When You See a ‘Hottie’ and the Mind Spins a Story | Understanding Sexual Desire through Vipassana

Disclaimer:

I’m not a teacher but a Dhamma friend who is still walking the path toward the end of suffering.
My intention is simply to share from my own experience — what I’ve learned from several well-known Thai Forest monks, what I’ve tried in practice, and what I’ve found helpful for me. I share these reflections in case some of them resonate with others. In the Thai Forest Tradition, we don’t teach others until we’ve finished our own work — the end of suffering. That day may never come, so I’m just sharing my experience along the way.
This is not a guide or formal teaching. If you find anything here useful, please look up the original teachings directly. My words are based on personal understanding and may contain errors or imprecision. All my writing is inspired by the Thai Forest Tradition and shaped by my own practice.
A note on the writing: English is not my first language. To make sure the meaning I wish to express isn’t lost in translation, I’ve used AI assistance only for proofreading and grammar checking — to help improve clarity, not to change the essence of my words.

I want to share my experience and some teachings I’ve learned from my teacher, Kru Ba—an honorific for highly respected monks—and from other Thai Forest monks. I know this is a tricky topic, because it touches on celibacy, desire, and living a spiritual path as a layperson—and no one really gives clear answers. So I want to share my own journey: what I’ve experienced, what I’ve learned, and how I try to balance this path in real life—maybe it can be useful for others in a similar situation.

Introduction

For a brief introduction, I’m just a typical layperson like most of us here—a father of three young children and a husband. In reflecting on myself, I’ve noticed tendencies like greed, lust, and anger—traits that I suspect many of you might recognize in yourselves. If I had to single out the dominant one, it would be lust. I’ve known this about myself since I was around five years old, when I started having thoughts about women—but it was mostly in my own mind, never crossing any real-life boundaries.

I grew up attending all-boys schools from Grade 1 through 12, so my exposure to girls was limited. I’ve had a few girlfriends before meeting my wife. Like many healthy young men, I feel a natural sexual energy, which I usually need to manage daily.

What brought me to this path

Fast-forward to early 2023, when I decided to begin practicing Samatha meditation. I followed the mindfulness teachings of Luang Por Pramote Promojjo, which focus on anchoring your mind to a meditation object that resonates with you—like your breath or a mantra—and gently returning to it whenever your mind drifts into thoughts.

At that time, I had recently reunited with my best friend, who had become a monk and was walking the path alongside me, and I had also just found my teacher monk. These connections gave me a strong sense of faith and confidence in my practice.

As a Thai, I grew up hearing stories about skilled meditation masters—monks like Luang Pu Mun, Luang Ta Maha Bua, and Ajahn Chah—who were said to have the ability to perceive the state of their students’ minds. This made the guidance of an experienced teacher all the more meaningful.

If you watch Luang Por Pramote’s teachings, you’ll notice that at the end of each session, students can share their meditation experiences and challenges via Zoom. Luang Por offers corrections and guidance, sometimes even calling on specific students unexpectedly if he senses their minds have drifted from their meditation object.

The ability to observe the minds of others is one of the most important skills a meditation teacher can have. Hearing stories from my monk friend about our teacher monk’s insight only deepened my faith that I had found the right Vipassana teacher. I also felt a sense of accountability, believing that I was under his watchful guidance. This combination of trust, connection, and mindfulness has kept me committed to the practice and striving to stay aware as much as I can.

Where sexual desire arise from my daily experience ?

Here’s one example of what can happen in the mind when sexual desire shows up:

You see some hotties. It feels satisfying just to look — doesn’t matter if it’s opposite gender or same gender — lust arises.
Then you want to look back at them again.
You do look back again.
After looking, the mind starts forming stories — daydreaming, imagining she’s yours. What if I was her boyfriend? You imagine the two of you doing things together.
Your mind sinks deeper into the imagination.
You feel happy and drawn into those “what if” daydreams.
If the clinging is strong, another series of mind formations starts: I want to be someone good enough to have her. What if I was rich and then she’d like me? What if I became successful, famous, handsome… blah blah blah.
Then you start creating a plan in your head — who you need to be, what you need to do, to become that person.
Sometimes you even try to act out that plan. Sometimes the whole daydream dies down when you get distracted — like if someone suddenly comes to talk to you.
But later, when you’re home and relaxing, the memory of that good-looking girl’s face comes back. The same sequence of mind formations starts up again, and repeats.
You might end up creating sexual fantasies using that memory, or maybe a plan of what to do when you see her again — asking for her number, trying to build rapport, and so on.

This whole chain of events is what the Buddha called Dependent Origination (Paticcasamuppada). There are twelve steps in the full cycle, but it’s not easy to see all of them at once. As mindfulness (sati) and concentration (samadhi) grow stronger, you’ll begin to notice parts of this chain more clearly. In this example, I’ll share only a portion of it.

When your eyes see a girl, the visual object is picked up and passed into the mind. Vinnana(consciousness) creates phassa (contact).

From contact comes vedana (feeling) — pleasant if you like her, unpleasant if she’s not your type.

From pleasant feeling comes tanha (craving) — you want her.

Craving turns into upadana (clinging) — obsession. Now it’s not just desire, it’s your desire. The “me” who wants her is born here.

Once there’s clinging, the mind slips into bhava (becoming). Suddenly you’re not just sitting here — you’re the lover, the planner, the dreamer. A whole little world pops up where you wear many hats and play different roles — social roles like parent, husband, wife, or child; or emotion-based roles like the angry one, the greedy one. And here, in this example, it has become the role of the one who is in love.

Each time you become one of those roles, a new “self” is born. Now you’re the guy who desires, who fantasizes, who plans. That’s a birth (jati).

Every birth comes with aging and dying (jara and marana), but in this present moment the aging and dying are your thoughts, not your body. This process of birth happens when the mind begins wandering through a stream of thoughts — like when you start daydreaming and spinning out countless “what-if” scenarios. A thought arises, then the thought falls away, just like aging and dying. This cycle can repeat many times, as you keep thinking about her in different ways: Should I go up and talk to her? What should I say? What if she rejects me? Should I go, or not go? This process of arising and passing away can keep going until something else distracts you — maybe someone you know comes over to talk, or you simply snap yourself out of it.

And with every birth comes its shadow — soka (grief), parideva (lamentation), dukkha (suffering), domanassa (frustration), upayasa (distress) — when the fantasy doesn’t match reality, or when the bubble bursts.

The same idea applies when you’re actually dying and being reborn, not just in one of your thoughts in this example. When you die, the last thought you hold can create a kind of duplication of that thought in your next life. That is where the suffering begins, as birth comes—aging and death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair.

The example can also be applied to any other feeling. For instance, when anger arises because you see someone you hate walking by, and you don’t feel good seeing them, your mind starts thinking about a plan for revenge, etc. Similarly, when you are driving and suddenly there’s a really nice sports car parked next to you, your mind starts creating a new becoming—the “what if” scenarios: What if I had a nice sports car too? Maybe I should look for a higher-paying job to make more money, etc. So a new “self” is born again—the person who isn’t satisfied with his car and wants to look for a chance to make more money.

Anyway, this is really deep Pali theory, and I’m definitely not an expert. I just wanted to create these scenarios for myself, so I have concrete examples to refer back to during my Vipassana practice. If you’re interested in exploring Dependent Origination in more depth, I encourage you to look it up and study it further.

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