— Jimmy Carter
Feels weird to remember I was younger than what I am today. That’s obvious, but I just want to recall these moments when I had no control about any of my feelings towards people. In my teens I remember really well the burning desire I felt towards some people I knew in high school and some of them knew it.
You see, the seduction game is precisely it. A game. But I didn’t know how to play it.
I thought I would dazzle the ladies by being a gentleman, but not how you are thinking about it. A gentleman from some sort of a bad romance movie. Kissing the hand, doing any favor in my power required. Yeah, exactly, I was a doormat and also not genuine. I was following a script which I thought would give me results. Psychology has a lot to say about that now, but the point is… I had no control. I was young, and starved like any of us is at that age and lacked confidence. People without confidence follow scripts and are not genuine, but the mask always falls off. So I figured, if I could just find a way to not “slave myself” to my desire for another, I would break free from my impulses to be more and more myself, which is the real game! Confidence! You can only be truly confident by using your own tools, not of some book or some talk on the internet. Even if they suck now, you can polish them into real gems!.
A way to gain confidence is to give some power back to you when you break free from a very particular illusion: Believing that desired or loved person to be so high and us so low. So perfect and so flawed. So deep and we are such fools. This is nonsense, and there’s a buddhist exercise I found out from the Dalai Lama himself, specially to balance the madness of desire. Here it is. You are going to love it:
Find a quiet place where you can think quietly and bring this person to mind. Let yourself dwell in all the details you can. The smell, the hair, the body perhaps… imagine this desired, perfect being without clothing. Try to fill in the details to your satisfaction. Now… imagine this flawless being without skin. Notice your mind having a resistant reaction. It might take a little bit more effort, but don’t stay there… keep dwelling deeper. Take off the muscle, try to picture the skeleton of your desired one. See his organs, the beating heart, the intestines… the fecal matter they carry with every intestinal movement. Yes… they also go to the bathroom, their fecal is also smelly, like yours. Their bladder filled with urine. Now. notice your own reaction to this exercise.
Don’t you feel a little bit more grounded? Perhaps horrified but you must admit it works! Haha. I am sorry, it's for the best!. But here, now you can go and talk to this person you never dared to speak to before, because what you did before was imagining every possible and impossible situation where you will be looked upon as inferior. Even if you fail, you will be rejected by a person, flesh and bone like you and me, who also takes a really nice time in the bathroom… because he or she is also human. Brilliant, isn’t?
Do this as many times as necessary until you feel you are being real. Personally, I don’t believe in going on dates only to impress with masks, phrases and “moves”. What’s the fun in that? It’s always more educational and deep testing your own senses. How else will you build confidence?
Nevertheless, is a good night to just sit down and think how everyone is just a human. You, me, the government, the so-called “men of god”. By design we have the same mind, filled to the core with contradictions, resistances and biases. Maybe, just maybe, we could use the same exercise to forgive. To every failure in the other perhaps, there are twice in us we like to forget.
What do you think?
Best regards!
