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Fasting to Cut the Roots of Addiction
Whether your addiction be
sugar, salt or TV, fasting cuts at the spiritual roots of addiction:
fear, insignificance, laziness, self-centeredness, guilt, negative
thinking, resentment and spiritual emptiness. Fasting, being still,
prayer and reading the Bible have the power of a chainsaw on these
roots. During your fast, you take an aggressive stance on a battlefield
to face all your addictions. Urges come and you say no.
They return with greater urgency, and you stay firm in resolve. With
each resistance, the power of addiction grows weaker.
If you want an addiction to
die, don’t feed it. If you want to change your desire of an addictive
substance, see its ugliness. If you want to be free of addiction, thank
God for the challenge of addiction and do the opposite of what it
demands. Fasting and prayer are the opposite of addiction. Set your
mind on freedom and resist addiction.
You
will always have hard days and tough times filled with stress and
uncomfortable emotions. How you respond to these needs is either
healthy or unhealthy. A healthy response to stress is to go for a walk,
exercise, breathe deeply, or think faith-filled thoughts. An unhealthy
response is smoking a cigarette, worry and nail biting. Changing your
responses is indeed difficult as the behavior is engrained in your
neural pathways and you have to create a healthy response pathway. The
value of fasting is that it is a focused event dedicated to developing
healthy responses to the urges of addiction. It may take months of
retraining for your body to fully develop healthy responses that become
subconscious but be patient, it will happen.
If you are quitting coffee on a
fast, you can cut down for the first three days to reduce the
headaches. It is the same with cigarettes. You don’t have to quit in
one day. You can do it in stages. The advantage of fasting is that the
need for the addiction reduces drastically making it easier to quit. A
cigarette becomes heavy and can cause coughing. It hurts the lungs and
the taste becomes revolting. Alcohol loses is warm glow and instead,
become a sleepy numbness that feels foreign to the body. On a fast,
coffee is hard on the stomach, leaves a bad taste in the mouth and
causes you to be anxious. Fasting increases sensitivity and the body’s
negative reaction to all addictive substances. It is a learning
experience where you see through the illusion of the addiction. During
the fast, it is easy to break addiction. The real battle comes when you
quit the fast and return to the day-to-day patterns of normal life. You
will need to make some changes to maintain your freedom from addictions.
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