Positive Moods May be the key to Transforming our Lives and our Culture

And yet, all around us, and within us, the joy of being is singing, dancing, and celebrating. We can see and feel it clearly in nature: free-living birds, fish, and other animals are celebrating their lives with gusto and grace. Wherever we look deeply, water flows and speaks, flowers and leaves turn toward the sun and dance in the breezes, and clouds and trees, rain and silent snow, vines, rivers, and mountains all fulfill their place and purpose, unfolding life on this magnificent planet that we share in our ongoing journey around the sun and through the cosmos. This way of seeing, cultivating an open heart and a sense of gratitude for and connectedness with the ongoing blossoming beauty of the larger order, improves with practice. We have not been taught by our cultural programming to see in this way, but rather to see nature and animals as perpetually in conflict, and also as mere resources for our use, far less significant than us, little more than mechanized props in our pressing human dramas. The wonderful and revolutionary news is that with continued practice, we can positively transform our way of seeing and experiencing the world and ourselves, raise our levels of energy and awareness, fall in love with life, and become an unstoppable force for healing, joy, and liberation. All that are required are an inner yearning to waken from the cultural trance, and the willingness to make a conscious effort to do so.

How do we make this effort? We practice. We practice in the exact opposite way we’ve been taught by our culture. This is why vegan living is the foundation of sanity, joy, and positive personal and social transformation. Through its food rituals, our culture has forced us all to practice exclusion, reductionism, the commodification of living beings, and disconnectedness, elitism, predation, and desensitization. With so much practice, as a culture we’re obviously committing ecocide, genocide, and suicide. Vegan living, in contrast, is practicing radical inclusion, resensitization, and consciously awakening to, savoring, respecting, exploring, protecting, and celebrating the interconnectedness of life. Thus, the first and most essential practice in cultivating positive moods is veganism: striving to minimize the cruelty and exploitation we cause others through our actions of body, speech, and mind.

The second practice is deep questioning. This is questioning all of the official stories we hear about the nature of reality that come from official sources, whether those sources are outside us or internalized as inner voices. I suggest questioning the protein story, the calcium story, the human superiority story, the 9-11 story, the various science and religion stories, the many health, money, and gender/sexuality stories, and realize that reality may be very different and far more beautiful and liberating than we’ve been told.

The third practice is quieting our mind. According to researchers, we are thinking about 60,000 thoughts per day—roughly one thought per second, every waking moment. For the average person, 85 percent of these thoughts are negative, and 95 percent are repetitive. It is time we have a vigorous occupy movement for our own minds, and develop the ability to free ourselves from the inner story that revolves around my problems and myself as a fundamentally separate self. As we do this, we can awaken to the realization that what we are is eternal conscious awareness, and that our body and our thoughts are arisings within this awareness that we are, like clouds arise in the sky. Our true nature is the sky, and we are as free, essentially. These are but words until the truth they point to is directly experienced, and this experience is the result of practicing the kindness and deep questioning of vegan living, and allowing our minds to be quiet, shifting our attention from the content of the thoughts to the space within which all thinking arises.

The fourth practice I’ve found to be empowering in creating inner joy is taking time every day to connect meaningfully with nature. For me, being barefoot on the Earth and swimming in natural settings like oceans, lakes, and streams are particularly refreshing and conducive to setting all my cells to singing. The fifth practice is to conscientiously practice cultivating a sense of gratitude. I’ve found this to be hugely beneficial; it seems to go to the roots of the mental disease and trauma that our culture inflicts on us. Depression, anxiety, fear, anger, pride, jealousy, and stress all evaporate in the healing light of gratitude. I believe we can always find reasons to be grateful, and the blessing this brings is inner peace and creative exuberance.

Our mental attitudes frame everything we experience, and these attitudes have often been programmed by our toxic and competitive culture that kills millions of animals daily for food, and enrolls us in this disastrous project. One of the greatest gifts we can give animals, ourselves, our loved ones, and our culture is the effort to dismantle these culturally-mandated attitudes, and learning to reframe situations from the perspective of compassion, joy, and gratitude. I am not in any way recommending becoming unwilling to face the despair and outrage we naturally feel when we awaken to the often hidden cruelty and horror in our world, but allowing ourselves to feel it and move through it. As vegans, we are doing our best to consciously minimize the violence rippling out from our actions and it’s essential that we also practice recognizing and giving thanks for the beauty and grace that are abundantly manifest around us so that our advocacy efforts flow from exuberance and self-confidence, rather than anger and dread.

Systems of oppression thrive when moods are negative and people are shut down in their energy, power, and solidarity, and these oppressive systems must disappear when people are strong and filled with the spirit of gratitude, confidence, joy, and sharing. Please, if you have any further ideas as to how we can constructively improve our moods, share them. Thanks!

 Image Source: Pira7ex/Flickr