To be or not to be a vegetarian

I will comment on a recent FB post here:

I'm feeling...compelled to become vegetarian again. But damn! you have to eat so many veggies to get the same calories as meat. I feel like I'm stuffing my face all the time when I abstain. Any advice, vegetarian friends?
Apparently you aren’t the only one having that experience. While traveling in Europe with a group of meat-eaters, each time I ordered my vegetarian entree, my plate of food was so enormous, I had to pass it around for everyone to share. People just assume if you are a vegetarian, you will need a lot of food to feel full after your meal. Watching me enjoy nut cutlets, quiche, moussaka, vegetable lasagna and other beautiful, vegetarian kitchen creations, they all vowed they would travel as vegetarians next time.

My experience has been that after the first week or so of no meat, the body adjusts and your hunger is easily satiated with normal sized meals. You can get plenty of calories from nuts, coconut oil, avocados and, if you aren’t vegan, from dairy and eggs.

But that was my experience. It sounds to me like your body may be telling you something different.

My question is: what is compelling you to want to become a vegetarian? If you feel that it would be the healthiest thing for you to do, then ride out the hunger for a week or two and see how you feel. Maybe there are other motivations to explore as well.

It sounds like you have been vegetarian before. What was that like? Were you able to get enough nourishment and energy from your diet? Why did you go back to eating meat?

What you eat affects every aspect of your yoga practice and your life. That said, food is medicine and everyone may not need the same medicine. Listen closely to your body and don’t be afraid to explore a little.

Are you, or have you ever been vegetarian? What was your motivation and what effect has your diet had on your health?
You can leave your comment at www.smilingyogi.blogspot.com

Change is a given

Shifts Happen. So what do you do about it? Well, you can sit around and worry about what might be, losing sleep and getting more and more uptight and fearful, or you can be fully present in the moment, and marvel at life unfolding.

And if you watch very closely, you’ll notice that the times you suffer most are the times when you are not accepting what is. You are wishing it were different than it is, but it is not different, it is what it is. Once you figure that out and really get it, you can deal more efficiently with anything that happens to you. You will not be wasting time and effort grunting over things you can do nothing about. And when you do make a move, it will be more direct, with fewer attachments to outcome. It is freeing.

It’s not what happens to you but what you do with it, what you make it mean that determines your level of happiness. Zen teacher Cherie Huber used to say people are meaning making machines. Ha ha! Isn’t that the truth!?! Watch yourself as you move through your life, interpreting things. What are your patterns? One way to move beyond your own mental patternings is to say to yourself, “that’s one way of looking at this. Are there other ways?”

Byron Katie has a wonderful way with this practice. She has four simple questions and a turn around for you to use anytime you get lost. On her website www.thework.com she asks "Who would you be without your story?" Whenever you are afraid of the impending changes in our world, ask yourself that question. You can ask, “Who would I be without my money?” Or just fill in the blank with whatever fears you hold onto - “Who would I be without ______?”

My Stuff

Oh my! Where has the week gone? It amazes me how time flies.

In addition to my usual yoga and meditations, I have numerous little disciplines going on in my life now. One is to do a sketch a day in my journal. To be honest, I’ve missed a few days already but I won’t let that stop me from sticking with it. I am doing it as a little meditation, of sorts. I love the one-pointed mind that has to take over in order for these little sketches to happen, and I want to be there more often.

I am focusing my sketches in different ways. In January, and maybe February, I’m drawing my stuff - things that I own, or things that I have around me daily.

Another discipline I’ve added to my day is to play piano. I have a Casio keyboard here and I’ve plugged into all the lessons that come with a macbook, and a few others I’ve found on the internet. The same mind set takes over when I sit down to practice. I think I’ll do a 30 minute practice session and two hours later, I’m looking at the clock in disbelief. Where has the time gone?

I like being in that timeless spacious mind. It feels so light and free, like being a child again. I’ve been out skiing nearly everyday this year, even in the sub-zero temperatures. Actually, it’s ski joring because my little dog is pulling me, sort of. Somedays, he decides we need a break so I take off my skis and lay down in the snowbank on the edge of the forest. Again, instantly, I feel a mind-shift to a much freer, more expansive state. I feel myself open to an entirely more alive and aware state, with less mind chatter and more simple sensations, like a crisp breath of fresh air, the cold hard ground beneath my body, and my face being kissed by snowflakes.

I have started a new page on my website: podcasts. Visit at smilingyogi.com for a meditation podcast. - more to come!

Whose Business?

One of the simplest and most effective things for you to observe is offered by Byron Katie. She asks, “Whose business is this? Is it mine, yours, or God’s?” Only three choices. Simple.


Notice when you are worrying or trying to control another person’s life choices. Do you have your own life in such perfect order that you can also take care of someone else’s?


But there are times when it doesn’t look so black and white. Maybe there are grey areas. Someone once posed the question to Francis Lucille. They said something like “when you are in a relationship, and something is bothering you, how do you know when it’s yours and when it’s theirs?” And the answer came that as long as you have an emotional charge, you have your own issues to tend to.


How do you tend to it? Contemplate and Meditate! Self study and residing in Presence will discharge the ego and bring wisdom.

Let the Body Speak

As an intellectual type on the enneagram, I almost always find my way to understanding through my thinking mind. I intellectualize everything. I’m wired that way. It’s my default approach, my vantage point.

I’m sure that is one reason I was so drawn to yoga in the first place. The respite it provided was palpable. It is refreshing to step out of the mind cubicle and into the fascinating world of the body - my own physicality.

Being in asana is another form of meditation for me. But this morning, this beautiful, sunshiny, cold Sunday morning in January, I consciously turned my awareness to check in with the body and got instant, loud and crystal clear insight on what is needed now, to maintain the balance I’ve been enjoying.

My Lyme symptoms have largely subsided. I only have occasional waves of subtle sensations that act as a reminder for me to pay attention; a reminder that balance isn’t static but ever shifting and adjusting to life circumstances. I love the invitation/reminder to let my body speak for itself and to listen well and take heed.

Courage

What is courage? I recently read somewhere that courage isn’t the lack of fear, rather, it is feeling your fear and being able to move ahead in spite of it. I’ve been playing around with the idea, and attempted to take one courageous move each day this week. I began to notice all the little ways my inner critic had been holding me back, many of them subtle.

Rather than one nameable, measurable action each day, it became more a period of honesty. I am facing the small thinking and an inner critic that has been given too much power in the past. (Mainly because I didn’t really notice how both were yanking my chain.) I am facing them with equanimity and interest and then, as they fall helpless to the floor, (as they do when you stop to notice them) I am stepping calmly, deliberately and boldly over them and getting on with my projects and my life.

Non-harming

I was looking at the yamas and niyamas, and particularly at Ahimsa, non harming. It is the foundation for all the yoga practices. I asked myself: “What do we need to make that happen?”

Self-study is the first thing that jumps out for me because we do stupid things to ourselves and others when we are not paying attention, or basically are not being conscious. We first have to study our own thoughts, actions and intentions, and all of the subtle workings beneath them, before we can see the error of our ways and choose a more nurturing and effective direction.

Then there’s abhyasa (practice = relentlessly returning to awareness) and vairagya (equanimity = entering the whole affair in an open and objective manner, a willingness to expose your own mind workings and trappings for what they are: trappings/mind patterns).

I decided to make an art of asking myself - before I eat, drink, say, or choose things - “who chooses?”
I say art because I don’t want to take all the naturalness and spontaneity out of my actions and become anal about yoga philosophy. I want to use consciousness as a key to greater consciousness. I want to cultivate it like a precious garden... to invite it into my most personal thoughts, intentions and tendencies with trust and openness.

I ask who chooses, as a way of noticing when I am on auto pilot, saying and doing things out of habit or because I’ve been programmed that way. It comes to me from my early studies of Ramana Maharshi whose most basic teaching was to continually ask “who am I?”

Happy New Year

It looks like I’ll be in one place for a while so one goal I have is to get back to my blog. Actually I now have more goals in place than I’ve had in many years. I used to work a lot with goals. Then I noticed that life unfolded in its own way, regardless of my planning so I lived without goals, taking things as they came.

But now I want to play around again, with planning and goal setting. It helps me stay on task and see things through to completion. It also helps me to organize my thoughts and all the many projects I want to work on in the coming year. One of my goals is to do a weekly entry, at the very least, on this blog. There. It’s public. Wish me luck.