hi Steve,
was it easy transitioning to vegetarian for you?
i grew up with a meat eating family. my dad would take me hunting as a kid. eating meat was a normal thing growing up and was a regular practice. cooking meat with my dad was a bonding experience.
for me attempting to become vegetarian has been a struggle. sometimes i am successful. sometimes, not so much. the environment i am in caters to eating meat as well. i should be able to surpass these things but i have failed time and time again.
the horrors of meat farming should outweigh my shortcomings- i should be able to continue a vegetarian diet. but i'm not sure i've accepted it internally anymore... knowing the horrors that be.
Everyone around me-- my friends and family ate meat. My grandfather used to take me to the stock yards and i remember him chopping the heads of chickens off as a kid. i used to eat steak and potatoes every nite at ponderosa steak house which was across the street from a musical store where i taught instruments. i was quite young at the time. Probably a teen-ager or in my early twenties. i was reading the Self Realization Fellowship Lessons at the time and wanted to meditate more deeper. i remember Paramahansa Yogananda saying that meat makes you restless and consequently it is more difficult to meditate and that it increases the animal desires in us so that desires are much harder to overcome. i immediately decided i was going to b a vegetarian. From that day on i never touched any kind of meat again. I also remember Paramahansa talking about fish-especially bottom feeders-clams, lobsters, snails, shrimp etc. as being a detriment to spiritual unfoldment as well. It took me a couple of years to eliminate fish from my diet but i did this also. There were no vegetarians around me at the time. i just felt that it was necessary to my spiritual life. Later i reflected if i could not chop the heads off animals how could i possibly let someone else do it for me?
i now feel lighter and am not subject to as many mood swings as i had while eating meat and the dark moods that were like dark clouds following me. It looks like mccoy left a wealth of info on this thread. i will have to give it more attention. Hope this helps u Eric. i realized at a very young age that my culture, my friends and my family had very little understanding of what i was trying to do with my life. So their influence was minimal. i took pride in being different because i had a strong hunch i was way ahead of my times. Sometimes we understand that the masses are lost. We have to follow our conscious and the dictates of our intelligence and wisdom. Though we have many flaws of our own in some ways we are called to be leaders. Leaders are often new trend senders. They may be very unpopular in some ways. But history will eventually rectify the blunders of followers.
