Written by Teri Callaghan, MS, MFT

The first time I read the previous list I threw the book across the room shouting, “I love my life!” Clearly this was a sign of lack of readiness. It was a while before I picked up the book again.

I had met Jasmuheen two years earlier at a Wesak Celebration in Mt. Shasta. I remember seeing Light and Energy all around when I looked at her and saying to the person next to me, “Who is that?” My friend said, “That’s Jasmuheen, she’s a breatharian.” I went up to her on the break and asked, “Why do you do it?” She answered, “Constant communion with the Divine.” From that moment those words stayed with me like a subtle mantra. What would it be like to be in constant communion with the Divine?

A year later, when I was visiting Mt. Shasta again, I saw her face staring at me from the cover of a book in the Golden Bough bookstore. After some discussion with the owner of the bookstore about how people were feeling about this information and if anyone she knew had tried it, I bought the book. And now here I am.

There are some people who absolutely resonate with this path. I am just one of those people. It feels normal to me. Eating has always been confusing for me. As a child, like many of us, my parents would have to force me to come in from playing (which was all I wanted to do) to eat my dinner. What a waste of time, I would think. Then all that time sleeping so my body could digest, all that time going to the bathroom, all that time planning and eating the next meal. It really interrupted my real job here, which I knew was to play.

Now, as an adult who is free from the need to eat food, I often feel like a child again. I have so much time and energy to engage in my natural occupation, which I more and more come to understand as play.

Many people, I have learned, find the idea of breatharianism to be totally foreign and often suspect. To those people I simply say, this path is not for you. Every person is an individual, sovereign being. Every path of personal mastery comes from finding what is right for the individual, and then finding the individual courage to follow that path. In my opinion, the master’s path also involves at the least a tolerance for each other’s individual journey and at the most a curiosity about other journeys as an opportunity to learn and evolve. I am assuming it is the curiosity about the master in you that has led you to this course.

I utilized a six-month time of preparation for undergoing the 21 day process beginning December 26, 1999, with the plan to be free from my need for food on the turn of the millennium. During the six months I fasted one day a week, read everything I could find on the subject, discussed it with experienced people, meditated, affirmed, visualized and prayed. I utilized the therapy techniques of EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) and EFT (emotional freedom technique) to help resolve my fears and strengthen my belief in myself. I also began preparing my family and friends.

During my time of preparation, I spent one whole day with Wiley Brooks to learn as much as I could about his experience. I honor Wiley for his breakthrough in this field. He has experienced a lot of criticism and attempts to discredit his work. On that day we spent together, he was adamant that a person cannot live a breatharian lifestyle in a city environment. He learned through his own research that once a person stops eating food, the body becomes even more sensitive to toxins. Since a city environment is replete with chemical, noise and emotional toxins, he said that there is not enough pure prana to sustain a breatharian in a healthy way. After considering his input, I decided that I wanted to try to continue to live in the city where my life, friends and work were, to see what would happen. My rationale was that people are always saying that things are not possible, until they do them. Wiley was able to accomplish all the “impossible” things that he accomplished, and I wanted to build upon that and to have my own experience. Even though I lived and worked in a city, I also had close access to beautiful, prana-filled natural environments. In terms of preparation, I wasn’t ready to give up my lifestyle, but knew I was willing to give up my attachment to that lifestyle. I had no idea how important question #5 in the preparation questionnaire would become in my own life.

I set up a space in my meditation room and assigned several people to check on me daily beginning December 27th. As a person who spent 12 years in Catholic school, I found early on in the process that I held a deep-seated belief in suffering. I had been taught that the only sure way to God and Heaven was the path of the martyr, and the more suffering the better. As I went through the 21 days, I experienced my fair share of agony, along with an ecstasy that remains to this day indescribable. During that period fears came to the forefront that I didn’t even realize I was holding: “You are crazy, you will die, you will be alone, your God is a delusion,” and more. Because I feared weight loss, for I was a not a person who needed to lose weight, I burned all my pictures of Gandhi in his post-fasting body. It was like dying to be born again.

It is taught that in the first 7 days of the process, the spirit will leave the body in order for the physical vehicle to be rewired to accept prana as the primary nutritional source. On the 8th day of the process I was laying on the floor, wondering why I was going through all this self-imposed suffering. I began to realize that I was listening to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing, “I Know My Redeemer Lives” and started to weep (it was playing on my CD player, I wasn’t just hearing voices from Heaven. At that point I knew my spirit was starting to re-inhabit my body and I could begin to feel the depths and the heights of my emotions once again.

I had many interesting and funny dreams over the 21-day period. In my dreams I kept “trading up” in cars (cars representing my physical body). As the days progressed I moved from driving my old Ford Pinto until I was cruising in a new Subaru Legacy, sleek and shiny. On the 21st day I dreamed that I was running gracefully and effortlessly. I looked over and saw that Jesus was running along side of me. In my dream Jesus said to me, “Now you can run and never get tired.” I woke up elated, energized and quite thin.

I lost almost fifteen pounds in the 21 days and did not look like an advertisement that would promote anyone wanting to become a breatharian. As I had to go out into the world right away and resume my private practice as a therapist, I decided to consciously create the energy of health and beauty emanating from my physical form. The first week of being back with people, no one said or acted like they noticed anything different about my appearance. My appearance felt so accomplished, that the second week I didn’t think to recreate that energy. The very first person that walked into my office the second week looked shocked!

“Teri, are you ill? You have lost so much weight!” This person had already seen me the week before and had not said a word. From then on, I remembered to consciously emanate the appearance of health and vitality until my physical body was able to acclimatize to the change over.

After about 3 months of daily yoga, meditation and integration, my body toned up and I began to look healthy, even though thinner. I only gained a few of the pounds back, but my body was adjusting to the change. What was most apparent to people when they saw me was that I appeared vibrant and energized. I had to get my driver’s license renewed six months later and when I compared the pictures, to myself I looked like a completely different person.

I began to require less and less sleep, often sleeping just 4 or 5 hours a night. One night per month, I stayed awake all night. When I laid down (Jasmuheen calls it “laying the body down”), I would be aware of cool vibrations of energy pulsating through my body. It was very pleasurable and enlivening. When I realized that I was going to be awake, I learned to embrace the time as more opportunity for connection to my Higher Self.

My intuition in my work with people began to improve exponentially. I had more energy and alertness and found myself working more hours with no mental or physical fatigue. In that first year my business volume and income doubled. It was so fun to have all the extra time and energy previously committed to shopping for food, thinking about food, preparing food and cleaning up from food.

There were also many challenges, especially in the beginning. Since I worked on my own and my children were grown, I didn’t have to deal with regular daily expectations around food. The people closest to me got accustomed to finding more creative ways to connect, rather than eating out. My favorite way to interact with people became taking walks, instead of eating out. So my friends learned to call and say, “I would like to get together, where would you like to go for a walk?”

Many people were worried and afraid for me. A cousin, who is a nurse, at one point called my sister, also a nurse, to suggest that she have me involuntarily committed for observation. Many people became defensive when they learned of my lifestyle, as if my living this way was a statement that they were doing something wrong. I found this difficult and confusing emotionally.

I have found many creative ways to respond to occasions that involve food and eating out. In many situations, it is not appropriate to share with people that I am living on light. Restaurants are tricky. I have tried everything, from sitting with people while they eat, often telling the wait person that I ate before I came, which is true, ordering soup and eating only a few bites and then having the server be concerned that there was something wrong with the food, or just ordering a drink. Unless the conversation is particularly invigorating it can be uncomfortable for people to have me just sit there when everyone else eats. I have cooked a number of large family meals since I became a breatharian and that is quite a surreal experience. I am cooking mostly from memory, as food no longer tastes or feels the same to me. I often just try to make sure that it looks good, think about how much I love the people I am cooking for, fill the food with that love, and then hope for the best.

I was very naive in the beginning. I was so excited about what this demonstration of living without eating food meant to me and my consciousness, I thought that other people would be positively affected by seeing this apparent miracle in the life of a regular person. I finally had a better understanding of people’s reactions when I saw the movie What the Bleep Do We Know? There is a scene that discusses the native people in the Caribbean and their reactions when Columbus’ ships showed up in their world. The people literally could not see the ships because there was no reference point in their brains for the image. The shaman could see the ripples on the water and went out everyday to stare at them until he could see the ships. Once he saw them, the rest of the people could see them as well.

Most of the people in my life literally could not see me or that I was not eating food. After four Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners with my family they still asked why I was not eating. When I tell them that I am living on light, they change the subject. In this last year, one of my nephews attending the Air Force academy heard a talk by a yogi from India. In that talk the practice of breatharianism was mentioned and he connected the dots. He came home and told my sister who then, after four years, looked it up on the internet. She then called me said, “I have to hand it to you, Teri, I read that not that many people can do it.” I guess she finally heard from the Shaman.

People always ask what I do eat. For the first several years I lived on tea, water, some smoothies and an occasional chocolate chip cookie for comfort. It is so amazing how people will jump on this information as evidence that I am not really living on light. I eventually stopped talking about it and kept it as my own private world of wonder. I was not and am not interested in proving anything to anyone. I know that my body does not receive the nutrition it needs to maintain the high level of health and energy I have from an occasional cookie or smoothie.

After the first few years I began to experiment with some eating. What I have learned, is that once I stopped eating food my physical body had no real interest in it anymore. In fact, my physical body was extremely grateful and let me know in many various ways. What I did miss mostly was the emotional comfort that food would bring. When I was sad, I craved macaroni and cheese, the comfort food of my youth. And so I began again to eat some of the things that comforted me or entertained me, always coming from the knowingness that I was using the food for other purposes rather than nutrition. I can eat whatever I desire, free from the current rules of nutritional wisdom.

Breatharianism is not about eating or not eating. I heard and read this so many times during my time of preparation. Breatharianism is about accessing nutrition from all the abundant sources in the Universe. It is about personal mastery, sovereignty and freedom. For me these were just words on a page and thoughts in mind until I had my own experience. Then, and only then, did these become wisdom by which to live my life.

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