best read one step at a time
- The writing: Jacobs-Stewart writes from inside recovery, not above it — grounded and personal
- Skip if: you want clinical research over lived experience and personal reflection
About This Book
For anyone in recovery who has ever felt the Twelve Steps and their own evolving spiritual life pulling in different directions, Thérèse Jacobs-Stewart offers something genuinely clarifying. Drawing on her work as a counselor and her personal experience in recovery, she maps the surprising common ground between Buddhist mindfulness practice and the Twelve Steps — the shared insistence on presence, humility, and surrender. The result isn't a reinvention of either tradition but something more useful: a way of holding both at once, so that working the Steps feels less like obligation and more like a living practice.
What makes this book worth sitting with is Jacobs-Stewart's voice — warm, unhurried, and grounded in lived experience rather than theory. She moves through each of the Twelve Steps in sequence, weaving in mindfulness teachings without forcing a tidy equivalence between them. The structure gives readers a natural rhythm, returning again and again to the present moment as an anchor. Her prose is accessible without being simplistic, and the reflections she offers invite genuine pause rather than skimming. It reads less like a self-help manual and more like a conversation with someone who has done the work herself.