This program discusses the possibility of breatharianism, or living without eating food, and is not a full instruction. For your safety, please do not attempt to cease eating without proper expert guidance.

For your safety, please do not attempt to cease eating without proper expert guidance.

Today’s Between Master and Disciples – “Isabelle Hercelin: Breatharianism as a Way of Life” – will be presented in French and English with subtitles in Arabic, Aulacese (Vietnamese), Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech-Slovak, English, French, German, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Mongolian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Russian, Spanish and Thai.

In scriptures, the human body is often referred to as the temple of God. Yet, it is quite an uncommon privilege for any soul to attain this sacred abode that houses the Divine, as it is truly a blessing to be reborn as a human being. On several occasions, Supreme Master Ching Hai has spoken about the rarity of this phenomenon:

To be reincarnated in the human world is hard. You have to have enough Human Quality. You have to have affinity with the parents and with the society, with the people around which you are born. Very difficult.

To be a human, you need some merit. You have done something good in the past in order to be able to pick a human birth.

As a living temple of God, the human body is fully equipped with miraculous wonders that can be awakened in those who are spiritually conscious and have complete faith in the Creator of all life. Inedia, Latin for “fasting,” is the human ability to live without food. Since time immemorial, there have always been individuals who can sustain themselves on prana, or the vital life force. Through the grace of the Providence, inediates, people who follow a food-free lifestyle, can draw the energy from nature to nourish themselves:

They live on the chi from the ground, or from the forest, and from the sun and from the air. They make use of all that. Or they live on love, on faith alone.

These individuals are known as breatharians(pranarians or inediates), solarians, or waterians, and they come from all walks of life, from different cultures, and all corners of the world.

Indeed, the possibilities and miracles in this life as our benevolent Creator has designed for us are endless; we only need to connect within to recognize our abounding largess as God’s children. Supreme Master Ching Hai has lovingly recommended a weekly series on Supreme Master Television to introduce those individuals of the past and present who have chosen to live food-free on Earth.

May their spiritual stories enthrall you; may hearts be opened, and horizons be expanded. We now invite you to join us for the first part of our 4-part series, “Isabelle Hercelin: Breatharianism as a Way of Life,” on Between Master and Disciples.

For the past year, Isabelle Hercelin has dispensed with the need for physical food and has been living as a breatharian. Without food, what nourishes and keeps her so youthful and vibrant?

Since you don't eat anymore – I mean physical food – what nourishes you? What do you call prana?

I find it difficult to explain; it is difficult to express. To me, this energy of life is an energy of love, but I can't even express this love which is present in all things, in all situations, in all emotions and in all relationships – and it really, immensely, fills you up.

For Isabelle, there isn’t any physical food that is comparable to the sensations of living on prana.

And this love… For me, this confidence that I have in life... I can't say how I feel about it. It’s not easy to express, but it fills you up 100,000 times more and 100,000 times better, and it is 100 times more satisfying and 100 times better than real food, even though I truly thank the Earth for everything that she has given me until now.

In the course of human history, there have been many food-free individuals who relied on the cosmic energy to sustain their physical bodies and spirits. Quite a few also lived for tens of years merely on faith, love, and complete devotion to Jesus Christ or God. It is no different for Isabelle.

People say that you get your nourishment from faith and love. Yes. Could we say that?

Yes. And it nourishes me from a dimension, I would say, extremely vast. It nourishes my whole being, more than the real food, which is very limiting. This energy of life which connects me to everything and creates this food for me, fills me up…

When Between Master and Disciples returns after these brief messages, we’ll find out how Isabelle’s journey to breatharianism began with a change of diet to one that is healthier and more compassionate. Please stay tuned to Supreme Master Television.

Welcome back to Between Master and Disciples on Supreme Master Television. Let’s continue with our feature, “Isabelle Hercelin: Breatharianism as a Way of Life.”

What made Isabelle gravitate toward a lifestyle without food? She’s an ordinary housewife with a normal family life.

I was born in Paris. I have two brothers, and when I was about ten years old, I moved to and lived in Brittany, in the region of Vannes. When I was seventeen, I left the security of my family to live with my husband, the father of our child, Maeva. I am also the grandmother of a little girl named Lola, born a few months ago. Since childhood, however, Isabelle has had a unique experience with food.

Everything started since my birth. When I was born, it was the era of women’s liberation, and thus I was bottle-fed with baby formulas, and that had never agreed with me. My parents didn’t know what else they could give me; they were not informed about the existence of other options. So I was bottle-fed and was moved as quickly as possible to solid food, somehow or other.

Aside from the challenges with baby formulas, Isabelle was born with a preference for plant-based foods, which is the diet that all children naturally opt for. And this solid food didn’t agree with me either because I think I was born liking neither meat, fish, milk, nor dairy. So for my parents and myself, those mealtimes were not easy.

I would sit for hours in front of my plate, and the rest of the food would be put away in a refrigerator for supper in the evening or even the following day. And it went on like this for practically seventeen years. I started grumbling when I was about fifteen.

Supreme Master Ching Hai has often shared that, since birth, children have an inherent inclination for vegetarianism, a diet replete with all necessary vitamins and minerals. However, due to the misinformation about the so-called “nutrition” of flesh foods, parents often force them to eat meat, to the detriment of the children’s health.

When children are born, many of them reject meat, but we force them down and then after a while they eat meat like naturally. Many children don't want meat at all – it happens – and they strongly resist it. If you give them vegetarian from childhood, they never demand meat.

Many of our fellow practitioners, they have children since after initiation and their children are nourished by vegetarian food and grow up so strong and healthy, less sick than any other child, and so pink, so beautiful and pure, soft in the look. They never demand meat. In fact, when somebody else gives them meat by mistake, they were shocked and dropped it - a child of five, six, four years old.

To Isabelle’s parents, providing for their children’s necessities and comfort was their way of expressing love, and unfortunately, that included feeding Isabelle and her siblings meat.

It was very important for my parents to be well fed and that it was also dignifying, and this was love. So some of you will certainly experience that. We give love to our children when we are able to bring a piece of meat every day on the table, fish, and a balanced meal. For them, this was what was important. So they were very vigilant and made sure that we get fed three times a day in what is considered to be a “balanced” way, which was also considered “balanced” as well in society.

Fortunately, in her teenage years, Isabelle found the willpower to say “no” to the harmful meat diet.

I was somebody who was very disciplined, and so I started to say “Stop!” to all the food that I didn’t like, around fifteen-sixteen years of age, without knowing what I could replace for the things that I didn’t like. So I fed myself anyway during all those years, but not with pleasure.

Through a chance encounter, Isabelle discovered a more palatable and healthier animal-free diet and, for the first time in her life, enjoyed the simple pleasure of eating food. When I left the “family’s nest”, I had the joy of meeting a lady who had an organic health food store. And there I’d learned the existence of another type of food which was much healthier and much more pleasant for me, which is typically called “vegetarian.” And it’s there that I discovered that “no meat, no fish, no dairy” corresponds to food that is labeled as vegetarian or vegan. And from there I really started to nourish myself with great pleasure.

What led Isabelle to dispense with food completely and live only on prana? Join us again next Sunday for part 2 of “Isabelle Hercelin: Breatharianism as a Way of Life.”

We appreciate your company for today’s episode of Between Master and Disciples. Good People, Good Works is coming up next after Noteworthy News. Please stay tuned to Supreme Master Television. Heaven bless, and farewell for now.

Isabelle Hercelin, a breatharian from France, has been living on Light for the past year. And this was the beginning of an awareness – even though there were other things before – the beginning of an awareness that we are connected to everything, and that it is important, as human beings, to be respectful of this Earth that welcomes us.

Tune in to Supreme Master Television on Sunday, September 26, for our program, “Isabelle Hercelin: Breatharianism as a Way of Life,” on Between Master and Disciples.

Tune in to Supreme Master Television today for our program, “Isabelle Hercelin: Breatharianism as a Way of Life,” on Between Master and Disciples.