I read myinnerpath’s entry on hunting, and I thought I’d riff off of it here.

It’s interesting to see where other animal communicators come down on eating animals.  One woman on Penelope Smith’s website states, “I won’t eat anything I can talk to.”

Do you observe any judgement in that statement?  Is there something unsaid that you can sense, (maybe it’s just me.)

Well, for me, this would include more than animals.  I’ve taken some great advice from mature trees, believe it or not.  The can tell you about the environment, they may have insight into human history, once I discovered a bear den after the image popped into my head while talking to a tree. 

I’ve started an interesting exercise – when I select produce to purchase, I hold it in my hand and imagine how it will feel to eat this particular plant.  Sometimes I take dietary advice from my animal or invisible friends, to treat anxiety, digestive or immune issues, or even to raise my vibration in preparation for a marathon reading such as last Saturday.

In Margaret Atwood’s “Edible Woman” the character goes through a phase in her life where she systematically eliminates various things from her diet, and at one point she senses the life force in a carrot and is suddenly unable to eat it.  I think of this often when I juice carrots – for some reason juicing carrots used to remind me of breaking bones and screaming.  I’ve since learned this isn’t coming from the carrots, but perhaps a past life memory.  The carrots are totally cool with nourishing me. 

You can try this too – find yourself drawn to a beautiful piece of produce, even if it’s something you’ve never eaten before.  Hold it.  Ask in your mind how this life form can help your body.  See what pops in. 

I think when making decisions on your diet, you could really benefit from reviewing your relationship with your food.  Your attitude and emotions.  Guilt.  Disgust.  Sadness. 

I have a friend who asked me to talk to her chickens about a pecking order issue within her backyard flock.  It turned out there’d been an upset related to my friend taking the eggs with guilt in her heart.  One hen was trying to hide her eggs and didn’t understand why they kept disappearing.

When my friend changed her attitude and instead showed the hens she was taking the eggs and projected happiness and gratitude when she did take them, it changed the dynamic between the hens themselves.  They all understood that it was their job to provide eggs, and to feel pride when they laid them. 

I’ve enjoyed leaving my body before sleeping and “going along for the ride” with an animal for an hour or so.  It’s an amazing way to learn things about other species, and one of the first things they often show me is how and what they eat.

 A grey whale once showed me how thin he was (this was during the spring migration north).  He then showed me how he would dive, drag his cheek on the ocean floor and swallow up the herring roe.  It’d get the whole experience, the sensation of rubbing my big whale face on the ocean floor, the deep almost desperate sense of hunger, the way the roe glistened like jewels, the gratitude of taking live-giving energy into my starving body.

Animals seem to love telling me about their food.  Once, a Siamese house cat named Tupoc showed me by projecting the full body experience of how wonderful and exciting it is to catch a bird.  He showed me the delightful CRUNCH of strong teeth on soft bone, how the blood flowed warm and the feathers felt delightfully soft.  The bird, a robin, left his body immediately when the cat caught him.  There was no suffering, a simple exchange of energy, a release.

While I was riding along with the old whale, he showed me a time in his previous whale life where his body became very old, and he decided it was time to die.  He swam out to the open ocean and actually called in the orcas, advertising his condition.  The orcas arrived and the grey whale rose out of his body moments before the first bite.  There was this sense of gratitude between the grey whale and the orcas. 

Now, I know orcas, cats and other predators sometimes play with their food in what appears to be a callous manner.  I’ve seen our bald eagles swoop down and rip apart a sea gull for the sheer feral joy of it.  There’s something glorious in this embracement of their predatory nature, and it seems the prey animals immediately go into “shock” (or partially leave their bodies) and don’t take the physical sensations of their body into their soul experience, if that makes sense.

This is so different from the way we kill cows, isn’t it?  Cows are such wonderful animals.  The females are gentle, strong, stoic and so loving.  The males, depending on their testosterone levels, can run the gamut from stoic to explosive, but they’re awesome none the less.

So our culture has recently started raising these animals in immoral conditions, and creates a drawn out trauma of their deaths.  Any animal lover has already educated themselves on these factory farming issues, and I’m sure I don’t ever need to see another PETA video in my whole life, so I won’t go into further detail.

When these are the animals we take into our bodies, how does their life experience affect our physical bodies?  We don’t understand these things yet.  But I wonder how much of our guilt comes from taking in animals who have experienced terrible lives and deaths?  I wonder, on a molecular, quantum-mechanics level, how an animal’s life affects the bodies of the consumer?

This is why I get my back up a bit when people refer to a food as being “suitable for animal feed.”  It’s usually garbage, processed and turned into pellets, then fed to factory farm animals.  Well why on earth would you want to eat an animal that’s been eating a diet of food that isn’t considered suitable for people?  What is that animal’s body composed of anyway??

There’s the unfortunate practicality of whether or not you can afford to eat your ideal diet.  I can’t always afford to buy the free run eggs.  I prefer to get my eggs locally, but they’re not always available.  Sometimes I have to buy $3 chicken horror eggs.  You know what?  Some people can’t even get bread.  I’m sure they’d love my chicken horror eggs.  Sometimes we simply need to survive in this weird world.

Survival may mean living in a city surrounded by smog and tense people, taking in environmental toxins, stress and pesticides on our food.  Sometimes it means eating a lot of kraft dinner, or self-medicating emotion with ice cream. 

I don’t know, I think we’re all just trying to do the best we can with what we have.

I can’t always get organic food.  I can’t always AFFORD organic produce.  But I’m trying, and I’m discovering that when I include a vegetable juice or smoothie in my daily diet, I feel my vibration rise.  I become aware of a cold virus rattling around in my body, even though I’m not symptomatic, and I hear my body’s request for ginger, more carrots, more kale.  These are not things I used to be inclined to eat.

I have these internet friends, beautiful women who currently live in Brazil.  I think we bonded a bit over the blogosphere, because Leigh and her female partner did the same thing at the same time as my Sweetie and I:  we dismantled our city lives, disbursed nearly all of our possessions, moved thousands of miles away and resolved to engage in a different, healthier, more fulfilling life. 

Leigh, author of liveyourbliss was not blogging about being psychic at the time, and neither was I.  She and her partner, Helena, have been raw food vegans for four years.  Their diets have been extremely healthy in comparison to most of ours.

Helena was recently diagnosed with an inoperable tumor.  Conventional medicine could not offer her much hope to live beyond a few years.  She and Leigh decided to go a different way.

So now Leigh and Helena are blogging about their Gersen Adventure.  There’s a great series of videos on you tube called the Gerson Miracle, and I encourage readers to watch these if they’re interested in learning more.  I feel like I’ve learned so much just looking at the Gerson philosophy through the eyes of a psychic, or the lense of a quantum physicist.  The short of it is that cancer has been generally curable for decades.  It’s well documented.  Gersen cancer patients have a survival rate and a CURE rate that far outstrips western methods. 

I tell you, these two women are the reason I started adding organic vegetable juice to my diet recently.  I’m gradually ramping up to a cleanse, and I’ve already noticed improvements after a course of liver-cleansing beet juice drinks.

The point I’m driving at is this:  Our diets express our relationships with food, and ultimately our relationship with the world.  Whether our food includes animals or not, our attitude towards our diets affects our habits which inevitably affect our physical, emotional, psychological and even psychic health.

My diet is starting to change, and I don’t feel like I’m making a real effort to change it.  I’ve been vegetarian, I was vegan for two years, I eliminated sugar and flour for two years after that.  Each diet required an iron will and a good dose of judgmental attitudes about “bad” foods and the people who eat them.

Now I’m moving away from judgment.  I’m coming at nutrition in a different way.  It’s interesting.  It’s easy.  Well, easier than the above mentioned diets.  Maybe I’ll call it the Psychic Diet.  Next new fad, eh?  Ha haa.