I started masturbating probably at the age of 12 and by 14 or 15 started watching porn. I am in my mid-30’s and this is not my best streak. I have gone up to 180 days without masturbating before. But there is a huge difference between now and then. My best was around 6 years before, those 180 days, I was literally fighting. I was fighting with urges all the time, ruminating, etc and then came a day when I was too tired to fight and I gave up. The tension mounted and exploded. This time, these 120 days was different, I simply didn’t fight, I stopped seeing it as battle. I had the same level of urges like last time, but the way I handled my urges was different this time. I am not exhausted this time, not feeling any pressure but on the other side I can feel my urges dropping off little by little or at least they are not strong as they used to be.
I have been contemplating about submitting a post about this since a couple of days. Its because I am seeing a lot of people posing about fighting, fighting spirits and keeping up the fight. Dear brothers, I cannot stress anymore, please give up fighting because this is a battle you cannot win. Please don’t take it as a battle. I have read somewhere a story from an Indian epic about a demon which gets the half the power of the one who fights it. The demon draws half the power from its opponent and it becomes stronger and the opponent becomes weaker. Porn, is such a demon. Every addiction is such a demon. If you fight it, it gets power from us and gets stronger and stronger until one day we are too weak to fight and give up. When we give up, we give up bad. That is what we call binging.
So, what can we do? Just like the story of the demon, we should kill it without fighting it. Starve it! Do not give any food. Here the food, is our attention, our mental attention. Now this is another difficulty. How do we starve something which always forcefully demand our attention? That’s what Napeolean Hill says, ‘transmutation’. ‘Sublimation’, says the Eastern philosophy and Buddhism. In the beginning I thought these funny words, ‘transmutation’ and ‘sublimation’ are just jargons used by spiritual geeks and it has no relevance to common people like me. Its only recently I realized the priceless value of this practice and the immense power it carried. It just means divert your mental attention to something that is positive so that you forget the other.
Find something that is worthwhile, pick up something that helps you grow. Please don’t pickup another addiction in order to avoid one, but something positive, something interests you. Put your mind into it. Every time an urge comes, acknowledge its presence, ignore it and forget it. Give your mental attention to something else that’s positive. Some people work out in the gym, some pickup a musical instrument, writing, meditating, etc.
I wish someday all of us reach a stage when we are no longer interested in the ‘superpowers’ NoFap could bring, the ‘alpha male’ thing and all such things and we even forget we are on a NoFap streak and this becomes a natural part of our life.
Just a quote to remember:
“Whatever you fight, you strengthen, and what you resist, persists.” ― Eckhart Tolle
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