Dancing Down the Moon

Ahimsa in the Mirror: Part 2

II: Paradigm Shifts Begin at Home

My personal definition of the Sanskrit term Ahimsa is "dynamic nonviolence."  It is the Green Tara, sitting serenely to receive the pain of the world but with one foot extended, ready to step up and act on her compassion.  It's a form of love that is constantly growing and evolving as our consciousness expands, but a ripple must have an epicenter.  Change may be inspired by an outside stimulus, but it still has to come from the inside or it goes nowhere.

For most of my adult life I have been quietly violent toward myself.  Violence, suffering, and pain are not interchangeable terms; pain is unavoidable in life, but violence usually is, and suffering is often a matter of perspective.  There are some kinds of pain that are in fact good, even necessary--growth is not a comfortable thing (and neither is a tattoo).  I've spent years inflicting both violence and suffering upon myself out of a mistaken belief that I didn't deserve any better.  If I were to direct that same hatred at others that I have toward myself I wouldn't have any friends at all.  As it is, my tendency toward self-directed cruelty has at times leaked out, usually unintentionally, via my acid tongue.  I am slowly--very slowly--teaching myself to mind my words, but as I said, that applies to the things I tell myself as much as others.

Some people cut themselves, some people shoot up heroin, some people have empty unsafe sex.  Some people belittle themselves and cling to abusive or simply negative relationships.  Others do all of the above.

I eat.

I'm always going to be a curvy girl, or at least I hope so.  When I was my happiest in my body around age 16 I was a size 14, which is perfectly respectable whatever the charts and "experts" say.  But when I moved to Austin, I started smothering my emotions and abusing myself with food. 

My weight crept up slowly at first, but after I was assaulted in 2001 a switch seemed to flip inside me and suddenly I wanted nothing more than to disappear.  It's funny how getting fatter and fatter makes you less and less visible to the world; you become a sexless floating blob that is somehow too big to be seen.  I wrapped myself in comforting layers of fat, on the wobbly logic that food couldn't hurt me, wouldn't abandon me, and was always with me.  Things evened out after a while, but every time my depression overcame another medication I started working once again on a long term unconscious plan for slow and secret suicide.

This last year was especially bad.  I put on, and I'm not exaggerating, at least fifty pounds in 2008, topping out at 295.  I gorged on ice cream and pizza almost every day and then lay awake at night waiting for my heart to give out.  I felt like I didn't deserve health and well-being, but should resign myself to diabetes and heart disease because obviously I was too weak and pathetic to do anything about it.  I was a worthless, fat slob, and I would die alone and be found with my face chewed off by my cats, and have to be lifted out the window by a crane.

I wanted to carve off hunks of my flesh with a machete, starting with my enormous belly.  I wanted to be humiliated and insulted, to have the rest of the world affirm how useless I was.  But most of all I wanted to eat--I wanted to fill the gaping hole in my soul with cookies and cheese.  I wanted to eat as much dairy as I could to prove that I was too powerless to be vegan. 

I can't say for certain exactly when the moment came, but I remember quite clearly, in the midst of one of my internal litanies of damnation, stopping long enough for a thunderous voice in my head to shout:

BULLSHIT!

I'd been struggling with the realization that Ahimsa is not something that I can only apply to animals for months; I even got my tattoo with that idea in mind.  It took a long time, however, for that understanding to sink in past the rage and self-abnegation I had built up around myself for years.  The strange thing is that once I finally got it, it was as if the decision had been made already and all I had to do was let it happen.

I started working on my health at New Year's, and it's been almost easy.  For a great many people losing weight is a form of abuse, but for me it's more of a process of letting go.  I've been holding on to so much for so long and most of it was hurtful. I've been terrified that without my fat I would lose my identity, lose the Fat Girl image I've been living behind.  After my thirtieth year, however, I have decided that my identity isn't what I thought it was, and that I have to surrender to something higher than my fear if I want to thrive.

I'm finally letting my body speak without censure or censorship, and my body has said, "Dance, drink water, stop talking shit to the mirror, and stop eating crap."

And my mind replied, "Well...okay, I can do that."

I'm trying to treat myself with patience and love instead of severity, and while I wouldn't say I'm all that good at it just yet, I am getting better.  This past weekend for example I had a bit of a setback in the form of a drunken binge that ended in an all-night prayer to the Porcelain God, because I had a depressive episode and threw all my hard-won health discipline to the wind, but afterward I realized that such destructive behavior is simply not worth it.  Ahimsa toward myself is the only way I can live.  It may take a while to fully embody that practice, but I am determined.

When I wrote The Body Sacred, as with my first book, I felt like I was channeling a voice that came from somewhere beyond me, but I'm starting to think that it was actually my real voice, the one that's been bound and gagged for so long.  The words were true and beautiful, but it took them a while to become more than words to me.  I started the book during an "up" phase of my body/mind relationship that unfortunately didn't last much past the last page.  That loving inner voice wanted me to hear it and understand, to be inspired the way other people were when they read the book. 

What can I say?  I'm a little slow sometimes.  And as stubborn as a grey pubic hair.

Devoting myself to the practice of Ahimsa means so much more than veganism and not calling myself Shamu.  It means that I have to consider all parts of my life part of that practice, and gently but persistently bring all my behaviors in line with that ideal. It's a pretty massive undertaking, but I can already say that just the amount of progress I've made in the last few weeks has taken such a huge weight off my shoulders that I already feel like a different person. I'm looking at the way I treated myself in 2008--or, really, my entire life off and on--and finding myself amazed that I've survived so long, but also feeling an upwelling of empathy for myself for all those years of misery and confusion. It's just so sad to me that I felt that way, that I still struggle against feeling that way, to have hated myself so very much when I absolutely did not deserve that kind of cruelty from anyone.

I hope I never get that lost again.

For now, I'm concentrating on being found...and I have to say that so far it feels pretty wonderful.

Ahimsa in the Mirror, Part One

I: Practice Makes...More Practice

If you are alive, you killed something today.

One of the things that veg*ns hear constantly is the worn-out old argument about the "suffering" of plants; one of the things that veg*n Pagans hear ad nauseum is that everything dies and death is just a natural part of the Circle of Life, Simba, so we might as well take all that bacon with us to the grave.  Some even accuse us of being afraid of death or in denial of the dark side of life.  We kill microorganisms by the million just breathing, we hit bugs with our windshields, and insects and rodents die every day in the course of vegetable farming--even organic farming.

So obviously if you can't be 100% vegan--and you absolutely can't in this world--you shouldn't even try, right?

To me the question is not one of death.  Vegetables die for me at every meal.  Granted, about thirty pounds of plants are required to raise one pound of beef, so if you're worried about vegetable suffering I'd still say veg is the way to minimize that, but still, being alive and taking up space means that something else can't.  Law of physics, you know.  Every morsel I eat is one that another being couldn't.  Just like me getting a job means someone else didn't.  Does that mean I should be unemployed?

Literalism is often used to justify unacceptable behavior.  Look at fundamentalist Christians and homosexuality, or Islamic extremists and...everybody.  Taken literally, the mere concept of veganism, Ahimsa, or even the Wiccan Rede is utterly ridiculous, impossible, and just plain silly.

Great! Let's all give up and pull the wings off flies!

That's why I view Ahimsa as a practice as well as a virtue.  Notice that a lot of worthwhile aims--yoga, Wicca, medicine, tantric sex--are all referrred to as "practices," not "perfects."  Just because you can't go all the way doesn't mean you shouldn't try.  Don't think you can stop eating meat?  Eat one less flesh meal a week.  This doesn't just apply to what you eat, either.  Just because you can't stop worldwide poverty doesn't mean you can't help one person.  It may not seem like much but I guarantee to that one person it was everything.

It may be just a burger to you, but to someone, it was life.

Whether or not it's justifiable to kill and eat animals for food is, to me, unimportant.  We could argue about that all day and get nowhere, just like with any fundamental belief.  But the fact is that our appetites have created a system that causes immeasurable suffering to living things, all kept carefully out of sight, torture and murder performed for us by hit men who have next to no worker's rights and are barely paid a living wage, only to come home and transfer the violence of their employment to their families. This isn't some kind of out of proportion veggie propaganda.  Find any video of a slaughterhouse killing floor or read interviews with workers and you'll see what really goes on behind those faraway walls.  If it were only death meted out by the industry, the numbers would still be outrageous, but the abuses and horrors perpetrated against defenseless animals are inexcusable.  There's simply no reason for it. 

All of this to satisfy our taste--not our needs.  Whatever you think about eating flesh, the fact is, nobody needs a Big Mac.

The irony is that this cruelty is also slowly killing us.  Broccoli isn't the culprit in the rising cost of healthcare and the swelling cancer statistics.  Nobody has a heart attack from eating rice every day.  I would take perverse amusement at this, but really it saddens me that people are able to live with blinders on, when the human race is capable of so much more.

I am working to remove myself from the system of innocent blood spilt over willful amnesia.  I am not perfect and never will be.  I can't guarantee I won't go on a cheese bender one day any more than I can guarantee I won't accidentally hit a butterfly with my car.  I have no idea what life has in store for me, but I can make the solemn and earnest declaration that I am committed to the practice of nonviolence and will do the best I can to minimize the suffering of other beings especially in the name of my desires. 

(Sounds awfully Buddhist of me, doesn't it?  I think Paganism needs a version of the Boddhisattva Vows--of course, that would require a much more organized view of the universe than most Pagans have.)

Next post I'll talk about what it means to commit to nonviolence toward the self.