Midlife Crisis – Rebirth – Ritual – Burnout – Learn how to die properly
Midlife Crisis - The Necessary Crisis
In midlife we come to terms with our own mortality. The Midlife Ritual is a week-long meditation retreat in which we reexamine life and death wholeheartedly. Midlife is a time of radical review of old patterns and values. It is often the time to take stock. However, this interim assessment is not of a material or financial nature, but rather it is about the meaning of life. If you don't respond to the call of midlife, your body and mind will report burnout.
The Midlife Crisis - Person without Rank and Name
Until midlife we live one-sided lives because we need a strong ego to find our way in life. But after that it's about moving from the ego to the self, to your own person without rank or name. This can only be achieved if we accept our shadow.
Ego Death - The Holy Grail
Ego death is what happens when someone who loves you cheats on you (spouse, parent). Imagine the world is incredibly complicated and you only see a small part of it. Your understanding is based on making assumptions about things and simplifying those assumptions. So when you trust someone, you massively reduce their complexity. Let's say we were married, then there are a whole range of ways you will behave that are more simplistic. So in a way I can tolerate being around you because you are not everything at once. These simplifying structures are hierarchical and some of them are far more important than others.
Breach of Trust
Trust is one of them, especially trust in loved ones and family members. That's why betrayal by a family member is really catastrophic. Because it destabilizes your past, all your memories, it destabilizes your present and it destabilizes your future. It shakes your faith in humanity, including yourself, and everything collapses and that is the death of the ego. Underneath the ego for Jung was another structure that he called the self. And the self is what remains constant across the death of the ego, but it is deeper and less personal, it is archetypal. It is what the ego collapses into when it collapses and then what the ego rebuilds over time.
Voluntary - Involuntary
There are two types of it because you can have a voluntary or involuntary ego death. A voluntary ego death is when you have learned a lot and are ready to let go, so that would be your own imitation. It's like lighting a phoenix and setting yourself on fire, that's a much better idea, even though it can still be very hard. Involuntary ego death is very hard on people. People will do almost anything to prevent that, which is partly why they fight to maintain their group-promoted axiomatic simplifications. This is not surprising, because you would lose yourself. Ego death is a trip to the underworld or a fall into chaos, and that is less bad if you do it intentionally.
Pinocchio
But in the Pinocchio story, for example, this is illustrated by Pinocchio descending into the depths to save his father from the whale. He does this voluntarily, but it almost kills him. He barely gets out of the whale, drowns and dies, but he comes back to life. So even if you do it voluntarily, it is still very hard, but it is better than doing it involuntarily, which is the other alternative.
Anima & Animus - The Courage for the Completeness of the Soul
It is also about integrating the female soul parts (anima) and the male soul parts (animus). When the man represses the anima, he becomes moody and controlled by his whims. When the woman represses the animus, it often manifests itself in opinions that are no longer questionable. A sign of the integration of anima and animus is that men and women find their own identities and at the same time get along well with men and women around them. The man no longer needs to devalue the woman. And the woman no longer needs to fight the man.
Escape Tendencies - Challenge
Midlife is a time of transformation and therefore a challenge:
- Instead of transforming yourself, you want to change others, your environment, your society.
- You constantly change external things (behavior, diet, exercise). But it's no use, because you reject what you want to change and then it sticks.
- You rule out any change. This often leads to rigid conservatism. I hold on to the old attitudes to life, to the old rituals, to the old way of life. I'm not moving. But that leads to inner rigidity.
Inner Transformation - Pain and Courage & Self-Development
In midlife we have to face the truth and jump into our own abyss:
- Self-Knowledge - Unless we honestly know ourselves, we project our problems onto others. Self-knowledge is painful.
- Serenity - Courage to let go of old behaviors and often entrenched change of attitudes towards work and relationships. Or it may also be that you should change your job and leave the relationship. That's why the midlife crisis is a truly existential challenge that often involves the entire family.
- Mystical Self-Realization - The breakthrough from the ego to the self, to reach the unadulterated image of God within me.
Through Death to Life - The Gateless Gate
Only those who are prepared to die remain alive after the midlife crisis. It is very difficult to let go of unlived life.
People who feel like they have never really lived cling to life like a straw. But this doesn't make it more lively, it makes it more convulsive and narrow. So midlife is an opportunity to take the path inward and in this way become calmer, milder and wiser.
Midlife Crisis in the Modern Times - Fatal Timing & Burnout!
Since in modern society we usually start a family and have children later in life, the midlife crisis encounters very unfavorable family situations. In earlier times it was common for one to build up one's ego with the young family and establish oneself in the relationships as husband, father, wife and mother and in one's career. When the children had already moved out, the wife and husband were able to devote themselves to midlife with mutual understanding.
Nowadays, midlife comes at a time when family and children place a lot of strain on parents. Delayed family planning clashes with the needs of midlife and leads parents to almost impossible situations and excessive demands. A fatal timing that often leads to divorce and thus the destruction of the family. If you don't respond to the call of midlife, your body and mind will report burnout.
Meditation - The Phoenix must die first!
The highest empowerment is to understand that which can neither be given nor received. The highest level is attained when one has understood that which is neither high nor low. Once you understand that there is nowhere to go, you take the highest path. What is most necessary is to understand that which is without birth and death. The highest kind of right knowledge is to understand that which cannot be fathomed.
Having understood that which is neither great nor small, one uses the highest spiritual vehicle. The highest view is to understand the meaning of nonduality. The highest meditation is to be aimless. The highest course of action is to be without grasping and rejecting. When one has understood that which cannot be achieved through strenuous striving, one has attained the highest fruit.
Midlife Initiation - Zen Retreat
The initiation into midlife is a week of meditation in the Honora Zen Monastery. Life & Death is the big thing, be vigilant because everything is transient and passes quickly, time waits for no one. A thousand paths lead to the gateless barrier; once through and you are free from life and death.
MEDITATION is very difficult in a godless and fatherless time because we are aimless and divided. Meditating means first penetrating your own shadow and then diving into the deep, chaotic and dark source. Take a deep breath and think the unthinkable. Sit like a mountain and penetrate into the depths of the deep so that your true self awakens. Then the fire phoenix can rise again from the ashes with its thousand-colored plumage.