I should remember the feelings I had the day after fasting
-1) Dreams of difficulty getting to a delicious fucking Thai restaurant on New York’s subway system, which inexplicably, dream-style, led in this case through a crazy-ass fairytale landscape. I presume all this represents spiritual purity mixed with beastly, ravenous hunger.
0) Upon waking up: Exhaustion, hunger of the body rather than hunger of the stomach.
1) Relief that I’m allowed eat again.
2) Total delight in eating. The taste of food magnified, the subtleties drawn out. That and real gratitude for what I was eating: simple scrambled eggs and toast, with a couple of strips of burnt bacon.
3) The mild shock of a full stomach. Waiting for digestion. Surprise at blood-orange colored piss that came out of me. This may have been the “toxins” I’d heard I’d be expelling.
4) A bit of laziness, overcome by doing the dishes. This may have helped usher forward my digestive process.
5) A lasting feeling of renewed health. Like Jen said she read on the internet, a feeling of clarity, and calm.
6) A bursting stomach after a big lunch of Pho. It seemed that I may have eaten too much, which feeling I can’t recall as far as I think back.
7) Having digested the Pho, more calm, and upon getting home, good steady energy, and a lack of anxiety despite having not accomplished terribly much in the day. Totally attributable to improved digestive powers. Thanks, juice fast!
8) I should also mention that I drank coffee. This might relate to the energy I feel right now. It feels, I have to admit a little like a coffee-high. But I stopped drinking coffee for a while because it started to make me feel shitty instead of good, so I’m also counting this as a disputable point for juice-fast.
9) Now I’m hungry again, because it’s 8:45 and I haven’t eaten dinner, but I still feel OK, which is uncommon for me, and awesome. I think it was the juice fast!
In conclusion, I have to hand it to religious people, fasting is a pretty good way not only of showing devotion to God/Buddha/Earth Spirit/Big Other/Bon Jovi/etc/etc/etc, but also a pretty good way of making yourself feel really hungry at first, but then feel really better-than-you-did-before-you-were-so-hungry-that-you-thought-about-eating-everything- you-saw-or-even-thought-about. This re-inforces my feeling about religion that underneath the obviously misinformed reasonings of ancient people, there are pretty good arguments in favor of many of their weird rites and rituals.
The deeper conclusion is that mysticism works. Do weird shit to yourself because you will learn from it. This is the stuff to remember.
