Why You Can’t Sit Still With Yourself

I spent the day working from a cafe.

Told myself I was going to finish some work. But underneath that, there was another reason. I wanted to test myself. To see if all this inner work I keep talking about actually holds when I am out in the world, surrounded by people, with nowhere to hide.

Here is the thing about pleasure.

The pleasures of life can be gifts. Ordained, maybe, by the universe or by God, for us to actually enjoy. There is nothing wrong with them.

The problem is what we use them for.

The moment pleasure becomes the exit. The thing we reach for to escape a painful reality, or an inner state of unfulfillment, of discord, of a dissatisfaction we cannot quite name. That is when the gift becomes the leak.

Because when you sit with it instead. When you choose stillness over the next fleeting pleasure, over the to-do list, over the phone. The pain creeps up. And it does not creep up gently. It rises until it feels like a whole building has come down on your chest.

That is the moment most men never let themselves reach.

The inner compulsion comes to the surface. It gets so heavy, so loud in the body, that we reach for something. A substance. A screen. Anything to counteract a tension that has been living in us the whole time.

And that is exactly what I was testing today. Sitting in that cafe, feeling one particular compulsion rise to the surface.

For me, that one is women. Fantasy.

Let me be honest about my history with this.

I have worked with plenty of addictions. I was a millennial whose family handed him to the screen. I was a serial gamer. An alcoholic. I took every drug I could get my hands on. I smoked for fifteen years and it took me that long to finally quit.

And none of it. None of it tested me the way this does.

Losing my cognitive function to fantasy. Watching my attention get hijacked and pulled out of my own head, and then the pleasurable sensations that wash over me afterward, that make it so hard to stop.

Because here is what I have come to understand about men, about all of us.

We are sensitive creatures. We are more than a body. We are an energy conduit, a nervous system, a field. And some addictions are harder than others precisely because they did not start as addictions. They took form in childhood. They wired themselves into us before we had any say. And they take time, and patience, and a specific kind of tenderness to break down. You have to meet the tension where it lives, in the body, and stay with it long enough for it to find its own resolve.

Here is a hard one.

If your mother was absent. Or anxious. For whatever reason, through no fault of her own. That leaves something in you. A tension and a story, running in the background, carried in the body long after the mind forgot the details.

And that tension does not stay quiet. It goes looking for its resolve. It will attract partners into your life who bring that exact lesson, that exact pain, back up to the surface. Not to punish you. To be met. To be seen. To finally be resolved.

But it only works if you are willing to see it.

And you cannot see it if you are stuck indulging. If every time the ache begins to rise, you reach for the substance, the food, the porn, the fantasy, whatever your particular exit is. The coping mechanism does its job perfectly. It keeps your shit from ever reaching the surface.

Which means it also keeps you from ever meeting it.

So humor me.

Why is it so hard to choose the present moment, over and over? Why is it so hard to just stay still and relax into consciousness? Why do we not see ourselves as whole, as already complete? Why do these coping mechanisms feel stronger than we are?

Here is what I keep landing on.

We think of ourselves as permanent, unchanging structures. Fixed things. We honor self-control over being. We honor gripping over curiosity. We indulge freely in our seasons of spring and then resist our autumns as if winter were a personal failure instead of a season that was always coming.

And the ego. The ego loves to believe it has this handled. So it takes whatever needs to come up and it pushes it back down. Pushes and pushes what is asking to surface, buries it deeper.

Only for it to come back through the cracks in the dam we so foolishly built.

It always comes back through the cracks.

Here is the part I want to leave you with.

You cannot patch a wound by changing your behavior. You cannot out-discipline it. You cannot indulge your way around it or manage it into silence.

The only way is through. Through the descent. Through the ache.

And not by force. Not by white-knuckling it. Through a devotional, kind approach to the very thing that keeps taking you down.

You change your relationship to what you used to resist. You stop treating it as the enemy at the gate. You invite it in. You pour it tea. You sit with it with no expectation of it leaving, no agenda to fix it, no timeline.

And you do this not from the mind. The mind wants to solve it. The mind wants it gone.

You do it through the body. Because the body has its own intelligence. Its own medicine. Given enough presence, enough breath, enough staying, the tension knows how to resolve itself. It always did. It was just waiting for you to stop running long enough to let it.

That is the work I was doing in a cafe today, with a coffee going cold in front of me, letting the compulsion rise and choosing not to feed it. Just feeling it. Just staying.

Some days I win that one. Some days I don’t.

Today I stayed.

Be well.

Stay open. Stay rooted.

Stay open. Stay rooted.