In Madrid we are trying to live in the solution and not in the problem. Before the regular one-hour Sunday meeting where we read and comment on a piece of official SA literature “to relate our sharing to some aspect of what we have read,” we are having on a trial basis a half-hour Tradition meeting. We’ve already been through several items of Discovering the Principles and are going to start to read Guidelines for Group Recovery, which has just been translated into Spanish.

Important as meetings are, we consider them to be only one more tool among others. If we want to live a happy and free sobriety, besides attending meetings we have to live the principles of the Steps on a daily basis. We discovered that the best solution to avoid dumping and intellectualizing at meetings is to share our “experience, strength and hope” — how we work and live the Steps and how they are working in our life.

To facilitate this, every morning we call one another to share a gratitude list and to renew our daily commitment to sobriety and victory over lust. We add whatever we feel we need to: living just for today, surrendering resentments and fears, turning over character defects, giving up this person or trigger, etc.

At night we report to one another in order to make ourselves accountable to somebody. We are experimenting with the following list:

We share our worst lust temptation, or several of the worst, and what we have done with it or them. I discovered that I feel much more motivated to give up the temptation and make the real connection if I’m going to “get current” with somebody at night. Once I felt so bad about sharing for several days in a row that I just didn’t look and repressed my lust. The prospect of getting current motivated me to take more of my time to pray and surrender the temptations. The benefits are amazing.

We surrender our worst resentment or fear, and the defects behind it, following the AA Big Book [P. 65] format, but being more specific in the third column where we check character defects such as pride, self-pity, self-centeredness, intolerance, selfishness, dishonesty, greed, impatience, etc.

Immediately we tell our SA friend whether we have surrendered these character defects or not (Sixth and Seventh Steps); whether or not we prayed for the object of our resentment and how we could have reacted to his or her behavior.

We report if we have prayed for other people — people we don’t necessarily resent — and if we have done something good and loving for somebody, especially something we didn’t want to do.

We share what has struck us the most in our personal program reading, which is often connected to the Step we are working at the time.

Of course this scheme cannot be put into use immediately with all the newcomers. It’s what we do with some people who have some background with the Steps or are sober and have worked them for a while. With “pure” newcomers we limit ourselves to sharing on lust temptations. We add the other items according to where they are and their own needs.

If other members in other places are trying other daily “getting current” formats, we’d be very pleased to know how their experiment is working.

• Morning:
• Gratitude list
• Daily commitments

• During the Day:
• Prayer in the middle of the temptation, as soon as it shows up. As many times as I need it. If the temptation doesn’t go away, and still praying, I call a member — Before, not After.

• Night:
• Worst lust temptation. What have you done?
• Worst resentment or fear. Character defects involved.
• Do you surrender those character defects? Have you prayed for the person? How could you have reacted?
• Have you prayed for other people? — this time people we don’t necessarily resent. Have you done something good and loving for somebody? — especially something we didn’t want to do.
• Which idea has struck you the most in your daily personal program reading? — often connected to the Step we are working at the time.