I could feel my torso ache and wail in deprivation:
"Is this hunger or thirst?"
I thought to myself.
Accepting a (rather loose) protocol of intermittent fasting for a few years at this point, I became filled sense of self flattery in my ability to disentangle the two signals from each another. After all, I had just completed an episode in the sauna after the morning gym - my last nutritional intake (if one can call Vanilla wafers nutritional) had been less than 8 hours prior - I couldn't be hungry, could I?
Fasting teaches us about the nuances of body signals: the habitual versus dire, discomfort versus danger, craving versus need; there is little one can say, by way of words at least, to accurately capture the satisfaction felt when dining after a 20 hour fast. Through these subtle observations, a dawning awareness gives new colour to our interpretation of each clue the body emits.
A personal discovery I made in adapting to fasting schedule was the understanding that when "craving" food, I may actually be trying to satisfy an adjacent desire: thirst. It never occurred to me that meat, vegetables and other nourishment contain water and that it wasn't calories and energy I was after, but instead moisture. It makes one think: what other habitual physical and mental signals do I take in superficial guise?
Reading the trauma research author Bessel van der Kolk's "The Body Keeps the Score" prompts me to take a long gaze into all my internal compulsions, interpretations and conclusions. What is the body earnestly asking for and what proxies do I use to service it out of habituation? I have to believe, if one could accurately understand the precise asks of the body, it would be possible to live in communion with it. However, all of this is said as if I am an individual entity, the persona, living in a glass VAT dismembered from the body - which is false, I am the body too, am I not? Perhaps a second look into these façades reveals the too silent symphony of biochemical equilibria unnoticed each day.
When craving for companionship as relationship, Is it a desire for intimate touch and closeness? Oxytocin? When craving chocolate, Is it a desire for certain deprived elements? Magnesium? When I crave for thrill, growth and adventure, Is it a for desire movement and blood flow? Vital circulation by variance?
I am not sure the human being could live with this level of material focus — or maybe it could? — we are masters of employing what is False but useful, nature only knows the truth. Perhaps that is is why awareness is considered a most high virtue… but that foothold is for an explorative path at a different time.