To Meat or not to Meat, that is the questionable question....
In my 30th year I embarked on the dietary adventure of a lifetime. I am
an O + blood group person and had followed the blood group diet since my early 20's, eating meat and feeling happy and healthy with it.
But in 2008 with my partner at the time, I started a fully immersive regime of raw vegan eating, vegetable only juicing and hot yoga, punctuated with weekly water fasting. We even threw ourselves into water fasting for two weeks at a time on a regular basis. This was inspired by my first experiences with Plant Medicine from the Amazon as well as a synchronistic meeting with David Wolfe, famed raw food evangelist.
At the time it was hugely transformative and I grew spiritually at an unequivocal level. I felt I had found the ultimate formula! And despite the exasperated concern of family and friends (who threw their hands up in despair at not knowing what to feed me) I ploughed head-first (as I usually do) into a new way of living and being. I looked and felt like a super model! Shiny, skinny and alkalized to perfection.
Daily infrared saunas, wheatgrass enemas, daily wheat grass shots, drinking only distilled water, bentonite clay and psyllium husks, homemade probiotics, super foods, ashwaganda, shatavari, brahmi; hell, you name it we probably did it if it was going to cleanse our colons, upgrade our cells and scrub us out from the inside, catapulting us into our light body amazingness!!! And for some time I was an advocate myself for all things vegan and “green” from cosmetics to cleaning products to travel methods. I chose to ignore the fact that while I fasted I did not get cravings for fresh fruit and vegetables to satiate my hunger – no – I craved roast chicken and racks of lamb.
What I did not count on (as a result of this incredible leap into purity) was the amount of emotional detox I was drawn into at the same time. Being a highly sensitive and emotional being, with a fantastic ability to just function despite the insanity that lay very neatly concealed below my well manicured veneer of resolute positivity, I had 30 years of “depression, sexual abuse, rape, abandonment and self hatred” I had not touched on …. ever!! And so the heaven of my (what I thought at the time) was a twin-flame relationship, crumbled into purgatory, and not until our painful divorce in 2015 was I able to see how all that cleansing and purging had perforated huge holes in our ability to function as a couple later on in our relationship.
Be that as it may, I would not change anything and I have no regrets. Our time together taught us both so much and we left a legacy behind us through touching so many lives with our healing work. However at the time, I could never have imagined the long-term consequences of my diet. And still today, I am paying dearly for not carefully considering the extremes of this approach to my body and health.
It was only in January this year (2017) that I stumbled upon a wonderful alternative doctor who shared with me that taking the contraceptive pill is highly toxic to your body if you are vegetarian or vegan. The pharmaceutical companies use copper in most contraceptive pills to mimic estrogen within the body. And copper can not be detoxed from the body unless there are animal proteins present in the diet, leading to all sorts of health issues later.
So horror of horrors, I had no idea that while I was doing all this incredible detoxing, spiritual development and ethical living, I was allowing my contraceptive pharmaceuticals to funnel themselves deeper and deeper into my tissues to be stored there until the time when I was so exhausted and depleted, that I got really sick in 2014 and my body could no longer cope.
Fast forward to early 2015 when nothing I was trying was working, I decided out of desperation that the only thing I could still try was the GAPs diet to heal what I thought was a leaky gut and terrible digestive issues. Depressed and devastated that I as a healer, could not heal myself, I embarked on yet another crazy journey as (by this time) a mostly vegan-vegetarian. Now I had to handle, prepare and consume only bone broth, knuckle meat, raw eggs and eventually some vegetables in soup for three solid months.
Oh lamentation!! I had so much self judgement and self hatred to work through because of that. How could my body do this to me? Every spiritual practice I was associated with at the time condemned this behaviour.
My lowest point was sitting and watching the Life of Pi movie, whilst drinking my usual bone broth dinner and eating the meat attached to the bone, feeling like one of Lucifer's chosen with tears streaming down my face. It was a difficult time. And yet I realised that with all the intense fasting and deeply detoxing my body for more than 3 solid years from 2009 to 2012 (until my travel schedule caused me to have to stop) with the intention of breaking down the barriers to spiritual evolution, I had broken my body down to the point of snuffing myself out. To the point of almost no return.
After 8 days of feeling mortified while I stared at the death in my dinner bowl, colour started to return to my face. My body started to sing and I felt more alive than I had for the last 3 years (2012 to 2015) of struggling with myself and my principles.
My greatest wish would be that I could live in peace with all living beings. I have a deeply devotional spiritual practice that is very disciplined, sometimes regimented and I'm often very hard on myself. Yet the compassion I have had to find in the depth of my soul for this physical body I inhabit was where my true self love started.
I do still believe that eating a mostly plant based diet is the ideal way to live in harmony with the environment. And so I have had to make peace with the fact that if living this incarnation means that I need to consciously eat meat as medicine and yet sacrifice my ability to end my karmic cycle of suffering out of compassion for myself, then so be it.
How far would I be prepared to go for my beliefs? For my principles? Would I be prepared to die?
I chose rather to forgive myself for not being what I tried to force myself into being.
And so perhaps this is also my journey of moving into sanity, and allowing the final “cleansing” to just be what it is.