Karma Builder: Today's Karmic Workout – Fast For A Day
Today's Exercise: Fast A Day
[Preparatory Note: the human body was designed to go without food for days and days at a time. The average American can go nearly a month without eating. Having said that, if you have health issues such as diabetes, hypoglycemia and a variety of others, you need to consult your doctor before trying this exercise. If you have an eating disorder, your version of this exercise should be to eat a perfectly healthy diet for 24 hours. People suffering from anorexia or bulimia should never fast for any reason.
For this fast, we are going to ingest nothing but water for 24 hours. It is a walk-away fast meaning that we are not going to prepare by loading our diets before hand, we are just going to stop eating for an entire day.
You should prepare to take notes whenever you become conscious that you are fasting. You want to be able to watch your mind as you fast and writing is a great way to make sure that you don't just notice what is going through your mind, but rather actually formulate solid cognition as you notice.]
Stop eating. It is easiest to start a fast when you wake up and simply refrain from eating for the day. Starting a fast after you have already taken a meal in a day can make hunger pangs more intense.
Notice that when you get hungry when you are fasting that there is at least a mild level of panic associated with the sudden awareness of hunger and then the secondary thought that you cannot eat.
Make notes when you notice that you are fasting. The real purpose of this exercise is not about food, but rather, is to notice how your mind reacts to not eating. Make particular note when you are tempted to cheat.
When you resume eating the following day, do not gorge yourself. Make sure that you start with a light, but nutritious meal.
Training Note:
Food is woven into our thinking in a very broad pattern and it has become a much more complicated matter than simply acquiring fuel for survival. When we eat, he often have positive emotions and become as addicted to them as we do the food that we are eating. If fact, that is the primary process of addiction – the sensation of positive emotions associated with a particular activity such as eating, smoking or drinking. We become slaves to the need to feel good emotionally and that, in turn, shapes our behavior.
Fasting gives us the opportunity to see our relationship to food from a different perspective. When we fast, we get hungry and when we ignore this reminder to eat, we might even experience a little bit of panic. For many people, going an entire day without food can seem like a very hard thing to do. Your mind resists it partially out of a sense of threat. We are programmed to eat even if we have to kill to do it. This is part of our survival programming, however, it is not nearly as ferocious as the emotional thumb-sucking we do around the comfort that eating gives us.
Karmic Benefits:
Disconnect Yourself From Addiction: there is really only one reason to eat and that is to obtain the basic building materials that your body needs to rebuild itself and to acquire energy. In modern times, however, this is often the last reason that we eat instead of the first and only reason. Many of the emotional interconnections that we make with food can actually hurt us. We eat to feel happiness. We eat to relieve stress. We eat because we are bored. Breaking up these harmful emotional connections starts by seeing them for what they are and to see them, we have to call them out.
Observe Your Basic "Wiring": when we have a insightful relationship between mind and body, we eat purely to maintain our physical well being and never to to create an emotional response. We select foods that we need instead of those that we crave because they give us a "food high". More people die each year because of food addiction than from any other type of addiction including drugs and alcohol. Addiction is addiction. Seeing how our mind relates to food is the first step toward developing a purposeful relationship to eating.
Gain A Toe-hold On Living On Purpose: the fact that we get up in the morning and go to work, pay our bills and have a place to live leaves us with the delusion that we living on purpose. The truth is, if we were to look at it minute by minute, most of our lives are spent in a relatively chaotic state. We do not seem to have complete control over ourselves and the thought of going to the gym or eating properly can seem, for some of us, as a huge burden. Even for athletes, there are other parts of life that get ignored for the same reasons that non-athletes overeat. You cannot take control of you life all at once. It starts by noticing, distinguishing and reinterpreting your own behavior piece by piece.
It May Be Fiction, But It Is One Heck Of A Karmic Workout.
Read The Lotus Blossom, D. M. Kenyon's fictional account of a teenage girl who turns off her cellphone and enters the very real, but mystical world of Budo warriors. Humorous, irreverent and heart-wrenching, The Lotus Blossom is an unforgettable tale of a Midwestern teenage girl's transformation into a budo warrior in the midst of the turmoil of the Information Age. Available in all digital formats, paperback and soon to be released in hardcover.
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