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Victoria Moran is a high priestess in the vegan world. After eleven books on spirituality and well-being and weight loss, which got her on Oprah twice, she became not only the author of books about veganism and a leading spokesperson for it, but also the founder of The Vegan Academy, which has graduated hundreds of lifestyle coaches who spread the vegan word and help people with their vegan diets. Victoria being my podcast guest may seem odd to people who know me as the author of The Anybody Can Make It, Everybody Will Love it Cookbook, that’s anything but vegan, but I recognize the value of a lifestyle that’s becoming ever more popular as well as the charms and wisdom and authenticity of one of my favorite friends who, twenty years ago, was my Salon guest on a book tour for Shelter for the Spirit, about how to turn your home into a scared space. Thanks to Victoria, although the gourmet in me would hate to convert, I recognize that if everyone became vegan it could alleviate the greatest threat to human survival, which is global warming. You’ll be very moved by that if you see A Prayer for Compassion, the documentary film Victoria just produced.  I wish we were on video because Victoria is a gorgeous human being who well deserves the award she got from PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, as PETA’s Sexiest Vegan Over 50!

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Ramana started acquiring a Los Angeles following in my living room more than 20 years ago, and he since has branched out to acquire other US bases as well as a clientele in India for pilgrimages to Arunachala, the sacred mountain. I was attracted to the work Ramana was doing after he was sent as a messenger to the world by Papaji, the Indian disciple of Ramana Maharshi’s. I already was steeped in the non-dual awareness that Ramana Maharshi was all about, where god is within and there’s no worship of something outside ourselves, and we talk on the podcast about what’s special about Ramana’s work beyond coming from that perspective. His Radical Awakening process was a benchmark for me as per his tagline, “Never take another workshop to find yourself again.” He literally tapped me when I was “there” and now I’m like Pavlov’s dog – I tap myself and go to that timeless place where the universe and I are one.

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Making L.A. a Friendlier City is a wonderful project of mine that would be done as a pilot in L.A. and could be taken up by cities everywhere to really affect the vibe to make us into friendlier people. It’s a submission for an initiative that LA2050 does every year, where they give away ten 100K chunks to improve things in Los Angeles. To find out more about this project: http://bit.ly/MakingLAFriendlier. Voting is over, and we are waiting for results to be announced on June 4th, 2019.

Here’s the website design for the project

WEHOville, the great West Hollywood online newspaper,
interviewed Suzanne Taylor for Making L.A. a Friendlier City

Read more here…

There’s a territory we must learn to live in where we’re committed to the good of the whole. When I engage with a person who’s on this wavelength, or I read something well-written that’s coming from this understanding, or a movie or a play has that ring of being right-on about it, I get excited. There’s something deeply satisfying, kind of like hitting a bullseye, when I meet a compatriot in this pay-dirt for humanity.

I was reading THE CLEAN MONEY REVOLUTION: Reinventing Power, Purpose, and Capitalism (a great book by Joel Solomon that I bought because I know Joel and to know him is to admire him), and came to a one-page statement by Rex Weyler that’s one of those spot-on deliveries of core truth that stirs my heart. I’ve been an admirer of Rex’s, one of the founders of Greenpeace, for a long time. Over the years, having passed along several things he’s written, my enthusiasm got me an in-person visit when Rex came to L.A. a while back.

When I sent Rex’s piece to fellow participants in an Elders Action Network webinar series about our worldview, the moderator said, “It is the most succinct statement I’ve read about the situation, the natural ecological process and the solution for the evolution of consciousness.” The better we understand what got us where we are the better we can grapple with where we need to go, and this piece of Rex’s is stunningly informative on that front:

Humanity is in a state of ecological overshoot, which occurs with every successful species. Nature teaches species how to grow and flourish, but does not teach species how to stop—so everything over-grows its habitat capacity. Everything. Plants in the garden, wolves in a watershed, algae in a lake. Humans have been so successful (ecologically) that we have now overshot the productive capacity of our ecosystem. That is normal and it is the fundamental ecological challenge. Now, all genuine solutions to overshoot involve contraction — plants crowd each other out, wolves die off until the prey recover, algae dies off until nutrients are restored. That’s pretty much a law or pattern of nature. No escape. Technology and efficiency don’t buy us a pass.

Starvation, disease and predators are some of nature’s default “solutions” to ecological overshoot. We can add our own contribution of warfare. But as intelligent, ingenious creatures, we want to devise better ways to contract, and create a mature, stable culture as opposed to simply growing bigger. That is our challenge. But our economic system — capitalism — is fundamentally based on growth, and few governments (outside of Bhutan, perhaps) are willing to discuss the end of growth capitalism. Few environmentalists are willing to discuss it. So we’re in a deep dilemma. We have to learn to talk about it in adult conversation, without freaking out, and then we have to actually act on this knowledge.

How to contract as a species and reduce consumption to suit our finite habitat on Earth—how to do this creatively, intelligently, minimizing suffering as we do so— is the work that lies ahead.

I’d love you to comment on this blogpost, especially to talk about the need for a different mind-set or worldview where we get it that we sink or swim together whereby we need to create a stable, sustainable world instead of simply growing bigger. Do you have an evolutionary idea about this? (Here are some ideas that have been submitted.) If humanity thinks differently we will act differently, and creating the understanding that we are in it together, where, in the words of Charles Eisenstein, “What’s more for you is more for me,” is our challenge. The whole SUESpeaks website is devoted to that work. Please get involved!

Find out more about Rex Weyler, Joel Solomon and Charles Eisenstein in our Heroes Gallery.

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