Do any of you incorporate fasting into your practice? If so, what is your procedure and your reasoning?
I love to fast! It make me feel soooo good: physically and mentally.
My “diet” is to eat everything that grows from the Earth and seaweeds. Literally everything you ca imagine. When fasting I avoid meat and all animal products. Sometimes I fast with no food at all for few days, just water. Feels fantastic.
BUT ONE MUST BE READY TO FAST … fasting is not a simply diet. Fasting involves spiritual aspect.
CitiMonk is right. One should be ready. One should also be patient and observant. It helps to start on a week-end. It is also important to plan what you do while fasting. Serene activities like meditation, reading/ writing, listening to soft music, being in the company of trusted friends who would speak softly. Self-observation is important because initially body rebels with acidity and astral self makes one irritated.
Hence, it is better to start with “juice/ milk/ water only” fasting before going for total fasting. Eating is a physical reflex which is already set into a metabolic cycle, which is on an average 18 hours . In fasting we are changing that. So, it helps to skip eating for 6 hours at a time initially and eventually settle into 12 hr fasting. One should also remember not to eat a lot while breaking fast. It helps to break it by eating slowly, spread over 20 to 30 minutes and possibly no-meat diet.
There are many advantages of fasting. It cleanses the digestive system, especially any inflammations. It strengthens the will. It teaches perseverence. It sharpens attention and refreshes awareness.
I fasted a few times during the pollen season for my allergies. It was hard, I never liked it, but it worked. And it all went just like the person who had tried it had described it. First I got really sick, but less like allergy and more like a common cold (the difference being for instance that going outdoors didn’t make things worse, in fact it got a little easier to breathe). Then after three days it was pretty much gone.
I never understood why though because nothing about the fasting actually made me feel more “clean” which was the idea. You know, rid the body of toxins and then your allergy goes away. Somewhere between the sugar water I had to drink to be able to stand up and the enemas it didn’t feel very cleansing.
Much later in life my step-daughter, who is a doctor and who has specialized a bit in allergies told me “ah, but that’s just your immune system getting less efficient with the years so now it won’t over react as much as it did before”, as I had told her that I was getting better with each passing year. THen it hit me! That’s how fasting had worked to stop the allergies. As my body got no food the immune system went down (which is pretty evident as you actually get weaker when you fast), as it went down it stopped over reacting.