Divorce – Divorce Ritual and Help for Men – Guide for Men in Separation and Divorce

Trauma - Healing

Trauma is not what happened to you, but what happened inside you. Otherwise, you can never heal. Trauma can be caused not only by what happens to you, but also by what didn't happen when it should have happened. So, if your needs aren't met, that can also be very hurtful and traumatic. For example, if you were never really loved and respected. Neglected. But, if trauma is what happened inside you, the wound you suffered, the meaning you made of it, the way you then began to believe certain things about yourself or the world or other people, and if trauma was that disconnection from your true self, guess what? Good news. That can be recovered at any time.

Careful! There are two triggers of trauma:

• From the outside in: Something really bad happens to me, even though I am innocent.

• From the inside out: I do something really bad, even though I would never have thought myself capable of doing it!

That's why when you talk about the new way of looking at trauma, if we see it as this wound, as long as we see it that way, it sounds like it can be healed. If we see it as a series of things that happened, it will never be undone. But the biggest lesson I can learn from this is that we cannot allow this to dictate our lives - how we see ourselves, how we see the world, how we treat other people, how we perceive possibilities, how we even feel about spiritual transformation.

Muddy water hits the jade statue!

Inner Transformation - Pain, Courage and Self-Realization

In divorce we must face the truth and jump into our own abyss:

• • Self-knowledge - As long as we don't honestly know ourselves, we project our problems onto others (Scapegoat). Self-knowledge is painful.

• • Serenity - courage, letting go of old behaviors and often entrenched attitudes. It may also be that you have to change your job and leave relationships. That's why divorce is a truly existential challenge that often involves the whole family and friends.

• • Mystical Self-Realization - the breakthrough from the ego to the self, to reach the unadulterated image of God within me.

Through Death to Life - Divorce as an Opportunity

Only those who are prepared to die remain alive after divorce. It is very difficult to let go of unlived life. It is a time of spiritual drought in which we listen in vain. But in this time of testing our faith and proving our trust, our longing is finally fulfilled and the voice of silence sounds more blissful than ever. People who feel that they have never really lived cling to life like a straw. But this does not make it more alive, rather it becomes more convulsive and narrow. So divorce is an opportunity to go inward and in this way become calmer, wiser, gentler and wiser.

It is an opportunity for purification and a touchstone of loyalty!

Initiation Ritual - Dissolve Dependence on the Symbolic Mother!

We must break the dependence on the symbolic mother in order to become men. All major transitions in life have been accompanied in all societies by "rites of passage," passage rituals designed to help people take the step across the threshold. The most well-known ritual, studied mainly by ethnologists, is the initiation ritual, in which young men are initiated into the secrets of tribal law and the secrets of sexuality.

They must leave their mothers and their homes, are withdrawn into the bush, symbolically devoured by a maternal monster, and then initiated into the secret law of the tribe and religious traditions. When a young man has gone through this passage ritual, he is then a full member of the tribe; he is a man. In many tribes, those who are afraid or for some reason are not initiated are said to be "not initiated, he is an animal," meaning that they have remained completely unconscious - they have not really taken the step to being human.

Initiation Ritual for Women

During natural childbirth, the woman goes through this transformation. She is ready to die and be reborn as a mother with the infant.

The First Commandment - Loyalty!

You should give priority to all things. Whether it is your family, marriage and children, your partner, your job or your money, none of this is as important as your personal relationship with the higher being, with God. Loyalty to God, because the true, the good and the beautiful should be at the top, above your own reputation, career, etc.

Personal Betrayal - Identity Crisis

Time does not heal all wounds. Often we just suppress inner hurts and are broken for life. Personal betrayal is one of the worst experiences we can have. Because when we are betrayed, we can no longer trust our own judgement. We no longer trust ourselves. That is why betrayal shakes our entire existence. It goes so deep into the core and soul that we briefly doubt our own identity.

Suffering - Breakthrough to the Self!

Life is suffering! How can we create something good from this suffering? In divorce we come to terms with our own mortality. It is a time of radically reviewing old patterns and values. It is often the time to take stock. This stocktaking is not of a material or financial nature, but rather it is about the meaning of life. If you do not follow the call of transformation, your heart hardens and you are lost. It is about the path inwards, on which everyone progresses in gradual self-initiations to a new, more alert and more conscious life from the spirit of living oneness with the kingdom of God.

Reconciliation - Who actually needs to reconcile with whom?

Have you reconciled with your life, the past and with people? Have you reconciled with yourself? What is your relationship with God? Or, what do you think, what is his relationship with you? Or do you have none at all? Are you afraid of an answer?

Sin - What separates us from God

What is sin? Sin is everything that separates us from God. Is our action sin, or is it actually our will, our inner striving? Perhaps we can understand it better if we ask ourselves what it actually means to be close to God? That means that everything we do and feel and decide, we do out of love. That everything is filled with love. Conversely, however, that means that if we separate ourselves from God, it is the result of us doing our own thing. If we do that over and over again, then love begins to grow cold and our hearts harden.

Madness - Bubble and Echo Chamber - Hell

Our will shapes what we believe. We want to believe so many things so that they suit us. Not the other way around. Our belief is actually shaped by our will and if we want to believe something, then it is a delusion. We can create our own delusion. About ourselves and about the world and about what is really important. And we know what happens when we only move within our own warm building.

The modern term is bubble, we move in our own bubble, about what we think and want and do. We find confirmation from others who think the same way as we do and so a world is built around us that has little to do with the truth. That is completely normal because people want to believe something. God allows the consequences of our own delusion. He simply lets us go and then we sink into our delusion. Hell is a life with his own kind. If we are lost in ourselves and in our delusion, what is left for us? Misery.

Heaven - Liveliness

In contrast to this, there is heaven. Liveliness is the best word for heaven. Flowing liveliness and abundance, an awareness of bliss, of meaning, of truth and of being able to be creative. All of this corresponds to a state that is similar to divine existence and only when we are in such a way that this is possible for us are we close to God. We are actually happy in the innermost sense without being intoxicated and we are part of the flow of life.

Ugliness - Arrogance & Pride

And the people who are selfish and who above all only think of themselves and who believe they are something very special, who have cultivated their arrogance within themselves, who have learned that you have to lie a little in life, who therefore lie as a matter of course, are abysmally ugly in the light of this state. At the same time, however, this being flooded with light is something that is obvious to everyone.

That means that everything is revealed and for those who then have to reveal their own ugliness, it is unbearable. That means they cannot bear it and what is the desire then? One wishes to be with those who are of the same kind and has a need to conceal the darkness. If one has understood what heaven actually means, then one knows that heaven is hell for those who can be described as quite unholy in general.

Conversion - Misery & Hate

There is also a strange opinion that it is possible for people to be converted through their misery. Like someone who is really stuck in their torment and hate and is suffering. Then you think that you have believed something wrong and when you believe it correctly you are converted. There is no form of insight from such motives. Or does someone seriously believe that the torment of a person who no longer has a chance to act in their egoism would lead to some kind of gentle insight.

It is much more likely that anger and hatred of one's own fate will grow ever greater. And in the present we can see that this inner irreconcilability with one's own fate, this anger at the fact that this is expected of one, shapes an incredible number of people deep down. If we are so irreconcilable now, it makes sense for us to somehow squeeze some love out of our hearts. Should we try to be loving now, even though there is such a raging irreconcilability within us. Where should we get that from?

No Turning Back On Our Own

Put simply, there is no turning back on our own. The moment we are caught up in our hatred, we don't know which way we should develop love within ourselves. If we are in this hatred and if the consequences of this hatred overtake us, we still need a judgment. If we now need a judgment from God or vice versa, it will help us if he simply reverses this judgment and if our status before God is now different again. Never mind. We are still the same. In order for us to be able to be reconciled with him, something has to change within us.

Rebirth - Sanctification

We must become fundamentally different. We must become heaven-compatible, so to speak, which is called sanctification in Christian language. Something in us must change completely from the ground up, something like a renewal must be possible from within. Everyone needs to be reborn. Rebirth means renewal from within, not from without. From within, that means a completely different seed of will must come into our hearts. Our entire will must change, because we cannot want anything else from within. If we want something, then we want it for ourselves. We still want to become holy, for ourselves, we want to go to heaven, for ourselves. We want all the blessedness for ourselves. But that is just selfishness.

The Divine Becomes Human

For us to have any chance at all, God has to do something completely different. He has to make the otherwise incompatible divine so human that we can actually bear it. If the divine becomes human and the human then begins to be placed in us in its inner holiness, then we will not perish. Then it has a chance, if it is so gentle and so loving and humanly suited to us, then perhaps we can grow from within into this other form of vitality. How is that supposed to work?

Jesus

There is only one way to do this. That God himself becomes human, that he becomes so human that he comes to us as a complete human being. Jesus did that and still does it today. It is necessary that he makes a substantial transformation possible for us, that is, he has to transfer what corresponds to his nature into us in a substantial way. In other words, to where our innermost being is. Into the realm of death.

The Realm of Death - Total Hatred

The realm of death is an independent form of separate existence. Absolute separation, total lovelessness, total hatred. He must therefore bring his innermost being into it, become human and die like us. And then he must penetrate exactly what constitutes the realm of death. He must therefore give his innermost being, his blood, to us. So that we have a chance at all of becoming a new person or, to put it another way, of becoming a part of this new person who is embodied in Christ.

The Cross

Through the cross and through death on the cross, God actually made the human in himself compatible. He sacrificed everything to love that which was left of his humanity - as a human being you always have to think about yourself and you are afraid of pain and death. He transformed everything into love in such a way that his entire humanity was dissolved in love. In doing so, he practically took all sins upon himself. He took on the worst, namely total separation, and actually offers us his flesh and blood.

He offers us his innermost flesh and blood so that it can become part of our innermost being, so that we can become one with him and still remain free. That we can become a new person and that we can first reconcile ourselves with this loving God. And experience that he has long since reconciled himself with us. He reconciled himself with us the moment he was willing to actually take on all the work and all the pain that comes with being dead so that he can get very close to us. So that there is even a chance for us, who are extremely self-centered and selfish by nature, to be healed from within. That is rebirth.

Loving God

To experience this reconciling power within yourself from this loving God and to feel how his love begins to grow within you. How to be transformed from the inside out and how to begin to experience how wonderful it must be to exist forever in the glory of God and to no longer be afraid of anything in the future.

Dragon Slayer - Satanic Face

When we feel the evil, it is a shock that goes deep into the heart. This is also the trauma where our perfect world is destroyed, so to speak, because we have looked into the abyss, into the satanic face of the real evil in other people. Emotional pain and the horror that such a thing exists, that people can be so evil. What can be called evil has its greatest power in that it threatens with its own face. That is, as soon as someone suggests that they can also become evil, the need for a perfect world leads reflexively to compliance and appeasement.

People would rather feed the dragon in the hope that they will then have peace, rather than actually dealing with the coldness, the meanness and the evil face.

The abysmal evil that looks out from a person as soon as they actually start to become evil creates bewilderment. The fact that people can be like that instinctively creates fear in most people.

Be Careful! There are two triggers of trauma:

• From the outside in: Something really bad happens to me, even though I am innocent.

• From the inside out: I do something really bad, even though I would never have thought myself capable of doing it!

Can we look into this abyss of evil ourselves? No, because our own will is to weak, but we need his will. Only then will his mighty power take effect in us, because we can't do something like that alone. The soul, left alone, decides to do it. Accept the abandonment, because then you can bring in the connection to God.

We would be helplessly at the mercy of the dark forces, but in this way we are strengthened by him. Then we can take on the greatest suffering and that is another term for love.

As long as we don't honestly know ourselves, we project our problems onto others (Scapegoat). Self-knowledge is painful.

Intensive Retreat: Phoenix Ritual - Rebirth and Resurrection

To heal, we men seek the peace and quiet in the cave. This is how we can actively allow the phoenix to die and rise again. Among like-minded people, familiarity, protection and camaraderie arise. The Mountain Week - Phoenix Ritual (a week without sleep) at Honora Zen Monastery is the cave in which the phoenix can be reborn.

All living things sail in a boat that crosses the ocean. Man is one with the boat. The ocean is one with the land. Everything you see is in constant activity and movement. But there is only one thing that is majestic and yet completely natural. All things rest in its embrace. Do you ever notice that one unmoving thing? By understanding it, you reach the realm of freedom.