A non-medical treatment for drug addiction, using yoga and meditation, is emerging as an alternative route to recovery, writes Róisín Ingle.
Four years ago, Fr Joe Pereira was invited to the Coolmine drug rehabilitation centre in Dublin to share his non-medical approach to healing which has aided the recovery of thousands of addicts across India over the past two decades. "It has been slow but steady," he smiles, when asked about the impact of his teachings here. "It's not easy for the Western person to stop the chatter of the mind".
On his third visit recently, the priest explained how his unique approach - a combination of yoga, meditation and breathing exercises - was gradually being introduced at Coolmine. Two people at the centre have been trained by him and meditation is now a twice weekly part of the programme at the organisation's Ashleigh House, in Co Meath. "Where drugs make a pathway into the brain and debilitate us, meditation can make a pathway into the brain and empower us, so that is something worth telling the world," he says.
Pereira came to yoga through B.K.S. Ayengar in the 1960s. By 1975 he was a certified Ayengar instructor incorporating yoga and meditation into his pastoral duties, eventually adding a ministry for alcoholics to the parish's services in Bombay. His organisation, Kripa (which means grace), was founded in 1981. His work soon came to the attention of one of his heroes, Mother Teresa, who charged him with looking after the boys in one of her Calcutta orphanages where Kripa is still based.
"I was able to do something for a category of people she could not help," he says. "Those who had gone into abject poverty as a result of addiction."
Later his parents, devout Catholics of Portuguese ancestry, donated some family property to house the services and Kripa received EU funding for a facility on the outskirts of Bombay. The organisation now has 187 staff in 34 centres across 13 archdioceses in India where heroin and solvent abuse is, he says, "a huge problem". Around 90 of the workers there are what Pereira calls "wounded healers". He himself struggled with alcohol abuse as a young man.
"These are people who have been through recovery and wish to share from their experience rather than from their expertise, but many of them go on to become professionals," he says.
"One thing we learned from the spirit of Mother Teresa is that we can teach others not from our abundance but from our poverty. By getting in touch with one's own limitations, we can celebrate those limitations and help others to celebrate them."
When he talks about his non-chemical approach to addiction it's not hard to see why places like Coolmine are keen to learn from him. He says that people in the West bring a "left brain approach" to addiction. "But there is no left brain approach to this problem," he says. "The answer lies in getting in touch with the body, the body never tells lies while the mind does. Doing yoga they can love their body back to life. They become meditation addicts."
Kripa's recovery programme combines the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous with yoga and meditation instruction. "By coming closer to their centre, to their stillness, they move beyond addictive and self-destructive patterns," he says. The organisation also serves clients suffering with HIV/AIDS who tend to exhibit may of the same emotional responses to their condition - anger, depression, guilt - as drug addicts.
He is deeply critical of the approach of the medical community in the West to this category of patients. "For me, the medical approach to addiction is quite obsolete. What in medical science is helping us to discover the wisdom of the body? Nothing," he says.
He believes that drug substitutes are the poorest response to addiction. "There is no chemical solution to chemical dependency. We have to get out of this vicious cycle and give a human response not a chemical response."
Pereira has called for an "enlightened blend" of different professionals working together which is why in the first 10 days of treatment at Kripa centres on orthodox measures such as counselling.
"But we also need the transpersonal approach. This journey is only possible through yoga where you bring people to see all of their body, all of their breath, all of their preoccupations and then they disown everything," he says.
"We show them they are not their body, they are not their breath, they are not their addiction."
Not surprisingly, within some elements of the church in the West Pereira is viewed as a controversial figure but in India his methods have been accepted by virtually all the bishops. "Only one or two have yet to be converted," he says.
He works closely with the World Community for Christian Meditation and supports "innovative ways of connecting with other faiths".
"When I look into the eyes of someone who is coming to me for the first time I say: 'the whole world has condemned you but you are beautiful and above all you are good'," he says.