This is not an article to examine whether watching porn is good or bad. Things become ‘bad’ when we give up our power by allowing it to control us and take over our lives.

I am writing this article to share my experience because so many people I work with and speak to have shared similar experiences.

In 2011, I had a life changing experience in India when I went into a deep meditative state. It compelled me to look at many areas of my life including:

• My relationships
• The way I expressed my sexuality

Some realizations took a couple of years for me to completely understand and appreciate. Other realizations came quickly and I immediately made changes.

One of my biggest realizations was how dependent my orgasms had become on porn.

Porn robbed me of my imagination, made my orgasm depend on it, and set many false expectations.

At the time, I thought my pleasure was connected to a man’s satisfaction.

This was a deep wake up call.

I didn’t realize that the beauty of sex had lost all it’s power and magic because, it had become a performance, overdone, unfulfilling and sometimes painful.

I was putting on a performance instead of just being with my partner and flowing in the experience.

Prior to watching porn, I was tapping into my own healthy dose of imagination. Sometimes there was no imagination and it was all about feeling.

But after watching porn, I had no imagination left. How can I imagine anything when all the images were given to me?

The moving images became so powerful that I started depending on porn scenes to have an orgasm during sex.

It took me away from feeling the slightest sensations and going into transcendent states.

Sex doesn’t thrive on predictability and repetitiveness; instead it thrives on moods, intimacy, surprises, laughter, words, fantasy, love, touch and so much more.

I’ve never been one to have an addictive personality or over indulge regularly, but this ‘dependency’ weakened my power because I allowed it to have control over me.

So how did I allow this to happen and why did it take me 10+ years to realize this?

The Science

Scientific research shows that, porn trains our brains to release more endorphins than is natural in response to an overload of sexual stimuli. (You can learn more about this here).

After a while, our brains become desensitized and develop a need for higher and higher stimuli to attain the same arousal and excitement.

Thus begins the spiral into more hardcore porn and higher quantities of it. I also fully understood how people can get addicted to porn since the moving images can be so powerful.

How I Stopped Watching Porn: The 30 – Day Habit Reversal & Challenge

In India, where I was studying about the philosophy of yoga and mediation, they said if you want something to become a permanent habit you must do it for 21 days straight.

I also believe in setting an intention and taking action to demonstrate that intention. Intention backed by action shows willingness to do whatever it takes.

I had to do something quickly to break the habit. So I gave myself a challenge – no porn for 30 days.

During self – pleasure I had to make a conscious effort not to play the scenes in my head and instead feel the sensations and pleasure I was giving myself.

My practice with meditation helped me be more aware of my thoughts and catch myself when I would fall into the pattern of replaying porn scenes.

I also started to do a lot of my self-pleasure in front of a mirror with my eyes open to watch and feel myself.

After 30 days, I had no desire to watch porn, but to test my will power I decided to have a look after a few days.

I had to shut if off after 30 seconds. I noticed so many little details that I was oblivious to before. It was too fake.

Energetically, it had a very low vibration and wasn’t nurturing me on any level and porn became a turn off.

Porn Sex Vs. Real World Sex

Porn is not about erotic love. While both lovemaking and porn have their place in the world, lovemaking is the opposite of what porn portrays.

Art By| @HazelMead

We are erotic creatures and sometimes enjoy watching other’s having sex.

If you want to watch real world sex then check out this website MakeLoveNotPorn.

It’s a user-generated, crowd sourced, video-sharing platform curating videos of real people having real world sex.

Final Thoughts

Today, lovemaking is a completely different feeling for me and has more variety of expressions than ever before.

Also, the way I self pleasure has completely changed – I am in no rush to orgasm and enjoy all the subtle sensations when I get lost in pleasure.

I am NOT saying porn is evil, because everything created for human consumption comes from human consciousness and there is a supply for every demand.

We are all given the power of choice and we decide what we choose to consume and how. When we allow something or someone to over power us, we give up our power of choice.

As we go through the cycle of life, our desires change, causing us to leave old patterns behind and create new ones to fulfill our new desires.

Cover Art By|Brita Seifert