Relational Reset and Creative Action

I recently had a beautiful conversation with my dear friend, mentor, and long-time spiritual companion, Judy Carman, author of Homo Ahimsa: Who We Truly Are and How We’re Going to Save the World, and co-founder of the Interfaith Vegan Coalition. We were discussing our plans for International Calf and Cow
Mother’s Day 2026 and—of course—relationships. Because they always find their way into everything: our relationship to self, to God, to each other, to all sentient beings, and to their homes.

I found myself sharing a moment in my partnership that was not tender or gentle, a familiar relational pattern that crops up whenever we misalign with the truth within each other. It is a pattern that repeats itself, inviting attention to what still needs somatic attention and care, to the triggers and stories that still bind us and prevent us from being free. At times, the returning pattern evokes a quiet fatigue, because it asks from us presence, change, healing, honesty, and care. It feels both deeply personal and strangely archetypal, as if it belongs not only to me but to all humans. As if we must all learn to navigate it.

In response to my sharing, Judy gently suggested I revisit the work of Byron Katie. Katie reminds us to slow down at the moment judgment arises and meet it with inquiry. Her Four Questions are deceptively simple:

Is it true?
Can I absolutely know that it’s true?
How do I react—what happens—when I believe that thought?
Who would I be without that thought?

And then comes the turn: the invitation to turn the thought around and see how it lives, not “out there” but within me. I wondered: what would happen if both my partner and I—all of us, for that matter—could engage in this compassionate inquiry together? Could we soften our judgments, open space in our hearts, and allow grief, love, and moral awareness to coexist without collapse?

Grief, Moral Awareness, and Vegan Life

This is not new terrain for me. I have explored mirroring and projection throughout my adult life and written about it extensively, particularly in my book The Essence of Sacred Relationships: Spiraling into Divine Union and Compassionate Service. And yet relational work is never finished. It unfolds in layers.

What we understand intellectually often needs to be met again—through the body, through grief, through lived experience. Wisdom is not linear. It spirals.

After my conversation with Judy, something deeper began to stir. I wondered how much unnecessary strain might be eased not only in intimate partnerships but in the wider relational field vegans inhabit every day. What if The Work were applied to the lived experience of being vegan in a non-vegan world?

What if the same inquiry that softens interpersonal tensions could also support those carrying the weight of witnessing animal suffering and allow them to remain in loving relationship with people who, often unknowingly, participate in it?

Psychologist Clare Mann has named the existential distress of being a vegan in a non-vegan world vystopia. For many vegans, the grief created by the normalized violence around them is constant and cumulative. It includes not only sorrow for the animals but the strain of navigating grocery stores, family meals, holidays, and all the other cultural institutions and practices founded on unspoken separation, commodification, and harm. The vegan’s distress—a nervous-system response to sustained ethical dissonance—is often minimized, misunderstood, or pathologized by the broader community.

In this context, Byron Katie’s work opens a potential doorway. For when a vegan makes the judgment “They are cruel” or “They are indifferent to animal suffering”, much of their distress stems from the conviction that this judgment is firmly grounded in truth. At times, they may feel surrounded by moral monsters. And yet the Four Questions gently ask:

Is it true that they are cruel or indifferent?
Can I know with absolute certainty that it is true?
How do I live when I believe it?
Who might I be without that belief?

Inquiry does not deny the reality of harm; it simply asks whether carrying judgment, despair, and blame around that harm are actually serving life—or depleting it.

In her Grammy-winning song “Wildflower,” Billie Eilish beautifully captures the delicate emotional architecture of the relationships made possible by such questioning. She sings of loving someone while carrying the awareness of their harmful choices. This is what many of us feel: devotion to a person mixed with grief—not judgment—for the harm they are doing or participating in. Like Eilish, we hold both love and moral awareness—again, not judgment—simultaneously, without needing to choose between them. We see the “cow in the leather,” so to speak, yet we remain present and relational.

Creative Action: Grief into Devotion

In my book Griefmapping, the stage of creative action is pivotal. Creative action does not result from bypassing grief; it is what becomes possible when grief has been felt, honored, and metabolized—when it moves through the body instead of hardening there into a reactive defensiveness or immobilizing us beneath its weight.

Creative Action happens when grief becomes devotion. When grief is allowed to move, compassion naturally widens—not in order to grant anyone permission to harm, of course, but in recognition of their conditioning, disconnection, and collective inheritance. The question shifts from How can they? to How did we arrive here together? From this place, advocacy becomes relational rather than adversarial, embodied rather than inflamed.

Byron Katie often reminds us that when we argue with reality, we suffer. Creative action does not mean resignation to reality, however; it means meeting reality as it is without adding any internal violence, so that our responses can be clear, sustainable, and life-affirming. A regulated nervous system is far more effective than one that is overwhelmed. Love that includes self-care is far more enduring than a love that burns the self out.

International Calf and Cow Mother’s Day: A Ritual of Love and Action

International Calf and Cow Mother’s Day is an expression of creative action. It is grief transformed into ritual, education, art, and care. It honors the mother–child bond not through accusation but through remembrance and reverence. It invites people into awareness through story, beauty, and compassion rather than shame. It is activism rooted in love, not urgency alone.

This is the invitation of creative action: to let grief inform how we live, speak, and organize without letting it consume us. To care deeply without collapsing. To remain in relationship—with animals, with one another, and with ourselves—while telling the truth.

For vegans, this may involve turning inquiry inward when judgment arises, tending the body when sorrow surfaces, choosing conversations that open rather than close, and creating structures of support where grief—like vystopia—can be named and shared rather than carried alone. It may take the form of art, ritual, education, sanctuary, policy work, or simply the modeling of a life aligned with care.

Griefmapping teaches that grief is not a problem to solve but an intelligence to listen to. When honored, it becomes a map, guiding us toward creative compassion, grounded love, and sustainable care in a world that desperately needs all three. Creative action is not the absence of pain. It is pain that has found its purpose. And perhaps this is where Byron Katie’s questions, Clare Mann’s vystopia coinage, and Billie Eilish’s lyrics converge—in a fierce but tender commitment to love without abandoning truth, a commitment to act without abandoning the heart. I wonder what might happen if all of us—partners, friends, communities —engaged together in this compassionate inquiry. What transformation might arise when grief and love move through us collectively?

With reverence and resolve,

Tami Hay,

for the Million Vegan Grandmothers
Happy International Calf and Cow Mother’s Day
May this be the first of many!