The Hungry Ghost

 

 

[powerpress]http://www.fuub.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/The-Hungry-Ghost.m4a[/powerpress]

 

Last year my twins were two years old and although at times they were loving and funny and sweet, at other times they provided a textbook elucidation of the term “terrible twos.” I was griping to a friend of mine about the tantrums, the biting each other, and the “going boneless” when they don’t want to be picked up. “Must they really both be two years old at exactly the same time?” She listened carefully and about a week later I received – count them – seven parenting books in the mail. I had never thought I had time to read parenting books but now I decided that I didn’t have time not to.

 

I now recommend the practice of reading parenting books to all parents, not because of any particular techniques that you couldn’t figure out for yourself, but because reading them reminds you to be intentional about your parenting. It reminds you that you are communicating your values, day and night, to your children in the ways you relate to them.

 

There was some really interesting, counterintuitive stuff, though, in one of these books, about self-esteem and praising your kids. It basically said not to. In American culture, we praise kids all the time, thinking that this is helping their self-esteem. “What a great drawing! …You’re so pretty! …Fantastic work on the puzzle!” But this book, citing the work of child psychologist Dr. Haim Ginott, makes the case that when you tell a kid that their painting is “great,” a) they don’t know what that means and b) you rob them of the opportunity to determine its value for themselves. They don’t get to learn to see the world through their own eyes, they only learn see it through the eyes of others.

 

What he suggests you do instead is just describe what you see. Describe it in detail and describe the effect it has on you and the world. It’s a very non-attached, almost Buddhist approach. So when your kid shows you their drawing of a ghost, instead of saying that it’s great, you can talk about what colors they used, where there are squiggly lines or straight lines, or whether it’s scary to look at it. Then the kid can see that the drawing created a certain effect and that’s information that they can use to determine for themselves if their ghost is “great” or “not great.”

 

Skeptical at first, I gave it a try with my own kids. My daughter Miriam came to me and said, “Mommy, mommy, I finished the puzzle!” And instead of saying, “Good job, I’m so proud of you!” I said, “Wow – you did that whole puzzle all by yourself without any grownup helping you! That must have taken a long time.” And she said happily, “Yes. I’m so proud of myself.” Bells went off in my head: this is self-esteem.

 

Self-esteem is a profound and complicated concept. On one level, it’s just what it sounds like – it’s how you esteem yourself; how you appraise yourself in relation to some ideal of value. Having true, independently grounded self-esteem is considered kind of the holy grail of emotional health. In the child psychology literature it’s usually contrasted with being peer-oriented – dependent on the approval of one’s peers for a sense of self worth. But “self-esteem” seems to me like a paradoxical concept because the word “self” here is both the subject and the object of the term. The self is both doing the appraising and being appraised. So you could say that, taken literally, self-esteem is an impossible loop – like lifting the chair that you’re sitting on. Who am I to assign value to myself? Where does that value come from?

 

And this question of where our value ultimately comes from is where psychology textbooks fall silent. It’s a spiritual question. It’s one that all religions attempt to answer, including Unitarian Universalism. The very first of our Seven Principles states that we affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person. According to the authors of the Seven Principles, our worth is simply inherent. It’s a beautiful idea – that we have worth, we have dignity, simply by virtue of being persons. It’s probably a holdover from the notion of the divine spark – that we are each a carrier of a tiny piece of divinity, the breath of God. But over the years, for some us, the religious flavor of it fell away and now it’s a special something in our DNA that lends ultimate value to whatever it inhabits. We each have worth and dignity, beauty and importance just ‘cuz.

 

So self-esteem is a faith in one’s own “just ‘cuz” value. And it turns out that this faith is really hard to come by, not just for children but for all of us. Maybe because most of our parents didn’t parent us like Dr. Haim Ginott recommends, most of us grew up learning to peg our sense of self worth to other people’s expectations – peers, parents, strangers on the street, authority figures, the norms established by media narratives. Instead of our worth feeling inherent and unconditional, it feels contingent – like something we have to achieve or prove. And the problem is, it’s a constant rat race. We’re never done achieving it – if you get a good grade on one paper, there’s always another test coming up; if you manage to lose ten pounds, you need to lose another ten; if you get a raise at work, you’re going want to try for a bigger one next year.

 

It becomes habitual, the constant striving for approval from others. And if you’re on this treadmill, rarely, if ever, do you decide that you’ve arrived – you’ve made it – and now your self-worth is secure for evermore. In fact, it tends to work the opposite way. The pursuit of social approval is addictive. There’s a kind of inflation so you need more and more of it to get the same high. It’s painful to watch in another person, and it’s painful to experience. But it’s a kind of pain that we are so used to, we don’t even notice it. It’s our culture. Even those among us who seem most confident, most self-assured, often are desperately addicted to success at work in order to feel good about themselves, or need their kids to get straight A’s in order to feel good, or need to be told how young they look for their age in order to feel good. Take away those external bolsters and they wouldn’t even know who they are anymore. We “crowd-source” our own worth and dignity. And while we have parenting books to help us keep our kids off this treadmill, many of us how no idea how to get off of it ourselves.

 

In Buddhist mythology, there’s a story of a being called the Hungry Ghost who has a really big belly but a really skinny neck, only big enough for a needle. He wants to eat and feel full but no matter how much he eats, he can’t do it: he’s always hungry. Thich Naht Hahn teaches that we all have a little bit of the Hungry Ghost in us – we have this restless anxiety that we should always be doing something differently, having something more, being something else. And that hunger is never sated. He writes:

 

When we feel disconnected with our source of life, with our ancestors, with our traditional values, we begin to wither and become a hungry ghost, going around and looking for something to help us revive, looking for a source of vitality again. Someone who is alienated feels that he or she is a separate entity that has no connection with anyone. There is no real communication between him or her with the sky, with the earth, with other human beings, including his father, her mother, brother, sister and so on. Those who feel cut off like that have to learn how to practice so that they will feel connected again with life, with the source of life that has bought him or her there.

 

Thich Naht Hahn recommends a kind of mindfulness meditation practice to help reconnect us with the source of life. To fill our hunger from the inside, rather than the outside. Through practice, we slowly release the illusion that achievement and approval will make us happy. For those of us who are more religiously inclined, prayer is the same idea. While prayer doesn’t seem to be very effective in directly changing the outside world, it’s extremely effective at changing the inside world. In prayer we connect with the ultimate Source of worth and dignity, the unconditional love that our Universalist theology teaches. We invite it into our souls and as that holy presence grows within us, we gain an unshakeable confidence. The importance of social achievement and approval shrinks. Whether it’s meditation, prayer, or some other spiritual practice, the key is to be intentional about it. You have to practice literally every day if you want to have any hope of counteracting the powerful messages we receive in our crowd-sourced world.

 

But what if you are successful, attractive, healthy, smart and you feel pretty darn sexy most of the time? What if that reward loop of social approval and self-image actually works in your favor?  You’re happy! Why should you be motivated to pray and meditate and work hard to change that? Why should you unplug from that yummy dopamine drip? I’ll tell you why: regardless of whether you’ve got real happiness or not, it’s more than your happiness that’s at stake. It’s your ability to be trustworthy and keep your promises and act ethically and compassionately in the world. By extension, what’s at stake is the wellbeing of everyone and everything you love.

 

Because let’s say that in order to believe in your own value, you need to maintain your untarnished legacy as head football coach at a Division One university and you get word that an assistant coach may be molesting children. What are you going to do?

 

Let’s say that in order to believe in your own value, you need the approval of the other parents in your button-down suburban Connecticut town, and your young son wants to wear a dress to school. What are you going to do?

 

Let’s say that in order to believe in your own value, you need success at your job as a high level advertising executive and you get offered the big Philip Morris account in Central America, selling single cigarettes to impoverished smokers to keep them addicted to nicotine. What are you going to do?

 

Someone whose sense of self-worth is crowd-sourced can actually be dangerous. They simply don’t have the spine to make the hard decisions this world needs. It’s incumbent on all of us to grow that spine through our faith. Luckily, Universalism makes a promise to us that makes such a spine possible – that all of us are ultimately loved and accepted by God or the Universe itself. We are all journeying toward its loving embrace. No one is left out, no one is refused, not even for murder, much less than for a bad hair day. Our inherent worth is inalienable and sacrosanct. And so we can feed the Hungry Ghost on this promise; through practice, finally a square meal. I urge us all to make this practice a priority, to find our true source of self-esteem and go hungry no longer. So that we can come to feel full and whole, just as we are, not because of any praise or accomplishments, but just ‘cuz.