When we look
deeply enough, we discover a disturbing force that is fundamental in generating
our dilemmas and crises, a force that is not actually hidden at all, but is
staring up at us every day from our plates! It has been lying undiscovered all
along in the most obvious of places: It is our food.

Photo by: Deus Florida

Honoring our
natural place in the web of life by eating the foods intended for us will plant
seeds of abundance, love, and freedom, whatever our religion may be. Our
prayers for peace will bear fruit when we are living the prayer for peace and,
most importantly, when we offer peace to those who are at our mercy and who
also long for peace and the freedom to live their lives and fulfill their
purposes.

Photo by: FlyDime

Our welfare is
ultimately dependent on the welfare of others. By freeing and encouraging
others we are liberated and encouraged. We can never sever our connection to
all beings, but we can ignore and violate it, planting seeds of tragedy and
suffering.

Photo by: John Talbot

Liberating and
honoring the feminine principle is perhaps the most pressing task in our
culture’s evolution toward peace, sustainability, and spiritual maturity. The
feminine principle, cross-culturally, is concerned fundamentally with
nurturing, receptivity, making connections, intuition, and bringing forth new
life.

Kris Carr's 'Crazy Sexy Life'

Part I: The History of Animal Rights

Part 2: The History of Animal Rights

Kevin Gianni's Health Renegade Show

Why Go Vegan with Madeleine and Will Tuttle?

The
inner feminine is our intuition, our sensitivity, and our ability to sense the
profound interconnectedness of events and beings, and it is vital to peace,
wisdom, joy, intelligence, creativity, and spiritual awakening. With every baby
calf stolen from her mother and killed, with every gallon of milk stolen from
enslaved and broken mothers, with every thrust of the raping sperm gun, with
every egg stolen from a helpless, frantic hen, and with every baby chick killed
or locked for life in a hellish nightmare cage, we kill the sacred feminine
within ourselves.

Photo By: Andrew Hux

Many spiritual
teachers have pointed out that when we harm others, we harm ourselves even more
severely. The hard-heartedness of the killer and exploiter is in itself a
terrible punishment because it is a loss of sensitivity to the beauty and
sacredness of life. That loss may go unrecognized, but the life itself,
armored, violent, and competitive, is lived as a struggle of separateness and
underlying fear, and its relations with others are poisoned.

When we uproot
exclusion and domination from our plates, seeds of compassion can finally
freely blossom, and this process depends primarily on us watering the seeds and
fully contributing our unique journey. We depend on each other, and as we free
the beings we call animals, we will regain our freedom. Loving them, we will
learn to love each other and be fully loved.

Photo by: Cobalt

Within us lie
seeds of awakening and compassion that may be already sprouting. Our individual
journeys of transformation and spiritual evolution call us to question who and
what we’ve been told we and others are, to discover and cultivate the seeds of
insight and clarity within us, and to realize the connections we’ve been taught
to ignore. As we do this and as our web of journeys interweaves within our
culture, cross-fertilizing and planting seeds, we can continue the
transformation that is now well underway, and transcend the obsolete old
paradigm that generates cycles of violence.

Photo By: Sabina Fata

We have all been
born into a herding culture that commodifies animals, and we have all been
affected by the cruelty, violence, and predatory competitiveness that our meals
require and that our culture embodies. We’ve also been taught to be loyal to
our culture and relatively uncritical of it, to disconnect from the monumental
horror we needlessly perpetuate, and to be oblivious to the disastrous effects
this has on every level of our shared and private lives.

Photo by: Shelly Watson