60+ days on Hardmode - BUT IT HAS FELT EASY!

Hey everyone I'm very happy to say that I have made a breakthrough in managing my urges/ cravings for porn and masturbation. I really struggled with masturbation in the past and ironically this led me to porn because I wanted to find some sort of outlet to my sexual energy, but this only made things worse.

I kept myself optimistic over the next few years and even made it to 60 days hardmode at one point. However the urges became greater and greater the more I tried to suppress them and eventually I started to figure out that I was going to relapse in the next day because I knew it would the urges would build to become too much to handle. I began trying everything the online forums and internet articles said would kill the urges: taking cold showers, confiding in accountability partners (both in person and online), keeping track of the days I had abstained, snapping a rubber band on my wrist, praying, watching inspirational movies, reading inspirational quotes, etc. Still I would eventually relapse a few days later, because I could only repress my feelings for so long.

So one day I became really frustrated thinking, “Damn it there must be a way to overcome this! There just has to be! Wait a minute…hmmm…who would be an expert on not giving in to their sexual urges? Oh I know! Of course how could I not have thought of it earlier? Nuns and Monks!”

And so I went to YouTube and Google and finally found the answers I was looking for. Now let me share them with you.

These techniques are actually quite simple to apply and mind blowing to me when I realized how effective these simple ideas work. They are based in the Buddhist teachings and even though I am not religious in any way (at least associated to any one religion), these ideas were very logical and understandable. So, the Buddha's teaching is that if we just understood these things as they were, we would not cling to them we would not desire for it. This is a recurring theme in all these techniques (see below):


Step 1: Analysis of the object of your desire and understanding that seeing is just seeing; there is nothing inherently pleasurable about the object you perceive.

· Use the mantra: “hair, hair, hair,” or “breasts, breasts, breasts,” and so on for analyzing and learning about a particular body part and to also separate the adjectives (i.e. “beautiful”) from the object.

· Use the mantra: “seeing, seeing, seeing” for separating the attachment from the object and to also separate the adjectives (i.e. “beautiful”) from the object.

· If you do these mantras repeatedly, you will find that your mind changes; that you're able to look at it and see it just as seeing; that the connection that you made between the object (pornography) and this sensation is gone.

Step 2: Understanding there is nothing beneficial or inherently likeable about pleasant sensations

· When you feel that happy or pleasant sensation come up in your body simply say to yourself “happy, happy,” “pleased, pleased,” “pleasure, pleasure,” or “feeling, feeling.”

· Simply attempt to see it for what it is. This will get rid of all the baggage that we have surrounding it – all of this judgment that we make that “this is good. This is bad.”




Step 3: Eliminating the Desire to Masturbate and Watch Pornography

· Remember that desire is a sort of tension/stress.

· You can release this stress by simply looking at/thinking about it and repeating your mantra: “wanting, wanting” or “liking, liking” or “desiring, desiring” when you are in the state of liking something (i.e. while you're taking a cigarette, or while you're masturbating, or watching pornography, etc.).

· I have found that repeating the mantra “craving, craving, craving” also helps when urges/cravings inevitably come up.

· These mantras will destroy any desire for the object. And they will destroy the clinging. There may well be the craving/urge in the beginning, but it won't lead to clinging because you'll see that the craving is useless.

 

I recommend that you repeat these mantras in your mind or out loud. I would highly recommend giving these mantras a go. Do a 30 day experiment with them and if they don't work for you then you can always move on to something else. If you are skeptical I totally understand because I really was at first too, but I thought that I may as well try it because some action is better than no action.

I truly hope this helps because it has helped me get past 60 days on hardmode again when I never thought I would ever again. And it has been so much easier because all I have done is repeat these mantras everyday when the cravings come up for me.

Let me know how it works for you, I'd love to hear some similar successes or what could be improved with these techniques.

Wishing you all the best!

 

yeah no problem! I agree it is very much like mindfulness meditation.

I totally agree you cannot repress these feelings because this leads to a slow build up which eventually will lead to a volcanic explosion in the form of a major relapse. I think this is a common misconception that many people here have; they try to fight the temptation and push those feelings down, or they fill their life with so many events and activities those feelings are also repressed. I'm not saying that we shouldn't develop new habits (ie going to the gym, cold showers -- because I still do both), but we must learn to understand the nature of our attachment to pornography and masturbation and see women just for who they are -- they, like us men, are simply human beings with a collection of organs and physical features that serve a specific purpose. Then we must feel these feelings of pleasure for what they are.


Here are some more interesting points I have discovered that relate to what you were saying about inherent sexuality:

"There is no connection between seeing in the naked human body and the pleasant sensation. When we were young we saw our parents and siblings naked and this didn't bring about pleasant sensations.

Yes, puberty gave us this desire for sexual acts, but it's through our repeated connection between the human body and the sexual act (masturbation/sex) that creates the attachment to the human body.

We know objectively this should not be the case because the human body is just another body. There should be no more attachment to the human body than to say a monkey's body, or a cow's body, or a fish’s body because they all have the same an anatomical structure basically. <-- this idea is kind of mindblowing, but in all reality I think this is true.

From a Buddhists point of view, through successive rebirth, we have come to create this attachment to the human body through our repeated connections of sexual intercourse throughout the existence of humans. We have built up this addiction. And that is what has given us this increasingly coarse body and caused us to even be born with this sense of attachment to the human body which leads of course to the “natural chemical reactions” in the brain."

I think this is why it is so important to distinguish what you are seeing as just light touching your eyes and what you are feeling as just a pleasureable feeling that doesn't have to cause attachment.

“What benefit do you gain from pleasure? From physical pleasure? What is positive about it?” And you know you can simply you can give a tautology and say “it's good because it's pleasant” or “pleasant sensations are good because they're pleasant” which are both meaningless of course.

And this isn't simply a tricky sort of argument, it's not an intellectual trick of sorts. It's actually true that there is no benefit and there is no intrinsic positive nature in a pleasant sensation. And you don't have to take my word for this and this isn't a dogma that should be accepted. Go test this yourself. When you examine the pleasant sensations you now no longer feel guilty that “I'm feeling this pleasure.”

"The issue is this clinging, this craving for pleasant sensations and the idea that pleasure is somehow positive.

Because if you are able to understand that pleasure is not positive in any intrinsic way, then you actually will have no need to chase after women either. But whether that’s an agreeable thought to you or not, I don't know, but we're thinking objectively here. If you come to see through objective mantra practice that something is useless or worthless, then why would you want to chase after it?

If on the other hand through the practice of the Buddhist teachings you come to see that actually these things are beneficial then we are not asking to give them up. If they are intrinsically beneficial, then keep them. Develop them. Sustain them.

All we are saying is that there are certain things that you're going to see for yourself which are unbeneficial and useless/worthless [like porn and masturbation]."

Hope this makes sense

 

That is good stuff swagzenegger! I like what you were saying about how the craving is for the chemical and masturbation and porn are just the tools to get those chemicals.

Yeah I still feel my symptoms from when I watched porn and masturbated, just to a lesser degree now. Thankfully the brainfog is gone, but every time I see a scantily clad girl while I watch tv or a movie, or while going through a magazine or driving down the highway (those damn billboards!) these symptoms reappear. The symptoms I'm referring to are an over salivating mouth (like almost all the time), muscles spasms/twitches especially in the mouth and jaw area, and numbness in the mouth and jaw area. I suppose my mind still has those patterns/pathways in the brain myleinated. I have been having trouble with the social anxiety they cause though. It is strange because after a few days the muscle twitches and salivating mouth symptoms disappear and then my anxiety is almost nonexistent. But then I have a sort of overcautiousness and some anxiety of running into scantily clad girls.

If anyone has a fast track to get rid of these anxieties a little faster let me know. But I suppose if I must be patient, then over time these should heal. It is just frustrating because the anxiety that is caused by these symptoms blocks me from being my witty, confident self and subsequently I really struggle with trying to tell stories or just speaking my mind clearly. And I haven't had a girlfriend ever (I'm 23) so I feel like these symptoms would probably subside (at least faster) if I had someone to be intimate with. But I can't be sure.

 

Thank you Harry, yes they really help me a lot. I do not repress my feelings anymore. I do take cold showers purely for the health benefits, but I do not use any other sort of methods for reducing urges. It is purely just doing mantras everyday.

I'll tell you how I sort of progressed through the mantras:
my first 30 days I had a real attachment to porn and women's bodies and so seeing a scantily clad picture really sent urges through the roof. So I used the mantra "liking, liking, liking" anytime mental images or real images came up in my vision.

Also I had a real attachment to masturbating, I really liked to do it because the pleasure felt so good, but at the same time I really wanted to stop masturbating because it was really affecting my social life...so I used the mantra "liking, liking, liking" whenever I thought about masturbating or felt like it.

Note that I started doing these mantras about 100 days ago, and I have only masturbated once, and I haven't seen porn in about 120 days. The one time i did masturbate I made sure to repeat the mantra "liking, liking, liking" while doing it and it did help me gain control of what i was doing. I was able to understand/realize "oh you know what, there isn't anything inherently positive or likeable about masturbating (the act itself)" and so I was able to stop before orgasm/ejaculation. Then of course I had major urges/cravings to masturbate because I still wanted the pleasure, so that is when I started doing the mantras, "craving, craving" and "wanting, wanting."

It is weird how well chanting them in my head works, I didn't think it would work, but it really does. I use these three mantras daily, but about 90% are the "craving, craving" and "wanting, wanting" ones. Since I still have to use them, I suppose the attachment is still there, but it is so much easier to just feel the cravings and just saying "craving, craving, craving" repeating the words until the cravings dissipate. Before doing these mantras I had no idea what to do and the cravings and urges just kept building and building until I had to either masturbate or look at porn.

And there is nothing wrong with watching inspirational movies/ videos, in fact I would recommend them because they encourage all good things, but I don't think these alone will help you stop the addiction.

 

Thank you PotentLife! Let me know how it goes

 

It's been a while since I've posted here, but I still use the mantras everyday and the results have been very good. I have stayed off of Porn for almost 5 months now [yes unfortunately I did relapse (to explicit images on Craigslist) after I first posted this thread due to desperately wanting sex. Learn from my mistake... masturbation without pron or fantasy would have been a much better alternative].

The only tough thing is that after 3 or 4 weeks the urge to masturbate comes around. However I'm starting to find that having a masturbation-orgasm release in this time period is ok. When I try to keep going without releasing I really feel this pressure build up inside more and more and I feel very irritable and not productive because of it. As long as I masturbate without thinking about any sort of porn (visual or auditory) then I am ok. Just masturbating to masturbate and getting it over with is what works best for me. I don't prolong the masturbation or picture any sort of female. I just do my best to come back to the mantras and breathing while doing it.

A big thing for me to begin stopping the facial tics and mouth watering has been to bring my attention to my breath and my mantras as much as I can, while avoiding fantasizing to anything that arouses me (whether it be auditory, visual, or feelings). I like most of you have a bank of porn memories to call upon and it is very important for me to not conjure up/ try to remember those images, sounds, and feelings. Otherwise the facial tics and mouth watering comes back. Masturbation without the fantasizing is definitely the best way to go.

So for those who would like a structured sort of goal format to get to a similar position I'm at:

*Do your absolute best to avoid porn at all costs - and yes this includes scantily clad images and videos of women, any sexual sounds, any pornographic literature/ reading, etc.
I would do your best to filter out social media and get an ad blocker, website blocker, and K9 Web blocker too. Think about what people did before the dawn of electronics: television, radio, computers, etc. Having your life revolving less around technology is a good thing in my opinion. Do the best you can when outside of work and get some fresh air

*When your urges come do the mantras mentioned above.

*Everyday remember to focus on your breath. Yes, just by focusing on your breath you are actually meditating even while doing other tasks during your day. I always thought you had to put aside time and stop doing everything to meditate but this is not true. Listen to a Tibetan Monk explain this...search keywords: "mingyur rinpoche huffington post"

*If you must masturbate, do not use any external stimuli to help (i.e. porn, sex toys, etc). Do your absolute best not to fantasize while masturbating (this will be difficult to be disciplined) as this will heal your addiction and neural pathways the fastest. If you cannot do this (at the beginning it may be difficult) then fantasizing is miles better than actually watching/using porn. But while you fantasize do some mantras and breathing and this will begin to disrupt the myleinated pattern in your brain.

*Give back to others. Being a generous person by volunteering your time (whether it be for chores around the house for your spouse or family, or by volunteering at a organization) starts you on the path to more social abundance and stops you from focusing so much effort and worrying about yourself. We need more of a balance in this regard. Check out Steve Pavlina's new youtube video on "overcoming scarcity" for more on this.





I wish everyone all the best in their journey! I am doing my best to improve everyday and learn from my mistakes just like you