Food, Fasting and Spiritual Development

It is tempting for a spiritual seeker to undertake some form of extreme fasting. The practice of fasting has been used since time immemorial all around the world to increase the vital force by reducing the ‘drag’ of the physical body and its operations around acquiring, preparing, eating and digesting food. Additionally, extreme fasting has been reported to help the seeker achieve various altered states of awareness, in what has been called a ‘vision quest’ in certain traditions. Fasting has also been used as a mechanism to interfere with the vital desire or craving for food or specific tastes, and it has been used by many traditions as a means of fixing the attention on the spiritual process and having the seeker learn how to rely on the Divine for his sustenance by whatever comes into the begging bowl that day during the time prescribed by the path for seeking nourishment for the body.

At the same time, there are limitations to the use of fasting and the imbalances it can create in the physical body, which, after all, is foundational for the life on earth and should be properly attended to in order to provide a solid support for the spiritual development. It should be noted that the Taittiriya Upanishad makes numerous references to the role that food plays in the spiritual practitioner’s sadhana: ‘Verily all sorts and races of creatures that have their refuge upon earth, are begotten from food; thereafter they live also by food and ‘this to food again that they return at the end and last. For food is the eldest of created things and therefore they name it the Green Stuff of the Universe. Verily they who worship the Ete
al as food, attain the mastery of food to the uttermost… For food all creatures are born and being born they increase by food….’ and ‘Thou shalt not blame food; for that is thy commandment unto labour.’ ‘Thou shalt not reject food; for that too is the vow of they labour.’ ‘Thou shalt increase and amass food; for that too is thy commandment unto labour.’ (translated by Sri Aurobindo, The Upanishads, excerpted from Brahmanandavalli and Bhriguvalli). There are numerous further references that make it clear that food is both the physical substance and, at various levels of the being, the life-energy, the other vibrational energies that sustain and support our overall being in all its parts.

There may be benefits to short-term fasting on occasion. Recent nutritional science shows that refraining from eating for a certain number of hours in a day can be a positive benefit to the body. This is not the same as long-term or extreme fasting, which tends eventually to weaken the body, reduce its substance and strength for most individuals.

It is of course possible that certain individuals have found a way to nourish the body without intake of much food, yet that does not answer the general situation. Paramahansa Yogananda, in his Autobiography of a Yogi, reports meeting such an individual!

Until and unless an individual can make a transition to a method that supports and strengthens the physical body without the need of physical food intake, the seeker should work to find a suitable balance that avoids the extremes and provides the body what it needs without awakening greed for food, desire or craving.

Sri Aurobindo observes: “The idea of giving up food is a wrong inspiration. You can go on with a small quantity of food, but not without food altogether, except for a comparatively short time. Remember what the Gita says, ‘Yoga is not for one who eats in excess nor for one who abstains from eating altogether.’ Vital energy is one thing — of that one can draw a great amount without food and often it increases with fasting; but physical substance, without which life loses its support, is of a different order.”

Sri Aurobindo, Bases of Yoga, Chapter 4, Desire — Food — Sex, pg. 67