Setting proper expectations about urges.

[CreamCat]

Shall I expect to have urges to randomly search the internet, eat junk food, waste hours of my precious life on criticism, and so on after many years of proper personal development?

What kinds of expectations shall I have about urges?

What shall I do if urges hit me while I don't have a certain amount of positive momentum?

While I have momentum, it's not that difficult to ward off urges. When I don't, I experience difficult challenges.

For now, the only imaginable way to practically ward off urges is to find ways to maintain momentum and remove obvious distractions that I have allowed in my life so far. If I don't remove obvious distractions, it could take more than 4 decades to clean up my mind.

Edited June 19, 2019 by CreamCat

[hamedsf]

Lemme give you a much simpler practice instead of forcing things to happen and putting up resistance:

if you simply raise your awareness while you're doing your activities/demonstrating behaviors, the extra behaviors will be warded off!!!

awareness per se, auto-corrects everything! 

Edited June 19, 2019 by hamedsf

[Aakash]

If urges are stopping you from reaching your objectives and goals directly, then you should stop it. If they aren't then you can do them until you become an addict, however it does not stop your next days activity or ability to wake up/ go sleep [so texting before bed is not good ]. you have to wait a certain number of days before your brain chemistry changes and that's probably around a month minimum. In addition you have to spend that time doing either a substitute activity or as the guy above me suggests meditation. 

[Salvijus]

6 hours ago, CreamCat said:

Shall I expect to have urges to randomly search the internet, eat junk food, waste hours of my precious life on criticism, and so on after many years of proper personal development?

It depends on what you do. If you did some practice that is designed to dissolve compulsions, usually it is called "dissolving karma" type of practice like vippasana or samyama or even shambhavi for example. Then you'd come out of it in a very short time. 

There are many types of meditations with differerent results and goals. You can meditate to raise your awareness or to raise your kundalini or other 100things you can do with meditation. But unless you do the practice which dissolves compulsions you will not get anywhere. You can do a 100years personal development and you'll still have the same compulsions.

"If you don't do the right things, right things will not happen to you" 

Edited June 19, 2019 by Salvijus

[Truth Addict]

Just keep your basic needs met and don't worry about other things.

Maslow's hierarchy is so underrated here.

[Sahil Pandit]

7 hours ago, hamedsf said:

 

if you simply raise your awareness while you're doing your activities/demonstrating behaviors, the extra behaviors will be warded off!!!

awareness per se, auto-corrects everything! 

This is a great point.

Slow down, feel the feeling, notice where it's located in the body, dis-identify, and let it go... 

[CreamCat]

7 hours ago, Salvijus said:

If you did some practice that is designed to dissolve compulsions, usually it is called "dissolving karma" type of practice like vippasana or samyama or even shambhavi for example. Then you'd come out of it in a very short time. 

There are many types of meditations with differerent results and goals. You can meditate to raise your awareness or to raise your kundalini or other 100things you can do with meditation. But unless you do the practice which dissolves compulsions you will not get anywhere. You can do a 100years personal development and you'll still have the same compulsions.

Can you be more specific about it? I want to try specific things.

[Salvijus]

Vipassana S. N. Goenka,

Sadhguru Inner Engineering,

selfless activity, volunteering. 

 

[CreamCat]

4 minutes ago, Salvijus said:

selfless activity, volunteering.

Vipassana and sadhguru inner engineering sound credible, but I'm skeptical about selfless activity.

Selfless activity is not particularly known for improving discipline.

[DrewNows]

Description says to become conscious of the subconcisius, being fully present with the urges will allow you to break free from conditioning ?

Edited June 20, 2019 by DrewNows

[DrewNows]

6 minutes ago, CreamCat said:

Selfless activity is not particularly known for improving discipline.

Feeling committed to something greater than you does produce the momentum for discipline. Teamwork is very effective 

[Salvijus]

Volunteering is called karma yoga for a reason. Because it dissolves your karma, meaning it disintengles you from your attachments. You don't need to use your logic here, just try feeding the pigeons, you'll see it will burn you so much!.

But it's okey, that's not the only way, There're many other ways to go about it

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=389731201621819&id=20781959145&anchor_composer=false

 

 

 

 

[Aakash]

1 hour ago, Salvijus said:

Volunteering is called karma yoga for a reason. Because it dissolves your karma, meaning it disintengles you from your attachments.

This is a brilliant remark, this is exactly what i'm going to do from now on. Feed some tigers for the greater good, and this will free me of my bad habits. Thanks! 

[Dan502]

I've similarly been struggling for years with regular bad habits e.g. not beig able to put the laptop down causing me to stay up late and be less effective the next day. 

I don't feel capable of meditating.

I may try bringing some more awareness to what I'm doing and may also make a chart to log several details/KPIs, like how a person might manage a team's productivity at work.

[CreamCat]

17 hours ago, hamedsf said:

awareness per se, auto-corrects everything! 

Yes in the long term. But, awareness alone doesn't correct everything in a reasonable amount of time. I need a lot more than awareness to correct things in reasonable amounts of time. Plus, it's difficult to maintain awareness over hours.

In a competitive game, one needs every competitive advantage.

Edited June 20, 2019 by CreamCat

[CreamCat]

• I expect those urges to come back again and again for months and years.
  • The urge to eat junk food.
  • The urge to treat myself with food, porn, internet, ... after hard work.
  • The urge to masturbate to porn when I'm horny
  • The urge to randomly browse or search the internet
  • The urge to quit or procrastinate due to fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
• You would have to settle with mediocrity if you cannot push past fear, uncertainty, and doubt for years and decades.
• Get used to urges, fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Get used to pushing past them on a daily basis.

Edited June 21, 2019 by CreamCat