You may be surprised at how simple mental training is, provided you’re willing to let go of mystical notions and misunderstandings you may have picked up in the media. It is easy to understand and easy to use. Especially to overcome problems like premature ejaculation. Intention is half the battle!
In a nutshell, mental training is simply a way of reprogramming the mind to achieve more positive behaviors, feelings, and results. Although Western culture, especially American culture, is action-oriented and suspicious of “just sitting,” “just thinking,” and “just daydreaming,” we are quickly learning that the mind’s activity is paramount.
How the mind receives, perceives, and interprets information determines what you think, how you feel, and what you do.
We are beginning to understand that the mind can contribute to physical illness such as high blood pressure, heart disease, ulcers, asthma, yeast infection and colitis.
In recent years, our most rigorous scientists, physicists, have come to the defense of the imagination. More and more we hear of the use of fantasy and imaging in scientific discovery.
The scientist we most revere, Albert Einstein, never conducted an experiment and was rarely inside a laboratory; he just sat and used his mind. He said that his imagination — he pictured himself riding on a beam of light — provided the key to his discovery of the theory of relativity. No wonder Einstein maintained that “imagination is more important than knowledge.”
The essence of mental training is a state called trance, a natural human capacity consisting primarily of a state of focused attention in which we are more receptive than usual to suggestion. This state often comes about spontaneously, where it is used for ends both positive and negative. Practice with the methods will give you control over the state, so that you can enter it at will to achieve goals you desire.
Have you ever been so involved in a movie, a book, a piece of music, a sports event, or a work project that you lost sight of your surroundings (for example, you didn’t notice that the person you were with left to buy popcorn or go to the bathroom) and didn’t notice the passage of time and were surprised to find that hours had passed?
Have you ever gotten so caught up in a daydream — of falling in love, winning the Nobel Prize, or doing some great deed — that you had to spend a few seconds reorienting yourself in time and space after you were interrupted? To overcome premature ejaculation you need to be in a similar state of mind.
If you’ve had any of these experiences, you have been in the focused state of attention that is a large part of mental training. These naturally occurring trances are common human experiences, by no means confined to situations where a person is meditating or involved with a hypnotist.
Most of the things we call fun can lead to trance. It’s easy to become deeply involved in anything that feels good, because of the involvement, it’s just as easy to lose track of time and other matters.
You may be deeply concerned about finances or health, but you forget about these things to the extent that you get engrossed in dance, games, a good movie, or something else you thoroughly enjoy.
Sex is one of the most common examples of everyday trance. When sex is good, the partners are strongly focused — on their own sensations or on what’s happening tee their mate — to the point that time is not noticed, noises are not heard, and even pain is not perceived or is less strongly perceived.
A common example of the influence of trance in sex is when afterwards one partner tells the other about how much noise he or she has made and that partner is totally unaware of this. Another example is afterwards when you become aware of the pain of a bite or scratch. The pain would have been obvious to you when it was first created were you not so focused on your pleasure.
The antithesis of good sex is a lack of involvement, as, for instance, when one or both of the partners are not focused on what’s happening but are standing back, watching, analyzing, and criticizing. That’s how you can most easily overcome premature ejaculation – by not watching yourself so eagerly, trying to see where you are succeeding or failing. Not judging yourself.
A lack of involvement almost invariably leads to bad sex and sex therapists busily try to get clients more involved, more focused on sensation and feeling. All they are really trying to do is institute the sharpened focus we are calling trance.
Orgasm is probably the ultimate trance. During the few seconds of orgasm, your attention is narrowed to a rather limited part of your being and it is almost impossible to think or be aware of other things.
The physical sensations are so strong as to command your total involvement and attention. All other considerations are momentarily forced aside. And this, we think, is one of the main reasons that orgasm is so pleasurable.
Everyday trances are spontaneous happenings over which we generally exert little control. With a little help, however, we can use these events to great advantage.
Ironically, there is one kind of common experience that is often used systematically and with devastating results — negative self-suggestion or negative self-hypnosis. The mind is never quiet, as those who have meditated know too well. It is always talking to itself, sending messages and images about all sorts of things.
What hasn’t been clearly recognized until recently is that a lot of what the mind says is negative: “You’re too stupid to do well in this work,” “You’ll never be able to finish this task by the deadline,” “You don’t deserve anyone like him,” “You’ll never be happy.”
Negative self-suggestion is an automatic process in which people repeatedly tell themselves in words and images about their shortcomings and failures. People with low self-esteem, which includes most people suffering from depression, send almost continuous messages to themselves that they are stupid, inadequate, and incompetent, that everything will turn out badly, and that they deserve nothing better.
Negative self-suggestion works. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy, bringing about in reality the inadequacy, worthlessness, and so forth that is imagined and suggested. It is this fear and expectancy which makes premature ejaculation self-perpetuating.
Take a depressed woman, for example, who continually tells herself that nothing will turn out well. On her way to a party, she tells herself over and over that there won’t be anyone there worth meeting, that the whole event will be a bore, and that even if interesting people are present, they won’t be interested in her.
She enters the party with a cloud of gloom over her and makes real what was in her imagination. People tend not to want to meet her because she appears to be so negative, which, in fact, she is.
She tries not to notice the interesting conversations going on and if she does notice that a certain man is attractive, she won’t approach him (because she “knows” he wouldn’t want to talk to her.
She sends out such negative messages that he’s unlikely to approach her. So her despair is confirmed. She meets no one, does nothing, leaves early because the party is so boring. and tells herself on the way home, “life really is boring and depressing, not really worth living.” Of course, the same process happens with men who come too quickly – they expect it to happen – and so the cycle of premature ejaculation goes on and on.
Many people, including a lot who believe that mental training doesn’t work, are already masters at it, using their imaginations in negative ways and doing an incredibly effective job of making themselves miserable. Their unintentional use of informal, negative self-suggestion training follows the rules of effective mental training: it is done frequently and with great detail and involvement.
They often are deeply engrossed, entranced, in their fantasized failures, inadequacies, and humiliations. And they usually have no idea of what this regular practice with negative thoughts and images is doing to them.
In the therapeutic use of mental training, whether with a therapist or on one’s own, the point is to use one’s imagination in more constructive ways. You have to have the right suggestion to control premature ejaculation. This might be more subtle than just saying you will last longer in bed!
There are two main ingredients in effective mental raining: a relaxed, receptive state and positive suggestions. Start with positive sexual suggestions. The therapist or coach makes suggestions to the client to do or feel or be something different. When you do the process yourself, you make the suggestions to yourself.
The suggestions can be about anything. Here are some examples: “Each time you practice mental training you will be more deeply and more fully relaxed, as relaxed and comfortable as you like.” Or, for sexual issues, “every time you go to bed with your partner you will feel more and more confidence and enjoy greater and greater control over your ejaculation.”