Hungry Ghosts continued...

Hungry Ghosts continued...

Since the last post, I have been urged to expand on the subject of the hungry ghosts.

Meg writes: "At the end of that post my response was....Wait!  I want to know more! 
More about that hungry ghost!! Hungry ghosts in general. 
What they do, how they are drawn, how to get rid of them.

You are the very first person (and only so far) who ever told me about such a thing

and it is such important information...."

It is an important piece of the puzzle in many situations...   So much can be said...

Here is another story that will help to shed some light on the subject...

Some years ago a woman came to me for healing sessions. She had just moved to our town.

She and her husband found a lovely older home in a tree lined neighborhood.

They liked the quiet ambience of their place compared to the hectic noisy city they had left behind.

All went well for the first few months.

But soon after, she started to complain about a change in her husband's behavior.

He had become withdrawn and unhappy in recent weeks... he was just not his old self. 

As time went on he became morose and argumentative.

Strangely, he had started to drink... daily.

Prior to that, it was normal for them to have a glass of wine on social occasions. 

The problem escalated and soon, her husband was drinking to excess most nights.

Their marriage started to suffer. 

Whenever she tried to talk to him, it always sparked a bitter argument.

He had not been unreasonable before.  She felt increasingly alienated from him.

After a couple of months of watching their situation deteriorate, I wondered if we needed
to seek an answer in a less obvious direction. 

It occurred to me to ask her about what he was drinking.
Was he drinking anything out of the ordinary? 
Her answer was very interesting. 
His choice of drinks was very uncharacteristic for him...gin rickeys, manhattans, vodka gimlets... 
drinks that belonged to an earlier era.

Bingo!  I thought.  Hungry ghost...
 

I asked her for further details....where and when he drank....what were his patterns?

She observed that he was becoming increasingly secretive about his drinking... 

and that he was drinking in the laundry room .  
When he came home from work each evening, his new habit was to down a few stiff drinks
before dinner, eat dinner in sullen silence, after which he proceeded to drink himself
into a stupor each night before stumbling into bed.

He was obviously losing control as time went on.

In my mind, I felt sure that he was taking on the personality of the former owner of the house.

I asked his wife to get to know her neighbors and find out everything she could
about the previous occupants...

It wasn't long before she got the sad story of the family that had lived there... 

The house had belonged to a Doctor, his wife and their son. 
For the most part, they seemed like an ordinary family.

All went well until later in life when their son fell into depression as a young adult. 
He moved back in with his parents after college, unable to succeed in life. 

The young man spiraled downward into drug and alcohol addiction, despite the family's best efforts to get treatment for him. 
The young man eventually committed suicide in the basement of the home. 
His parents were devastated...Their only child...dead.

His father soon took to drinking to deal with his pain and loss.  He became increasingly withdrawn
and depressed.   And then he eventually died from the effects of alcoholism....in that house.

I arranged to visit the house with his wife.  When I walked toward the laundry room I felt an angry, heavy presence trying to block my entrance.  The laundry room was ice cold. 
(We later found out that the laundry room was the former location of the old doctor's large liquor cabinet)
I had engaged the former owner.    It took some work to dislodge him from the husband and to remove him from the house, but he did finally move on.  He was reluctant to leave...there was much unfinished business there.  I made it emphatically clear that he had no right to cross the boundaries
into any other person's life.
. 

When we all talked afterward, the new owners were able to see the progression of events and make the connections.  They understood the gradual encroachment of the unhappy spirit into the husband's energy field and mind.  Armed with that knowledge, they were able to turn things around.  They cleared themselves and were able to keep their house clear. Soon,the husband was back to his old self, unencumbered, and his wife felt like she was back together with the man she'd married.

In the next post, we'll talk about how to distinguish between ordinary personal problems and addictions and those that might involve a hungry ghost or harmful energy...