Good Life Project - Valarie Kaur | A Revolutionary Love

Episode Date: September 13, 2021

Valarie Kaur is an activist, documentary filmmaker, lawyer, educator, and faith leader. She rose to global acclaim in late 2016 when her Watch Night Service address asked the question, “Is this the darkness of the tomb – or the darkness of the womb?” The video went viral with 40 million views worldwide, and her question reframed the political moment and became a mantra for people fighting for change. The daughter of farmers in California’s heartland brought up in the Sikh Faith, Valarie earned degrees at Stanford University, Harvard Divinity School, and Yale Law School. But, it was 9-11 that launched her down the now two-decades-long path of activism and advocacy, when those in her family and community became the targets of hatred and violence.Over the last two decades, Valarie’s work has led to policy change in everything from hate crimes, racial profiling, and immigration detention, to solitary confinement, Internet freedom, and more. She founded Groundswell Movement, Faithful Internet, and the Yale Visual Law Project to inspire and equip advocates at the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and justice. More recently, she heads up the Revolutionary Love Project, which is both a movement and a powerful learning hub designed to help learn about loving others, opponents, and ourselves. Her debut book, See No Stranger, is both a memoir and a manifesto, calling us all into our better, more expansive and conscious selves. This conversation opened my eyes in so many ways. You can find Valarie at: Instagram | Understanding America: 20 Years LaterIf you LOVED this episode:You’ll also love the conversations we had with Rev. angel Kyodo williams about the intersection between race, love, and liberation.My new book is available for pre-order:Order Sparked: Discover Your Unique Imprint for Work that Makes You Come Alive and get your book bonuses!-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

My guest today, Valerie Korr, is an activist, documentary filmmaker, lawyer, educator, and faith leader. She rose to global acclaim in late 2016 when her Watch Night service address asked the question, is this the darkness of the tomb or the darkness of the womb? The video went viral with 40 million plus views worldwide and her question, it reframed the political moment and became a mantra for people fighting for change. at Stanford University, Harvard Divinity School, and Yale Law School. But it was 9-11 that launched her down the now two decades long path of activism and advocacy when those in her family and community became the targets of hatred and violence. And over the last two decades, Valerie's work has led to policy change in everything from hate crimes, racial profiling, and immigration detention, to solitary confinement,

internet freedom, and more. She founded Groundswell Movement, Faithful Internet, and the Yale Visual Law Project to inspire and equip advocates at the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and justice. And more recently, she's headed up the Revolutionary Love Project, which is both a movement and a powerful learning hub designed to help you learn about loving others, opponents, and ourselves. Her debut book, See No Stranger, it's both a memoir and a manifesto, calling us into our better, more expansive, and conscious selves. This conversation opened my eyes in so many ways. And as I've been sharing the last few episodes,

before we dive into today's conversation, to help celebrate the launch of my new book, Spark, we have been sharing Spark stories, drawing these fun and inspiring two to three minute stories from the book in the beginning of each episode, leading up to the launch of the book on September 22nd. I was so inspired by these amazing people. I wanted to share their experiences and kind of short hits of inspiration and insight as we all make the transition into a season of reimagining and for many reinvention. So here's today's story. Laudapena, who's a maker advocate, is an animator, designer, and filmmaker. Growing up in the Dominican Republic, she was always drawing. Everyone around her thought she'd become a fine artist, but her mind was more drawn to

creating physical spaces. She'd vanish into a room for hours, moving boxes and pretty much anything else she could find to create physical representations of imagined environments. In her mind, the box in the corner would be an oasis in a desert. She was moving people around, creating scenes and telling their stories in virtual space. And Lauda eventually moved to New York to study design at Parsons School of Design. After graduating, she began building her career at an agency designing video games for kids, before focusing on digital motion design for everything from TV to film and the online realm. What started as designing and creating physical spaces in her childhood home

for imaginary characters to move through evolved into a career building entire virtual domains, beings, and stories for millions to enjoy. But the virtual world wasn't enough. Eventually, Lara's advocate shadow spark type began calling her to apply her creative skills to make something that was more meaningful to her, to create in a more purposeful and heart-centered way. It gave direction to her maker impulse. As a young girl in the Dominican Republic, she'd benefited greatly from those who recognized and encouraged her to pursue what made her come alive. Lara was passionate about helping young girls discover and nurture their own uniqueness.

So she decided to tap her maker skills to create a visual experience that would amplify the voices of girls around the world and help them claim their own power and stories. She launched She Is The Universe movement at sheistheuniverse.org, became a one-woman film crew, and began traveling the world interviewing teenage girls and featuring them in three- to five-minute mini-docs. And of course, she designed and built the She Is The Universe website, and not only films, but also produces, edits, and creates the motion graphics and special effects along the way. It's amazing to see how that early maker impulse to create spaces and tell stories has evolved and

danced with her advocate shadow to create new ways to express itself over a period of decades. So if you enjoyed that story and are curious about your own sparkotype or imprint for work that makes you come alive, grab a copy of Spark using the link in the show notes, or just go to your favorite bookseller. Plus, when you order before September 21st, you'll get some pretty cool bonuses. Okay, on to our conversation with Valerie. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever.

It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Just so excited to dive in. You know, the work that you've been doing for your entire adult life is powerful and compelling and necessary. And the lens that you bring to it is really unique and inclusive and accessible. And I want to dive into all the different aspects of that. But let's take a bigger step back in time. You write so beautifully and you speak so beautifully about when you were a young kid,

the relationship that you had with your grandfather and how central and how important he was in your life, especially when you were little. You're already going to make me cry. My grandfather helped raise me, so he was there before memory. He was the one who would rock me to sleep at night, whispering the prayers of our ancestors. He was the one who would drive me to school in the mornings. I would play at his feet as he tended the garden in the backyard. And Papaji, I called him, he was my mother's father, I called him Papaji, Father. He was always humming the Shabbats, the prayers, almost like it was just a deep breath. And I realized it wasn't so much

that he was praying, but he was cultivating his orientation to wonder. I mean, he would just see the rainbows that appeared in the sprinklers and just say, come on, how amazing. He would look at the stars at night with me. We would talk to them as if they were our friends. I mean, you almost imagine it as childlike. And yet this man who was filled II in the British Indian Army. I grew up with stories of him saving one canteen of water through the deserts of Libya and Egypt and saving that one canteen of water to wash his long hair while his British superiors laughed. But that's how important his hair, his turban was for him, the articles of his faith. I grew up with stories of him escaping the mass violence and the trains filled with the dead during the partition of India during that when Pakistan was carved out of India and him and his family had to migrate to what is now Punjab. And I grew

up with stories of him surviving the pogroms in Delhi in 1984. And every time in the face of death, he would recite this prayer, the hot winds cannot touch you. You are shielded by love. So my grandfather was the person I wanted to be when I grew up. You know, he wasn't just the gardener or the poet. He was the warrior. And he saw me as a warrior. I'm like, I'm a little girl in two long braids. And every time I'd come home running from the racial slur or the mean girls at school, he would look down at me and say, my dear, don't abandon your post. Honestly, Jonathan, I feel like my whole life since my childhood has been this beautiful attempt to keep the promise I made to my grandfather to not abandon my post.

So powerful in so many ways. And one of the things that really lands with me is this, what seems like an irreconcilable duality of ferocity and the warrior side and the conviction while at the same time standing in a place of utter openness to wonder, to newness, and to gratitude for every moment, everything, every person, every interaction. I think it's easy to look at those two states and say, how could they coexist? And yet he modeled them in this really powerful way for you. Oh, he did. What a delicious tension, juxtaposition. It doesn't seem like it would make logical sense.

And yet that's how he lived, how he saw the ideal and the Sikh faith in the Sikh tradition is the Santh Sipahi, the Santh Sipahi, the sage warrior. The warrior fights, the sage loves. I began to see it as a path of, much later in life, as a path of revolutionary love. I began to think, what does it mean to live into that every day? And the sage, the sant is enraptured by the world as it is. And the warrior, the sepahi, is laboring for the world as it ought to be. So how do we hold that, the both of that? And this is where I use warrior metaphors and I use birthing metaphors. I keep thinking the midwife, she says, breathe my love, and then push and then breathe again. There's a surrender in the breath, an orientation to the present moment, to sensations, to being here now with you, Jonathan,

and this magical moment that is just existence and being enraptured by it, finding it wondrous. And then in the next moment, taking the deep breath, after the breath, okay, we roll up our sleeves and what do we do now about Afghanistan or inequality or COVID or what is my role in the

labor to make this world a more just place for us all. And, you know, what ends up happening is there ends up being a little bit of breath in the bush and a little bit of push in the breath, you know, it just becomes a way of moving through the world, the Santhapahi. Yeah, it's so powerful. You know, I think I was first introduced to these two seeming polarities, but really complements really through Eastern philosophy, through Buddhism, and through the way that Thich Nhat Hanh moved through the world also in that somebody where I think a lot of people would look at Buddhism and say, well, the whole goal is to be present, to accept things as they are in the moment, and to just cultivate the skills and the practices and the tools to find equanimity in that space and to just allow. And yet here's somebody who lived and similarly faced all sorts of other atrocities against himself and the community and reached a point where he said, yes, and I have to conceive of a better world and I have to act at the same time, but to not forsake whatever grace you can find in the moment. And at the same time, have enough presence in the future

in the space of becoming. Not an easy dance to do, I think for any of us. Oh, I've let go of the idea of perfection a long time ago. The hard way. I finally had to learn that, you know, I think as soon as we make our heroes saints, we strip them of their power. Because it means we cannot be like them. That, you know, we deny them their full humanity. And what I love about my grandfather, and I tell the story in my books, you know, Stranger, is that as beloved as he was to me earlier on, we had to wrestle. We had to struggle later on in life in the messiness of it all. And so now I've come to think of my life as a series of experiments with revolutionary love.

In here, in the intimate space, and out there in the world. And if it's a series of experiments, then I can just show up with the bravery I can muster and make the mistakes and learn from the rough edges and show up again. Yeah, that's beautiful. You shared that your grandfather's tradition and the tradition in which you were brought up, the Sikh tradition, Sikh faith, part of that, the lineage and part of that, is the warrior side in the most fundamental way in that it requires you to be observable and present in the world. You know, it's sort of like part of the edict is you must be in the world

and forward-facing and wearing certain things and stepping into the outside world in a way where there is nowhere to hide. Yes. And it sounds like that's very intentional in the underlying, in the essence of the tradition. Yes. Well, in the Sikh tradition, we're invited to wear these five articles of faith. And one of them is this long uncut hair, which men, some women wear in a turban. The hair, the long hair, the turban was meant to be seen, meant to make it so that we could not hide. You know, Guru Nanak said, if you wish to play the game of love with me, step forth with your

head on your palm. The first teacher of the Sikh faith, for him, you know, this is what my grandfather would say too, love is dangerous business. For if I see you, if I choose to see the world through the eyes of wonder, and if I choose to see you as a part of me, I do not yet know. You, Jonathan, part of me, I do not yet know. I must be open to hearing your story, to letting your grief in my heart, to fighting for you if you are in harm's way. That kind of love has always been disruptive, has always challenged the oppression of any era. Because what if we saw George Floyd as our brother, and Breonna Taylor, a sister, migrant child caged at the border as our own daughter? You know,

what would we risk? How would we show up differently, if even a fraction of that kind of energy we could bring to our labors in the world? And so six became known as warriors because we could not hide from the fight, literally. And so how ironic, how ironic, Jonathan, that these markers of faith, that these turbans meant to represent our commitment to love and serve and fight for justice for all was the very thing that marked Sikhs as terrorists in this country for the last 20 years. I know you've also, you tell the story how when you were younger, as much as you adored and revered your grandfather and his teachings and his ideas and his stories, like any other child.

I mean, when you're young, especially you just want to fit in. You don't want to be different. You know, it's like, we can have these very heady and deep and real conversations now. And then, but there's the window that we all go through where we're just like, please like, let me not stand out. And it sounds like you had that season in your life as well. And I love that you share those stories too, because I think it's easy to, you know, for us to sort of look back in time and paint the picture that we want the story to be

and then let that story be told publicly. But like you said, when we start our conversation, you know, like when we paint the perfect picture, you know, we're really creating harm. And we're setting expectations that ripple out and don't have the effect that we originally intended. And I thought it was beautiful that you shared like as a kid. Okay, so there were stories that you told. I think the line was like, you know, people would say like something like, oh, you're Indian. And you're like, oh, I'm not that kind of Indian. Yeah, right. I'm not the kind who lives in teepees, or I'm not the kind who worships idols. I'm even saying these things. I am just it's like sticking in my mouth because I can I can feel how damaging and how hurtful it is to hear that for indigenous peoples or Hindu Americans. And yet, isn't that what white supremacy does? It pits us as people of color against each other, clamoring for our proximity to whiteness. It's like, yeah, I'm dark, I'm Indian, but I'm not primitive like those people over there. So please have me over for dinner. I'll use my fork. It was in the subtle ways, in the subtle ways you see, I could see now only looking back on my life, how internalized depression made its way into my psyche without knowing it. And then how I then became a participant in that kind of subtle ongoing brutality. It took me years to wake up to it, to understand what had been done, and then to choose differently. It seems like one of the moments when you were younger that really changed you and started a process of waking up and maybe looking differently at

the world around you. After you had been also surrounded by, it sounds like, kids who were very devout in their faith and very, very attached to the belief that there is one path. And that was not your tradition. That was not your faith. You were not a part of that. You had this experience with this one woman named Faye that seemed like it was just, it was even just reading it was just so hard opening. I've been trying to find her. Yeah. We had exchanged letters, you know, oh gosh, 25 years ago. I haven't been able to find her, Oh, no kidding. friends, teachers who tried to convert me. I remember a neighbor brought over someone who performed an exorcism on me because she said every time I was hearing a voice in me that said there were many paths to the divine, that was the devil speaking to me. So I had a number of really traumatic moments and every time tried to find, you know, respond earnestly. And there was this one day, one Sunday

morning, I go to the Gurdwara with my grandfather and I'm listening to the kirtan, listening to the prayers, you know, all of Sikh scripture is devotional poetry. And so worship is just listening to those poems set to music and song. So here's my grandfather closing his eyes, just losing himself in the poetry, right? The surrender, the wonder into oneness. That's our practice. But I am like, my fists are clenched, my heart's beating fast as I'm thinking back to all of these encounters and wanting to fight back, thinking we are warrior people. What are we doing here hiding? So I left in the middle of the service. I got up, I marched out of that Gurdwara in downtown Fresno. I went down the street to the first church I could find and it was locked. So I went to the next church

and I just pounded the door. And Jonathan, I don't know what I was thinking. I think I just, I was like, I'm going to confront the priest in front of the congregation. I'm going to fight for my people. I'm this teenager. And the door opens and there's this light woman in this beautiful flowery dress and the church is empty. You know, I'm like, that's when I learned that Christians usually finish their prayers before six to a little later in general. And she was the church organist and she had been practicing and she said, can I help you? And I thought of some kind of excuse, like, can I sit and listen to you play? She said, yes. So I sat in the pews trying to figure out how to get out of there. And she set

her fingers on that organ. Oh, Jonathan, it was like, you know, a thousand birds, like leaving a tree at once. It was this burst of energy and harmony. And as the music went on, it, you know, I closed my eyes and I could just, I didn't know if I was in the church or in the Gurdwara. And I had these images of Jesus and from his hands, you know, not condemning me, but his arms outstretched. And from his hands, the forming of the Ik Om Gad, the central truth of the Sikh faith, oneness. And by the time she stopped playing, I was just sobbing. And she said, what's wrong? And I realized that I had finally tasted, and the Sikh faith is called Sahaj, that ecstatic moment of surrender, vismad, you know, ecstatic wonder. I had experienced what my grandfather was trying to teach me all that

time, but inside of a Christian church. So the irony of that, I had come to go to battle and I had found my sanctuary. And Faye, this beautiful woman, she said, well, tell me my love, like, why are you crying? And I said, well, I just can't believe in a God who would send me to hell. You know, I'm like, oh, maybe this is my moment that I got to fight her. And she says, well, I can't either. I think there are many paths to the divine. I started laughing and she starts laughing and I'm like sobbing into poor Faye's blouse. She's holding me. And we sat there for a long time, just talking and laughing about, I don't know. It's like she chose to see me as someone who was a part of her that she did not yet know. You know, come sit, listen, tell me, tell me about you.

And I remember returning to my grandfather. I didn't even tell him what had happened. He just had this beautiful, soft smile. And we got in the car and returned home together. And that moment, Jonathan, stayed with me all my days. Yeah, I often wonder when you're a kid and you have an experience like that, that maybe lasts minutes. And there are these little, there are these like vignettes that just stay with us decades and decades later. And I think sometimes we don't even really understand what's been

revealed until we revisit them way later in life and say, oh, oh, this is what really happened there. We just knew something happened. So they were so laden with emotion that they become embedded in our psyche, but we don't understand what the learning is from it until we're much further into life and reflect back and it sort of unfolds. It's almost like all the little tiny traumas, the microaggressions, the conversion attempts, or just like little tiny blocks of ice that had been in my body, just freezing parts of me. And that encounter was just like the warm water just melting it away. I mean, I feel like I often think of healing as the long journey of returning to one's body. And that freedom is, you know, being at home in your

body and therefore at home in your body and therefore at home in the world. And that moment with her returned me to my body, returned me to a sense of home in the company of another. And I do think that's why I've carried it so many years because it's the antidote. Yeah. The Apple Watch Series X is here.

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Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk. Tell me how to fly this thing. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. I guess the other thing that arises for me out of that story, and it's a curiosity, is so there was this thing that was revealed to you, but at the same time, there was this impulse in you that was so strong

that you literally got up. You left your grandfather. You walked down the block. You pound on one church. And that church is locked up. And you're like, no, no, no. I am not done. I am not done. Something has to happen here. and you go searching for someone else. So there's clearly this fire in you. There's a sense of right and wrong, a sense of justice, but not just a sense of it, but a sense that I need to do something with this. I need to act on it. And I wonder if that was a common thread earlier in life or whether that moment also was in any way catalyzing around that aspect of you. Oh, how beautiful.

I think it wasn't a recurring theme. It wasn't like I did brazen things all the time. In fact, I was a very good girl. I would keep my voice down. I would keep myself small. I would only raise my hand if I really had the answer fully formed in my mind. You know, it was, it was, I had imbibed enough of the messages that to be good or to be liked or to be lovable as a little brown girl is to make other people feel comfortable. And so this was not that, right?

This was like realizing that a whole childhood of that wasn't, you know, was making me like crawl in my skin. And there was something, you know, because my grandfather would always tell me the stories of the warriors of our faith, including the woman warriors, you know, the first woman warrior who leads the men into battle. She goes where no one else will go. She becomes the one she was waiting for. And in our Gurdwara even, there are portraits on the walls of these warriors and these battles and these martyrdoms and this willingness, not only to not make other people comfortable, but to stand up for the sense of what is right. And I was standing up. It was very clear

in that moment. I wasn't doing it just for myself because the charge that I had from those who tried to convert me was like, you need to do this for your family, for your grandfather, your parents, your little brother. They're counting on you. If you don't do this, eternal suffering. I would have dreams of Judgment Day, hellfire. Like my family's destiny was, you know, I love them so much. On my shoulders, it was a matter of life or death for me. And until like, I understood that what I needed to do was not, you know, figure out how to convert them.

It was to protect them because they were good and lovable and beloved by the divine, just as they were. And so I think it all kind of culminated in that moment. And, and thank goodness that the result was so, was so life-giving because then I think that was probably the beginning of me like, okay, maybe I can stand up again and see what happens. Yeah. I'm fascinated by the concept of sliding doors. Do you ever wonder, do you ever reflect back and wonder what would have happened had you knocked on that second church door and either nobody was there or there was an open congregation and this notion of you walking down the aisle and confronting?

Do you ever think back and say, I wonder how different my course would have been had the scenario been a little bit different in that moment in time? Oh, that is so delicious. Right? Because who knows what would have happened? You know, it could have been someone with the same sensibilities in their hearts, and they're going to model this beautiful welcoming before their whole congregation. But I don't know, knowing the Central Valley in the 80s at that time, it probably would have been a confrontation that would have caused the priest then to defend himself before the church and then would have caused me to be the lone warrior.

And then, oh, my goodness, who knows how that would have turned out. You know, I'm understanding now that, you know, you don't give birth alone and you don't go to battle alone either. You need your people with you. So I learned that clearly later. So I'm lucky that it turned out the way it did. Yeah. No, it's beautiful. You wonder if there was a little bit of intervention there in some way, shape or form, if you believe in these types of things. It feels like also, you have been set on a path for a long time now for your teens,

for your entire adult life of deep inquiry, self-inquiry, but also inquiry of everything and everyone. And also activism. You end up, when you go to school, you're at Stanford, you're studying religious studies and international affairs, and then would eventually go on to explore divinity at Harvard and then law at Yale. But early on in that journey, there's a moment that touches down in your life and touches down in all of our lives as somebody who grew up outside of New York City and lived there for 30 years once I was an adult. I was in the city on 9-11 in 2001. And I experienced it in a very particular

way being a native New Yorker, knowing people that were in the towers that didn't come home that day. And just being in a state of profound mourning, being in this very place where this thing happened. And that moment forever changed me in so many different ways. You experienced it in a profound way, but also very differently than me. First, Jonathan, I just, I wish I could embrace you right now. The trauma of that, of being so close to it, of losing loved ones, of, you know, united in unity and mourning and then declares a war on terror.

You can't grieve and prepare to kill at the exact same time. I keep thinking that all of us are carrying some unresolved grief around what was lost. It's interesting to hear you say that because as someone in the city, the messages that started to come in to me from folks outside of the city, from all over, were more, we need vengeance. Let's go, let's right this wrong. And in New York, in that moment, we were all in a state of profound trauma and grief. Our mind was not about, you know, like, where do we go from here or retribution or how do we, we were just in a state of profound, profound grief. And it struck me even then, I was like, wow, this is, people are experiencing this in just very, very different ways.

And I just kept thinking to myself, I'm like, I don't know if we'll ever be there, but we're not there now for sure. This is not the time or place. We need to be with this and grieve. And it's almost like the proximity to the event was partially determinant of the response that folks had. And not judging or shaming anyone about it. I think we're all human beings who react in a certain partially coded way. So it was interesting for me. And then for you, like you said, the president goes on TV and makes these statements. And you and your community and anyone with brown skin in the country at the time are

affected in a very different way than me. I was a kid in college. I was home for the summer, and I was watching the towers fall on you know, on that endless loop, like sitting on the floor of my parents' bedroom. And then we saw the image again and again of the turbid and beard. And that's when I realized, oh, our nation's new enemy looks like my family, my grandfather. And at that point, we had been living and farming in California, in America for a hundred years. And yet overnight, we got these desperate messages. This was before YouTube, before social media, before we had any channels to tell our own stories. So it was just emails. So between the emails and the phone calls, it was just

these desperate messages. My brother has been beaten. My sister has been stabbed. Our gurdwara is on fire. Our house of worship has been graffitied. A Molotov cocktail has been thrown through the window of our home. Someone's going to die. Someone's going to die. And then on September 15th, we got the news, a phone call that Bilbir uncle had been standing in front of his gas station planting flowers in Arizona when a man shot him five times in the back. The man, when arrested, called himself a patriot. And Bilbir Singh Sodhi was the first person killed in all the hate violence that followed 9-11. And he was a family friend. So at this point, I have this crisis. I'm paralyzed. I don't know what to do with my country under attack. My family, my people, my community cannot leave the house because we're under attack. And Bobir Uncle's story

barely makes the evening news. All of these stories, to the extent that the media chronicled them, they were identified as isolated incidents in an otherwise united nation. But, oh, but they were, you know, hate was just braided into every day of our lives. And so I was like, I have, you know, do something, anything. And at that point, I was supposed to take a semester abroad to work in India to collect the oral histories of the partition. I wanted to be a professor of religion. I wanted to be an academic. So I was going to go study violence in the past and hear violence was happening all around me in present time. And thank goodness, the university was like, there's no way you're going near Pakistan because it's too dangerous.

Not realizing that it was far more dangerous for me to be crossing the country with my turbaned cousin in the wake of 9-11. But they said yes when I proposed using that time and my camera to document hate crimes in the wake of the attacks. So within a week, we were on the road going from city to city, home to home, Gurdwara to mosque. And we would arrive sometimes when the blood was still fresh on the ground and talk to people. I remember trying to seem all professional. Like I had, my mom bought me this like London fog coat and I had my first cell phone that my father gave me. And I'm like, I'm going to be the journalist, you know, capturing. And then, you know, they would open the door. We would call them auntie, uncle, they would give us some cha.

He would be drinking the tea. And then, you know, cause there were no, there's nobody else. There was no investigative journalists there. Where were the mayors? Where were the elected officials? There's no one else to really to hear the story, to grieve with them. And they would begin to tell me. And the hardest part of every testimony wasn't necessarily the act of violence. It's what followed. You know, it was just seeing the crestfallen face, the lost sense of belonging, the stolen dignity. Oh, seeing themselves through the eyes of their neighbors who saw them as suspect, foreign, terrorist. And realizing that that had to have been part of how people had been seeing them all along. You know, 9-11 didn't cause the hate. It uncovered what was already there. We had to already be seen as the them to be expelled so efficiently from the us.

So it was painful. And we still called it the backlash. We still treated it as if it was this finite chapter in US history, this dark chapter that we would look back on with regret. And the violence kept going. And all these years later, two decades later, hate violence has never fallen to the today than we were before 9-11. So instead, it just initiated a new era, a new world so that our kids are growing up never knowing that it didn't have to be like this. It could have been otherwise. When you literally drive cross country and show up to to record these stories and and to see these people ah i mean at 20 years old you know to try and like knock on the door and say oh i'm i'm gonna be here and be the neutral you know like party to do the journalist thing and then it had to have been just such a profoundly challenging moment on so many levels for you. And also a moment that it seems like, you know, that moment changed a lot of people's

lives and the trajectory of their lives and their careers. And for you, it did in a way that you never saw coming, you know. It changed everything. But for the last 20 years, you know, you have essentially been building on that moment. Yeah, it changed everything. Because the violence kept going, I kept returning to the road. You know, you have essentially and I was abused by a police officer, that's when I realized, like, actually a professor told me, like, look, you're going to keep going out there and you need armor. You can't just keep showing up without armor. And so that's when I'm like, I applied to law school. And then the film that we ended up making from the footage i i worked with a filmmaker to make

the film ended up falling in love with him he's now my husband our children are downstairs i mean it's it's surreal to think that every part of your life everything i know now i can trace back to that choice to respond to those towers falling and bo B. Runkle's murder with not making myself small, but trying to show up to it. And I have to say though, Jonathan, with every film, with every lawsuit, with every campaign in the last 20 years, I still held on to this idea that we were making the nation safer for the next generation, that we were going to, you know, that there was a sense of linear progress, that we just had to,

and that all came falling apart for me when my son was born. And that first year of his life was the 2016 election season and hate violence was just skyrocketing once again. And this time I, you know, I opened up my toolkit and at this time, by this time I had accumulated such a robust toolkit, you know, like I could do the lawyering, the organizing, the filmmaking, the speaking. And I was just paralyzed. Once again, I couldn't pick up any of it. I left my job at Stanford Law. I got really quiet. And I began to think, it's like, okay, there's something deeper here, some deeper malady that our problem as a nation is not simply a political one or a social one. It's a spiritual one. And as much as I had been fighting for sound government

and just policy, and as much as we need those just policies, what we truly need is a shift in culture and consciousness, a new way of being with each other, of seeing each other. Sikhs just don't need to be known. Black people have been known. Indigenous people have been known. It's knowing is not the problem. It's needing to be loved. It's needing to be seen as kin. And that's inviting people into seeing through the eyes of wonder, seeing no strangers. How do we do that? How do we do that? I've spent the last 20 years of my life organizing around hate. I'm going to be spending the next 20 years of my life organizing around love. Yeah. I mean, it all comes back to that line that you shared earlier you're part of me

i do not yet know if we could come to that place and it sounds like you've come to a place where you said okay so we've been trying to approach these problems in a particular way or particular set of ways for generations now and it hasn't yielded a whole lot of change, sustained change, meaningful change at scale. So what if we stepped in with a different lens? You have a phrase that you mentioned very early in our conversation, but we'll circle back to revolutionary love. And so my curiosity is when you say, when we talk about revolutionary love, what are we actually talking about? Revolutionary love is the bravery to see no stranger, to say you are a part of me I do not yet know, and then let all of your actions flow from that way of seeing each other. I declare that revolutionary love is the call of our times,

but really, Jonathan, like, it's ancient. This call to love has been on the lips of spiritual teachers, indigenous healers, for thousands of years. Jesus calls us to love our neighbors, and Muhammad to take in the orphan, and Abraham to open our tent to all and Guru Nanak to see no stranger, Mirabai to love without limit, Buddha unending compassion. I mean, we've heard these calls to love. Historian Karen Armstrong calls it the axial age, right? Starting

in the eighth century, this idea that we began to awaken from a tribal understanding, although only those in my tribe are fully human, to a sense of shared humanity. So we've heard that call to love for centuries. I feel like we're in the midst of a second great awakening, a second great transition, like a second leap in human consciousness. Will we be able to embody that ethic of love in the way that our society is structured and the way that we do community with each other to affirm human dignity at the center of it all? Will we be able to do it not just in the wake of crisis or in the wake of the violence, but actually as the way that we are with each other? Can we be pioneers in a new way of being with each other? I feel like that's the great question of our era, of this time of transition. And this is why I've been asking this question. The future is dark. Is this the darkness of the tomb or the darkness of the womb?

Will we perish because we can't figure this out? Or will we begin to birth a world that is longing to be, an America that is longing to be? The midwife says to breathe and to push, there is a wisdom in sustaining longevity in any long labor. So my invitation now and my work now is around giving people the tools to sustain themselves in the labor of building beloved community where they are. Hmm. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman.

I knew you were going to be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him.

Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations,

iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. the phrase revolutionary is interesting to me um i spent a chunk of time studying non-violent revolution dynamics and you know the sort of a the person who so many people point to as the the one who really figured out what is the transferable framework to be able to organize around these principles? A professor emeritus, Gene Sharp, who passed, I think about two years ago, who developed this really powerful lens on that, that then became a short manual that actually has been used and passed around to see the organizing structure and the fundamental philosophies and ideas of so many nonviolent revolutions around the world in the last 30 years. One of the things that stuck with me so powerfully

when I deepened into his work was he said, we focus very often, one of the stumbling points in any form of revolution is that you build the rally cry around what you want to move away from. You say this, you identify the oppressor and you say the purpose of the revolution is we must take this down. We must topple this person, this system, this paradigm. And he said that rarely ever works because if that becomes the goal and then you end up actually building a solution, which is far better than that. But that thing still exists, then you're perceived as a failure. And he said, you know, the alternative to that is to rather than focus on toppling this source of oppression, of pain, of suffering, focus on the qualities and the structure. Like what are we building that will be so much better, so much more inclusive, so much more nourishing for so many more people in its place that people will no longer be able

to justify clinging to the pillars of the past. And they'll start to flock to this new thing. And whatever structure was supporting the old, it just disintegrates on its own. And nobody really cares if it's still left there in some ramshackle form of what it used to be or not, because they're just focused on what are we stepping into? What are we bringing our hearts and our minds and our actions to, to create that is better moving forward? And so I brought that overlay to your notion of revolutionary love. And I said, effectively, that's what you're doing here.

You're saying, yes, let's acknowledge the past. Let's acknowledge the existence of certain things that we don't want. But let's focus our energy differently. Let's create a container bound by and expanded by love and invite as many people into that. And just let that slowly over time disempower whatever paradigm exists now, because it just, it pales in comparison to the feeling it gives us, you know, when you look at this new paradigm. I mean, does that land with you? Oh, absolutely. So deeply. In fact, I want to read you this excerpt from my book. It's

the chapter called Reimagine. And it's because, you know, coming up as a young activist, I was all about resistance, you know, resist, resist, resist. And there is a need and power in resisting for survival. But resistance alone won't deliver us in the ways that you have just illustrated. So here's the excerpt. The greatest social reformers in history did not only resist oppressors, they held up a vision of what the world ought to be. Nanak sang it, Muhammad led it, Jesus taught it. Buddha envisioned it. King dreamt it. Dorothy Day labored for it.

Mandela lived it. Gandhi died for it. Grace Lee Boggs fought for it for seven decades. They called for us not only to unseat bad actors, but to reimagine the institutions of power that order the world. Any social harm can be traced to institutions that produce it, authorize it, or otherwise profit from it. To undo the injustice, we have to imagine new institutions and step in to lead them. That's it, Jonathan. I feel like this is our moment to declare what

is obsolete, what can be reformed, and what must be reimagined. And when I invite people, especially in movement spaces, into reimagining, you can see how weak that muscle has been. Because part of the trick of oppression is that it just doesn't give you any space for breath. It keeps you in nonstop crisis response mode. You're always under siege. You're always responding to the latest cascade of crises. And I feel like while we need frontliners, all of us can't be there all of the time. And I had to learn that the hard way by realizing I couldn't stay there because I was no good to anyone if I was so fatigued during the front lines work that

actually we need people playing different roles in the ecosystem. And if we have enough people in those spaces to protect vision, protect imagination, hold up an idea of the world that we want to live in, then we're accepting the truth that revolutions happen, not just in the big grand public moments, not just in the marches or the declarations or the topplings, right? Revolutions, true lasting revolutions happen when a critical mass of people come together to inhabit a new way of being, a new way of being together. And I feel like I've been seeing it lately. It's invisible. It's hard to see, but I've been seeing it with so many people waking up from the pandemic, from the racial reckonings, from the 20 years of war. We're waking up and we're finding ways sometimes inside of our existing church or schools, but

oftentimes outside to try to practice this thing called beloved community, that hard, that hard work of, of being in relationship with one another rooted in love. And when I look at the good life community you've created, like, Oh, I see it as a pocket of revolutionary love. Yeah. And I don't disagree with that at all. Um, you know, one of the things that I love also about the work that you've been doing, so you have this incredible, so much of your ideas and your story are written in this book, See No Stranger, which is a stunning book, by the way. And also as a writer, to know how difficult it is to write memoir, but also prescriptive to a certain extent,

it's literally almost impossible to do that really well. But my mind, like I would read one sentence and my mind would melt with the craft of language. And I'd read another sentence and my heart would open with the depth of the ideas. And I was just like, oh, so powerful. That is the deepest like compliment. I'm just taking that straight to my heart. Thank you. Yeah, it was really so beautiful to move. And then to see, by the way, that the paperback version of it, the cover is based on a print that was done of you by Shepard Fairey, who is like literally the artist who I've been following for my entire adult life because I'm obsessed with his work. I was like, okay, so to have, to get Shepard to actually create a print for you, you have to be an extraordinary person in the world.

It was, it was, let me say it was a total surprise. Um, I had Shepard's Obama poster up on my dorm room walls, right? All through law school. So to fast forward, and it was, it was actually this art collective called Amplifier Art saying around the time of the inauguration of this year that we want to like hold up visions of the people who are pointing the way for what our nation could be, not just what we're against, but what we could be. And they brought Shepard my story. And I sat for a portrait, not knowing really what was going to happen. And some weeks later here, he's not just taken my portrait. He found a way to weave Sikh wisdom into it. So this necklace I always wear, the Ikom God necklace, the center of our faith, the oneness, he made that the mandala at the center of the portrait, surrounded by khandas,

which represent our willingness to fight for justice with love. And then see no stranger, nakobari nahi bagana, I see no enemy, I see no stranger, those words he brought to life in the print. So it's honestly, it still feels very surreal. It's a great honor. And I feel like you can't really understand unless you see it happen, but there's a QR code on the back of the book. If you scan it, you hover your phone over the cover and my portrait comes alive and starts speaking to you about revolutionary love. Right. So like you just layered coolness on top of coolness here. I mean, we're talking about really, really deep topics also, but come on, there's also something like just kind of crazy awesome about this whole thing.

Since the hardcover came out last summer, it's been really clear like, oh, this book is not a standalone book. It's anchoring a movement and a movement has art and a movement has music and tools. And so Ani DiFranco, Justin Tranter created revolutionary love songs for the book and for the movement and Shepard's artwork. And yeah. We've had both Ani and Justin on the show. Yeah, of course. So clearly we are meant to be hanging out together. Yeah. I mean, it is amazing. And it is, it's a manifesto at the end of the day for revolutionary love. And people rally to that. People rally to the idea. People come to it and say, how can I step into this and be a part of it?

And the other part of what I think is so compelling about what you've been doing is that, yes, you've written this really powerful work. Yes, you've been out there crafting language and movements and taking action. And at the same time, something in your brain says, okay, so we need to create tools so that, you know, as millions of people organize around these ideas, they're not sort of like constantly saying, hey, where's Valerie so she can answer our questions? Where's Valerie so we can do this thing? So you literally built, you know, like programming and tools and education to give to anyone who wants to step into this exploration and be able to guide themselves as individuals, in groups, as communities. The Revolutionary Love Compass, I think, is sort of the embodiment. It's the framework for all of this. And I know it would

take a long time to actually deconstruct everything that's in there. But I'd love if you could share just sort of like the fundamental of what this tool is about, because I think it's really powerful. Thank you. Can I share with you how it came to be? And then I'll talk a little bit about it. Yeah, please. I remember that moment of crisis that I had back in 2016 and realizing I had to shift from the front lines. I had a gift that very few women who are mothers or activists are ever given. I got a room

of my own, you know, like enough of a book advance to start writing and thinking. And I moved my family to the rainforest in Central America for a year. I opened up my journals and my books and I read everything I had written and read since the age of seven and was searching for patterns. And I realized that what I was searching for wasn't just practices for revolutionary love that were taken from lived experience. I also wanted to be sure they were backed by research. So I put together a team of scholars from neuroscience, ethics, education, psychology, history, to be reading with me and researching with me. So as I wrote See No Stranger, I would be getting these memos with, you know, and you'll see the end of the book has 40 pages of footnotes of end notes that show how deeply researched it

is as a manifesto. And what ended up happening in that whole process was saying, oh, love, you know, I'm a lawyer. Anytime anyone would say the word love, like I would roll my eyes. Like love is the answer? You want me to, with what we're up against, the institutions that are perpetuating injustice? And I realized in this process that the problem was never with love.

It's the way we talk about it. How do we go back to the love as the muscular ethic that was given to us from our scriptures and songs? How do we put that into practice? And so I began to define love as sweet labor, fierce, bloody, imperfect, life-giving, a choice that we make again and again. And if love is labor, we don't have to get all mystical about it. If love is labor, love can be taught. Love can be modeled. Love can be practiced.

What are the tools that we need? What are the core practices that we need? These 10 core practices emerged, you know, wonder, grieve, fight, rage, listen, reimagine, breathe, push, transition, joy, let joy in. And I began to imagine these practices as points on a compass. And we've organized them in such a way that we created the revolutionary love compass. So you can point the compass to an other, and you'll see the practices that you might need to exercise as you're practicing what it means to see no stranger. You can point the compass to an opponent. And I don't use the word enemy. An enemy is a permanent position, but an opponent,

someone can slide into that category in and out. And if it's an orientation to you, if this is someone who's opposing your way of being or your ideas, then your inclination is going to be to dehumanize them, to think of them as monstrous, but the core practice here is to tend to the wound. I've come to realize that there are no such thing as monsters in this world. There are only human beings who are wounded, who act out of their own insecurity or blindness or greed. That doesn't make them any less dangerous. But when we choose to see the humanity of even them, we can awaken to the context, the cultures, the institutions that drive that harm. And we become smarter about not just resisting, but re-imagining the context as a whole.

So that's how we practice orienting to an opponent. And then you turn the compass one more time to ourselves. So revolutionary love is the choice to labor for others, for our opponents, and for ourselves. And this is what so many social reformers skipped over. You know, Gandhi, King Mandela, they taught us a lot about how to love others and opponents, but not at length about how to love ourselves. This is the feminist intervention. This is me going back to Black women leaders, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, who teach us that caring for ourselves is part of the revolutionary work.

So here are practices for how to sustain longevity, resilience, even joy in that ongoing labor. And I have to tell you, Jonathan, now, like when we formed the compass, it was initially like, this is what we need for our movements out there in the world. But I've been using this compass all the time in my own home. Like when my son is throwing a tantrum, he's an opponent to me, like, oh, I know what to do. I can open up this compass and take the tools out that I might need for him. So this is where I feel like, okay, if Michelle Alexander taught me this, she actually has become a godmother figure in my life. She gave the book its name. And she's the one who said, you know, what's happening here, in here, is just as real as what is happening out there.

So in your intimate life, in your relationships, in the textures, in the contours of how you're relating to your kids, your family, your colleagues, that is also where the revolutionary work happens, just as it is out there. So this compass is a tool that people are using, both in their work in the world and in their daily lives. And that's been thrilling to see. Yeah, that lands so true. You know, when I looked at it at first, I was sort of thinking, okay, so I can see how

this applies in the context of all the things that we're doing in the outside world and the things that we're trying to make happen. And then the same exact thing. I'm like, oh, this is actually a thing for your friends and for your family and for your kids. And for this is, it is just a tool to be able to step into any relationship from a place of equanimity and compassion, which is not easy to create and also not roll over, but have tools and process to understand, like, how do I enter this? How do I engage in a way that feels constructive and inviting rather than destructive and

excruciating? And I want to be clear that it's not about bypassing those hard emotions either, you know? Right. A hundred percent. So grieving is a core practice on the compass. You know, grief is the price of love. Grief is how we show the depth of what we have loved. So grieving with others. And then rage. I always was taught to believe that rage was the opposite of love. And it's only in doing this work and mining my own life that I really understood that no, rage is the force that protects that which we love. So the solution is not to suppress your rage or to let it explode, but to process it in safe containers and then choose how to harness that energy for

what you end up doing in the world. So I think the reason the compass has been so new for people is that Parker Palmer, the Quaker elder who has also been godfather figure for us calls it the new nonviolence. You know, it makes space for our difficult, intense emotions to go through them. And it protects, you know, the need to love ourselves. And there's also this idea that any one of us has a different role in the labor of revolutionary love at any given time. You know, if you have a knee on your neck your neck, it's not necessarily your role to look up at your opponents and try to wonder about them or listen to them. Your role is to take the next breath,

to stay alive. That's your revolutionary act. But you might be someone who's in a position to tend to the kinds of opponents. So much of the compass is understanding, what is my role in this season of my life, in this community, in this encounter, and then finding the courage to step in to try it. So powerful. It feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well. So sitting here in this container of Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? Oh, to live a good life. Oh, I go back to the Santh Sabahi, you know, to be enraptured by the world as it is, is to live a good life. To labor for the world as it ought You know, I will live a good life once we win this, once my kids are safe, once we... And now I've come to understand that, you know, we may not

see the fruits of our labor in this lifetime, that we labor for a future we may not live to see. And so what does it mean to have the labor be an end in and of itself? And so when I show up to the labor with love, then my labor becomes porous enough to let breath in and to let joy in. And so Jonathan, I've come to decide that laboring for a more just world with love and with joy is the meaning of life, the meaning of a good life. Thank you. Thank you. Hey, before you leave, if you love this episode, safe bet you will also love the conversation we had with Rev. Angel Quixote-Williams about the intersection between race, love, and liberation. You'll find a link to Rev. Angel's episode in the show notes. Thank you. And if you appreciate the work that we have been doing here at Good Life Project, please go check out my new book, Sparked.

It'll reveal some incredibly eye-opening things to you about your very favorite subject, you, and then show you how to tap those insights to reimagine and reinvent work as a source of meaning, purpose, and joy. You'll find a link in the show notes, or you can also find it at your favorite bookseller now. See you next time mayday mayday we've been compromised the pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him, we need him!

Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes.

The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary.