BTH – Gina Bria – Hydration Foundation
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Dr. Katie Deming MD: [00:00:00] Did you know that water fasting has been used for healing across nearly every culture and even animals instinctively stop eating when they're sick or injured? Today I'm joined by Gina Brea, anthropologist and founder of The Hydration Foundation to explore water fasting, not just as a tool for physical healing, but as a powerful ritual for personal transformation.

You'll learn how water is more than hydration. Gina shares how fasting can reconnect you to your future self. And your ancestral roots stay until the end to hear a powerful story of how one of my fasters connected with the late husband of a fellow faster during one of my group water fests, an experience that left everyone in the group speechless.

Let's dive in.

Dr. Katie Deming MD: Hello everyone. I'm Dr. Katie Deming, and this is The Born to Heal podcast where we explore [00:01:00] holistic practices for cancer prevention and healing. Let's welcome Gina Bria, an anthropologist, and also the founder of The Hydration Foundation. Welcome, Gina.

Gina Bria: I'm very excited to have this conversation because I think it's one that's really missing in the conversation around fasting and the anthropology. The ethnography of fasting. So thank you so much for opening this really fascinating topic.

Dr. Katie Deming MD: as an anthropologist and also a steward of water, I. Why are you so excited about prolonged water fasting?

Gina Bria: Well, I think, uh, water fasting. Is a topic that reaches so far back into our lineages, we can't even find the beginning of it. As humans, we may have to go back to, um, animal studies and looking at what animals do [00:02:00] when they are ill, uh, or injured. So, um, I just wanna start that conversation there because what that indicates to us is water fasting isn't just a human cultural act.

Um, it is also part of our, uh, biology. It's a way to activate biology. And,I would say within the last 20 years, we now actually have. Some grasp of what those mechanisms actually are in terms of fasting, the prolonged fasting, turning off pathways of damage and turning on pathways of recycling our own, uh, diet and our own system.

Think about that. That's really incredible. Of course, now I'm referencing that in terms to animals who. Take time [00:03:00] too fast when they are injured or ill, and then in that cycle begin to create new energy through the recycling. And then that energy tips into ways to heal that are not activated when we haven't gone through that very specific kind of process of withdrawal, recycling, and then renewal.

So I love this whole topic. I think it's absolutely fascinating. But, uh, Dr. Katie, I think there is one aspect to this whole conversation, and I hope, uh, your audiences first already. We won't, we won't have to go all the, over all the fasting information because it's. It's prevalent now. It's all over the place.

But to talk about something I think I, I, I don't hear which is the role of rituals. So now skipping over the animal part, although I hope we'll come back to the part where we can talk about animal rituals and fasting. ‘ cause it's really there. [00:04:00] In fact, just a brief, um, just a brief snippet. Uh, we recently had, uh.

Earthquake in and in the San Diego Zoo, the elephants immediately started circling and then they turned their, their faces outwards, their butt inwards, and they protected all their young in those, um, that pocket. So when they sense, and of course they were getting the vibration of the earthquake already through frequency, when they sense those kinds of issues, they have animal behavior.

We call instinctual, but also looks a lot like ritual. So we can, we can now be, begin to think about animal ritual as present as well and why. I think ritual is the missing link to water fasting is that what we've spent the vast majority of our time in fasting talking about is how you use it as a healing [00:05:00] mechanism, which is correct.

And then people use it as a religious devotion, uh, offering, a devotional offering, which is also correct. But I'd like to add another element, which is ritual is the purpose of ritual is to add an additional layer, an additional strata to the end, to the identity that we already have. So if you're fasting for health reasons, you do not wanna leave the ritual aspect behind because you don't wanna miss the potential for ritual when you're fasting to ignite a new strata and dimension of identity to who you are as you come out of the fasting.

Okay, so I'm gonna stop there because I've said a lot. I'm sure you have. Questions, reactions, ideas, I'd love to hear.

Dr. Katie Deming MD: you know, I think that [00:06:00] you're hitting on something that when I started doing this, I didn't know the full impact. I was thinking, you know, this was brought to me by my mentor who heals in the ancient ways, who, you know. This is really an ancient practice. And he explained to me when he first brought this, you can heal cancer by doing prolonged fasting for, you know, 30, 40 days.

And at first it was just mind blowing because I didn't, I. Even think that was possible or safe or you know, I just really had no reference for it. But then as I started to see the clinical results of people having, you know, my very first person that I fasted, she had brain metastases from breast cancer and the brain metastasis went away completely and just disappeared.

And then my next person was someone with breast cancer. And the breast cancer in her breast completely disappeared. And so. [00:07:00] intrigued, like, wait, what's going on here? But it wasn't until I started doing this in a group setting and really a container that was designed to help them not only traverse fast, safely, also start to uncover what else. wanting to be birthed actually through this transformation. I always talk about that healing is a transformation that in order to heal, we need to become someone different than the person who created the illness and the body. witnessing the emotional and spiritual transformations that are happening during these fasts was surprising. Also such a like, oh yeah, of course. Like this is what, you know, it's like, it's a vision quest. It is a vision quest. And then the beautiful piece that I have is [00:08:00] to have a powerful healer supporting the energy of this group and you know, the frequency of Don Javier supporting this. I'm guiding them, you know, through the process, but then they're also being cradled and supported by a frequency that is so high.

And then water, you know, there's, there's so many places that we could go with this of, you know, the intelligence of the water. But me, it's funny because you're hitting on the ritual aspect, the transformation that's possible through this process of fasting, really, I didn't. Understand or perceive until I got into it and started seeing it for myself.

Gina Bria: Because you aren't adding anything else. This is not like, oh, now I have to go. Why do I have to buy some, uh, some Tibetan bulls? What now? What now? Is there candles involved now? What? It's not. You're not? Adding anything other. The water [00:09:00] fest is an, the effort for the water fest is enough. Enough. What you're doing is activating a, a, a, it's a, in, it's an invitation for a dimension to come in that you may not have been aware is they're hovering, waiting for you for this invitation.

'cause of course it has to be personally, you have to make the personal request for, um, for assistance in the ritual realm. And I'll clarify those thoughts a little bit late, uh, in a minute. From, from the anthropology point of view, which is simply a skill, it's a skill to know, oh, I get it. I'm doing this thing for my health, but my health isn't the end point.

I thought it was the end point. I'm doing this to get healthy. That's what I'm trying to do, right? Actually, health, the, the health of the body. Is for something isn't the de destination. And if you've been living your [00:10:00] health as if it were the destination, you can see how that's already a shortcoming. It isn't, there's not enough juice in there to really bloom the health, uh, fully because the point of of health is for us to come into a fuller sense of self, and we keep adding to that.

All our lives and even past death, we continue to add to our infinite self in order to have something to contribute back to our group, back to our tribe, back to our culture, back to our times, back to the needs of our times. So your healing, add the dimension to you that allows you to have more. And really specific needed, more like no one's going.

Also gonna be bringing this specific set of qualities, gifts, properties, and presents to your immediate circumstance of need. [00:11:00] This is the, the thing about ritual is it's unbelievably personal, in fact. Biology is personal. You wouldn't have been evolved to drop in at this moment unless there was a very long effort by biology to get you here, by nature to get you here.

So returning to this idea that you're not adding anything is this isn't costing you anything more in terms of the effort of doing a water fast. It's simply. Inviting in the, all the dimensions of what a water fast wants to do for you is able to do for you. 'cause now we can, I'll, I'll stop so you can comment on that, Katie, but there's, again, there's this aspect of we, we have to have the conversation.

Well, what the heck is water? Right.

Dr. Katie Deming MD: Yes, absolutely. Well, and I think the, you know. I love that you describe it as this invitation [00:12:00] because what many people see it as it's taking away so many things. Right. And actually I do, you know, when I talk to people who are interested in water fasting is that I. There's something very powerful when we take away all of the other distractions, all, you know, food, all the ways that we cope, We cope with food, we cope with overdoing, we cope with, you know, the busyness of life. We cope with stuff It's really uncomfortable for people to step away from life, you know, and in, um, shamanism, you know, Don Juan, the quote of, you know, stopping your world is one of the most powerful things that you can do.

And this is what a water fast does, is it stops your world because. You have to rest like the, the healing in a water fast happens in the rest and the stripping way of everything else [00:13:00] that you are then faced with yourself, right? And so much so much detox. So, so many beautiful things happen actually through a water fast.

But I think that it's. It is really an invitation, you know, and that's what I say to my people who are on the water fasting group, is that this, there is so much here for you. But it's really, you have to take that invitation and go into it, you know, because so much that's possible on the personal transformation.

And I thought initially that the whole purpose was this, of this was to get into a autophagy to, you know, flip the script so that instead of the cancer using the fuel from the body, the body is using a cancerous fuel. But now I. This is my personal opinion. So of course when people come, they're gonna come for whatever their own reasons are.

And I, I honor that [00:14:00] because I think this is a sacred ritual and I think that people, it, it's very deeply personal, but as I've witnessed this, that even if someone's cancer does not go away, the. Gift that can come out of an experience of doing a ritual and a rite of passage like this, like a water fast is so far beyond that. in and of itself has I think, even more value than value than making the cancer goal wage, which seems crazy, right? So as an oncologist, I'm not saying I don't want that to happen, and that happens a lot of the time, but. It's so much bigger than that, and also healing happens when we're transformed.

And so if someone's able to transform their consciousness to open to. Really seeing the world differently, seeing themselves differently, having such a different appreciation for what this [00:15:00] thing we called life is, which most people who go through water fast really develop a very different sense of this whole experience through the process that is valuable beyond measure in my mind and, and really so beautiful to witness. But I would, you know, I wanna know from you. Like, what is the history? Like what, how has water fasting been used throughout the ages as a rite of passage and this, um, invitation into transformation?

Gina Bria: I just wanna re reiterate what you've said, that connecting water, fasting to identity is key. In fact that is that that health is just something that happens in between that moment. And what we're shooting for here is, uh, becoming more of ourselves than we were before we started our illness, or we started our water fast and coming out on the other side [00:16:00] with new information about who we are.

It's solid. It cannot, it's immutable. It can't. You, you, you have this experience and you know things about yourself that you didn't know. And again, I wanna be clear. What you find out about yourself is, uh, how you find out more truths about yourself. And these truths are affirming and positive and life-giving.

They're not, oh gosh, I didn't know I had such a, you know, I was deficient in this, I was deficient, I was unworthy. You know, all the kinds of self-talk that are, that's, um, prevalent in our culture. In fact, the highest version that we've ever lived through. No one, no other culture ever has the kind of, uh, detrimental cell chatter that we have.

But that's because we live in a very abnormal culture and it produces ill health. So, um, helping, there's, helping oneself understand the whole context and, [00:17:00] um, uh, of why water fast coming forward now would be such an elegant and useful approach because now you're gaining identity while you're healing yourself, and that doesn't, that doesn't dissolve once you're on the other side of a water fest.

But the history, the anthropology of water fasts, um, they're just everywhere. They're, they're usually assigned seasonally because if you practice water fasting seasonally, it does diminish, uh, ill health it. It keeps you healthy for reasons we now understand, uh, the work. Um. Winning the Nobel Prize, acknowledging that autophagy is the, is the what's going on when we do this fasting, but, water fasting has been used, so it's been used for high holy days, high, high feasting cultures, as a seasonal, uh, a [00:18:00] seasonal technology, but it's always been used as a personal technology as well, so.

Uh, you mentioned, um, vision quests. Um, they're always there. In fact, um, one little strategy in the North American, just prevalent among North American tribes were using, um, maple SAP as a replacement for water. So they wouldn't do entirely nothing fasting, but they would do water fast, but then they would suck on a little maple sap, which has.

It turns out they have incredible mineral content, right? So they're basically making mineral water. It's super cool. All this stuff is so, so fascinating as I delved more deeply into it. But what I'd love to, to, um, come back to is the personal use of water fasting as a, a vision quest. In other words, the purpose of a vision quest was to send young men and women out.

To discover something about [00:19:00] themselves, and the tribe was expecting you to come back with a knowledge after a vision quest of what your gifts were, who you were, because then you would know what to contribute to your culture, to your time, to your tribe. So, um, even through the history of a tribe, of course different gifts are needed and then different people are born and then different, they go on different vision quests and they come back with new information or new, a sense of reverence about what gifts they have to address the, the difficulties that the tribe or the victories that the tribe is facing right then.

So, um, personal vision Quest. Are what's called in the anthropology literature, the rite of passage, and I've always loved this term first because it uses the word rite, RITE, or rites of passage. And that now puts it right back in the camp of, [00:20:00] of ritual rituals and rites. And that this idea that there's, um, accompaniments of things, there's different ritual.

Tools that go with all of this, that are assistant, that really help to get you through a very difficult, narrow passage, this rite of passage that allows you to squeeze through a bottleneck or a troubled time or a cultural troubled turbulence time, um, or a particular health issue, a body time to get you out on the other side with with leaving behind.

Always leaving behind whatever that difficulty is. So that's the kind of larger anthropology context and why water fasting is showing up with such popularity in our culture. You know, 20 years ago, this wasn't even on the map in my anthropology studies, and now it's just [00:21:00] everywhere. And I do think it's a response.

It's a, it's a technology response, uh, to our particular time. So that's. That's the sort of larger context, and then I'm hoping you'll ask me about water, what water is,

Dr. Katie Deming MD: let's go there. Actually, know, what is water in your mind?

Gina Bria: it's a very important topic. What is water? And we're not looking deeply enough into that because most people just think it's wet. You know, it's keeping my organs moist, that's why I need it. And, um, and we're finding out, um, and your audience, of course, might be very aware of this.

Lots of new science around phases of water. Uh, we now have a fourth sort of plasma phase, but you know, chances are there's so many phases of water we're not even gonna find 'em all in our lifetime, nor do we need to because, um, sort of a short pre or just a category of water to help us think about [00:22:00] this is, you know, water course i