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 contribute to the development of our increased sensitivity and consciousness. Often religion teaches practices that neglect or even harm our animal body, believing it to be spiritual. We are awakening to the fact that actions which devalue, oppress and harm the animals on this planet – ourselves included – are not a sign of kindness, spiritual maturity or compassion, but rather a lack of sensitivity and awareness of the internal experiences and sentience of other life forms.

The Theory Behind Alternative Diets

Most of the choices we make throughout the day are a direct result of our conditioning – that is, behavioral training we have received from our parents and the dominant behaviors of the society at large around us. Conditioned behavior is a problem, because it is a collection of actions that are ‘normalized’ simply because the majority of people perform them and send us the message that these actions are socially-acceptable. As we develop our consciousness, we begin to question the activities we have always done, and those that society around us is doing. We begin to examine the actions for the first time, looking at them with fresh eyes. We also begin to notice how those ‘normal’ actions affect other people and other species.

This is usually a major wake-up call, as we begin to see the ways in which self-centered actions override the rights of others to explore their own experiences – we suddenly notice that many of the actions society has normalized are actually causing extreme suffering and harm to other people and other life forms, including the planet. The spiritual exploration of cultivating greater sensitivity and awareness leads us to see the ways in which we cause harm to others, and challenges us to find new ways to meet our own needs that are more considerate towards the lives and experiences of others. This is the theory behind vegetarian, vegan and raw diets.

Imagine how much negativity you introduce into your own body-mind when you participate in the enslavement and killing of an intelligent and emotional species.

If you have the opportunity in your life to visit a commercial 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 – by being deceptively led into a metal chute which leads them onto a slaughterhouse’s kill floor, where they are suddenly shot in the head (free-range and organically-fed animals included) or thrust in front of a machine that tears their throats open and hangs them up to bleed to death (kosher). Seconds later, their stomachs are slit and their guts fall out on the slaughterhouse floor, their heads are cut off and their skin is pulled off with a winch. This is the way in which they die – the truth is kept from you because it is brutal and violent.

We are awakening to the fact that actions which devalue, oppress and harm the animals on this planet – ourselves included – are not a sign of kindness, spiritual maturity or compassion, but rather a lack of sensitivity and awareness of the internal experiences and sentience of other life forms.

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 and die naturally.

When one of these animals is slaughtered, it dies feeling intense emotions of terror and pain. These emotions of fear and horror create an energetic charge that radiates throughout the animal’s body at the time of death. When you consume meat from this animal, you are taking this energetic resonance of pain and fear into your body.

Imagine how much negativity you introduce into your own body and mind when you participate in the enslavement and killing of an intelligent and emotional species. When you consume the flesh 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.

Alternative diets are an attempt to bring our consumption of food into alignment with our developing sensitivity.

This is why many spiritual practitioners over the years have chosen to eliminate meat and animal products from their personal diets. It lightens their hearts because they are not participating in a web of practices that is oppressing other species, and it lightens their own karmic load because they are not feasting on food that carries energetic imprints of pain and fear.

Imagine…

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 developing sensitivity. Organic, Vegetarian, Vegan, and Raw are dietary choices to reduce our negative impact on others. We can choose to reduce the amount of harm we cause to other species and our own animal bodies, and even to support and nourish our bodies and the lives of other species.

Organic products offer us an alternative to the conventional farming model, which deforests massive amounts 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 in order to make the process of killing many animals at a time ‘efficient’;

Over-using the soil by injecting chemical fertilizers rather than allowing the land to be fallow (rest and recuperate);

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.

In contrast, organic choices support:

Smaller farms operated by families and sustainable communities;

Fair wages for farm workers;

Living soil health using composting for probiotics;

Natural farming and permaculture methods which work with the natural landscape rather than alter it;

Non-toxic fertilizers and pest-control methods that retain life force in the food; and,

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 the entire web of harmful practices linked to the raising and slaughtering of animals. It also removes you from participating in the destructive activities of the seafood and fishing industry, which cause devastation to the ocean by:

Damaging reefs with the use of dragnets;

Polluting the ocean with debris from lost lines, nets and plastic buoys that break down and end up in the stomachs of shorebirds;

Harm non-target species such as dolphins, turtles, sharks, whales and seabirds that get inadvertently get caught in nets; and,

Diminish entire species to extinction through overfishing.

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 culturally-normalized pain 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 kills its enzymes which are required for digestion. Cooking food is an unnecessary and unnatural habit developed by the human animal alone which has brought on increased illness in the species. Raw food choices are not just fruits and vegetables, but also include a large variety of superfoods from around the planet including blue-green algae, seaweed, acai, maca, cacao, goji berries, inca berries, roots, herbs and supplements, sea salt, and colloidal and monoatomic elements.

What Can I Do to Improve?

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 lessen the negative impact 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 petroleum-derived 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. Be aware: even conservative scientific institutions are beginning to speak out about the link between animal protein and illness. A diet high in 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, make conscious choices.

More about Jill: www.jillstephaniemorgyn.com