The Lord of the Rings Challenge

Day 25 no PMO. Not feeling the urge for PMO but I do feel very lost in my life right now. I’m having a hard time being happy.

 

Day 180

Thank you for your appreciation. But I learnt lot of things from Lord of the ring challenge and met new brothers. So that I won't leave the challenge until majority of brothers defeat the PMO forces . I will wait for this moment. Thank you for everyone for helping me to reach this goal.

 

Good night brothers. You can defeat pmo forces

 

We hope your comeback brother

 

well done friend, and thanks for sticking around!!!

 

yeah , I never leave the challenge.

 

Waiting for your success story

 

Checking in Fellowship Friends!

104 Days Free of PMO.

Day 1 of this challenging week went well, although I had some disturbed sleep last night. The slight brain fog, anxiety and lower energy is my burden. I will bare it, it is not as strong as it has been in the past. I will be cautious over this week and try my best.

Stay Strong!

@Baki Hanma Congrats on 180 days brother!! Wonderful achievement, you have crushed the ring. Keep going forward and paving the path. I'm glad you are sticking around and hey, there are two more achievements if you are up for it!

@CALM IN SUFFERING I'm glad you have no given in to temptation brother.

@LLOYYD I'm sorry to hear about your relapse brother, you've assessed what has caused it. Perhaps evaluating your need for twitter, is it something that truly helps you /your goals? Maybe removing it for the time being will assist you. I would do a cost/benefit analysis on it and see if it is useful to you. Rise again!

@Toni7 It is not a failure brother, you have gone for such a long streak. Your perspective matters, look at what you have accomplished over this period and congratulate yourself. Evaluate the relapse, set in motion a new plan to conqueror it and stand again!

@crazyhorse11 It's my pleasure brother, our fellowship is strong. I'm glad you have a plan of action. Do not worry, I am doing my best as well. 4 more days for me and I will have some time off from work. Also, Orcs are no longer part of the challenge, check out the front page. Our brother @RiseToGreatness has updated the rankings, you start off as hobbit!

 

What is it? Day 2 I think.

I'm in a public place and I noticed I have some urges. It's still mostly about p games but I'm also thinking on looking at some nudes or "non nudes".
I also realized I still have kept a safe for a porn game. It means I'm still interested in continuing playing from that save. So I deleted my browser cookies and cash and with it that save.

Urges seem to grow while I'm reading and posting on the forum.
But I say to myself: you can surf these urges, no need to act out.
It has been long enough, though and I will shut down my computer now and go.

So this is a double win for today: deleted that save and surfed the urge without giving in.

 

Hey little bro, congrats for completing the challenge and getting White Wizard! Inspiring indeed bro.
If I get there, I will also still stick to the challenge and go for the "Special Challenge" all the way through.

@Redemptionisrequired I have deactivated my Twitter again since starting this current streak. I think this will stay that way which it will be permanently deleted for good unless I reactivate for certain reasons. I am still thinking what else should I use it for but as of right now there is nothing. I didn't mention this but it started from watching a regular movie. Let's just say if I see an actress that looks like a P star that I know of then my mind starts getting curious. Which is bad and now leads to peeking like my P-sub issues. Instead it will lead to peeking on P instead of P-subs. P-subs are still getting better. I guess I will assess cost/benefit analysis but as of now. I can't think of the benefit besides one particular reason to keep it.

Any way, this is to Baki and everyone here. Continuing from my previous posts, I was going to check in my days but I wasn't expecting a relapse from being away a bit. But I have decided to step back and take a break from this challenge for numbers of reason. I will say it has something to do with @Gallade_Templar words. Saddening to be honest.
This time he drove me away besides other things. That's all I am going to say. I'm still thinking about it and maybe when time goes by then I will decide later. If I decide to come back here then I will check in with a current streak or start back at Day 0 again later. If I start back again, I will commit to it as best as I can.

Oh I got a message from one of the mods here about my incident Day 24 post. Yes, I couldn't reply because I don't know how to DM anyone here. I don't have this feature for some reason as I have said to Redemptionisrequired. Not sure how to fix this.

So lastly, I'm out of this challenge.

God bless you all in destroying your PMO ring for good.

 

Day 2 checking in.

 

9 days
Low urges yesterday, worked out, but worked almost all day. I took some hours for rest a little.
Today I didn't worked out, I was too tired and I have the flue, so maybe tomorrow I'll work out.
Keep strong my brothers.

 

6 days. In the old forest still. Home from my visit with my family. Old memories haunted me. Some temptations. It is changing though. I can't access porn. I am finding I am wanting to find a real girl to connect with. It is still to soothe the pain of my family traumas. Still not healthy. I left my parents place almost shaking. The elephant in the room is so immense with my family. Maybe with more sobriety God will call me and show me how to call it out charitably. Spent time with my dad today. He's kind of like a 5 year old trapped in a 65 year old mans body. Can't handle any adversity whatsoever. It's hard to watch him whine like a 5 year old. I watched my mom and dad this weekend and so much of my life makes so much sense. I experience this every time I go and see them now. I don't know how I handled it as a kid being around them all the time. 3 days with them now and I am wiped. No wonder I needed to numb myself with PMO.

 

Day 445 end

 

4 days

Huge congratulations @Baki Hanma you've made it! How did you do it? Please share your wisdom, we could use it

 

End of day 10

Another day survived. I have to confess one thing, I will do it because I assume you don't know me in real life. I have disgusting fantasies of my wife dyin so that after her death I could fuck other girls. I myself am disgusted by them. I am not imagining her death I am only thinking of what would happen after that. The fact that I have some heart pains leads me to think about my own death and then the death of close ones and then this is what comes out of it, the thing I am full of - my lust.

When I was a teenager I used to imagine what would happen if my parents died and what I would do with the inheritance and the freedom I would gain. Maybe it's just the soul of a man crying out for freedom in both of those cases. But freedom doesn't come from the out side it comes from the inside.

@Redemptionisrequired thank you for the encouragement

Good luck!

 

thank you for sharing this, you are really opening up. Don’t beat yourself up too much on these thoughts, there is an inner addict voice in your head saying this, and it isn’t you. I think you just need to recognise these thoughts coming into your head and challenge them. It’s not really you, you don’t want your family to die for many many reasons more important than sex and money…you know this.

the fact you can share on here and feel bad for these thoughts is a strong step, it shows you can recover I think.
Personally I never wished my wife dead, but I did used to wonder/ fantasise what life would be like after she was gone. My inner addict told me that my life and time could focus on hookups, prostitutes and porn, and wouldn’t it be great!!! I know that this isn’t true, I’d be lonely, broke, isolated, sick and unhappy. That is what would happen if I followed that path.

stay strong brother

 

Day 31 checking in

today I’m just feeling pretty strong anger at the porn industry, and marketing and how it uses sex to sell. It exploits the people who are forced to do these things for a living. And it exploits the people who view it, and have their instincts and natural desires corrupted by such bullshit….to make money.

 

Very grateful and much appreciated brother!

 

Questions to answer after crash

• Last relapse time place trigger: midnight to 4am on Fri night, phone in bed, read Mantak Chia book which has trigger drawings
• Emotion at time - numb & exhausted to all else except the little yearning for dopamine deep inside
• What accelerated the fall? started fishing, and shut out my conscience which was getting in the way
• Rationalisation used/ told myself I would just look up taoist art, then once the triggers came I just said I would look at pics of beauty, then clips on graphic sites, then told myself I should just look at whatever I wanted now as I would not do this again ( this is 'logic' I've used before and it is a total lie, trust me
• What boundaries were ignored? Boundary of complete detox from all and any sexual content; Boundary to never fish again; Boundary to stop fishing ( convinced myself that once you pop u can't stop - untrue, another lie, just unwilling to bear the discomfort of desire); Boundary to go onto P sites; Boundary to never look at clips: Boundary to never download; Boundary to never binge - all of these boundaries were violated
• Lessons Learned from relapse: how easy it is to fall; how we must have a plan for later weeks; how I can't simply walk away, we need to go through the process of recovery fully; how the taste of natural dopamine awakens the desire for more and so how we need to learn how to be satisfied & grateful with what is natural.
  • I am at highest risk of triggers when I am dreading a task that exposes me to potential criticism. Reason for this fear of criticism is a fear of being found out for being a procrastinator and for the times I have distracted myself and others with chats etc... instead of working on my tasks. So the key is the temptation to procrastinate and so how do I reframe these temptations as opportunities to engage & raise the appraisal cortex while lowering the limbic cortex. The main opportunities are
  • a) when I am faced with a mountain of tasks
  • b) when I am staring a monotonous task
  • c) when I am facing a task, the result of which exposes me to criticism
  • d) a mix of the above
  • When these arise ( which is daily ) I amgoing to take a do as you go approach andjust do even a little task or part of a taskrather than allowing me to goto thedistractions like social chats, surfing, etc...
  • Use Faster- balance v crazy - blassted & brace

• Patterns from last few relapses
  • After a prolonged period of abstinence, getting natural dopamine hits and my addictive brain starts looking for more and more, rather than stepping back and accepting these gifts, being grateful and rather than learning to be satisfied with nature, I seek unnatural highs all the time
  • Over confidence in my ability to resist, feeling it's all behind me
    • researching semen retention, when I should be concentrating on detox only for now
  • Over confidence leading to vanity in other things like getting fitter, more muscular, etc... then becoming arrogant wanting to 'share' the object of vanity
  • Engaging in bawdy talk in work and flirting with female colleagues
    
  • Using streaming services to 'relax'
    • getting caught out on scenes which I falsely feel confident enough to handle (but am not)
  • Letting domestic tasks slip behind
    • Not changing bed clothes regularly
  • Self Pity
  • No reward system in place
• What are the guidelines you need to put in place with respect to Sleep, Diet, Media Usage, Exercise and your tendency to Isolate?
  • Sleep - 7.5 min bed before 11
    • At wk 4 start paring back the hours to 7 during the week with one 6 hour and two 8 hours
    • No devices or TV after 9
  • Diet - lower calories a little to aim to lose 10kg in 4.5 months - slow and steady
  • Exercise - low intensity winter base fitness training
  • Media Usage - as above
    • Cancel streaming services - Done
  • Isolation - reachout to friends and family and arrange weekend meets to avoid loneliness at weeekends
  • a) fantasy and lust are in the head, they are not in the body per se, they hijack natural sexual desire and weaponise it for insidiously egotistical purposes. Sex without lust is connecting and communicating with another human being through our bodies, it is not a mental thing, it is a physical communication, a sharing, a sort of sacrificing of the ego for vulnerability, humility, humanity. Lust and fantasy hijack this most natural of acts and subvert it, we no longer want to communicate or connect, we want to extract, exploit and manipulate. We want to 'get off' on this person or fantasy. Lust and fantasy are ego-centric, selfish, it is about the me. If anything is given it is for a selfish end-goal, always, a sort of self interested trade off. The two things could not be more dissimilar
    
    Freedom Fight and other sites recommend using BRACE when the mental urges arise. I now understand that the main purpose of this to drop out of our heads and into our body. Step out of the realm of fantasy and into the body, via our breath.
    
    So I am committing now to practice BRACE each time the urges arise
    
    b) I am a great planner. I have lists of To-Dos as long as 10 arms. This is very good, planning is good. But last night I realised that this has become a strong form of procrastination. I feel I can't get stuck in until I have every step planned out, and so I rarely get stuck in, unless it is last minute. As on humorous quote reads "If it wasn't for the Last Minute, I wouldn't get anything done". So as I use this to prevent me doing tasks, the list of open tasks grows and grows. And so now I have the barrier of the un done tasks, the barrier of the incomplete planning and the barrier of the fact that new tasks are incoming hourly. I say barrier, because these barriers keep me in my head all the time, I use them to stop dropping into my body and just doing some tasks. But worse than that, I use the insanely long list of tasks to put off getting to key reflections, prayer, retreats etc... and I use it most importantly to not be mindful, so I am building a barrier around my true self, my core, who I am. All of this keeps me in my head, where lust and fantasy live.
    
    So I am committing to do a few of things here -
    1. 1. Just do tasks as I go, even if I didn't get time to complete my planning, it may not be perfect but something is always better than nothing, and lots of somethings are way way better than nothing
    2. 2. Prioritise tasks related to spiritual and mental health, to help me drop out of my head - this is the real place that the addicted part of my brain wants to avoid - so I am going to do what it doesn't want me to do, I am going to do what my soul, intelligence and conscience want me to do instead
    3. 3. As above continue to practise BRACE to drop into the body
    
    c) As we progress on this path - pain is inevitable. Our lives and our society are über medicated to numb the pain of reality. The longer we go along this stretch the pain we avoided all our lives will reveal itself, along with the urges to medicate it. We will need to renew our decisions, sometimes daily and remind ourselves this is what we signed up for - we are here to heal and transform our pain by embracing it, so that we may truly free for the first time in our lives, and forever more.
    
    I commit to embrace the pain as it arises, remember that this is what I signed up for. I will stop running away as this is the only way to be free, stop medicating, it is ok, these are growing pains, we are growing again, like butterflies emerging from our pupae and how wonderful is that?
• New Triggers to avoid
  • sexual innuendo in work
  • flirting - this is a non-negotiable
  • reading up on taoist semen retention
  • streaming (if for any reason this is necessary then only when commonsense media has been applied first, but detox now should be no streaming)
• Trigger plan: I will dust down a trigger plan I made a year ago (not good that we are talking years when it cones to this batttle - this has to change, I need not to be writing another crash report in one year here - in fact I am committing here and now not to do so)
  • One key trigger plan is instead of pushing it downwards, push the urge to the side and breath - clear thw mist of desire in the mind and see the light come in - a good meter of this is how clear and wonderful otherwise mundane things appear when the light is there as opposed to when the mist of desire is falling. When there are urges the ordinary is flat, borderline repulsive. However, when you clear the urge from your mind you perceive the multi-dimensional wonder in the ordinary and a sort of peace overcomes you.
  • Go for a walk, mindful breathing, humility, slow down, chip away at tasks - what is the reward for this week?
• What were your Faster scale lows before each relapse?
  • Speeding up - not being able to do tasks mindfully rather rushed and intensely with lots of stress worrying about what others might think either desiring their praise (vanity/ arrogance) or fearing their criticism as if it were some sort of torture (vanity again). All of this over a prolonged period leads to Exhaustion and Self Pity in which state the craving for the release and comfort of pmeo seems healthy. So vanity is the prelude to lust.
• What were the commitments to change running up to the relapse?
  • I was on auto pilot for those weeks barely any reflections or self awareness just pain sickness stress and survival - I didn't have a plan for these type of situations - the double bind was I felt I deserved to relapse coming out of that period, while knowing that in truth epmo is not a reward that someone "deserves", but an act of self harm and so although it feels like a treat in tough times, it is in fact akin to taking poison through the eyes at the precise time that it is most harmful ( when I am already run down )
• Why do you think you didn't resolve your double bind?
  • I have a strange relationship with how I perceive my capacity to do things. Somehow my mind has me in a bind, convinced that I cannot be anything and so to spite this I stop trying. Now the simple answer here is that I'm like a spoilt child who throws their toys out of the pram when it doesn't get its way, but, while this is part of the story, there is something else, there is a deeper self contempt, probably born of the arrogance of others, a sort of mental schoolyard bully because if I am my own worst bully then no one can bully me. This bully is constantly telling me I am no good, that I'm below average academically and so can never compete in a world dominated by the academically brilliant. The truth is somewhere in between. There are great achievers whose no 1 attribute is their work ethic, not their brilliance, and there are those that are brilliant that are bums. It comes back to being grateful for what I have and doing the best I can with what I have and having the humility to accept my limitations. So be grateful for the gifts I have and the phenomenally fortunate life I live, repay this debt of gratitude with humility and hard work and accept any challenge that comes my way with gusto.

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