Alexander Love sat down with the man who murdered his father, and the reason it happened on a screen tells you almost everything.
The conversation happened on Zoom. Not because it was convenient. Because the man who murdered Alexander Love’s father asked for it that way.
His name is Herbert. He’s serving life in Pennsylvania, and life there means life. When the counselors set up the restorative justice dialogue, Herbert requested it be over video, and the reason he gave was that if they were in the same room, he was afraid Alexander would come across the table and try to strangle him.
So a son and the man who killed his father met, face to face on a screen, more than 20 years after the murder. Alexander’s first question was what his friends call him. The answer was Razor, a name earned the hard way across four and a half years in solitary.
And by the end of it, the two of them were friends. Will took this one solo, I wasn’t on the call, and I’ve listened twice trying to understand how a person gets there.
The doorway nobody wants to walk through
Alexander opened the episode with the thing he wishes every man knew. Pain is a doorway into profound possibilities, and the door only opens when you turn toward it.
That runs against everything we’re trained to do. The script most of us got is that when something hurts, you kill it as fast as you can and then get back to being happy, as if happiness lived on the far side of not feeling. Alexander’s whole life is a rebuttal. The pain itself transforms when you turn to face it. And here’s the line that reorganized how I heard the rest: the degree to which you can be with the pain inside you is the degree to which you can be with pain in anyone else. Your own avoidance is the ceiling on your compassion.
Hero and villain is a story for movies
Here’s what Alexander refuses to do, and it’s the hardest part of the whole hour. He will not flatten Herbert into a villain.
The backstory makes that possible. Herbert was 19. A man he trusted, the one who ordered the killing, lied to him and told him Alexander’s father was part of “the game,” a player in a world where death was on the table. Herbert had a code, he wouldn’t hurt innocent people, and that lie is the only reason he crossed the line he crossed. He didn’t learn he’d been lied to until his conversation with Alexander, more than two decades later. It was the one moment in the dialogue he got visibly worked up. Sit with that. He’s serving life, and he found out he was deceived into it from the son of the man he killed.
Alexander went further into Herbert’s world than any movie goes. First dead body around age 5. First killing witnessed before he was 9. There was a children’s name in the neighborhood for a shooting, for the display of blood on the ground. They called it Rainbow Bright. A kid’s name, because it happened often enough to need one.
None of that undoes the murder. Alexander holds both hands open at once: Herbert killed my father, and Herbert is a deeply good, sincere man. He says the friction of holding two truths that don’t fit, if you have the courage to stay in it, is catalytic. It grows you. And under all of it is a belief I share and can’t prove: that if you look deeply enough into anyone, there’s an unbroken part that is fundamentally good.
The guardians at the door
So why is turning toward pain so hard? Alexander’s answer, drawn from parts work, is that we’re all protected by guardians, and they mean well.
He splits them into two kinds. The yang guardians run on control. The inner critic. Keeping it all together. Grin and bear it. Show no weakness. The yin guardians run on collapse. Scrolling you can’t stop, the third drink, the porn, the show you binge to go numb. Both are parts of you doing their best to keep you from feeling something they decided you couldn’t survive. The problem is the bill. Numb yourself to the pain and you numb yourself to aliveness in the same stroke, because it’s one dial, not two. Wall off the grief and you wall off the joy, the connection, the whole thing.
The way out isn’t hating the guardian. Alexander’s move is to get curious about what it’s actually protecting, then relate to it from a steadier place underneath, what he calls the ground of being, the part of you that isn’t your thoughts or your sensations or your story. That’s also the case he makes for meditation, and it lands for me. Leaning into your pain from that grounded place is a completely different act than leaning in from another part that’s already drowning. You can’t build the house on sand. And the thing I keep coming back to, the reframe he and I would both plant a flag on: a good man is not the one who feels no pain. A good man is the one with the courage to turn toward his own...
What to do about it
Turn toward, locate, embrace. Next time something hurts, don’t stay in the story spinning in your head. Drop into your body and find where the feeling actually lives, chest, gut, throat, below the neck. Then bring it curiosity or warmth, the way you’d get close to a sleeping puppy, and let that gentle attention touch the edge of the pain. That contact is where the doorway opens.
Meet your guardians. Name your go-to protection. The controlling one (inner critic, keeping it all together) or the numbing one (the scroll, the drink, the screen). Then ask it what it’s trying to keep you from feeling. You’re not trying to kill it. You’re trying to understand what it’s been guarding.
Change the observer, not just the actions. If you keep landing in the same reality, the same fights, the same stuckness, don’t just swap the behavior. Look at how you’re making meaning underneath it. Start with our free Awareness Self-Assessment to see the pattern you keep recreating: focusnowtraining.com/assessment-page. Paid subscribers, Resource 2 walks the whole thing.
Ask for help, and pick the right people. Alexander is blunt that healthy men don’t do this alone. Find one person or one group that can see what you can’t, and make sure it’s a group that grows people, not one that just reinforces everyone staying stuck. Reply and tell me the pain you’ve been powering through instead of turning toward. I read every one.
Reconsider your villain. Name the person you’ve cast as all bad, the ex, the parent, the boss, the guy who wronged you. You don’t have to excuse a thing they did. Just ask what you’d see if you looked deeper. Reply with who came to mind, and I’ll build a follow-up on what it costs us to keep people flat.
This week on Men Talking Mindfulness
Alexander Love is an acupuncturist and developmental coach who serves as a senior facilitator and director of curriculum at the Newfield Network. He created the Alumina process, a parts-work method weaving shadow work, Eastern wisdom, and polarity work, and he’s finishing his first book, The Evolutionary Gestures Trilogy, built around his father’s murder in 1998 and the restorative justice dialogue he’s had with the man convicted of it. Will sat down with him solo for this one, on pain, forgiveness, and the courage to turn toward what hurts.
Watch on YouTube | Listen here
One more thing before the paywall
Awareness to Action has been open a couple of months now, and the group of students in it is real. Text A2A to 33777 or go to https://awareness2action.com. It’s built to take you from knowing this stuff to actually turning toward it, with real practices and real people. On the fence? Reply with the word A2A and I’ll tell you straight whether it’s for you.
Until next time,
Jon Macaskill and Will Schneider
Focus Now Training and Men Talking Mindfulness
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