My dear friend, Dr. Will Tuttle has been a vegan advocate since 1980.
He has given close to 5,000 talks across more than 50 countries. His internationally-acclaimed book, The World Peace Diet has been translated into 17 languages. He has spent decades in the trenches of the vegan movement, reflecting what works and what does not, watching people burn out and give up, watching others quietly transform everything around them without ever raising their voice.
And when he spoke recently to a group of vegans on my Vystopia Transformation Program doing deep personal development work, he said something that really got people thinking.
He said words to the effect that going vegan is maybe 10 percent of the work. The other 90 percent is the inner work.
He calls it Deep Veganism. And it’s not about being more vegan in the outer sense, but about going into the underlying dynamics of your own psychology, your own conditioning, your own shadow, and understanding how the same cultural mentality you went vegan to move away from is still running quietly in the background of your mind.
What is Deep Veganism?
For over ten thousand years, human societies have been shaped by what Will calls Herderism. The mentality required to own, control and exploit other beings as property. That mentality does not just live in factory farms and slaughterhouses. It lives in our religions, our education systems, our governments, our family structures, and in our own minds. It is what we are all immersed in long before we ever heard the word vegan.
And when we go vegan without doing the inner work, we often end up expressing that same mentality in a new direction. We disconnect from non-vegans the way society has disconnected from animals. We create hierarchies where vegans are superior and everyone else is inferior. We try to dominate conversations, convince people, control outcomes, and we attach our happiness to whether or not someone changes.
Is Trying to Change Someone a Form of Violence?
Will was pretty clear on this. The desire to change someone else is itself a form of violence. And it is also completely ineffective.
What he has seen work across five decades of advocacy, is congruence. When your words, your tone, your actions, your inner state, and your values are all pointing in the same direction, you do not need to convince anyone of anything. You become a living invitation. People feel it before you say a word.
But that congruence does not come from knowing more facts or finding better arguments. It comes from:
- Doing the inner work.
- Developing the capacity to regulate your own nervous system in difficult conversations.
- Learning to speak your truth without needing the other person to receive it in any particular way.
- Cultivating genuine states of loving kindness and compassion, not as a performance, but as a practice.
If you are already doing personal development work, you probably recognise this territory. You have felt the gap between knowing what you believe and being able to embody it under pressure. You have noticed the places where your vystopia, the grief and urgency of being vegan in a non-vegan world, is still running the show in ways you have not fully understood yet.
That gap is not a flaw. It is the 90 percent, and it’s exactly where the most important work happens.
Invitation
If you are ready to explore what that looks like for you specifically, I would love to have a conversation with you. If you want to connect with other like-minded and like-hearted people to accelerate this change, and have a genuine conversation about where you are, what you are working with, and what your next step might be, let’s set that up.
Find a time to book a conversation with me. https://veganpsychologist.com/conversation
Reference: TUTTLE, W. (2016) The World Peace Diet (10th Anniversary Edition): Eating for Spiritual Health and Social Harmony. USA: Lantern Publishing and Media
