36 Years on My Spiritual Journey
&
I Just Figured Out What Fasting Is
I had a health scare this year, almost died and it was
a huge blessing. Most times the
‘tragedies’ in our lives are blessings in disguise, but only when we step back
with awareness and ruminate on the lesson.
Pretty much in society we are taught just to power through. Life roadblocks are meant to slow us down
and they ask us to retool. To look
deeper into ourselves and how we are showing up in the world.
I love Western medicine, it saved my life, but often
Western medicine creates a façade where we turn the responsibility for our
health over to our doctors. Eastern
medicine, on the other hand, promotes us to be responsible for our personal
healing. It’s like all things in life,
no one is going to save us, spiritually, physically or mentally, we have to
save ourselves.
So, what does all this have to do with fasting? I was going to a sports medicine doctor that
also has alternative medical training.
Trying to reactivate my right diaphragm which is/was paralyzed. During the course of about eight sessions,
he would drop these pithy comments and questions into our conversation. Then I would ask him for clarification, and
he would say go look it up in PubMed.
If you know anything about people that are Masters,
they rarely tell you what to do. They
just drop a comment, that is mysterious and puzzling. They point us to the pearl, but we still have
to pry open the oyster shell ourselves and dig the pearl out from underneath
the slimy muscle.
In one of our sessions he said, there are benefits to
fasting for more than 16 hours. So, I
started playing with it. Don’t ever do anything
anybody tells you to do about living your life, including me. Listen with awareness and if it resonates
with you, play with it. We are all
different, yet all the same.
So, I started playing with fasting. I have been playing with it for months. This is what is working for me. I eat once a day. I usually eat in or around dark. I started eating late evening during the
summer and as we moved into winter, my body wanted to eat around dark, so I
just followed my body.
I graze for a 2 to 3 hour period. I try to eat as close to the ground as
possible. Which basically means I eat
almost anything as long as it is not highly processed. I eat meat, vegetables, fruit, eggs, cheese,
cream, butter, potatoes, nuts, some bread(but primarily sourdough from a good
local bakery). I watch my sugar and
salt intakes. Especially salt, which is
hidden in everything, especially processed foods. Sushi, love sushi. I eat out very little. The more you cook at home the more processed
foods, fast foods and even good restaurant foods become less appealing. All
these things are tendencies; I try and make no hard fast rules about what I eat
and how much I eat. Grazing for 3
hours, I can eat a lot of food, especially if I am physically active. Close to the ground and one extended eating
period daily are my only ‘rules’. I do
this 5 plus days a week. During the day
I drink a little coffee, green tea and water.
It's pretty simple.
It just takes time to change the habits that have long been ingrained in
us.
But let’s talk about the benefits of fasting, what
fasting really is and the real reasons to fast.
Fasting will make you feel a lot better, especially
combined with taking out processed foods and lowering sugar and salt intake. This is another story, but all things you
put in your body are a drug. Every food
is broken down chemically in the body.
So healthy things promote health.
A coke is a drug. An apple is a
drug. Everything we put in our
body is a drug. Cigarettes, weed,
alcohol, fruits, vegetables, meat. All
our drugs because they all break down into a chemical form in our body.
It takes a lot of energy for your body to break all
these things down. So when you are
eating 3x a day, a large portion of your
daily energy, your prana, your life force goes to digestion. Once you limit that to one time period, you
free up your energy to be used in other ways.
It is also exhausting for your body to always be digesting. Your body doesn’t have time to rest and to
heal.
Fasting is just more than food. What we do and what we focus on, in any
given day is how we are spending our life and our energy. So when we fast, we turn away from the outside
sources that we are focused on and now our energy turns inward. When I suspend watching 3 hours of Netflix,
or 3 hours of shopping, or any of my chaotic outward focuses, I am fasting from
the world. That means I am focused on my
spirit.
As we fast from these things we realize that we are
‘in the world but not of the world’.
Then our spirit becomes strong.
We can feel a hunger pain, observe it and know that it is a signal from
our body. But our spirit sees the
hunger signal and then chooses. We no
longer react, but act into the world. Or
choose not to act at all. And we grow
more comfortable with the silence.
We realize in this process that it is our spirit,
which is naturally loving and intelligent, that should be in control. So fasting from the world promotes our
spirit to become master of our body, our emotions and our thoughts.
I know this article is just a crash course. But play with it. Become your own Master. Your spirit is like the genie in Alladin’s
lamp. It is huge and powerful, but it
is currently contained in this itty, bitty little body.
We are only as powerful as our worse addiction. An alcoholic’s constant thought is, ‘where
is my next drink.’ That is what their
mind is consumed with. As we push our
addictions for love, for money, for food, for power, out further and further,
our hearts and minds have the space to focus on the true nature of our
spirits. Our spirits, which are
animated, by the spirit of God are inherently huge, powerful, loving and
intelligent. Because that is what the
spirit of God is and that same spirit is what animates our bodies on
earth.
The word fast has two meanings. One
meaning is to hold tightly and the other is speed. When we fast
from the world, we remind ourselves to release our tight hold on the
world. And releasing our tight hold, allows our spirit to move freely
with speed toward our liberation.
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