Hello and welcome!
My name is Ernest Morrow
I am a mentor and lifelong student on the Left Hand Path
Our culture’s story of how life works stopped working for me when I was 15…
And it certainly didn’t feel like a spiritual awakening. I don’t think most of them do. It felt like a very large problem.
But nothing was going to make me unsee what I discovered: That chasing fulfillment and satisfaction through control of external outcomes was never going to work.
No matter how good I could get at outcomes the tension of locating the meaning and purpose of my life outside of myself was never a permanent solution.
Living life this way was only going to lead to suffering and anxiety.
My biggest problem was I didn’t have any alternative. Nothing our culture had to offer solved this dilemma. And I was only 15. So another 80 years of suffering did not seem like a sustainable option.
I had two alternatives: Get out now OR start asking LOTS of questions and running LOTS of experiments.
I Chose The Path of Direct Experience
For nearly 30 years I have devoted myself to learning how to live from my heart in a world where everything changes and nothing we are taught to do to achieve happiness actually works.
How? By trial and error and grace. In my experience, the only way to learn something deeply enough to guide others is to need that wisdom so badly for yourself first.
I am passionate about the ways in which human beings contact their own truth and beauty in an experiential, every-cell-of-your-body way because that is what I have most needed to learn for myself to make life worth living.
I have emerged out of the smoke and ashes of life in this world – generational family dysfunction, deep loss, broken dreams, failed relationships – as a mentor and guide for those brave souls who have chosen to wake up in the midst of it all.
I dedicate my life, my work, my song, to my students, my ancestors and all beings.
Today is a beautiful day to live and love and die!
I call my approach the Left Hand Path
The medicine of the Left Hand Path is brewed in the cauldron of our own direct experience. It is immediate, sudden, transformational and available to anyone willing to slow down and notice the truth of their own present moment experience.
No levels. No steps. No secrets. Just you and your life. All you need is hidden in plain sight.
I am committed to the path being practical and life-changing and embodied because in our culture we mostly deal with ideas and skillbuilding. I was stuck here for a long time.
Even the best ideas don’t matter if we can’t live them out. This describes 20 years of my own seeking and I have heard the same story from countless others over the years.
Until I directly experienced the reality of my own life, no matter how much I understood with my mind or how adept I became at meditation/yoga/prayer, nothing much changed.
I have devoted my life facilitating this direct encounter with each person’s own unique humanity because it is the best solvent I know for all suffering and the only true path to intimacy and love.
Everything changes when we contact the reality of our own life. Everything.
I will not sugar-coat the cost of saying ‘yes’ to our deepest experience of life but I am convinced there is no other way to live.
My students and I are living, breathing proof that the joy of being human is not about finding better ways to control the world…
And none of us can do it alone.
I have benefitted greatly from many traditions, lineages and many kind and generous teachers over the years. Also from some unkind and non-generous ones as well. My gratitude is to every one of them.
I stand on the shoulders of Roger Laborde. Cynthia Bourgeault. Adam Gainsburg. Deborah Jones and the Nine Gates Mystery School. Murray Kennedy and Osha Reader. Mark Saito and Jan Engels-Smith. Jayson Gaddis and Dr. Betty Martin.. Louis Weil and the OSB Cam. My parents, my friends, my beloveds and many others.
I have drunk deeply from the wells of Zen Buddhism, classical Tantra, Kashmiri Shaivism, the indigenous spiritualities of North and South America, Taiji and Qigong, the Mankind Project and, above all, my font and summit of tantric Christianity.
My greatest teachers are my children. Their brave decision to allow me to be their father has catalyzed more healing and awakening and hunger for freedom and truth and love than I ever could have imagined.
And I acknowledge my education which I can only hope was as much a help as a hindrance. A Masters of Divinity from the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley. Association Montessori Internationale certificate in primary education. Bachelor of Science in Biology and Philosophy.
