You are a living being, part of the incredible species of human beings.
Wow, we are so incredible, not above or below any other species, yet if you look at our variety, the colours, shapes, way we function differently, the resilience, strength, courage, creativity and way some use their intelligence, I type in awe of the uniqueness of us all. I love nothing more than observing people do their thing, interacting, communicating, be who they are in all their successes and failings, learning to be human.
Yet somehow, despite this beauty & wonder, there are so many people out there, bent on fitting each other into little neat boxes, categories, similarities and comfort zones. Stereotypes which silence the uniqueness of our individualised vibrations & not only harm us have a long-term impact on the evolution of humanity. We are born different, we are here to bring what we do, who we are, as unique as that is, to share, impart and lift the vibration of our species if we choose, this is more than the universal chant of Om at the beginning or end of your yoga class.
Now maybe I lost you there somewhere leaning towards a discussion in the science of quantum physics. Let’s make it more user-friendly, we are all connected, all living beings, everything, every one of us. What you do has an impact. What you say, how you say it, how you act, react, behave, it all has an impact. It changes you and it changes others. You may feel powerless at times if you spend too much time watching the news, yet every choice you make creates a ripple across the planet.
We are also one of the most vulnerable species on the planet, as infant’s we cannot survive without appropriate care, safety, security, connectedness. We know from the data & research, without healthy interactions, nutrition and stimulation, our early childhood experiences which lay the foundation for our adult brain health, can reshape our trajectory whether it is a negative or positive experience.
Somewhere around 384-322 B.C., a bit short of 100,000 years ago, a wise guy called Aristotle, regarded as one of histories greatest thinkers, stated ‘Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man’. Not because he was arrogant & thought he had all the answers for raising children, this is before Xbox & education being formulated from textbooks, before music lessons, sports camp & children spending more time in extra-curricular activities than some adults sleep. This suggested that even back then, those first 7 years played a major role in forming the values, beliefs, behaviours and habits we bring into adulthood. What values are you teaching your children?
Somedays I sit on the back porch or with my sunhat over my eyes on the outdoor lounge, breathe in & exhale out the thought that humanity could in many ways be devolving.
At least 108 million people died throughout the wars of the 20th century. In 2015, the World Health Organisation estimates 5.9 million children died from preventable disease and illness, while over half, 56% of all deaths in Africa in the same year stemmed from maternal, perinatal, communicable & nutritional conditions. In 2017, the US Department of Defence cost on war estimated the US government spends $250 million dollars a day, yes I said ‘A DAY’ for the war on terror.
Despite our intelligence, despite evolutionary advances, the incredible work of DNA, of being able to genetically pinpoint molecular changes in life forms; despite technology, scientific advances, the dedication & incredible use of human intelligence, biodiversity on a grand scale is imperilled, species extinction rates are believed to be happening at a rate 1,000 times faster just because we exist, our existence, the ignorance, the disregard is killing our planet. To make matters worse, it is preventable. We are screwing with the health, well-being and longevity of our planet’s survival. Some estimate from 100 – 1,000 per million species each year are forever lost due to climate change and the destruction of species habitats. Mobile phones alone are responsible for this devastation of gorilla forests for the mining of coltan, a tiny little thing needed for mobile phones. I mean, we can recycle our phones, who do you know that recycles their phone? How many phones have you owned already & where did you source it from? We are encouraged to buy the latest trend & all the while undermine the long-term survival of primate species.
I mean even on the vegan forums, people debate why a ‘vegan’ would be against the use of palm oil, it’s not like the oil itself comes from an animal. Hellloooo….Vegan ‘a person who does eat or use animal products’…’using or containing no animal products’. Palm oil or vegetable oil, it has many aliases. You often see palm oil written as ingredients on many shelf products, vegetable oil another word for palm oil. It is widely used in the manufacture of soaps, shampoos, detergents, toothpaste, frozen products, cake mixes, biscuits, in cosmetics and toiletries (nice combination of uses eeewww!), potato chips, chocolate and milk (where some countries add Vitamin A). The cheapest shampoo and conditioner on the supermarket shelves is vegan! Why wouldn’t you choose that!
The surging demand for these products is the catalyst for more palm oil plantations. Massive plantations have sprouted up around the world, palm oil is the 3rd largest export for Indonesia. Malaysia & Indonesia alone make-up 85% of the world’s palm oil supply. In order to create more palm oil plantations, natural rainforest habitats, home to not only Orangutans, many species, is destroyed to make way for more palm oil-laden products on the shelves.
The air pollution from the forest fires alone is having a huge impact on the environment, let alone the long-term impact on biodiversity. Indonesia is the 3rd largest contributor (after China & the USA) to carbon into the atmosphere, impacting on climate change. It is estimated an area of 300 football fields is being cleared every hour. Just to produce palm oil, for all your products, we are losing an estimated 6,000 orangutans each year, as well as 80% already of the environment orangutans, need for survival.
Wouldn’t it make sense now that we know better, we do better? Wouldn’t it make sense to stop all new products coming onto the market from adding palm oil unless it has been produced using sustainable palm oil?
Yet it makes sense given the UN Convention for the Rights of the Child 1989 to do something about the use of child slave labour, the abduction of children from their families, taken across borders to farm the cacao bean. In the last decade or so, the media has publicised the cruel and false claims by chocolate manufacturers about their supplies out of West Africa being fair trade and sourced without child slave labour. As a result, did it change the consumers choice? Just a little, more products were manufactured with locally sourced cacao, yet it hasn’t prevented the largest chocolate manufacturers in the world from becoming more secretive about their ingredients. As a result in 2004, a journalist was allegedly abducted and murdered by the First Lady’s entourage, in 2010 3 journalists were detained after exposing corruption in the trade. Hershey’s, Nestle and Mars are just some of the big name manufacturers who source their cacao from the Ivory Coast.
You are the consumer, you have a choice & you can make a difference.
Lately, you’ve probably heard more about concerns for the world’s bee populations & rightfully so, it’s critical. Let’s hope you have. Whether you have changed your behaviour for palm oil or child slave labour by merely making better choices at the supermarket, I’ll leave that with, you to consider the impact of your choices on human and species suffering. Though take the contribution bees make to the long-term survival of the planet, as the super pollinators of the world, they pollinate 70 of the 100 of the crop species needed to feed 90% of the world’s population.
When we lose bees, we lose the plants they pollinate, we lose the animals that feed off those plants. Without bees, we will have very little to eat. Unless you know something I don’t, the Jetson’s magically appearing wall oven that generated food was just a kids cartoon.
The use of chemicals, pesticides and hormones in food have increased at alarming rates. People have become so busy doing & wanting, that sitting down and weeding the garden, a task that encouraged us outdoors more, physically active and natural mindful, has been replaced with spraying the edges & weeds with toxic chemicals where bees cannot survive. Please don’t use chemicals in your garden.
Pesticides are widely used in farming and for food sources around the world. Whilst the use of DDT – Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, is no longer permitted in Australia on crops, banned in many countries and restricted under the Stockholm Convention by the United Nations in 2001, it is still used in some countries supplying food, diet is identified as it’s major way of entering the body and even detected in the breast milk of mothers who have ingested the foods treated with this pesticide. The organ most affected is the nervous system, with toxicity related to convulsions and cancers. So even though it has now been banned there is still concern it is present due to its lingering impact on the environment. In 2010 a report revealed even after 38 years of it being banned, DDT was still being detected in food in the US.
In February 2009, a study in the US, in Environmental Health Perspectives by Shim, Mylnarek & Wijngaarden, examined closely a look at parental exposure to pesticides at home and their offspring children who were later diagnosed with brain cancer, revealed a significant, higher risk of children developing astrocytomas.
Some years ago I lost my son Ben to an anaplastic astrocytoma in the brain stem. At the time I overhauled the house. I took out all the chemicals, stopped using products for cleaning and washing, anything that I thought could contribute to ill health. I looked at food, we tried natural therapies & used mainstream medicine advances, we gave it everything we had to keep him alive. Sadly he died at 3 years and 4 months of age, before going to school, before making long-term friends, before learning to drive, discover his dreams & then fulfil them.
If I was to learn nothing from this experience his life and death would have merely been a passing of time. I had a choice.
We all have a choice, we can be part of the solution or part of the problem.
We can be changing the world, evolving and improving survival, leaving a legacy of hope for our children or we can be the reason they have so little future to hope for.
When we know better, we have the intelligence to do better. It is a choice.
You make choices every day in the supermarket, you make choices when you vote, elect politicians who support change, advance our communities, this planet.
You make choices when you drive a car, what fuel you use, where you live if you have a garden that attracts bees or destroys habitats. You make choices with the waste you generate. There are 4 ways to part with waste, either burn it, store it/dump it, recycle it or prevention, by not generating waste at all.
Landfill, invented in the 1920’s in the UK, by the 1950’s became the major source of waste management. In many countries, including the US, ocean dumping was commonly used where large barges of waste were taken out to sea & then off-loaded. It is estimated that more than 95% of the solid waste generated each year in the US originates from agriculture, mining and industrial waste.
Can you join the dots here, see why human beings are the largest negatively impacting living species on the planet! If we are so clever, then why is this still happening, how can we be possibly destroying the planet and living species in the process?
I haven’t always been vegan, I haven’t always cared about the environment or taken the time to think more about my choices. For a long time, I went along out of habit, routine, cultural programming, ignorance was kinda bliss and irresponsible at the same time. Saying it is too hard or too costly are just excuses, I made them. Ignorance really wasn’t bliss, it was just ignorance. I’m a single parent on a low income, for a long time I had no income, yet no one could remove my choices, these always remain my own regardless of what events or circumstances occur. I can choose to change direction any time I decide. I am not powerless, I have many choices, I make them every day with what I eat, how I eat, where I source my food, whether I have a garden, how I get around, these are the easy ones.
I can choose what I buy, where I buy and from who I support. I can choose socially responsible business owners, companies who are making an effort, even small, to be the change they want to see. I can choose to support those who are wanting to leave the world a better place than they found it.
For a short while, some years ago I took a break from my usual career, I opened a retail store. It was an idea my daughter and I toyed with for a while, our favourite bohemian labels, products and a store filled with life and colour. I had a choice and I made it.
I decided I would try and source as hard as I could those businesses who in some way were attempting to make a difference. I looked for socially responsible business, for creative individuals who took the time and effort to source sustainable products, to know where in the world they sourced their imports and if they cared about the people behind the communities generating their products. Did they have a care factor?
The ripple impact of this was a karma in our store you could take home for free. With every purchase you created change. You created a vibration, a ripple of energy with your choice. People mattered; people mattered above and beyond profit.
It wasn’t hard at all, it was actually relatively easy. Clothing labels known for their incredible creativity yet manufactured out of buildings utilising solar, with workplace procedures supporting equal and diverse opportunities, family-friendly policies. Footwear companies, making the effort to produce their products in self-made co-ops, providing opportunities for income and community by providing a workplace for women to leave violence, to reduce poverty, to create sustainable long-term change.
I took my experiences as a yoga teacher and brought them into everything I do, still do today, how I live, how I work, how I teach and interact, learn, live, breathe.
We have choices, from the smallest moment of thinking to action, to habits and behaviours. We can create change by making conscious choices to be the difference we are seeking. We can be responsible and never stop learning about being more compassionate, kind, giving and generous to each other or we can be constant takers, impacting on the negative decline of our planet and species survival.
It sounds pretty dire I hear that, yet this is our reality there is nothing warm and fuzzy about cancer, about preventable disease about the death and destruction of thousands of species each year. Our children, my children are predicted as the least resilient of all children of all time. How did we get there? Don’t you want to know and then how we can do something about it? Yet despite this prediction, this group of Millenials appear, to give a damn about the big picture stuff more than any other generation.
Young children in Australia are more likely to take their own lives than die in a car accident. Nearly 3,000 people take their lives in Australia each year. Suicide is the leading cause of death for young men 15-24 in Australia. No, it’s not just those in service roles, it is our children! They are the largest group to take their own lives each year and with the least amount of funding to prevent and educate young people, to support young people in homelessness, to live in safe, nurturing and healthy environments.
You can make a difference. We can all make a difference.
You have a voice, use it.
You have choices, make them wisely.
None of us will be getting out of here alive.
So why not use the time we have to leave the world a better place?
To create a planet that becomes a legacy of hope and enriches the lives beyond our own.
Every day, your first step, breath, choice, you can make a difference.
Where you buy, what you buy, how you spend your money.
You can demand through your buying power businesses make better choices that reduce their negative footprint on the planet.
Yes, it takes more effort, yes it can be time-consuming at present. That’s because it requires a complete cultural shift of consciousness for some folk, it means flipping everything they’ve known and accepted upside down. Yet, it can be done and millions are making better choices.
If the data is on point, 10 years ago in the UK 150,000 chose a vegan lifestyle, that figure today is nearly 600,000. There has been 185% increase in vegan products. In October 2017, New Zealand media reported the demand for vegan products was so high, supply was unable to meet demand. Vegan businesses are making record profits, doubling on the previous year. A pole in 2016 in NZ revealed 1 out of every 10 Kiwi are vegetarian. Australia is the 3rd fastest growing vegan market in the world after the UAE and China. A market that is currently $136 million, estimated to be $250 million by 2020. It makes sense to the planet, to your body, your soul & our survival to shift to a wholefood, plant based diet.
Whilst I am outside the age range of being labelled a millennial, this group of young people previously widely criticised for their attitudes to employment, responsibility and property ownership, have been massively impacted by the legacy of our past. They will inherit our failings, the legacy we leave and they are now shifting the energy levels, creating change and they’ve had enough.
I couldn’t agree more with many out there chatting about this shift in the history of human consciousness and it’s about bloody time. Enough greed, enough war, enough shootings for goodness sake. Enough hurting each other, criticising, stereotyping, hate and crime. This is the generation that has said bullying is not ‘part of the process’ of schooling, they’ve had enough. These are the voices who are speaking up & speaking out about how we treat each other, they are showing their parents, their communities how it should be done. Enough ignorance, apathy, dog eat dog attitude in business. Enough couldn’t care or less, don’t give a damn or worse. Enough abuse, violence, sweep it under the carpet. Enough demands placed on our young people from adults who didn’t achieve what they wanted so they figure they’ll live out those unfulfilled dreams through their offspring. Enough already. Enough. The planet is hurting, our children are hurting, we are hurting, when disease, is preventable. Read those statistics again above. How many children dying from preventable disease, children born without a choice their parents ate food smothered in pesticides or worked in places that put their unborn children at risk, how many need to die before it matters?
Call them whatever you like, they will take it on the chin and get on with it, do exactly what we should be doing. They’ve been called lazy and hippies, like those words, are new. Labels won’t shift you forward. They have more information and technology and science and capacity than ever before, we just need to get behind them & give them the opportunities we all need. Let them be imaginative, let them create, inspire, challenge, provide opportunities to come up with solutions to climate change, to environmental impacts, to extinction, to creating a sustainable food source that limits, even eradicates or wait for it….actually works in alignment with the planet, with all living beings. If you are judging others and doing nothing about personal change & expecting to lift your own vibration or be the change the world needs, then you are behind the eight ball and your risk of devolving is high, you need to jump on board, let all that crap go, start giving back, stop taking, there is plenty to go around. Learning doesn’t stop the moment you put down the pencil and close the textbook, it’s every day, every moment, every opportunity.
Millenials are being highlighted as the most socially conscious generation of all time, most socially responsible, diverse generation. More aware, more alert, more in tune and maybe that is why their generation is rubbing a few people up the wrong way, it challenges history, it challenges irresponsible practices and the ignorance of the past, it challenges us all to sit up and take notice, to listen to younger generations maybe they see the world a different way, yet maybe they don’t have rose coloured glasses on either because they care about more than profit, more than fast food, more than creating a home that looks like it was cut from a magazine.
It’s possible this is an easy generalisation about generations like this, yet of course, there are many from every generation, who are, everything those of the socially responsible millennial generation display and more. There are millions of people out there waking up with intentions every morning to create more harmony, more peace, more compassion, kindness and love in the world. There is you and I, we can make a difference with, our choices.
Today, right here, right now.
You emit a vibration and energy, an Om so loud and so profoundly beautiful it sends shockwaves into the bodies of those who need more than a gentle nudge.
We have this incredibly stunning, inspiring and earth-shattering diverse planet, let’s save as much of it as we can. Be the change you want to see.
Make a difference.
Choose wisely.
Choose consciously.
Think before you act.
Think before you buy.
Think, think, think.
What vibration will you omit today?
fromthegypsyattic 