The Purpose of Fasting in Yoga:
Self-Awareness Through Abstention
This article about fasting in yoga is a part of the Yoga Practice section of our Yogi’s Guide to Yoga.
Beyond Food: The Purpose of Fasting/Abstention in Yoga
When we talk of abstention, we usually mean giving something up—often food, but also substances, screens, speaking, or stimulation. Both of these terms—abstention and fasting—refer to the voluntary restriction of some behaviour that would normally offer relief, stimulation, or satisfaction. And while abstention can offer various physiological benefits, 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. 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 (i.e., who we become) when discomfort arises.
...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 Yoga Recommends Fasting
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, this 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). 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 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.
Fasting interrupts the cycle of craving and gratification.
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. And abstention also allows to become aware of 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.
The purpose of abstention in yoga is not, strictly speaking, to extinguish any particular behaviour. The purpose of abstention in yoga is awareness, nothing more. Abstention in traditional yoga is intended as a tool of self-awareness, and self-awareness is what produces transformation. 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 and 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.
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.
A Simple Case Study in Abstention: How To Limit/Reduce Your Screen Time
Fasting doesn’t need to be dramatic to be revealing. There are simple actions we can take to reduce our screen time which are worth testing. As examples, we could simply delete the apps upon which we spend our most time that we know serve no meaningful purpose in our lives (and even make us feel worse about ourselves.), or we could make these apps less accessible by storing them on page two/three and/or in app folders. Or we could render our phone interface in grayscale, effectively making our phone screen less compelling. However, these (and other) methods are easily reversible unless accompanied by a mindful commitment to spend less time and attention on technological devices or, preferably, more time/attention on meaningful goals and projects—rather than spending hours of time on a screen.
A mindfulness-informed perspective on excessive screen time emphasizes becoming aware of your motivations when you find yourself automatically (and unthinkingly) reaching for a screen (e.g., phone, TV, tablet, etc.): the mere use a screen is not as destructive as the instinctive reliance on a screen to avoid unwanted thoughts and painful emotions, and including the very people/situations that produce these unwanted thoughts and feelings—such as the discomfort that accompanies having “nothing” to do. Become aware of instinctive reaching for your phone/screen (either in thought or in deed) is not intellectual, but is rather become acquainted with what it feels like to want your phone/screen. You want to notice the trigger without being consumed by it. You want to become aware of the trigger, every trigger, with no commitment to doing/non-doing. “Awareness” in yoga is not intellectual. (And in yoga, self-awareness is self-transcendence.)
While instinctively reaching for our phone/screen may allow us to avoid particular anxieties (including the anxious experience of boredom/nothing or craving), it simultaneously reinforces our inability to remain with discomfort.
The “spiritual” value of fasting is in what it reveals.
The “Spiritual” 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 “spiritual” value of fasting is in what it reveals.
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.
This article on the yoga and fasting is part of our Yoga Practice section of our Yogi’s Guide to Yoga, which includes a Yogi’s Guide to Meditation.