Meditation on Masturbation

I just completed a 30 minute meditation session, 10 of which I spent asking the question "Why do I masturbate?" This dredged a lot of stuff up. Here goes:

Shame and Escape

These are the biggest ones. This goes back to when I was a kid. The older I got the more I hated myself and my life. I was a sensitive kid, and wasn't dealing with the changes of adolescence well. I was also a sensitive teen, and the older I got, the more I felt I just didn't fit in at all. I escaped through masturbation. I developed a particularly bad habit around final exams: I'd create a "study zone" in the basement right in front of the computer complete with tables for food (and books) access to what was the Internet back then, and lots of tissues. That's right, once the exam stress got too high, I would just jack off continuously.

The shame was all the things I was holding back. I hated most the way I looked, but I also hated who I was. I didn't want to be gay. I wished I hadn't quit playing sports but at this point I felt it was too late. (I still get trapped in THAT one sometimes.) In short, I wished I was tall, muscular, popular... most of all popular. I was very lonely, almost all the time I felt like I was alone and nobody understood how I felt.

Now the shame problem is a feedback loop. I'm ashamed of wasting all my time masturbating because I hate that's who I am right now. And I'm conditioned to masturbate when I feel shame. Not a healthy cycle at all.

I've actually been working on my athleticism and self-image. I still don't like what I see in the mirror though. I'm definitely pleased with the progress I've made, but I still don't like what I see. This is something I need to get over; I'm starting to worry that I may never truly like what I see if I don't learn to love myself with the flaws. Shaving most of my hair off made me see myself in a new light, and I'm hoping this change is enough to break me out of more of my patterns. It's started to.

I am going to take some time and consider what I want myself to be. What does success look like for me? What would life be like if I didn't feel compelled to masturbate and no longer logged into sex sites? I think that would be amazing. I'd be truly free.

And I want to be.