[This technique was developed by a guy on www.yourbrainrebalanced.com. You must create an account there to read his post.]
Short version: Always meditate BEFORE you masturbate.
In other words, you take control of your weak moments instead of pretending you can eliminate them altogether.
For 9 months and counting, I have not only abstained from porn, I have not sought any erotic image whatsoever. As I write this, I am sitting alone in front of a computer that provided me loads of videos in the past. Though all of it is still perfectly within my grasp, I am 100% confident I will not go for it.
For all masturbation skeptics, I have also kept a handle on that too. For the last 8 months, I have masturbated only once every 4-5 weeks. During the months of June, July, and August, I didn’t masturbate at all.
Longer, detailed version:
First few weeks:
– Meditate Indian-style for a strict amount of time before looking at porn and masturbating. (I started with 15 minutes)
– Set a very modest limit to how often you can masturbate. (3 times per week is a good start)
– Make a personal commitment to never again masturbate or look at porn without meditating first.
Over the next couple months and beyond:
– Gradually limit how often you can masturbate. Go to once a week, then maybe once every two weeks, but keep it slow and steady.
– Restrict how often you can view certain kinds of material. My first step was restricting hardcore videos to once per month. After about three months of playing with these limits, I went from hardcore videos to softcore videos only to images only and then finally nothing.
– Gradually extend how long you must meditate. (I went from 15 minutes to 20 to 25 to 30. It’s up to you, but I think 15 minutes is the bare minimum and anything past 30 is unnecessary.)
– Don’t ban ANYTHING. Just keep rescheduling it. It’s easier to say “I won’t be looking at porn a year from now” than “I won’t look at porn ever again, not even when I’m 102”.
Q & A: Doesn’t this still require will-power? Of course! But the will-power required is significantly less than in other approaches to quitting pornography. The key to making the personal commitment work is that you actually ALLOW yourself to masturbate after meditating. That way, when your penis-brain says “you can’t hold me back forever” you can respond with “Yes, I know. But you’re not coming out until I tell you to!”
What’s so hard about sitting still for a little while if you know there’s sex on the other side? Whenever I wanted it BAD, it became HELL to meditate. Meditation requires discipline and calm, and that’s the opposite of what’s going on when a craving hits. It’s literally painful to attempt meditating like that. If you actually CAN endure it, the craving will have to die. In the early days, I got a few sudden cravings and actually had to give up on them because I couldn’t get through meditation. The same thing applies to sickness: if you’re too sick to sit still for 15-30 minutes, you probably shouldn’t be masturbating either.
But why are you still looking at porn in phase 1? For me at least, I thought it was important to allow porn early on.
First, it helped strip away the positive feelings I had for it. At first, I looked forward to it. But after masturbation gating for a couple weeks, I felt absolutely disgusting when I sat down to porn, like a gambling addict in front of a slot machine. I think you’ll be shocked what porn becomes after you do this long enough.
Second, how do you honestly convince yourself you will NEVER do something again? Hell, maybe when I’m 92 I’ll pop open a playboy and go at it. If you read what I said carefully, I’m not banning porn forever! I’m merely scheduling it and re-scheduling it into the future (probably indefinitely, but don’t tell my penis I said that).
Some final remarks:
I apologize for discovering this and not posting for months. To be frank, it’s worked so well that I lost my interest in reading about pornography addiction altogether. The only reason I came back today was because I saw a TIME magazine in Walgreens with the words “meditation”, “addiction”, and “cravings”. Part of my motivation for coming here was selfish (I want to be FIRST), but also, I don’t think TIME has it completely right.
TIME’s basic premise is that meditation helps build will-power and controls cravings. Basically, the Scientific Community now thinks meditation will help us “Say No”.
Well, long before the Scientific Community said so, I tried meditation to control cravings. I tried it over and over again. It didn’t work. The problem was that I just couldn’t stand it after a while. Like I said above, if you really want something BAD, you hardly have the self-discipline and calm required to sit Indian Style for 15-30 minutes. The first six times it might work work because, philosophically, you think “it’s the right thing to do”. But over time, once you’re no longer thinking “I shall fight porn with Zen!”, you just don’t want to do it.
In contrast, I used meditation as a sort of gate that I had to walk through to get to the bad stuff. It’s easy to keep meditating this way because you’re penis brain know it ends with a reward. Naturally, it also becomes a beautiful experience in its own right. I’m not going to tell you how to do it or what it’s “supposed” to be like. However, I will tell you that I now meditate regularly for many reasons other than gating off masturbation.
I’m confident this method could be used for other cravings as well. Paradoxically, it gave me control over my failures by giving me control over when I would fail. Feel free to re-name this method if “Meditation Gate” isn’t a good enough name.
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