 The soul is nourished by fire and air, and the body by water and air. Hi there, today we are covering a topic that has been part of the health and wellness community since before there even was a health and wellness community. It could even be said that we have been using this wellness technique for as long as people have been on the earth. It's super powerful and is full of all kinds of benefits that everyone can take advantage of. This ancient health practice is none other than fasting. There are many different types of fasts found across just as many cherished traditions and they all generally revolve around the idea of not eating food for a period of time. The most common is a water fast where you drink only water and don't eat any food for the duration of the fasting period. In recent years, some other forms of fasting have been quite popular as well, such as juice fasting where you consume only fresh fruit and veggie juices. There has also been some remarkable cases and studies on dry fasting which entails going a said period of time without both food or water. The question is, and something you may be asking yourself right now, why would anyone do this? Fasting is without a doubt one of the quickest and easiest ways to rapidly heal your body. It is known to provide a wide range of benefits such as reducing neurological diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, inducing body-wide cellular repair processes, lowering risk of diabetes, reducing stress and inflammation, and even preventing cancer. On top of these benefits, fasting also spurs deep mental, emotional and spiritual healing, helping you release worries, anxieties, stresses and even helping to get rid of certain addictions. In this way, we then find new clarity and peace within mind, body and spirit and come to a place of deep spiritual revelation. Fasting has played a huge part in many different spiritualities around the world and has been said to play a large role in connecting you with God and finding yourself. In Christianity, Jesus fasted for 40 days in the wilderness after being baptized by John in the river Jordan. In Buddhism, the Buddha practiced extreme levels of fasting prior to his enlightenment. In Islam, Muhammad practiced fasting quite regularly and initiated a new type of fast called intermittent fasting, which was abstaining from eating and drinking from sunrise to sunset. This fast was adopted by all Muslims during the month of Ramadan and still takes place today. Fasting also plays a large role in Jainism, Taoism and many other spiritualities. Across all of these faiths, they believed that fasting would bring incredible miracles into our lives. When combined with prayer or meditation and a commitment to our spirituality, fasting can help us to increase our spiritual abilities, reach states of deep inner peace, learn to identify the difference between authentic hunger cravings and food addictions, develop self-restraint and discipline, improve manners, protect us from lustful desires and encourage great bodily purification. This is only a small list of possibilities of what can happen physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually when we participate in a fast. So how does this work? Well, on a physical level, our bodies have an innate capacity to heal themselves. However, under normal circumstances, a great deal of energy in our bodies goes to the digestive system and metabolizing processes, turning the food we eat into usable energy for us to live our lives. This also means that the systems required for healing and repair are put on hold until these other processes have run their course. Thus, by fasting, we are essentially asking our bodies to take a break from digesting, freeing up a lot of energy for use on healing other parts of our bodies that often get neglected. For those who are curious, the deep physical cleansing benefits of fasting only really arise when you cut out food entirely. Just eating less than your recommended daily amount is not the same because eating anything at all adds to your body's active energy storage called glycogen, which takes about 10 to 12 hours to be depleted. It's only after this time that the body starts burning fats for fuel and using up your excess fat storage for energy. The benefits that we could really go into here are astounding. However, the main points are as follows. Once your body enters into the state of burning fats for fuels, we see our glucose levels drop. We start to lose weight and belly fat as it's used up for fuel. We see insulin and IGF-1 levels drop, reducing risk of diabetes, and we see many deep cellular repair processes begin as the body begins removing waste material from our cells. We also see beneficial changes to several genes and molecules related to longevity and immunity to disease, as fasting actually produces new stem cells into the body. This process also reduces oxidative stress and inflammation as well. Fasting is also very beneficial for heart health as it improves blood pressure, cholesterol, blood triglycerides, and blood sugar levels. Doing this also improves brain function, which reduces anxiety as a result. Not surprisingly, exercise is the only other thing we know of which shows the same positive effects on brain health as fasting. Whenever you end a fast, it's important to do it very carefully. If you come off of your fast and go straight into eating how you used to, you may find your belly becoming quite bloated. This is actually normal if you intake food too quickly or eat food that your newly cleansed body doesn't actually like. If you instead start with teas, soups, and smoothies and then begin shifting to small amounts of raw or plant-based foods, your body will have a much easier time adapting back to eating again. For those who are just starting out with the practice of fasting, you should probably know the different kinds of fast that there are because there are quite a few that exist now. Here's a short list of different fasts that you can try. Water Fasting The most basic and essential of all of the fasts, it's just drink nothing but water for the duration of the fast. In this way, you consume zero calories, zero nutrients and zero carbs and thus this becomes one of the purest fasts out there. Many people just starting out sometimes include a small 50 calorie soup broth per day but no higher as 50 calories are not enough to stop the ketogenic process of your body breaking down fat storage. The next fast that we want to share is juice fasting. This is one of the easiest fasts to get started with from the perspective that you can go days and days without experiencing hunger because you are still supplying your body with tons of energy for your body to use. We could talk all about juice fasting but if you really want to learn about this one, go and watch Joe Cross's documentaries, Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead, one and two. They are absolutely brilliant films about Joe's and others' experiences while juice fasting and how much healing was experienced because of it. Intermittent Fasting This is when you fast for a period of time during the day then break the fast for a meal at some point in your day and then resume fasting. This is essentially the basis of the Ramadan style fast but you don't necessarily have to practice fasting only when the sun is up. The idea here is to pick a number of hours that you want to fast for during the day say 18 hours and then you have a small window of 6 hours to eat every day. Ideally, you want to reduce this to about a 4 hour window and then fast for 20 hours every day. This style of fasting works best if you can commit to it for several weeks which gets your body in the same state as if you did a 3 day water fast. Dry Fasting Now, before we even describe this one we'd like to express not to try this fast until you have practiced other forms of fasting for a long time and not to practice without supervision. That said, this is going to blow your mind. There is this myth out there that humans can only survive without water for 3 days and then you'll die. However, the longest record for someone surviving on a dry fast is actually 18 days. It is suggested that this same fast is what was practiced by Jesus, Buddha, Moses and Krishna in the Old Scriptures but nobody knows for sure. Dry Fasting is particularly intense because it involves cessation of both food and liquid for the duration of the fast. Some even restrict physical contact with water as well because under dry fasting conditions the skin becomes more absorbative to the moisture in the air and what you touch. Normally, toxins are released through the liquid in the body but since there is very little water in the body at this point toxins are eliminated by a unique mechanism whereby each cell essentially becomes its own furnace to burn up its own waste by attempting to rebalance the heightened levels of pressure between the inside and the outside of the cells. This method of fasting also releases more living stem cells into the body than regular fasting. A Russian doctor named Dr. Filonov has practiced medical dry fasting with his patients and experienced some tremendous results in healing some very deadly diseases and has compiled his research into a book called Dry Medical Fasting, Myths and Reality. A translation of the book is available on our website and we'll provide links below in the author comments. My live-action counterpart Jordan did a 7-day dry fast between the August Eclipses of 2017 and you can read about them on his blog. We'll also post links to that in the comments too. There are also a lot of new fasting systems out there which have been invented recently such as the Master Fast Cleanse. This is a fast which combines intermittent juice fasting and dry fasting where you consume dark juices for 6 hours a day and then dry fast for the remaining 18 hours until the next hydration period. You also consume a small amount of psyllium husk pudding with activated charcoal and bentonite clay which is essentially a non-nutritional fiber that massages your intestines and peels toxins out of the colon as it moves through. Then once a week you dry fast for a longer period and that longer dry fast duration increases over the course of the fast which is upwards of 60 to 120 days. Our friend Giovanni did this fast and if you'd like to read about the experiences he had you can do so on the Collective Evolution website. You'll find links to that story in the author comments as well. Now again, for those who are just starting fasting or who are even seasoned vets we'd like to give you some warnings and advice to keep everybody safe. Firstly, be careful and don't push yourself too hard. If you've never done fasts before it can be jarring and very difficult to do a fast more than a day or two but that's a great place to start. The first three or four days are always the hardest but once you really get into the flow of it you might even find that you're not even hungry once the fat burning really begins. Also, fasting becomes easier with every friend or family member you do it with. When you have mutual support from a community around you it's just easier than if everybody around you is eating and you are not where it can become easier to fall off the fast before your body has fully reset. For us, for about a year between 2016 and 2017 we adopted a practice of fasting every Sunday as a spiritual practice and an energetic reset and it felt great. It actually stopped after we did some much longer fasts and now we simply fast when it feels right to. Thank you so much for watching and happy fasting. Hey there, we'd like to give an extra special thanks to Elaine and Alyssa two of our new artists who helped bring this video to life. We'd also like to give a big shout out to Rhythmia who have provided tremendous support for us as we've been growing this past year and we're so thrilled to be creating together. Stay tuned, lots more on the way.