THE MINDFUL VEGAN

A 30-Day Plan for Finding Health, Balance, Peace, and Happiness

Lani Muelrath, Benbella Books (OCTOBER) Hardcover $17.95 (250pp), 978-1-944648-47-3

“By aspiring to live vegan, you’ve already made a choice that is fundamentally ethical and mindful,” writes Lani Muelrath. But there can be personal and social challenges to the decision, ranging from not having food ready and available when we’re hungry to offending family and friends. And there’s also the perennial question, Am I doing it right?

Muelrath offers mindfulness as an effective tool for managing these challenges, and she’s combined mindful living practices with vegan eating in a way that doesn’t require complex training or lots of spare time. Her approach awakens us to our real feelings, helps us make more skillful choices and reduce stress, and creates a new freedom around food.

Muelrath’s thirty-day course begins with a one-minute session and makes building commitment easy by adding just a minute each day. Included are training on mindfulness meditation, help in navigating difficult mental states, and strategies for dismantling the addiction loops that keep us chained to negative behaviors.

Each day includes a formal meditation practice with an audio-guide option, a brief research-based lesson, and an inspirational “mindful moment.” Add to this the many inspirational quotes, personal vignettes, and Muelrath’s healthful and tasty vegan recipes, and you’ll have all you need to make your practice both effective and joyful.

“You are embarking on a journey that can deeply enrich, support, and transform your life experience,” writes Muelrath, who reports that her mindfulness practice led to a fifty-pound weight loss. “It superseded every other tool for change I have ever known,” she writes, adding that along with changing her relationship with food, “mindfulness … shifted, for the better, my relationship to just about everything else in my life, too.”

“KNOWLEDGE OF YOUR BODY PUTS THE POWER BACK IN YOUR HANDS.”