Stoking The Hunger Within: (Wilderness) Fasting as a Spiritual Discipline for Men

There is a primal edge uncovered by fasting. This sharpness cuts between our deepest longings, and the numbing agents we rely on to keep our anxieties at bay. Choosing the emptiness of fasting in a world of consumption is counter cultural. It’s a splash of cold water, a stoking of the fire within, an awakening from the daze in which we lose ourselves. Perhaps now is the time for us to pick up this practice with more intent, not only as individuals, but as a community, and even as a world.

There are a few spiritual practices that all the great traditions affirm: prayer, charitable giving, the study of sacred texts, and more. Fasting from food is on that list as well, but unsurprisingly, in the country whose economy boasts the highest rate of consumption in world history, fasting has largely been ignored. Perhaps we avoid it because, more than any other spiritual practice, fasting stirs our sacred longings and opens our eyes to the utter shallowness of American mass culture; it touches the prophet in each of us. All of this is unnerving! Yet often the medicine we most avoid carries the very antidote we most need.

American Christianity—from which ideas such as Manifest Destiny, the Prosperity Gospel, and Christian Capitalism has emerged—has often focused on God as a cosmic vending machine, whose main purpose is to enrich us. In Will Ferrell’s movie Talladega Nights, his character famously prays for dinner: “Dear Lord Baby Jesus… we thank you so much for this bountiful harvest of Domino’s, KFC, and the always delicious Taco Bell… Thank you for all the races I’ve won and the 21.2 million dollars—Woo! Love that money!—that I have accrued.” It is funny in part because it rings painfully true. American prayer is largely consumptive and transactional, and in this mythology, a practice like fasting really doesn’t fit.

Consider instead Moses fasting for forty days on the mountain, Elijah in the wilderness, Siddhartha Gautama under the Bodhi tree, Jesus in the desert, Muhammed in the cave, Francis on the mountain, Ignatius in the cave, Paramahansa Yogananda in the mountains, and Black Elk on his vision fast—just to name a few. All these spiritual giants used extended periods of fasting, almost always in wild places, as a way to make interior room for the divine. These practices were not meant for just them, but for all of us.

Fasting is potent because it strips away and makes space, rather than focusing on adding something new. It helps us travel light. If you are like me and use food to dampen down stress, fasting does just the opposite—at least at first. In the absence of food, a whole host of things surfaces and are intensified: fear, anger, bitterness, and general anxiety. But other things can rise up too, alongside and within these emotions: dissatisfaction with the status quo, a desire for connection, love, and significance, and a longing to be known by the Divine. When given time, the anxieties, anger, and other feelings slowly fade, are healed, or pale in comparison to the sacred longings deep within us which are always growing. Fasting makes room for, as Mary Oliver put it, “a silence in which another voice can speak.”  

That is all well and good, but for someone new to the practice, the question might be quite simply: how do I do it “right?” How do I make sure I’m not just hungry and miserable? This is part of the wonder of fasting, that as long as our intention is there, the actual process of fasting will guide us. 

The most important thing is to set an intention. Why are you doing this in the first place? From there, fasting doesn’t require us to believe anything, know anything, be anything, or do anything.  It fits squarely in the spirituality of subtraction. It isn’t something we make time for, but rather, it frees immense amounts of time up for us! As an embodied practice, there is a certain inescapability to it, rather than having to remember that we’re intentionally in the middle of a practice, we usually can’t help but be aware of it throughout the day. In this, we become newly aware of the time given to us!

Fasting for one day can intensify your emotional and spiritual sensitivity, but is not representative of the experience of doing a longer fast such as three to seven days. When I’ve fasted for a full day, once a week, for week after week, my body begins to anticipate and even dread the day of fast. During the fast, the pangs of hunger are always there, my own neediness is blaring in my head, and while I’ve been able to keep up my regular schedule when fasting, those days are not easy days. However, longer fasts are quite different, especially when combined with lots of time alone in wild places. Sometime on the second day, hunger completely fades away and food is forgotten. The buzz in my body drops off precipitously, until I’m calm enough that I can feel my heart beating in the tips of my fingers, hear it in my ears, and a certain clarity and vividness take over. I doubt my own patience and even ability to ever get to a state of calmness like that if working primarily with meditation. They say that the third day/evening is when this clarity is most acute, which is why wilderness fasts or vision fasts often include extensive night work on the third night.

In Illuman, we’ve often fasted together in conjunction with rites of passages being held around the country, as a way of being in solidarity with these new brothers. Some have worn black and fasted on the third day (the day of grief), others have fasted while the men are out in the wilderness on the fourth day. Perhaps at the various MROPs, EROPs, and Young Rites coming up this month, you’ll want to join in on this. I know some MROP teams fast as a group on a weekly basis in the months approaching an event as a way to drop in together and form a container of prayer. Illuman brothers in at least Texas and Washington put on annual wilderness fasts as well that are open to men, and Minnesota is planning to do a Firming in 2026 that will incorporate a 24 hour wilderness fast.  

But you need not wait to do it with others. You start anytime and do it alone, and you’ll be part of a community that spans space and time—a community that takes up this practice for the sake of their inner life and for the sake of the world. I wonder, is it time for you to consider adding fasting to your routine? What else about fasting is important and what is your experience with it?

We’re excited to announce a new community group on Illuman’s online community just for helping each other compare notes and learn about each other’s spiritual practices. In this group, we’re all beginners. Let’s keep up the conversation there.