Today, we have many people becoming vegetarians for one or more of the following reasons:

• The greatest occurence of cancer cases and other chronic diseases in history.
• A growing concern over the health of our ecosystem.
• A significant number of people are seeking spiritual grounding in response to a rising fear of Armageddon stimulated by an almost constant, worldwide coverage of war and conflict.

I decided to share my opinions on vegetarianism because in my career I have worked with many unhealthy vegetarians. Often my vegetarian patients were in need of animal nutrition yet, for one or more of the above reasons were initially resistant to my suggested inclusion of animal foods for regaining their health. As you can imagine, it is very challenging as a Holistic Health Practitioner when the patient resists coaching yet wants help at the same time! As a health coach, I applaud questions for they are often legitimate attempts to learn and grow. But it is just as important to see that dogmatic resistance retards education and growth.

Does Meat-Eating Impede Spiritual Development? In Part I of this article, I shared many aspects of vegetarianism and meat eating that are commonly missed by experts of all sorts. While there are a plethora of reasons and excuses people give for not eating meat, the most common I hear, and the one that stirs my soul the most, is that eating meat impedes spiritual development. To such a comment, I must respond with a quote from William Shakespeare:

Relationships are essential to life. Even the most radical of introverts – a yogi sitting cross-legged in a secluded mountain cave – is only there because of relationships:

• He could only be here because of his parents’ relationship with each other.
• He could only be there because of a relationship with a teacher.
• He has an essential, unbreakable relationship with the earth, water, air, and the sun, all of which offer sustenance (plant or animal) as a byproduct of these elemental relationships.
• He has a keen drive to realize self and God.
• His self-development is only perceptual “self” development, for each one of us is essentially a cell of a larger organism called humanity. My relationships are your relationships and your relationships are my relationships.

“Why is change so hard?” It may be the most common question I answer for clients. Change in general is easy – change is always happening. But directed change can be tough and this is what we’re really after in personal development – movement towards some goal. So why is directed change so hard? There are a number of reasons, but in this article I want to address the first stumbling block that most people run into – lack of self-knowledge.

Sometimes it can be a real challenge to keep your legacy on track. Success can be scary and human beings have all sorts of ways to self-sabotage. This article focuses on some of the more common roadblocks to reaching your legacy and offers some very simple, effective techniques to avoid those roadblocks and defeat that self-sabotage.

When working with clients, I often tell them that they are a living battery. I’m sure you can feel the truth of this in a metaphorical sense. When you are feeling good from living well, your will always have energy – you will be holding a good charge.

But when I say that we are batteries, I mean this in a very literal sense as well. Consider that each of us maintains an electromagnetic field. As we become run down or progressively unhealthy, our energy field diminishes accordingly. If you allow your energy field to diminish below that of the people around you, you will, by the nature of electrical energy transfer, begin to draw off of them.

The PPS program often takes practitioners into uncharted territory. After all, there’s a lot to learn about being a human! Fortunately we have plenty of time and the Earth is an amazing schoolyard for us to learn and grow. And if current world events are any indication, there are a lot of people with a lot of growing to do. In fact, the vast majority of people are still pretty far down on the developmental process.

This article offers a brief meditation on a simple, but overlooked fact of our being. That simple fact is this - if you can fully accept responsibility for your choices you will become truly human. Accepting responsibility for your choices is the only way to fully unlock all of the potential that is part-and-parcel of being a human.

In this article I want to delve deep into the topics of mind and experience. I’d like to do this by sharing a philosophy that emerges from Chinese Cosmology, because I find that this philosophy has helped my students and clients to more effectively manage their mind. The hope is that this model offers a way of understanding why we perceive the world in the way we do and why we adopt certain attitudes towards the world, thus making it easier to overcome the disempowering habits and perceptions we harbor.

The journey of every P~P~S Practitioner begins with work on themselves. But this is only the beginning of the journey. Once you understand your self and have taken self-management seriously, you’ll realize that the next step in your evolution is to understand your relationships with others in your life. Over the years, I’ve discovered a relatively simple metaphor for understanding relationships and maintaining healthy relations.

The metaphor is the lock and key, and you can learn a great deal about your interactions with others and how to make those interactions with others better contribute to everyone’s growth and happiness with this one simple image. I’d like to explore this metaphor with you today.