Lately, I’ve been thinking about the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism and how they relate to my life.
The Four Noble Truths are as follows:
The truth of suffering;
The truth of the cause of suffering;
The truth of the end of suffering;
The truth of the path that frees us from suffering
I’m one of those people who have a history of food addiction, and I was heavy for most of my adult life. After I went to a healthy plant-based diet in the past two years, I have slimmed down a lot. It wasn’t why I made the change. My primary motivation was just to stay out of the hospital. But once I started losing weight, I started feeling so good that I kept on going. Animal products — including dairy — are very heavy in calories. Prior to having a medical emergency which motivated me to go vegan, my partner and I had been getting to know the cows at a local farm and we were thinking of going vegan for the animals.
Since there is so much shame and guilt associated with excess weight, it has been hard for me at times to not judge my past self. It helps to understand how the refined foods industry profits from keeping people addicted. It also helps to understand how trauma works, including ancestral trauma. After my father died less than five years ago, I did a genealogy search on my paternal line. Many of my ancestors died young from conditions related to addictions, including food and alcohol addictions.
I know all this intellectually, but I felt myself feeling guilt and shame about being overweight in the past. I’ve long known that guilt and shame are heightened by the patriarchy. And since going vegan, I’ve developed a theory that excess fat on the body is simply another symptom that things are out of balance.
But feelings run deeper than knowing things intellectually.
So, when I was listening to a talk by the late Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn talking about the “inter-being” of all things, it was extremely helpful to hear that suffering is related to happiness. In this same talk about the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, he also mentions that that suffering helps us realize what the absence of suffering feels like. In other words, I understand how well I feel because I remember how bad I felt. And this includes the suffering of the animals. I feel that I am very lucky that I was able to make the change.
“Happy,” the dairy cow, is crying: another reason to go vegan.
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Janet Mason, author 