Fasting

The deliberate setting down of intake for a bounded time, so that what was running on automatic becomes visible and a body is given room to do its own repair.

Nearly every tradition that lasted kept some form of it, and they kept it for overlapping reasons: a body left without new input turns to clearing and rebuilding; a mind that cannot reach for its usual comfort meets what the comfort was covering; and a person who has voluntarily gone without has learned something about their own will that argument cannot teach. The canon holds it as one of the cultivation disciplines, a drafted Pattern beside Sleeping, Dreaming, and Nutrition.

It is load-bearing as the clearest worked example of the subtractive move that Detoxification names in general. A person adding practices on top of an unexamined life gets a busier unexamined life. Fasting is the opposite motion, done on purpose and for a set time, and the setting of the time is what distinguishes it from deprivation: it has an end, it is chosen, and it is entered from sufficiency rather than from lack.

The word extends past food and the canon uses it that way. A fast from speech is Silence And Stillness As The Ground taken deliberately. A fast from the feed, from a habit, from an opinion one is attached to, from a role one hides inside — each works on the same principle. Rest And Regeneration and the Sabbath pattern are a fast from production. In a Cell, a shared fast of any kind is one of the older ways a group discovers it can do something together that none of its members would sustain alone.

Two honesties. Fasting is not safe for everyone, and a body that is depleted, ill, growing, carrying a child, or in recovery from Addiction may be harmed by it; the floor of care outranks the practice. And fasting is easily captured by pride and by control, where it stops being a clearing and becomes another way of managing the self.

Also called: the fast Stands on: Nutrition · Detoxification · Discipline Opens onto: Rest And Regeneration · Silence And Stillness As The Ground · Healing · Vitality In play: table · Gate Sources: Fasting (a drafted Pattern Card) · The LIØNSBERG Pattern Language, Cultivation Disciplines and Specific Sacred Practices (the latter marked as a partial gap) · lionsberg.wiki: Fasting Open: The Pattern Language lists Fasting twice — once as a drafted cultivation discipline, once among the specific sacred practices still to be patterned. The drafted Card is thin.