I recently completed a 5 day water fast. I had been feeling like I wasn’t making any progress in my recovery and was getting dismayed that perhaps where I am is all I will ever get. Through everything else, I could endure because there was that hope that eventually it would clear up and I would get more physically able to be productive, but I was starting to think that that wasn’t going to happen.

It was sort of like a midlife crisis except more of an accepting old age crisis. Apparently I am not adjusting well to the concept. While I have a better situation than a lot of people and even devotees I know personally who have worse medical conditions, I am more under the bodily conception than them so am not dealing as well with it.

Anyway, I decided to fast to death which I figured would either put me out of my mental anxiety misery, or else give my body a chance to cleanse itself of all the debris from the pharmaceuticals I have been taking for the last few years and perhaps jump start a bit of a recovery. Or at least shake off the malaise I was feeling and get me rehabing better.

When we had hepatitis E community wide back in 1976, there happened to be an Ayur Vedic doctor visiting. A devotee had returned from India and cooked a feast for the devotees to showcase his newly acquired recipes. Shortly thereafter he came down with the hep. 28 days later the initial wave of devotees were laid low and suffered with it for 6 weeks.

The doctor put the whole community on mung water and rice. We boiled whole mung beans until it made like a tea, then discarded the beans and and took the water along with plain unspiced, unsalted rice. We did this for 5 days.

A lot of the devotees who followed the protocol still got sick but it ran its course in 2 weeks instead of 6. Those who cheated and stole maha got nailed with the run of it.

Anyway, that was a tangent to what I was going to say. Kirtanananda Swami had bursitis and was unable to lift his arm above his shoulder. The Ayur Veda doctor put him on a 5 day fast in order to help alleviate it.

The idea was that the first day you fast, you clean your digestive system, the second day your blood is cleansed, the third, your organs, the fourth, muscle, and on the fifth day your bones. So depending on what is your problem, you fast for that period.

The reason I chose a 5 day fast was because after most of the aches and pains of the interferon treatment have faded away, it seems I am left with carpal tunnel syndrome which makes typing unpleasant. Being physically unfit for duty, if I can’t type, my whole world sort of closes in on me as far as any kind of productivity goes. Thus, 5 days.

FYI, kids, don’t try this (extended fasting) at home unless you do some research as to the correct way to start and stop fasting, or you may a.) not get the benefit b.) possibly hurt yourself. I have been doing extended fasting every once in a while for about thirty years so it wasn’t a completely compulsive thing.

Anyway, while I was fasting, I also did a 5 day internet fast. I scheduled a series of posts so it gave the illusion that I was active but I wasn’t. Unfortunately, for some reason, Planet ISKCON doesn’t sequence posts in the order they were published, but either when they were edited, or skips them, so for PI readers, those posts didn’t show up.

It was a sequence of poems, leading from despair to old age, the process of dying, then about the state of death. The last was an appreciation from Tupac Shakur for the presence of God. The idea was if the fasting to death thingy worked, that was going to be my exit line.

Early in the process though, I realized I would, as I do at most things, fail. The first hint was that I was watching a movie on the evening of the second day and when a family sat down to eat, I could smell the fresh bread on the table.

Anyway, to break out of the internet fast I posted the Death takes a holiday picture, which in context to the string of bleak poems was, in my warped sense of humor, quite funny. Alas, poor PI readers missed the buildup so the punchline went flat. Even if they go directly to my site and read through the sequence, the impact is gone.

So I even failed at the joke. :-)