Pain Is a Doorway: What Forgiving His Father’s Killer Taught Alexander Love About Being a Good Man

In 1998, Alexander Love’s father was murdered.

Years later, Alexander sat down with the man convicted of the crime — on Zoom, at the man’s request, because he feared Alexander might come across the table. What Alexander found in that conversation was not vengeance, not even closure exactly. It was something closer to friendship. And it reshaped everything he now teaches about pain.

Alexander is an acupuncturist, a developmental coach, and senior faculty at the Newfield Network, where he created the Lumina Process — an approach to shadow work that weaves together Eastern wisdom, Integral theory, and parts work. His TEDx talk is called “How Embracing Pain Creates a Legacy of Love.” And his central claim is one most of us are trained to resist.

Pain Is a Doorway

“Pain is a doorway into profound possibilities,” he told Will, “and through embracing our pain, that doorway opens.”

We’re taught the opposite. When something hurts, get rid of it as fast as possible, then be happy — as if happiness came from turning away. Alexander’s experience is that the pain itself transforms when you turn toward it. And there’s a relational payoff: the degree to which you can be with your own pain is exactly the degree to which you can be with pain and discomfort in others. Which makes turning toward your own suffering not a self-indulgence but a prerequisite for showing up for anyone else.

Hero and Villain Is a Story, Not the Truth

By the time Alexander sat down with Herbert — the man who killed his father — more than twenty years had passed, and forgiveness was already present. His reasons for meeting were layered. One was almost civic: he wanted to show that this kind of conversation is possible.

“Hero and villain works fine for a movie,” he said, “but it doesn’t capture what it means to be human.” His line about it is the one people remember: if he can build a genuine connection with the man who murdered his father, then whatever discord you’re carrying — even, he joked, being furious at your mother-in-law — there’s hope for you too.

What he learned in that conversation deepened the point. Herbert had been nineteen, lied to by an older figure who knew Herbert had a moral code and manufactured a story to get around it. Herbert didn’t learn until their conversation that he’d been deceived. He had grown up in a level of violence most films sanitize — he saw his first dead body before he was six. None of this erases what he did. But it dissolves the cartoon. And holding both truths at once — Herbert murdered my father, and Herbert is a fundamentally good human being — is exactly the friction Alexander says grows us.

We Are Fundamentally Good

This is Alexander’s most radical claim, and he offers it carefully: he believes human beings are fundamentally good. Not that we don’t do terrible things — clearly we do. But that if you look deeply enough, even in someone who never expresses it, there’s a treasure there. A deep, unbroken dimension of being that remains good.

Sitting across from Herbert, he says, that wasn’t hard to see. It was easy. Which doesn’t mean certain people shouldn’t be in prison — they have other aspects that cause harm. But the unbroken core is still there, underneath the tragic choices.

The Three-Step Practice

For men who want to actually do this rather than just admire it, Alexander teaches a three-step practice.

First: turn toward. Pain is usually wound up in a story that pulls you out of your body and into a mental spin. The first move is to decouple the narrative from the sensation.

Second: locate it. Go into the body and find where the feeling actually lives. Where is the heaviness, the anxiety, the grief? For a lot of men, the honest first answer is “in my head” — which is the sign that you’re still in the story, not the sensation. There’s a whole landscape below the neck, and that’s where the work is.

Third: lovingly embrace it. Bring a genuine loving or curious presence to the sensation — he uses the image of getting close to a sleeping puppy, gentle and unhurried — and let that presence make actual contact with the edge of the pain. Not metaphorically. You feel the pain, you feel its edges, and you bring warmth right up against it. In that contact, the doorway opens.

“Being soft,” he’s careful to say, “is not anti-masculinity.” There’s a healthy, integrated masculinity that holds gentleness within its stability and structure.

What a Good Man Actually Is

The cultural story — real men feel no pain, strong men don’t hurt, pain is weakness — has a history. Alexander points to decades of deliberate marketing that tied masculinity to a hardened, armored posture. Recognizing that these narratives were sold to us, rather than simply true, opens a door: if the story was written, it can be rewritten.

His rewrite is simple. A good man is someone who has the courage to turn toward his own experience. The outer world takes courage, sure. But the inner landscape is more nuanced and more intense, and the willingness to go in there and embrace what’s waiting is the harder, truer bravery. Men who develop that capacity, he notes, aren’t diminished by it. They’re better husbands, brothers, friends, and fathers — and people want to be around them more.

This episode discusses murder, grief, and incarceration in a restorative justice context. If you or someone you know is struggling, please reach out to a trusted person or a crisis line in your country for support.

More about Alexander Love

Website & free course, Awakening the Post-Tragic Dawn: alexanderlove.org
TEDx talk: “How Embracing Pain Creates a Legacy of Love” — search on YouTube
Newfield Network (9-month coach & personal transformation training): newfieldnetwork.com

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Co-produced by Robert Lopez | cratesaudio.com