The Purpose of Fasting in Yoga
Self-Awareness, Craving, and the Pursuit of Stability
Written By: Balraj Persaud
This article approaches fasting as a practice of self-awareness, showing how abstention can reveal the instinctive self, hidden habits, and the patterns that drive our behavior when comfort is withdrawn. It also explores how craving and aversion are tied to our attempt to restore equilibrium, and how fasting is one method that can bring us face to face with the instability of experience and the limits of satisfaction.
Beyond Food: Abstention & Self-Awareness
When we talk of abstention, we usually mean giving something up—often food, but also substances, screens, speaking, or stimulation. Both of these terms—fasting and abstention—refer to the voluntary restriction of some behaviour that would normally offer relief, stimulation, or satisfaction. The purpose of fasting in yoga is self-awareness—to become aware of the very self who is moved/compelled to indulge—to notice who/what/why/when/how we instinctively reach for whatever we reach for. In yoga, abstention is not pursued as a moral ideal, but as a practice of becoming aware of the discomfort that motivates action—and the craving and compulsions that shape our thinking/feeling/acting/perceiving—that is, who we become—when discomfort arises.
Fasting and the Instinctive Self
Fasting produces real biochemical changes that directly affect the mind: blood sugar shifts, hormonal fluctuations, and the withdrawal of habitual sources of stimulation can produce irritability, restlessness, and a marked intensification of craving. In yoga, this is useful. When our comfortable habits are removed, the instinctive self surfaces with unusual clarity. The discomfort is not a side effect to be managed—it is the very material of practice; what we call the “self” is often disclosed most clearly when we are deprived of the usual things that keep us settled.
Fasting is not, strictly speaking, about self-denial, self-punishment, or self-scolding. It is, rather about revealing that the self that is often organized around what it reaches for when comfort disappears—that is, around its deeper cravings and aversions. In other words, the deeper value of fasting is that it reveals the structure of our desire/aversion itself: not just what it wants, but what it cannot yet tolerate not having, and not yet tolerate feeling. In yet other words, fasting reveals how (and that) craving is a form of regulation. Fasting becomes a way of seeing that the instinctive self is not random or silly; rather, it is adaptive, habitual, and protective—even when it is also limiting.
When comfort is withdrawn, the instinctive self becomes visible: any unthinking reaching-for, hidden dependencies, the way the mind rushes to restore equilibrium. Fasting shows that the unthinking self—the very self we often aim to change when embarking on some fast—is not most visible when it is satisfied, but when it is interrupted. Ultimately, fasting serves as a way of seeing not just craving and aversion, but the deeper intolerance beneath them: the self’s inability to remain with the felt unreliability or precarity (or instability/insecurity) of experience—of our life/circumstances not staying stable, so to speak, not keeping us satisfied/full.*
The purpose of fasting in yoga is self-awareness—to become aware of the very self who is compelled to indulge—to notice who/what/why/when/how we instinctively reach for whatever we reach for.
Why Fasting Reveals the Instinctive Self
Fasting interrupts the cycle of craving and gratification. Abstention of any kind removes the possibility of the fulfillment of some habitual way(s) of engaging with the world; the “loop” of desire and fulfillment cannot be closed, and this gap provides an opportunity for becoming aware of the nature of the motivation to engage in some behaviour. However, the experience of this ‘gap’—of unfulfilled desire—is often uncomfortable, and an inability to remain with this discomfort can often produce/reinforce other behaviours designed to close the loop of discomfort, especially if your approach is suppression/repression by any means necessary.
Traditional yoga contained many kinds of restraint—not to purify the self, but to reveal it; not in order to suppress elements of our inner life but rather to bring them to awareness, to become aware of the way(s) in which our awareness is always already being consumed, to notice our relationship with that from which we were abstaining, including our relationship to related objects/people/situations, etc.—relationships of which we may have been unaware. One such relationship may include food itself, but it may also include the social, emotional, and situational conditions wrapped up with the thing from which we are abstaining—conditions of which we may have been entirely unaware. Our instinctive self often arrives on the scene, so to speak, before our conscious self shows up. The longer it takes for our conscious self to show up, the more our behaviours are subject to the compulsions of our instinctive self. In this sense, fasting is not merely deprivation; rather, it is a way of interrupting the automatic closure of desire so that desire can be seen rather than merely acted upon.
Remaining With Discomfort: Meditation
In the context of abstention, the point of meditation in yoga (including mindfulness) is to cultivate the capacity to remain with our triggers rather than have our behaviours be defined by them. Meditation in traditional yoga was used as a tool for the cultivation of our capacity to see the myriad ways in which our attention is automatically and habitually pre-occupied. As a tool of self-awareness, meditation allows us to notice our automatic habits prior to being consumed by them. These habits are often connected to protecting ourselves from feelings and thoughts that we want to avoid. Meditation helps us to cultivate the capacity to remain with these challenging aspects of our inner life so that our life isn’t determined by them. Where fasting is particularly useful for working with craving because it creates the conditions under which craving becomes unavoidable (i.e., it does not wait for craving to arise—and object chosen is a usually known source of addictive tendencies), meditation helps us identify its texture (and, among other things, how it shapes the rest of experience) and remain with the discomfort long enough to see its pattern without rushing to restore equilibrium.
This is also why self-awareness in yoga is not intellectual. It is not the same thing as having an idea about oneself. It is closer to a direct (almost felt) recognition, an immediate acquaintance with what is happening before it hardens into action, explanation, or self-interpretation. And it is why fasting, to be of any use as a practice, requires a genuine and active (i.e., mindful) commitment—not merely the removal of something, but the intention to remain present to what that removal uncovers.
Ultimately, fasting serves as a way of seeing not just craving and aversion, but the deeper intolerance beneath them: the self’s inability to remain with the felt unreliability or precarity (or instability/insecurity) of experience—of our life/circumstances not staying stable, so to speak, not keeping us satisfied/full.
Fasting as a Practice of Self-Awareness
Abstention also allows us to become aware of both the nature of our dependence on some particular thing/person/behaviour and on the nature of the experience of fulfillment—including the extent to which said fulfillment reinforces the sense of “lack” that motivated the behaviour in the first place. Abstention also brings into view the various parts of our life connected with this dependence/habit, including our relationships—both with others and with ourselves—and the extent to which our habit is supporting or hindering the pursuit of our most meaningful projects and goals.
And so abstention is particularly useful when dealing with what we might call “addictions”. While stronger forms of addiction present uniques (and serious) challenges (such as alcohol addiction), the self-awareness gained via fasting/abstention applies to various kinds of addictions, including addictions to those things that we may not think to be destructive, such as exercise, self-help, and even spirituality.
This is not because fasting magically cures attachment. It does not. It gives us a clearer view of attachment. That difference matters. A practice can expose a pattern without erasing it, and that exposure is often the beginning of any genuine transformation.
The purpose of abstention in yoga is not, strictly speaking, to extinguish any particular behaviour but to illuminate our automatic practices (perceptual, behavioural, etc.). And in yoga, self-awareness is self-transcendence. However, self-awareness pursued for the purpose of transformation remains infected with inadequacy and limited by the anxious (and narrowed) pursuit of self-transcendence. In other words, when abstention becomes a strategy for transformation, it often becomes a way to bypass the very discomfort it’s meant to reveal. The transformation in yoga occurs when striving ceases, not when striving is hidden under more refined goals like healing or growth (or enlightenment). This is difficult if we aren’t aware of the relentless background uneasiness of dis-ease of inner lack that gnaws at us motivates our relentless quest for “filling up” said sense of lack in/with the world.
The Deeper Value of Fasting in Yoga
Abstention allows us to bear witness to the way(s) that we are pushed/pulled by what’s missing in us and the feeling of inner lack itself, the feeling that motivates us to add to ourselves (financial freedom, fame, recognition, status, etc.) or subtract from ourselves (defects, guilt, negative emotions, trauma, sins/karma, etc.) so that we are never made to feel anxious, small, unworthy, incompetent, etc., again. Fasting makes us confront the fantasy that we could one day be free of discomfort. Fasting makes visible what is normally invisible: our reactions, compulsions, and our subtle ways of pursuing the fantasy of invulnerability. This is the fantasy that keeps us bound; the more we crave wholeness, purity, freedom, the more we reinforce the very anxiety we were hoping to eliminate. The deeper value of fasting is in what it reveals. (This is, of course, not a call for extremity. Pushing abstention to excess can become another way of pursuing invulnerability, turning practice into a form of control rather than self-awareness.)
In this sense, fasting—as a kind of ‘limitation’—is what opens up the (meaningful) freedom of not being determined by our unthinking, automatic habitual way(s) of being in the world. Yoga is not the destruction of vulnerability, but is simply what remains when we relinquish the quest therefor. It is what remains when we stop needing our discomfort to be eliminated. But it’s difficult to relinquish what we can’t see. Fasting is one way of becoming aware.
In this sense, fasting—as a kind of ‘limitation’—is what opens up the (meaningful) freedom of not being determined by our unthinking, automatic habitual way(s) of being in the world.
Further Reading
*Jonathan Gold argues that “unreliable”—or perhaps more precisely “precarious”—could function as a translation of the Pāli, duḥkha, usually rendered as “suffering” or, more recently, “unsatisfactoriness”. See his 2023 article, ‘Pyrrho’s Buddha on Duḥkha and the Liberation from Views’.