I decided to fast for the entire day on Saturday, June 23. There were a variety of reasons why I did so. I last fasted in 1997. I did so at that time in solidarity with the starving people in North Korea. I felt that I needed to know what it was like to go hungry, granted for me it was just a short experiment. In 1997, I did so at a time when a large number of people were fasting for that same purpose.<\/p>\n
This time, I fasted for a different reason. This time, I was inspired by Mahatma Ghandhi whose autobiography I had been reading for some time, off and on. Specifically, Ghandi stressed the importance of fasting as a means to understand desire and learn restraint. I feel that recently have been so completely surrounded by a fierce world of consumption that I needed to break out of it. In fact, I am a vegetarian, and try to avoid processed foods, but even then I still have trouble with the compulsion to buy something, or eat something, in the course of a day.<\/p>\n
Fasting did not cure me of this social malaise, but I did spend a good amount of time thinking about what exactly drives desires and how to snap out of the patterns of compulsive consumption. I also noticed that my senses were sharper by the end of the day. Perhaps another benefit?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I decided to fast for the entire day on Saturday, June 23. There were a variety of reasons why I did so. I last fasted in 1997. I did so at that time in solidarity with the starving people in North Korea. I felt that I needed to know what it was like to go … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9296425,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10659529,1342],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-2","category-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/green-liberty.org\/circlesandsquares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/green-liberty.org\/circlesandsquares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/green-liberty.org\/circlesandsquares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/green-liberty.org\/circlesandsquares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9296425"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/green-liberty.org\/circlesandsquares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2367"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/green-liberty.org\/circlesandsquares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2367\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/green-liberty.org\/circlesandsquares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/green-liberty.org\/circlesandsquares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/green-liberty.org\/circlesandsquares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}