People typically think that fasting is related to food. But there are many forms of fasting.
A “fast” is any period of voluntary abstinence from an action of body, speech, or mind.
Conscious fasting is an ancient tool that can be effective for spiritual purification. “Spiritual Purification” is not punishment. It is any action that increases consciousness and turns you in a life-giving direction.
A Complaining Fast is a spiritual purification practice that primarily targets speech and thought. Speaking uses a tremendous amount of energy. When you speak, you are literally sending out your life’s breath. And of course, the mind uses incredible amounts of energy to shape and direct thought forms 24/7. This is why so many formal spiritual vows relate to conscious use of speech and conscious shaping of thought forms. By fasting at the level of speech and thought, you can harvest power very quickly. And then you can intentionally direct that life force towards enlightening with ease.
I invite you to enter this honorable practice with the spirit of gentleness and curiosity.
THIS IS NOT ABOUT tracking all the things you are doing “wrong.” There’s no dogma to police yourself on, like: “You should never complain.” “Complaining makes you a bad person,” etc. This is also not about repressing yourself or bypassing pain and pretending to be positive.
THIS IS ABOUT awakening wisdom. Wisdom is that which generates life. This is a creative practice. This is about discovering more deeply what genuinely brings you alive.
PRELIMINARIES
- Choose a time frame that feels manageable and powerful to you. If you are not sure where to start for a complaining fast, I suggest starting with 1-5 days. Then add on more time as you wish. Stick with whatever time frame you choose for your Complaining Fast. This is important. Completing what you intended builds confidence. After you complete the practice, you can reflect on how it went and adjust accordingly in the future.
- It can be meaningful to align the Complaining Fast with special events to amplify the power for yourself. This could be a particular time of the month, your birthday, a family passage, a life transition such as the shift out of a relationship or job, etc.
- Plan ways that regularly remind yourself of your Complaining Fast. It is fairly easy to remember you are not eating a certain food. But speech and thought patterns are more subtle. Place celebratory reminders all around to encourage yourself. Sticky notes are great. Have a friend that you check in with daily about how it is going. Put a new screen saver on your phone and computer. Let the reminders be joyous. You are doing something wonderful.
- The night before you begin, or the day you begin, create a ritual for yourself to open the practice. This doesn’t need to be elaborate. But do make it sacred in some way. Say a prayer, light a candle, call your friends and tell them, invite all the good forces to assist you… Consciously welcome yourself into this healing practice in a way that feels good to you. The opening ritual is a statement of: “Now I have begun this powerfully healing practice.”
- When you close the practice, create a closing ritual. And, in your own way, dedicate the energy of the practice to the highest good for all. No matter how you think the practice went, it is important to celebrate your efforts. Intentionally choose to feel great about completing this practice. No matter what occurs, you will have raised consciousness.
THE BASIC PRACTICE
Step 1: Bring awareness to your complaining.
Notes on step 1:
Remain focused on your actions. You will notice other people’s complaining. But the practice is not about tracking or micromanaging other people. The habit of spinning out of connection with yourself and being overly obsessed with others’ faults does not grant you spiritual power. This is about building the power to act in the world in alignment with your values.
A complaint is an expression of dissatisfaction. Complaints can have a positive place in the world and can be catalysts for meaningful change. But during this practice, it is not helpful to debate yourself or others about all the “good” forms of complaining. Your harmful complaint habits can happily use up your energy justifying their existence.
Instead of analyzing, choose to feel the impact of the complaining on your energy bodies.
Let it be simple. You have entered this practice intentionally. If your awareness has flagged something as “complaining,” it is most likely negatively impacting your energy bodies.
Do those thoughts, words, and actions feel good to you… Do they soften your heart towards yourself and others…. Generate connection with the present moment, calm your nervous system… Ground you… Uplift and inspire you… Place you in a state of integrity?
If not… Validate that this complaint is not nourishing you. And move on to step 2.
Step 2: Intentionally choose to stop complaining.
Notes on step 2:
If the complaint is at the level of mind and has not moved into speech or physical action, then pause and do not externalize that form of energy further out into the world. Let the thought form be as it is. There is no requirement for you to act out the thought. Continue to witness how that thought form affects you. Witness until it has passed.
If you have already put the complaint into the world through speaking or physical action, then reflect on the impact in your energy bodies. What is the energetic aftertaste of those actions? How does it shape your worldview? If you confirm that this complaint was not a meaningful use of your life force, then set a clear intent not to repeat that pattern. Take a few moments to reflect on what you might have said or done instead that would actually feed your life force.
Step 3: Celebrate! You are nourishing yourself by turning away from harm.
Notes on step 3:
Step 3 is about choosing to feel good about caring for yourself. Identifying and stopping that which harms you is the foundation of spiritual practice. By recognizing even one instance of harmful complaining and refraining from it, you have awakened greater wisdom within.
This is wonderful. Everything in all the universe benefits each time you refrain from harming yourself. By intentionally feeling good about yourself, you replace the negative imprint with a wisdom-based one. The wisdom imprint will grow in power and guide you in the future. It will become easier to see what is life-giving. Your spiritual IQ is rising!
Go deeper during your complaining fast with these reflections.
IDENTIFY THE “ATTEMPT” IN YOUR COMPLAINT
A harmful complaint arises from an underlying wound longing for direct validation and care. What is the complaint trying to accomplish? By identifying the attempt underneath your complaining, you can attend to the pain directly.
An Attempt at Emotional Release:
Complaining can be a way to release pent-up emotions, especially anger. However, complaining often is indirect. It will not transform the energy in a conscious, healing way.
Explore expressing your feelings directly. Who would you like to share this feeling with? Who can receive it directly and be with you during the process? Usually, once the feeling is named clearly, it can move through more easily. You might explore a “feeling wheel” to help you pinpoint the emotional vibration running underneath your complaining. https://feelingswheel.com/
An Attempt at Intimacy:
Complaint exchanges can mimic intimacy. But they are not genuine intimacy and will never satisfy that longing.
The word intimacy comes from a root meaning the deep “innermost” of something. Intimacy develops when we connect with others at a Soul level. The Soul expresses emotion, but it does not negatively complain. The Soul is always in service of promoting more life. Practice choosing honest and open exchanges that bring you into Soulful resonance. Share and listen with an open heart when you are able. Intend towards the soul level in all exchanges.
An Attempt to Fit In: (another version of the attempt at intimacy)
Do you complain because other people are complaining? Is it a way to feel included? Are you unconsciously matching their pain patterns? This is a very entrenched habit in our culture. Instead, you can consciously choose to match an energy with others that feels good.
An Attempt to Solve an Issue:
It may seem that by complaining you are problem solving in some way. But usually, complaining as a way to solve a problem is about expressing feelings of powerlessness. It can be a way to try to get someone to step in and fix things for you, an indirect way to manipulate a “savior.”
Practice asking directly for help. Collaborating with others sparks new ideas. It helps us view old problems differently.
An Attempt at Comfort:
For some of us, the discomfort of complaining becomes a comfortable cover-up, a way to avoid feeling deeper pains. You constantly pick at smaller wounds as a distraction from the big ones. Most of us are not comfortable exposing our deepest wounds. You probably do not openly complain about things that trigger truly deep shame or hopelessness. Instead, you might choose a “comfortable” set of dissatisfactions to fixate on as distractions.
A great daily practice is to say hello to your deepest pain/s. Even if you are not sure what, or where they are. Send a loving message. Let those parts of yourself know that you- your Wisdom Self – is present and listening. Invite them to share anything they are longing to share and to tell you what they truly desire. It can be as simple as taking a few deep breaths and saying, as the Wisdom Self, something like, “Hello, my deep pains. I am here with you. I am not ignoring you. I want to care for you. I am listening.”
And then sit quietly for a few more moments in a mode of opening listening, simply letting your energy express itself and find some movement.
An Attempt to Get Attention:
Complaining can be an attempt to bring attention to yourself. Particularly when you are feeling isolated, rejected, or generally let down. But the attention brought in will focus on criticism, either of self or others, and will be destructive.
Again, direct expression is the life-giving antidote.
An Attempt to Fill Space or Shift the Perceived Speed of Time:
Sometimes complaining becomes the unconscious go-to for filling up space when one is bored or impatient.
Taking a conscious pause to relax into spaciousness and connect with a positive intention for the moment can help.
An Attempt to Cope with the Unpredictability of Life:
Complaining can be a strategy to “get ahead” of expectations that everything will go wrong in life. This can happen particularly when there have been sudden painful shifts in your history. Perhaps the feeling that life is dangerous has been proven true. Hypervigilance takes hold and then pervades even when everything is alright. The confused thinking is that if one complains in advance, there will be less disappointment in the future. But instead, one ends up going around looking for things that are wrong before they happen and generating dissatisfaction all along the way.
Recall the universal truth that where attention goes is what grows. Place your energy towards that which actually nourishes you. Attend mindfully to caring for yourself as best as you are able and then intentionally let it go. Allow for the potential that the future may surprise you in wonderful ways.
IDENTIFY YOUR COMPLAINT STYLE
We each have a unique style of complaining.
Complaints at the level of the physical body:
These include various forms of body language such as eye-rolling, facial tics, and physical tension patterns. Many tension patterns are unconscious complaints. These convey criticism and judgements that are not being voiced directly.
Complaints at the level of speech:
I couldn’t begin to cover the immense variety here. Speaking takes so much energy. Consider the creative energy you can reclaim by withholding harmful complaining intentionally and directing that life force towards something meaningful for you.
Explore for yourself discerning the vibrational distinction between a harmful complaint and a life-giving one. There is a difference in the sponsoring energy underneath the words.
Complaining at the physical and speech level is all motivated by the mind.
Complaints at the level of mind:
Perceiving yourself, others, and the world from a lens of dissatisfaction can become an unconscious mental habit. This is especially prevalent in our current culture where growth through suffering is so normalized that it seems to be just “the way it is.”
Considering growing through joy is purifying in and of itself.
Consider that suffering as a path of growth is not at all necessary.
Consider that it is possible to be content with life, as it is, as it arises, always.
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Notice what nurtures you.
What actions of body, speech, and mind feel great to you?
Intentionally engage in those nurturing actions during the Complaint Fast. This will support deep repair of your energy bodies. And since you will be directing your attention towards what feels great, you will be way less likely to indulge in harming yourself by complaining.
What are your go-to habits of complaining?
Reflection prompts to explore:
(You don’t have to figure out the answer to these. Allow the space after the prompt to be spontaneously filled with whatever arises. Let yourself make visible on paper the thought forms that populate the semi-conscious and unconscious realms. Go through all of these or intuitively go to the ones that call you. Just keep in mind that you may tend to skip over the ones that actually hold the most hidden power.)
I hate…
What I complain about the most is….
I do this because…
My laziest complaint/s are…
I do this because…
The situations I complain about chronically are…
I do this because…
The environments where I feel emboldened to complain in, or about, are…
The person/groups I feel emboldened to complain around, or about, are…
It is really hard for me not to complain when…
The complaint that never ceases is…
The complaint/s I picked up from my family is/are…
The complaint/s I picked up from my culture is/are…
The thing/s I complain about that I have absolutely no intention to actually do anything about are…
I do this because…
Complaining helps me avoid dealing directly with…
If I dealt with this (these) thing (things) directly, I would…
I am angry about…
I am sad about…
I am afraid of…
I feel badly about…
I am hopeless about…
I am helpless about…
I would like to direct my creative energy towards…
What is going right in my life is…
What is going right in the world is…
What is most precious to me is…
What is most interesting to me right now is…
Where my life force truly sings is…
If I could intentionally change anything, I would change…
The next right step towards that transformation is…
SHORT LIST OF ANTIDOTES TO COMPLAINING
In addition to the other practices mentioned already, here are a few more effective pattern disruptors.
This is by no means an exhaustive list. Make note of any antidotes that work for you.
- Enjoy opening into stillness, silence. And spaciousness of mind. Nowhere to go. Nothing to do. No one to be. Rest in Presence.
- Listen to your thoughts. No need to converse with them here. Really listen. And then listen more deeply. And more deeply still.
- Notice that if you can listen, you are not those thoughts. Even the life-giving thoughts are temporary forms of energy. They are not you.
- Practice genuine direct expressions of emotion with those who are open “enough” to receive you.
- Practice being the person who is open to receive the direct expressions of another.
- If you notice you are stuck in a pattern, playfully shake your body out to loosen up the flow of energy.
- Ask an expert or professional for help with the topic that is challenging you.
- Sounding mantras: Mantra means mind protection or liberation of the mind. The vibration of mantras cuts through deep unconscious thought patterns underlying the majority of habitual complaining. Mantra is intended to be done consciously. Simply droning on mindlessly puts one in a hypnagogic state that does not promote lucid transformation.
- Cultivate appreciation. Let that expand to gratitude. Let that expand to Awe. Keep going and see where you are taken in the upward spiral. (Caveat here. Let the appreciation be genuine. This is not about pretending or manipulating yourself to feel a certain way. The difference is not subtle.)
- Celebrate for yourself, others, and life overall. (As above, let the celebration be genuine. This is not about pretending or manipulating yourself to feel a certain way. It is about choosing to notice what is going well within and all around you.)
- Get out in nature. Even a brief moment of closing your eyes and feeling the sun can transform your energy. If you can’t get outside for whatever reason, imagine it. This can work wonders as well.
- Intentionally Cultivate Open-Heartedness.
WHAT IF I KEEP COMPLAINING ANYWAY?
Well then… Congratulations! You brought awareness to your complaining. That is Step 1 of the practice. Celebrate your expanding consciousness. You are building the power to consciously direct your life force. With that power, you can choose to grow through joy. This is so wonderful. Keep Going….
Step 1: Bring awareness to your complaining.
Step 2: Intentionally choose to stop complaining.
Step 3: Celebrate! You are nourishing yourself by turning away from harm.