Shortly after I decided to become a vegan, I started module two of my training with Bo. Another ten days of training, this time covering assisting, spinal anomalies, the science of yoga, structuring a class, and finished up with an intensive on the Yoga Sutras by Edwin Bryant. Our training is being filmed for use as a future online training. On some days we feel like reality stars, like Jersey Shore Yoga or something. During this module, our camera guys were amazing - quiet, unobtrusive. They looked like camera guys. They sounded like camera guys. One of them was named P.H. I don't know ... I felt like that name was too cool for anyone that wasn't in the film industry.
Filming during a yoga training can be an interesting thing. At times, you find yourself clamming up. Other times, you find yourself running on and on and opening up about things that, well, you might not want out there in the universe with your rights to them signed away forever (or whatever that release said that I signed). One can only hope that editing in teacher training is different than editing in reality shows. I don't think I'll appear to be a drunken, hair-pulling, sex-crazed maniac a la Jersey Shore Yoga, but who knows?
We got through all of the filming, and then Edwin showed up. We had been told that he was a live wire. That no one knew what would happen when Edwin was around, and that we shouldn't give him any chai. It felt sort of like the warnings given to the new Gremlins owners. Bo dropped Edwin off, told us not to give him any chai or get him wet after midnight (that part might not be true), and then took off.
Edwin taught us many things that weekend. And he drank some chai. Most importantly, he taught us what it looks like when someone has a true love for a divine being. Edwin manifests his belief in and love of Isvara in every moment. I haven't met someone that possessed of belief in a long time.
Edwin also spent a lot of time discussing ahimsa. He believes that one cannot be a practicing yogi or yogini while harming others - and that includes eating meat. His fiery speech on the topic shored up my baby step veganism. Not because some guy says he doesn't think I can practice yoga while also eating meat, but because it just feels right for me at this moment in time.
Sometime during Edwin's weekend of Yoga Sutras, sitting out under the trees in the first burst of autumn, listening to his lecture, I recalled wanting to be a vegetarian as far back as when I was a child. I grew up in a hunting family. People killed things and then cut them up and ate them. I would go visit my best friend and cousin, who lived a few yards away through the orange grove my great grandfather owned, and there sometimes was a dead thing hanging from a tree in her yard, face down, neck slit, bleeding into a pan. I ate doves that had been freshly killed. I was served (did I eat it?) possum, rattlesnake, gator, armadillo, venison, and other things. In the South, even vegetables have meat in them. And they taste good.
It wasn't to lash out that I decided I wanted to be a vegetarian, but even as a child, it just felt right. I was friends with the cows that lived in the pasture that bordered our orange grove. They had loving eyes and I watched them for hours tending to each other. They cried when they gave birth. They were playful and joyous and not obviously smart but fun to be around. (Interestingly, they were Brahma cows) When I announced my plan to give up meat to my mother, she said there was no way, that it was too much work, that she didn't have time to feed me differently than the rest of the family. An understandable position. I dropped the idea and didn't even think about it again until my early twenties, when I was so skinny and unhealthy and pale from being a poor recent grad that people often mistook me for a vegetarian. Maybe I even was. We didn't have money for meat. But I dropped it again as I was taken over by a passion for cooking, the Food Network, the slow food movement, local food, humanely raised and slaughtered meats procured from a friendly farmer at the local farmers' market.
Then I got chickens to raise as pets. One of my twins is allergic to animals with fur. We had to get rid of our cats. Dogs were out of the question. If I could raise my own eggs, then I could have harm-free eggs, and the boys could have pets. I fell in love with the chickens. They were sweet. Sure, they'd peck your eyes out (they tried - with my youngest), but they had relationships, what appeared to be feelings (bird feelings, but still). There was a pure joy in watching them peck and scratch through the yard. I even enjoyed the way they would seemingly purposefully dig up my husband's prized plants - not even to eat them, just as if they knew that it would make him fuss at them. Well, now I couldn't eat chicken anymore, either, obviously.
Edwin kept asking us, during his weekend with us, to LOOK at the animals we eat. To get to know them. His point hit home with me and reminded me of a childhood dream that could be realized now that I'm a grownup. Just like those cowboy boots I finally got myself on my last trip to Austin. Oops. I wasn't a vegan then. And now that I own them, I can't get rid of them. That would just be wrong.
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