One of the most common questions we get can be summarized as this: "Is fasting difficult?" The answer to that is a bit of everything and not easily tallied as, quite simply, no two fasts are the same.

From others, I have heard each of these multiple times: I didn't even think of food; that was the hardest thing I have ever done; after day (usually 2 or 3) I had so much energy; I couldn't do anything but lay there; I can't believe how clear everything was…

From my own experience, I have felt the following: I have no energy; I have so much energy; I don't want to move, all day; I want to take long, all-day walks; I feel weak; I feel so clear and awake; time is moving so slow…

So, the question begging to be asked is, why fast? Why subject ourselves to this discomfort? The answer to this is vast, but if I had to choose one complex conceptualization which is ultimately simplified in a fasting, wilderness rite-of-passage ceremony, it would be this: we choose to fast as a way of calling in greater purpose and meaning into our delicate, fragile, and precious lives.

One of my favorite threads on this comes from Colleen, who, while out on a fast in Death Valley, asked herself deep in the experience: What am I really hungry for? On the 2nd day, while hunger pangs were severe, she asked herself this potent question. She took herself on an all-day walk with that question and realized that what she was really hungry for was to feed the people, to embody the expression of her gifts, and for connection.

See Colleen's Desert Birth Story blog to read more about her experience: https://www.alchemyofprana.com/post/desert-birth-story

Foster and Little (1989, 1992) understood that the fast was a necessary part of the ordeal—the initiating challenge which would ground the experience as physically and psychologically different from everyday life. As they (1989) explained, "A wilderness fast alters the civilized consciousness" (p. 107).

A wilderness rite-of-passage ceremony is not simply 12 days camping with friends. Yes, oftentimes, the pop-up community develops deep and life-long friendships with one another. Yes, the experience includes backpacking or car-camping and associated tasks and orientations. Yes, there can be profoundly touching moments because of the wilderness immersive setting. 

What is different, which is both simple to write and decidedly profound in practice, is the intent. This isn't just armchair philosophizing; each person/participant/initiate who signs up does all the preparatory logistic work, packs their food and supplies into a car or a duffle for travel, and then takes the journey to the ceremony location and arrives having both outwardly and internally taken the potent step of calling themselves and their lives toward something new, unknown, wild, liberating, devastating, heart-cracking-opening… 

And that is just the first step and the first Council—the severance part of the journey. All of that is prologue to the threshold time on the land. 

Foster and Little (1989) noted quite directly that as fasters, we are not looking to earn some 'merit badge' (p. 81). Most importantly is that each participant can find their own personal edge and then stay with it. I know this very well. Having spent a solid decade in healing recovery from my mental health struggles, when I first went out on the land, I was not willing to sacrifice that decade of grounded existence just to 'complete the fast' without food. So when I needed to during my ceremony, when I met my edge and stayed with it and didn't leap beyond it, I ate some emergency food which I had with me. In fact, I did not actually complete a four-day fast without food until my fourth fast because staying in the ceremony, staying with my personal edge, was what was most essential for my healing.

Foster and Little (1989) spoke to this directly: "Severity or degree of suffering is not always transformational. A 'better cure' is not always effected by a 'harder trial' (p. 80). I did not read this until after my personal experience of leaning into my edge via four separate ceremonies, but the succinctness of this wisdom is bone deep.

Food, as Fisher (2012) noted, is also not without its own social and cultural meanings and attachments. Certainly, food can be medicine, but it might also serve as a principal distraction, not least because food often becomes a principal element around which we organize our days. Threads noting the significance of fasting can be found throughout many extant spiritual traditions. Armstrong (2023) noted that the ancient Greeks called the intentional emptying of the self kenosis (p. 89). Here, as she noted, a proper understanding of kenosis is about suspending our allegiance with what psychology calls the ego. While kenosis and fasting are not quite synonymous, they can be complimentary and collaborative processes, and often, kenosis practices included fasting.

Each initiate is empowered to make it their own ceremony and choose what is necessary for that ceremony and what is superfluous. For me, food was necessary for a while. Then, summoning all of my personal practices (i.e., yoga, meditation, prayer, intention setting, and daily ceremonies), I was able to navigate the terrain of my psyche without food. I will never forget the liberation and healing I felt having finally made it, and also the joy of taking the time I needed to get there in wholeness and not sacrificing my truth for some externally conscripted objective.

So, is fasting hard? Probably to some degree and in some way for all of us every time, but that question is less important than the reason for the wilderness rite-of-passage ceremony to begin with: the intent. Essentially and directly, our intent is the why, summed by the answer to this question: What is so profoundly important deep in the recesses of our life and psyche that we are willing to set off to the wilderness and make it sacred via a wilderness rite-of-passage ceremony?

On the programs Colleen and I guide, we spend time with each participant in an interactive Council (talking circle) where we ask, directly, "So, what do you know about your intent?" The guides then continue to interact with the initiate while the rest of the participants are with-nessing (witnessing), a very essential and important role of holding non-judgmental heart-space. Almost without fail and often quite quickly, the initiate has the opportunity to share their vulnerable heart with this new community, to call forth that which is ready to die and that which is ready to take new root as they shed the layers of protective armoring.

I return: is fasting hard? Is dying with our dreams left unlived hard? Is meandering through life finding purpose based on encultured idioms hard? Is watching our reactivity, our defensiveness, our fragility hard—it certainly has been for me.

Did a wilderness rite-of-passage ceremony fix this for me? Of course not, but it helped me cultivate the ground inside to love my shadow, to soften my edges, to open to my most vulnerable emotions, and to begin to make sense of the complexity of being. In essence, it moved me from a place of transactional understanding to one of deep relational being.

To me, fasting creates a powerful internal quickening, but instead of a rush or urgency, the horizon of time expands. I begin to notice so much more. I begin to remember that I am of this earth, and not on it.

Fasting, then, in addition to the solo time and the minimal shelter, becomes an aspect of "readying the soil for a seed to be planted in it" (Foster & Little, 1992, p. 45). The seed is your deep truth, what your intent statement points toward like a finger pointing to the moon. Fasting becomes a vehicle for removing distractions, for making a statement with your life about the importance of your life and gifts.

All of this, in sum, helps us reorganize our encultured linearity into the sacred web of intercorporeality as we lean in and myth ourselves.

Just writing about it brings forward memories of my fasts, my intents, the healings, falling Aspen leaves, cold cold water, stars, wind, fierce cries of aliveness, an uncomprehendable stillness and quiet, and the smell of sage as my dear one and our community carry my changed self back through the stone threshold with smoke, prayer, and hugs.

I cannot wait to go again

into that good, good night

of shadow

emptiness

purpose

Deep bow. tbird 🌊

References

Armstrong, K. (2023). Sacred nature: Restoring our ancient bond with the natural world. Anchor Books.

Fisher, A. (2012). What is ecopsychology? A radical view. In P. H. Khan, Jr., & P. H. Hasbach (Eds.), Ecopsychology: Science, totems, and the technological species (pp. 89–114). MIT Press.

Foster, S., & Little, M. (1989). The roaring of the sacred river: The wilderness quest for vision and self-healing. Prentice Hall Press.

Foster, S., & Little, M. (1992). The book of the vision quest: Personal transformation in the wilderness (Rev. ed.). Fireside.