In honour of World Vegetarian Day/Month, this would be a great weekend to experiment with kicking the meat habit.

What does eating vegetarian have to do with being softer?

It’s kinder to your body – Since cholesterol comes from animal “products”, vegetarians have way lower cholesterol levels, and hence lower rates of heart disease and stroke. Vegetarians also have lower weight, lower blood pressure, and lower rates of cancer and diabetes.

It’s kinder to the Earth – 18% of greenhouse gases come from meat production, versus 13% from cars. In North America, half of all water resources, one-third of all fossil fuels, 70% of grains, and 80 percent of agricultural land are used to raise animals for food.

It’s kinder to animals – Do I need to explain this one? By going vegetarian, you can save around 100 animals a year. If you need incentive, and are ready to find out where your meat comes from, watch this very unsoft video.

It’s so yummy!

I’ve been a vegetarian for 17 years now, but I know being a full-time vegetarian it’s not for everyone. But just like cutting your electricity use or car use, cutting your meat intake by whatever percentage you can manage will help make the world a softer place.

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Want to go longer than a day? Here’s a few more resources:

Vegetarian Starter Kit (Or order a hard copy variation)

Making the transition – with recipes!

More recipes!

Here’s a way to spend 15 seconds and no money to:

• get food to those who need it
• help sick, blind or amputee children and prevent blindness and HIV infection
• help prevent breast cancer by getting mammograms for women who could otherwise not afford one
• provide books to children around the world
• protect rainforests
• feed abandoned animals

All with just the click of the mouse! Just visit The Hunger Site once a day and click once for Hunger, Breast Cancer, Literacy, Child Health, Rainforest and Animal Rescue. For each click on the site, sponsors donate money for the charity partners.

How does it add up? In 2008, the site donated:

• Over 70 million cups of food for people
• Health care services for nearly a million children around the world
• Funds to protect over 600 million square feet of rainforest
• Over 500,000 books for kids
• 7500 mammograms
• 75 million bowls of food for shelter animals

If you want to do more, you can buy a variety of products on the site, a portion of which go to further support the causes. For more information about where the money goes, see the “about this site” on each of the pages.

If you set the page as your home page on your browser, you’ll be sure to remember, and you’ll know that no matter what else happens that day, you’ll have made a small difference that adds up.

This sounds like a very cool project!

Inspire Me Today is going on a global hug tour. The founder of IMT and her husband will be flying around the world in a small prop plane, to over 100 locations on a tour to “gather inspiration, deliver 100,000+ hugs and share more than $1,000,000 with important causes…”

If you want to get a hug, you can see where they’re stopping see where they’re stopping. They’re also looking for team leaders in each city they visit.

For $10 you can sponsor a hug for one of the causes they are supporting:

• Chennai, India, to support the efforts of Dr. Mani’s Children’s Heart Foundation where just 100 hugs – or $1000 – will save the life of a child;
• a preserve in Chiang Mai, Thailand to help rebuild the threatened elephant population;
• Siem Reap, Cambodia where a mere 2 hugs will fund a years education for a child.

Wishing them luck with the project!

Volunteering is an amazing way to give back or pay it forward, giving of your time rather than money. But only about one in four North Americans volunteer. The rest don’t know what they’re missing out on, because volunteering improves your mental, physical and emotional health!

There are many people finding innovative ways to harness the power of Twitter, Facebook, etc to promote volunteering. For example, Britt over at Have Fun Do Good, has put together a list of 21 Twitter feeds about Volunteering.

But Brandon Mendelson is taking it much further. He’s a man with a mission: to raise awareness of and gratitude for volunteerism, while benefitting several non-profit organizations with technical equipment and knowledge, AND raising money for the Invisible People homeless voices video project. And he’s using social networking to help do it.

His project, A Million High Fives will use “crowdfunding” over the next several months to raise the money required for the adventure. Anyone interested in participating pays $1 for each business card to be displayed in a world-record event . The goal is 300,000 cards and there is extra exposure for buying 100, 200 or more.

You can also send in used laptops, cell phones, game systems, digital cameras, etc to be donated to Invisible People and various charities.

The project kicked off on September 1 and runs through September 2010. Get in on the ground floor! You can follow tweets about the project using the #AMHF hashtag. Good luck Brandon!

Are you clearing out the closets to make space and find a new home for that collection of Hardy Boy Mysteries? Or maybe bidding on that Strawberry Shortcake Lunch Box?

Using eBay, you can use those sales or auction time to help non-profits by using their Giving Works initiative.

You can search for items that have been posted that benefit a specific charity, and/or earmark a certain percentage of your sales to be donated to a non-profit. You can also bid on fundraising auctions (currently going: Go whale watching with Hayden Panettiere or Isabel Lucas to benefit the Whaleman Foundation) They also provide a button to use your PayPal account to make a donation directly to one of the charities.

Since 2003, the program has raised $127 million! I only wish eBay would promote the service even more. I’ll be dropping them an email…

Just in time for Be Softer’s opening days, the Body Shop has launched a campaign that gives you softer hands while giving you a chance to help others.

The campaign, called Soft Hands Kind Heart, benefits ECPAT International, a global consortium of organizations whose goal is to put an end to child prostitution and porn.

You can of course instead make a donation directly to ECPAT.

And you can join the facebook group to spread the word.

Every Friday, I’ll be offering up something fun and/or courageous for us all to try over the weekend. Be sure to comment to let us know how it went!

This weekend’s challenge: smile at strangers.

Depending what size city/town you live in, this may seem like a radical idea. I remember my sister telling me once on the New York subway not to smile because people would either think I was crazy, or a gullible, easy-target tourist!

Smiling has been shown to improve our health and attractiveness, and to improve our own mood.

Here’s how you do it:

I live in a decent-sized prairie town where people are pretty friendly, so I’ll up the challenge by going to the downtown district where we have our share of suits rushing by on Important Business.

Things to investigate:

- Is it contagious? Do people smile back? Does age or clothes style affect the return rate?
- Does it feel good just to do it, even if people don’t respond?
- If people don’t smile back, do you feel judged somehow?

Maybe another weekend we’ll try something radical like saying “good morning” to our fellow world-dwellers…

One day, not so long ago, I was burned out from working on a movie, and trying to recover by lying down on a couch to read some mindless fiction. But I kept hearing this voice saying, “What are you doing on the couch? You should be looking for your next gig! You should be revising your resume, you should be out networking, you should be cleaning the house, you should be figuring out how to make more money…” Perhaps you’ve heard this voice? It’s not very restful.

I was talking to a friend about how frustrated I was that my energy was sapped, when I needed to get going on future projects and ambitions and achievements, and she asked gently, “Is this working for you?”

I stopped, mind officially blown. What kind of question was that? I was On My Way, on a Career Path, heading to Success, checking off a list of Achievements.

I breathed for a moment. And thought. Or rather checked in with my gut instinct, which is much more likely to bring me the truth.

No, I realized, “This” was not working for me. “This” being a lifestyle of multi-tasking, hyper productivity, constantly striving to be Better, to do More, to have More, to achieve More. In fact, “this” was exhausting the heck out of me, draining me mentally, physically and emotionally. I was not, in short, having fun.

But what else was there? I wondered.

I asked myself, “What is the opposite of Work Harder?” Certainly not “Work Smarter,” which is just another form of pressure: figuring out what “smart” is and deciding whether what I’m doing now is “smarter” than what I was doing before. No, being “smarter” or “more productive” is still a voice in my head constantly badgering: asking, yelling, judging whether I’m being Smart Enough, Fast Enough, Tough Enough or Productive Enough.

So that left the true opposite of Harder: “Softer.”

On to Part II

I’m so glad you made it to this new site!

Some things we’ll be talking about here:

• Tips for being Gentle with yourself
• Ideas for being Kinder to people you know, and even those you don’t
• Ways to Live Lightly on the Earth
• Very cool people who are helping make the world a softer place.
• New ways of approaching work, play, health, life…
• How creativity and living softer are inter-linked.
• Challenges to living softer in today’s world
• Fun things to try
• Tips for stress management and stress relief
• Tips for simplifying your life and decisions
• Your thoughts, ideas, inspiration!

Please join me in the experiment, and join in the conversation!