Ernest Morrow

Sometimes life seems impossibly tender. It seems easy to forget how vulnerable I am and then suddenly there it is.

A flood of sadness or fear or shame and, for a moment I forget if I know how to swim.

Thrashing about is exhausting. I did that for years. As if my little waving arms and feet could make the flood recede. But all I did was tire myself out.

I am convinced that at the level of essence we are all lovable and worthy. Absolutely. 100%. We do not need to earn anything from Life. We are loved whether we figure it out or not.

But you know what? Human relationship is not unconditional. That is a paradox that I see often gets lost in a lot of healing and consciousness work. It’s not enough to simply accept that we are lovable. We need to act as if that is true. How? By showing up for others.

In my experience, we all have to earn the right to feel good about ourselves in relationship and that comes with showing up for ourselves and others with commitment, integrity, reciprocity and accountability.

What is forgiveness?

For me, the really powerful truth of forgiveness is that it is a *different way of seeing* which holds the tension between our essence and our ego.

We are so conditioned to identify with our pain body that whether we are acting from love: “I open my heart to you” or acting from pain “I close my heart to you” we use the same pronoun “I” to describe it. Both actions seemingly arise from “me”.

But on closer inspection I don’t believe this holds up.

The “I” that opens my heart is very different than the “i” that closes my heart. They are two completely different states of consciousness. The ego does not want us to differentiate between them because it benefits from us feeling guilty/unworthy/ashamed by our own actions. In fact, it reinforces the probability that we will continue to act out of fear of being bad which can only cause suffering for ourselves and others.

But when we realize that it was the ego/serpent in us that transmitted the pain rather than the truth of who we are we begin to see things in a way that allows us to experience redemption. We can still mourn and grieve our unconsciousness but we can rest in the knowledge that it was not a conscious choice.

As Kabir says, “All are forgiven and moreover, dears, no one has ever been guilty.”

And if we experience ongoing torment of our guilt we now get to name that too as the serpent who is using its own misdeeds as leverage to extend its power in our lives.

It is an act of great courage and revolution to find connection with other men!

Dear Men: This is How we Start a Revolution.

I would love to get a big conversation going so please share widely amongst your networks. I would also love your personal feedback so please respond below or email me 🙂

With respect,

Ernest

You know those days when life takes you to the edge?

How deep can you feel? How far can you let go? How big can you get?

These are the questions Life is asking of me today.

There is a spiritual heresy out there that life gets easier if you are awake or ‘aligned’. Ask Jesus how that worked out.

The purpose of Life, it seems, is for the light to shine into darkness. And that sounds way too abstract. What that really means is that I get to find away to become present (my Light) to the pain I feel (the darkness). There is no heavenly dimension where this gets played out. It happens here and now right where you are and I am.

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