ON NOT BEING A VEGETARIAN

I was talking to a vegetarian yesterday, and for her it was a simple matter of feeling, of opening your heart, and then you really wouldn't want to eat meat.

And I didn't have an argument against it. I was vegetarian in my 20s and 30s. It began briefly before my Buddhist days, and then in a sustained way while I was doing Buddhism. Though because there was a group dynamic at work, meat-eating also acquired elements of taboo.

And then along came Shamanism, an earth-based path that put the life back into me - and eventually, the meat-eating. I felt there was something missing in me that was supplied by meat. And last night I lay awake thinking about this issue, and I realised that I couldn't go back to being vegetarian. My head and heart can provide good reasons for being vegetarian. But on a gut/instinctual level, which takes me right down through my feet and into the earth, I just cannot be vegetarian. I don't exactly know why. It is something to do with having my hands in the entrails of life, to do with doing what people have always naturally done, which is to eat meat.

Maybe it is easier for a lot of women to be vegetarian, because through childbirth they are brought closer to the earth and to a raw experience of life than men are. Sweatlodges are often more of a man thing, because they are the ones who get ungrounded with all their head stuff and warrior thing. 

So I don't know, I'm just speculating. What I have seen in this is each persuasion judging the other, and it's easy to see why. Vegetarians moralising at meat eaters, and meat eaters making fun of vegetarians. But I think it's best to live and let live and trust that people are genuine in what they do.