Sharon Gannon Quotes

Most of the plants grown to be fed to farm animals are heavily saturated with pesticides and herbicides and have been genetically modified, all of which contributes to the pollution and destruction of our environment, which harms us all.

Some people may argue that if the animals are treated humanely prior to being slaughtered, this justifies their confinement and slaughter. Is it ethical to rob beings of their freedom but give them a comfortable prison and provide them with food until they become fat enough to be slaughtered? Any way you look at it, farms are places where animals are kept in preparation to be slaughtered and ultimately eaten as food.

We can't have happiness if we cause others unhappiness.

If you practice Yoga for small, selfish reasons, you will remain the same, bound by your beliefs about what you can and cannot do. Let go and offer your effort to limitless potential. Dedicate yourself to the happiness of all beings.

Each of us, through the actions we take, plant the seeds which will eventually but inevitably grow and create the reality we will find ourselves living in.

Don't try to do this by yourself: to become a good yogi you need a teacher. Find a teacher you can bow to, who can teach you how to be kind - how to serve others - because the key to enlightenment lies in that. Be humble, work hard, study and practice. Chant the Name of God, do japa and meditate, every day.

All living beings are spiritual beings because all of life breathes. Breath is an indication that spirit is present.

What you eat should not just be "good for you" but it should contribute to your happiness - it should make you a happier person.

The way we treat animals is the root cause of all the human suffering in the world, from poverty, starvation, disease, and war to lack of clean air and water, not to mention all the varied forms of human emotional and spiritual suffering.

Human beings are Earthlings and as Earthlings are connected to every other living being on this planet.

Most of the food crops raised in the world today are fed to livestock destined for slaughter for us to eat, and most of the water used is used to raise the food crops that are fed to those animals. It has been estimated that, because of the extraordinary amount of grain it takes to raise food animals, if we reduced the amount of meat we eat by only ten percent, that would free up enough grain to feed all the starving humans in the world. So when we choose to eat meat instead of vegetables, we are choosing to take food away from others who are hungry.

Life begins with an inhale and ends with an exhale. ln between that inhale and that exhale is our life.

To live and breathe with an exclusive focus on one's small self, disconnected from the whole, is the definition of egotism.

What could be more physical than what you eat, where you live, and who you live with? These are all very physical issues.

To find out how much protein you need, take your weight and divide it by three. Rest assured, a whole foods, varied plant-based diet will give you all the protein you need.

You cannot do yoga. Yoga is your natural state. What you can do are yoga exercises, which may reveal to you where you are resisting your natural state.

Compassion is the key to a successful relationship because by means of compassion we can access the innermost needs of the other. When we are aware of those needs, we can begin to communicate and not just profess what we think we know and demand that others change because we want them to.

We ourselves can never be free if we rob others of their freedom.

Worry is a prayer for something you don't want.

Be clear in your mind what you want the outcome of your communication to achieve. If your aim is more than just to vent your anger towards a meat eater and you sincerely want that person to be a kinder more compassionate being, then you must start by seeing them as a kind and compassionate person. If you are unable to see them as kind and compassionate, then how dare you demand them to see themselves that way.

Yoga may have originated in India, where the cow has been revered as sacred for thousands of years, but times have changed since Lord Krishna played his flute for the cows of Vrindavan. There are factory farms in India now.

Animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, use for entertainment or for any exploitative purpose.

To be politically activated is to dare to care about the happiness of others and that is just about the most important activity anyone can be involved in at this time, because it changes a person - it lifts them from normal self-centeredness to a state of other centeredness. That is a good thing because it expands our perception of self. This expansion of consciousness leads to enlightenment, which is the meaning of yoga.

Be a communicator, not a self-righteous proselytizer or preacher. Many people are only concerned with expressing themselves, which isn't necessarily communication.

In fact, studies show that vegans tend to get more iron than meat eaters. Vitamin C from fruits and vegetables increases iron absorption. Meanwhile, dairy products reduce iron absorption significantly.

It's a common myth that athletes and other highly active people need the protein from meat and dairy to fuel their activities and build and repair muscles and other bodily tissues. In fact, there is growing evidence that consumption of too much protein can lead to very serious health issues, including kidney disease, osteoporosis, and cancer. The active body can get all the protein it needs from a diverse, 100% plant-based diet.

Everything we do should contribute to happiness.

What you do to benefit the lives of others will ultimately also benefit you.

Yoga practices shift our identity away from the ego-personality and its struggles so that we can begin to reconnect with the essential nature of our being, which is bliss.

Communication implies communing, having a shared experience with another, not "talking at" or "talking down to" someone.

There are many activities that human beings have been doing "forever." We might argue from that perspective that eating meat should be allowed to continue. Men have been raping women for thousands of years; does that mean that it is normal and should be allowed to continue?

What we do to others will come back to us. You can't expect to be happy by causing unhappiness to others.

I don't miss another opportunity to try to do my best to finish the things I have left undone. I could say: It's my unresolved karma that wakes me up in the morning.

Live with the anticipation that something incredible might happen at any time.

Each asana is like a sound or letter in an alphabet. Every letter in an alphabet produces a unique sound vibration. Each asana vibrates at a specific frequency. When asanas are performed in sequence, beautiful phrases or sutras result, producing a mystical language.

The best we can do is strive to minimize the amount of harm we cause by living. We need to eat in order to live, and there is no moral or ethical code that dictates that we should refrain from eating and allow ourselves to die for some higher purpose.

There are atoms of air in your lungs that were once in the lungs of everyone who has ever lived. In essence, we are breathing (inspiring) one another.

Human population growth is a problem in that most humans consume more than they need. The Earth's resources are now strained to sustain the needs and wants of the human population, which continues to escalate.

Jivamukti Yoga is a path to enlightenment through compassion for all beings. Jivamukti is a Sanskrit word that means to live liberated in joyful, musical harmony with the Earth. The Earth does not belong to us - we belong to the Earth. Let us celebrate our connection to life by not enslaving animals and exploiting the Earth, and attain freedom and happiness for ourselves in the process. For surely, the best way to uplift our own lives is to do all we can to uplift the lives of others. Go vegan!

Fishing is taking a huge toll on the planet's ecosystem. We are emptying the oceans, seas, lakes, and rivers as we fish them dry.

The number of human deaths due to hardening of the arteries and other similar diseases suggests that human beings were not meant to eat animals; our bodies are unable to digest the animal fat effectively and it ends up stored in our blood vessels, not to mention our waist lines, buttocks and thighs!

Lions and other carnivorous animals do eat meat, but that doesn't mean we should. They would die if they didn't eat meat. Human beings, in contrast, choose to eat meat; it isn't a physiological necessity.

We must stop viewing ourselves as separate and disconnected from the rest of life, as if we are a special case and the laws of nature or karma do not apply to us.

As humans, we do get to choose what we eat, and when we choose to eat a plant, we are eating (i.e., harming) just that plant, plus indirectly whatever nutrients that plant consumed over its lifetime (and we are also harming whatever beings may have been living on that plant or who were injured or killed in the harvesting process). But when we eat an animal, we are eating not just that animal, but also indirectly all of the plants and other beings that that animal ate over its lifetime - those plants became the flesh that we eat.

We are so unconscious about our actions that we don't even realize the immense suffering we are causing to animals, the planet, and ourselves.

Milk is for babies. Human beings are the only species that drinks milk into adulthood and besides that we prefer to drink the milk of another species (enslaved cows and goats), and we have come to consider it normal when, it is actually a pretty perverse form of sexual abuse!

If we weren't so dirt-conscious, we would obtain adequate vitamin B12 from soil, air, water, and bacteria, but we meticulously wash and peel our vegetables now - and with good reason, as we can't be sure our soil is not contaminated with pesticides and herbicides.

Today's fishing industry supplies land farms with fish as well. Over fifty percent of the fish caught is fed to livestock on factory farms and "regular" farms. It is an ingredient in the enriched "feed meal" fed to livestock. Farm animals, like cows, who by nature are vegans, are routinely force-fed fish as well as the flesh, blood, and manure of other animals. It may take sixteen pounds of grain to make one pound of beef, but it also takes one hundred pounds of fish to make that one pound of beef.

Human beings have been waging war and destroying the environment for long time. Just because it has been going on for a long time and become an unquestioned habit, does that mean it should be allowed to continue.

If yogis are to come to the realization of the interconnectedness of life, then we must free ourselves from the conditioning that has caused us to think it is all right to exclude all the other animals from our own goals of peace, freedom, and happiness.

Because of our unenlightenment, we do not know that what we do to others we ultimately do to ourselves.

The best way to uplift our own lives is to do all we can to uplift the lives of others.

We have been conditioned, taught, and coerced by the agents of our culture (parents, grandparents, advertisers, food critic, etc.) to eat the flesh and drink the milk of other animals. Because of this conditioning, which has occurred over a long period of time (thousands of years), we have developed addictive eating habits and blinded ourselves to the facts of our biological system and its true needs.

The way you treat others determines the way others treat you; the way others treat you determines the way you see yourself; the way you see yourself determines who you are.

When we have a choice it is always best to choose kindness. Veganism is simply the kinder choice.

Eating vegetables, fruits and grains rarely causes total destruction of the plant or tree on which the food grew; after harvesting, seeds remain to be replanted the next season. But this certainly does not happen when an animal is slaughtered - death is final; that animal will not reproduce again!

Om Schooled is the perfect manual for anyone who wants to start teaching yoga to kids. This is not just a theoretical book - it is a step-by-step manual. Sarah Herrington shares the wisdom she has gained from her day-to-day experiences, for many years, teaching all ages of children yoga in the New York School system.

I passionately feel that as long as we view ourselves as superior and other animals as exploitable our consciousness will remain stuck in a level of ignorance that will disallow a full realization of the truth underlying reality.

The present moment is where eternity exists.

Three things to never leave home without: your keys, birdseed for the birds, and your mala beads to chant through difficulties.

In fact, we are designed anatomically to be vegetarians.

We have become so addicted to our greed-driven habits that we have lost our moral compass and don't know what is right and wrong.

Be confident in yourself, in your abilities, and in your goals. Then go for it.

Some well-to-do parents may say, "I have a right to have as many children as I want because I can take care of them." That may be so, but can the Earth take care of them?

The raising of animals for food and all that it entails is the single most destructive force impacting our planet's fragile ecosystems. Our planet simply cannot sustain the greed of billions of human beings who are eating other animals.

In fact, numerous scientific laboratory tests and field observations have led to the conclusion that animals are conscious, intelligent, emotional beings. They are not machines and truly feel physical pain when it is inflicted upon them. They are capable of experiencing a wide range of emotions, including loneliness, embarrassment, sadness, longing, depression, anxiety, panic, and fear, as well as joy, relief, surprise, happiness, contentment, and peace.

Ethical vegetarians eat only plant-based food in order to show compassion toward animals and other humans and to benefit the planet.

It is true that every being is enjoying life or suffering as a direct result of his or her own past actions. The animals in the factory farms may have been meat-eating human beings in a previous birth; we don't know, and it is not our place to judge.

Cows that are fed organic food are still kept as slaves on farms, regardless of whether it is a large corporate factory farm or a small family farm. Besides, every dairy cow, no matter what she has been fed, has her babies stolen from her shortly after birth and she will inevitably end up in the slaughterhouse.

To meet the huge consumer demand for fish, the industry can no longer rely on hunting wild fish. Now we are doing to fish what was done to wild cows, sheep, goats, chickens, and ducks thousands of years ago: we are confining them in holding pens.

Patanjali tells us that if we practice aparigraha, (greedlessness) we will begin to understand not only where we have come from but where we are going and how our karmas have contributed to where we are now.

The enemy of the spirit is the selfish ego, which thinks that happiness can be gained through causing unhappiness and disharmony to others. In many ancient languages, the word for enemy means "one who falls out of rhythm; one who is not working in harmony with the larger group."

If it were possible to live without causing harm to any living being at all, then indeed we might well choose not to eat carrots or other vegetables. But that is not possible - merely by being alive, we necessarily cause harm to many, many beings: we step on them inadvertently, we breathe them in without noticing, we kill them when we brush our teeth or wash our bodies, etc.

In fact, drinking milk and eating dairy products can rob your body of calcium and contribute to osteoporosis. If you eat dark green leafy vegetables like kale, collards, and mustard greens, you can get enough calcium from a vegan diet.

Inspiration pushes me out of my tight intellectual comfort zone and into humility, the wonderous state of not knowing. From this place of zero, limitless possibilities seem to arise.

Raising crops to feed animals for human consumption requires a lot of land. It takes eight or nine cows a year to feed one average meat eater; each cow eats one acre of green plants, soybeans and corn per year; so it takes eight or nine acres of plants a year to feed one meat eater, compared with only half an acre to feed one vegetarian.

Today "aged" foods like sauerkraut, miso, and tempeh are fermented in hygienically sanitized stainless-steel vats to assure cleanliness, so we can no longer be sure they will provide us with the B12 we need. Vegans should not mess around with this issue.

Don't expect others to change. Instead, take on the project and see if you can become the change you want to see in the world. Try your best to let go of anger, blame and seeing yourself as a victim.

Sunlight is essential to the body's ability to absorb calcium from the food you are eating. Make sure you receive adequate vitamin D every day through sunlight. About fifteen to twenty minutes of sun on the face and hands is usually enough for most of us.

If you want to know if someone is a "spiritual being" ask yourself, "Is he or she breathing?" If the answer is yes, then you know that you are in the presence of a spiritual being.

Try your best not to get distracted from your goal. Let everything you do be your way of getting closer to your enlightenment; never take a vacation from spiritual practice.

Remember that everyone you see and every situation you find yourself in has come from inside of you; you have created your reality by how you have treated others in your past.

We enslave, torture and then slaughter animals to eat them, then when we eventually become sick from that we enslave, torture and kill more animals in laboratories in the hopes of creating drugs to enable us to continue with our animal-abusive lifestyle! Few of us look to the future (i.e., to our parents and grandparents), see the effects of an omnivorous lifestyle, and opt out of it before it makes us sick.

All breathing beings are spiritual; this includes everyone who breathes, whether they are animals or humans, carnivores or vegetarians.

Because we lack sharp claws, aren't very fast on our feet, and aren't exactly endowed with lightning reflexes, it would be very difficult if not impossible for us to run down an animal, catch it with our bare hands, and tear through its fur and skin in order to eat it. Biologically, we are designed to be frugivorous herbivores eating mainly fruits, seeds, roots, and leaves.

If we ourselves want to be free and happy then by enslaving and harming animals we will not be able to achieve our goal.