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Why are you a vegan?

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We eat children and destroy our world in the process, says Gannon.

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Sharon Gannon:

Gannon is a renowned yoga master, instructor and animal rights activist. In 1984, she and her partner David Life created the Jivamukti Yoga Method, which is a path to enlightenment through compassion for all beings. They are pioneers in teaching yoga as spiritual activism/activation. The JY Method emphasizes vinyasa, scriptural study, devotion, prayer, music, chanting and meditation as well as animal rights, veganism, environmentalism and political activism.

Jivamukti's passionate focus on the original meaning of the Sanskrit word "asana" as seat, connection, relationship to the earth is as practical as it is radical at this time of global and consciousness shift. The Jivamukti Yoga Method is taught worldwide at Jivamukti Yoga Schools in NYC, Detroit, Toronto, London, Berlin and Munich. The Jivamukti practice is also available on DVDs Yoga Journal has recognized Gannon and Life, as innovators in Yoga and "The New York Times" says, "Without Jivamukti, yoga in the U.S. would still be the obscure practice of a few."

"Time Magazine" recognized Jivamukti Yoga as one of the nine methods of Hatha Yoga taught in the world today. JY is featured in the acclaimed documentary film: What is Yoga? Sharon is a featured yogini in various books: "Yoga" by Linda Sparrowe, "American Yoga" by Carrie Schneider, "Yogini" by Janice Gates and "Women to Women" by Christina Lessa.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: Why are you a vegan?

Sharon Gannon: For obvious reasons I hope, when you eat animals you are causing them harm. Not only are you causing the animals harm, which goes against the precept of ahimsa, but you’re causing harm to the environment. Ultimately you’re causing harm to yourself and other human beings under a false impression that you’re gaining something for yourself. But the age-old wisdom is that nothing of benefit can ever come to you by causing harm to someone else. It just doesn’t work that way. Whatever we do will eventually but inevitably come back to us. You don’t even have to believe in karma.

If we looked at this practice of eating animals and robbing them of their fluids, their milk, their eggs, we would see in that practice the actual root causes of so many of the things in this world today that we’re trying to find solutions for – war, poverty, global warming. The UN issued a statement not too long ago saying that the waste emissions from confined animals, enslaved animals used for food contributes more to global warming than all the car and truck emissions in the world. That’s significant. This is a significant thing to look at; but we’re so conditioned – and it’s to eat meat and to drink milk – that it’s a physiological addiction that even though we may think that we may have an idea in our head that it might be better to be a vegetarian, we have the bodies of addicts. And so we’ll have to deal with that which is, it’s huge, but it can be done. It can be done.

In fact, I say “vegetarianism”, but I really mean vegetarianism meaning only eat a plant-based diet. Which of course there’s a word for that these days. It’s called “vegan”, and that’s what I really mean. But sometimes that word is very scary to people, so vegetarianism seems more soft.

Sometimes when you say vegetarianism people think that it’s okay to eat fish or drink milk. And well not if you want to enhance this planet. Not if you want to be happy. Not if you want to contribute to a better world. Just the United States we kill 10,000; oh god; 10 billion land animals every year for food. Ten billion.

There are only six billion human beings on the entire planet. So this is just in the United States we’re killing 10 billion land animals. Those are the animals that are in the factory farms. I’m not even counting the animals that are the wild animals that are hunted; just the confined, enslaved animals.

But we’re killing many more sea creatures. And the statistics for individual sea creatures are very hard. It’s estimated 17 billion sea creatures. But usually sea creatures are measured in tonnage, and the statistic for that is 80 million tons of fish and sea creatures. Eighty million tons every year. This is just United States statistics.

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