For The Wild - VALARIE KAUR on the Ancient Call to Love ⧸253

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00:00:30.940 Hello and welcome to For the Wild podcast. I'm Ayanna Young. Today I'm speaking with Valerie Kaur.

00:00:38.700 Who is an ancestor who makes you brave? Can you conjure them behind you now? What made them brave

00:00:46.340 in life? Can you imagine that they might have something that you need to know to be brave with

00:00:52.760 your life now and next. Valerie Kaur is a seasoned civil rights activist and celebrated prophetic

00:01:01.100 voice at the forefront of progressive change. Valerie now leads the Revolutionary Love Project

00:01:07.280 to reclaim love as a force for justice in America. As a lawyer, filmmaker, and innovator,

00:01:14.120 she has won policy change on multiple fronts. She founded Groundswell Movement, Faithful Internet,

00:01:20.860 and the Yale Visual Law Project to inspire and equip new generations of advocates.

00:01:27.020 A daughter of sick farmers in California's heartland,

00:01:30.580 Valerie earned degrees at Stanford University, Harvard Divinity School, and Yale Law School.

00:01:36.660 Valerie's new book is See No Stranger, a memoir and manifesto of revolutionary love.

00:01:44.320 Well, Valerie, thank you so much for joining us today.

00:01:48.000 You have been swirling around my mind for years now, and so I'm really happy to finally get the chance to connect and tune in.

00:01:56.360 I am so grateful to be here with you, Ayanna.

00:02:00.140 Wonderful. Well, this is going to be a really great conversation. I can feel it.

00:02:04.900 And as I was preparing for our interview, I was reminded of the following passage from author Arundhati Roy.

00:02:12.100 Quote,

00:02:42.100 Americans. To call someone anti-American indeed, to be anti-American, or for that matter anti-Indian

00:02:50.220 or anti-Timbuktuin, it's not just racist. It's a failure of the imagination, an inability to see

00:02:57.820 the world in terms other than those that the establishment has set out for you, end quote.

00:03:04.000 And truthfully, I think it's very easy for many of us to identify as anti-American,

00:03:09.000 but as someone who has spent a great deal of time organizing folks around collective renewal and

00:03:15.040 moral visioning i wonder if you could begin by sharing what you imagine for our country and

00:03:20.920 how this image has been deeply molded by your lineage you know the words of guru nanak who is

00:03:28.980 the first teacher of the sikh faith just wash over me his vision nakobedi nehibagana nakobedi

00:03:38.080 I see no enemy. I see no stranger. When I think about my own faith and my own lineage, I realize

00:03:47.440 that there's a mystical stream in my faith that runs through all the great wisdom traditions of

00:03:54.740 the world. And it is this deep recognition of our oneness. I think of it as an orientation to life

00:04:02.980 through the eyes of wonder that we could look upon the face of anyone around us or any being

00:04:08.060 or anything around us and say, you are a part of me, I do not yet know. You are a part of me,

00:04:16.140 I do not yet know. You know, that truth of our oneness, I have just been amazed by how it's

00:04:25.340 increasingly verified by science. You know, we share a common ancestry with everything alive,

00:04:32.220 that what makes up our bodies are elements that were fueled and born in the bellies of

00:04:38.780 long-distance stars, that the atoms that circulate in our lungs are the same atoms that circulated

00:04:44.940 in the lungs of our ancestors.

00:04:46.540 So this idea of our oneness, our interconnectedness that we can say to anything around us, you

00:04:53.640 are a part of me, I do not yet know.

00:04:57.780 It's not just a spiritual truth anymore.

00:04:59.900 It's also a biological fact, a cosmological fact.

00:05:04.680 And when I think about our spiritual teachers, our indigenous leaders through the centuries, hasn't that call to love been ancient?

00:05:14.680 To see all around us as sisters and brothers, to expand our hearts, to include all of us, to love without limit.

00:05:22.120 And yet, why is it that we live in societies that have depended on our failure to imagine others as part of ourselves?

00:05:36.860 I look at any society around the world and I can see a sort of hierarchy of human value.

00:05:43.100 And the oldest hierarchy of human value on U.S. soil is the story of white supremacy.

00:05:48.980 So for those who think or say that they are anti-American, what you are really saying is that you are anti-hierarchies of human value, supremacies that keep one group of people over other groups of people.

00:06:04.420 That's not an American problem.

00:06:06.160 That is a human problem that has existed through the centuries

00:06:13.560 and that it's coming to a culmination now.

00:06:18.600 Now we have a choice.

00:06:20.820 Those of us who have heard the call to love,

00:06:23.040 who know the truth of our oneness, it's up to us now

00:06:25.580 to step into those institutions of power, to take the reins,

00:06:29.540 to start to lead them, to start to birth beloved community

00:06:33.160 where we are. And that's why I believe this call to love, love without limit, what I call

00:06:38.420 revolutionary love, is the call of our times if we are to survive. Wow, what an intro.

00:06:46.460 That was so beautiful. Felt really good to hear. It's, yeah, soothing. And there's another quote

00:06:57.600 that I want to bring up that you write, quote, at a time when it's this dark, when the fires

00:07:04.100 are this bright, when the future is this uncertain, each of us can summon the ancestor we need

00:07:10.680 at our back. Who will you summon? Who makes you brave? End quote. And yeah, I just like to ask

00:07:19.480 you about the practice of summoning ancestors during this period of transformation,

00:07:23.840 particularly the importance of broadening our understanding of ancestors beyond those who

00:07:30.100 are immediately related to us and maybe a second part to that question is which ancestors are you

00:07:36.760 currently summoning? I love this question you know this the centrality of the necessity to

00:07:45.180 summon our ancestors that that did not occur to me until I was in labor with my first baby

00:07:52.780 with my son. There's a stage in birthing labor that is considered the most dangerous stage. It

00:07:59.340 is the final stage, the most painful. It is called transition. It feels like dying, and yet it is

00:08:05.960 the stage that precedes the birth of new life. I remember when I was in transition,

00:08:12.100 the midwife is like, breathe and push. And I just said, no, no, I can't. It feels like a ring of

00:08:18.420 fire. And my mother was by my side and whispering the prayers that my grandparents taught us when

00:08:24.620 we were little. And in that moment, I, you know, I knew I could not do it alone. I looked at my

00:08:32.040 mother and then, oh, Ayanna, I saw my grandmother standing behind my mother and her mother behind

00:08:40.420 her and her mother behind her. This long line of women that sort of disappeared into infinity. 0.86

00:08:47.400 these women who had who had pushed through the fire before me and it's only with then did I

00:08:53.440 take a breath almost as if they were just putting that breath in my body and I could push and then

00:08:58.100 my son was born I think we're in a kind of transition as a as a nation as a human race right

00:09:08.040 now the contractions are coming fast the crises um you know come wave after wave there's barely

00:09:15.000 time to breathe. It feels like dying. And yet, is this the darkness that precedes the birth of new

00:09:20.800 life? Can we transition humanity into a future that is sustainable, healthy, multiracial,

00:09:28.440 where we all are beloved and free, where we last? That's the question of our lifetime. And

00:09:36.500 just as I could not do it alone on the birthing table, I don't think we can do it alone now.

00:09:41.640 You know, how did our ancestors labor for justice before us?

00:09:47.080 How did they, in the midst of so much grief and loss and atrocity and trauma, still find the courage to breathe and push and stay in the labor for future generations?

00:10:00.080 And not all of them did, right?

00:10:02.180 But there are enough of them we can summon now.

00:10:05.020 And for me, I often summon my grandfather, who's the one who first taught me the prayers when I was a little girl. And I think about all that he survived in his lifetime and how much he taught me what it meant to live the call of my faith to revolutionary love.

00:10:25.780 but he's very present to me these days.

00:10:30.360 I meet a lot of people who say,

00:10:32.000 but I don't have grandparents like that

00:10:34.260 or I don't have ancestors like that.

00:10:35.980 And so to your question, Ayanna,

00:10:38.040 I invite people to expand their imagination

00:10:40.260 of who they can claim as their ancestors.

00:10:42.980 If we're all one human family,

00:10:44.640 then you can look beyond your own family line

00:10:48.260 to recent history, to our collective history

00:10:52.440 and imagine you know who is an ancestor who makes you brave can you can you conjure them

00:11:00.040 behind you now what made them brave in life can you imagine that they might have something that

00:11:07.020 you need to know to be brave with your life now and next when i do this with people you know

00:11:15.940 the answers are really beautiful and varied i hear john lewis i hear ruth bader ginsburg

00:11:22.860 i hear you know great aunts and uncles i hear

00:11:27.260 spiritual teachers from king to mandela to thinkers like audrey lord and james baldwin

00:11:40.760 i think we we can look to any corner of our history to find sources of inspiration and

00:11:49.600 i encourage people to develop you know a relationship with one or two of them

00:11:54.200 who you feel like you really need their life as a text for you and there are some morsels of wisdom

00:12:00.280 there that are available to you if we just get quiet enough to listen to them we don't have to

00:12:04.400 start from scratch. You know, the body, if the body in labor knows how to breathe and push with

00:12:11.060 every turn through the cycle, then so do we as a human race. So what wisdom do we need to draw up

00:12:17.200 on now from our ancestors in order for us to find the courage, the tenacity, the audacity to keep

00:12:23.620 breathing and pushing now? Thank you for sharing that. I'm sure that soothes a lot of people,

00:12:30.780 and definitely including myself and uh yeah it gives an expansive who do you summon ayana

00:12:38.020 well i mean i that was definitely coming up for me that question while you were responding and

00:12:46.000 what i'm really grateful for what you're saying is the expansiveness because i i know sometimes i

00:12:52.920 feel that tight chested closure around this question or just many questions and

00:13:00.940 yeah I I feel like many times I summon our more than human family and kin and

00:13:11.260 yeah I feel like I I summoned the the forest as family and that has been probably one of the most

00:13:22.920 important and deepest relationships of my life and definitely where I feel like I learned

00:13:28.580 what unconditional love feels like and the devotion, the dedication to that

00:13:37.400 unwavering loving commitment to a being. So yeah, that's definitely who first comes to mind

00:13:47.140 when I think of summoning for strength and vision and guidance and love and comfort.

00:13:54.180 But I definitely want to sit with this question more. Yeah.

00:13:58.760 Oh, no, I just I that is so profound to me, you know, that to imagine our trees as as ancestors in a way, as living ancestors.

00:14:10.420 You know, when I think of a forest, I think of all that is unseen in a forest.

00:14:15.240 And, you know, we've been learning so much about the mycelium underneath the ground, this kind of network that connects the forest together that, you know, we too, we look as though we are trees standing apart, but we are interconnected and interdependent and can nourish each other across distances, just like the mycelium beneath the forest floor.

00:14:37.820 I have been so I mean the more I look into the natural world the more I see sort of models or

00:14:46.220 examples or beckonings into how we can imagine ourselves as a human race so I think your answer

00:14:52.380 is deeply powerful thank you and thank you for asking that yeah and before we delve into the

00:15:05.260 beautiful facets of revolutionary love. I wonder if you can give a bit of background for listeners

00:15:10.880 on the ways in which Sikhism, and I might be mispronouncing that, so please correct me.

00:15:18.580 No, you got it.

00:15:19.380 Oh, okay. Yeah, great. So I'm wondering in the ways in which Sikhism has informed your activism,

00:15:25.640 particularly the teachings of Guru Nanak and how they have remained pertinent 500 years

00:15:32.000 plus or 500 plus years later. You know, when I was a little girl growing up on the farmlands

00:15:40.660 of California, my grandfather would tell me the stories of our ancestors and the story of

00:15:46.580 Grunanik. And it was our origin story that always captivated my imagination and that has stayed

00:15:53.180 with me to today. And it was a story of a young man who was so distraught by all the violence

00:15:59.420 around him, the inequalities and the turmoil that he disappeared by a river for three days.

00:16:06.740 He retreated from the world and sat in perfect contemplation, trying to find the answer,

00:16:11.580 the solution. And the sun rose and the sun fell. The sun rose and the sun fell. And this is the

00:16:17.520 year 1469. People thought him a dead man, a drowned man. But it happened on the third day,

00:16:22.860 he was struck by a vision of our oneness and he emerged with this you know vision on his lips

00:16:30.140 ik oh god we are one we belong to one another humanity is one the world is one but he didn't

00:16:37.300 yeah he didn't begin to like give lectures or tell stories or write histories he he began to sing

00:16:43.660 like the the revelation of our oneness struck him in wonder in this mod ecstatic divine wonder and

00:16:55.060 out of this wonderment he began to sing songs of love that we now call shabbat so our entire

00:17:02.720 scripture is just made of this ecstatic poetry just praising the divine all around us and within

00:17:10.300 us. Guru Nanak talked that, you know, we could all learn how to see the world through the eyes

00:17:16.160 of wonder, that there is a voice in us called home, the eye that separates itself from you.

00:17:22.060 And we need that voice to operate in the world often, but it tricks us into believing that we

00:17:28.500 are separate. Our separateness is an illusion, Guru Nanak teaches. We belong to one another,

00:17:34.840 And this meant that we are called to love one another.

00:17:38.720 But my grandfather used to remind me, but love is dangerous business.

00:17:42.720 You know, not just love is talk, talk, talk.

00:17:44.640 No, love, the labor of love, that is dangerous business.

00:17:48.720 For if I see you as a part of me I do not yet know and I choose to love you,

00:17:52.320 then I must let your grief into my heart.

00:17:55.140 I must be willing to fight for you when you are in harm's way.

00:17:59.180 the ideal in the sick faith was known as the sant sepahi the sage warrior or the warrior sage

00:18:05.860 the warrior fights the sage loves it was a path of what i call revolutionary love

00:18:13.060 i i believe that that call that i heard as a little girl you know echoes all around the world

00:18:20.560 through the millennia but is the call of our times today you know because what what might happen

00:18:27.720 And if we saw Migrant Child at the border as our own daughter, or George Floyd gasping for breath as our own brother, or Brianna as sister, or the Asian American women slaughtered in Atlanta as our own aunties, what might happen?

00:18:46.780 What would we risk?

00:18:48.800 What movements would we build?

00:18:50.300 What would we demand?

00:18:51.360 How would we harness our rage?

00:18:54.420 How would we reimagine a world in which all of us are safe?

00:18:57.720 And what might happen if we made love the ethic that guided all of our actions?

00:19:05.780 This is why I've been retiring the word activist lately.

00:19:10.180 It's like, I don't want to turn everyone into activists.

00:19:14.500 I simply want to invite you into a way of being in the world.

00:19:18.300 And if you see the world through the eyes of wonder, and if you see our interconnectedness

00:19:23.660 and you choose to love others as a part of you,

00:19:26.760 then there's nothing left to do but to grieve and to rage and to fight

00:19:31.660 and to reimagine and to be invested in a world where we are all free.

00:19:37.560 And so I invite people into imagining revolutionary love,

00:19:41.400 not as a prescription, but as a way of being in the world.

00:19:44.980 Anti-racism is the bridge, but love, beloved community is the destination.

00:19:49.740 So what might happen, Ayanna, if we could inspire a critical mass of people to practice this together? Might we be the ones to generate enough energy and enough change to shift humanity as a whole?

00:20:04.600 this is why I believe the discussions you have on this podcast for the wild are so essential I mean

00:20:10.940 you are contemplating with thought leaders with visionaries with artists and activists around how

00:20:16.980 we create that shift in culture and consciousness not just about government and sound government

00:20:23.800 which is absolutely necessary but not sufficient to create that deeper shift in how we see how we

00:20:30.140 be how we do. That's a revolution of the heart. And that's what I think we need now.

00:21:00.140 Old faces wash away

00:21:15.460 Near places where raves in space

00:21:19.340 Carved in stone by the tears we made

00:21:22.640 The day she went away

00:21:25.240 The day she fell from the graves

00:21:29.540 And when my skin is withered and gone

00:21:34.720 Know my bones will still be strong

00:21:38.500 For the mirrors made from the golden rays

00:21:41.860 They come from the sun

00:21:44.800 They come from the one

00:21:48.400 And I know all rivers go

00:21:53.880 Rivers go home

00:21:56.780 yeah and the revolution of the heart and I also kept holding on the um oh gosh the wonder I think

00:22:06.200 that's what you the word you use just holding on to the wonder because I I know for myself I can

00:22:11.040 get so trapped in the whirlwind of this time and sometimes I feel like I need to break it and

00:22:20.400 and be like why am I here and what do I love and what am I fighting for and why and tap back into

00:22:28.840 the wonder because otherwise it can just get so overwhelming and yeah so I think these practices

00:22:35.940 are so necessary for us and yeah and I often think about the kind of pedestalization that

00:22:44.740 takes place in many movements and how this ultimately works to our detriment. And I was

00:22:50.440 particularly moved by something you shared on Instagram that sort of alluded to this.

00:22:54.800 It was, quote, I think we commit a kind of violence to our heroes. Spiritual teachers like

00:23:00.680 Nanak, social reformers like King, when we turn them into saints, as soon as we make them superhuman, 0.97

00:23:07.400 we drain them of their power. Because who can be a saint? But when we see them for who they were,

00:23:14.220 human beings who took their pain and followed their best visions of who they could be who we

00:23:20.100 could be then we let their power take effect inside us we can be like them i can see what

00:23:27.080 nanak saw i can train my eye to see no stranger i can sing a song of love for all my days

00:23:33.680 i can let that show up in how i mother my children and how i citizen end quote and i think for many

00:23:41.480 this practice is actually quite difficult. You know, we may be trained to canonize those we

00:23:48.620 esteem. So can you speak to how you've trained yourself to recognize the collective humanity

00:23:54.100 of our leaders and how this encourages us to show up with grace for ourselves and each other?

00:24:00.460 Oh, I really wrestled with coming to know more about the personal lives of some of the

00:24:11.440 social reformers who I most put on a pedestal. That's how this came to be, is that I look deeply

00:24:22.900 into the life of Gandhi and the life of King and the life of Mandela. And I'm a mother with babies,

00:24:32.220 you know, nursing on my chest and trying to find a way to create harmony in the home and balance

00:24:38.760 that or do that at the same time as building movements and creating art and putting out this

00:24:44.260 call. And it's really, really hard. And the narrative I have in my own mind around my own

00:24:50.000 failure, my own imperfections, my own neuroses are so large that it's so easy to look at these

00:24:55.660 figures in history and say, well, I can't be like them. The more I looked into their actual lived

00:25:01.720 experiences. We see them for who they were. They were deeply human, deeply wounded, flawed,

00:25:11.540 imperfect, and yet could summon the wisest part of themselves in order to do extraordinary things

00:25:18.380 in the world, to change the world, to call us to a higher consciousness. We know their lives

00:25:24.520 because they are more recent figures, but if you go further back to any spiritual leader we have

00:25:29.640 put on a pedestal. I bet we will find the same thing. And this was a dangerous thing to say

00:25:34.260 for me to post about Guru Nanak. It's Guru Nanak like Jesus or Muhammad, you know,

00:25:39.940 entire communities are invested in making them superhuman. But I've really embraced this radical

00:25:47.340 notion that as soon as we do that, we drain them of their power because we say we cannot be like

00:25:52.260 them. If we say, no, they were human like us. They are inside of me. I am part of them. They

00:25:59.280 are part of me, then we are more free, I think, to let ourselves be imperfect and flawed and still

00:26:06.100 summon inside of our own selves, our own deepest wisdom, our own visions for what the world ought

00:26:13.380 to be and how our lives could be in it. So I say that when people put me on a pedestal too.

00:26:19.700 It's like, don't do that. Don't do that to those living either, not the faith leaders who inspire

00:26:25.480 you or the prophetic voices because as soon as you do that you you drain me and them of their

00:26:30.720 power and you drain yourself of any of your own potential you're not seeing your own magnificent

00:26:37.340 light and your own unlimited potential to be able to lead it may not be in the same way it may not

00:26:44.520 be on a stage behind a mic but it will be you know in in a way that is essential for the future

00:26:51.760 of our people if you are showing up fully where you are, how you are. Each of us has a sphere of

00:26:57.880 influence. Each of us has a role to play. Each of us has a set of talents and tools. Each of us has

00:27:05.260 a story, multiple stories that the world needs to hear. We need you. We need each of you. And so

00:27:12.020 to see the Nanak in you, the Jesus in you, the Mohammed in you, the King in you is what I 1.00

00:27:19.600 invite us all to do if we are if we are going to truly transition the species 0.96

00:27:27.080 so much um gratitude for this last response of yours because i yeah i just feel it so much

00:27:37.320 and you know you outline three main tenets of revolutionary love love for each other

00:27:44.040 love for our opponents and love for ourselves and i've heard you speak about how this practice

00:27:49.540 requires us to love beyond what evolution requires which is such a beautiful ask

00:27:56.240 so um yeah i'd love if you could elaborate a bit further on how you've come to define

00:28:02.760 revolutionary love yes okay so so to start with i will say i'm a trained lawyer so anytime people

00:28:13.380 had used the word love standing on a stage you know i would be the one to roll my eyes

00:28:18.340 It's like, what, love is the answer? And the face of entire institutions designed to perpetuate oppression across generations, like how is love a force against all of that?

00:28:29.900 I came to understand in a long kind of deep internal journey that I write about in my book,

00:28:39.280 See No Stranger, that the problem is not with love. It's with the way that we talk about it

00:28:45.980 in our contemporary culture. We tend to talk about love as a rush of feeling, as something

00:28:51.560 that happens to us. We fall in love. It's a flood of emotion. And that is certainly part

00:28:59.800 of the experience of what it means to love. But when that's our only definition, then of course,

00:29:04.540 love falls into the trap of, you know, feel good actions or civility or a rush to forgiveness. No.

00:29:14.100 When we think about our closest relationships in life, you know, parents and children and

00:29:19.400 friends and families, and think about your closest relationships that love that sustains them is,

00:29:26.280 is really defined by ongoing practical care. So I began to redefine love as a form of sweet

00:29:34.620 labor, fierce, bloody, imperfect, life-giving, a choice we make again and again and again.

00:29:43.940 And when we extend that kind of love, even just a fraction of that kind of love,

00:29:48.840 beyond our immediate circles, then that's when love starts to disrupt the world around us. It

00:29:57.220 can be a force for political, social transformation. So I define revolutionary love

00:30:03.240 as the choice to enter into labor for others, for our opponents, and for ourselves.

00:30:12.320 Now, if love is labor, then love can be taught, love can be modeled, love can be practiced. We

00:30:18.600 can learn how to love well together. We can learn how to build beloved community together. So I took

00:30:24.700 some time to pour through all of the wisdom traditions that I had been exposed to, works in

00:30:33.240 neuroscience, the science of human behavior, psychology history, case studies of social

00:30:38.060 movements, and began to see patterns emerge of 10 core practices of revolutionary love.

00:30:46.880 And I'm really excited to share with you, Ayanna, that these 10 practices, that they

00:30:53.360 are how I structure my books, you know, Stranger, but we have also just built a learning hub

00:30:59.460 where we imagine these 10 practices as points on a compass.

00:31:04.540 And so we've created a tool that people can hold in their hands and say, okay, if I'm

00:31:08.840 in the work of loving another or in the work of loving an opponent or in the work of loving

00:31:13.360 myself, what tool do I need? What practice do I need in my life now? Our vision is to seed

00:31:20.900 pockets of revolutionary love across the country where people are doing these practices together

00:31:26.240 and our tools are there to support you. And really, I say this is a new framework or a new

00:31:33.320 offering, but we know that love is ancient. And so I often say to folks, if any of this is

00:31:38.700 resonating to you, it's because it's just touching a deep wisdom that's already within you. It's

00:31:43.280 just bringing it to the surface. We are just remembering how to practice love as a revolutionary

00:31:48.900 act in our lives. And if people want to find the learning hub, you can go to ValerieCore.com

00:31:56.060 and all of it is there and available for free. I love imagining you being a lawyer,

00:32:03.060 rolling your eyes and just going, come on. I love that. It's just so great to know that

00:32:11.380 i just love it anyways so um yeah that was a really good vision and i would like to focus on

00:32:21.860 declaring love for ourselves amidst a period of time when self-hatred seems to be so pervasive

00:32:28.940 at the subconscious and conscious level in all of our communities be it because of social

00:32:35.980 conditioning or forced severances or an existence that has been primed for consumption.

00:32:43.080 I'm just wondering, how have you seen folks grapple with self-hatred and begin the process

00:32:49.520 of unlearning through a revolutionary love framework?

00:32:54.480 Yeah, you know, this, I think there is a voice in all of us that tells us you're not good

00:32:59.900 enough, you're not smart enough, you're not strong enough, you're not beautiful enough,

00:33:04.280 you're not enough that not enoughness you know is put into us so many of us as children but

00:33:10.900 especially if we are in bodies that are denigrated by the society so I it was very loud in my body

00:33:17.260 as a as a young girl of color as a as a young sick American girl I had that voice very loud

00:33:25.560 I mean how do we live in a culture that wants to make us strange to ourselves when I say see 0.86

00:33:30.900 stranger, I mean ourselves too. And I knew that it was important to love oneself, but I didn't know

00:33:37.420 how. I mean, how when the images that we are bombarded with, with the policies that we're

00:33:42.120 subjected to, with the stories that we are told over and over, either disappear us or negate us

00:33:47.800 or sexualize us or terrorize us or make us into terrorists, like how are we supposed to see our

00:33:54.100 own sweet flesh as beloved. I didn't know how. I remember the first weeks of holding my son in my

00:34:03.940 arms. I would say to him, oh, my love, you are so beautiful. You are so strong. You are so smart.

00:34:12.240 You are so brave. I mean, he's a newborn. He can't do anything. And here I am.

00:34:17.080 And my husband would turn to me and say, well, why don't you speak to yourself that way?

00:34:24.100 why don't you speak to yourself that way? You see, you know, we lay down these neural pathways

00:34:32.920 in our brain through repetition. And the deeper, the more we repeat the way that we speak to

00:34:40.820 ourselves, the deeper those grooves are. And so I had to lay down new pathways in my brain.

00:34:45.620 I had to learn how to speak to myself differently. And I, that meant, that meant I had to practice.

00:34:51.980 audrey lord great black feminist said we can learn to mother ourselves we can learn to mother

00:34:58.160 ourselves so i got a journal and i began to call it my wise woman journal and i wrote in it every

00:35:07.020 day i still write in and it's right next to me as we're speaking it's been six years and i open it

00:35:12.160 up and i say wise woman here wise woman says and she speaks to me as if i am her own beloved child

00:35:18.520 or sweet sweet best friend oh my love you are tired today it's okay pour the cup of tea you

00:35:25.660 can show up to the podcast just you don't have to be perfect you could just sink into your

00:35:29.760 authenticity in the moment just let it flow just let it be and then you'll be able to gather your

00:35:34.960 energy to nurse the baby and then do the thing you know like she counsels me and she tells me

00:35:40.060 the hard truths but she does it in this compassionate way not this way that is driven

00:35:45.000 by self-hatred. It's a guide, you know, it's a voice that guides me. I feel like listening to

00:35:52.200 that voice of the wise woman in me over and over again, you know, throughout the day for years now,

00:35:58.880 six years now, is how I have finally learned how to love myself. I think this voice of deep wisdom

00:36:08.660 resides in each of us, you know, we can call it by different names. I know, I know friends who

00:36:15.840 call it spirit or Buddha nature or Vahekuru or Allah or Jesus, right? It's just a voice of deep

00:36:23.560 wisdom within you speaking to you with a kind of unconditional love. You know, some, I have some

00:36:30.440 friends who call that voice best friend or inner professor. That's one of my professor friends. So

00:36:35.760 So whatever name you choose, I think cultivating that voice and getting quiet enough to let

00:36:41.000 it speak to you is important, not just for your own wellness, but for our collective

00:36:46.180 survival, you know, because the loudest voices in the world right now are running on the

00:36:51.220 energies of fear and criticism and cruelty.

00:36:54.480 What if enough of us weren't then responding, reacting to those voices out of our own sense

00:37:00.820 of scarcity or stress?

00:37:02.580 What if we were summoning our own deepest wisdom to say, okay, this is how I wish to respond in a way that is deeply aligned with my values and that presages the world to come?

00:37:14.520 I think loving ourselves in this way, summoning our deepest wisdom in this way is not only how we can find longevity in life, but how we might build enough collective wisdom to transition the society as a whole.

00:37:28.520 yeah these questions around self-love self-hatred forgiveness especially for me i think a lot of

00:37:38.660 it's come from just feeling so complicit and so a part of many of the problems we face and trying to

00:37:47.920 hold the complexity and not justify but accept what it is to be a human especially in this

00:37:56.800 country at this time and I've definitely been walking with this question so it's it's really

00:38:03.400 timely for me personally and I'm no for so many others because I definitely have a lot of other

00:38:08.480 folks in my community who are struggling with the groundedness of self-love so thank you I just

00:38:16.360 yeah no I I just I want to honor your reluctance and your skepticism about it because

00:38:23.440 the term self-love has been sort of co-opted by this self-help industry that is invested in

00:38:33.020 practices that often feel like spiritual bypassing. You know, it's the yoga mat and

00:38:37.380 the retreats and the workshops that give you the illusion that simply loving yourself is enough to

00:38:46.220 change the world while then you're still not paying your domestic workers who are taking

00:38:49.980 care of the babies while you're at the retreat, or you're still participating in policies that

00:38:53.800 crush the lives of Black people in your cities. So I think that it's healthy to be skeptical

00:39:00.780 because that term has been often used as a way to promote escapism or narcissism.

00:39:09.740 This is why I say revolutionary love must be practiced in these three ways, love for ourselves,

00:39:17.340 love for opponents and love for others any one of them alone is a recipe for disaster just loving

00:39:24.300 ourselves that's we've talked about that loving our opponents without loving others or ourselves

00:39:29.580 that's self-loathing and that that can create deep deep damage and loving others without loving

00:39:36.700 our opponents or or loving ourselves that's ineffective you know that's where so many

00:39:41.560 of our movements have been where we are starting to act like the forces that we are fighting,

00:39:48.060 we're starting to become what we're fighting, or we are forgetting how to love ourselves well

00:39:52.780 enough to last. So how many young people are opting out or taking their lives or getting sick

00:39:57.740 because there's not enough collective care to make it a priority for us to love ourselves well.

00:40:04.720 So I have been shifting the term self-love to loving ourselves. I've been shifting the term

00:40:11.160 self-care to community care. Like so many, I'm following the lead of Black women leaders who

00:40:16.460 have been using this language, because that gets out of some of the problems that you're naming

00:40:23.000 about self-love as a form of bypassing or escapism. If we're thinking about loving ourselves

00:40:30.600 as dependent on making sure that the people around us also have the tools to love themselves,

00:40:37.740 Then care is something that we are building in our culture, the culture of our home, the culture of our organizations, the policies of our companies and of our nation writ large, loving ourselves, caring for ourselves as part of what it means to fight for the world that we want is I think, you know, is the feminist intervention here.

00:41:01.800 and it's precisely because 1.00

00:41:04.820 too many women of color 0.93

00:41:06.580 have not only bore the brunt of injustice 1.00

00:41:09.100 but bore the brunt of movements

00:41:10.680 for justice

00:41:12.360 in other words

00:41:13.080 the movements are fought on their backs

00:41:15.760 or over their dead bodies

00:41:16.780 and they're saying no no no

00:41:17.660 we have to last we matter

00:41:18.960 and we can last together

00:41:21.880 if we are prioritizing each other's care

00:41:24.200 as a way of loving ourselves along the way

00:41:31.800 Winter's gone now

00:41:47.680 Where goes the time

00:41:55.200 I thought I was a dancer

00:42:03.520 But my body's tired

00:42:13.320 And so I laid down

00:42:25.200 I feel like you really hit the nail on the head with the cynicism vibe around self-love and

00:42:33.560 you know dominant culture has sought to commercialize love and so I think for some

00:42:39.060 this notion of revolutionary love may be harder to really grasp so there is this question I have

00:42:46.840 it's like how do you situate revolutionary love not as a feel-good pursuit or just as a feel-good

00:42:53.040 pursuit, but as an invocation of a warrior strategy. It's really hard, isn't it? I mean,

00:43:00.840 oh gosh, you know, to be out there with this message of love has been so challenging and

00:43:06.980 fascinating and, you know, life-giving too. You know, I, I find that I, I find a few different

00:43:13.760 challenges and one is that, yeah, I have to really define, no, no, no, love is, is not

00:43:19.300 the feel good thing it's not civility it's not you know forgiveness without thought of

00:43:24.940 accountability it's not these things and and then i have to show really what it is and i do that

00:43:31.180 through telling story into into showing stories of revolutionary love the book is filled with them

00:43:36.660 and then even when people hear and understand this call to revolutionary love without limit

00:43:42.200 then some of them are like what you want me to love my opponents you know people you know the

00:43:46.960 demagogue in office, the abuser, the white supremacist marching with the Confederate flag.

00:43:53.460 And then I have to really break down what I mean by the ethic of love. It doesn't mean you have

00:43:58.400 to feel for them. It just means I invite you to wonder about them, to see the wound in them,

00:44:04.840 and to wonder about the cultures that radicalize them, the contexts that allow them to do what

00:44:10.300 they do. And then I have to remind them that doing this is not just a moral act. It is a

00:44:15.360 strategic act. It is how we become smarter advocates. There are no such thing as monsters

00:44:21.800 in this world, only people who are wounded. And the more that we understand those wounds, the

00:44:25.760 smarter our policies will be. Our visions for the future will be visions that might liberate them

00:44:31.700 too. But then I have to do the work of saying, remember, revolutionary love is practiced in

00:44:37.280 community. It's not the sacrifice of an individual. It is a practice of community. So

00:44:41.600 at any given moment, you know, we have a different form of love that we must, you know, that we're

00:44:49.160 called to in this moment. So if you are someone who has a knee on their neck, it's not necessarily

00:44:56.160 your role in that moment to look up at your oppressor and try to wonder about them.

00:45:01.740 Your job is to stay alive, to let the next breath in. That is your revolutionary act.

00:45:06.540 if you are someone who is safe enough or brave enough to wonder about those kinds of opponents

00:45:13.140 when some of us cannot then we need you now you know we need you in that labor so this is where

00:45:21.260 role literacy is really vital you know what where do I belong what what am I called to do in this

00:45:28.320 moment in the season of my life do I need to focus on loving ourselves to help my community process

00:45:34.360 our grief, our trauma, our rage? That's certainly where I am as a woman of color after the last

00:45:38.960 year, the last four years, really the last 20 years. Or are you someone who is ready to build

00:45:46.120 those bonds of solidarity with the communities who need you to march with them, to grieve with

00:45:52.660 them, to fight for them? Or are you someone who is in a position to reach out to some of those

00:45:58.020 opponents to come to be in relationship with them, to give us information about what is driving them

00:46:05.660 so we understand them more deeply, so we're smarter, but also open up the possibility of

00:46:12.220 transformation. Might not be this year or next, but maybe in five years, maybe in 10, maybe in 20.

00:46:19.680 I believe that redemption, transformation is a possibility for almost all of the opponents that

00:46:26.780 we are raging against now. Because I've seen it. I sat with former white nationalists and

00:46:36.360 prison guards and soldiers, my own former abusers. And I tell these stories and, and this book in my

00:46:43.560 book, See No Stranger. And every time I think it's impossible. I mean, sometimes it is sometimes no

00:46:50.380 change takes place. But when I choose to wonder and stay in relationship, then the impossible

00:46:57.500 future of reconciliation suddenly opens up and transformation is a reality.

00:47:09.700 So to let wonder lead us in those pursuits and to support each other, to play different roles

00:47:16.020 in the movement i think to reflect on what my role is at this moment in my community in my

00:47:22.620 institution in my home in my life that's what i that's what it means i think to practice

00:47:29.100 revolutionary love as a way of being in the world

00:47:31.800 yeah thank you so much for just being really clear um about this

00:47:42.020 the privilege of being able to love or sit with one's oppressor and um how to channel that divine

00:47:50.380 rage and just yeah i really i think that was really good for us to hear and as i think about

00:47:58.340 what it means for our collective healing to sit with those who we see as our enemy i think about

00:48:05.700 how a great deal of listening is required and i'm reminded of a quote from psychotherapist and

00:48:12.340 author miriam greenspan who writes quote without a listener the healing process is aborted human

00:48:19.720 beings like plants that bend towards the sunlight bend towards others in an innate healing tropism

00:48:26.580 there are times when being truly listened to is more critical than being fed end quote

00:48:33.640 And I'm wondering if you could share with us an example of when you've seen healing catalyzed through the process of listening, particularly amongst two parties that may have otherwise never given each other the time of day.

00:48:47.400 oh maybe it's because atlanta is still in my mind the the massacre in atlanta that

00:48:55.820 the last time asian americans were massacred at that scale was when it was my people

00:49:00.680 the sick americans killed in oak creek wisconsin when a white supremacist opened fire in a gurdwara

00:49:07.640 in 2012 i was there for many days for weeks for months really and i could see i could see the

00:49:17.380 You know, exactly what you named in Miriam's quote, in the wake of the bloodshed, how essential it was for us to be seen, to be heard, for our suffering, for our loss to be recognized by the local community.

00:49:36.560 I remember standing in front of the caskets that were open at the memorial, you know, looking into the faces of people who look like my parents and just feeling like I was about to fall into the abyss when the doors of the high school gymnasium flung open and there were thousands of people, 3,000 people, neighbors who flooded through those doors to simply witness us, listen to us, listen to the sons and daughters tell the stories of their parents killed.

00:50:06.560 to grieve with us and how that wasn't some secondary work or something that was nice to do.

00:50:12.320 No, that was foundational to our healing and to our ability to organize later to change federal

00:50:21.140 hate crimes policies. One of the people who came to grieve with us was Arna Michaelis, a former

00:50:29.920 white nationalist white supremacist who actually started the anti you know that the hate group

00:50:38.100 that radicalized the gunman he showed up to grieve with us because he was ravaged with guilt

00:50:46.880 and he and Pradeep Kaleika the son of the slain Gurdwara leader

00:50:53.300 became friends. They call each other brothers. They heard each other's stories. They listened

00:51:02.540 to each other in a way that turned them into brothers. And now they travel together to schools

00:51:08.840 across Wisconsin and the country telling their story about what it means to lead a life after

00:51:15.600 hate. I mean, these stories of revolutionary love, of possibilities opening up when people

00:51:23.400 have the courage to sit and listen to one another and they're all around us. You know, I think that

00:51:32.220 having the courage to tell them again and again, as much as we tell the stories of atrocity,

00:51:38.940 is how we encourage new generations to to practice it to say you can do it too you can do it in your

00:51:46.400 own life in your own home in your own intimate spaces you can practice listening as an act of

00:51:53.740 love yeah and i know for myself sometimes just listening and acknowledgement is the majority of

00:52:05.580 the healing just that the relief uh that can come with that and connection is so important

00:52:13.000 and oh valerie yeah as we come to a close i just i think about how i know so many folks who have

00:52:21.860 become disaffected by activism or others who are intimately feeling the scale of the task at hand

00:52:29.820 And I'd like to share this one final quote from you.

00:52:34.920 So, quote,

00:52:36.160 We can turn to our wisdom traditions for practices that give us courage.

00:52:41.280 In this time, Guru Gobind Singh designed the Dilaruba,

00:52:47.160 a string instrument small enough for his soldiers to carry on their backs into the battlefield

00:52:52.080 so that they could touch the space of joy and love through music, song, and poetry in the mornings

00:52:57.940 before they faced the fire end quote so i'd love to know how have you personally been able to retain

00:53:06.260 joy amidst the fire do you know as you're speaking i'm looking at my actual dilruba

00:53:14.680 in the corner of my room i you know it was the after 2016 after that last presidential election

00:53:21.260 with everything we were up against i thought okay i gotta deepen my spiritual game here i gotta up

00:53:26.860 my game here. And so like, what, what better solution than to, than to learn how to play

00:53:33.120 the actual Dilruba that our ancestors had designed for us, um, to give us a sense of

00:53:38.960 serenity and equanimity, even in the fire. Um, I still can only play the scale, but I can play

00:53:44.200 the scale very, very well. And that is one source of joys is music, you know, to bring music into

00:53:50.960 into the day, you know, to let myself sink into the sensation of bringing the tea to

00:53:59.580 my lips or, you know, to afford myself a moment of looking out the window and taking in the

00:54:06.600 blue sky or to give myself a deep night of sleep and let myself dream and let myself

00:54:12.360 have some time in the morning to remember my dreams and play with my dreams.

00:54:16.000 I'm like, all of these ways are little ways to let breath in.

00:54:21.660 You know, the midwife says breathe and push and then breathe again and then push and then

00:54:25.100 breathe again.

00:54:25.780 So to weave these little moments of breath throughout the day and throughout my week,

00:54:30.320 throughout the season of my life is how I've come to let joy in more and more and more.

00:54:36.580 And my children and I, we have this practice where we do dance time almost every night,

00:54:42.480 even the dark nights even when it's difficult we're we're dancing together just one song it's

00:54:48.320 only you know two and a half minutes and it's enough it's enough for me to feel this kind of 0.98

00:54:53.340 rising energy in me and i'll leave you with you know one last vision from the sick faith it's 0.86

00:55:00.940 it's called jardikala jardikala and when you say joy i what i really mean is is jardikala what i

00:55:10.160 really think of is Jardikala. And this term Jardikala is, it's something that we say to

00:55:16.220 each other. Are you in Jardikala? It's something that you're in. It's something that happens to

00:55:20.240 you. It's like a current that carries you. And it's often translated as eternal optimism, but

00:55:25.620 it's really not about the future at all, or about an idea that you hold in your head about the

00:55:30.000 future. It's about the spirit that you're in, the state that you are inside here and now in

00:55:35.820 the present moment. So I translate Jardikala as an ever-rising spirits, even in darkness,

00:55:44.000 ever-rising joy, even amidst the pain of labor. Joy is possible. Even on the birthing table,

00:55:53.080 between the labor pains, my husband was making me laugh. At my friend Joyce's side, when I was

00:55:59.880 helping her die, she would make me laugh. Even in the midst of pain, even on the front lines of

00:56:05.820 protest even when we are facing the fire hoses or or the army of police officers in the street even

00:56:13.440 even when we are you know battling our own internal demons or struggles behind closed doors when we

00:56:20.520 are just trying to find the light find survival if we can just even in those moments just allow

00:56:27.120 ourselves one deep breath sink into the present moment let in a sense of wonder then joy might

00:56:35.800 might find us again, might carry us again,

00:56:38.480 and it might feel like that sparkling, rising energy inside of the body

00:56:42.380 that I have after we dance every night with the babies.

00:56:47.060 When I go to sleep these days, I think of my day as an entire lifetime

00:56:51.380 with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

00:56:55.080 And I ask myself, okay, what was the hardest part of this lifetime?

00:56:58.140 And what am I grateful for?

00:57:00.340 And what was the most joyful in every lifetime,

00:57:02.600 time, no matter how hard the day, you know, has a moment, an offering of joy and paying attention

00:57:11.180 to it, allows it to grow as a felt sense in my body that returns me to Charitikala. And in the

00:57:18.020 morning, you know, each day is a new lifetime and a sudden, a surprising gift that we receive. So

00:57:24.520 I turn to the children and we say to each other, I get to be alive. I get to be alive today.

00:57:30.660 I get to be alive today with you and that's enough

00:57:35.940 thank you so much for closing us out like that that was really beautiful but

00:57:42.800 just Valerie one more thing before you before we end is how can listeners connect with your work

00:57:50.160 further oh I am just so excited to share with everyone our learning hub

00:57:59.120 Um, if you go to ValerieCore.com, you will see the revolutionary love learning hub and there are teaching tools and videos and original artwork and original music and opportunities to take courses there. We're just getting started and we'll, we'll keep adding to this learning hub, um, as, as we build, as we grow this movement together.

00:58:23.820 And if you want to be in touch in real time, then Instagram is where I'm most present. You can find me, my handle is at ValerieCore on Instagram. And there I'm posting every few days and often have invitations to keynotes and workshops and free opportunities to convene, to engage in guided meditation, to find each other in community.

00:58:47.880 so those are the two places that you can find me and that we can be in community together and

00:58:54.020 i just want you all to know that you know if you are feeling this call to love in your heart you

00:58:58.520 are not alone it is in the zeitgeist and this is how we are going to to lead through this new era

00:59:05.860 together yes yes i want that and um thank you valerie so much for your time and the medicine

00:59:16.200 of this conversation it's been honey on the heart and i really appreciate it thank you

00:59:22.940 and thank you for what you do every day

00:59:25.320 thank you for listening to for the wild podcast the music you heard today was by amara and

00:59:36.280 madeline sophia for the wild is created by ayana young erica ekram francesca glassbell and julia

00:59:43.880 Jackson.

For The Wild - September 29, 2021

VALARIE KAUR on the Ancient Call to Love ⧸253

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