On Compassion and Eating Vegetarian

TLDR: Some miscellaneous reflections on compassion and vegetarianism.

I have been reflecting this year on some of my annual themes, like “what is the meaning of life?”, and “how do I want to live this year?” I’ve also been reading some books on career development and finding meaningful work, which ask questions about what motivates me in both life and work.

One consistent element of my approach to living for the past few years has been an attempt to cultivate more compassion. Today I was doing a guided meditation on self-compassion, and it used a variation of a common loving-kindness mantra:

May I be at ease.

May I be free from suffering.

The motivation of this meditation was to cultivate a compassionate response towards the suffering of others by first practicing a compassionate response towards our own experience.

One reflection I had during this meditation was a connection to why I decided to start eating a vegetarian diet. Twice in the past two weeks I’ve had people ask me about eating vegetarian. In one case it was a coworker asking what made me start eating vegetarian, and another case was my dad asking if I was still eating vegetarian. (I only started in October of last year so it is a reasonable question.) Despite writing about this topic in the past, I still struggle with how to succinctly describe my motivations for eating vegetarian.

During my morning meditation today, it struck me that eating vegetarian is one way I’m attempting to cultivate compassion in my life. I like this answer to the “why vegetarian?” question because I think it does a better job at explaining my motivations, and how they fit into my larger approach to life. It’s probably slightly simpler to say “for animal welfare” or “for the environment”, but those address the “what” more than the “why”. For me, the “why” is because I feel that eating vegetarian is a more compassionate way to eat and engage with my food, and compassion is a guiding principle in my life.

That is all. 🤷‍♂️🙃