From one point of view, our practice of meditation in Step 11 is always unsuccessful. No matter how we fix our attention on the focus of our meditation practice, sooner or later we forget. We're distracted, we follow the distracting thought, and then five minutes, twenty minutes, half a day passes before we "wake up" again and say, "Oh no -- I've done it again: another part of my life gone, without any ability on my part to remember it." That's our ego saying, Gotcha!

But there's another way to look at this. When we practice meditation, not only are we constantly losing our focus, we're constantly becoming aware that we've lost it. After those minutes or hours of distraction, we say to ourselves, "Just a minute -- I've been distracted." And that moment of recollection is also a moment of the purest awareness. If you like, we are never more aware than when we're aware of being unaware.

And -- for those of us who continue to meditate -- that is the great thing that has changed. Sure, we get distracted; but we also are aware sooner or later of that distraction. In that sense, we are awake; we may fall back asleep quite often, drawn away by the distractions of the ego, but now there is a term to that distraction -- no longer does it last for ever, as it does for most people. So when our ego says Gotcha!, it's not really true. For in the very moment it says it, we are once again awake, and once again in the real world of true awareness.