Transmuting Life’s Tragedies: Embracing a Post-Tragic Perspective

Deep Transformation

In this powerful episode of Deep Transformation, Alexander Love, adult development expert and author of the Evolutionary Gestures Trilogy, shares his personal journey

Key takeaways

• Trauma and tragedy are not endpoints but catalysts for profound growth when met with presence and curiosity.
• The 'post-tragic' state is not a developmental stage but a dimension of being accessible through deep inner work—where pain becomes a source of compassion and connection.

Main topics

• Adult development and lifelong psychological growth
• The post-tragic perspective as a transformative framework

Notable quotes

"We don't leave tragedy behind. We turn toward it and drop into a dimension of being that can interface with it in a new way."

"The alternative to certainty is not chaos—it's an emergent mystery, and there's something beautiful in leaning into the delicate unknown."

Conclusion

Alexander Love invites listeners to embrace the full depth of life's tragedies not as dead

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Welcome to Deep Transformations, profound conversation with Alexander Love, the highly respected adult development expert and coach. In this episode, we explore the crushing personal story of what happened to his father and Alexander as a result. We will move through his framework of pre-tragic, tragic, and post-tragic levels of development and experience. What happens when we accept the tragedy, the pain, and the darkness and continue to move through it? You will find this very powerful and ultimately inspiring. Speaker 1 (0:31) Welcome to Deep Transformation, self, society, spirit, life-enhancing, paradigm-rattling conversations with cutting-edge thinkers, contemplatives, and activists with Dr. Roger Walsh and John Dupuy. Speaker 1 (0:48) I'm Roger Walsh, and our co-host is John Dupuy. And today, our guest is an expert on a topic of enormous importance for each of us individually and for our culture and society and even civilization at large. That topic is adult development, the ways in which we can mature and grow throughout adulthood. Our guest's name... There's Alexander Love, and Alexander is a man of many talents and facets, which include being an acupuncturist, an expert in Chinese medicine, in addition to an expert on adult development. He's also a coach and teacher, lecturer, and particularly at the Newfield Network. And he's the founder of EOS, an organization for deep transformation, and so a perfect guest for us. And he's also just... Speaker 1 (1:42) working on and completing a book, the Evolutionary Gestures Trilogy. And I want to say that I have listened to some of Alexander's talks on adult development, not once, but three times. And I don't know anything else I've listened to three times. So I have learned a lot and you will too, I'm sure. So Alexander, you've basically devoted your life to the whole topic of healing and well-being and... development. How did you come to orient your life to this? Well, I'm so glad to be here with all of you. And, you know, it began in my 20s. I thought that I was going to be a guitar player, musician. My dream was to start a traveling musical circus. And then something devastating happened. When I was 20 years old, my father was murdered. And in that moment, the direction of my life shifted dramatically. Speaker 1 (2:39) And so it went from, you know, sort of being in a state of perpetual innocence and just learning music and having fun to having to really lean into some much deeper questions. And as a part of that, I began exploring transformation and healing. And that's where that journey opened. That's a pretty dramatic transformation. And you have incorporated that into your work. You've dealt with how we... relate to suffering and how suffering is a catalyst for adult development and for maturation, can be a catalyst for maturation and healing. And what was it that specifically brought you to this incredibly important topic of adult development? And I want to just say, this topic is so important and so little known in our culture, the fact that we as humans Speaker 1 (3:33) can continue to grow and mature throughout our lives. We don't have to stop maturing psychologically and spiritually when our body stops growing at around 20. Yeah, absolutely. Well, you know, one of the things that occurs to me is that human beings, we have this unique... this unique gift. I like to call it the sacred gap. And the sacred gap is the space between the knower and the known. It's the reason why we can reflect. Because I can look at the stars and I can say, what is that? I can look at myself and I can say, what am I? And for me, Speaker 1 (4:16) being a human being along with the rest of us and walking through that sacred gap. You know, in my early 20s, I just started asking a lot of questions, trying to understand, who are we? Who am I? What the heck is going on here? This place is not what I expected. It's not what I thought it was. So what is going on? And, you know, while holding those questions, I came across integral theory and the work of Ken Wilber. I became fascinated with this idea that we grow up and that we change as we unfold through time. And it started to, it gave me a way of attempting to understand myself and my pain and understanding others and why would somebody murder an innocent man? You know, all of these things, all of those kinds of questions come up when we look at development. Because development, one aspect of it is an exploration of how do we make meaning? Speaker 1 (5:15) And how does that meaning change as we change? Okay, those are the big questions. Well, there's several directions we could go here, but just to emphasize the importance of what you just said, that you started asking questions. That is so transformative. I've decided that as a motto, I can trust people who have questions. I'm wary of people who have answers, and I flee people who have the answer. So you have questions, which is beautiful. What I feel in you is a openness to the unknown and a curiosity. Does that resonate for you? Yeah, it does. My experience among other things is that we're in a profound mystery and that our challenges, our experience of chaos, our pain, losses, the tragedies, that this is an invitation to lean further into the mystery. There's a sense of Speaker 1 (6:21) All of the things that we could encounter as human beings, the pain and the ecstasy and everything in between, they're like really deep potentials inside all of those things, like seeds of possibility. And, you know, there's times in my life when I really clung to certainty because the alternative seems like chaos. But what I've discovered over time is that the alternative is dropping into an emergent mystery. There may be chaos along with that, but that's workable. And that there's something beautiful in leaning into that delicate unknown. Yeah. And a lot of your work I've been studying last week has been great. Deals with trauma and pain. And I brought questions. First of all, what happens when you don't deal with your trauma and pain? What if you just said, I think dad got murdered. That's it. No. Speaker 1 (7:18) I'm not going to do that one. So how would that affect you practically in day-to-day life if you don't deal with this stuff? Well, you know, my sense is, you know, working with clients and in my own experience that turning away from pain, turning away from the traumas in our lives, it deepens our experience of separation. Because whatever I'm walling off in myself, I'm going to have to wall off any of those things if I see them in other people too. And so whatever, you know, the man who murdered my father, his name is Herbert. Whatever Herbert represents, whatever his violence represents in my own being, if I wall myself off from that, I'm going to have no tolerance for it in other human beings. And so as a practical example, I've noticed for many years, I've had a certain kind of allergy, you could say, or reactivity to it. Speaker 1 (8:17) any form of violence that I notice in anyone. It doesn't have to be physical violence. And if that goes unchecked, then what I can do is become subtly aggressive to try to get rid of their aggressive, you know, their subtle aggression. And so that's just one example of how turning away from pain, it ends up meaning we're turning away from each other because we're human beings are all, we all share a degree of pain. And then conversely, If I learn how to be with my own agony or grief, loss, pain, whatever we want to call it, the love that I'm able to bring to that translates as the ability to bring that love to others. So that's what opens the possibility to sit down and have a conversation with Herbert or someone like Herbert or a neighbor who votes differently than I do. Speaker 1 (9:12) All of those people now become something I can lean into and have dialogue with, have interaction with, and maybe even bring some love. And that's a direct extension of the love that I'm bringing to all of those places in myself that are uncomfortable. You said not only did you lean into the trauma of your murdered father, but you, well, I watched a video of you reading a chapter from your book called The Room. And first of all, let me say, you are a writer, brother. That was some beautiful poetic prose. I was just like, man, I'm in the hands of a master here. Very impressed and moved. And you said that you'd met with. Speaker 1 (10:02) the man that murdered your father. And why did you do that? And how was it? Yeah. So I met with Herbert about 28, 27, 28 years after my father died. That's a lot of time to interact with my own inner, you know, painful experiences. By the time that I realized I could meet with Herbert, there was a good degree of forgiveness that had already taken place. One of the main reasons why I went was not to get to not feel forgiveness because that was already there. It was because I wanted to show all of us, because I'm just a person like anybody else, I wanted to show all of us that these kinds of conversations can happen. And that the degree to which forgiveness is possible is perhaps infinite. And that there is, I figure that if I can meet with the person who killed my dad, then any of us can meet with our neighbor that we had a disagreement over and decided to stop talking. Speaker 1 (11:26) And I wanted to show that it was possible. And of course, I hoped it was possible. You know, it was also a hope. I hoped because it could have been any kind of conversation. Well, what it turns out, and I think this gets at one of the beauties of being human, is that on the one hand, Herbert is a man who murdered my dad. And on the other hand, Herbert is a good man. deeply good man. He showed up with respect, with care, with humility, with the desire to invoke healing. And the first conversation was three hours. My experience was that it was a deeply moving conversation. Speaker 1 (12:11) where I got to explore what's it like to learn where someone has been coming from. So in the context of development, we're all coming from somewhere. We're all an unfolding, growing gesture. We're all in a process of becoming. And so the man that's in front of me now has the 18, 19-year-old Herbert who did the thing, but there's also 27 years of... a human being who's been growing and can reflect on that younger version of himself. So there's an opportunity to get to know that. What shaped Herbert? What leads someone to murder someone else? Speaker 1 (12:53) And so, of course, I mean, there's a lot that could be said in response to your question, but that's just some initial musings around it. What is forgiveness and what is not forgiveness? I mean, how does that work? Well, I mean, I can share my understanding of it. Sure. That's why you're here. I think there's a lot of ways that we could explore that. But to me, when I am not forgiving someone, I've taken our shared history and I'm putting it in between us. So when I look at you, I don't really see you. I see what you did, or I see whatever aspects of our shared history that had felt like they've caused me harm or whatever it's caused, that that's somehow in between us, and so I don't actually see you. And forgiveness... Speaker 1 (13:44) as I experience it, is the process of leaning into that history and feeling all of the complexity and the conflict and the unresolved stuff and working it out one way or another. We can work it out in ourselves. The other person isn't required. Sometimes they're not available, which is good that it's not required. But sometimes it is also available. And so in one way or another, we work out, we untangle these knots of our shared historical pain so that it's no longer between us. Speaker 1 (14:22) It doesn't mean I forget. Forgive and forget personally doesn't make sense. That phrase doesn't make sense to me. It's remember deeply. Become so intimate with what happened. Feel every aspect of it and let it be transformed by love. And then, now that when I'm with Herbert, I'm not like, oh, you're the guy who did this and you're the guy who did that and I have all these stories about who you are. Instead, I'm with someone who's in front of me, just like I'm with the two of you right now. And we can discover who we are in this moment while also making contact with, yes, we have a shared tragedy. Both Herbert and I share a tragedy in our history, but that doesn't have to filter my lens so that I don't actually see that there's a good man here. Speaker 1 (15:10) And did that forgiveness, the level of forgiveness that took you to talk with this man, meet with this man multiple times, was that the work of years? Yeah. Or did you just have a moment where it just went poof and it was gone? You know, it's interesting. I sort of assume that Herbert's childhood was terrible. It turns out that it was true. It was very violent, like beyond what I think many of us could imagine. He said his father has hands like shovels, just to put some of his language to it. And so somehow there was a sense of understanding early on, although I think there was understanding without having embraced a lot of the pain. But I actually don't remember feeling angry, which is strange. Speaker 1 (16:09) But I don't remember feeling angry. I've mostly experienced grief and a sense of, wow, this man's life must have been so horrible that he could do something like that. I don't know that that occurred from anything that I did. But the ability to show up with Herbert and bring love, I think, came from years of facing my own pain and learning how to love that. Also working with clients for many, many years and understanding how human beings work, how we function, what's going on in our inner landscape. I think that those things all help. Speaker 1 (16:52) And it seems like the willingness to be with pain is such a crucial part of healing and maturation. And it seems like whatever we have in our mind that we're unwilling to experience sticks around until we are willing to experience it. And whatever we're unwilling to experience runs our life. Basically, you can spend your life. I had a patient who was a needle phobic who... All her friends were heading off overseas and she was stuck at home because she couldn't get immunized. And it only took a couple of sessions of first, you know, bringing your needle into the room, moving it closer to her, et cetera. And her being willing to experience what she had spent a lifetime avoiding for the fear to dissolve. And that's a relatively small example, but... Speaker 1 (17:48) Sounds like you did that in a much larger and more extended way, even to the point of coming to be able to care deeply for this other forward human being, as we all are to some extent. Yeah. Well, you know, for me, it comes back to the sacred gap is that, you know, if I'm needle phobic, it's because I can anticipate a sensation and then reflect that I don't want that. And that same gap is what creates revelation and epiphany and insight, but it also creates suffering because we can then take a perspective. It's in that gap between the knower and the known that I can take a perspective on pain, on joy, on my neighbor's voting tendencies. And so this opens up both the possibility for incredible insight and wonder, but it also creates suffering. And the suffering gives us the opportunity. Speaker 1 (18:58) to start turning our witness, turning our awareness towards what we're scared of or what we reject, just like you described. So then we can practice getting a little closer. And of course, the how do we get closer to pain? There's a whole, you know, vast set of technologies that we can explore that, you know, there's ways that I like to do it. There's a million ways that helpers have. devised so that we learn how to move towards the things that scare us or that we reject so that maybe those hidden seeds of potential start to blossom, start to grow. And we've zeroed in here on the topic of our relationship to pain and suffering and sorrow. Speaker 1 (19:47) partly because it's such