What's One Thing You Stopped Doing?

Reddit Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/Mindfulness/comments/1re39uu/comment/o7acuol/?context=3

Abandoning pornography, masturbation, and lustfulness. That was awesome.

Snoo_44409: Thats a hard go. Does it ever get easier?

Oh yeah, especially when you start to see the fruits of relinquishing the neediness for sexual gratification. The real tricky piece is doing it in the moment when you’re actively in scenarios that activate it - being in the presence of a highly attractive person, in a sexually charged space, or with naked men and women around.

Anything that actually puts you in that mind-space. It’s one thing to abstain completely (which is also hard in its own way, very much so), another thing to sit in the very center of what creates it and watch how the craving arises and cutting it at its root.

When it doesn’t move you into that grasping desire or shut you down to avoid the intensity of the feeling, and you just “are”, is an incredible experience of self-power. You’re no longer at the mercy of its shiny qualities and act freely in the moment with precision. And then you spontaneously imbue your life with greater confidence, moral strength, concentration, speech, abundance, etc.

I say this all because I used to be very meek, quiet, scared, addicted to sex and pornography, craving attention from beautiful women, etc. In a sense, I felt very much like a little boy. But cutting through this very challenging domain has been a revelation in my way of being, so this is just an offering of an observation after doing the years and years of work.