When a vegan yogi stops stretching and starts eating meat
Recently I tried to teach quantum mechanics, the big bang and evolution to two Mormons that came to one of our retreats in San Diego, needless to say this wasn’t easy.
I think it’s important as a teacher to share with folks what has worked with me while also leaving plenty of space for people to take what they need and to have their own belief systems and ways of being. I’ve been a vegan yogi for the last ten years but recently I have undergone some pretty big physical and emotional shifts that caused me to reexamine these ways of being that have been such a big part of my lift for so long.
I say often that the only thing I advocate people do every day is have a relationship with themselves so they know what they need and what serves them best. Spoiler alert: I needed to follow my own advice…
Energy creates our physical reality. I love to share the stat that as a physical being you are 99.9999% energy. Energy moves in waves and carries information. When it slows down it creates matter that holds elements of that information. Sound waves, radio waves, Wi-Fi waves, they all carry information that we can transduce when we’ve honed the technology of our body, i.e. our brain and specifically our pineal gland. This is why meditation is a super power!
Lately, I have been bumping into information about eating meat while simultaneously feeling an urge to bring it back into my diet. After being a pretty disciplined vegan and sharing the benefits of a plant based diet with people over the last decade it felt strange and even disingenuous to be getting pulled in this direction. My body has mostly felt great during my vegan years. I’ve been healthy and pretty strong despite some setbacks this last year. Those setbacks actually led to me discontinuing my physical yoga practice. More on that later.
I’ve always advocated for people to experiment with a plant based diet and ultimately decide what works for them. In fact, as a teacher I’ve advocated for people to do that with whatever I teach be it breathwork, meditation, cold plunges, yoga, exercise or self hypnosis. I lay out a buffet of things that have helped me with the advice that we should all seek the modalities and applications that work best for us. I’m actually creating an “Ultimate Morning Routine” program filled with both grounding and activating practices with advice on how to self diagnosis and choose what works best for you each day, coming your way soon!
I was listening to Taylor Sheridan (creator of the show Yellowstone) on the Joe Rogan podcast talk about his ranch down in Texas. He said that when farmers clear a plot of land to till and plant, they decimate everything in their path. Rodents, ground nesting birds, bugs, everything dies. When I went vegan my biggest motivation was the harming of animals. I was in my yoga teacher training and our teacher said that Ahimsa was the most important tenet of being a yogi. Basically, that was the first of the yamas, or ethical behaviors of being a yogi and if you missed that chapter everything else was null and void.
Ahimsa is non-violence towards other beings. Our teacher made us pack only vegan lunches during the training and we couldn’t store anything non-vegan in the fridge. I adopted this way of thinking as my own, especially since he taught me so much (albeit a lot about what worked for him) and carried it for a long time.
In that interview Taylor and Joe talked about hunting and how one animal could feed their families for months on end. One good sized deer or elk could provide up to six months. They argued that if you’re advocating for veganism based on animal rights or welfare that you’re simply valuing one life over another. Dang.
They went on to talk about how there’s also massive inefficiency in growing food, especially in organic food since so much is lost to animals eating the crops and much of it spoils in transit. Their point was, when one animal dies for food most of it makes it to your belly where as plants, unless you’re growing your own, simply have more casualties you don’t see along the way. There’s even a lot of research on plants feeling pain when being harvested. Essentially, whenever we eat, something has to suffer to make it so. It’s part of the circle of life.
My brother works on an organic farm and has for many years. His girlfriend is vegetarian and has gotten him to at least open up to more vegetarian possibilities. In wanting an unbiased opinion that could see both sides, I asked him if what Taylor Sheridan had said was true. He told me that mostly, yes, if we aren’t growing our own food or have access to small local farms our veggies are contributing to a lot of lives lost. He also said that at some point, even on a small friendly family farm, animals are fighting for food too so you either let them take your crops or you have to do something about it.
Was I looking to confirm my newfound / new felt biases? Possibly. So I went on a crusade looking at a lot of the information that was coming out advocating for plant based diets. What I found was that yes, some people most certainly are benefitting from a plant based diet. Also, many of the most radical changes reported were occurring in people who were pretty unhealthy BEFORE making a shift to finally eating fruits and vegetables. I also found tons of literature and testimonials from super fit people who were thriving on animal protein, some who were even eating almost exclusively meat. Have I sustained on a vegan diet, for sure. Have I thrived? I’m not sure.
In that same yoga teacher training I learned a very rigid system of yoga asanas (postures) that became the foundation of my exercise plan and what I would pour my life into teaching for the past ten years. I became pretty flexible, like stick your whole hand under your feet flexible, and I could stand on my head and even do handstands with no formal gymnastics training.
However in the last 18 months every time I would practice yoga I would get a sharp pain in my back. This pain had been there in a dull way over the past few years but now it was becoming a real problem. I began to have sciatic pain down my leg and I was having to take multiple days off between workouts. At its worst, I would have trouble getting out of bed or bending over to tie my shoes. I began doing an elimination diet of sorts, using my body in different ways and then seeing how I felt afterwards. The common denominator was yoga.
I could lift weights, mostly fine, hike, fine, hockey, fine, stretch, oh hell no I’m in pain. How could something so healing be doing so much damage? Well, like anything, too much of even a good thing is not so great. I taught and took a LOT of hot yoga classes over the years and I remember pretty early on wondering, “is this ACTUALLY good for people?” My hunch is that sooner than later you will see some research pointing at the fact that the hot room can feel great (there’s lots of great research on deliberate heat exposure and the myriad of benefits it provides) but that maybe it gives people a false sense of how flexible they really are and shouldn’t be combined with yoga. I once had a conversation with a man from India who said to me “John, do you think they know that in India we do yoga in the shade?”
I suspected that after years of stretching and not balancing with proper strength training, I had literally begun to pull my skeleton out of place. I also suspected that maybe I was having cartilage issues due to some dietary insufficiencies. The cartilage in my sacroiliac joint had finally had enough and was letting me know. I ceased all stretching regimens, literally my favorite go to for my body, and began to employ help and research to heal. I worked with a physical therapist to help find and fix muscle imbalances and put together an intentional weight training program. I actually found a lot of spirituality in weight training (more on that in my next blog!)
It’s probably no surprise that with this new training regimen that my body was craving animal protein and that my own internal energy shift was changing the algorithm for how the world expressed these new practices to me. I didn’t abandon ship on yoga, rather I doubled down on the philosophy and the breathing practices which as it turns out are the most transformational teachings I offer in our retreats and the things I love to teach the most. I was already teaching very little yoga asana and the last studio I was working with didn’t really show a lot of interest in me expanding my role there. In fact when I told them I wanted to step back from teaching full time and offered two weeks' notice they said, “it’s ok, we can actually get your classes covered immediately.” The universe was sending some clear messages, these chapters were over.
My body shifted seamlessly into these new ways of being, I also reincorporated coffee into my regimen after almost 12 years of not drinking it and not offering it on retreats (to the chagrin of many!) Day one I felt like I was on crack but since then have rediscovered that wonderful focus and energy boost that make things like writing this blog or going for a workout oh so much more fun. You can literally find research advocating for coffee and its benefits and others telling you it's terrible for you. This was literally a microcosm of this entire research crusade I was on. Wherever I was looking I was finding, “it depends.”
I’ve actually seen many experts, people who are leaders in the wellness world, back track or even flip flop on their beliefs in recent months. Again I think another wink from the universe. I’ve always said that we are evolutionary beings and that our best method for learning is the scientific method which involves hypothesis and experimentation to derive a conclusion. I think it’s important to always leave the door open to many ways of being and recognize that we are evolutionary beings. I would argue one of our greatest challenges right now as a species is our inability to recognize and accept that other people’s way of seeing and moving through the world is what works for them. I think social media and our lack of real human on human interaction has further exacerbated this issue as folks sit back in judgment of others through a screen rather than sharing ideas and beliefs in constructive dialogues or debates.
It was part of the challenge of trying to share my teachings on quantum mechanics and energy fields to the Mormons on our retreat. Their belief systems were so ingrained they really never opted into the retreat at all. Right from the start they refused to turn in their cell phones to a retreat called “digital detox” and told me they didn’t like that I used curse words. In fact, they went to far as to say it was a sign of lack of intelligence which science tells us is simply not true, in fact the opposite may be true.
Humans are highly adaptable creatures, they can eat seven times a day or not at all, they can get skinny and flexible or big and strong, they can scale high mountains and travel to the depths of the seas. Ultimately who’s best to say what is best for you is you.
The only thing I’ve ever strongly advocated for, the only thing I tell people they should do every day is to have a relationship with themselves. One thing that is clear is that how we think and how we feel creates our state of being. Science shows that how we think about ourselves, our own inner dialogue, is more powerful than any diet or exercise program. In fact, research shows that folks who mentally rehearse exercising achieve many of the same benefits of people who actually exercise! This is to say a different way that the energy of the brain (thought) can literally change matter (muscle). Cortical synchronization occurs when your brain emits brain waves to your muscles as if you are actually doing the activity you are envisioning!
My humble advice? Be kind to yourself and to others as we’re all trying to find our way and do our best. Be open to learning from others and try to remove your judgment of them. Be willing to experiment and play. Be open to the magic of the universe and watch out for the winks.