Wikipedia

THANK YOU ESSAY, for your amazing magazine, every two months again. The themes, the depth of the articles, the colors, and the images have become so much more attractive these last years.

As I don’t master English, I read the Spanish version which is translated every two months by a team of Spanish fellows who do speak it well. Fortunately today, Google Translate does a great job to help me write emails like this one.

One of the previous editions had an article that mentioned information about SA on Wikipedia. Currently, there is information about SA on Wikipedia in six languages: English, Dutch, Polish, Ukrainian, Hebrew, and Persian. With Spanish being the one of the biggest languages in the world, the Spanish Intergroup would love to add the Spanish information too. However, we don’t know how to go about.

Therefore, it would be great if some of the fellows who have experience with putting information on Wikipedia would be willing to contact me: bcnjuansa@gmail.com

An Attitude of Gratitude

One of the most helpful practical tools in recovery for me comes from the 18-wheeler: “Whenever I’d catch a likely image in the corner of my eye, instead of obeying the impulse to look and drink, I’d keep looking straight ahead while praying for that person” (SA 162). To that, however, I have found it particularly helpful to add a prayer of gratitude to God.

For example, if I see someone while I am traveling and am tempted to take from that person through lust, instead I will pray for them, surrender the trigger to God, and thank God for something unrelated that I am grateful for, such as my home group in SA.

Why do I feel the need to add gratitude to my prayer for the person I am tempted to lust after? Two reasons: one is that as one old timer said, “gratitude is an antidote to lust.” I find this to be true in my own experience. The other is that I have, as the Big Book puts it, a “magic magnifying mind” (AA 420). If I am triggered, my magic magnifying mind tends to want to return to lust after I have prayed for a particular person. But when I focus on gratitude, my mind has something else to latch on to. I can surrender, give in the form of prayers toward someone, and then give gratitude toward God for something else. That helps me to move forward to the next best step, and helps me to stay sober even when I am most triggered.