Next year, Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan will celebrate his 30th year of sobriety. While he’s managed to stay off alcohol and drugs on his own, he says initially kicking his destructive habits required a little help from a higher power: a martial arts sensei.

“When I got sober back in ’94, I was in this position, like, how do I do this?” he says. “Somebody introduced me to my martial arts sensei. I was pretty desperate to find center. We did meditation and I started calling people, like what you do in AA, calling people or meeting with people [to make amends].”

But it wasn’t just positive energy that fueled McKagan’s recovery.

“My sensei would say this thing at the end: ‘Today’s a good day to die,’” he recalls. “Everything else is so positive; this is such a macabre thing he’s saying at the end, I don’t know what it means. I woke up one morning and had nothing on my shoulders — not one thing — and I could look in the mirror and I could smile at myself. It was the weirdest thing and it was so powerful. And ‘today’s a good day to die’ means, ‘I don’t want to die today,’ but you’ve made all your amends.”

McKagan’s Lighthouse LP will arrive on October 20th, with the title track available to stream now.