Articles Reflecting a Vegan Lifestyle used with permission from All-Creatures.org

Once we have chosen to be vegan, the possibility of leading a charmed life is well within our reach. Victoria Moran shares her wisdom in simple but powerful tips to help you live your life to the fullest.

Your Charmed Vegan Life
From Victoria Moran, Main Street Vegan Academy, MainStreetVegan.com
April 2026

Images from Canva

Originally printed in the Main Street Vegan blog, MainStreetVegan.com.

You’ve done the coolest thing. You’ve decided to make food choices and life choices based on compassion. You’re setting into motion a ripple effect that will enrich the lives of people and animals you’ll never know, and others who’ll show up on earth after you’ve left it. It’s a tremendous thing, this surrender to caring. It clears your head, keeps you young, and lifts a burden you didn’t know you were carrying until it was gone.

I’ve done a lot of writing, speaking, and thinking over the past 30 years about living a charmed life. I wrote two books on the subject, one a bestseller in 32 countries, and presented on this topic for associations, corporations, churches, and huge health conferences. But only recently did I come to fully understand that the most important component of a life we’d call charmed is the deep peace and satisfaction of knowing you’re striving to do the most good and the least harm that’s feasible in your life situation. Being vegan is the foundation of a life that works. You’ve got that. Here’s the rest.

Know that you are worthy

Most of us waste a lot of time distrusting ourselves and discounting ourselves. But the real truth is: you are an expression of the beneficence that brought you forth. Of course you have more to learn as you go along, and you’ve done things in the past that you wish you hadn’t. Even so, nothing you have done, nothing that was done to you, and nothing anyone else has ever said to you or believed about you erases the inalienable truth that God made you and you have infinite value.

Start a serendipity log

It’s a pity when someone is living a charmed life but doesn’t know it. Preventive medicine for charmed-life blackouts is to keep a serendipity log, an ongoing list of wonders, delights, and delicious coincidences. To get started, put a little notebook in your purse or pocket and make note of the serendipities showering you throughout the day. These are little joys such as, “A coworker gave me a copy of the novel that I can’t get from the library for another six weeks,” or “I just found out that I’m going to be in Cincinnati the same weekend as my friend from Seattle.” The key is to appreciate all serendipities and not judge them by their size.

Bring back chivalry

Because it is one tall order to live a charmed life in an uncharming culture, it’s up to each of us to bring back chivalry, updated for our times. Reduced to its fundamentals, chivalry is being the heaven-sent friend or stranger in a story that goes, “I don’t know what I would have done if (s)he hadn’t shown up.” How about stopping to help someone whose grocery bag breaks, or the embarrassed fellow shopper who’s just knocked over a towering display of bathroom tissue? Or talking to the bored little boy in the post office line while his mother chats on her cell phone? Or giving a hand to the stranded motorist trying to change a flat?

Wash the dishes with all your heart

You virtually guarantee a charmed life when you give yourself as fully to doing the dishes, and tending to the other miscellanea of living, as to some grand adventure. You can count on the dishes. They’ll be there alongside the grand adventures, and if no adventure is immediately forthcoming, the dishes won’t let you down. Try some conscious dishwashing. Release all judgment. Just be with the process and with every plate and fork and measuring cup until the task is through. In a charmed life, the best thing going is what is happening now, even when it’s scouring a skillet.

Gather the gurus

The informal but venerable gurus I’m alluding to are our glorious friends. Gather them by hosting a salon, either to learn something (bring in a teacher or speaker), address an issue in the community, or simply hang out with intriguing people. Or connect with a prayer partner (make contact daily by phone or weekly in person for prayer; or a gratitude buddy: the person with whom you share what is at this moment is filling your heart with gratitude. I think of it as counting your blessings in the presence of a witness.

Love it, then maybe leave it

Any situation in your life that ends before you come to love it, you’ll run into again. Oh, the names and faces will change, but circumstantially you’ll be right back where you were five or ten or twenty years ago, again presented with the opportunity to learn to love. This seems counterintuitive because we think of love as the “tie that binds.” But love is also necessary when ending a relationship or leaving a position, organization, or locale. Leave some love behind and go forward free.

Claim a café

Claiming a café is not the sole province of writers and students. We all need a place to go where we can be alone with company, where the waiter or barista knows our order in advance, and where a certain corner is, more often than not, ours. At your café, you get the energy of the people around you, inspiration from a woman’s locket or a little boy’s lollypop, and heartening freedom from undone chores, a ringing doorbell, and, if you leave your cell phone at home and don’t sign up for WiFi, other people’s demands on your time.

Indulge your simplest pleasure

Certainly you enjoy many things, but your simplest pleasure: is basic, easy to access, cheap, and not dependent on any other person. Think carefully of what your simplest pleasure is. For example, “sitting in front of a crackling fire” can be your simplest pleasure, but only if you have easy access to a wood burning hearth. What’s your simplest pleasure? Dancing maybe, or puttering in your garden. A steamy soul-soothing bath, or watching your favorite comedy shows. Reading with a cup of tea. Once you’ve named it, enjoy it every day.

Live richly

People whose souls thrive on simplicity can live elegant lives on relatively little cash. They exploit the low and no-cost riches tucked away in the library, consignment shops, beauty schools, eBay, barter, matinee movies, free day at museums and galleries, and every park in town. (By the way, some of the people who live in this frugal fashion are wealthy. They simply like simplicity—and using their money for other things––changing the world, for instance.)

Proceed despite detractors

Chances are there is someone close to you who is convinced that they missed out on having a charmed life and they don’t think much of your odds either. Their resignation is like a black hole in the next cubicle or on the other side of the bed. Your assignment, then, is to live a charmed life despite them, not to spite them. Claim your autonomy. You’ve been entrusted with a precious life all your own. Although you owe those around you kindness, consideration, honesty, and respect, you owe yourself a life well lived.

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Victoria Moran is the author of 14 books, some shown here, including the international bestseller, Creating a Charmed Life, as well as Main Street Vegan, The Love-Powered Diet, and her newest, Age Like a Yogi. She is founder and director a Main Street Vegan Coach Training Academy and host of the long-running Main Street Vegan Podcast. She is a cofounder of the Compassion Consortium (interfaith spiritual support for animal advocates), recipient with her husband, Rev. William Melton, of the 2025 Homo Ahimsa Award, and inducted in 2024 into the Vegan Hall of Fame. Victoria and William live in New York City with an adopted chihuahua, James, and rescue pigeon, Thunder. Follow her on IG @VictoriaMoranAuthor and FB @VictoriaMoranAuthor and on YouTube @VictoriaMoranOfficial.

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Posted on All-Creatures: April 8, 2026
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