 Tomorrow is a day called Ekadashi here in the ashram and it's supposed to be beneficial to fast on that day. If you watch the natural cycles of the body, based on this natural cycle, once in one mandala that is one mandala is forty to forty-eight days. In this forty-eight days, three days will happen where your body does not need food. If that awareness is not there as to which day it is, for that in India they are fixed what is called as Ekadashi. That means four days before the full moon, four days before the new moon day, people don't eat. They wake up in the morning, no breakfast, no lunch, only after the sun sets they eat one meal. This is just to allow the system to realign itself. If you give this break it's very very good for your health and your body the weight functions because the system needs that time to adjust itself. Every day food, every day food, it's lot of hard work for the body. Give it a little break. So what is its spiritual significance? Because it's a cleansing. If your system is not vibrant, you won't feel like doing anything spiritual. You're feeling lethargic. For a meditator the biggest enemy is sleep. To sit here with eyes closed and fully alert, take something else. For most people if they close their eyes they should sleep. So to sit here and to be very alert with eyes closed takes a certain level of vibrance in the body. So to create these vibrance we observe how to eat, what to do, how much to eat, all these things. It is not spiritual but it is providing the right kind of body. So in that context fasting here and there giving the body a break to recover itself, recover its vibrance, not become lethargic with food is important. The ideal break between one meal and the next meal is eight hours always. If eight hours is not possible for you, minimum five hours break is needed. You must feel a certain sense of hunger before you eat. Before you feel hungry, if you put food into the system, the system will become lethargic. It will not know vibrance. So human vibrance can be in various levels, many different dimensions. It can carry you to completely different dimensions of experience and living. So keeping the body well is a fundamental requirement. Somehow on this day I feel that the need for food is not as much as it is on other days. So reducing the food intake definitely helps to clean the system and it also gives rest to the digestive system. So we fast for 24 hours and break the fast in the night to the particular kind of meal which is more gentle on the system, in up of kanji, papaya, chutney and cooked vegetables. Every morning before we do our morning practices, we have neem and tamarick with a tippin-like honey water. Now Sadhu Guru says this has a lot of medicinal benefits and is very supportive for yogic sadhana. Anything that you borrow from the planet, it will cause a certain level of inertia in the system. Now the important thing is that you are conscious of this and to keep the inertia levels at the minimum. Why always whether your sadhana is working or not is always gauged by how much you sleep and how alert you are is because we are checking the inertia. How much inertia are you generating? If you are generating too much inertia, obviously you need to do something about it. So the inertia levels will increase if the body does not allow a certain amount of energy to enter the cellular level. For it to enter the cellular level, neem and tamarick as a combination is a tremendous… it's like a dilator. You know what's a dilator? Now if your… if your ophthalmologist wants to look into your eye, he looks into your eye, you don't show much, he puts a dilator. Your eye becomes like this, now he looks into your eye. But this is kind of a dilator for the energy it… it dilates the body in such a way that it allows the energy to enter and fill up every crevice in the body. This is important. Otherwise if you do lot of sadhana, not just… not neem and tamarick are not the only things, these are physical supports, other sadhana itself is doing it. Neem and tamarick is a good support because it's dilates the cellular structure in such a way that it is able to absorb. As you do your asanas, the body will simply crackle with a different kind of energy. So consumption of neem and tamarick with a mildly laced honey water acts as a wonderful way of cleansing the system, dilating the system that when you do sadhana, one thing it brings flexibility to the muscles, another thing is because the dilation brings flexibility to the muscle and that flexibility as a consequence becomes a way that you slowly build the system into a more powerful possibility. So taking care of the food and a few things is important. As important as sadhana, being disciplined with your food, what you take into the system is as important as doing the sadhana. The idea is if you take this neem and tamarick combination early in the morning and drink something warm, it cleanses the stomach in a big way, if there are any minor infections in your stomach it will go away and it also kills the cancerous cells in the body. When I say cancerous cells, it is not that you must be, you know, diagnosed as having cancer, all our bodies have cancerous cells. Every when this percentage of cancerous cells goes beyond a certain percentage, only then it becomes a disease, otherwise every one of our body has cancerous cells and how many of them are there decides your health status in many ways. We've just got done with our morning practice sessions and headed for the brunch. The way that we sit in the hall is we sit cross-legged and we eat with our hands. By eating with the hands, you really create that connection with your food before it even goes into your mouth. Another aspect of how we eat in the hall is we eat in silence. It really helps you be more conscious and aware and why this is important is because I've become more aware of how my body is while I'm eating. In situations back at home or watching TV while eating, you put your hand into the bag of chips and all of a sudden there's no more chips left. But when you eat this way, consciously, you can better feel all the sensations in your body and to know when to stop. Here at the Ashen we have two meals a day. After introducing this diet, I've seen some changes in the way I do my practices. My sleep quota has gone down quite significantly. As a guru says, there should be at least eight hours gap between the first and second meal. I can definitely see that it has worked. So if you space out the food between one meal and the next meal, if there is six to eight hours gap without eating anything else in between, most of your cancerous cells will die. Still if some of them are tough and they don't go, that is why twice a month there is a courtesy for you. Now huge studies are being made and they are saying the same thing, that if you just fast for a period of time, fasting does not mean eight days, fifteen days and killing yourself. No. Just you eat your evening meal today, the next meal is only tomorrow evening. If you give this much space, most of the cancerous cells get neutralized. Will all of them be gone? No. They don't even know how to lie low, but they will never be able to increase their numbers and gang up in one place to become an ailment. It's not just about the type of food and how many times we have food, but it's also about the healing and cooling properties of the food. It changes accordingly to the weather. Everything is put together to create the right kind of balance. After training in the afternoon, we are also taking a soup. In the afternoons they will give you what is here locally called as Kullu and the English came here and named it as the horse gram. So horse gram soup they will give you in the afternoon. You drink horse gram soup and horse gram is one among the lentils. It is the most protein rich lentil found on the planet. It's very high powered, so that's why race horses are fed with this gram which is called as horse gram today. Now this will increase heat in the body. From my experience of taking this during this training, I would say that I never get sick like fever, cold. I can better tell what my body needs. Sometimes I feel like eating more raw food depending on how much energy I've exerted. I'm able to tell better because I'm eating in this conscious manner. I have definitely never enjoyed eating food this much. It's definitely a different way of eating.