When our urges become irresistible, what can we do?

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What can we do if we are unable to resist our urges, such as lust, when they rise very strongly in periodic intervals, say like once a month. The first thing is, don’t be discouraged.
This is a long battle, and a small wound, or a failure in this battle does not mean that we have failed in the war. In the Bhagavad Gita, after Krishna 5.22 states that yahi samsprachaya abhoga, that desire leads to agitation, that sensual indulgence will lead to suffering. Then Arjuna has a question.
Yeah, I understand this, but still the desires will come. Desires keep coming. So what do I do? So Krishna says, next verse, tolerate.
While talking about Shatno Tihai Vyasauram, this is 5.23, Shatno Tihai Vyasauram, praakchari vimoksanat, kama ko dhodho dhavam vegam, sa yuktah sa sukhina raha. So there he says, tolerate, and how long tolerate? He says, you may have to tolerate till the end of your life. Praakchari vimoksanat, in the time we give up our body.
Because in one sense the urges arise due to our desires themselves, due to our bodily condition itself. To some extent some urges are just biological drives coming from the fact that we are in a human body, in a physical body, and there are physical drives associated with it. Now tolerance, we could say it means two things.
We tolerate the urges when they come and we don’t give it to them. So that is tolerating the urges. And second is tolerating ourselves when the urges come and sometimes we succumb.
That doesn’t make us a terrible person, that doesn’t mean that we are hopeless. It just means that we are human and we are conditioned right now. So rather than worrying too much about what happens when the urges arrive, we can worry more about what happens when our urges are not there.
So in between the peaks in the graph of the urges, in those periods in between if we are slowly and steadily strengthening ourselves, then by that we will be growing. And by this three things will happen. If we instead of lamenting or worrying about what will happen when the urges come, if instead we focus on doing activities that strengthen ourselves.
So for example, doing devotional activities, engaging ourselves meaningfully in Seva and also taking up responsibilities in all areas of our life. What will happen is that we will slowly find the urges themselves becoming less frequent and less violent. So they will not come that often and when they come they will not be that agitated.
And thus even if we fall, it’s like a boxing match. We fall, we don’t, it will be a knockdown not a knockout. It’s never a knockout unless we give up.
But even if it’s a knockdown, we will be able to rise quickly. We will be able to rise faster and resume our spiritual, resume our standards and moral standards also. And so the first thing is that the urges will become less violent and less frequent if we focus not on what happens when the urges come but on what we do in between those urges.
We try to do activities that strengthen ourselves. Second is that if we know that there are certain situations or times when the urges come, at that time we can try to take preventive or protective measures. So it’s not always possible to avoid stimuli but just like if we know that on a road there is a pitfall say there is a bump, speed breaker or hole, pothole in the road, then we will go slowly.
So like that through self-observation we can understand which are the areas where we are more vulnerable and we can try to deal with those. We can try to protect ourselves from those. And lastly try to pray to Krishna and especially do some activity which gives us a lot of spiritual strength such as it doesn’t have to be chanting or reading Bhagavatam but maybe hearing hymns, memorizing bhajans or just compiling together and watching attractive pictures of the deities that we like.
Try to have some devotional activity that we can do which is not, all devotional activities are good for us but some devotional activities feel good for us. We can do those activities then we will find that we are moving forward in our journey toward Krishna by studying. And we will be able to resist the urges much better.
So three things, focus on strengthening ourselves in between the urges without worrying too much about what happens when the urges come. Second is that try to keep a distance from triggers as a protective, preventive measure. And third is that when the urges do come, have something which is both good for us and feels good to us ready so that we can focus on that instead of having to just fight the urge without having something positive ready access it.
Hare Krishna.