Fast with Your Eyes
• Watch less TV and video; reflect more on your life through keeping a journal.
• Become informed about the causes of hunger in the world.
Fast with Your Ears
• Listen less to the radio, CDs, cassettes; listen more to your own inner heart and spirit.
• Be attentive to the words of others.
• Listen to and let yourself be challenged by the words expressed in the scriptures.
Fast with Your Mouth
• Take just one helping of the food that is served.
• Eat fewer sweets and processed foods, but appreciate more simple food and drink like water and good bread.
Fast with Your Hands
• Back off from things that agitate you.
• Take time to just sit and reflect, to rest and observe.
• Make time in your schedule to put your hands together in prayer.
• Share from your own goods with those who have less.
Fast with Your Feet
• Become more attuned to the modern compulsion to be always on the go; resist the impulse.
• Offer yourself a daily quiet half-hour of reading that nourishes your spirit.
• Learn quiet sitting in meditation.
• Make more time to welcome others to your home.
Fast with Your Body
• Attach less importance to external fashion and makeup.
• Reclaim your natural hair and skin color.
• When eating, practice stopping when you've had enough, rather than continuing to eat until you feel full.
Fast from Anger, Resentment, Bitterness
• Get to the bottom of why you're angry or resentful: What's the hidden demand underneath?
• Do the hard work of talking it through with the other, of expressing clearly what it is you are asking for.
• Pray for the grace of forgiving those who have hurt you.
Fast from Judging Others
• Unhook from conversations in which others are being disparaged, or contribute something positive to balance the negative things that are being said.
Fast from Complaining
• When you're feeling inclined to complain, stop and look at all you are blessed with and give thanks instead.
Fast from the Presence of Your Children
• When you feel their absence, find some meaning in the emptiness and the silence.
• Choose life for them by supporting them graciously as they strike out to make their own marks in the world.
• Choose life for yourself by turning to and embracing new possibilities for living, growing, and loving.
Fast from Glossing Over Your Losses Too Quickly
• Allow yourself to feel the emptiness, the ache, the absence.
• Take the time to do the inner work of grieving.
• Resist the quick but superficial emotional fix, the easy fill-in.
• Risk listening in the silence to the soft voice of inner wisdom.
Fast from the Intimacy of a Spouse or Friend during a Temporary Absence
• Leave the heart space vacant and let your longing turn you toward God.
• Refresh your realization in the time of absence that relationship is life's blue-ribbon experience, that of this "food" we are meant to eat, and that without it we die.
• Let your desire for the presence of the other teach you that we were made for communion, and "our hearts are restless, Lord, until they rest in Thee."
