Kylir

You guys are awesome! Thank you so much for the kind words, the encouragement, and the really great thoughts. Really, it means a lot to me. Thank you very, very much! I'm still going strong and I am still sober from porn, masterbation, and angry outbursts. I want this to last my entire life. It is wonderful. Although I am afraid it'll come back. I especially feel this way since I can't really point to something I am doing/feeling and say "that's what got rid of my addiction". I feel like I can't really even know if it is truly gone. I still struggle with consistent meditation too, but I'm working on it. I pretty much just do it when I remember and the mood strikes me. I feel that I have spent so much time trying to understand myself on my own terms. I've learned a lot. It has been good. But I do feel like I need to do something to save my marriage. Like somehow showing these changes in me and the new understanding I have? Or maybe I ought to just be me and let God sort everything else out?

Hello fellow actualizers, I am very new to the ideas and things that Leo is teaching. I've just started meditating and trying to do it 20 minutes a day. I often miss days. I'm also addicted to pornography and masterbation and have been for 23 years. I'm verbally abusive when angry and am controlling. These things have led my wife (of 11 years) to want to divorce me. We've been separated two months and things aren't looking good. I believe my negative traits originate from the same deep, underlying problem: feeling like I must do things all alone, by myself and that I am not enough, not capable of doing what I have to do. These feelings have originated from my inability to control and stop myself from masterbating and viewing porn and my childhood. So I watched Leo's video on addiction where he suggests as a first step to breaking addiction is sitting in a room and doing nothing for a couple hours. I decided to try it out and see what would happen. I set an alarm on my phone for two hours and then I meditated the entire time in an empty room. I was expecting it to be rough, like cravings for porn would come up or negative feelings or that I would struggle with thoughts of recovery. But instead it was "easy". I just sat there and tried to do and focus on nothing. Thoughts would come into my mind and I was able to notice them, not get wrapped up in them, and let them go. Admittedly there were some instances where I did get caught up in something, typically it was thoughts about changing myself and my recovery from porn/anger, but I was able to get out of them without them going on for very long. I'd say my experience of sitting in an empty room for two hours was exactly how sitting in an empty room for two hours should be. In light of my current problems, I was wondering if this meant something? Did I do the meditation wrong? Should I have been focusing my thoughts on an existential void and being in it? Or perhaps does this mean a weakening of the addiction? Or simply is the addiction still there and I am filling it with recovery now instead of porn and anger? I'm curious what you guys think of this. Also, 5-6 months ago when my marriage started falling apart, which was a wake-up call for me, I hit therapy and recovery really hard. So hard that I feel like I may have replaced my addictions with a new addiction and obsession to recovery. Seeing therapists and talking to others feels good. All I want to do is think about, read, and talk to others about my problems. It is like I am trying to fill a unfillable void, as Leo talks about it. So for whatever reason, I have been sober from masterbation/porn/anger for this 5-6 months and it has been easy to stay sober. What are your thoughts on this? Thanks!