Category: Global change

What Do Vegans Eat Anyway?

During the years of the Great Shift, our diets are evolving right along with us. Vegetarianism has grown in popularity, for reasons of both health and compassion for animals. I myself have been a vegetarian for 35 years and primarily vegan for about 12 of those years. People often ask me what I eat. Some ask the skeptic’s question “What do you eat for protein?” but others are really curious about what makes up a vegan’s diet. With that in mind, I thought I’d share a sample menu of what I usually eat in a week, with the disclaimer that this is not a recommendation or a framework from any particular dietary regimen. It is what I have come to from years of variations. I change things up whenever I come across exciting new recipes.

I became a vegetarian mainly because of a reluctance to contribute to the suffering and death of animals, but I was also concerned about health issues and sustainability. When I first made the change, I ate lots of eggs and dairy, thinking I needed to have that protein to make up for lack of meat. I soon discovered it was unnecessary because veggies, grains, nuts, etc. provide plenty of protein. In fact, recent studies have found that Americans eat too much protein, which can be detrimental over time. So I cut back on eggs and dairy until finally I dropped them from my diet entirely (except when I can’t access any other vegetarian options while traveling).

Vegetables, fruit, grains, nuts, seeds, tofu, beans, and legumes are the basis of my diet now. I was a raw-food vegan for several years, and my diet is still about 70% raw, but I have added back some cooked meals as well. 99% of the food I eat is organic. I also buy locally grown whenever possible, which is easy in the summers when local farmers markets have flavor-full, nutrient-dense organic vegetables and fruit.

Breakfast: Large fruit & greens smoothie that includes 1 cup coconut water, 1/2 banana, 1/2 orange, 1/2 pear, 1/2 apple, a handful of blueberries & strawberries, 2 romaine lettuce leaves, 2 dinosaur (lacinato) kale leaves (destemmed), a cup or two of spinach, 2 tablespoons ground flax seed, 2 tablespoons flax seed oil, 1 tablespoon chia seeds, 1 teaspoon each raw hemp protein powder and spirulina. Some people might be put off by the greens added here, but they really don’t overpower the fruit, and you can always adjust amounts to personal taste. (Greens are key health foods, especially raw—include them wherever you can.) Hemp, flax, and the other add-ins balance out the sweetness in the fruit and help to give me sustained energy for many hours.

Lunch: Protein smoothie: 1/3 cup almond milk, 2/3 cup coconut water, 1/2 cup frozen blueberries, 1/2 large banana, 8 walnut halves, 1 tablespoon each: raw pumpkin seeds, raw chia seeds, raw hemp protein powder, raw almond butter, flax oil. Blend on high for 1 minute.

Sample Dinners: Every night, I have an oversized bowl of salad that includes 4 or 5 kinds of lettuce, arugula, dandelion greens, watercress, sunflower sprouts, and dulse, with a dressing of olive oil and lemon juice, and ground raw pumpkin seeds mixed in. Main course could be one of the following: 1) raw basil pesto with cooked quinoa pasta; 2) cooked zucchini-mushroom-tomato sauce with crumbled tofu, served over quinoa pasta; 3) sprouted raw wild rice mixed with chopped raw carrots, red pepper, celery, zucchini, dinosaur kale, walnuts, sun-dried tomatoes, olive oil, lemon juice; 4) cooked curried red lentils with brown basmati rice; 5) raw veggie sunburgers with sliced heritage tomatoes; 6) quinoa avocado salad with raw red pepper, scallions, carrots, pumpkin seeds, cilantro, olive oil, lime juice; 7) soups such as raw cucumber-spinach or cooked spicy black bean.

Snacks: Celery with raw tahini or hummus, nuts, fruit.

As I say, this is just a sampler of possibilities. There are dozens of wonderful vegan recipe books available. Ultimately, the idea is to find food and recipes that are enjoyable and fun to eat. Tastes are very individual, but contrary to popular opinion, it is possible to eat vegan food that is both life-enhancing and delicious. Ultimately, you have to love what you eat because that energy is also digested with your food! Bon appetit!

Midpoint 2012: Evolving at the Speed of Light

My experience of the long-prophesied and much-talked-about year 2012 has thus far been beyond anything I could have imagined even six months ago. The prevailing feeling has been of infinite possibility and limitless expansion. I have a heightened sense of my own ongoing transformation, day to day, even minute to minute. What I once considered impossible or unlikely (learning how to dissolve pain or fear) has flowed easily into the realm of my own experience. I am evolving, and it’s happening so fast that I am aware that I am evolving. And I’m not alone.

Forget Charles Darwin—this is super-evolution, 2012 style, and no one gets left behind! It is a collective evolution wherein we are all expanding into the improbable and impossible—into our wildest dreams materializing in physical form. The magnificence of our own divine potential is flowering right before our very eyes. As we evolve, labels, roles, belief systems, and separations of all kinds are falling away. We are becoming our own teachers, healers, and gurus—our own luminous pieces of God consciousness on Earth. We truly are “the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

Recently, I took part in an online interactive chat session and live streaming video with Panache Desai and hundreds of people around the world (many got up in the middle of the night or before dawn to participate). The oneness and love shared, and then transmitted outward from participants to all beings everywhere, was phenomenal. The energetic shift was palpable. During his weekly webcasts, Panache often guides listeners to create these expansive circles of energy and light. Many spiritual groups use healing, prayer, or intention circles on a regular basis, and with the Internet, these kinds of circles grow and their effects increase exponentially. Using technology combined with psychic connection to share/send the energy of love and light brings more and more people into conscious awareness of oneness. Increasingly, individuals are sensing that something greater is possible—a fifth-dimension world based in compassion, sharing, and loving-kindness for all beings. We are beginning to live that truth in our daily lives.

In the midst of tumultuous changes on the planet, we are alchemists, working miracles, one by one and ten thousand by ten thousand. Metaphoric metal is turning to gold. People are throwing aside crutches of all kinds, physical or nonphysical, and walking unassisted into the manifestation of their own visions. Imagination is the magic wand we wave, and spiritual energy creates the new world before us. The mind alone cannot conceive of the wonders yet to come. It is the heart that leads the way. From a place of love, anything is possible. All it takes is belief—in ourselves, individually and collectively, and in the infinite guiding wisdom that holds us in oneness in the cosmos.

Earth is on track for spontaneous evolution into higher consciousness; together, we are creating an en-Light-ened present unlike any time-bound past that has preceded it. We are stepping into magnificence, into living our soul selves in every moment. I feel the truth of this deep in my own heart because I experience it every day. The miraculous is everywhere. Finally, we are one with those miracles, eyes wide open, hearts wide open. It is a time for celebration!

“We are one heart, one love, and one spirit. We are one consciousness expressing itself in 7 billion different ways.”—Panache Desai

New-Earth Day

“A new heaven is the emergence of a transformed state of human consciousness, and a new earth is its reflection in the physical realm.”—Eckhart Tolle

Forty-two years ago, the first Earth Day was celebrated on April 22, 1970. It was the beginning of a long journey back to fully recognizing our planet as our mother, our home. Our energy, our consciousness, and our ultimate destiny are inextricably interwoven with that of Mother Earth. Humans have strayed so far from that awareness, lost in the extremes of separation and denial. Yet, slowly we are making our way back to seeing our oneness—our oneness with all living beings and our oneness with the planet we call home.

Some may look around and see only disaster and suffering—global warming, human destruction of the environment, the callous attitudes of corporate and political leaders. Still, there are ever-widening cracks in the facade of business as usual. People, young and old, are gathering together to bring about life-affirming change, in spite of the forces set against them. People are speaking out against the proliferation of chemicals in the food we eat, against the uncurbed killing of trees for timber, against the unnecessary dependence on fossil fuels for energy, against the loss of habitat and wilderness. Countless groups are working to bring our planet back to full alignment with its blue splendor and green magnificence.

One such group is Trees, Water & People (www.treeswaterpeople.org). Their stated goal is to “improve people’s lives by helping communities to protect, conserve, and manage the natural resources upon which their long-term well-being depends.” Specifically, their work includes a fuel-efficient, forest-saving cookstove program, community-led reforestation projects, a tribal renewable energy program, and watershed health programs. The Organic Consumers Association is another dynamic grass-roots public interest group (http://www.organicconsumers.org). They are concerned with issues of food safety, industrial agriculture, genetic engineering, fair trade, and environmental sustainability. Their over one million members take part in campaigns to urge public officials and politicians to address matters of concern to local and global communities, such as labeling genetically modified foods and stopping the pervasive use of pesticides, herbicides, etc.

Thousands of other groups and millions of individuals are now participating in the co-creation of a new Earth, one in which humans no longer heedlessly destroy the very environment that sustains them. The wisdom of indigenous peoples who have traditionally thought of the impact of their actions upon generations yet to come is finally approaching critical mass in the collective world consciousness. We still have so much yet to do, but looking back over 42 years, what we have achieved together is no small feat.

Celebrate Earth Day this year by buying organic vegetables and fruit at local farmers markets or food coops, taking part in a local tree-planting activity, or asking two or three friends to help you pick up trash in a local park. Attend an Earth Day celebration near your home and learn about all the community activities available to help our planet in small and large ways. You can also visit global online sites such as Earth Day Network (www.earthday.org) and participate in projects like their Billion Acts of Green campaign. Finally—take a few moments to look around with conscious awareness and appreciate the extraordinary beauty of our precious home sweet Earth. Happy New-Earth Day!

 

All You Need Is…

Love. The Beatles sang about it more than 40 years ago, and their message is never more important than today, during this time of a Great Shift in human consciousness. Love that is about universal sister/brotherhood. Love that links all beings in oneness, in unity consciousness. Love that connects us through the heart to something greater than our individual lives. This is the love that hundreds of poets and musicians have written of. Bob Marley sang about it in “One Love, One Heart,” and his son Ziggy carried it forward with “Love Is My Religion.” Tracy Chapman expressed it in “Heaven’s Here on Earth.

Love is the one value that seems to run through all cultures, countries, and religions. Many spiritual leaders and ordinary people have lived their lives in its service. Yet the world has remained divided by wars, violence, and hatred. Why have we failed as a species to hold to this value that we claim to believe in? Perhaps we had to live the extremes of human behavior in order to find our way back home. Perhaps we are evolving, finally, as a people and as a planet, to the point of irrevocably embracing the fact that love is the only real solution. Perhaps the veils are falling away at last so that when we look in one another’s eyes, we see our own reflection.

The truth is we are love at our very core. Layers of life’s hard knocks may have covered it completely, but it’s still present. As we move through the ongoing vibrational shifts on planet Earth, those layers will be peeled away or will fall away on their own. As we face monumental changes and challenges, we will be stripped down to our essence. We will reach out to our fellow beings for comfort, for reassurance; we will reach out in celebration, in joy. We will link arms and hearts in recognition that love is, and always has been, the universal truth of our lives here on Earth. It is why we came here—to embody human love and divine love simultaneously. It is why we are living the extremes of this time of radical change…so that we can finally stand together as one world united in love.

The next generations, too, are being born with the greater truth of love strong within them. Click on this link to see a wonderful children-produced video, “One World, One Heart Beating”: http://youtu.be/kY9HieCkT9c

Playing for Change

Earlier this month, I attended an outstanding concert given by the band Playing for Change. The original Playing for Change was a unique musical gathering, via technology, of individuals all over the world, each simultaneously singing or playing the same song and listening through headphones to the others. Some were street musicians, and all were recorded outdoors. The combined blending of voices, instruments, and diverse cultures was very moving, especially given the lyrics to the song used: “Stand by Me.” This extraordinary musical event was captured in a documentary film and also became famous globally on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Us-TVg40ExM).

After that first long-distance collaboration, Playing for Change recorded other songs with some of the same and also different musicians. The Playing for Change band formed and began to tour the world, often performing benefits to raise funds to build music and art schools in communities that need “inspiration and hope.” They believe that music is a universal language that can unite people from different backgrounds. The group of musicians I saw in concert included two from the original recording, Clarence Bekker from Amsterdam and Grandpa Elliott from New Orleans, as well as others from Africa and the U.S. The musicianship was excellent, the songs diverse and powerful, and the performances literally vibrated with high energy. The entire audience was on their feet singing and dancing for the last few numbers.

Throughout two nonstop hours of music, the message of “playing for change” was conveyed, both in the lyrics and in the musicians’ introductions to songs. The double meaning of the name, Playing for Change, of course, refers both to their commitment to “bringing peace to the world through music” and to musicians who perform their music on street corners or in subways. I’ve always been struck by the power of that name and of the multiple implications for global transformation through music, through play.

The current “Occupy” movement incorporates both of these in flash mob events where large groups perform well-known popular songs, such as Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” and the classic disco tune “I Will Survive,” with cleverly changed lyrics to bring home a message about workers’ rights, economic equality, or social justice. Because the dancing and singing are both playful and hilarious, onlookers often laugh and sing along. Humor and music are both great connectors.

I also think of the larger meaning of playing for change—how we all live our lives, day to day. Are we open to change? Do we make time for play? Do we allow music to open our hearts with compassion and joy? Every time I hear “Stand by Me,” I feel a surge of hope for the world, for the possibility that we can all join hands across cultures, countries, and ideological differences to live a future based in unity and mutual understanding. It feels like an anthem for the times. (Listen at the link above.) I am grateful to groups like Playing for Change who so eloquently and tirelessly bring this message to people everywhere.

Visit the Playing for Change website to learn about them and to hear other wonderful songs: http://playingforchange.com/.