I’m a yoga teacher, so I get asked a lot if I’m a vegetarian. It should be a pretty simple answer, but it’s not. So here’s the long version, if you’re wondering if vegetarianism is right for you, and whether or not it’s right for me.
I grew up on a cattle ranch. (It won’t be that long of a story, but that’s a pretty essential element, I think.) I grew up eating meat. I thought vegetarianism was weird. I knew exactly zero vegetarians until I went to college, where I met three.
It wasn’t enough to turn me, and I think part of the problem was that I didn’t really know how to cook without meat. I grew up eating meat and potatoes most days of my life. We didn’t do casseroles or quiche or stirfry. We had meat in the form of steak, fried steak, chicken fried steak, or hamburger; we had potatoes in the form of mashed or baked but usually mashed. For a vegetable we had peas, green beans, or corn. The first two I loved. Corn, I still do not eat to this day. Also, it’s not a vegetable, as I know now.
I did my 200-hr yoga teacher training at age 24. We were served a vegetarian cuisine, and I assumed we would be lectured about the merits of vegetarianism.
We were not lectured, and I think that’s where I understood more fully what yoga was about.
Over half-way through the program, vegetarianism hadn’t even come up. When someone finally asked about it (many of my classmates were meat eaters back home), what we were told has always stuck with me: “Keep working on yoga, and yoga will work on you.”
They said not to worry about forcing yourself into becoming a vegetarian. It was a better way, from the perspective of ahimsa (a yoga principle meaning “non-harm”), but they assured us that if we just keep practicing, the things we don’t need in our lives–be it meat, sugar, unhealthy relationships, worry, or whatever–would fall away.
I found it very easy to be without meat for the duration of the program. I didn’t miss it at all.
The first time I ate meat after returning, I was sick for three days.
So I had the knowledge, but I didn’t have the cooking skills. Giving up meat entirely still didn’t seem feasible, especially when mom and dad would load up a cooler of the grass-fed kind for me every time I went home to visit. (This was before living abroad.)
Fast forward a couple of years. My boyfriend said he wanted to go vegetarian for awhile, and I said, no problem, I’m in.
And it was easy. I just didn’t buy, didn’t cook meat. I asked for “no meat” at restaurants. I started exploring recipes and realized I loved to cook, and there were a million delicious meatless options that had nothing to do with potatoes or peas.
I was a devoted vegetarian for more than a year.
I forget now what led me to loosen my personal restrictions. I still prefer a vegetarian diet. But when I go home to visit, it’s a tall order to skip the meat at my family’s table all the time. When I go to someone’s home for dinner, I like being able to eat what’s being served without wondering if it was cooked in bacon grease. I still don’t buy meat, but I go out for sushi.
Does this mean I’ve failed at vegetarianism?
I say, not at all.
I figure I’m about 90% meat free. That’s better than 50%, and much better than 0%. For me. I’m contributing that much less to some really messed up meat-industry practices and giving my body that much more green stuff. For now, I’m really happy with that. It feels good in my body, and it feels good to me emotionally. I’ll keep working on yoga, and maybe yoga will eventually free me from wanting to go have sushi. 🙂
Seems like nowadays we spend a lot of time justifying our eating habits. I just spent a whole post on it. But we really don’t have to. Your all-the-time meat-eating is not offensive to me, any more than my preference for non-meat things should be to you. And I’m not convinced that there aren’t some of us who need meat in their diets more than others. Our bodies are all different and while we can generally agree that vegetables are good and tablespoons of sugar are not, there is still a lot of room for differences in what we consume that still allow us to be healthy.
I don’t think you have to commit to full-on vegetarianism to reap the benefits of cutting back on meat and increasing your vegetable intake. Try one or two meatless days per week and see how they go.
So yes, I am a yogi and a yoga teacher. Yes, I prefer vegetarianism. But yes, I still eat meat sometimes.