The Mindful Vegan: A 30-Day Plan for Finding Health, Balance, Peace, and Happiness by Lani Muelrath

Author:Lani Muelrath
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781944648480
Publisher: BenBella Books, Inc.
Published: 2017-10-10T07:00:00+00:00

DAY NINETEEN

higher ground and mindfully navigating conversations

Mindfulness must be engaged. Once there is seeing there must be acting. Otherwise what is the use of seeing?

—THICH NHAT HANH

MEDITATION PRACTICE: 19 minutes

Day Nineteen, Meditation on Breath and Bodily Sensations

“What a great title,” Patti Breitman—longtime vegan, author, advocate, mindfulness meditator, and friend—commented as we sat down to have a chat over green drinks about The Mindful Vegan. These words were her immediate response to the name of the book. “It’s almost redundant,” she added.

Patti’s right. By embracing vegan living, you are acting on your ethics mindfully, in a profound way. You are taking an active stand against the current norm that ignores the environmental crisis and reduces sentient beings, as all animals are, to things. Wherever you find yourself on the spectrum—from aspiring vegan to advocate to activist—you’ve moved to higher ground.

Yet sometimes it can feel as if you are swimming upstream, can’t it? Every time you see animals listed as edibles on the menu—or a burger on a billboard, or a “happy chicken nuggets” commercial—you recognize how deeply embedded the problem is in our culture. As clear as it is to you that using animals as “products” must be halted—along with the pillaging of our planet that perpetuates the project—the stress and pain you feel can be profound. Johan Galtung, principle founder of the discipline of peace and conflict studies, said that the definition of violence is any “avoidable impairment of fundamental human needs.”1 It’s time we broaden the definition to include all sentient beings. When you perceive the dairy case in the market as violence, the effect can be an overwhelming sense of urgency: things need to change—now!

We are mystified at how simply being present as a vegan at the table can provoke hostility, resistance, even accusations from others. You are probably not the first who has been called judgmental just because you brought veggie burgers to the office picnic or passed on the turkey at Thanksgiving. We can tell ourselves that this hostility has nothing to do with us and that it is merely projection by others. But it still stings and brings up feelings of defensiveness, frustration, and isolation.

To gain more insight into some of these challenges that you may be experiencing, today we’ll take a glimpse into the meat culture and why it can be hard to bring others—friends, family, and coworkers—on board. Getting under the surface of this phenomenon can be of great help. You’ll find out more about what can give rise to the resistance you experience—important information for everything from the playing field of daily living to the front lines of activism. And we’ll underscore why your mindfulness practice—inner activism—is so important for vegan advocacy and activism of the outer kind.

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