Mediations on Fasting
Hunger. Reincarnation. Yoga. Cooking. Prayer. Restraint. Family. Fasting for Ramadan: Notes from a Spiritual Practice, a new book of insights and meditations by yoga instructor and Oberlin College creative writing professor, Kazim Ali, touches on these parts of the human experience. Writing about the Islam occasion of Ramadan, Ali articulates the process of fasting from dusk to dawn:”Twenty-nine or thirty days to explore the line between the interior of the body and the surrounding world, to think about what is brought to us and what we owe,” he writes. He also compares the process to yoga. “[Yoga] is a practice, not unlike fasting, that allows us to practice linking the inside-the private experiences of the body and the mind-with the outside, the pulsing, breathing, actual world.”Even if you’ve never fasted in your life, Ali addresses the other way we deny our appetites–something most human beings can relate to.
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