'Fasting', along with 'prayer' and 'charity', is a proven means on the path of spiritual practice, and it is a tool that guides us to treat God and our neighbors with the right attitude.
To properly understand fasting, we must not view it in isolation from other practices, but rather in connection with them, especially prayer.
By examining the experiences of the early church and the writings of ancient monks, this book leads us to a new understanding of fasting as a form of prayer, a prayer offered with both body and spirit.

Through fasting, we fully realize our existence as creatures created by God's hands.
We are creatures who find our fulfillment only in Him, creatures who do not rest on the grace we have received, but long for and pursue Him who gave us grace.
Through fasting, we stretch ourselves out to God with all our body and soul, and we bow down before God with all our body and soul.
Fasting is the flesh's cry to God.
It is a cry that bursts from the depths, from the abyss.

If you deny yourself all pleasures and become unpleasant to others, that is certainly not a desirable thing.
That's not what fasting is.
The key is to discover 'what is holding me back' and 'what is it that I am living from that source'.
Only when I consciously let go of all the vicarious gratifications that block my ears and blind my eyes during fasting do I finally realize the deep truth within me.
During fasting, I remove the covering that lies over my seething thoughts and emotions.
This allows everything within me to emerge.
My unfulfilled desires and longings, my desires, rise up, as well as my obsession with myself, my success, my possessions, my health, my need for recognition.

While fasting, I encounter negative emotions, such as sadness or anger, that hide behind a kind facade.
By engaging in various activities, eating and drinking this and that, and comforting yourself, the wounds that you have tried to cover up burst.
Everything that has been suppressed until now is revealed.
Fasting strips me of who I am.
Fasting tells me what dangers I face and where I must fight.

--- pp.49-59

Those who practice fasting correctly become humble.
How should we understand this? Humility means having the courage to descend into one's own human nature, into the dirt of one's own existence.
In Latin, the word 'humility' (humilitas) comes from the word 'earth' (humus).
First of all, fasting forces us to face ourselves.
Soon, we will face our hopes and desires, our thoughts and feelings, our shadows.
Just recognizing our own shadows can make us a little more humble.
Moreover, fasting pushes us to our limits.
This experience clearly shows that we are human beings with both body and soul, and that we cannot escape our bodies.
It also reminds us that we cannot abandon our bodies and do whatever we want with them.
We must accept our bodies, and above all, we must accept their deficiencies, their inadequacies.
We must acknowledge our bodies.
During fasting, we face our own deficiencies.

--- pp.63-64

There is a thin line between being enlightened by God and being blinded and deluded.
Fasting can lead to either.
We must not confuse the natural effects of fasting, which sharpen the senses and make the mind more alert, with this enlightenment spoken of by Philoxenus.
Such effects can certainly help us reach enlightenment through God.
However, it can also be an end in itself or be identified with seeing God directly, or meeting Him face to face.
Fasting can only lead to true enlightenment when it leads us to helplessness.
For monks, fasting is merely a path into their own powerlessness, not a means to achieve any feat or effect on their own.
Fasting plunges us into the abyss of our weakness.
And in this abyss of ours we meet the abyss of God.
The abyss of our helplessness cries out to the abyss of God.
This is as expressed in the Psalms:
“Abyss calls to abyss” (abyssus abyssum invocat, Psalm 42:8).

--- pp.117-118