I’ve been Vegan since 2012. Just coming up to my 6 year anniversary. It was a great lifestyle change and something that now just feels totally natural. It was a time I got involved with a personal and spiritual development group (which I’m still well involved with). The teachings are mainly Buddhist and Taoist and there is an emphasis on compassionate living. You weren’t pressured to do anything but a lot of people there were vegetarian or vegan and it was seen to be an overall better way to go.

I decided to be vegetarian for a month and to see how it felt. It felt easy and I immediately felt loads lighter in my body when I was running (I’d just joined an off road running group at that time too). It was 6 weeks later I made the transition to being Vegan. It just seemed the obvious next step. My skin immediately felt loads clearer. I think from the impact of consuming dairy I must’ve had an intolerance to.

My world seemed to really change. I felt so much more me. It was as if my whole path of personal growth had just come through to a whole new dimension. It was like a veil had been lifted. There’s a common reference in the Vegan community to the movie the Matrix where Neo can take one of two pills. One of which leads to the real world and the other to stay where he is. It actually felt that dramatic. It was as if before I was just clouded and this was now reality.

In my spiritual development group they often spoke about our true selves being like a pool of water with rocks being taken out as we make progress. This was how it felt. In my spiritual group analogy there is the idea mixed with Buddhist teachings that more vegetarian based diets are more connected to what is seen to be truer selfhood than those with meat. In Buddhist teachings it is seen to be better karma to be vegetarian. I’m not sure exactly what my personal stance is here but I do feel that there is a lot of truth in the idea of cognitive dissonance and the idea that people are not really seeing meat for what it actually is. The idea of the natural connection being lost. Analogies are made of it always being our natural instinct to support and protect animals when we see them in day to day life anywhere other than a plate.

I started to become more disgusted by the thought of eating meat and started to just see a dead animal when I saw it around me. It was powerful and at the same time really quite distressing, it was as if blinkers had been taken off. I actually had a really dark phase for a period of time mixed with feeling really angry with the world. This actually went on for around 8 months. I was working with my usual Counselling mentor and doing all my general back to basics personal development reading I usually did when I was in a bad phase but I wasn’t shaking it and coming through this time. It was really quite difficult. Although the change felt so natural and easy on some level it was clear that the stuff it was bringing up and the actual transformation to newer me was a really big thing to ultimately integrate. I thought of the Psychology idea of the dark night of the soul. Like a real death taking place.

It was after 8 months of being Vegan I moved to a Vegan house. It was actually a real relief. Although my veganism has all calmed down now at the time I found meat around me to be severely distressing. I’ll never forget a strange feeling I had when I lived in Schnapper Rock on a morning I smelled bacon cooking. At first I experienced the part salivating feeling I used to get when I smelled bacon, following this I had images of pigs in factory farms and actually felt physically sick. It was strange to experience both. I do feel this is cognitive dissonance in full effect.

I watched the movie Earthlings (which I will never watch again) showing the whole process of factory farming and words of Paul Mccartney who said ‘If slaughter houses had glass walls everyone would be vegetarian) seemed really resonating. I felt like all my eating meat had just been robotic and conditioned. It was strange to think back on my reputation when I lived in South Korea in early 2000s of having pork barbeques and as someone quoted ‘eating a whole pig every time I went out.’

I remember my birthday in April 2013 and it being a point where I felt like the cloud had lifted and like I was just feeling better and more solid and grounded in my new self and in my new home. It just happened all of a sudden. I spoke with my mentor who said I sounded as good or better than I’d ever seemed. Following that I actually experienced what I’m happy to say was the best year of my life up to that point. I made lots of cool friends in the vegan community and felt like I had a whole new and deeper life in ways. I felt more compassionate and more connected. I really enjoyed eating more than ever too and felt super healthy. I finished my first marathon in 2013 and did it again the year after. I felt the healthiest I’d ever been I think with it going hand in hand with interest in nutrition I hadn’t really had before. When I finished the first marathon I could’ve carried on another 10k I was so obsessed with my diet and the training!! 🙂 I felt amazing.

I attended a protest at one stage against a horrible rodeo which was going on in Auckland. It was totally gross to see what was being done to animals there and the mentality of some of the people there. It was just over a year after becoming Vegan I had my one and only tattoo on my back. I wanted some symbol of that time. It was something I thought I’d probably never do but I started to become really interested in them and the idea of part of your soul on your body. I did it and felt great with it. It’s a sun with 7 rays signifying the 7 chakras. The sun has tonnes of symbolism around birth death and rebirth. In the sun there’s a labyrinth mandala which symbolises the life journey and searching for the best way through. It was done with vegan ink of course 🙂 Some ink incredibly has animal bone char in.

I had strange feelings during this time of chakra opening in my body I read about. As I continue my personal growth I continue my interest in chakras and do think about veganism as being perhaps more spiritual in ways, but I’m not sure of this yet.

I realised later on though how it wasn’t all as rosy as I thought. Whereas I still love being Vegan and can’t imagine ever changing I started to notice things that just didn’t connect with me at all. I blogged a while ago about a really known vegan person called Gary Yeorovsky who was hugely sexist and generally vile in his rhetoric while somewhat revered by members of the community. I started to notice this real sense of militism in it’s following which I felt for me was actually destructive to the whole generally positive idea. I felt like whereas some sort of angry phase is pretty fair and natural that some people don’t really ever leave that. It seems that veganism seems to become some sort of end in itself rather than being a cool thing to do which stabalises into a whole sense of just being oneself. That’s how I grew to see it anyway. There was one point I was practically bullied off a facebook page for giving the mere suggestion that not all people may be able to be vegan.

A good friend of mine who’s interested in Chinese medicine and spirituality said how a journey of personal growth can often start with compassion which ultimately needs to stabalise in other virtues like mindfulness for it all to continue it’s cycle. I couldn’t help but feel that somehow there was a sense of stuckness in some areas of veganism I was witnessing.

These days my veganism is just a cool part of me. It was a great change and I can’t ever imagine changing back. I think it’s a great way of life for anyone seeking to be more compassionate and also can be super healthy if you do it right. I linked a pretty cool book here which in my view is pretty well balanced and helped me on my journey. :). Becoming vegan was a year of my life I will always remember.

https://www.bookdepository.com/Becoming-Vegan-Express-Brenda-Davis/9781570672958?a_aid=philwalker

Yesterday I had an angel alchemy session with my new colleague and friend Lamanda Brown. Check her out online. She is an Angelolgist. It’s very unusual work for me which I’ve found super interesting as I keep up personal development and working to expand my knowledge. At the end of our session she provided me with a statement to work with to keep reflecting on in our lives…

To ask yourself ‘If I loved myself I would…’ I found this really intriguing statement to use for ourselves. As a therapist I work with clients in the area of self compassion constantly. Some people like the recently passed Louise Hay purely worked on self love as the primary essence of her work whereas she got people to look into a mirror and see what they could say about themselves and eventually plant new seeds to foster change.

I feel to ask yourself the question above is a wonderful small trick for the mind. It works by challenging the subconscious which can be geared to a lack of self love. I’ve used it myself in the last few days. In fact even last night it was my reason to delay writing this until today after my hard day of work.

So when you’re thinking about a relationship and whether it’s worth your time or in your general life management just keep asking yourself this question while remembering the more you can get a healthy self love the more you will be operating from your own organismic valuing process and working towards being your best self.

That’s all. Have a pleasant evening everyone

I have experienced, and clients often speak to me about the subtlety of narcissistic abuse. This is part of the evil and the damage it does. It has been referred to and compared to a slow torture like Chinese water torture. A constant subtle eroding of esteem doing more and more damage. People often say how due to the subtlety it is very difficult to speak to anyone (other than a therapist) about it. Telling people could likely elicit responses of ‘this is you’ or ‘don’t worry about it’. It is here that listening to our intuition and following through our emotional process of knowing we are worthy of feeling safe is absolutely vital.

A client once spoke to me about subtle jibes which they made clear to the abuser felt uncomfortable. The perpetrator would always respond by saying that this was a joke. It was easy in this situation for the perpetrator to get political support with this from others. Remember that if you find something uncomfortable you have a right to ask this to stop and for it to be respected, regardless of how someone may ‘objectively’ justify it. It’s all about our feeling reality at the end of the day. This client found the energy drain of this incredible as if part of their soul was constantly being blocked from expression and somehow being taken away from them.

Narcissists’ are masters at ‘looking like’ a good person and ‘appearing’ righteous. My client on the surface lost a lot by following through their own organic process with this. They detached from a lot more supeficial friends but through this experience were able to go through their own amazing process and today while still having some throwback experiences with others live a lifestyle more authentic to the one they ever would have lived has the pattern continued. Today they are wonderfully energised and live a creative life fully on their own terms and walk their own integral path and feel free. They have more in tune dreams and are dedicated to their own growth. This has been perhaps my most exciting case to illustrate this kind of point. They give their permission for me to mention in this very general way btw.

I believe our biggest learnings come from overcoming abuse from Narcissists’. The personal and spiritual development can be absolutely extraordinary. Always notice subtleties and remember this is part of the evil. Scott Peck in ‘People of the lie’ (https://www.bookdepository.com/People-Lie-M-Scott-Peck/9780099728603?a_aid=philwalker) discusses this well. Remember you are only human and you have a right to be you and walk your own path to becoming the best version of yourself.

The DSM 5 is the psychiatric manual which looks at what is pathological in the way of mental health. Pathological mental health is typically when someone is in a cycle of behaviour which is destructive to themselves and/or others. Narcissistic personality disorder which is a particular interest of mine for example obviously hurts and demeans other people. Within this cycle to the perpetrator has a dark shadow which they are lost in and are not able to see the light and integrate their issue.

There is typically not enough in my view wrote about what constitutes healthy mental health. I feel in many respects we are still locked in the lack of sickness model rather than the real moving into the thriving space. I feel there is a huge issue with this being seen as pretentious and too much etc etc but I feel it is of fundamental importance to always be working through into these levels.

Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers and Carl Jung were people who spoke of the fully functioning person, an individuated person and the self- actualiser. There can often be a mistake in seeing such as being narcissistic but this really is a huge mistake. Whereas it certainly involves a toughening up of boundaries and likely rejection of certain things that took place before a person on this path will be someone who’s behaviour is of a helpful and forward moving nature. Someone dedicated to a purpose, feelings of beauty, integrity, connectedness. A narcissistic individual is inflated and seeks to harm whereas someone on the other end of the scale uses themselves to be of service.

Amanda Ferguson in ‘Life works’ speaks of normal mental health as being seemingly more mundane. Someone who is in tune with the beauty while also the suffering in life. Not the same level of emotional fluctuation but a level of balance and constant management. I would agree with this also although would not use the word ‘normal’ since I feel in definition normal can more refer to the mainstream and it is unknown as to if there are more people on the pathological scale or the non-pathological scale.

Ken Wilbers’ integral life practice speaks of the whole being good while doing good idea. His books are wonderful for developing consciousness and also highlighting the huge issue of Boomeritis and this lost spiritual world of postmodern flatland. A real disease to look out for, to manage and to overcome. It’s really important to keep working to get our grip and to keep working to the more conscious and aware scale.