fullset

Hello fellow members, This is my first post, and I'm afraid it is going to be a long one. First of all, a little bit of my background and then I promise to come to my story/dilemma right now. But before I do that, I have to thank you guys for all your contributions that you have made and will make in the future. I've read two threads on this forum. The first one was a mega thread of 100 day semen retention experience and the other was the path to enlightenment started by dawg. Ok, so now my background. I'm 27 year old living in US. I moved there when I was 15. I am originally from India. As is the culture there, I've always been very interested in meditation as most cultural/mythological stories had accounts of powerful men, kings, warriors, saints etc. gaining their strength and powers from years and years of meditation. I still have to admit that I'm not very good at meditation at all times, but sometimes I do hit the zone where I can go for about 45 minutes. And now my current situation: After moving to US, I lost my way and got addicted to smoking cigarettes, smoked weed, and masturbated to porn once or twice almost every day. I quit porn and masturbation last year for about a 100 days. I did have wet dreams every 10 days or so. Somehow I got back onto porn and went on and off for most of the beginning of this year. But, on May 21 of this year, I quit smoking cigarettes, weed, porn and masturbation. The thing that helped me the most was I started taking cold showers and exercise. A month later I was going kayaking on a lake and I put on sunscreen. Now I've never had skin issues, but I started breaking out. I have had more acne since then than I had my entire life. After this persisted for a while, I started getting a little sad. Now I'm normally an abnormally happy person, but acne was seriously wreaking havoc on my psyche and my confidence. To make matters worse, I put on an acne medication that burnt my skin on my face. To get me out of my funk, I went back to taking hot showers. It helped just a slight bit. I got a little desperate and had to FORCE myself to masturbate. Acne improved a little bit. And now over the last week, I've masturbated to porn every day, taken hot showers, and started smoking as well. One really weird thing that I've noticed is that insects and bugs were really attracted to me. Like how they would be to rotting meat. Again, normally they are not. Ther has been times that I went out camping in the national forest and my friend was getting clobbered with bugs and mosquitoes and insects, and they wouldn't even come close to me and I didn't even have bug spray on! Somehow I was emitting a scent of rotten meat? I don't even know if this makes any sense. Anyhow, I am thinking that something somewhere went horribly wrong. I am blaming sunscreen and EXCLUSIVE cold showering, but more so the sunscreen since I was taking cold showers for the first month without any problems. As a matter of fact, I felt better than I ever had in my life. What do you guys think? I've read somewhere that if you don't know what you're doing, retention can be very harmful. I've been introspecting about this and thinking diligently about what is causing my facial skin to not be healthy when it had been for 27 years and I've ran out of ideas. I'm praying that some of the more experienced, enlightened individuals could help me out. Thanks, Fullset

Thank you!

But out of all the things that could've caused this, what do you think was the culprit?

Thank you. I also burnt my skin - a reaction to benzoyl peroxide which is made it worse and has left a few scars. Hope they clear up soon as well.

I think seeker of tao gave the best explanation. We see emptiness in space because space is a vacuum and hence nothing to reflect light so we can see. Things in space reflect light (like planets that we see) or emit light (like stars) or consume light (like black holes).

Being cynical is good, but only to a certain extent. Do you have any advise/suggestions/thoughts about my problem though? I would love to hear them!

I took cold showers first up in the morning. I do not recommend ice cold showers before going to bed. Cold showers pretty much got me pumped up and readya to conquer the world. Not exactly the feeling you would want before you wind down and go to bed, but may be 4-5 hours before your bedtime might be a good idea. Personally, I used to get wet dreams every 10 days last year when I was abstaining. This year when I went on a 90 day abstinence, my frequency increased from every 10 days to every 14 days and after a month (that is 2nd wet dream) I stopped having them. So yeah, give cold showers a try. In my experience it helped immensely.

Yes, but I find strength from the fact that good times do follow bad times. It certainly doesn't help being pessimistic.

In my experience, the best way to do this is to take cold showers.

Forgot to mention, but I did do intermittent fasting - no food for 16-20 hours and eat for the rest of the day. I agree fasting is EXTREMELY good. I got a lot of mental clarity from it.

The right way to lead myself to the path of enlightenment. If not enlightenment, the extreme bliss that I experienced when I didn't masturbate, didn't watch porn, didn't smoke, and took ice cold showers every day. What I'm trying to figure out was what is the root cause for this. That I watched porn without masturbating for close to 3 weeks and that energy stagnating enabling bacteria to feed off of it. Or that I used a bad sunscreen and took cold showers on top of it so it made deep into my skin and causing me to break out (cold showers supposedly close the pores on out skin). God I just want to get back to the state I was in in the beginning of July before this thing started.

Yeah, but I went a little over 100 days last year and it wasn't a problem. I think watching porn for 3 weeks after I stopped masturbating resulted in seminal energy? And that combined with a cheap, shitty sunscreen, which along with cold showers made it deep into my skin that resulted in acne? I'm just trying to figure out the source of the problem so that I can correct it. Right now, I'm back to the way I was before I started this whole thing last year - smoking cigarettes, weed, and taking hot showers just so that I can get back to my "normal" state. But after having felt the bliss of not masturbating and not smoking, I'm desperate to be able to do it again. When I do go back to not masturbating, watching porn, and smoking, I want to do things the right way. But since I got burnt this time around, I want to get into it a bit carefully.

EDIT: I'm sorry, but there is one thing that I did not type out correctly. I did quit masturbation on May 21st, but for about 3 weeks, I did watch porn. Is it possible that seminal energy produced "degraded" like food and caused my issues? You guys' thoughts are truly appreciated. Thank you

Hello fellow members, This is my first post, and I'm afraid it is going to be a long one. First of all, a little bit of my background and then I promise to come to my story/dilemma right now. But before I do that, I have to thank you guys for all your contributions that you have made and will make in the future. I've read two threads on this forum. The first one was a mega thread of 100 day semen retention experience and the other was the path to enlightenment started by dawg. Ok, so now my background. I'm 27 year old living in US. I moved there when I was 15. I am originally from India. As is the culture there, I've always been very interested in meditation as most cultural/mythological stories had accounts of powerful men, kings, warriors, saints etc. gaining their strength and powers from years and years of meditation. I still have to admit that I'm not very good at meditation at all times, but sometimes I do hit the zone where I can go for about 45 minutes. And now my current situation: After moving to US, I lost my way and got addicted to smoking cigarettes, smoked weed, and masturbated to porn once or twice almost every day. I quit porn and masturbation last year for about a 100 days. I did have wet dreams every 10 days or so. Somehow I got back onto porn and went on and off for most of the beginning of this year. But, on May 21 of this year, I quit smoking cigarettes, weed, porn and masturbation. The thing that helped me the most was I started taking cold showers and exercise. A month later I was going kayaking on a lake and I put on sunscreen. Now I've never had skin issues, but I started breaking out. I have had more acne since then than I had my entire life. After this persisted for a while, I started getting a little sad. Now I'm normally an abnormally happy person, but acne was seriously wreaking havoc on my psyche and my confidence. To make matters worse, I put on an acne medication that burnt my skin on my face. To get me out of my funk, I went back to taking hot showers. It helped just a slight bit. I got a little desperate and had to FORCE myself to masturbate. Acne improved a little bit. And now over the last week, I've masturbated to porn every day, taken hot showers, and started smoking as well. One really weird thing that I've noticed is that insects and bugs were really attracted to me. Like how they would be to rotting meat. Again, normally they are not. Ther has been times that I went out camping in the national forest and my friend was getting clobbered with bugs and mosquitoes and insects, and they wouldn't even come close to me and I didn't even have bug spray on! Somehow I was emitting a scent of rotten meat? I don't even know if this makes any sense. Anyhow, I am thinking that something somewhere went horribly wrong. I am blaming sunscreen and EXCLUSIVE cold showering, but more so the sunscreen since I was taking cold showers for the first month without any problems. As a matter of fact, I felt better than I ever had in my life. What do you guys think? I've read somewhere that if you don't know what you're doing, retention can be very harmful. I've been introspecting about this and thinking diligently about what is causing my facial skin to not be healthy when it had been for 27 years and I've ran out of ideas. I'm praying that some of the more experienced, enlightened individuals could help me out. Thanks, Fullset

Thank you guys for your support.