Why is fasting on nothing but water and lemonade the most difficult, joyful, painful , profound, and life changing thing we can do? Because it is the radical opposite of what we usually do to try to make ourselves happy. When we do a fast we find liberation by going against the grain of our usual habits.
Listening to all of you here on this forum, it becomes clear that many well meaning fasting souls, have two separate experiences of their fast, and it makes them miserable. There is the fast that we are actually having, and then there is the reactive state we are having to our experience. Many of us have genuine physical discomforts from the cleanse, and at times our bodies go through a lot. But we also develop a reactive mind state to those difficulties and become stressed and anxious. Even if the discomforts are minor we contract into them.
Do not let your mental experience of the fast far out weigh your physical experience. If you find yourself in an occasion where really strong detox symptoms arise, try not to fall into negative speculation about how long it is going to last, or how difficult it will be. By conflating our physical experience with our mental reaction, the pain becomes our identity. We take birth as a person who cannot tolerate the SWF, or cannot drink the laxative tea, or whatever type of person who cannot do MC successfully.
_________________ In a moment of consciousness, change can occur.
Last edited by shivabliss on Tue Dec 02, 2008 8:49 am, edited 6 times in total.
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