Fast This Way
Page 18
In other words, the spiritual side of fasting happens in conjunction with the scientific side. They are not two separate things. Advanced spiritual states are mentally demanding, so they are also metabolically demanding. You can marshal extra energy through specific diets that remove the toxins that are slowing you down, or you can remove those toxins through fasting. (Ideally, you’ll do both.) In addition, you can use fasting as a spark to release the latent chemical energy your ancestors would have used to survive: for the final sprint in a hunt or for the last surge to go find some sort of sustenance. When you need that energy to take you to a new level of consciousness, you’re going to have a much easier time getting there if your body is strong and metabolically fit.
Fasting strengthens your connection to other people as well, because whether we have a billion dollars or nothing at all, we’ve all experienced the feeling of hunger. When we see someone who is hungry because he or she has no food, we reflexively feel his or her despair. In fact, there are cells in the brain called mirror neurons that attune us to other people’s emotions just by our observing their faces. And the more we fast as a spiritual practice, the greater our access to a deep reserve of empathy and connection becomes. The more we are able to transcend the needs of the self and quiet the persistent voices of the ego, the more we are able to tap into our sense of belonging in the larger collective.
Our shared humanity is defined by more than the common material needs of survival. We all share a hunger for purpose—for a way to put our constructive imprint on the world—and fasting brings out this hunger every bit as much as it brings out the more literal, physical kind. When someone chooses to abstain from food for spiritual reasons or to explore what makes him or her tick, it inspires us to do the same. On a practical level, once you are stronger, you will have more capacity for doing good in the world. You will be more able to solve problems and provide skills and resources that will benefit the people around you. Fasting truly reinforces our imperative to connect in so many ways.
In my travels through Nepal and Tibet, as well as in my personal studies and my experience fasting with the shaman in Arizona, I’ve learned firsthand that fasting is inherently both a physical and a spiritual process. The ultimate source of your focus—whether it is on meditation, on God, or on your next burger—is the neurons in your brain. They want ketones. When you start fasting, those neurons stop burning low-octane glucose and start devouring the new high-octane fatty molecules. You gain clarity because there’s more of a spark inside your brain. More energy. For most of us, it takes a lot of effort to achieve such a spiritual state; it generally doesn’t happen when you’re overfed and exhausted.
THE JOY OF GOING WITHOUT
The reasons people undertake a spiritual fast are varied and deeply intimate: renewing their faith, mourning the death of someone they loved, emerging from a life crisis, recovering from addiction, searching for purpose. No one can tell you the right reason to do it. Your motivation is something that belongs to you alone. What I can do is offer some guidelines, drawn from my own hard-earned experience, about how to mentally prepare for an effective spiritual fast.
First off, embrace the joy of fasting. When people hear the words spiritual fast, they often picture ascetics who have removed themselves from society and deprived their bodies of all enjoyment. In this imaginary scene, the ascetics are probably flagellating themselves madly in the hope that physical pain will help them atone for indiscretion or weakness. Think of that as the old-school spiritual fast. It’s not how I roll. (If I want to inflict suffering on myself, I’ll just eat some kale.)
Fasting is not about pain; it’s about discipline, self-control, and self-improvement. You may choose to push your limits—and it’s not my job to tell you what limits to push or how hard—but pain is a distraction from the transcendental awareness you’re seeking.
Second, you can do whatever you want during a spiritual fast. You can have sex. You can dance. You choose; it’s up to you as long as you maintain a focus on spiritual awareness. The point is to make your body go without food, not without pleasure. The Tantric and Daoist schools teach that ejaculation is depleting. If you’re a man, it really is much better to have as much sex as you want during an extended fast but not to go all the way until you finish the fast. The same teachings say that if you’re a woman, you should feel free to climax as completely as you possibly can. Science now shows that there is a real drop in testosterone the day after ejaculation, which will indeed make you irritable.
I didn’t believe any of this. I read about it and set about conducting an experiment to disprove it. For an entire year, I graphed the frequency of ejaculation and sex plotted against my happiness levels. I published the graph in an earlier book showing that happiness reliably falls the day after ejaculation—call it an ejaculation hangover, just for men. The lesson here is more nuanced. If you’re on a spiritual (or normal) fast, you’re already pushing yourself. You may be crankier and have less energy. You simply don’t want to deplete yourself further, because the next day your willpower to resist food or resist yelling at your boss, your spouse, or your kids, will be lower. Why suffer more when you’re fasting?
If you’re a man and you ignore this advice, expect an epic orgasm, because your brain will be powered by ketones and you will be in a slightly altered state. It’s just that you’ll regret it in the morning. If you’re a woman and you have sex during an extended fast, your orgasms will likely be more intense as well. You don’t read about it often, but both men and women can have intense spiritual visions during orgasm. Sex and fasting together make it far more likely.
That said, just snuggling in bed can make fasting easier because it will raise your blood level of oxytocin, a hormone associated with love and social bonding. Just don’t finish. Sorry, that goes for masturbation, too. I know, this is a sacrifice, but your momentary loss of seismic pleasure will be offset by the ways that an effective fast heightens your sense of arousal and connection to those you love. Your improved mood and increased energy could lead to a more profound and powerful sex life over time, and a stronger relationship with your partner in general.
Third, avoid self-judgment during your fast. Think of it this way: your physical fast cleanses the body of chemical impurities, while your spiritual fast cleanses your consciousness of the emotional baggage that weighs you down. These are not easy jobs! We all have some spiritual toxins in need of cleansing, and the mental clarity that comes with fasting may shine a light on problems you didn’t even know you had hidden away. You may become aware of aspects of your personality, or perhaps memories or motivations, that are holding you back. This awareness will pull you further along the spiritual path. It will help you see the person you want to be and then will draw you along toward realizing that vision. I find it useful to keep a journal to record these observations.
While you’re learning to fast, it may well happen that you break the fast and then regret it. Sooner or later, everyone who fasts regularly will have a time when they resolve to fast for two days, say, but something in their mind convinces them that it’s a fantastic idea to break the fast early. Very quickly, you come to understand that there’s someone other than you inside your head calling the shots. It’s a very persuasive voice, capable of convincing you that it’s your idea to eat a cookie in the middle of your fast.
There’s a name for that voice: it’s your ego. Learning to face down your ego and transcend it is the goal of spiritual practice. Fasting is going to make your ego scream that you’re starving, even though you know damn well that your body has plenty of energy available. Fasting helps you perceive what is actually happening, stand up, and take charge. As you go on your own journey, just like my walk with the shaman, keep in mind that no one is perfect. No one succeeds right away in every effort to change. Simply being on that journey, actively engaged, is enough.
Sometimes, you will eat the cookie. That’s okay.
TRIPPING ON OXYGEN
Here’s a f
ourth major guideline to assist you in your fast. Whether or not you are focusing on the spiritual aspect, adding breathing exercises will bring more oxygen to the fire. After all, whether you’re in ketosis or burning sugar, your body makes energy by combining air and food to generate electrons. When you alter your style of breathing—boom!—you can modify the other side of the equation, adding oxygen to speed metabolism or holding it back to build cells strong enough to thrive with less food and less oxygen. You’re already burning fat by virtue of fasting. If you have less food, you can deliver more air and still have an abundant supply of energy. Your body is always trying to keep the equation balanced. At the end of the day, you can accomplish your goals in a low-oxygen, food-rich environment, or you can do the same in a high-oxygen, low-food setting. It all depends upon how you play around with the variables.
If you bring more oxygen to bear on your spiritual practice, all of a sudden things will change. Controlled breathing, in addition to fasting, is a part of many religious and meditative practices. One example is pranayama breath work in Hindu practice. Defined literally, it comes from an ancient Sanskrit word that roughly translates as “breath exercises.” My introduction to this practice came years ago, shortly after I met my wife, when she perceptively told me, “You should start doing yoga.” I took her advice and discovered that most of the classes ended with pranayama breath work. Some of the techniques seemed disarmingly simple, such as doing guided breathing while covering one nostril and then the other, but they led me to some really surprising altered states. That was a big discovery for me, just how malleable consciousness is.
That was also when I came to appreciate the enormous variety and complexity of breathing techniques. Most of us believe that deep breaths are good for us, healthy and relaxing. There’s just one problem: taking lots of deep breaths and breathing more reduces the amount of carbon dioxide, or CO2, in your body. You can hold only as much oxygen in your body as CO2. That’s why hyperventilation makes you dizzy. In fact, blood flow in the brain decreases when you breathe deeply or quickly. The ancient breath practices therefore generally focus on slower breathing—basically, taking reduced breaths; slower breaths, not deeper.
Slow breathing into your diaphragm stimulates the vagus nerve, the longest nerve in the peripheral nervous system. The vagus nerve is a vital communication highway that connects the brain, heart, and liver. Messages carried along the vagus nerve serve to regulate everything from speech to digestion to body temperature. One of the most significant roles of the nerve is in controlling blood pressure. If your blood pressure is too high, the vagus nerve sends signals throughout the body to lower your heart rate, bringing forth a sense of calm while reducing stress, anxiety, and anger. Stimulating the vagus nerve via diaphragmatic breathing, or deep breathing, sweeps away these potential impediments to a successful fast. Even if you are not actively seeking a spiritual state, you will not enjoy your fast if you’re feeling edgy and anxious.
You can create a sense of calm by breathing in slowly, then making a very long, slow exhalation, over and over. At the start of each breathing cycle (the inhale) your sympathetic nervous system slightly elevates your heart rate. During a prolonged exhale, your vagus nerve does a most marvelous thing, sending out a message that overrides that temporary instant of panic. By releasing the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, the vagus nerve slows your heart rate. A prolonged exhale enhances vagus nerve function, lowering stress levels and improving cognition. Psychologists Roderik Gerritsen and Guido Band at Leiden University in the Netherlands developed a biophysical model suggesting that the response of the vagus nerve is directly related to the euphoric and otherworldly effects of yoga and meditation.1 That insight suggests another biohack for fasting: when you feel hungry, take a few slow, deep breaths into your diaphragm, which will tell your body to calm down.
Another form of breath work that can accompany a spiritual fast is holotropic breathing, a body control technique for attaining elevated consciousness that was developed by the Czech psychiatrist Stanislav Grof as a way to mimic the effects of LSD without taking drugs. Stan is widely credited as the father of transpersonal psychology, which applies the techniques of therapy to the pursuit of spiritual enlightenment. When I first tried it, I was shocked by how much I could alter my perception of reality merely by manipulating the flow of air into my lungs. Holotropic breathing uses very fast, deep breaths for a short period of time to launch you into an altered state for healing. You don’t have to be fasted for it, but it is more effective if you are in a fasted state or if you provide some ketones through a dietary hack.
Doing holotropic breathing2 with Grof, I’ve had some wild experiences. I’ve left my body. I’ve seen what looks like past lives. People who believe in past lives say that when you experience one, often the first thing you see is your feet in the past life. As I lay on a mat in an old hotel in Palo Alto (which has now been replaced by condos), I breathed until my hands and feet tingled. Suddenly, I was aware of feet that weren’t mine but at the same time belonged to me. I looked around and entered an intense vision of a life about six hundred years ago. In that vision, the man with the strange feet died with just one regret: that he hadn’t finished training one of his students. When the breathing was done, I sat stunned, as I realized I knew someone in my life who reminded me of that student. Feeling stupid, I tentatively told that person, “I had a weird vision of a past life, when you were my student. Sorry I had to go before I was done.” The impact on my friend was immediate—like being punched in the gut, followed by an enormous outpouring of grief. My vision connected to a highly private memory from my friend’s past, something he had never shared with me.
I don’t have the tools to explain it, and there’s no way to verify that it’s anything other than a hypoxic state generating visions. It sure didn’t feel that way, and it doesn’t explain why two sentences summarizing it would create that response in another person. I’m still mystified to this day, but I choose to believe that it’s more likely real than not.
In fact, I’ve seen more through holotropic breathing than I have through experiencing ayahuasca. You can have experiences like that, too. Some people practice it alone, but that’s not for the faint of heart. I recommend that you find an expert in holotropic breathing and try it when you are doing a spiritual, contemplative fast. You won’t be sorry. You can do it without drugs, without danger—while you are doing things that improve your health, in fact. This type of breathing is yet another reminder that you are a lot more than the bag of meat you walk around in.
There are many other breathing techniques you can experiment with as well, and nearly all of them work better with fasting. There is the Wim Hof method of breathing, developed by the Dutch extreme athlete of the same name, which will give you superpowers for handling cold showers or ice baths, with or without food in your system. Or there’s the popular “Art of Living” technique, which focuses on full yogic breaths and abdominal breathing. I did it every morning for five years before falling out of the daily practice when I moved and had kids. An estimated 40 million people do Art of Living daily.
All of the heavy-duty breathing methods I’ve discussed so far can be used in conjunction with fasting to deliver even more profound results. Fasting makes your metabolism more powerful, and that power requires oxygen to reach its full potential. For spiritual fasting, especially when you’re getting started, the breathing method I prefer is one developed by the world-renowned integrative physician Dr. Andrew Weil. It’s simple and easy. His method is called the 4-7-8 technique, and it’s just as simple as it sounds: Breathe in through your nose for four seconds. Hold the breath for seven seconds. Then breathe out for the count of eight, expelling all air from your lungs and making an audible “whoosh” sound as you do so. You should repeat this cycle up to four times in sequence and do it twice a day. During a fast, you can increase the number of repetitions up to as many as twelve. Dr. Weil has found that the 4-7-8 technique is ideal for helping you fall asle
ep at bedtime. During fasting, it reduces cravings and anxiety and helps control mood swings.
Everybody should know basic controlled breathing methods. They have the effect of calming the body, centering the mind, and focusing energy. It may take some time and practice to master breath work and see the benefits—as I’ve said, it’s not easy for most of us to access a spiritual state. Learn to fast first. Then learn to breathe. The spiritual feeling will follow.
It’s common for people to regard spiritual energy and biological energy as two distinct things: one subjective and personal, the other objective and (in some mysterious sense) absolutely “real.” That distinction is an artificial one, though, as misleading as the idea that we are just meat robots.
Your body has a tremendous amount of distributed operational intelligence, meaning that your brain doesn’t need to tell every cell in the body what to do. Your cells go about their jobs independently and then report what they did or didn’t do in the form of electrons. Biology textbooks will tell you that the signals are carried by molecules such as peptides and hormones, along with electrical currents and probably even magnetic currents. Whatever terminology you prefer, our internal communication system is fundamentally all about moving electrons. By the time the signals reach your conscious mind, they’ve been heavily processed and filtered by a bunch of cells that did their job and didn’t bother telling us about their little accomplishments.