Divorce Rituals & Hand UN-fasting
By Anna Jollymore
July has a strong emotional resonance for me, for a number of reasons. Big Things often happen for me this month. For example - five years ago in July I stood up in court before a judge and asked for a legal divorce from my husband. I'll never forget the feeling of relief when that judge *thonked* an actual rubber stamp down onto the paperwork and my marriage was finally done.
It wasn't even a contentious divorce. It was a fairly quiet, peaceful end to a ten year relationship that provided many positive memories and experiences. My ex and I even went out to brunch together after our court date to celebrate with mimosas! (As Sandra Oh says in the movie Under the Tuscan Sun - you start a marriage with champagne, you should end with it too!) Still, even under the best of circumstances, divorce is HARD. It's a long, embarrassing, expensive, and painstaking process of untangling all the fibers of shared future building. It is actively UNdoing so many things. It's exhausting. I was ready to be done, and ready to move on. Or so I thought.
The following summer I started to develop a nagging pain in my hand. I thought at first it was maybe carpal tunnel, maybe a stressed tendon or even the early signs of arthritis developing. As the days stretched longer, the pain grew worse, and no amount of ibuprofen seemed to help. I finally mentioned the pain to my friend Megan, who is a talented energetic healer. She asked a few basic questions like - "which hand?" and "what part of your hand do you feel the pain most acutely?" and it didn't take long for it to finally hit me - it was my left hand, my ring finger. And of course, I also realized that it was this exact week in July that I had been standing in court asking for a divorce just one year previous.
Talk about a "duh" moment from the universe!
Megan and I worked together to take a look at my original vows and see how my energetic system was still connected to my ex. We created un-vows, and I did a personal ritual later using my wedding ring to unfasten my hand from his. After that, the pain in my finger went away almost instantly.
Marriage is an elaborate ritual. You stand before your community, often presided over by some elder or spiritual authority. You speak vows, you exchange rings. The energetic layers to a ritual like that are profound, and cannot be fully undone by filling out paperwork and having some random judge rubber-stamp it.
If you're struggling to move on from a divorce, I urge you to remember the ritual aspects of your marriage ceremony and other strong symbols or talismans you still carry that are associated with that union. What needs to be done to unbind these things on a spiritual level? It takes the same level of care and intention to separate hearts, lives, and futures as it does to weave them together.
