The Fruits of Fasting - Jessica Berger Gross

The other day a friend of mine, in the midst of an overwhelming year of graduate school, called to tell me how she was spending her spring break. "I’m on a melon fast," she said, "I’ ve been weaning myself off other food for a few days now, and I feel amazing—freer than I’ve ever felt before." A couple of years ago I would have thought my friend had graded one too many freshman essays. But having recently completed a fast myself, I knew exactly what she was talking about.

Yoga teaches us how powerful, even life-changing, it can be to alter our most basic bodily processes, such as movement or breath. What, then, if we were to `practice’ eating much like we practice breathing in a pranayama exercise—slowing the process down, watching it, even holding on to it for longer than we had thought possible? Last winter, I decided to see for myself. I signed up for a seven-day raw juice fast at Kripalu Yoga Center in Lenox, Massachusetts. Through yoga, I had already become happier and healthier than ever before, and I was eating a nutritionally sound diet. But I knew that things weren’t quite right when it came to me and food. A reformed pizza-and-fries kind of girl. I was now overly focused on my `healthy’ diet, afraid to sit down even occasionally to an overindulgent meal for fear of careening back to my old habits. I craved a more balanced, loving approach to satisfying my appetite.

© “Yoga International” (Oct./Nov. 2002) published by Himalayan International Institute, Rural Route I, Box 1130, Honesdale, Pennsylvania 18431. (Website: www.himalayaninstitute.org. Reprinted with permission.

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