Dietary Choices
This article appears courtesy of Healing Headquarters www.healinghq.com.
As seekers committed to a path of enlightenment, there are many practices for us to draw upon in our awakening process. We want to participate in activities that strengthen our spiritual self and diminish our egotistical self. Often the ego has been confused with the animal body, and religious practices neglected or even harmed the animal body, believing it to be spiritual. Practicing a combination of mind-body techniques, such as meditation and yoga, for example, help us to keep in balance between the development of our compassionate, wise spirit and the healing of our equally wise and intuitive animal body.
The Theory Behind Alternative Diets
As we organize our lives to be more in alignment with our spiritual ethics, we make choices to reduce our karma in this lifetime as well. For example, we can burn off karma by doing jobs of service, where we assist others. We can also minimize the amount of karma we are currently accumulating by making choices in our consumption that are lower-karma, or neutral-karma.
This is the theory behind vegetarian, vegan and raw diets. If you have the opportunity in your life to visit a cattle feedlot, for example, you will observe that there are thousands of cows overcrowded in muddy pens. They don't have enough room to walk freely, and they are separated from their family groups and offspring. They are kept this way and given shots of antibiotics to minimize disease under these overcrowded conditions. They wait in these pens until they are slaughtered in groups by having their throats torn open by a robotic machine. They then bleed to death.
As humans, we have taken another species that lives on this planet and enslaved it for our own consumption. There are no wild cows on this planet (except a few in India, thank you!) and this species, which is intelligent, emotional, and animated with divine consciousness just as we are, suffers terribly because of our practices. We have taken away their freedom to live naturally and die respectfully.
When one of these animals is slaughtered, it dies feeling strong emotions of fear and pain. This is an energetic resonance that vibrates throughout its body. When you consume meat from this animal, you are taking this resonance of pain and fear into your body.
Imagine how much karma you introduce into your own body-mind when you participate in the enslavement of an intelligent species. When you consume meat and dairy products from these animals, you bring their pain and suffering into your energetic body. It is difficult to raise one's own vibration spiritually, when one is constantly ingesting the lower vibrations of fear and pain.
This is why many spiritual practitioners over the years have chosen to eliminate meat and animal products from their personal diet. It lightens their hearts because they are not participating in a web of practices that is harming other species, and it lightens their own karmic load because they are not feasting on food that carries energetic imprints of pain and fear.
Plants are a very interesting species. They have evolved in such a unique way. If you notice, most plants get their energy for living directly from the sun, the air, and the earth itself. With the exception of a very few, they do not get their energy by ingesting other species. In addition to this, many of them actually provide food for other species to eat--they make fruit, vegetables, leaves, and oxygen which can be consumed by other beings to live! This species has very good karma! All it asks in return is that you spread its seeds around, and help it propagate itself. In return, it gives you everything you need. Imagine how your own energetic vibration might be different eating cows or eating plants.
What are Alternative Diets?
Alternative diets are an attempt to bring our consumption of food into alignment with our spiritual goals. Organic, Vegetarian, Vegan, and Raw are dietary choices to reduce our karmic load. We can choose to reduce harm to other species and our own animal bodies, and even support and nourish our bodies and the lives of other species.
Organic products offer us an alternative to the conventional farming model, which harnesses mass quantities of land for its operation, relies on chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides for production, and may involve irradiation, cloning and genetically-modified foods. Large conventional farms put the family farmer out of business. They operate on a corporate business model, which seeks to maximize profit and minimize expenses. This results in choices such as: hiring immigrant workers for low wages, overcrowding animals, killing animals with brutal methods, over-using the soil by injecting chemical fertilizers rather than allowing the land to be fallow, tilling the soil which erodes topsoil, using chemicals that destroy the natural probiotics of the soil, irradiating food, which alters its chemical construction, and so on. Organic choices support: smaller farms operated by families and sustainable communities, fair wages for farm workers, living soil health using natural farming methods which retain life force in the food, better quality of life for animals who are given more space, fed healthier food, and allowed to live in social groups.
Vegetarian choices eliminate the consumption of other animal species altogether. This removes you from participating in the karma linked to the raising and slaughtering of animals, and also of the seafood and fishing industry, which causes devastation to the ocean by damaging reefs and diminishing species to extinction through the use of dragnets. By eliminating these species from your consumption, you afford them respect as life forms with the right to live on this planet without being enslaved and hunted to extinction for food by humans. You also free yourself from bringing lower vibrational energies into your own energetic system, which helps you to ascend faster on your own spiritual path. When you stop consuming predatory creatures, you remove the predatory consciousness from your own vibration. You become more peaceful, and root-chakra drives become more balanced.
Vegan choices eliminate not only flesh as food, but also avoid taking away things that other animals produce for themselves. Recognizing that cows produce milk to nourish their own offspring, chickens lay eggs in order to raise a new generation, and bees produce honey to feed their own community, we come to see that taking away their production forces these creatures into a state of anxiety where they continually produce in an effort to overcome our interference. Sacrificing these traditional foods from our diet is a choice made out of sensitivity and respect for the lives of other species, and their right to live without constant enslavement and harassment by our species.
Raw or live-food choices recognize our role as an animal species within the natural food-chain, and our natural diet based on an analysis of our physical anatomy. As a vegetarian species, we have molars, a sideways-grinding jaw, and a long digestive tract for breaking down plant material, rather than sharp canines for tearing flesh and a short digestive tract for expelling flesh rapidly. Adding fire to food breaks down its chemical composition and reduces the life force in the food, and is an unnecessary and unnatural habit developed by the human animal alone which has brought on illness in the species. Raw food choices are not just vegetables, but also include a large variety of superfoods from around the planet including maca, cacao, goji berries, inca berries, roots, herbs and supplements, including colloidal and monoatomic elements.
What Can I do to Improve Where I'm At?
Change occurs at the rate you set for yourself. Do what you are able, at the rate you can handle. Some people change overnight and their dietary choices are permanent. Others battle cravings and addictions to foods they are not willing or ready to eliminate from their diet. Here are some steps you can take to improve the karma of your food choices:
1. Be mindful. Notice what you put in your mouth every day. Become more conscious of what you are feeding on. You become what you eat, not only biochemically, but energetically also. So notice what you are consuming.
2. Go organic. The best thing you can do for yourself is to reduce the amount of industrial chemical fertilizers and sprays you are ingesting. Decide for yourself if you want to be ingesting unnatural sprays and fertilizers when the only animal species on the planet showing cancer rates are humans and domesticated animals being fed processed foods. Take back control of your body's health by refusing to ingest industrial chemicals any time you can. You will also be supporting small family and community farmers who are struggling to keep the natural food-source alive on this planet.
3. Decrease your consumption of meat. If you are still going to eat meat, then buy only free-range, organic meat. This will protect you from antibiotics, steroids, mad-cow disease, and other dangers associated with conventionally-processed meat. It will also decrease the amount of pain, fear and suffering you are exposed to from your food. Be aware: even traditional scientific institutions are beginning to speak out about the link between animal protein and illness. High meat consumption is linked to heart disease and cancer. Why not consider new ways to achieve your iron and amino-acid intake, such as spinach and goji berries?
4. Introduce New Alternatives into your Old Habitual Diet. You don't have to be raw to visit a raw-food restaurant! You don't have to be vegan to make and enjoy a great recipe! Bring light-energy foods into your diet and enjoy them, whenever possible!
Above all, be well, feel good when you eat, keep improving!For more information, check out the Resource Guide.