For 8 years I was in a relationship with a hardcore vegetarian. During most of this time I did not identify as a vegetarian myself, but I cooked mostly vegetarian food in our house, and I respected and understood my partner’s vegetarianism completely. When he decided to also quit eating eggs, I admit I did some huffing and puffing because that seriously challenged my baking and cooking habits, as well as our sweet ritual of sharing meals in restaurants. But then when it came down to it, I couldn’t bear ever baking cookies that he couldn’t also enjoy, so I always ended up using egg-replacer anyway. See, I understood vegetarianism intellectually. It made a lot of sense to me. But I continued eating a hamburger every now and then when I was out.
Until one Summer when I was biting in a hamburger at a local diner, and all of a sudden it tasted disgusting to me. I was chewing on this meat and something about it just felt wrong. This glob of animal parts was (or plural, were…) raised under horrible circumstances and was (were) killed to become this mediocre dish on my plate. I suddenly felt shame and a disturbing sense of decadence. I was chewing on suffering. I was chewing on pain. And I was allowing that degradation into my body. How is that nourishing? It was in this moment that a shift occurred from understanding vegetarianism intellectually, to feeling it emotionally and spiritually. That’s when I stopped eating meat. I have had a couple of meat dishes since in other people’s homes as a gesture of gratitude for their hospitality, but when I get to choose, I always choose meatless options. When asked, I now identify as vegetarian.
It’s an interesting feeling, because once that shift has occurred – once that light switch flips over – you can’t really go back. You can go from unawareness to awareness, but you can’t go from awareness into unawareness again. That doesn’t work. You could go into denial. And there are a lot of ways in which I am in denial when it comes to the choices I make as a consumer in a capitalist society. Our societies are actually based on systems of complete denial, so it’s particularly easy to go along with that current. In fact, we are constantly stimulated to participate in this system of denial with every step we take in this world. Our supermarkets are neatly presented aisles of denial. Our traveling methods are meticulously streamlined networks of denial. Our wardrobes are eclectic messes of denial. Our electronics are such amazingly convenient apparatuses of denial. We are in the thick of it.
Now, I am not writing this because I am preaching vegetarianism to you. If you caught my drift, the idea is that such preaching is fruitless. My point is that knowing something intellectually will never be enough to generate change. This goes for everything in life. We have reached the absolute end-station of the intellect-train. To prevent this train from driving us all straight off the cliff of existence, we need to hop onto the train of emotional awareness. That means we have to personally and collectively look deep into the abyss of planetary suffering, and begin FEELING our actions on an emotional and energetic level. This is scary work. We have made a real mess of things, and it’s extremely painful to bear witness to that reality. But I believe that we can talk about climate change, and sustainability, and ethics, and racism, and sexism, and everything that’s wrong with our world until the end of time (literally…), yet nothing will ever change until we really FEEL it. That means we have to begin uncovering all the barriers in our lives that prevent us from feeling pain, discomfort, grief, sadness, and sorrow. And from that place, we must connect the dots between our personal and our collective suffering.
Changing behavior on the basis of intellect alone is never going to be enough. Emotionally disconnected action, even towards a righteous goal, will not prevail. We need an uprising of emotional intelligence, of open hearts and spirits feeling passionately into the reality that our intellect presents to us. Don’t get me wrong, the intellect is a neat tool. But like any tool, it has no ethical compass. A hammer can be used to build a home and to smash someone’s skull in. Our intellect can be used to build networks of connection and to methodically orchestrate genocide. If anything is going to change our world for the better, it’s going to be that emotional heart of yours, it’s going to be your capacity to really feel pain, to cry, to love. Cultivating, harnessing, and revering emotional intelligence is going to be the next crucial leap in our evolution. And since we are dangling on the precipice of planetary destruction, I’d say it’s about time.
Yvet Youssef 