Fasting for the soul

Skip food for a day and something strange happens: the hunger leaves. I’ve seen it many times — the body stops asking, noon comes and goes, and instead of fading I have more energy. Plutarch gave the same advice two thousand years ago: instead of medicine, fast for a day. It works. And it’s free.

Meditate. Think of it as fasting for the soul.

You fast the body to clear out the junk and let it reset. Meditation does the same for the mind — you stop feeding it, the noise settles, and what’s underneath becomes visible.

It washes the junk out of your head, and the joy underneath becomes visible — the joy that is the substance of being itself.

Food is only the most obvious layer. There are others.

I don’t drink. Alcohol is a one-way ticket: you get duller and never notice, because you can still find your way to the liquor store. A man once told me his story. He woke up hungover, and outside the window his wife and son were planting potatoes. He had a drink, went back to sleep. Woke up — they were digging the potatoes out. Five months, and not one day of them left in his memory. When you don’t drink, the days stay with you — and you suddenly see how much everyone around you drinks. The sensitivity is back.

The noise coming in is food too — food for the mind. News, other people’s voices from morning till night. I stopped thinking about the bad altogether, and it got quieter inside: nothing catches, nothing starts a chain reaction, it just fades. Even sleep is a fast — eight hours in darkness and silence, every input off.

Once you’ve cleared the junk — you start to notice that all the wise people, in all the books, have been pointing at the same thing.

And this fast has an extreme form: stop feeding the body even air. A breath-hold — the fullest silence I know. That’s where we dive next.