#103 - How to Be a Spartan Warrior & Defeat Porn
“If you focus on who you want to be, everything else in your life falls into place.”
-Benjy Uyama
Marriage is a life-long commitment that marks the beginning of building a family and committing to your partner. It leads us to a far greater purpose in life, as our responsibilities change, and we consider not just our own decisions but also our partners in everything we do.
The Spartan Warriors are a group of men, some of whom are battling porn addiction, who have decided to start a new life of sexual integrity. They are a group of men who want to become ‘marriageable’ and be well-prepared for their future marriages.
Because of the North Star goal, there has been a greater level of success in defeating porn addiction by identifying one's purpose, goals, and how a person wants to present themselves in life; the Spartan Program uses the "North Star Goal" approach as a stepping stone towards achieving one’s vision and goal.
In this week’s episode, Benjy talks about why he created a group called the ‘Spartan’ Warriors and how this program can help you become a ‘marriageable’ man. He talks about battling porn addiction, what sexual energy is, and how you can use it to create and find your purpose in life.
Many people struggle with unwanted porn habits to the point where they no longer have control over their sexual drive or energy. Porn addiction can greatly affect your well-being, career, and even your relationships. So if you’re someone struggling with porn addiction, High Noon is a great community that can help you battle porn addiction, overcome these bad habits, and gain back your sexual integrity in life.
Learn more about High Noon’s Spartan program when you listen to Episode 103!
The Spartan group
The Spartan group's North Star goal
The Spartan program
How does the Spartan program work
The nature of porn addiction
Why are some people not serious enough about battling porn addiction
How can your life be at stake because of porn addiction
Where can you use your sexual energy?
Episode Transcript:
Andrew Love
Welcome back to Love, Life and Legacy, the podcast dedicated to helping you navigate these hypersexualized times of ours. And today's episode, Benjy talks about the Spartan group that he started. But at the heart of that, what does it truly mean to be a Spartan, and why that's important in combating porn and building a life of sexual integrity? He's created this brand new modality which is expressed through this group where he's serving a bunch of young men, in particular, to help them to become super eligible for a lifelong joyful marriage. So if you are the parent of a son, if you are a son yourself who wants to get ready for the blessing, if you are a young lady who's looking to understand the men that you're going to one day be married to, then this podcast is fantastic for you. Let's get into it.
Benjy Uyama
How are you doing everyone, this is Benjy. It is good to have you. So today, I'm just going to throw on the microphone and do a little solo episode about a really interesting program that we have going on right now as we're recording this. The Spartan program, the Spartan group, so I had this idea after talking with guys, men, in particular, I'm a guy so naturally, I talked to a lot of men about their goals and life ambitions and sexual integrity and what they really want in their life, and why people gravitate towards High Noon. Generally, for a lot of people it is because they're struggling with an unwanted porn habit or masturbation habit. They don't have the level of control that they want over their sexual drive and their energy. And they find themselves knee-deep in porn habits or unwanted behaviors that are destructive to them. Ultimately, having the life, career relationships, and body health that they want in their lives. And it's not conducive to having a porn habit that's dragging you down in your life. So after working with a lot of men, and talking with women, but mostly men, I've realized that a huge majority of guys in our world, in our community wants to prepare well for marriage. They want to prepare well to be in a relationship. They want to prepare well for making the eternal commitment. And when I realized this, I was like, man, this is really interesting because we talk a lot about the North Star goal in High Noon. The North Star is the thing that picks you up and drags you and is the thing that you ultimately want in your life. And if there are things that are blocking you from getting there such as pornography, then the North Star is a stepping stone to helping you latch on to that vision and goal for your life.
The idea of High Noon is we're not trying to just give up porn for the sake of giving porn, but we're trying to replace the habit with something that is beneficial, that is energizing, that is exciting, that is thrilling, that is life-giving that you can't even sleep at night anymore because you're so excited about. But hopefully, you sleep a little bit, you know what I mean. You're so excited about life. We always use the analogy of junk food, if you're at McDonald's. I grew up in the 90s so I talked about McDonald's as the prime example of junk food. It's not that McDonald's is not the only junk food out there, there's a lot of stuff out there that's not good for you. But let's use an example. If you're on McDonald's and you are addicted to it and you just can't get enough of it, and you grew up on it or whatever fast food, MSG and all that, the way to get rid of is not to just say no, no, no, no, no, no, and push it away, and maybe even hang out in the parking lot of McDonald's with your friends or go to Burger King next door. But it's actually just to fill your life with things that are more attractive, the things that are healthy for you. Seeing things that are actually nutritious for you and food that you ultimately really enjoy eating and look forward to eating. We all have those little snacks that we like because it's good for us, it's healthy, and we really are enjoying things such as, for me, it's peanut butter and yogurt and a little bit of honey. That's my special place.
So anyway, I'm talking about this because we found a huge majority of men and women, very much so women too. But for the sake of this podcast, because I'm a guy because I'm a guys group leader, we have women's group leaders as well in High Noon. I'm a guys group leader so I decided that I'm going to make a group of guys who are just going to make their North Star and their vision, their entire group focused on how do I become an extraordinarily marriageable person and extraordinarily marriageable man and have a smashing relationship in the future? So we started with the idea and I thought, okay, what are we going to call this group? And at the time, I was really into 300, the movie 300. When I was thinking of this idea, I was like, man, it'd be so awesome if we have a group of stellar 300 soldiers, warriors who are just so on top of our game and our sexual integrity. And ultimately, hopefully, will someday have 300 guys. That's my goal. That's my internal goal, is to have 300 men who are eventually over the period of time that we're doing this program, joining the program. So we started it. It's really really interesting, guys. This is what I think is really the important point here is when people are focused, are laser-focused on what they want in their life. When they're laser-focused on the kind of person they want to be, then magical things start to happen. And that's really the approach we have.
We started the program with our first call, and I gave them a little worksheet. I made a worksheet for them, a playbook. And I said to answer these 10 questions about your relationships, about your porn habits, sexual integrity, about your habits, about your life, about what your ambitions are, what you want to do, your career, what kind of marriage relationship do you want to have? How do you want to meet that person? Your relationship with God, your spirituality, and all this kind of stuff, we asked them the questions. And what we found is that when they get laser-focused about what they want to be, who they want to be as a man, as a person, that is a much better question to ask than anything else such as what do I want to have? How much money do I want to make? How many kids do you want? Of course, those are important questions but they're not at the top of the priority list. If you put those questions at the top of the priority list, you're not left with anything that's of significance. Because if you focus on who you want to be, everything else in your life falls into place. Everything else in your life is informed by who you are as a person.
So I make them make a list of characteristics and qualities that they want to be, and that is the start of their Northstar and figuring out what kind of life they want to have, what kind of vision they have for their future marriage. Who do I want to be? I want to be, for example, I want to be a man of unbreakable integrity. This was one of the guys in the group. He said that's my Northstar goal. I want to be a man of unbreakable integrity, and I want to bring that into every aspect of my life including not limited to my family, my marriage, my blessing, my career, my schoolwork. Everything I do has to be with integrity. It's through this process, guys, of making especially if you're in a set of programs and you're battling a porn habit, or you did battle porn habit because sexual integrity is a lifelong battle. That's what I always say. And you're always going to be faced with temptations.
But when you make it less and less about saying no, no, no, no, no, no and just for the sake of saying no, for the sake of no, but how do you identify the root cause of the issue and fill your life more with things that are just more exciting for you? I was in a group with a few guys who at that time were figuring out what it is they want to do in their life. They were really struggling because they were trying to replace the thrill, that artificial fake thrill of porn with another artificial fake thrill such as playing video games or something. Then I was like, what really makes you excited? Then the guys say, oh, playing video games. I was like, okay, really?
Guys, I don't think video games are a good way to approach it. In general, I don't think distracting yourself is a good approach to beating a porn habit because you're not actually filling your life with anything that's really healthy, good for you, exciting for you, and has long term benefits for you in your relationships, in your health in your career, and anything like that. So I was like, okay, so your Northstar is you want to play so many video games? Oh, this guy's, so listen here. You want to play so many video games that it distracts you to the point where porn is not an issue anymore. And he's like, yes. I was like, okay, just like with a junk food analogy. That's basically saying, I'm going to start eating more Burger King so that I can stop eating McDonald's. Alright, so this always brings me back to the point. For the sake of this conversation and starting groups, this sparring group really is about the most serious guys. I was trying to get the most serious guys out there. And of course, we've had a demand for women to do a women's group. I'll just say real quick that I really, really hope that there is a woman's Spartan group. I don't know if there are women Spartans? What do they call them, Athena's? No. Amazonians? I don't know. Whatever they're called, I really hope so. It's just that I'm not capable of running a woman's Spartan group, because I'm not a woman. And I wouldn't feel confident, and I don't think they would be comfortable with this guy telling them stuff about life.
Anyway, I do hope there's a women's group. But the bottom line is that these guys are serious. They're paying 40 bucks. It's just 40 bucks for the Spartan group. And they're getting a six-week experience of meeting with me every day, of reading God's word every day about, guess what, God's vision for absolute sex through The Core of the Universe book. They're reading that book every single day, a chapter a day. They're meeting with me once a week, and they're checking in with me once a week on how their goals are and how their daily disciplines and determinations are. And I make them do three daily disciplines to do every week for six weeks, which is about 40 or 42 days.
So I'm really glad to have this group of serious guys because what I found over and over and over and over again with people who are battling porn habits is that I would say maybe 80% of the men this is just my anecdotal observation. 80% of men that I work with are not as serious as they hope and think they are. Let me say it again. I think about 80% of men and women who are trying to quit a porn and masturbation habit are not as serious as they think they are, or they hope they are. What I mean by that is the nature of porn addiction, the nature of a porn habit. Let me know if this is true for you, people tend to want to do something to get rid of it, but not do their maximal effort to get rid of it at the core. They're not willing to do those things that they know absolutely would be good for them in their journey, and they're not willing to do those things, they're not willing to give up the video game, the late-night video games, not willing to give up Instagram or YouTube or all the things that are not conducive to a long-term porn recovery plan because they're not serious enough to get through it.
Why is it that people are not serious enough about this even though they're trying to get help? Well, one, is because if you're battling a porn habit or addiction, the reality is that a porn habit sticks with you for a long time because you have trained your mind, your body, your spirit to utilize that porn addiction as a crutch, as a friend, as an emotional support system and as an escape mechanism to lean on when you're feeling difficulties in your life. Okay, let me know if that's true for you too. Usually across the board, when people act out, slip up in our groups, and we ask, why as to what happened? Why did you slip up? I'm not upset at them, I'm just trying to help you understand what led you to that. It's almost always because of a stressful emotion, a stressful event, stressful behavior or something in work happens, something at school happened, just some overload of life, relational issues with their wife or spouse, or with parents, siblings, just getting too busy. And it's doing those moments that people don't know how to release those negative emotions in a productive way. Not to squash them down at all. No, that just leads to more problems down the road, but how to relieve those negative emotions in a healthy productive way. Ideally, in some kind of communicative relationship with somebody or with God or with yourself even, and deal with it in a healthy way, in a productive way and learn how to cope with it.
But if you use porn, masturbation, escapism as a coping mechanism, then you will always bring it with you even if you try to get rid of it. Even if you decide to join a group if you're not willing to do the things that you know you need to do. I always talk about one thing. The one thing is the thing that you definitely probably should do to get rid of the habit, but you're hesitant to because addicts make the best liars. To other people, also, they make the best liars to themselves, which means that you're trying to keep the porn habit and masturbation habit close to you while pretending to do your maximal effort. If you were really willing to do your maximal effort to get rid of a habit, you would probably do things a little differently. Am I right? You would probably not spend so much time doing this or that. You would probably not be on Instagram checking out this person or that person. You would probably look at the opposite gender in a more healthy way, and I look at them in a sexualized way. You probably wouldn't be up late at night watching suggestive videos, movies, Instagram, YouTube, whatever you name it.
So when I ask that question to my guys in this group, it was a little bit of an eye-opener because they were like, yes, we're serious. We're paying 40 bucks for this. But at the same time, we're not as serious. We could take it a little further. When I asked them if your life was at stake, if I had a gun to your head or to your genitalia, I don't want to get too grim here, that's what I told them. If your life was at stake, and I throw it into you like your group facilitator, what would you do differently? How would your life change? How would your habits change? How would your behavior change to be more conducive, and you'd be less susceptible to acting out and your life being over? Of course, that's not the case. You could argue that your life is at stake in many ways. Is it not? Is your life not at stake with a porn habit that's ongoing and sucking the energy focus and drive in confidence out of you? Is it not at stake that you can't even have a relationship and you feel unconfident to be in a relationship? Or if you are in a relationship, it's hard for you to connect with your spouse because if this happens, it's hard for you to look at them in the eye or for you to look at your children in the eye or your parents in the eye because of this habit?
Your life is at stake because with a lack of focus and the amount of focus and energy that this is zapping from you, you can't really work on the things and focus on the things that really are important to you like your finances, like your career, like your relationships, like your health, like your body. Whatever is important to you, is it not the case that your porn habit is zapping you? Is it not the case that if you were to get rid of this issue at the core, finally get serious, finally understand the impact that this thing is having on you right now as we speak, then wouldn't your life be different? Wouldn't your life be infinitely more enjoyable? If you've ever had this experience, let me know, of going a long time without acting out. Let's say three weeks, a month, few months, a year even, did you not feel on top of the world? Did you not feel energized? Did you not feel like you were using your energy, your focus, your confidence, your drive for something bigger than just yourself? Did you not feel that?
Here's the thing. Sexual energy is a creative energy. Biologically speaking, reproductively speaking, it's a creative energy. It's designed to create life. And if you're not creating life literally having babies, it's an opportunity for you to create something in your life that is beautiful. So I think that perspective is helpful, the sexual energy, creative energy. So what can you use your creative energy for? What can you use your drive for in your life to create something? Whether it's anything. You could create a relationship. You could create yourself. You could recreate yourself. You could create your body, your health. You could create a business. You could create a new YouTube channel, or you could create your abilities to play an instrument or sport. You could create a new career for whatever it may be. Use your sexual energy, especially if you're single, to create something. If you're married, if you're in a relationship, use your sexual energy to create a smashing blessing and make that your entire life. Let that consume you and let that consume your focus so that your focus not diverted and diverged by the impact of pornography and masturbation in your life.
I hope this is helpful for you guys. I wanted to introduce the Spartan group to you all. If we do have another group coming up soon, which we will, I want you guys to consider joining it if you're a man. If you're a female, I'm so sorry, please be patient as we figure it out. If we do have a female one. And if you want to step up as a leader for the female group, or participate in and just let us know, and we'd be happy to do that. But for you guys out there, if you're aged 14 to 40 years old. Right now, our age group is from 18 years old, most of them are in their late 20s, 25 to 28 years old. But it's a really ideal time to get serious about what this marriage preparation thing is. What is this blessing thing? How do you actually find a partner? And I'm here to guide you through it because this is what has been my line of work for the last 10 years. And I want to take your hand and just help and serve, and just be your guide and let you know that you can do it. You really can. Okay, if this is helpful for you guys, let us know because we like hearing podcasts feedback. It's good to have you all. God bless.
Andrew Love
Hello everybody, Andrew Love here for one last announcement. And that is, I encourage you to join our newsletter. We don't spam people. We give you the goods. We give you good quality information once a week in your email. And so we send out newsletters, probably on Saturday's mid-morning on average. And these are filled with blogs, the latest content. Everything you need to know in order to get through your week with High Noon Light. So let us light up your inbox. Join our newsletter by going to highnoon.org. It's all right there. It's super easy. We won't spam you. We just want to let you stay connected to this High Noon Providence. So go to highnoon.org, and sign up for our newsletter.