The Tiny Hungry Ghost — A Letter from the Quiet Threshold

I was in the middle of a treatment with one of my clients when what felt like an ordinary moment opened a door inside me. Nothing heavy was said, nothing emotional, just a simple conversation exchanged over the soft rhythm of breath and touch. But something stirred. It was so subtle I almost missed it, one of those inner shifts that makes no sound yet arrives with a kind of gravity.

As our conversation was ending, she shared the name of her tarot reader with me. I smiled and said it would be nice to talk to her someday, to find out more about this hungry ghost of mine. And that image - The Hungry Ghost- lingered in my mind long after she left.

Later, in the space between clients, I felt a wave of introspection move through me. The kind that doesn’t ask for permission. My hands were still damp from cleaning after her treatment, the music still floating softly in the room, the diffuser releasing its familiar scent and yet the silence inside me suddenly felt full, alive, and insistent.

Words began to form as if they’d been waiting behind a door I didn’t realize I’d locked.

What came was the quiet realization that the tiny Hungry Ghost inside me had been whispering again. It wasn’t dramatic; it never is. It speaks in riddles and echoes, in the softest tones that somehow manage to sound deafening. It slips into my thoughts disguised as caution, as humility, as reason. It tells me to stay small. It tells me not to rise too quickly. It tells me that wanting to be seen is dangerous. It tells me that being understood is asking for too much.

And it always pretends it’s protecting me from something I cannot see.

For a moment, standing there alone in my studio, I felt how deeply this ghost had woven itself into my life. How it always tries to take control in the most unsuspecting moments. How it diverts me away from my center not because it is unkind, but because it is afraid. How it became loud precisely because, for so much of my life, I was not allowed to be loud, brilliant, or authentic at all.

The Hungry Ghost is not a villain. It is simply the part of us that never received what it needed when it first needed it. It is the child inside who went unseen, unheard, unheld. It is the adult who still reaches for validation not out of vanity, but out of longing. It is the quiet ache of a life spent dimming itself to match the rooms it entered. It is everything we swallowed in silence because no one taught us how to digest pain.

Some might say the ego is the Hungry Ghost. For me, it feels more like a wound, a wound that learned to speak because the world around it refused to listen. And now that I am reclaiming my voice, my truth, my fire, this little ghost panics. It tries to pull me back into the familiar shape of who I used to be. It whispers, “Who do you think you are?” and “You’re only doing this for show,” not because it wants to sabotage me, but I am realizing that is because it is terrified of disappearing.

Every wound becomes a doorway when you stop feeding it shame.

But I see it now. I see how it shows up in the smallest moments. How it presses its worries into my thoughts when I am expanding. How it clings to old stories even when new ones are forming. How it tries, with such innocence, to keep me safe in the only way it knows.

And I’m beginning to understand that healing isn’t about exiling this little ghost of mine or silencing it into submission. It’s about acknowledging it. Listening to it. Naming it, Offering it the compassion it never received. It’s about letting this tiny presence inside me know it no longer has to starve. That it no longer needs to claw for scraps of validation. That I am finally here. That I am not abandoning myself the way others once abandoned me.

We all have a Hungry Ghost. Every single one of us.

Some carry it in the voice that says they’re not enough. Some carry it in the relentless need to prove something. Some carry it in the fear of being seen, while others carry it in the fear of being forgotten. But the ghost is the same: always longing, always trembling, always hungry, always hoping someone will finally understand what it has been trying to say.

My revelation that afternoon wasn’t just about me. It was about all of us. The human condition is not a lack of love, but a lack of nourishment in the moments we needed it most. And now, in this threshold of my life, standing between who I was and who I am becoming, I see the Hungry Ghost not as an enemy, but as a returning messenger. It asks only to be seen, fed with truth instead of fear, met with compassion instead of dismissal.

Maybe healing doesn’t begin with becoming stronger or wiser. Maybe healing begins with simply saying:

“Hungry Ghost, I see you. You can rest now.”

And so these words, born in the quiet space between clients, are not just mine. They belong to anyone who has ever felt the tug of their Hungry Ghost in the dark. Anyone who has wrestled with the fear of being too much or not enough. Anyone who has dimmed their light just to be allowed to stay. I was able to meet with my client's Tarot lady and well, there is a line in this song that came from her wisdom.

If you are reading this.... Thank you S.

And, If you recognize your own ghost in these lines, may this serve as a soft reminder that you are not alone. You are not broken. You are not failing. You are simply carrying a part of yourself that has waited a very long time to be fed with kindness.

And perhaps, if we all learn to listen gently to the Hungry Ghost within us, we may finally learn how to set it free, so it can finally return home.

☥