I fasted one other time for about a month when I was 21.  It happened because I had nothing to do while visiting my mother before returning to University except help with housework and prepare meals.  The food available in the backwoods of central B.C. didn’t appeal to me because it was mostly canned vegetables, canned milk, canned moose meat and bear meat stews with lots of gravy and greasy potatoes.  I decided to pass on it altogether.  I remember rather enjoying that time as a fine rest and I left feeling very good ready to take on the world full force ahead.  At that time I didn’t know there was such a thing as fasting, it just happened that way.

After Elizabeth went on her way, I decided to experimentally fast myself.  I consumed only water for two weeks.  But I must have had counter intentions to this fast because I found myself frequently having dreams about sugared plums, and egg omelets, etc.  And I didn’t end up feeling much better after this fast was over (although I didn’t feel any worse either), because I foolishly broke the fast with one of my dream omelets.  And I knew better!  Every book I’d ever read on fasting stated how important it is to break a fast gradually, eating only easy-to-digest foods for days or weeks before resuming one’s regular diet.

From this experiment I painfully learned how important it is to break a fast properly.  Those eggs just didn’t feel right, like I had an indigestible stone in my belly.  I felt very tired after the omelet, not energized one bit by the food.  I immediately cut back my intake to raw fruits and vegetables while the eggs cleared out of my system.  After a few days on raw food I felt okay, but I never did regain the shine I had achieved just before I resumed eating.

This is one of the many fine things about fasting, it allows you to get in much better communication with your own body, so that you can hear it when it objects to something you’re putting in it or doing to it.  It is not easy to acquire this degree of sensitivity to your body unless you remove all food for a sufficiently long period; this allows the body to get a word in edgewise that we are willing and able to listen to.  Even when we do hear the body protesting, we frequently decide to turn a deaf ear, at least until the body starts producing severe pain or some other symptom that we can’t ignore.

Within a few years after Elizabeth’s cure I had handily repaired quite a few mentally ill people in a harmless way no one had heard of; many new people were knocking at my door wanting to be admitted to my drug free, home-based treatment program.  So many in fact that my ability to accommodate them was overwhelmed.  I decided that it was necessary to move to a larger facility and we bought an old, somewhat run-down estate that I called Great Oaks School of Health because of the magnificent oak trees growing in the front yard.