Are you vegetarian / vegan for spiritual reasons?
A lot of people choose to go vegetarian for spiritual reasons whereas a lot of people simply go vegetarian for the sake of leading a healthier lifestyle. The biggest motivators seems to be spiritual reasons, health or compassion for animals.
David Wolfe calls raw veganism the path of aesthetic enlightenment and also refers to enlightenment the process of getting lighter – I suppose that’s his way as a raw-food author to connect spirituality with raw-food.
Kathy Freshton, who is a spiritual vegan advocate and manged to get Oprah to try out the vegan diet has the following to say about veganism and spirituality:
It doesn’t only make a difference to our own personal health and well-being, but conscious eating means you stay aware of where your food comes from, how the animals are treated and how the environment is affected by the foods that you eat.
If I want to be someone with spiritual integrity, I have to think about the principles that I want to adhere to— compassion, kindness, mercy and the alleviating of suffering when I see it.…I thought, ‘If I want to further myself on my spiritual path, as well as my health path, I need to have more integrity. I need to be conscious about it.’
I recently met with a small group of people and the one woman (who had a bit of German-Russian accent) wanted to know where I get time to squish in the amount of stuff on my schedule as the hours didn’t match up to what she thought was a realistic schedule. So I told her due to being raw-vegan, I don’t need that many hours of sleep a day which means I have a lot more time per day to work. Her response was, “Did you go vegan for spiritual reasons? We unfortunately don’t have a temple here where you can chant and we don’t really make provision for the weird-like-kinda people …”
I burst out in laughter at first thinking it was meant as a joke then realized she was actually serious …
Several times in the past people automatically assumed that I went vegan for spiritual reasons even though my reason for going vegan was purely to increase energy levels and performance in sport.
I suppose people will always have preconceptions if they don’t fully understand something.
