I am liberal; I recycle and compost; I vote Green; I am pro-CND and anti-Trident, TTIP and fracking; I forage; I’m a feminist; I’m anti-consumerist; I don’t use synthetic cosmetics or toiletries; I eat a 100% wholefoods diet; I buy my clothes in charity shops; I do yoga; I meditate; I chant healing mantras, in Sanskrit; I pick wild flowers; I collect leaves, shells and stones; I don’t drink alcohol or smoke; I hug people; I hug trees; I eat organic as much as I can; I cry at injustice; I am more often than not too sensitive to read or watch the news; I am so empathic it hurts sometimes (ok, a lot); I love children and animals; I rarely curse; I drink herbal tea and filtered water (with crystals in it); I use incense; I have long hair; I practice Non-Violent Communication; If I were a man I would likely have a beard and wear sawdust covered checked shirts; I wish I had been at Woodstock; I wish I was Joni Mitchell (back in the day); I talk to the butterflies, the birds and the bees; I sing to fields of cows and sheep; I am obsessed with wellbeing, nutrition and healthy eating; I want world peace; I eat meat.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Nope, not the image of me as a man with a beard dressed as a lumberjack, wafting an incense stick, weeping over the 6 o’clock news into my Chamomile & Spearmint tea, chanting a Sanskrit mantra to calm myself down which translates as ‘I want world peace, I want world peace, I want world peeeeaaaaace’ as I’m just too damn sensitive ….

I EAT MEAT.

(…and maybe I curse slightly more than I’m letting on, but only ever for dramatic effect… And I can be a sucker for a stereotype, but again, solely for reasons of dramatic effect.)

But back to the point: Yes, I eat meat. I am perhaps one of the unlikeliest converted carnivores around. How can I possibly justify this to myself? Let alone to others? This is what I hope to go some way towards answering in this article as it’s something I have thought about a lot. A LOT. The short answer is: I can say with 100% honesty that I believe if I hadn’t started eating meat around a year and a half ago I would not be alive today: That is my truth. The long answer is…. well, it’s incredibly complex to say the least and so I am going to have to divide it into three sections: Mind, Body and Spirit.

Mind

Of course when I approach the topic of meat-eating vs. vegetarianism with my mind it’s a no-brainer: I do not want to eat meat. There is no way I can rationally justify it to myself or anyone else. The reasons for this are an amalgamation of the usual tenants of this argument: the moral and ethical dimensions of animal welfare and animal rights— and issues of intent, sentience and suffering when it comes to eating meat (I do not want to participate in the suffering of any living being, whether that be a cow killed for its meat, a goat pumped constantly for its milk, or a chicken kept in a cage used as an egg-making machine – for a while I even winced at the thought of picking wildflowers- aren’t they happier where they are?! But no, I decided, they want to be picked, they want to be appreciated for their beauty in that vase on your table- everything dies…) What else….? The environmental impact of the meat industry and agriculture— from factory down to farm level; the capitalist nature of the meat industry which seeks above all else to maximise profit; the gulf of separation between the consumer (at the dinner table) and the consumed (in the slaughterhouse) which distances us inexcusably from the killing of animals; the nutritional reasons for and against consuming animal protein and produce (the often reported dangers of red meat consumption especially); the implications of ‘species-ism’ and the inescapable violence required by continuing to live by the genetic inheritance we’ve received from our hunter-gatherer ancestors whereby we honour our animalistic predatory nature which lies at the heart of the soil-plant-animal-man food chain….

Wah! If I let my mind run away with itself I could go on and On and ON.

And that was always my biggest problem: I lived from my mind and I didn’t take into consideration the genuine needs of my body and soul.

If you have read my blog before, you will know that these days I tend to write predominately from my EQ and not my IQ— that is from my emotional intelligence and not my intellect; from my irrational body, heart and soul rather than my rational brain; from the right-hand side of my brain rather than the left; from my feminine deep inner knowing rather than my masculine fact-based font of received knowledge (although of course both of these are as essential as one another, and all the valid arguments outlined above come from the logic of the masculine, the integral counterpart to the feminine). But this article is no different. And it is this anti-intellectual approach that opens up the meat eating vs. vegetarianism debate to a new set of unusual factors I would never have even considered before, when I let my rational mind run my life.

So instead of delving into the well-trodden, completely valid and logical debates I mentioned above I’m going to get weird and wacky with it.  I intend to use my own personal experience with meat eating to guide us through how our choice to eat meat (or not) impacts us individually on the levels on mind, body and spirit— and how these tie in to the universal laws of Physics and the mystical laws of Spirituality. Which I think is quite some feat. So I might slip up a bit. I know that people have extremely strong views on this controversial topic and I want to state that I am not setting out to challenge any of these, whether for OR against eating meat, that is not my intention. I simply want to present what I’ve learned through my own experience as I think it’s totally FASCINATING, and for completely unexpected reasons. So there will be no quote-unquote ‘rational’ arguments here. If you want to fill yourself up on facts, figures and statistics then I suggest you take a look at Peter Singer’s inflammatory utilitarian ‘Animal Liberation’, John Berger’s writing on the ethical implications of eating animals in ‘Ways of Seeing’ or Michael Pollan’s ‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma’— I’ve just finished reading this and it takes both previous studies into account, and the wider book charts his personal journey as he follows the food chain right from industrially mass-produced corn, down through organic independent farming, right down to the hunting of a wild pig which he hunts, kills and eats as part of a meal made up entirely of hunted and foraged foods.

Ok my brain hurts. Enough intellect already!

But what is the ‘Omnivore’s Dilemma?’ It is basically the question: ‘what shall we have for dinner?’ knowing that we can choose from anything that is considered to be ‘food’ as our teeth are equally suited to eating both meat and plants.

Let me tell you– if my omnivorean dilemma were a genre it would be an EPIC.

I grew up eating from all the food groups, as most people do- and then when I began to form my own opinions and became aware of the ethical implications of eating animals as a teenager I began to dabble with vegetarianism, sometimes going the whole hog (or rather, it’s opposite) for a year or two at a time, sometimes being more lax about it. I went through down the usual ‘ignorant vegetarian’ path of eating WAY too much bread and cheese and pasta and barely a seed or legume passed my lips. By my mid twenties I would have said that I followed a predominately plant based diet: I was a master of variety when it came to grains, legumes, nuts and seeds, fruits and veggies, but I ate fish. And I ate a LOT of rice, in many different forms. In the couple of years before my diet changed radically I was one of those ‘I’ll eat meat in a restaurant but I won’t buy it and cook it myself’ kind of people. Fish was a constant though- with my qualification in nutrition I thought it was important to incorporate Omega 3 fatty acids into my diet. But even the fish I saw as a temporary measure, envisioning myself eventually cutting this (and the eggs and small amounts of sheep and goats based dairy that I ate) to transition to becoming a full on vegan, as with my Buddhist beliefs, I kept reminding myself: ‘fish have feelings too.’

These were the choices I made for myself. If there was one thing I had in spades it was WILLPOWER. I honestly thought I was being as healthy as possible. I thought I was a veritable BEACON of healthy living.

I made these choices 100% with my mind, my mind decided what my body was going to eat; my body, for its sins, had no say in the matter: I was still fully entrenched in the Cartesian rationalist mindset that we are our minds and not our bodies that I had been exposed to in high school: quite the comforting (and ultimately dangerous) belief for a young girl with such deep seated body issues and insecurities that they amounted to an eating disorder. I detested my own body so much that I clinged to Cartesianism like a life raft. ‘I’ was not this unwieldy, bulky, dirty animal body. ‘I’ was my MIND, thank you very much.

WILLPOWER. Luckily my body, despite all the limitations my mind placed on it, was on the whole very healthy for many years.

I didn’t however choose all the food intolerances I ended up being saddled with over the course of the last decade. I developed pretty severe intolerances to lactose, gluten, soya, deadly nightshade family; potatoes, aubergine, tomatoes, peppers, caffeine (I already knew this, it made me CRAZY, but I kept drinking tea and coffee to fuel my fast-paced lifestyle, every else does- why shouldn’t I?!), even oranges, ORANGES (yep, they just make me really anxious.) They all had to go.

Now- I say ‘developed’ food intolerances, but in fact, I think it is more of an uncovering— and these discoveries came about from years of a dialogue of trial and error between me and my own body, and from professional food allergy testing. As you grow more conscious you gradually begin to become more aware of how different foods affect you. It’s not that anything has changed, it’s more that you have a heightened sensitivity and once you are aware of something you know that you have to adapt to it, or continue to feel rotten. And it just continues to get subtler and subtler…

But, do you see the difference? My decision not to eat meat was a decision I made 100% with my mind and my body had no choice but to comply. The food intolerances were my BODY talking to me, and my mind had no choice but to listen. The food intolerances made me realise that I am not just my mind, and that I simply HAD to take into consideration the needs of my body.

So yes- my Omnivorean Dilemma was of gargantuan proportions, but at least it couldn’t get much worse….

Then I came down with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I was so sick I couldn’t get out of bed, let alone keep hold of a job or a social life, or any relationships. It was touch and go for a while, a long while.

But how could I possibly get so sick when I followed such a ‘healthy’ diet?

I thought I subsisted on the healthiest diet imaginable- no nasty red meat, nor poultry, no fatty cream or butter, and lots of clean grains, legumes, fruit and vegetables. My iron strong will was beginning to fail me (it was of course the very reason I was failing) and it was only when I was so ill that I could barely stand up in the morning and was more or less permanently in tears (when I had the energy to cry, that is) that I found myself in the presence of one of (if not the most) progressive and forward thinking doctors in the country (a leading consultant on chronic illness) who educated me that my body had become so chronically ill as I had been living on a diet of SUGAR: grains, root vegetables, legumes and fruits; especially all that RICE (which is broken down in the body as 97% of the sugar content of granulated sugar!) when in order to be healthy I desperately needed to switch to a diet high in PROTEIN and FAT.

And that meant MEAT. 

That meant eating animals, becoming a carnivore- and following a diet more in line with our hunter-gatherer forebears- the ‘Paleoloithic diet’, where you eat as if agriculture was never invented- renouncing all grains and sugar and subsisting on grass fed meats, wild fish, eggs, nuts, seeds, oils and vegetables, and a bit of fruit. This has close ties with the findings of Weston A. Price- who studied the meat and full-fat dairy rich diets of remarkably healthy indigenous tribes worldwide towards the middle of the twentieth century. My doctor strongly advocated switching to this type of diet to regain optimal health. Not just for me, but for most people.

At first my mind was having none of this. My iron will was unyielding.

But after a mind-blowing seminar I reluctantly swallowed the indigestible truth. I approached my doctor with a compromise and asked if I ate a steak a month and a piece of liver a month (the most nutritionally dense food on the planet) would that cut it? He looked me up and down and asked me with complete compassion: ‘and how long have you had issues with food?’ and in that moment I came crashing down from my pedestal as I realised that he had just read me like a book and and in one fell swoop had gone straight for the jugular (wow, that’s quite a lot of cliches in a one-r)- and in that one question he somehow spoke to the eating disorders of my teenage years, and much more than that, he exploded for me in 9 words how I had been ruling my body with the iron fist of my WILLPOWER dominated MIND when it came to what to eat for YEARS- as I had done with every other aspect of my life.

THIS was why I was sick.

What he was really asking me was: ‘And how long have you been depriving your body of what it needs to be healthy?’

The truth of it hit me right in the stomach.

(Let’s hand it over to my intellect for a minute) So what was the indigestible truth that my mind found so hard to accept? It was that although our teeth allow us to be omnicompetent: so we can use them to tear animal flesh as well as to grind plants, and although we CAN move our jaws in the manner of a carnivore, a rodent OR a herbivore (take your pick), and as much as we NEED specific chemical compounds that can only be found in plants to survive it is scientific fact that the human body needs nutrients that can ONLY be found naturally in meat. By this logic we can rationalise in our minds that we should not NEED to eat meat, unlike a full-on carnvivore… BUT the reality is that over the course of human evolution our bodies have evolved VERY little in terms of their physical make up since the days of Paleolithic man, and the majority of us simply NEED animal protein to survive- perhaps not to ‘survive’, but certainly in order to THRIVE.

I realised that to deny my body its essential needs was to deny my incarnation as  a human being.

And the extremely high rates of illness: diabetes, heart-disease, obesity, and chronic illness that our societies face today, when approached from the Paleolithic, or Weston A.Price models (which are gaining more and more ground everyday) argue that the cause our our desperately ill bodies is NOT red meat, fat, or dairy- but in fact, grains and sugar– it was the onset of agriculture that started this decline. And so, The healthiest thing I could do for my body was to start eating like my paleolithic forebears.

Body

So I stopped listening to my mind and I started listening instead to the wisdom of my body. It was not an easy transition to make. As I say, I did not want to eat animals. And my willpower was reluctant to abdicate its moral and ethical high-ground throne.

And just like that. Food stopped being a life or death gauntlet for me and became my medicine. That day, my mind gave in and I started eating meat and cut grains and sugar out of my diet completely was the day I stopped getting sicker and sicker and started to to heal: slowly, slowly, slowly.

And so I began to silence my mind and to follow the messages my body was sending me. It wanted PROTEIN, PROTEIN, PROTEIN and FAT, FAT, FAT. And lots and lots of healthy green vegetables, coconut and avocadoes, healthy oils, nuts and seeds. It still does. It is especially happy when I eat a fatty sirloin steak (or my current favourite- a confit duck leg), then the cells in my body applaud and yell THANK YOU! I literally can feel the fat travel up into my brain, lubricating it and taking away my migraines, and I feel, no, I KNOW, that I am HEALING. And I am not going to argue with my body- it needs what it needs. It was ignoring my genuine needs that got me into all this trouble in the first place.

As well as following a Paleo/Weston A. Price way of eating I also am a convert to Spiritual Ecologist Charles Eisenstein’s approach to diet, which he calls the ‘Yoga of Eating‘. He writes: ‘willpower implies pitting mind against body, in the Yoga of Eating we develop greater sensitivity to the body, greater sensitivity and trust. We stop seeing the body and its appetites as the enemy, but instead listen to the messages encoded in cravings, appetites and tastes… To abandon the habits of distrust, restriction, and denial; to emerge from the shadow of willpower and trust that the body is a friend that speaks truth; and to enact that truth even if it contradicts received beliefs about what is good and bad for you – this is no small step, but truly a leap of faith.’

The body knows best. Our job is to learn how to listen. So when I ask myself the question ‘what shall I have for dinner?’ I wait for my body tell me what it wants, as opposed to my mind forcing its agenda upon this poor, helpless creature.

In order to heal the body needs protein, animal protein, it needs the flesh of other beings to restore it to its optimum state of being. I surrender and submit: I need help to recover and I need the help of animals to do that, in the form of their flesh. I remember when I shared with my yoga teacher that I had started eating meat his response was: ‘Well done. I have been a vegetarian for over twenty years but in the year after my brother died I could have eaten steak for breakfast every single day’.

Do I love animals? Yes. Do I value my life more than I value the life of a cow or a sheep? Honestly, Yes. Why? Because I believe that I have a reason for being here and a difference to make in the world, and I don’t think it is too ‘species-ist’ to say that I feel that I can make more of a positive impact upon the world than a cow can (I know at the very least I have something to say- this article being a case in point), so I’m going to do what it takes to stay alive. And right now that means eating meat. So I buy the most ethically sourced meat, fish and eggs I can (which I only intend to improve upon), and I thank the fish on my plate, and I thank the fields of cows and sheep as I walk past them for allowing me to eat their brothers and sisters as without them I would not have recovered from this illness. For reals. I might even treat them to the occasional song…

Ok. So the body needs animal protein to heal. But surely you wouldn’t have DIED if you had kept on eating grains, legumes, fruits and vegetables? Surely that is complete madness?!

Ok- so grains, legumes, fruits and all root vegetables break down in the body as sugar (as I said: Rice: 97% sugar content of the white deadly stuff). Let me me tell you an anecdote about sugar that might seem insignificant at first, but if you’ll bear with me, I’ll go onto explain why this is relevant on a cosmic level in the final section on Spirit:

During my Chronic Fatigue I developed such severe hypo-glycaemia that I couldn’t tolerate ANY sugar whatsoever- and by that I don’t mean the white processed stuff, I’d cut that out years ago, I mean that I couldn’t eat ANY fruit, and it got so bad that I even had to cut out all root vegetables— so I was so sugar intolerant that eating a single carrot would leave me bed bound for days. No joke. Sugar is dangerous. It is the most addictive and legal drug there on this planet and we are all addicted to it and it is the number one cause of, not only obesity and diabetes, but also heart-disease and a whole host of other chronic illnesses. (I am not going to go into that much here as I have written a very detailed article on this already, a companion to this piece, which includes lots on Paleo and Weston A. Price and I’d encourage you to read it if you are interested ‘Can a Steak Really be Healthier for You than a Carrot :  The Fat vs. Sugar Debate’). What I will say though is that I remember a few years ago, a few months after I’d cut all processed sugar I was at work and I was REALLY tired that day, probably hungover, and I thought- you know what- I’m going to drink a can of coke to wake me up. I FELT LIKE I WAS ON ECSTASY. I couldn’t do my job, I freaked out, my pupils were completely dilated and with the caffeine and sugar I was buzzing like a washing machine on its last spin cycle- an old one that threatens to furiously jutter across the floor as if it has been possessed by some kind of demented demon.  It took me hours to regain my composure. You know that feeling when you’ve drank TOO much coffee? Well, like that but with a mega sugar hit on top. This is not a refreshing, invigorating tonic, this is DRUGS.

So that was then, this is now.

Last week I got a bit cocky and I decided I was going to eat and apple, an APPLE. I knew it was a risk as it was more on the red side than the green side of the scale (higher sugar content) but I am well on my way to being fully healed and I was having a good day and felt I could handle it. I FELT LIKE I WAS ON PILLS FOR THREE HOURS. And not in a good ‘I love you man’ way, but in a ‘shivering in the corner buzzing like a fridge, scared out of my wits’ way. I could not relax, I could not concentrate, I couldn’t even see straight. I had to force an entire can of tuna down my throat and multiple slices of corned beef just to bring myself back onto this PLANET. Sounds absolutely mental right? Well it happened. (If I ever decide to go to go to a techno night again then at least I know that I don’t need drugs or booze, I just need an apple- better only take a half to be safe though) And, this, as nuts as it seems, it is intrinsically connected to my spiritual reasons for eating meat, as I will go on to explain. Brace yourself- it’s about to get PRETTY out there…

Spirit

As much as there is a discrepancy between what the MIND wants and what the BODY wants when it comes to eating meat, we also need to take into account the role our Spirit plays in all of this. Anyone who has been developing a spiritual practice for a while will tell you: we are not our minds: in fact our minds are an adversary, and not an ally. Someone who is a bit further along the path to enlightenment will say: the body is an ally but we are not our bodies either: we are in fact Spirit. We ARE spirit, we HAVE a mind and we are IN a body. Essentially we are spiritual beings having a human experience.So…to bring this knowledge into the topic food- back to sugar: the reality is that when I eat sugar in any form (a badly timed carrot or apple will do it) I vibrate out of control. It is here where the laws of Physics and the mystical laws of the universe join us at the dinner table.

Quantum Physicists argue that the entire universe is one thing: a constantly moving, pulsing, vibrating mass of energy. This includes absolutely everything, yes, even you, and every thing (and every person) vibrates at a slightly different frequency and that is what determines our material state. The lower our vibration the denser we will be in terms of matter. Looking at the food chain: animal flesh vibrates at the lowest frequency, followed by dairy, followed by legumes, followed by root vegetables and grains, followed by plants, and finally fruits carry the highest energetic vibration (as they contain the highest natural sugar content and also they are the most ethical food to eat as they ‘fall’ from the tree and so do not need to be picked, harvested, plucked, chopped, dug up, or killed, in order to be ingested by us.)

Bringing the spiritual dimension in: the mystical laws of the universe state that the entire reason we are on this earth as human beings is to ‘raise our vibration’ the act of which expands our consciousness as we transition away from dense matter towards higher and higher levels of consciousness until we will vibe away as undifferentiated balls of blissed out energy, and return to our ‘original’ state: floating in a universe of pure love, of pure vibration. (I told you it was going to get weird and wacky.)

By this crazy irrational logic then if we wanted to raise our vibration by eating then we would ALL eat the highest vibrational foods possible, right? Shouldn’t we all become fruitarians? Well, maybe in a few thousand years, but right now the collective human body vibrates at far too low an energetic pulse to be able to handle all that sugar– that’s why we’re all so sick, remember?  But, it is no surprise that the traditional monastic diet is completely vegetarian/vegan, and there have always been legends that Tibetan zen masters and yogis subsist purely on air, purely on the positive vibes, man). At the meditation centre I go to to do Vipassana, the diet is strictly vegetarian and if it is your first time then the only food you are permitted to eat after midday is a piece of fruit (if you are a returning student then you eat nothing at all after midday)- and this ALL goes towards helping to raise your vibration- so you can reach higher states of bliss on the meditation cushion as when you raise your vibration you exponentially expand your consciousness towards enlightenment.

And it IS true, when you are dwelling in these environments of extremely high energy you can subsist on next to nothing. Last time I was there working in the kitchen I ate like a bird and was able to do more physical activity than I have since before my illness as I was riding so high on all the positive vibes, I can be a very clear channel for them. But the reality is that the majority of our world right now is very different, and when I left the centre I couldn’t get out of bed for a MONTH and could have eaten an entire cow every single day. I needed to eat the equivalent of a steak and 2 chicken breasts every day for the best part of a month, just to stay conscious, just to keep myself from shaking off this mortal coil.

But again, I ask- if this stuff about the vibrational frequency of food is true then why on earth would anyone eat meat? Surely we should ALL immediately switch to a vegan diet to raise our collective consciousness, and embrace all our animal bretheren in a friendly bear hug so that we can all dissolve into pulsating bubbles of LOVE together?! Well, yes, indeed.

But the truth is that our planet still is a long way off. We’ve still got a lot of work to do. And although many of us are raising our vibrations on a daily basis (meditation is the single most effective way to do this) until the overall vibration of the planet pulsates in harmony with the elevated consciousness of these people who are dedicated to becoming more conscious (the numbers are increasing all the time) then for now, some of these people ironically cannot forego eating meat precisely BECAUSE they are already vibrating at this elevated level of consciousness and until everyone else catches up they need to find ways to bring themselves back down to earth, to be pulled back down by gravitational force, so that they don’t vibe off the face of the planet, as they’ve got work to do. So the hilarious paradox in all this is that right now it is the people who are already operating at this higher vibration that might in fact NEED to eat meat ALL THE MORE as if we want to be able to be in the world (and to help others to raise their vibration) then we need to find ways to anchor, and ‘ground’ ourselves. Mental, huh?

So should you eat meat or not? I cannot even begin to answer that for you, but all I would say is the mantra is: listen to your own body and NOT your mind. And don’t forget your soul and spirit too.

But here are a few pointers: are you by nature an anxious, speedy, sensitive, nervous person who has a tendency to get whipped up into a frenzy and sometimes feels beside themselves or three-feet in front of themselves or three-feet behind themselves? Have you had any strange spiritual type experiences? Have you ever felt out of your body? (do you have an illness such as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome- which is essentially an illness not of the physical body but of the energetic body?) Well then, that might just mean you are vibrating at a pretty damn high frequency and if you are struggling you might be better off following a diet with lower vibrational foods for now.

That is unless your body’s PERFECTLY happy following a vegetarian/vegan diet (in which case you’ve really got it bang on, and you must have UBER self-awareness. Right now it is nigh on impossible for me to rectify my high vibration to a plant based diet at all but I live in hope, and will make transitions if and when my body is ready. My body that is; NOT my mind. Right now I am beginning to try to incorporate full-fat dairy again which will hopefully allow me to ease off on the flesh a bit- wish me luck!)

Or on the other end of the scale do you often feel heavy, sluggish, depressed, listless, like you’re wading through treacle, like this physical existence is all there is? Would you be unlikely to recognise a mystical experience if it came and hit you over the head? Well then maybe you might want to think about eating a diet of higher vibrational foods- becoming a vegetarian or a vegan.

And if you are already vibrating at a higher frequency are you harnessing this to expand your consciousness (and thus that of others and the planet) by meditation or other avenues? And if you are of the latter lower vibration group- are you undertaking consciousness raising activities such as meditation to begin to raise your own vibration so you can become privy to the mystical wonders of the energetic and mystical worlds that lie just outside of our physical bodies? They’re waiting for you.

Ok… I’m aware it’s getting REALLY weird and wacky now, but hey, I said it would.

To finish up I’ll share something another yoga teacher friend of mine said to me a while back: and it was that when people do a lot of work to raise their vibrations there is a risk that they will just ‘zip’ out of their bodies.

My spiritual reason for eating meat is because I am sometimes at risk of that. You know that blissful white light that is commonly talked about by people that have had a near death experience? Well, in my meditation I hang out there every day. It’s just as blissful as they say, btw. And in order to not ‘zip’ out of my body I NEED to undertake many activities to ‘ground’ myself- like hugging trees, standing barefoot on the earth, staying away from the city (for now) and most importantly, eating meat. So I’m going to keep thanking those cows and sheep and hope that as I get my vibration under control I’ll be able to ease off on them a bit, poor dears, as much as they love to be serenaded with little songs, I know it’s nowhere enough to thank them for letting me eat their brothers and sisters. But will I give up the daily white light bliss sessions and lower my vibration? Not a chance, as I know that THIS is where the real spirituality is, and not in our eating habits.

Last thing: did you know that the Dalai Lama, perhaps the most widely acknowledged enlightened man in the world has to eat meat for health reasons? It was this fact that got me thinking so long and hard on this topic. Think about what this man does- he spreads peace, love and higher consciousness TO THE ENTIRE WORLD. He literally cannot subsist on a diet of air (and the odd kumquat) in a monastery somewhere as it is his MISSION to bring these spiritual teachings out into the wider world. And in order to be IN THE WORLD, he needs to eat meat. He meditates every morning for at least 4 hours and his energy field is SO HUGE that even in an absolutely enormous auditorium his positive energy is so palpable that every single one of the thousands of people there can feel it moving through them.

Ultimately what I believe in my heart of hearts and in the very centre of my soul is that as we expand our consciousness, and the vibration of the planet rises, then eventually we will not NEED to eat meat at all as we will ALL be vibrating at a level of consciousness where it will no longer be necessary. Then the cows and pigs, sheep, ducks, and chickens can roam free, and join us in our universal consciousness evolution where we will shift our energy to no longer being 3D but being 4D, 5D, 6D… still existing as infinite consciousness but without the need for a 3D body – and as we all move closer to becoming those vibrating balls of energy and we will, we will…. OK, I think that’s enough crazy for one day. I’m off to eat some protein to calm down.