When I was a young vegetarian kid, I used to go to other kid’s birthday parties and have to bring my own “vegetarian” food. “You’re eating that? Ew” kids would remark, as I took out my fake meat, lentils, and bean burgers. I felt shame, disgust, embarrassment. I didn’t know it at the time, but I internalized that shame and carried it with me for years.

Flash forward to 30 years later. I’m in a yoga teacher training, and I’m eating real meat. I can sense the other’s judgements through their stares. I can feel a replay of my childhood – “You’re eating that? Ew.”

Welcome to the cult of veganism. Where if you’re in, you’re the living example of a compassionate person who (by dietary choices and their beliefs alone) is saving the planet, and when you’re not in (i.e. you eat meat) you’re responsible for destroying the earth, your body, and you’re pretty much an evil, insane, murderer.

It’s funny how times have changed. I am writing this article to outline my own journey from vegetarian, to vegan, to eating meat, and how I internalized that shame that I experienced growing up and that eventually turned into me “bullying” other people who didn’t eat meat. Finally, my health deteriorated to the point where I was losing my eyebrows and hair – just at the moment that I ended up on a permaculture farm.

Here’s the back story: My parents decided for us to be vegetarian because it was something they practiced under the advice of their guru, Swami Muktananda. I don’t recall being told explicitly why we were vegetarian, but I was definitely raised to believe that meat was “disgusting.” In spite of that, every Christmas my grandmother (who loved me dearly) would sneak me turkey and shrimp on holidays which I would eat up ravenously. Other than those once a year occasions, I grew up on lentils (so many lentils), vegetables, rice, and food that we grew in our garden. I ate everything, except for meat. We didn’t have meat in our home, and I didn’t crave meat because I didn’t really develop a taste for it.

Kids at school treated me as “weird.” I felt ashamed when I had to explain to people “I can’t eat that, I’m vegetarian” when they offered me a piece of pepperoni pizza at school. Also, I was bullied for my race – for being half-Japanese yet also being mistaken for being First Nations in a small Canadian town that is infamously racist. So, I was the weird, vegetarian, bi-racial kid in a small meat-eating and hockey playing Canadian town.

As I moved into my 20’s I never really resolved those wounds of guilt/shame. They then turned into self-hatred, depression, and extremely low self-esteem, which led to having poor boundaries, which led to sexual abuse, and then to attempts by me to cover up all this trauma with drug addiction.

My physical and emotional health completely deteriorated, and around 2012 I experienced a pivotal “awakening” moment – where life around me got so bad that I had nothing to do but pray and ask for help. The invisible forces listened, my prayer was answered; from that moment forward I decided to live — and heal the split between my body, mind, and spirit.

After experimenting with different diets (alkaline, vegetarian, anti-inflammatory, raw food), I eventually decided to commit to being vegan. Not only did I want to commit to it, but I also wanted to make it a part of my identity. The world had changed since my childhood and not only was being vegan way more accessible than it was when I was younger, but it was also the “cool” thing to do. Finally, I could be one of these cool kids for not eating meat! Veganism was a way I could experience this fundamental idea of belonging to a group, a movement, a purpose — which was the opposite of what I experienced when I was ostracized for being the one vegetarian at the table when I was a kid.

Furthermore, I (unconsciously) found veganism to be the perfect outlet for the suppressed anger of my own unhealed wounds. These are wounds which I spiritually bypassed and that I still had to work on — in spite of having an “awakening” experience. Because I never looked at those wounds, I still carried a lot of anger inside of me: anger for the bullying I experienced growing up and anger at the sexual abuse I experienced in my 20’s. I channelled that unexplored anger into “angry activism” where I was convinced that if you didn’t believe and live the same way I did you were basically destroying the planet. I said I was doing it for “the animals that had been silenced,” but the truth was that the anger was already in me waiting for the perfect disguise, the ideal outlet so I could unleash it on other people.

I also wasn’t just angry at other people – I hated myself still. I was so self-critical of myself that it manifested as a form of “orthorexia.” I judged foods as being “clean” and “unclean” which was a manifestation of how I felt about myself being “dirty” deep down inside (often a symptom and a belief that we lock onto when we internalize the experience of shame during sexual abuse). Keep in mind that none of this was apparent to anyone who knew me via my “social media personality” where I mostly shared experiences of bliss, love, etc. I presented a different personality to how I truly was inside because I didn’t even know what was going on within me. I was also hiding from myself.

Eventually, after nine ayahuasca ceremonies in Peru, I ended up with the strong message: “to heal your pain you have to heal your relationship to the earth.” So, I ended up travelling around to different places volunteering and working on farms, convinced that for own survival as a vegan I should really learn how to grow my own food, to become self-sustainable, to walk my talk.

Eventually, I settled into an ecovillage. The people there grew their own food, they emphasized the importance of taking responsibility for our feelings and recognized the importance of us taking care of the land for future generations. Perfect, I thought. I had my own vision on what that would look like: we would all meditate, do yoga, and be vegan.

But what I learned about farming ultimately went the opposite way: it confronted all my beliefs about veganism, and after two years of living on a farm – I couldn’t look away anymore.

Firstly, sure I was vegan, but I noticed that the soil that I was planting food in and eating from definitely wasn’t. The land that grew the organic non-GMO vegetables that I was enjoying was fertile BECAUSE it was being fed the blood, the bones, the manure of animals. So, if I wanted to call myself a vegan – could I be eating something that grew in this soil? Furthermore, with my sensitivity being blasted open from recent ceremonies, I witnessed that every plant that I picked or accidentally stepped when working in the garden also experienced pain when I picked it. There was no way to harvest my food without hurting these plants. I was advised to connect to each plant, to listen to it, and to ask to pick it before I did. I had to examine my relationship with all of life by looking at my own intentions and personal connection to what I was eating.

The animals were embedded into a closed circuit of life. We fed the pigs and the chickens scraps from the chicken that we wouldn’t be eating otherwise, in return, they gave us eggs and meat. The cows which roamed the pastures freely gave us their manure for the soil, they ate the grass in the fields, and also gave us their milk.

Not only that, these animals lived happier lives than most humans I knew. They were raised with the utmost respect and love. I considered that they lived in acknowledgment of this sacred relationship between life and death. I wondered: how did I know if they were “against” being eaten any more than the kale was against being picked?

I dove deeper and started to learn about agriculture. To grow a monocrop of anything (be it carrots, wheat, corn, strawberries) you have to destroy literally everything that is on that land. You have to wipe out all the trees, you have to wipe out all the animals that live in that space, you have to wipe out all the mycelium that the forest uses to communicate to each other, you have to kill all the life there, basically – so that you can put your own fertilized soil and systems on it and grow one crop. Every year, you have to do the same thing, you wipe everything out, and through the tools of modern agriculture, you can create a fake synthesis where new life grows again. This has nothing to do with being “organic” or not either, as organic farming executes the same practices except has to go by specific rules and regulations to get that “organic” stamp. Organic didn’t mean ethical.

Why didn’t I care about that, but I cared about the life of pigs, chickens, cows? Did the raccoons who lived on the land that now grows a mono-crop of strawberries not matter? Did I care more about them than the killing of every tree in a forest that occurs for clearcutting and agriculture?

One of my first days at the Ecovillage I met a First Nations man who told me about his perspective on the sacredness of relationship with our food. He said that his wife was vegan, but he is not. He told a story of how he learned to hunt and he spoke of his techniques on how he did it: how he would engage in a ceremony for the animal the night before, asking it for its life and when he met the deer he was meant to kill to give him signals to present itself to him during the hunt.

The next day, when hunting, he waited a few feet away from this deer he might kill. But first, he asked it for signals. It didn’t run. He asked it to leave if it wasn’t the one, it didn’t. He cried while he watched it take its last breath. He looked it in the eye. He pulled the trigger. It’s not a fun process, he said, it’s a ceremony. One in which a living thing offered it’s life to another.

In spite of learning all this, I remained vegan. It was easier for me as it was my default not to eat meat. It was my “comfort zone.” I went to India and did my yoga teacher training in an all vegetarian town and loved it. I came back with a gut more bloated than it’s ever been, feeling ungrounded, very out-of-body, and weak. I also came back with an expanded mind about the situation. I had never witnessed more abuse against animals than I had in India – maybe they weren’t eating them, but people were hitting cows and the cows were agitated and angry. The relationship was far from a sacred one that I envisioned when I heard tales of India – in my visit, I saw them more treated like a nuisance.

I also took the opportunity in India to look at these traumas where I held a lot of anger, really unpack them and see how they were affecting my life. I did yoga, meditated for hours a day, and used that expanded awareness to dive deep into the shadows I was carrying. I faced all the ways my guilt/shame from unhealed abuse had internalized as abuse against my own body. And after enough prayers, psychological self-work, meditation, and yoga, something shifted. I was beginning to love myself in a profound, embodied way again.

So, no surprise that right after my trip to India, I met the man who is the love of my life (and is now my husband).

A few months later, being back on the farm again, I kept getting the thought – you should try eating meat. It haunted me. Still, I wouldn’t give myself permission. Then, one day when my partner was eating chicken — I just went for it. I ate it as ravenously as I did when I was a child, and it was Christmas dinner, and my grandma was sneaking me it. Listening to my body, I could see it was literally starving for animal protein and had been for many decades.

Still, with all my knowledge of farming, I had to decondition myself from feeling it was “wrong” or bad. I landed on the concept of “loving-kindness” and compassion. It couldn’t be compassionate to eat an animal, a living thing. But why was it compassionate to eat food grown from agriculture on land that killed every animal on it? I could see that there was no possible way to execute this idea of non-violence in the way I “expected” it to look. Life fed on life. Everything alive suffers and has to die. As life that feeds on life, we cause suffering when we eat anything. I had no choice but to honour this cycle by not only facing death, but by seeing it as an essence of life, embracing and honouring it, every day.

Most of all, I could see how I certainly wasn’t demonstrating loving-kindness towards my own body by not giving it what it needs. My doctor told me I had “deathly low iron” for years (in spite of eating the best vegetables, food, supplements money could buy) and yet I continued not to eat the meat that would immediately remedy that.

Now, anyone who has done work on compassion knows that this ability to demonstrate compassion is something that can ONLY arise when you know how to be compassionate towards yourself. You cannot hold the pain, the anger, the sadness of any other human being until you have sat with that side of yourself and held it with awareness, presence, and unconditional love. How could I demonstrate compassion towards others if my own health was suffering because of these beliefs that I inherited? The truth was, I wasn’t. My own self-hatred, self-judgement was manifesting as abuse against my own body by taking a diet that wasn’t working for me. I also projected that internalized rage upon others and used the “justification” that I was doing it for the planet.

I was wrong.

Loving-kindness begins with taking all the parts of ourselves that we hate, that we have left in the cold, and embracing and nurturing them. In this, we become more compassionate to ourselves and through that inner safety we experience in our being it ripples outwards. In this, we can hold greater space for the parts of others that they are not willing to accept as well. This is compassion.

Yes, when anything dies – it is in pain. But can we hold, embrace, honour that cycle of life-death-birth or do we want to shy away from it? It is an essence of life, no matter what we eat.

More importantly, what is the relationship that we have with ourselves in relation to ALL of life? Not just the pigs, cows, chickens — but every single thing around us. The trees, the insects, the sky, every animal and every person that we meet?

After a few months of eating meat, I experienced a lot of changes I was not expecting.

I used to take 5htp for depression quite regularly – I no longer needed that as my depression and anxiety went away. My skin also got colour in it again; my cheeks were flushed. But the most noticeable difference was in my hairline: sometime in my late 20’s my hairline started to change, my thick black hair started to thin, and I brushed it off as the product of ‘ageing.’ That was ridiculous to think that that was supposed to happen to a woman in her late 20’s. However, after only a couple of months of eating meat, my hair started to grow in spaces I didn’t even knew it grew before because it hadn’t grown there in years, my eyebrows filled out again, and my body was in a state of reparation that it hadn’t been in for probably most of my whole life. My digestion also experienced radical changes. I had not been “regular” for years, and I noticed with meat I was going once a day as is recommended. The bloating in my stomach went down considerably. I was digesting food properly again.

Last but not least, I felt more grounded and in my body than ever before. And from this space, I was able to connect with people in a more profound way than I had ever known. I was also able to love deeper than I had ever loved before.

When I was vegan I was anxious, depressed, spacy; now I felt like I finally arrived at my own life and could show up to it again.

Eating meat was an act of compassion for myself. Honouring what my body needed helped me be of greater service to others.

Now I understand that with an article like this, I will be subjected to the hatred of many vegans who are probably dealing with similar things to what I dealt with. This is a note to say: I can feel your pain, of course I can, but that does not mean I will not take it on for you, nor am I doing you any favours if I do. Also, telling me what I did or didn’t do right with veganism isn’t of interest to me because I am not interested in others telling me what I do with my body and/or make assumptions on what I ate or how I lived. The oppression and dictatorship that vegans attempt to instill on others is something that I refuse to engage with because you cannot guilt/shame me any further. I’ve done and conquered that enough within myself.

I am writing this to share my own experience, and I also want to honour that every person’s body is different and there is no “one size fits all approach” to anything in life – INCLUDING and ESPECIALLY with DIET.

The most important message of this is to develop a relationship with your body and learn how to listen to it for it holds all the wisdom you need. No one can tell you what those messages are – it’s up to us to discover that and foster that relationship.

For those who are open to different opinions, I have compiled a list of links and resources that I have been inspired by and whose materials I have referenced above.

Permaculture ends meat-vegan debate, promotes anarchy

Study: White Oak Pastures Beef Reduces Atmospheric Carbon

Veganism I was wrong about veganism. Let them eat meat – but farm it properly

Changes to Dietary Guidelines Needed to Preserve Our Sanity