Soul Boom - How to Humanize Your Enemies (w/ Valarie Kaur)

Episode Date: November 13, 2025

How can we humanize our political "opponents" and stop viewing the world as "them vs. us?" Revolutionary love in practice. Valarie Kaur returns to unpack how we can transform grief into courageous action, and build a bigger we that resists dehumanization while defending democracy. We walk through tools like wonder, grief, listening across difference, and experiments with love on the frontlines and at home. Soul Boom Workbook (Out NOW!) 👉 https://a.co/d/dM5wTYM THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS! OneSkin 👉 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Get 15% off OneSkin with the code SOULBOOM at ⁠https://www.oneskin.co⁠ ZipRecruiter (try it FREE!) 👉 https://www.ziprecruiter.com/soulboom Uncommon Goods (15% OFF!) 👉 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.uncommongoods.com/soulboom reMarkable 👉 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://remarkable.com⁠ Fetzer 👉 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.fetzer.org ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⏯️ SUBSCRIBE!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠👕 MERCH OUT NOW! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠📩 SUBSTACK!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  FOLLOW US! IG: 👉 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://instagram.com/soulboom⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TikTok: 👉 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tiktok.com/@soulboom⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  CONTACT US! Sponsor Soul Boom: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Work with Soul Boom: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  Send Fan Creations, Questions, Comments: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  Executive Produced by: Kartik Chainani Executive Produced by: Ford Bowers, Samah Tokmachi Companion Arts Production Supervisor: Mike O'Brien Theme Music by: Marcos Moscat Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

They're targeting our nonprofits, our foundations. They're putting our names and faces on with... I have to push back against this there. There's a lot of use of the word they are. Even when you say they are doing that, they are doing that, it becomes almost a demonizing use of the word they. If you look at the example of the great spiritual leaders, Jesus was nothing but dehumanized.

And he humanized everyone he encountered. I think it's important to recognize that there are opponents. So when I say they... I have a problem with the word opponent. That's so funny. Okay, let's do this. Hey there, it's me, Rain Wilson. And I want to dig into the human experience.

I want to have conversations about a spiritual revolution. Let's get deep with our favorite thinkers, friends, and entertainers about life, meaning, and idiocy. Welcome to the Soul Boom podcast. Valerie, Core, thanks for coming back on Soul Boom. I'm so happy to see you, Rain. It's been like a year. and you've been on the road for a year in a tour bus doing the revolutionary love tour. Is that right?

That's right. We started in Los Angeles. You were our first guest. We boarded that bus. And it's a real bus. It's a real actual. It's like a rock and roll tour bus. It's like what Aerosmith.

Well, it's not so fancy. It's more like a Greyhound bus inside. But on the outside, it's as revolutionary love is the collarline. You don't have like sleeping barclor lounges and like Xbox. and no, nothing like that. Grassroot artists, activists. No, we have seats and that is enough. There are seats on your bus on the revolutionary tour bus for bozos on the bus like me.

But continue. So how many cities have you gone to? We've gone to more than 50 cities now. And we are going to places where atrocity has taken place. So we were at Nagalas at the border wall with a huge, huge wall dividing us at the U.S.-Mexico border. We were at the gas station in Mesa, Arizona, where Bill Biers Singh-Soddy, the first person killed in a hate crime was killed. That was after 9-11. After 9-11.

That's right. We were at George Floyd Memorial Square. We ended in New Orleans, and then we took a break. And now we're still traveling around the country, because it turns out, now more than ever, is when people need the call of revolutionary love. And what is that call? The root of tyranny is loveless. They are counting on us to shut down our hearts, to relinquish our humanity, to retreat into our fear or privilege. When you say they, who's they? Those who are grabbing power in this country,

authoritarian power in this country, weaponizing cruelty, giving us a common enemy in this case immigrants to advance their agenda. And I believe that the call to revolutionary love is to see no strain. to leave no one outside of our circle of care, to risk ourselves for each other. And that means to be braver with our lives than ever before. So every week I'm in a different city, we're gathering hundreds of people at a time. We're telling our ancestor stories, song, prayers, music, teachings,

and then we're asking people, what does it look like for you to be braver with your love than ever before? So I think this is really important, because you're speaking mostly to the political left, right? And activists. and you're asking of them to be warriors and be proactive and to activate, but to bring love with them in the great spirit of Martin Luther King in the work that they do.

Because if you go online right now, there's nothing but hate. And I caught a lot of shit for saying, hey, it really sucks that Charlie Kirk was shot in front of his wife and kids. and actually that he was a courageous man. Because unlike 99% of people, he was going into quote unquote hostile spaces, people that disagreed with him and having debate. Now, I didn't agree with most everything that came out of his mouth,

but I got a lot of hate from the left for saying that. That was, again, it was another flashpoint, another touch point about like, what if we just took a week or a month or a person, period of time to just love Charlie Kirk's family, how much love and compassion could we bring to those kind of situations? Because I think that folks on both sides are villainizing the other sides in ways that are incredibly toxic and ultimately not productive. Six days after Kirk's murder, I found myself on a plane to a rural part of Indiana in

to speak on a college campus with students. And I was afraid, Rain, as much as I found Kirk's ideas absolutely abhorrent, he was killed while speaking to students. It felt so personal and so intimate and so visceral. And I believe that in a time when the future of our country, our democracy is at stake, all of us are called to lead with our humanity above all. And so I understand people's even like reluctance into affording humanity to someone who denied their own. I understand that. And I feel that those of us who are able to alchemize our grief and our rage into action are called to lead

with love above all. And so, I mean, right now they're using that horrific act of political violence to wage a campaign of mighty vengeance against anyone who opposes this government's agenda. So they're targeting our nonprofits, our foundations. They're putting our names and faces on with. There's a lot of use of the word they are. And I really, I have, I struggle with that. I have a hard time saying they are doing this. Like there are some people. in the current administration that are doing that. And there are some that are not.

And there's a lot of moderates that are looking for solutions. And they're not representing necessarily the interests of the people in Kansas, in Missouri and Indiana. So it becomes a kind of, even when you say they are doing that, they are doing that,

it becomes almost a demonizing use of the word they. I think it's important to recognize that there are opponents. So when I say they... I have a problem. with the word opponent. That's so funny. I think it's like the opponent is someone that we box.

It's someone that we fight. And I think it's someone we profoundly disagree with. And we need to encounter in a proactive way that will create change. Now, I'm different than a lot. There's a lot of lefties who are kind of like, fuck that. No, they're fucking racist. I'm going to throw a Molotov cocktail at their face. And I get, I certainly understand that,

but I do think that we're on the same page in terms of like, if you look at the example of the great spiritual leaders, Jesus was nothing but dehumanized. And he humanized everyone he encountered, even though he was dehumanized and his people were dehumanized. The same thing happened with the Buddha. And I'm sure in your sick tradition too, and this idea of see no stranger,

like the persecution that your religious order suffered is like none that the world has ever seen for generations. And yet the sick always, well, the sick fought when their lives were threatened and their families were threatened, but they also tried to encounter with love. Nako bedi nehi begana. I see no enemy.

I see no stranger. When I use the word opponent, it is actually my choice to see the humanity of the person across from me. I don't use the word enemy. An enemy is a fixed and permanent identity, but an opponent is anyone whose ideas, words, or actions oppose your own. They may stay my opponent this whole lifetime, but they might not. And just thinking that as a revolutionary act,

it means that I can orient to them by tending their wound. there are no such thing as monsters in this world. There are only human beings who are wounded, who act out of their insecurity, their greed, their rage. This does not make them any less dangerous. But when I choose to see their wound, they lose their power over me. And instead of endlessly reacting, right,

from the fumes of hostility, I can sit in my deepest wisdom and in that place of love in me and respond from there. So actually, right, when I use the word opponent, it's humanizing the person who is working against my existence. And that helps me choose to fight in a different way. I block their actions with one hand, but I extend the other with the hope that they will take it

or one day their children might take it. For the brief high of domination is nothing compared to the infinite love and joy of true community. And that's why I can call myself a civil rights leader and activist that is operating, from this deep spiritual tradition that sees no stranger, that changes how I fight. So Charlie Kirk is my opponent, and I choose to mourn him as a human being who's lost his life for what he believed. In the same way, I ask everyone who is opposing us to extend to us the

humanity that they seem to be denying us. Yeah, that's beautifully said, and I get that. Folks, my skin and I have a little agreement. I keep living inside of it. and it tries not to flake off in protest. But you know what? The holidays are coming up and they kind of test that little deal. Cold air, travel, stress, it can be chaos.

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I'm trying to kind of sit in the middle and call people to a higher conversation. Yes. As you are as well. And the issue two with opponent is it becomes the person becomes the problem and not the idea. My opponent is the vilification of immigrants because we have a broken immigration system in this country. We can't have open borders. We can't have tens of thousands of people crossing in a day. We can't.

It will just blow up the economy. It's not sustainable. So we need to fix our immigration system. but we need to do it with humanity and with love and with kindness and with a deep understanding of where these refugees are coming from, whether they're economic or political. But the idea of vilification of immigrants and demonizing them, that is as old as the hills in humanity and has led to some of the worst pogroms and catastrophes in human history. And we have to recognize that. That idea, I find abhorrent. Yes.

And that's my opponent. And some people are putting forward that. And but I, to me, I have to get really careful to not not make them the boogeyman. Like a lot of people that I interact with, hey, Donald Trump. We may cut this. Who knows? They hate Donald Trump. Right. But it's like, it's not, it's not about Trump. It's about Trumpism because there's 47% of the country that voted for Trumpism. and Trumpish ideas. And those ideas are what we have to tackle, get underneath, take apart, shed light on. And how do you do that? Do you do that by shouting?

Do you do that by calling people evil? Do you do it by calling them racist? Or do you really unpack the terror of those ideas? There is room for every person in the world that we are fighting for. there is not room for every idea. I agree. Well said. And I believe that there are some of us

who need to create safe spaces to process our grief and our rage, to fight in the courts, to fight in the streets. For some of us, that is our primary role. That is our post. For others of us, we might be in a position to listen to our opponents,

to tend the wound, to hear their story, to hear what's at stake for them, and then to hold up a vision of a future of an America that leaves no one behind, not even them. I think we need room for all of us in the ecosystem of, like, the movement and transitioning this country.

So when you go in with your bus to a community, what happens? Who are you meeting with? What are you doing? And what is the charge you're leaving the people with? It's like building a whole world every night. You know, what I talk about is that we need more than resistance. We need to resist in order to survive, but we actually need to imagine the world that we want. we need to dream that world and share that world and practice that world and we can practice the

world we want in the space between us. This is so Martin Luther King, by the way. I mean, you're going, and that's so sick. It's going. It's all, you know, it's going back because King would talk about, like, let's think about the vision that we're trying to build. Let's that, you know, the beautiful community. Let's visualize what that looks like. And I think so much, especially in the activist space, has lost that, like, that vision, like what is it that we want ultimately? Can we have a world in which people can disagree civilly and people can be on different sides of a political spectrum and there can still be unity and acceptance and harmony and even working together side by side? So I just say amen. I feel like we are planting liberation experiments wherever we go. Like we're giving people a taste

of what that world can look like and feel like even in their bodies. And so every, in every city, we gather hundreds of people and we begin with music. Like, you talk so much about music in this book, to open the doors of the soul for people to get out of even the binaries or dualities of language and to feel like the connection with everyone around them and the earth itself, right? So we open with music and then we start to tell stories from our ancestors and we lift up this call to love revolutionary love as our birthright. and the call of our times. And then we give people practices for what is,

what does it mean to lead with your wonder, to be brave with your grief, to harness your rage and to creative action, to listen across lines of difference. So those are, those are, you just named like five amazing tools. Can slow it down and just talk us through those tools again.

Yes. So, all right. Live in wonder. Well, revolutionary love is to enter. So let's back up one more. Okay.

So revolutionary. love, what's the difference between revolutionary love and like great big love? Oh, it's the same thing. We're just making it clear that when you love like that, it changes everything. Okay. So love is more than a feeling that comes and goes, ebbs and flows. Love is sweet labor, fierce, demanding, life giving a choice that we make again and again. And love is the feelings that we have when we're in that labor. So we define revolutionary love as a choice to enter into labor for others, even our opponents and ourselves. When we orient to another, we call that practice see no stranger. And it begins with wonder. Can I look upon your face and say, brother, sister, sibling, you are a

part of me. I do not yet know. It sounds so simple. But who we see as one of us shapes what we do, whose stories we hear, what grief we lit in, what policies we support, what leaders we elect. when we orient with wonder, we let other people's hearts inside of our own. And we remember the truth of our oneness that we are actually all connected. The next practice is to grieve with others. You don't have to know people in order to grieve with them. You grieve with them in order to know them. And here's the thing about grief.

I mean, we're living in Los Angeles. We went through the wildfires in January and the raids this summer in 2025. And crisis after crisis, there's so much grief around us. I've learned that there's no fixing grief. And there's only surviving it and only in community do we survive it together. Let me say about Los Angeles, my good friend Aaron, his daughter, said Los Angeles truly is the land of fire and ice. Oh, no. Boom.

Boom. That's it. So what other better place to practice the liberation experiment than on this front line, right? Our home became this like practice space for revolutionary level, a container for beloved community. In the wake of the wildfires, it was filled with displaced. families and children in the wake of the raids. We had know your rights trainings. We would gather together and feed each other and give each other music and then we would go

out to the front lines to protest. Like we need to be able to value processing our grief, alchemizing our grief into action. And so when we grieve with each other, we gain information for how to fight for each other. So wondering about each other, grieving with each other and fighting for each other. That's how we love others as well. One of the things we were talking about a little before we started recording was about this important of this yin and yang of honoring the spiritual journey and revolutionary love like within and cultivating like our own garden of love of peace of sanctuary of healing and for activists

they often forget that part and they're out just kind of like striving for some kind of justice or social change. And a lot of people in the kind of self-help, healing, spirituality space, forget about the other component, about the spiritual revolution component, which is like, hey, we can harness these tools and this energy to go make the world a better place. And you find peace within so that you can go increase peace outside. You, you, you, you, you, harness compassion within so that you can bring that compassion and increase compassion for others that are suffering. You know, this is, this is tantamount to Buddhist practice, but people always just think, oh, Buddhism is be in the moment. And it's like, no, it's be in the moment and

cultivate peace so that you carry peace and reduce other people suffering. So talk a little bit about that dance that you're doing in your work. Well, it's, it's my ancestor's wisdom in the tradition. When I was a little girl, my grandfather would tell me the stories of our ancestors. And they called us to be sons, Sabahi, sage warriors. The sage sees through the eyes of love. The warrior puts that love into action. And so there were always together to the warrior fights, the sage loves. It's a path of revolutionary love. For me, I feel that the only way that we're going to be able to shift culture and consciousness in this country is by igniting all of us to retrieve our ancestors' deepest wisdom and marrying that deep knowledge and wisdom around

on oneness and love with what we do with our hands, what we do with our voices, what we do with our lives. It's interesting because it humanizes everything. And I've mentioned this before, but it's an article from the New York Times, the incredibly economically successful New York Times, that was about immigrant families. And it was interviewing folks about immigration, and they were like, all these people are coming over the border and they're rapists and their drug dealers

and their gang members. And then when they were shown a family, say, oh, here's the Gonzalez family, and the husband's worked his whole life as a farmer, and he came here and got agricultural work and put the daughter into school and she's training to be a nurse right now. The mother works at the church

and brings food. And then the people like, oh, well, the guns are great. I mean, they can stay. Oh, they're beautiful. Oh, and that's again, that's the day. It was that they. Because both sides use that they. They just want all the immigrants in here.

Like, well, they hate all the immigrants. It's like, how do we deeply, deeply humanize, everyone with as much compassion as possible so that it's not nameless hordes of rapists crawling over the border. It's families just trying to provide for their kids and they're unable to or persecuted for doing it in the lands that they come from. So it's, it's, it would have been easy to have that family that was kind of espousing some racist ideas about immigrants, right? And just say, they, they are racist. It's like, no, Once they get introduced to the Gonzalez family, you see their heart shine through.

So that's the work that we need to keep doing. And so I think stories are so essential that stories can break open our hearts that we can, when I talked about leading with wonder, to see through the eyes of wonder, to see that person, not as the criminal or the foreigner or the terrorists that are coming to threaten you, but to see them as mother, sister, daughter, beloved, to see their wounds, to see their struggles, to see their dreams, is to realize that you are part. of each other. And then to be able to like let that way of seeing guide what you do and how you respond in a moment when the country wants us to be absolutely. You know, a story that's coming to my

mind right now is from our house painter, Caesar, who I met in a Home Depot parking lot. My wife and I were like, we're going to paint our brand new house. This was 20 years ago. It's our first house. And we painted for a day and a half and we were like, fuck this. Have you ever tried to paint a house. It's so hard. It's so hard. And we were at the Home Depot getting some stuff. And this guy comes to sweet guys like, hey, guys, how you doing? My name's Caesar. Here's my card. If you need a painter. And we're like, you're hired. Come on. And we got to know this guy. We've been hiring him for 20 years. And he doesn't have his papers. He crossed the border as a teenager by getting on a train.

And him and the other people that were illegally crossing the border got locked in a train car. And he was in a train car with 20 dead bodies. He was the only one who survived. God. And he got to Texas and they let him out. And he was in there with corpses for, I don't know how long, days. I'm not sure why he survived and the others didn't.

Maybe he was more young, youthful. he was taken in by a church, became a born again Christian, has served the church's whole life, is so grateful for this country, worked hard as a house painter, put his kids through college, has suffered unspeakable horrors. And that's not even including the horrors that he underwent of what made him on foot cross from Guatemala across the entirety of Mexico as a teenager because he was being so terribly beaten by his uncle and his parents died when he was young. Like these are the stories of the immigrants.

And you can see the trauma read on his face and you can see his love for Jesus in his heart that saved his life. And that these families in Texas that normally we would say they took him in, sheltered him, educated him, fed him and brought him into their church and saved his life and saved his soul. That's the reality of what we're talking about. And that's a story. That's a real story. And also, if you

need your house painted, I will give you some of your story. Rain, I just want to go back to the point around opponents and why I think it's so important to be sober and clear-eyed about what's happening in the country right now. We've seen, you just talked about, you just told this really heart-wrenching story. And we've seen more than 3,000 of our neighbors in Los Angeles abducted and disappeared from our city streets, each one of them with a story as rich and deep as the one that you just told. We have an administration that is meeting our protests, overwhelmingly nonviolent protest, with astonishing military force. I've seen my fellow protesters beaten, maimed, trampled by cavalry. And now those federal troops are being sent to D.C.

and now attempted to be sent to Portland and Memphis and Chicago and Baltimore. And the one thing that all of these cities have in common is that the majority of these cities did not vote for this president. We're seeing the dismantling of any meaningful checks on executive power that we truly have not seen in our lifetime. And so if we saw any of these things happening in any other part of the world, we would call it an authoritarian takeover. And I don't use that term lightly. You know, authoritarianism is a method of rule that suppresses political freedoms and civil rights

to concentrate power in the hands of a single leader or an elite few. Most authoritarian in history, like in my ancestors' time, you said six faced incredible persecution. Authoritarians took power by military force. That's what we're used to. But in the last 30 years, increasingly they're elected, their free elections, and then disrupt, undo those democratic norms and institutions once in power. Across time and place, authoritarian's consolidate their power by waging campaigns of dehumanization, blaming everything on an outside group, right, and creating the story that the dominant group once had cultural power

and now it's gone away, but we need to get it back and they are the enemy, they are the problem. So it's okay, anything can be done to them. The vice president in February, to defend the near disappearance of all humanitarian aid around the globe by the United States, defended it by invoking a Christian concept of love. Ordo Amoris. He said, there's an ordering of love. You love here, your family, your friends first,

and only then you care about anyone else. Pope Francis, in one of his final statements to the world, rebuked the vice president by saying, no, that's not Ordo Amoris. Ordo Amoris is a fraternity for all, built on love for all without exception. So when I say revolutionary love is the call of our times, it's because they want to narrow our circle so small

that we don't care about the immigrant, the painter, and the story that you just told or the 3,000 were disappeared. Amen, and I hear you, and I agree with you, but for many on the left, a family in Texas that's born-again Christian, that loves guns, that voted for Trump, that is terribly afraid of, you know, too many immigrants coming, taking jobs away, have kind of been sold a bill of goods by Fox News, what have you, are anti-abortion because they're church members and they believe that abortion is taking a life,

and they want that enacted into law. To the majority of activists on the left, that family is hateful. and racist. And all I'm saying is that family saw Caesar and took him in and fed him and saved his body and saved his soul and acted with revolutionary love to someone very, very different than them. So it works on both sides. Now, I know you're talking a little bit more about like what's happening in our government and authoritarian regimes. But no, we're actually talking about the same thing. Because wherever I go, like, when I get hate, it's not just from the right. It's from the left.

People are like, I'm ready for a war, not about love, right? And I'm saying the only way we can fight the authoritarian forces in this country is if we build a bigger we. They want to divide us into us and them. They want us not to see the humanity of that family in Texas. But if we build a bigger we and say all of us can stand in our shared humanity and to see the threads where we do connect and operate from there, that is the only way we'll be able to. to like truly save our democracy. And I believe we have a window of time. We have like based on global pattern.

We have the coming year in which to act. And when I say we can practice the world we want and the space between us, like we must be able to practice our freedoms and values of belonging and connection and wonder and love right here, right now, that is actually our greatest act of resistance because we're showing them

that our communities are so anchored in love that the cruelty that drives authoritarianism cannot take root. Our dream must be more powerful than their nightmare. And you know what? Our dream, to your point, includes even that. That one day there will be a country where no matter our differences, we can live with a fundamental understanding that we are all one family. It's kind of embarrassing to admit, but these days my brain feels like 27 browser tabs have been left open

between emails, texts, and notifications. my focus is essentially an endangered species. And that is why I truly love remarkable. It's the rare screen that actually helps me unplug. A distraction-free paper tablet that feels like I'm writing on real paper. There's no social media, there's no pings, no nonsense, just pure focus. It's where I write down notes for my books. I jot down soul boom ideas.

I organize my goals. It's ultra thin, beautifully designed, has up to two weeks of battery life, and it keeps everything organized all your notes and projects in one peaceful place. And with the holidays upon us, it's honestly the perfect gift for anyone who could use less noise and more clarity. A busy parent, a creative friend, or maybe even yourself. Give the gift of being present. Find the perfect distraction-free paper tablet at remarkable.com. Hey, I wanted to give a quick shout out to our spiritual partners at the FetSer.

Institute. They have just launched a brand new shiny website over at fetzer.org. That's fetezzer.org. And it's full of spiritual tools for modern struggles, which is exactly what we're trying to cultivate here at soul boom. Fetzer believes that most of humanity's problems are spiritual at the root and they're helping people plant some deeply soulful solutions. So I urge you to go poke around their new website. Check out fetzer.org. Thank you, Fetzer Institute, for helping sponsor the show and all of the truly amazing work that you do over there. Fetzer.org. That's FetZER.org. It's finally here, folks. The Soul Boom Workbook, Spiritual Tools for Modern Living.

It's out now. This is the interactive spiritual journal your soul didn't know it needed. And now it can't live without. Listen, the world out there can suck sometimes. Fact. This is our spiritual revolution for changing the world with hope. In this, we get to explore beauty, love, God, grief, and the sacred power of potlucks. So pick up a copy of the workbook today. And bonus, invite some of your weirdest, deepest, kindest friends to get spiritually curious with you in a Soul Boom Book Club. I promise you this isn't self-help, this is Soul Help.

Order the Soul Boom Workbook today. Click the link below. Dubai. I applaud the work that you're doing. I really do. I mean, it's, it's, it's so important. And it's going, uh, in, in my mind, there are spiritual laws in every faith tradition that have to do with social justice about how we treat others on a, on a large scale, you know, and increasing fair-mindedness and seeing everyone as seen no strangers. This is in every faith tradition. Yes. And I it's so important to take the conversation beyond politics and right and left

and to go a step deeper and a step further. And just ever increasing compassion and humanization. And that's what I'm about. And it's hard, I beg your pardon, it's hard when you say opponents and they to increase compassion and humanization because it immediately vilifies them. You know, Tanaheesi Coates recently in the

in the very famous argument with Ezra Klein on his podcast talked about like, I'm not going to interact with anyone who dehumanizes me. I'm not even going to talk to them. And that's understandable. And it's easy for me to say as a upper middle class rapidly aging white dude. But that's a very dangerous territory to get in because you have people on the right and the left saying, I'm not going to interact with anyone who dehumanizes me either. They're saying the same thing on the right in a slightly different way.

So if all of a sudden we're not interacting with 30% of the other population, how are we possibly going to heal? And I think the great spiritual teachers and leaders didn't work that way. They didn't say, like, oh, if you dehumanize me, I'm not going to have a conversation with you. And I know that the spiritual walk is different than the political activist walk. but I think there's things that we can learn, and especially from Martin Luther King in this day and age. I was on the front lines of the protests in Los Angeles

this summer at the federal building, and it was everything that you saw on the news. It was the batons and the rifles and the cavalry and the helicopters and the tear gas. And when we got there as a group of faith leaders, we put our bodies between the protesters and the National Guard. Just when things were escalating, we began to sing the old civil rights songs, right?

The old hymills. Amazing. Everything calmed down. And then I hear, Valerie, you pray. And a rabbi nudged me to the front. And I was like, okay, okay, I will pray. She's like, no, pray that way. And she's facing me in front of this army of like stone-faced officers with batons.

And I could feel like the little girl in me shake because I was, I was badly hurt by a police officer 20 years ago in an act of police brutality that I never really fully healed from. And so all of that terror came back. And I looked up at the building and I thought of. of the neighbors that they are caging in that building. And I remember that if we sing loud enough, they will hear it. So I close my eyes and six, this is how we pray. We take off our shoes, right?

It's not conducive on the front lines of protest, but I take off my shoes, I feel. It's a terrible idea, Valerie, take off your shoes and there's tear gas, and there's horse dung and bullet casings. The asphalt is hot. Yeah. You know, and I like cover my head.

It's so impractical. She said, Valerie, you pray. So, and I close my eyes. and I recite my grandfather's Shabbid, his song, Prayer, Tatiwao na laaghi. Tati vao na la Lagi, bar brahsernay, Jogid Hamare Ramkar, Duklai na, bye. Hot winds cannot touch you. Hot winds cannot touch you.

You are shielded by the infinite. As I began to recite, I could hear the people behind me singing, and Rain, it was like feeling the song of love coursing down through the thousands of years and filling my heart and surrounding us, shielding us. And when I opened my eyes, the officer's baton was this far away from me. Whoa. They had advanced their line while my eyes were closed. You know what? I wasn't shaking anymore. I don't know how to tell you this, but in that moment, I felt invincible. Like they could beat me, they could arrest me, they could take my life, but they couldn't crush me because I was part of a song of love that began long before they were born would go along on

after us. And that these men, that they were our brothers too, even if they had forgotten it. A week later, we came back and this time. What happened then? They stopped? No, the tear gas went off and the cavalry moved in because it was curfew and we were leaving. And then I kept thinking, we're leaving, but the people there are not leaving. And so we have to come back.

We have to come back. And there has to be more of us. And we came back. This time, hundreds of us came back, right? We were practicing revolutionary love the streets of a lot. But what happened to your shoes? They got really dirty. But I grabbed, you know, but I kept thinking we have to, what happened?

Okay, that feeling that I had, right? What if hundreds of us had that feeling, that much, that much serenity, right, on the front lines? we came back hundreds of us with flowers. And this time we laid flowers on the steps of the federal building. And as I looked at those officers, the same officers, I thought, okay, revolutionary love is leaving no one outside of our circle of care. They're dehumanizing me, but I refuse to dehumanize them back. You don't have that power over me. You cannot make me hate you.

And I laid the flowers at the feet of the ice agents one by one. And in the beginning, it was so hard to make eye contact. but then there's something about like despite our hardest attentions when we look at each other's eyes like one by one right and then I the vigil is ending and I turn around and I hear ma'am I turn around he has a big gun he has the gun right so I have to go back to him and he says thank you he puts out of hand in this same spot you pointed your rifle at me You held your baton over me. And now you extend your hand to me.

Revolutionary love is to block your actions with one hand and extend the other with the hope that you might take it. And so I took his hand. I don't know if this officer will stop hurting our people. But I want to be the one who believes in that possibility. That's who I want to be in the story. I think our ancestors called us to lead with love above all. And we all have a different role at any given time.

So someone like you just mentioned Tana Hasi not being able to, right, and I respect that. If you have a knee on your neck, it is not your job to look up at your opponent and try to wonder about them or love them. But if you are someone who is safe enough or brave enough to be able to engage with opponents with the eyes of humanity, then we need you now. We need you in that labor. And here's the thing. The front line is not just in those city streets. The front line is everywhere. We are called to be brave.

Our boardrooms and our classrooms and our church pews and our kitchen tables. Like, what is your front line? And what does it mean to come to your front line with flowers? That's amazing. I'm so grateful for you. I love you. My daughter has been crying when I leave the house these days. She's sick, so I thought we were over that. And I haven't been talking to her about what's been happening in the country at all, but she connects our hearts. Mommy, our hearts are connected. And then I go and I fly and I do my thing. But she's been crying lately.

And for a long time after I got hurt by that officer 20 years ago, especially after I became a mama, I was like, I can't nurse my babies from a jail cell. My children need a mother who comes home every day. But now that there are six and ten, and they know a little bit about what's happening in the world, they're seeing our neighbors disappear. it's like, oh, they don't need a mama who minimizes risks above all. They need a mama who shows them what courage looks like. So this question of like, what does it mean to be braver with your life than ever before is a question I've been asking myself to. And taking myself back to the front lines of protest was when I was on my way,

I was shaking because, and it's that voice of fear. and I think that voice of fear is in all of us. Get small, put your head down, retreat. Don't do the brave thing. Don't say that thing. Don't go there. Don't do that. But that voice of fear is not wrong about the threat.

The threat is very real. That voice of fear is not wrong about the threat. Just wrong about the solution. The solution is not silence. It's more solidarity. And so that's why we came back hundreds of us to that front line. And that's why everywhere we go and everywhere we gather people, we say, who is the one who will take your arm, who will be at that front line with you, who will help

you be braver with your life and braver with your love than ever before. And it will look different to all of us. You know, sometimes it will be people who are engaging in deep solidarity with the ones who are hurting, you know. And other times it will be sitting with an opponent until they don't become an opponent anymore, right? I see no stranger. And then other times it will be just taking care of your own sweet mind and your own sweet heart in a time with so much crisis right so to be able to think about your life as a series of experiments with love every day. That's beautiful. Think about your life as a series of experiments of love every day. Yes, yes. And that can be with your family. That can be at the 7-Eleven. Yes. That can be in the

front lines of activism. Yeah. Yeah. So so far I come back. to my daughter and I hold her in my arms and I show her pictures of the flowers and say, Mama's bringing flowers. Okay, should we draw flowers now? Right. You know, out there in here, like everywhere, it experiments with love. I believe that can be the meaning of life. Wasn't there some famous Vietnam protest picture of the flower and the muzzle of the rifle?

Yeah. Yeah. It's ancient wisdom. Yeah. And it's a struggle that has been going on as long as there has been. and humanity. Right. And I think that's what I really learned in the last few years writing Sage Warrior. I spent so much time with my ancestors.

And I felt like, I feel like they prepared me for this moment. Wow. That's true. Yeah, because that book, Sage Warrior is all the core, no pun intended,

the core wisdom of your faith tradition. And I could, I can totally see that how it like, recharged your faith batteries and connected you to your ancestors as you've been moving forward this last year. Absolutely. And I realize that in every cycle through human history, people have been thrown into the darkness. And they have a choice. You know, do I retreat into my fear? Or do I be braver than I've ever been? Can I join my voice to a song of love? and I feel that learning from my ancestors

how they survived authoritarian regimes, how they survived apocalyptic times by becoming Synthsapahi, sage warriors, to face the hot winds of the world with the eyes of a sage and the heart of a warrior. I believe we're all called to become sage warriors now, whatever that looks like for us. That's so amazing. That's so beautiful.

Thank you for sharing the story. And if people want to find out more about the ongoing, Revolutionary Love tour. I mean, you have a book Revolutionary Love. You have a book, Sage Warrior, but where else can they go? Well, we are building a movement of revolutionary love all across this country. Sign me up. You were already a voice in the movement. I'm a founding member. We're all part of the same larger movement, right? This is not a four-year campaign. It is a 40-year vision to shift culture and consciousness in this country, block by block, heart to heart in every city

across America. And we believe that revolutions happen not just in those big grand public moments in the street. They happen in the space between us where critical mass of us are practicing a new way of being. So can we become human beings who know how to love as a way of being human? That's our invitation. And people can go to revolutionary loveproject.org. They can see, they can join us at one of our events all across the country. They can get the courses and the meditations and the guides and the tools. they can build community, they can know, you can know that you are truly not alone, that there are more of us than every before that are looking to love as our North Star. Thank you, Valerie.

Thank you, Ray. The Soul Boom Podcast. Subscribe now on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever else you get your stupid podcasts.