An article in the December 1996 issue of the Essay mentioned that while it only costs three dollars to publish a copy of the SA White Book, we charge ten dollars in order to raise enough funds to keep SA operating.

It’s 11:15 a.m. on the second Saturday morning of the month in Silver Spring, MD, a suburb of Washington, DC. The regular Saturday morning SA meeting has let out and the Maryland/Washington DC/Virginia Intergroup meeting is about to begin. I drove 35 minutes to be here; others came from as far away as the Maryland-Pennsylvania border or Fredericksburg, VA, both well over an hour’s drive away.

I have been coming to SA for over two years. I am now 150 days sober. I believe that my history of achieving a few months’ sobriety and then slipping lies with my ego. I seem to lack humility, which causes me to believe too much in my own way of seeing the world, no matter how painful that is, rather than accepting other people’s guidance and support.

That’s what the man on the SA tape told me to do for my boss. My boss told me I was a “permanent temporary” and that I wouldn’t be hired as a permanent employee. When he told me that, I had been on the job about a year and a half. As I went through the Steps again, I prayed for the people on my resentment list. The man on the tape told me to pray for them until I meant it, and I did.

As a shy and overweight teenager, I retreated into a secret world of masturbation. This covered feelings I couldn’t handle and made me feel good about myself. It was my first drug: medication through masturbation.

The Solution states that “We saw that our problem was threefold: physical, emotional and spiritual. Healing had to come about in all three.” A number of us have found that the emotional and spiritual are well dealt with in meetings and in the literature, but that there is not much discussion on the physical aspect of recovery.

Just wanted to send you a note about our area’s “Sharing of the Fellowship” retreat May 31. This was our fourth annual retreat and it was an especially wonderful experience of fellowship and recovery.

Soon after I got out of the Clinic in Bad Herrenalb in 1986, I moved to Bonn. I knew there was a male and a female SA member there and I got in touch with them. After speaking to my church minister, we had a meeting room. Thus, our first SA meeting took place on November 26, 1986 in Bonn.

As requested in the March 1997 issue of the Essay, below are some ideas for increasing the distribution of the Essay.

I know the discouragement and self-doubt of sitting in a meeting room by myself over and over again and waiting for someone to come. Then when they came, I spent years being discouraged at the people who didn’t stay. In our early days in Bozeman, one other member who had often been the only other person in the meeting, said, “Why aren’t people staying?” I was finally able to laugh and ask him back, “Why would a person be crazy enough to walk into a meeting with us two lunatics and want what we have?” It takes time to have enough to offer people to stay.

In the wake of the new focus on book study meetings a few years ago, I wanted to start such a meeting Thursday night, a night when there were no meetings in my metropolitan area. Admittedly, I wanted it near where I lived as well, but other SA members did live in the vicinity. I approached the church that I attended and was given permission to use a classroom for the meeting.

Service is important, for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it is usually more difficult to relapse when giving service than when not. However, “service” is not a sure fire “cure” for relapse, but it certainly helps.

I write this to express my gratitude to my Higher Power and SA for the gift of sexual sobriety. It has been a goal all my life but I could not attain it on my own, no matter how I tried. God knows how hard I tried! I grew up in an alcoholic home with a lot of violence. My father was an alcoholic who never got into recovery. My mother was a devout Irish Catholic who taught us children to be loving, decent and above all, to be chaste. I could not live up to that and consequently, I was prey to a lot of shame and guilt as I grew up.

Two years into the program and growing more and more cocky about my power over myself, during my first major crisis I slipped into my old patterns. Caught by the trance leading up to masturbation, I ended two years of what I would now call abstinence. In the carelessness brought on by thinking I was in control, I acted out.

My family and I took a vacation recently. In preparation I called motels and found one near our vacation area that was affordable.

Greetings from the Guam SA Group. We’re alive and well — three regular members, with perhaps a fourth.

Around 40 SAs and S-Anons from the U.K., Ireland, the USA, Austria and Luxembourg gathered at a retreat house atop London’s Mill Hill for “A New Beginning” over the weekend of March 21-23.

[The Oklahoma City Jan. ’97 SA Convention] was my second convention in the States — the first was of another S-fellowship. What impressed me about this one was the substantial number of members with five to ten years of solid sobriety. There was a very strong emphasis on the solution rather than the problem. It was also great to see so many people from different ethnic and religious groups. It was a great reminder that this disease is no respecter of persons.

Over the weekend of April 25-27, the third Australian SA Conference was held in Yackandandah, Victoria. With 24 members attending from various parts of Australia, this was the largest conference so far, and we are growing slowly in numbers and sobriety.

When I was a small boy of three or four years of age, I was the first to go to bed. I used to hide my head under the pillow and dream about women of beaming beauty. There wasn’t anything explicitly sexual, but I fused with them. I remember at that age walking with a two-year-old girl and immediately getting a weird feeling of being “connected” to nature and the whole universe — and being afraid of that small creature.