Caring Carnivore

Ahimsa, yoga's moral code of nonharming, tells us we shouldn't eat meat. But what if you're not ready to become a vegetarian: By changing your eating habits, you can become a more caring carnivore.

By Kate Roth

Christine Winters didn't mean to break her vegetarian vow. When she began to practice yoga—on her own with the help of tapes and DVDs—she joyfully accepted ahimsa, the ethical guideline that proscribes yogis from doing harm to any living being. "Because of ahimsa, I decided to give up meat. It made perfect sense to me," says the 30-year-old mother, who also decided to raise her daughter as a vegetarian.Yoga teachers see it all the time. As students open themselvees to the practice, "they are led very naturally to an understanding of do no harm," says author Lynn Ginsburg, who has studied yoga, Buddhist and Hindu philosophies, and vipassana meditation for 20 years, and Sanskrit for a decade. "It's a sneaky little thing that's built into yoga—the more you do it, the deeper it gets into your organic process. And when that happens, it wakes you up. Suddenly, you really do feel compassion for every living being."

Winters came to yoga seven years ago, but she learned about the abuses in the meat business through her volunteer work for EarthSave International and by reading Diet for a New America, by John Robbins, the founder of the organization. It opened her eyes to factory farming—where animals are treated as commodities, and where conditions are so bad for slaughterhouse workers that the U.S. Department of Labor has ranked the job as one of the most dangerous in America. "There was a synergy about my activism and my yoga, Winters says. Ahimsa and vegetarianism became an integral part of my life."

But she hadn't reckoned on the reaction of her loved ones—particularly her grandmother. "She disapproved of my decision to give up meat," Winters says. "Being old school, she didn't understand vegetarianism. She really believed it was dangerous." And since Winters often shared meals with her grandmother, her decision to give up meat caused constant conflict.

Winters persevered, but five years into her practice, she felt exhausted by the angry debates that inevitably ensued when she ate with her grandmother. When she found herself "almost coming to blows" with the older woman, she began to rethink ahimsa. "Here I was, straining to keep myself from screaming hurtful things at my own grandmother," she recalls. "That created a feeling of violence inside me, and that's against ahimsa."

The more she struggled, the further apart she felt from friends and family: How could the nonviolent path have led her to this brink? "There was a real social stigma around being a vegetarian," Winters says. In Bellingham, Washington, where Winters lived (she now lives in Olympia), the vegetarian community was small, and she couldn't figure out how to strike a balance between not eating meat and alienating the people around her. "It just got harder and harder for me to defend myself," she says. "I kept asking, Where do I draw the line? Do I really have to decide between protecting myself from emotional violence, and animals from physical violence? Why am I in this position?"

The Ahimsa Debate

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