How to come into contact with Spirit

“God gives us a cure by fasting.” St John Chrysostom

It is Day 33 of a long fast.

Fasting is very much in fashion with all the top gurus, prophets and saints. Jesus and Moses did it. The Buddha fasted for 6 years. Gandhi lived by it. Mohammed was a renowned faster. Rumi fasted. The Greeks fasted. Christians, Muslims, Jew, Buddhists and Hindus of all stripes have recommended fasting as a way to get in touch with the Ultimate. If you want a period of deep reflection and introspection, a long fast puts you in touch with who you are beyond your conversational mind and ego.

A good way to start is short intermittent fasting. You cannot screw that up. It is a good way for most people to start exploring this deep journey of the soul.

The motivation for most people is to lose weight. Some people want more time in their lives. We spend 3 or 4 hours buying, transporting, prepping, cooking and cleaning up. When fasting, you will have so much time, you won’t know what to do with it. Some people fast to save money. You’ll save $1,000+ this month at restaurants and Stop and Shop. If you go to Whole Foods, you’ll save $2,000. All of these motivations turn out to be secondary.

Long fasting will open up a channel with Spirit. That is the ultimate reason for fasting. It may not be the reason you started with. Fast in order to get in touch with the deepest part of who you are. Fasting will test the boundaries of your fixed food opinions and the nature of reality. Food is the Big Habit, that is largely unexamined unless you do a long fast. Most people try changing the foods they eat; just eat healthy and that is an improvement. Fasting is about starting from scratch. Get all of the old stuff out of your body. Start over with an empty colon. Then try to eat healthy.

Yes, you will lose weight by fasting. Lots of it. I have lost over 35 pounds of waste. Yes, you will flush out your microbiome of antibiotics, pesticides, metals and whatever is stuck in the crevices of your colon. Yes, you will release the lingering harmful toxins stored in your organs that will cause future diseases. You will lose stubborn belly fat. Yes, you will completely clean out 33 feet of poop from your colon and it will tighten up. You will completely lose the low level inflammation that is associated with allergies, depression, brain fog and fatigue. During a long fast, all your organs come to rest and go into healing mode.

Most disease starts in the gastrointestinal track. Disease patterns cannot grow in your body when you empty your colon. Get ready for the changes in your life that will happen.

The benefits of fasting are backed up by numerous scientific studies. In those studies, happy lab rats had their cancers go into remission. The fasting rats were more active, performed better on cognitive tests and out lived their peers.

Days 1 - 10, you will go through lots of rough stuff. It is very emotional and scatilogical. But it will be worth it. Get through those walls and you will feel incredibly light, joyful and happy for no reason. There will be more difficult moments, but nothing like the big hurdles around Day 1 - 10. Then everything gets easier.

Praanaayaama, aasana and meditation will be unbelievably ecstatic. When you fast, the breath will go incredibly slow. Praanaayaama and fasting are superpowers that work together. When you fast, the Mind gets still. The Mind is busy with food and all this busyness in the body creates agitation in your meditation.

Fasting will open the door to The Big Thoughts in life. A new way of thinking happens. A meta-thinking awakens above the voices and common discourse running in your brain. When we eat food, we are thinking thoughts that are influenced by the food we just ate, not just this morning, but yesterday and many days before. Days of cumulative food intake has a powerful influence over our thinking, and we falsely believe our thoughts are our own, independent of the food we eat.

Fasting is counterculture to everything thing in American culture. We are taught to be consumers of greedy edible pleasure, as much as possible. Fasting exposes the opinions and myths that we hold dear. The big myth is that “YOU WILL DIE.” “You will become sick if you don’t eat and keep your strength up.” The opposite is true. When we break the link to consuming 3 square meals a day, we become the real Self. When we eat, our mind moment is predicated on the foods we just ate. This is the “Burrito version of Tom.” This is the “Eggplant parmigiana version of Tom.” Oh, Tom is falling asleep now and complaining about bloating, gas….. inflammation and depression. Multiply that meal by hundreds of meals, meal after meal, cumulatively leaving their residue, bacteria, mold, viruses, one celled organisms, chemicals, pesticides and genetically modified goodness, and we all become bogged down with old karma. All this food leaves a trail through our bodies. If you stuff clean food on top of that mess, it will help a little, but better to start over. You will find that you don’t die, but rather something really wonderful happens. Fasting is the opposite of what you might expect.

Long fasting makes the world come alive. If it is your first long fast, disconnecting from food awakens a vividness you haven’t experienced before. Smells are richer. Colors are brighter. It can be like Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, but this is reality. This is your real state. You become You, not a mixed up version of you. The mind, body and everything gets so tranquil and clear.

Spending time in Nature is essential. Trees can heal and soothe the rough spots. Pine trees, Elm trees. Beech trees are your medicine. Now that you have all this time on your hands and you don’t know what to do, sit in the forest everyday. Commune with nature. The birds, leaves, grasses become your solace. It is heavenly to be next to a slow moving creek or a fountain.

Warning: Don’t fast if you don’t want change. This change might be shocking, and life transforming in ways that you never expected. Expect the unexpected. You are asking your soul to come and teach you. Surrender. You will be challenged. You might need to change jobs, change locations, relationships and old ways of being. You will make mistakes. You will be tested. When the worst emotional storms come, you will want to seek comfort in food. If you don’t act on those emotional moments, you start to gain power and confidence in yourself.

When I want to learn something, I seek out the best teacher on that subject available. I want the teacher who has lots of experience. There are lots doctors and nutritionists with impressive degrees giving opinions about fasting. If they have never done a long fast, they really don’t know what they are talking about. Their viewpoint is intellectual. Its a regurgitated secondhand opinion from what they heard in their training. They may have a white coat, but they don’t have direct experience.

Find the best teacher in any subject you want to learn, and it will shorten your learning curve. Fortunately, I found Kelly Karpoe, someone who has many years of experience doing this. She pointed out the path and all the pitfalls and problems. There were things I thought I knew about fasting, but didn’t. I thought I would just fast for 12 days, like I had done before in the ashram, but Day 12 is when it gets easy and all the benefits just start kicking in.

Because she is so highly experienced in this art, she also had to rewire my mindset around food. There is a cognitive reorientation that goes along with fasting that kinda blows my mind. You will have to read her book when it comes out. There are maybe 10 key concepts that have changed my experience of the fasting for the better. Here are two of them:

“Fasting is about deprivation.”

One myth is that fasting is about “Deprivation.” It is not. If you keep that mindset, it will ruin and shorten your fast. If you get far enough, you will move into a stage of abundant pleasures through all your other senses: smells, colors, touch and sounds. There is no sense of deprivation because life is so much richer. You will become very empathetic and feel things deeply.

“Fasting is about detox.”

Most people talk detox. Detox is not a good idea to begin with. If you only detox, you will become an acidic toxic bomb and destroy your kidneys and other organs.

Kelly talks about “elimination” as the most important aspect of safe fasting. You do not want to release toxins from your body, if the pipes are not continuously open or else you will get sick and grouchy, with crushing headaches. The idea is not to “detox” but “eliminate.” Constant pooping is what makes it safe. When the body starts to release the nasty things, this elimination process goes on for many weeks or more.

And praanaayaama is just awesome on a fast…….

There are some ways to do a long fast that are very healthy. There are some ways to fast that are very dangerous. People die fasting or breaking the fast, because they don’t know what they are doing. If you are contemplating a long fast, there is so much you need to learn, because safe fasting is very complicated. I am following a protocol similar to The Master Fast method. Google that, if you want to find out more. There are a hundred important discussions to have before you start the journey. I am still learning at light speed. I wish I had taken this journey sooner.