Deflating Hungry Ghosts

Release the need to replay a negative situation over and over again in your mind. Don’t become a hostage to your past by always reviewing and reliving your mistakes. Don’t remind yourself of what should have, could have or would have been. Release it and let it go. Move on.
(Les Brown)

Gabor Mate wrote in ‘In the Realm or Hungry Ghosts’ about his strange compulsive habit to collect expensive classical music CDs. Whenever the stress of his medical profession would get the better of him he went to the local record shop and purchased more CDs. Over the months and years the bills and collections would pile up. No matter how much his wife was complaining and no matter how much his intellect was crying murder given that he was an expert in the field of addictive cravings himself, he just couldn’t stop it!

When I read about his struggles I had to smile. Why would he call his ‘affliction’—a compulsive habit, not to mention addiction? Why couldn’t he call himself a classical music connoisseur and collector instead? Didn’t it occur to him that working with patients with heroine addictions is hard a work, that he in fact absorbed their destructive energies and carried their problems home at night? Classic music gave him peace of mind, and purchasing new collections was his subconscious satisfaction to buy a little peace of mind.

As within so without. For any an inner imbalances, life wraps itself around us and gives us plenty of opportunities to heal ourselves as we attempt to heal the world. His book was published in 2008 and I wonder if his favorite record shop has closed down by now. Did it give him as much satisfaction to buy CD collections on the internet as a mere digital file without glossy boxes and pictures? Sometimes the inner demons are much less scary and potent if we simply stop judging and battling them. Do you carry hungry ghosts inside? Have you already figured out how to deflate them? Maybe you don’t have to do anything. Just sit there and watch them deflate into nothingness.