[00:00:00] Welcome to the Walls of Sparta. It's a podcast dedicated to authentic stories of men overcoming adversity by demonstrating strength, leadership, and healthy masculinity. I'm your host, Greg Papanikolas, and you can find me on social media at Gregpcoach or YouTube or Facebook.
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[email protected] so today, again, we're going to cover a little bit is going to be part two of eroticism versus pornography. And then I broached this topic based on the fact that I thought a lot of people were talking about it. It was a hot topic. It was very popular amongst the banter on Facebook as I was seeing things week to week.
[00:01:56] Touch on that subject more than a lot of other subjects. When people weren't talking about, you know, politics or something, it was, you know, the. As part of the struggle of men, as we're, as we talk about on the show, one of the big struggles today was men overcoming that again, that desire to look at porn and try to change that habit and try to think of different ways to either increase the pleasure for you and your loved one or when you're pleasuring yourself, how not to go directly to something that, you know can affect the brain. As we've seen and heard in a lot of the studies on how porn affects your brain. So ever since that those studies came out, it's been, you know, a really hard topic not to.
[00:03:01] People had. Just don't want to get away from it, you know, because it's. It's. It affects almost every man. Um, and I know just from talking to men, they want to change it. They really do.
[00:03:12] And I'm here to help. And that's why I started this journey to coaching was to help men overcome all those things that are holding them back from their true potential. And this is one of them. So I want to talk a little bit about today, a little bit more about the pleasure sort of side of things. Self pleasure side of things.
[00:03:35] Not to say it won't, you know, talk about a little bit about how to pleasure your loved one. But for men to be sort of fully present in pleasure is to sort of redefine it. Like, we gotta listen to the body, you know, and instead of waiting for it to shout.
[00:03:56] Like, you ever notice how the way the.
[00:04:00] You get the standing. That hair standing on the back of your neck when it responds to a deliberate touch, that's not a small thing, right? Or just the way that, you know, pleasure is initiated and you feel the sensation how of, you know, a pair of your wife's nails or your girlfriend's nails trace the skin of your privates, right? There's. It sends sort of this, like, electricity through your body. That's very different than, you know, what you would experience watching porn. It's just not the same thing. So there's a whole landscape of sensation that remains sort of untouched because, like, we haven't allowed ourselves to explore it enough, really. Eroticism by itself taken apart from porn is an invitation, you know, of patience.
[00:04:53] And it takes a lot of surrender. But first the patience thing has to take place. We're going to tend to not be patient when we get on, you know, our phones and watch a bunch of porn. That's not being patient with listening to our body, with knowing what we want, right? To feel something a little bit deeper.
[00:05:16] We want it to be kind of that slow simmer, right? That's what you're looking for with pleasure, you know, versus trying to demand this eruption right away, you know, that you would normally get with porn. So there's. There's something really powerful in taking our time and sort of savoring the pleasure that we're in. We're in the moment of. Rather than, you know, working and rushing towards this inevitable end.
[00:05:49] And, you know, the journey that we talk about in eroticism is about, like, expanding the experience of the two of you, you and your. You Know, your wife or your girlfriend and the experience itself, you just. You want to feel like you're engaging in something fuller and embracing something a little richer or rather than the sort of easy way out, you know, with pornography, because it's such a quick. It's such a quick fix, you know, and then we get, of course, when they talk about the post nut clarity of like, Jesus, why am I always doing this after you've already climaxed? You know, so we have to remember that we as men are, you know, our bodies are not acting out of a script, okay?
[00:06:39] We're capable of feeling, sensing and exploring ways that we have yet to really discover fully. And these are the things that we sort of briefly were experiencing when we first started pleasuring ourselves. We were the types that would, you know, in my case, in Generation X, we didn't have, like I said in the last episode, we did not have all of that.
[00:07:06] All those resources, you know, we didn't have porn at our fingertips on our phones. Um, so, you know, we. We had to be more resourceful. We had to use our imagination. We had to think about fantasy. We had to live in the fantasy. And that's one of the things that. When I talk about, you know, meditative masturbation, how do we accomplish that so that we can use that as a tool rather than relying on porn? Because we're, again, with meditation, we're focusing again on the mind and the sensations. And when we imagine a situation or we imagine a fantasy, it has to be sort of this detailed, oriented thing.
[00:07:49] It has to be just as detailed oriented as the things that we think about in our own lives or we're planning in our own lives or. Or if we're coming to grips with something or we want to. We want to think of and. Or we're constructing something in our lives and we want to imagine it, you know, being successful. We want to use those same techniques when we're engaging in meditative masturbation.
[00:08:17] Think about where you are in that fantasy. Think about the colors, think about who's there.
[00:08:26] Think about the smells, think about the taste. You know, there's so much more that is not really touched on when it comes to this kind of stuff. We're just so quick to jump on our phones and just get right to it, rather than taking our time. You know, music on. On another hand, that is something that can really lift the senses and really be pleasurable. If there's a certain kind of music that really kind of hits your, you know, those receptors where you feel that pleasure you know, erotic pleasure or just some type of music that has that sort of erotic nature. Like, I'll find something on there that's just like. Just jives with me, right? And then I'll just close my eyes. It's as simple as that, right? I'm not afraid to say it, right? We shouldn't be afraid to say it, especially when this is such a huge fight, you know, against the urge, you know, to view porn. And I think the more we can practice these.
[00:09:33] This new avenue, right, of trying to reach a different area of your brain and to sort of reteach yourself to gain pleasure from something that you can deeply imagine, right?
[00:09:52] I think can be really special. It's. It's something that needs to be practiced. It's something that needs to be really worked on over a period of time. Because again, to solve this sort of like, porn crisis, we have to think about immediately how do we go to the next sort of phase of healing from it.
[00:10:16] There may be an underlining thing with our own traumas that sort of allow that to happen where we're letting too many past experiences affect that part of us. So the desire to jump right into the porn is part of our trauma, right?
[00:10:35] But really, if we can clear our thoughts and start from a blank canvas, right? And think about the things that really give you that deep sort of sensation, right? Imagining things as they're feeling a familiar feeling, something that has. Has felt good to you as a pleasure tool for a long time. Think of that thing that you end up feeling really good at the end of it, and you're very familiar with it. Maybe it's something your partner has done in the past, right? Or something you've done with a.
[00:11:14] Someone you've dated in the past where you really felt like they, like you felt that great sensation they gave you and they knew your.
[00:11:23] Your zones, right? You know, you knew. They knew your roger zones. Like they knew how to find the.
[00:11:30] The parts of you that really turned you on.
[00:11:33] Think about those things and really, really focus on those sensations. And when you get deep into the imagination, really try to find a way to get really super detailed into the colors, right? The smells, the sounds, right? Okay. There's something about a woman moaning, right? There really is, right? There's something that really kind of turns a man on when they hear a woman moaning. When it's genuine, right?
[00:12:03] The smells, like, you know, your partner's smell, you know, increases your pheromones. You know, these things that you're. Even if it's something random that you don't know why it turns you on. It's so weird that my wife's hairspray has this certain smell that just sets me off. And it's hairspray, but for some reason it, it reaches me on a different level that I had to discover later and be like, babe, what is that? She's like, that's my hairspray, you know. So again, really getting detailed, oriented in your meditation. Really sit there for a minute and start the breathing process like you would if you were meditating anyway.
[00:12:51] And think about the story, right? Build the story in your head and maybe use some music, right? Practice it over and over again. You know, if we're going to heal from the obsession with instant gratification and something right in front of ourselves, we're ignoring all the other elements of our senses, right? We're only focused on the sight, we're only focused on the visual. If you can close your eyes and think of all those different senses and how they impact you, we can really, really have an intense experience. And I've had a lot of intense experiences over the years when I realized that this was way more powerful and way more pleasurable. And then again, you're not, you're not doing it all the time either. With porn. Guys are, you know, they're on some kind of clock every day with some, some are doing it once a. A day, you know, and with something like this, you're taking your time with it. It's when you catch that, when you catch that feeling, you're.
[00:14:02] You're definitely not doing it just to do it, right, like you would with porn. It's just. Some men do it out of boredom or it's just part of their daily routine. With this, you're really responding to your, you know, what you're feeling at that moment. And if it's, and if it's something you're feeling that you, you want to capture and you want to feel it, you know, as part of that meditative process, you know, and self pleasure yourself to climax, do it. Okay? We can't be afraid of this, guys. Like, this is something that we had done as, you know, young teenagers. And we never took advantage of the fact that it was something much deeper and we could explore it even further.
[00:14:52] So, guys, I hope that helped today. Again, these are situations that come up that may be taboo for some people. Some people might be pretty comfortable speaking about it. I'm Greek, I speak about all this stuff and I don't care very open about these kind of things. So again, if you guys want to send me any questions through dm, let me know your experiences with this if you try it. I think it's really, really important to focus on the fact that it's not going to happen overnight. You're not going to be able to just click right out of it, right? That, you know, getting rid of the, the porn habit, it's something that it's going to take some time and being patient with the patient with the process and to really, really get really, just intentional with it.
[00:15:46] I think, you know, you can really make, you can really make for some wonderful, incredible moments that could then translate into other experiences with your loved one, right? Because when you know what turns you on in those fantasies, maybe you can explore them with your loved one, right? And you have that same desire to treat her with that, with that honor and, and desire that she loves to, to hear when you tell her things. So focus on that this week, guys, and I hope that you all are doing well and keep it up.
[00:16:31] Just definitely practice this and see if it, see how it feels. You never know again, guys, the we're gonna wrap up and I think, you know, next week I'll probably have guests again and I just wanted to kind of go over some of these hot topics. I'm glad we did.
[00:16:51] We'll touch on some other aspects. Not, maybe not of this, but just of relationships, sexual relationships and things like that and some other things about rectal dysfunction we can cover. That, I think, is another battle that men have to deal with. So we have to, you know, I think, touch on those aspects that men struggle with as well.
[00:17:18] Guys, if you're a man who has battled the demons and lived to tell about it, we want to hear from you. Come share your story. On the walls of Sparta, we interview men who overcome adversity by demonstrating strength, leadership, and healthy masculinity. Apply for a future episode by going to allsofsparta.com and once again, if you want to know how greatness feels and you have a burning desire to bring it back, get the Sparta code now@coach gregp.com thanks for joining us. On the walls of Sparta, guys. And remember, victory is near. There are no walls in Sparta. Take care.
