Ramadan is coming up. How will you practice fasting

Sarah

Peace

some people practice ramadan like the sunnis. Others say you have to fast every month according to the Qur'an etc.

What are your views and how did you reach your conclusions?

thanks

Cerberus

Trying to achieve this
"The goal of fasting is inner unity. This means hearing, but not with the ear; hearing, but not with the understanding; hearing with the spirit, with your whole being. The hearing that is only in the ears is one thing. The hearing of the understanding is another. But the hearing of the spirit is not limited to one faculty, to the ear or to the mind. Hence it demands the emptiness of all the faculties. And when the faculties are empty, then the whole being listens. There is then a direct grasp of what is right there before you that can never be heard with the ear or understood with the mind. Fasting of the heart empties the faculties, frees you from limitation and from preoccupation. Fasting of the heart begets unity and freedom."

In my experience I came to understand that the above definition is good enough for the real purpose of fasting. It's not "so that you can feel what the poor feels" or "so that you please god" or whatever, it's an old exercise to practice mindfulness.
With fasting you order yourself that you will not attempt to fulfill your pleasure-seeking impulses, it helps get a sense of the body vs mind relationship, and how the body forced the mind to fulfill it!

So real fasting in my opinion is about avoiding self-fulfillement. Expressing your anger is self-fulfilling. (it is impulsive and imposed on you ). Pleasure seeking is self-fulfilling (and it is also imposed on you) things like video games and movies and series etc. These are all self-fulfilling. There is no real fasting when you spend your time on those, you're just making yourself hungry and thirsty while engaged fulfilling yourself differently.

Proper fasting is difficult, the other """fasting""" is easy and useless.

Jafar

Trying to achieve this
"The goal of fasting is inner unity. This means hearing, but not with the ear; hearing, but not with the understanding; hearing with the spirit, with your whole being. The hearing that is only in the ears is one thing. The hearing of the understanding is another. But the hearing of the spirit is not limited to one faculty, to the ear or to the mind. Hence it demands the emptiness of all the faculties. And when the faculties are empty, then the whole being listens. There is then a direct grasp of what is right there before you that can never be heard with the ear or understood with the mind. Fasting of the heart empties the faculties, frees you from limitation and from preoccupation. Fasting of the heart begets unity and freedom."

So real fasting in my opinion is about avoiding self-fulfillement. Expressing your anger is self-fulfilling. (it is impulsive and imposed on you ). Pleasure seeking is self-fulfilling (and it is also imposed on you) things like video games and movies and series etc. These are all self-fulfilling. There is no real fasting when you spend your time on those, you're just making yourself hungry and thirsty while engaged fulfilling yourself differently.

Proper fasting is difficult, the other """fasting""" is easy and useless.

Nice description.

Things to add is Fasting is a great opportunity for exercising / training "self-control".
Expanding the term it's more of exercising "Self - controlling - the ego".

Hungry and thirsty is a "high priority" message from the body and certainly it will trigger the ego to send an alert, as ego is actually a "program" / "subroutine" with main goal of "survival".

Thus fasting is a great opportunity to dis-identify yourselves from your own ego by recognizing and accepting the ego. Every time a 'hungry' or 'thirsty' alert came, you can recognize it and accepting it by saying "I know.. but don't worry my ego you will not be hungry or thirsty in x hours / minutes from now".
The same thing with handling the emotion of 'anger', 'envy' or 'distress' which can be easily triggered during fasting. Recognize it and then control it.
It will then also increase your "self will power".

Which method to fast it depends on each.
Similitude is like exercise program, some prefer treadmill, some other prefer aerobic, weight lifting or marathon or combination of those.
Choose and / or customize things that works for you.

amin

Yes Fasting helps our body and mind improves our immunity,every culture has fasting mostly in fear about their excesses, our ancestors has identified the benefits of fasting and has followed it religiously. Seasonally some months/days are considered harsh like the eclipse days, before the peak summer or peak winter days so as to make things easy, people fasted.