by Mark A. Shryock
https://markashryock.substack.com/p/food-and-vibrational-energy
A reader asked: Does venison carry the same energetics as beef, as far as the grounding down of the upper chakras?
It is a great question, and it needed its own article.
WHAT CHAKRAS ARE
The chakras are the body’s energy centers. They run from the base of the spine to the crown of the head. The root governs survival and grounding. The sacral governs creativity and emotion. The solar plexus governs will and personal power. The heart governs love and compassion. The throat governs expression and truth. The third eye governs intuition and inner sight. The crown governs connection to the divine.
When these centers are clear and spinning at their natural frequency, you perceive more. You feel more. You know more. When they are weighed down or collapsed into lower frequencies, your perception narrows. The world becomes flat.
FOOD IS FREQUENCY
All food carries a certain frequency. A certain energy. It acts as medicine to the body, or it acts as a negative vibration, not because it is morally bad, but because it over-excites chakras that, for you personally, do not need stimulation. Or because it is poison, like pressed and processed foods that have had the life squeezed out of them until they are just dead matter wearing the mask of nourishment.
Food is light. It sings with frequency. When you consume an animal, you are not just taking in protein and fat. You are ingesting the geometric pattern of how that animal moved through the world, the emotional signature of its entire life, crystallized into tissue. The coherence of that light varies by emotional state, by the conditions of death, by the relationship between human and animal. A deer killed in terror carries a different signature than a deer killed in reverence. A cow that has spent its life in a pen, separated from its calf, lowing into the void of industrial agriculture, carries a different signature than a cow that walked green pasture in peace.
Food is medicine or it is disruption. It either attunes your field or it drags it. And right now, as the new light comes in and our light bodies are being built, what we eat is no longer just about nutrition. It is about attunement.
When we approach a living thing, and all things are living, with consciousness, we must do so awakened to this fact and with reverence. There is a sacred sorrow as old as the primordial stars, that all living things know and feel. Life eats life, and this is communion, a joining of energy of one thing to another to be transformed. The life goes, but the form gives way. And there is a sacred joy hidden in this sorrow, and we all feel this when we see a butterfly, for their very being whispers this always. But all must be taken with reverence. A tomato must be given thanks when its fruit is taken. A deer and a forest must be acknowledged when they give their life to you. This knowing we will return to, and this is one of the reasons big agriculture now fades from this planet in all its forms.
Likewise, when you sit down to eat, the food before you is alive. The life energy you consume carries a vibrational frequency that alters when you eat with reverence, mindfulness, and gratefulness. And when you approach food this way and speak a blessing over it, the life that is about to join you in communion does so in joy and surrender. And this more than anything else affects the vibrational frequency of what you consume. If you take life without reverence and consume it, you actually consume this lower, more negative energy of sorrow and separation. How the food is prepared, with attention and love or anger and duty, also alters the vibrational frequency. Even the way food is cooked, over a wood fire versus gas or electric, affects its vibrational frequency. Likewise, how it is served, with no thought or mindfulness, will alter the frequency and experience profoundly.
I once had a Buddhist monk in Thailand wave me into his courtyard and serve me tea and rice with such absolute focus and love it shifted me to an awareness and higher consciousness and gave me answers in that moment to questions I had carried for many years.
Processed food is the opposite of everything I have just shared.
In some ways we eat food for color, which is the visual clue of food’s frequency. One of the first things I was taught after my kundalini completely rose in 1986 and the room turned to a golden white light is if I wish to prolong my life I am not to eat things that are white or absent of color. Over the years this is always processed foods. And even though I advocate storing back white rice for survival to get us through the challenges of the next couple of years, if I eat rice right now, which is seldom, it is brown rice, not white.
As I wrote in WHAT I HEARD IN THE GARDEN, many of the products and methods we depend on now will not be available as we go through these changes. Much of what we have grown will give way to the “weeds” that surround us.
As we move forward and this new light comes in and our light bodies are built, many things will leave. One of these things now leaving is beef.
As I mentioned in that article, beef has always been something that, if someone’s lower chakras were so destabilized they could not function, I would tell them to go eat a hamburger. And it worked. It pulled them back into their body. But this was always a prescription, the way a doctor prescribes a medicine that has side effects. The medicine did what it needed to do, but the cost was real. Beef is the densest food frequency there is. It is tamasic, meaning it promotes heaviness, inertia, and dullness of consciousness. When it hits the root chakra, it does not open and ground you to the earth. It causes the root to contract under that density. And when the lower chakras contract, the upper chakras lose their open foundation and collapse into the contracted field.
When I lived in India for almost two years without eating any kind of meat, I could see the colors of auras with a clarity I had never experienced before. Then I drove thirteen hours to Chennai and ate a sixty-dollar blue cheese hamburger at the Hilton, and before I ever finished eating it, that clarity was gone. The color and detail I had been seeing disappeared. The root contracted under the density of that meal, and everything above it fell. The ability to see the full spectrum of the auras only returned as I began to stop eating beef again. We do not need that kind of medicine now. As we move into this higher energy, that old contraction becomes a drag.
The screwworm has returned to the United States for the first time since 1966. Beef is at a record $9.64 a pound as of April 2026, up thirteen percent in one year, and the US cattle herd is at a seventy-five-year low. Beef is on its way to becoming a thing of the past, and our diet will become so much lighter.
But to answer the question, venison does not carry the same energetics as beef.
Deer vibrates at the heart chakra. It is heart medicine. Where beef contracts the entire field into density through throat, heart, and root, deer opens the heart without the gravitational collapse.
The deer’s entire survival strategy depends on cardiac sensitivity. Their heart rate can spike from 40 to over 250 beats per minute in seconds, then return to baseline just as fast. That ability to feel intensely, release, and return to openness is the biological signature of an unguarded heart chakra. When you consume deer, you are metabolizing tissue that has been conditioned to feel without armoring.
In Native tradition, Deer is gentleness as power. The Deer legend tells of Fawn encountering a fire-breathing demon who blocked all creatures from Great Spirit. Fawn did not fight. She looked at him with compassion, her love penetrated his hardened heart, and he shrank to the size of a walnut. She cleared the path for all of Spirit’s children through heart-centered fearlessness. Deer is not prey-as-victim. Deer is prey-as-love-warrior, the heart that remains open under threat. Both Celtic and Native hunters prayed to the deer before the hunt, promising to take only what was essential, entering the relationship in the spirit of love and communion.
Deer antlers grow from the crown and are shed cyclically, bone that dies and regenerates. This creates a vertical channel from heart to crown that is unique in the ungulate world. The heart energy has a direct upward bleed. Deer heart meat is particularly active for heart-crown integration.
Deer does not ground the upper chakras down. It opens the heart chakra upward. It dissolves armor. It makes you vulnerable. It is the opposite medicine from beef.
This is not only Native tradition. In Ayurveda, the plant equivalent of deer medicine is Rose. Rose opens the heart chakra gently, cools the fire, and melts emotional armor without force. In Chinese medicine, it is He Huan Pi, the bark of the Albizia tree, called the Collective Happiness Bark. It enters the Heart and Liver meridians and does exactly what deer does. It goes straight to the heart with a spreading lightness through the chest, easing constrained emotions, grief, depression, the places where the heart has hardened or closed. Three traditions, three continents, the same medicine. Gentle heart-opening that does not contract the lower chakras to do its work.
WHAT BEEF ACTUALLY IS
Beef is a Taurus animal, ruled by Venus, fixed earth. In medical astrology, Taurus rules the neck, throat, and shoulders. This makes the throat chakra critical for the bovine. Cattle are vocal animals, lowing, mooing, the constant fermentation of the rumen. Their meat carries the frequency of embodied voice, the ability to speak from a grounded place rather than a scattered one.
But there is a shadow. Cattle are often silenced. The modern dairy cow lows because her calf has been taken from her. That sound is not communication. It is grief. The voice has been suppressed, and this creates a throat chakra distortion in conventional beef. You are eating an animal whose voice was taken.
The heart chakra in beef is Venusian. Warm, maternal, steady. But that warmth is protected by mass. The bovine heart is enormous and beats slow and heavy. There is nothing vulnerable about it the way a deer heart is vulnerable. Nothing swift. The cow’s heart has armored itself behind sheer physical size.
And the root chakra in beef is the dominant gravity. Cattle have four stomachs. They turn grass into dense matter. Their hooves compact the soil beneath them. Everything about a cow is designed to take light and convert it into mass. When you eat beef, that is what you are consuming. You are consuming an animal whose entire life was spent becoming heavy.
That density does not ground you. It contracts the root chakra under its weight. The root pulls inward, and the upper chakras, with no open foundation beneath them, collapse into that contracted field. It is heart energy that refuses to leave the body. It is throat energy that will not scatter. It is root energy that says stay here, stay heavy, stay safe.
And it was necessary. For generations, humanity needed this. The collective root chakra was destabilized, trauma, dislocation, war, industrialization, spiritual amnesia. Beef was medicine for a dense age, and like all medicine, it carried a cost. It anchored people to the earth so they could survive, but it did so through contraction, not through open connection.
But the age is changing.
WHAT COMES NEXT
The plant that holds the highest vibrational frequency or vitality, the prana, is magenta lambsquarters or magenta spreen in the west. Medieval monks grew it against the walls of the monasteries. It mines nutrients from the ground and then stores them in its leaves, but it must be eaten in good soil or it will mine the poison in the soil. Many high vitality plants like Jerusalem artichokes are like this. All plants do this to some degree. If you need grounding without the drag, you eat roots. Not thin taproots, but the dense underground storage organs that spent months converting sunlight into compact earth-energy. Jerusalem artichokes, burdock, sweet potatoes. These do not contract the lower chakras inward. They open the root downward, into the earth, and the earth pushes back up. Beef contracts. Roots connect.
Deer remains heart medicine for those who need the heart opened. But even deer is a transitional food for many. The deeper trajectory is toward plants that hold light without the animal intermediary, because the human body is becoming capable of direct light metabolism. The weeds around you are already doing this. They are not weeds. They are the new food. They are not substitutes for meat. They are the original frequency that meat was trying to replicate in density.
And then there is fruit. Fruit is the one food a plant makes to be given. The plant offers it freely. No life is taken. But the communion is still sacred. The reverence still matters. When you take a fruit and give thanks, when you eat it with that awareness, the fruit enters that communion in joy because this is what it was made for. And in that sacred act it is made one with your flesh. This is communion in its purest form.
But not all fruit is high prana. Fresh, whole fruit that is ripe and vibrant and has grown in living soil carries enormous prana. The water in fruit is structured light. You can feel it. A strawberry picked in the sun and eaten immediately is a different being than the same strawberry three days later in a plastic clamshell. One is alive and singing. The other is leaving.
But fruit that is unripe, overripe, irradiated, gassed, shipped across oceans, or grown in dead soil is not high prana. It is fruit in form only. The light has left or was never allowed in. Juice from concentrate, dried fruit with preservatives, fruit in syrup, these are low prana. The processing squeezes the life out, just as it does with anything else.
Color tells you. Deep berries, vivid mangoes, blood oranges, dark cherries, these frequencies are high. Pale fruits, fruits peeled and stripped of their color, fruits that have been turned white or beige through processing, carry less. A white apple core is not the same as the skin. The skin holds the frequency.
And timing matters. Fruit eaten in season, close to where it grew, close to when it was picked, carries the immediate breath of the plant. Fruit stored for months in cold storage is holding on but not alive in the same way. It is the difference between a current and a memory of a current.
So fruit can be among the highest prana food you can eat. But only if it is actually fruit, and not just the idea of fruit wrapped in plastic.
None of us are going to switch to everything I have written about here overnight, but it is where we are going as humanity.
The old grounding was contraction. You ate something dense, your root pulled inward, and you felt anchored because you were heavy. The new grounding is open connection. You root into the earth the way a tree does, not through weight but through a living relationship between your field and the ground beneath you. Your energy is clear and aligned, and that clarity is what holds you steady. You do not need to become heavy to feel the earth. You need to become coherent, your field open and in direct relationship with the earth rather than collapsed into density. Beef was the medicine of a dense age. The age of density is ending.
Eat what attunes you. Not what you are used to. Not what your grandparents ate. Not what the culture demands. Eat what your field can actually use. And if you find yourself reaching for beef, ask yourself: am I grounding, or am I dragging? Beef is $9.64 a pound and climbing. The screwworm is spreading across Texas. The US cattle herd is at a seventy-five-year low. The answer is already making itself visible.