Tara Brach - Revolutionary Love: A Conversation with Tara Brach & Valarie Kaur

Episode Date: December 19, 2024

In a divided, reactive, and violent world, how do we embrace love and joy? How do we genuinely include our opponents in our hearts? What gives us the courage to bring our whole being into serving and savoring? And what is our vision for a new world?   In this fresh and profoundly relevant conversation, Tara Brach and Valarie Kaur explore the challenges and potential of these turbulent times. Valarie, a Sikh activist, filmmaker, civil rights lawyer, and author, shares insights from her powerful books, including See No Stranger and her recent works, World of Wonder and Sage Warrior. Together, Tara and Valarie reflect on: How Revolutionary Love can be a guide in times of division and despair. Valarie's ancestral teachings on surviving apocalyptic times with courage. The role of joy, music, and community in building resilience and connection. Forgiveness, reconciliation, and transforming anger into meaningful action. Visioning a new world while staying rooted in hope, presence, and love.   Learn more about Valarie and the Revolutionary Love project at www.revolutionarylove.org .

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely, and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste. Welcome, friends. I begin with a poem. Poet Hafei says, The subject tonight is love, and for tomorrow night as well. As a matter of fact, I know of no better topic for us to discuss until we all die. So, in that spirit, our subject is titled Revolutionary Love. And my guest, Valerie Carr, is a Sikh activist, a filmmaker, civil rights, lawyer, and author of several books, including Ceno Stranger, and Sage Warrior. The latter book, Sage Warrior, is considered a spiritual text for these times. It draws on how Valerie's ancestors survived apocalyptic times

with courage and how we can do the same. So Valerie's the founder of the Revolutionary Love Project, and she's a dear friend. She calls me Big Sister, and we can feel it. There's so much resonance in what we write, what we teach. So in talking, our time, we look today, we look at how we can center love and joy in the midst of a reactive, violent world, and how we do that fully facing our own anger and fears and how we can open to a fresh vision for our unfolding world.

Before starting, I want to say that at the grounds of these themes that we cover is the understanding that to create a more loving world, we need to consciously dedicate to awakening our hearts. I think we can feel that these times are called, for that. And we need to do it together. So in that spirit, after the elections this November, I decided to offer a year-long program and it starts this January. It's called 2025, a year of courageous loving. And for those that feel called, we'll be meeting together through the year, to really learn how in our day-to-day life can we live from love.

So if you participate, you'll be receiving messages from me in your inbox and there'll be guided meditations and other teachings that I'm finding inspiring during these times. And there'll be weekly live meditations. I am joined by three other teaching colleagues, all teach one a month of the weekly meditations and we'll meet together every other month where we'll have a chance for your questions, a chance for me to work one-on-one with some of you, a chance to break into small groups and really get to know each other, questions about how do we bring alive teachings about love and wisdom in our day-to-day challenging lives. There's also going to be a private community space to live to live.

to support each other. And for those of you that want to, we'll have a way to match you up with rain partners so you can go really deep with a partner through some months or the whole year if you choose. So friends, this is an invitation to be part of a community that's committed to meeting our inner life and each other and all beings with love, with a courageous heart. open now, you can find it on my home page, Darbrock.com. I'd love to have you with me. It feels like it's just the right time for this kind of coming together. Okay, and back to the right here now. You're in for a treat. Valerie Carr is a very bright light in today's world.

Welcome, welcome and thank you for being here, beloved friend Valerie. I love you so much, Tara. I am so honored to be here with you. I'm so honored to journey through this life with you. Thank you. Mutual. I shared with those who are listening that you call me big sister and I figured as long as it's not grandmother, I'm really good with family. Yeah. And it's true. I feel that way. So, okay, let me just begin by saying that just the words revolutionary love. It's like, wow. Okay. And your declaration that it's really the call of our times is right, it's right at the center of everything you're doing. So for those that might not be familiar, let's just start right there. What is revolutionary love? What does it

mean? Oh, revolutionary love is when we are brave with our love. When we choose to leave no one outside of our circle of care. When we have the audacity to look upon the face of anyone and say, you are a part of me, I do not yet know. That way of seeing each other, that way of embracing the larger we inspire such courageous action. And this is a moment more than ever before where we are called to be brave with our lives. And so I believe with every fiber in my being that revolutionary love, our love, is the call of our times. I'm right there with you. It's truth. And, okay, so this year, you released two books, Sage Warrior and World of Wonder. I absolutely have them both. And World of Wonder, I hope you can see them, everyone, the beautiful books.

World of Wonder is going to my grands for the holidays as a gift. Love that. Yeah, yeah. So if you can, just to share, you know, what's the essence of those books? And, you know, how do they serve as part of revolutionary love? What do they mean? Well, we'll start with the children's book since I think. Yeah, please. You know, this way of seeing others through the eyes of love, I thought that I had to teach that to my children. And then my daughter taught me very quickly at four years old that I don't, I didn't need to teach. how to wonder. Like we're born thirsting for love. We're born wondering about others. And it's,

it's the culture that then severs us off from that way of knowing. And so my job as a mama was simply to keep alive, what she already knew. So we would take these walks to the beach every morning and wonder about the ants on a leaf, the birds in the sky, sweet little bee, tree so high. And we would say to everything that we saw, you are a part of me. I do not yet know. And then we would do that with the people walking by. What are their stories? And then we would do that with the sad stories that make us turn away. What do we do when we see someone homeless unhoused on the street? What do we do when there's a wildfire burning? What do we do when we see children under rubble in the newspaper? Oh, my love, it makes you want to turn away. But I keep listening.

I get brave. We can say you're a part of me. I don't yet know. And let that way of seeing inspire the one brave thing. And then, Tara, we do. did this even with people who are being mean, people we see as our opponents, someone kicking over the sandpail, someone being cruel, hurling a racial slur at another person. Can we have the audacity to say, you are a part of me? I do not yet know. What hurting part of you is driving that behavior? That way of seeing, that way of being is not represented in our culture, in our politics,

in our media, in our society at all. And yet it is the thing that can transform everything that happens next. And then we taught her about how to do it to parts of herself. Like, oh, my shame, oh my grief, oh my pain. You too are a part of me. I do not yet know. Instead of exiling parts of ourselves, banishing, punishing, being ashamed, can we love the parts of ourselves as a mother would? what do you have to teach me? What do you need me to know? Even the hardest, smallest parts of ourselves contain insight, the potential for healing, for transformation. And so a wonder baby says, wow, whoa, you're a part of me. I don't yet know. It was, my husband read the children's book, and he said, this is all of your first book, See No Stranger, 400 pages, boiled down into a nursery rhyme.

I said, yes, but I had to write the big book to get to this one. Revolutionary love is actually really simple. You know, love is our birthright. And so the children's book was a way for families and children to be able to sit together and inhabit that truth together. Delicious. I can't wait to play and be and go deep with them on that. So, okay, and Sage Warrior.

And Sage Warrior. Well, it turns out that even when you know, how to love, even when you know how to be brave with your love, it's very hard to continue to walk that path when you feel despair. I've been an activist for 20-some years. The crises are relentless and with this recent election outcome, it just feels like the future is so dark. And so how do we continue to be that brave with our love when the world feels like it's ending? I knew that I needed to go deeper. I had to up my spiritual game.

I had to go back to my ancestors. And when I was a little girl, I grew up on the farmlands of California. And my grandfather, a beautiful tall man with a tall turban and a long white beard, he would sing to me the songs, the song prayers of our ancestors and tell me the stories about how they became Sunt Sipahi, sage warriors. The warrior fights. The sage loves. It is an ancient doorway into revolutionary love. So the last few years, I went on a journey with these ancestors. I asked, how did they survive

apocalyptic times? How did they protect their joy when the world was on fire? How did they walk a path of love? And Tara, that journey took me to Punjab and back. I studied the stories of the first sick ancestors who lived 550 years ago in South Asia, what is now Punjab. And I learned that to be a Sonshapahi was to undo so much of how I learned to be an activist. I thought that I had always needed to speak from the wound to be able to be heard. I've spent so much time in such close proximity with trauma and violence that I thought I had to sit in the misery of injustice in order to respond to injustice. The world is in constant crisis, so I thought my body had to be in constant crisis all the time. And of course, the next four years, I feel like as an

activist who cares deeply about justice issues and about communities who are vulnerable in the face of policies and violence that will crush us, like my body, it was destined to be in nonstop crisis, to be in misery. But then I learned something completely different from these ancestors. The Sons Sapahi, the sage warrior, means that we can each cultivate the sage inside of us, that we can cultivate a space of freedom and pleasure and rest and beauty and wonder inside of us. And from there, we can find the courage to become a warrior in the world. Oppression wants us to believe that that space of freedom doesn't exist within us,

and that if it did, we didn't deserve it. Oppression wants us to be defined by our subjugation. But I've learned from the ancestors that we can tell the truth about our suffering and refuse to be defined by it. That our bravest ancestors cultivate that space, cultivated that space of freedom, that bright space within them. And from there they marched. From there they sang.

From there they organized. From there they served. From there they cared for each other. I learned that we can practice the world we want. in the space between us. And when we do that, we not only prepare ourselves for courageous action, but we presage the world to come.

That's what I call folks into now. You know, exactly where you are, your kitchen table, your kids' school, your friend's circle, your neighborhood park, your own tender heart, these are practice spaces for the world as it could be. How will you be brave

with love in those spaces? How will we make each other brave in those spaces and let it surprise you? So Valor, you took this on the road. I mean, this revolutionary love tour, you took this on the road, including the practices, and that incredible invitation that says it's possible to find that space of balance, and courage and freedom and peace and joy inside. act from that. You brought that to the road. So I want to just hear a little bit about what you discovered. You know, what did you notice about the state of the nation? You went through 45 cities.

That's right. And what did you discover about offering these practices to people through all these different places? That we can build worlds together. That we can reclaim spaces that have seen tremendous trauma and violence and reclaim them as places to remember, to heal, and to reimagine together. Tara, the Revolutionary Love tour, it was two months, it was 45 cities, and we started here in Los Angeles on a bus. It says, Revolutionary Love is the call of our times, and that bus was parked on the exact spot where Japanese Americans were forced to board buses to their incarceration 80 years

ago. We boarded a different kind of bus, a bus of love. love and liberation. And we took that bus into the southwest. We went to the border wall in Nogales, and we gathered there. We went to the gas station in Mesa, Arizona, where our sick family friend was the first person killed and a hate crime after 9-11. And in front of those gas pumps, on the spot where he bled to death, we gathered there. We went to an indigenous reservation, the Dejona-Odom Reservation, and gathered with youth that had been forgotten not only by the country, but by the reservation itself, because they're on the other side of the casino.

We took our bus through the farmlands of California, where I grew up into the Bay Area. We went into the Great Plains in the Midwest. We went from George Floyd Memorial Square in Minneapolis, Oak Creek, Wisconsin, to the Gurdwara that survived a mass shooting in 2012, the Sikh community. We went on to the east coast. We went down into the south, and we gathered in Birmingham, Alabama, and we gathered in Birmingham, Alabama, front of the 16th Street Baptist Church that saw a bombing that took the lives of four little girls. We gathered at a church where a slave auction block had once been in Memphis, and we ended

in New Orleans where, oh, a city that knows resistance, black liberation movements need music and need joy to be able to thrive for us to be able to last. And everywhere we went, We were telling the stories of our ancestors, how they survived Apocalypse, and we did it through music and through song and through wisdom. And we asked the people gathering, when did you experience an act of love that changed everything? And I met thousands of people. I heard hundreds of stories, and these stories of revolutionary love are everywhere. There are always moments in every cycle through human history.

people have been thrown in the darkness, and they have a choice. We have a choice. Do we succumb to our despair and to the illusion that we are separate and alone? Or do we dare lift our gaze and sing a song of love? Do we join our song with other people? Do we let love make us brave? Even if we don't know what's next, just to do the next right thing. We collected these stories, and it was like we were holding up a picture of a nation like, this is actually who we are. This is actually who we are. This who we can be. Yes, we were a nation born in genocide and colonization and mass enslavement. Yes, so many of the forces of white supremacist violence are shaping us now, shaking us now, feeling like the world is ending now, and the world has ended many times before,

and has been rebirthed many times before. This is simply our turn in the cycle. We get to ask who do we want to be. And what I discovered above all is that when we ask that question together, we find courage we didn't know we had. Will you share a story that inspired you about when somebody was facing just the horror and in some way re-remembered the possibility of love? It was the very first time I learned this lesson. I was 20 years old. And I was so broken by the murder.

of Balbir Singh Sadi, a beautiful, sick American father, wearing a turban and beard who was murdered in front of his gas station in Arizona. In the immediate aftermath of 9-11, he was killed in vengeance. And I took a journey, I took a different kind of journey across the country 20 years ago, collecting the stories of hate and fear and trauma and loss. And my last interview was with the widow, of Bobir uncle. I traveled all the way to Punjab, India to talk with her. And she was wearing white, the color of mourning, and I had a list of questions,

and I just crumbled them up and threw them away. She would just cry at the mention of her husband's name. So I just wept with her. I just took her hand and I grieved with her. And sometimes that's all we can do, right? There's no fixing grief. There's only bearing it and then bearing it together, we survive it. And so it was as if I was saying, Auntie G, you are grieving, but you are not grieving alone. And finally, I just mustered one question. I asked her, what would you tell the people of America? And I was expecting bitterness. I was expecting disdain. But you know what she said? Thank you. Tell them thank you. When I went to Arizona for my husband's memorial, they came out in the thousands.

Christian, Jew, Muslim. They did not know me, but they chose to love me. You do not need to know people in order to grieve with them. You grieve with them in order to know them, right? They showed up. They showed up because even though our community story was not told to the nation, the local community, the local faith leaders, the neighbors, the community members, passed the story block by block, you know, word of mouth to tell the story of Bobier Uncle so people would not see him as a terrorist or as a foreigner, but as a brother. He had come to this country to escape religious violence, that his widow's heart was now broken, that he was like, like one of those sages who live among us, he would hand out candy at the gas station when the

children came to visit. When someone didn't have enough money to fill up, he would just let them take gas and let them go. Like he was one of these people who lived a heart of gold and his story was told. And I don't think we need to be saints in order to be memorialized in after we, our lives are unjustly taken. But, but but Bill Beir uncle, he was. He was. It's like, I remember him not just for his death, how he died, but for how he lived. He was a beacon of revolutionary love. And if we can practice it at a gas station, we can practice it anywhere. And the people heard that story and they passed that story to each other. And the thousands of people came and their love in that moment, it healed this widow's heart. It helped her

survive what was unsurvivable. Valor, you also write. about your own process in forgiving the man that killed him. And when we speak about, you know, you're a part of me, how we get from the place of feeling so badly wounded to being able to include in our heart another who has caused harm is a really amazing, powerful process. So I'm just wondering if you might just share a little bit about yours. Fifteen years after Bobier Uncle was murdered, I returned to the gas station where he was killed. And I placed flowers on the spot where he bled to death and candles.

And I looked at his younger brother, Rana, and Ranaji said nothing has changed. They're still killing us. And I had the audacity to ask Rana G, who is the one person we have not yet tried to love? The next morning we called the killer Frank Roke in prison. And at first I thought it was this terrible mistake. He said, well, I'm sorry for what happened to your uncle, but I'm even more sorry for the thousands killed on 9-11. He was refusing to take responsibility.

I could feel anger rise in me like fire in a cage. And perhaps because I was playing that role, Rana G had enough space to continue to wonder about Frank to listen. And he could hear what I could not hear. Rana said, Frank, this is the first time I have heard you say you were sorry. And Frank said, yes, I am sorry for what I did to your brother. And when I go to heaven to be judged by God,

I will ask to see your brother. And I will ask for his forgiveness. And Rana G. said we've already forgiven you. Forgiveness is not forgetting. Forgiveness is freedom from hate. Sometimes that forgiveness comes at the end of a long healing journey like it did for us. Remember, it took us 15 years to make that phone call.

Like we had to have enough safe containers for our grief and for our rage, our rightful rage to be able to get to the point where we were, we could even wonder about the man who took so much from us. Sometimes forgiveness comes at the end. Sometimes forgiveness comes at the very beginning. We look into our assailant's eye and say, I forgive you, which is another way to say, you cannot make me hate you.

You do not have that power over me. Sometimes forgiveness comes in the messy middle, and sometimes forgiveness does not come at all. And that is okay. It is up to the survivor to decide whether or not to forgive. sometimes withholding our forgiveness is our only act of agency. And that is okay. Perhaps it is our job to give other people permission to do what we are not ready to do.

It may never do. You see, someone had to be in that prison for those 15 years, helping Frank withstand the heat of his own shame and his own guilt to get to the point where he could apologize to us. Our forgiveness was not contingent about his apology. his apology was not contingent upon our forgiveness. You do not need the other person, right? If you're ready to forgive, if you're ready to issue apology, that is up to you and your growth as a human being, your willingness to grow in your love. But when those two things happen in the same lifetime, forgiveness, meaning apology,

it's like a portal opens up in the universe. A process of reconciliation begins. And that's what happened with us. It didn't have to happen, but in listening to Frank and learning from him and reconciling with him, I began to understand that so much of white nationalist rage in this country is a symptom of unresolved grief. They're grieving the notion that this nation belonged just to them in the first place. I might not agree with that grief. I might not think it's justified, but it might not be my role to tend to it,

but someone has to tend to it because all the people who voted against us, they're still here. in December. They're still here in January. They're still here in the next four years. We're going to have to find a way to live with each other. But this is very important. I feel, especially in this moment, to let people know that everyone has a different role in the labor at any given time. The work of revolutionary love is the work of a community, not the sacrifice of an individual. And so if you are someone who has a knee on your neck right now and so many communities, especially with what we're about to face, will feel that way. It is not necessarily your role to look up at your opponent and try to wonder about them or

forgive them. Your role is to take the next breath, to survive, to resist. That is your revolutionary act. But if you are someone who is safe enough or brave enough to wonder about those kinds of opponents, oh my God, we need you now in that labor. You know, is it the neighbor down the street? Is it the uncle at the kitchen table? Is it the teenager falling into the rabbit hole of the algorithm?

If you are not puncturing the algorithm, who is? Isolation breeds radicalization teaches Hannah Arendt. And so who is our person to work with? Who are our people to work with? Only in sustained relationship can we begin to open up even the possibility of transformation? And you know what? Human beings, we mirror each other. If you come out with daggers out, they're going to come out with daggers out.

But if you come out and you really want to wonder, why? Why do they say that? Why do they do that? Why do they vote that way? Why do they believe that? Why do they think that's okay? Why don't they care? Why?

If you really want to wonder why, beneath the slogans and the soundbloods, you start to hear the person's story and you start to see their wound. And here's what I've learned, Tara, and sitting with people who have hurt me, who've hurt my people, there are no such thing as monsters in this world. There are only human beings who are wounded, who act out of their insecurity or rage or fear that does not make them any less dangerous. But when we see their wound, they lose their power over us. We become free.

And we can decide whether we are going to react from our trauma or whether we choose to sit in that space of freedom that we talked about, that space of deep wisdom and side of us, where we can take a deep breath and ask, how would love have me respond? That's the deep, courageous, internal work that we are all called into right now, to live in that place of love within us and respond from there. And what that action looks like may look very different from each of us, but I trust that we will be playing the role that we are called to play when we are making love our compass. Part of what I so appreciate about your way of holding revolutionary love is that it's not

a particular way of responding for any particular person because so often in spiritual circles there's this call for empathy and forgiveness and it's premature in the sense that there's a whole inner process that's actually bypassed in a way that doesn't make the forgiveness and care actually possible. And sometimes it's not a person's personal anger or hurt. It's a collective anger or hurt. And so many, so often we address it on the individual level. I mean, I'm thinking of one woman who was at a kind of meditation gathering and there was a whole inquiry. This is a woman of color who was really angry at a friend for not getting it and the racism at her workplace and her child was going through at school was awful.

And then she said, I'm just angry at white people. And then a white person said, well, that feels bad. You know, why are you lumping me in? I didn't do anything wrong. But here's the thing. Here's why I'm sharing this with you, Valerie, is that as we went deeper, the anger was really about generations of domination and violation. Underneath that, it was this longing, this longing to feel that, touch that piece of being

respected, cared about belonging. So she did a practice where she called on her ancestors to bear witness to the anger she was feeling. And the response she got just so struck me is that anger gives you power, but it's misguided if it's aimed at a human. it's empowering if you remember what you love. Oh, that is so beautiful. Yeah, yeah, because just as you say, under anger, there's something that matters to us. There's reason people will storm the capital angry underneath there's something they care about. And there's so much going on in our society

right now that leaves, and I'm thinking particularly of white males, but it's so many of us, isolated, separate, without meaning, without purpose. And in that separation, it's like there's this longing to belong to something and to have things different. So it's true if you can see how the person or the group that is being oppressive and violent is hurting. If you can wonder about the hurting, then you start to be free. And what I'd like to ask you to talk about is, to me, the biggest block in actually

even wondering. And I've been working with Israeli peace activists, Palestinian peace activists, and they're trying to bring people together, trying to bridge a device, trying to have more understanding, and everybody's living in such different silos of information and such deep existential traumas that the narrative is this is caused by a bad other, there's so much fear, Valerie, that it becomes very hard for anybody to wonder, how might you be hurting? I mean, that's that question, you know, where does it hurt? It's very hard to get to a place of how does love want me to respond because fear's so big.

So I wanted just to ask you a little bit how you work with fear, how you guide others. You know, what helps to build that fearless heart space that lets us respond with wonder? Oh, first I think we need to be breathing. I feel like what we are up against is taking our breath away. And our breathlessness is not a sign of our weakness. it is a sign of how awake we are to the forces that are unleashed and the magnitude of loss that is happening and that is about to happen.

I remember when I was sending my four-year-old son off to a summer concert in the park with my father, he came home sitting on my father's shoulders, like literally on top of the world, and he heard his first racial slur. My son was four, and it was go back to your country, hurled at my father and my son. And my son came home. My parents were shaken.

I asked my son, where is it hurting? I kissed that part in him. And what color is it? Did it shift? Yes, Mommy. And then I was like, okay, let's go to bed, my love. And so he's falling asleep in my arms. And then Tara,

My mind is racing. My fear is my brain is going, where do we move? Where can we move? Do we like plot a route to New Zealand to Portugal? There's no corner on the planet where small black and brown children are safe from this kind of violence. I was learning with what indigenous and black mothers have long known on the soil that we can't actually protect our children from being hurt. We can only give them the courage to face it. but I was having a hard time facing it.

I was like, and then suddenly, like, my heart is beating really fast. My hands are, and suddenly my son sits up and he puts his ear on my mouth. He says, Mommy, I not hear you breathing. You need to breathe to sleep, Mommy. And he says, breathe and push, Mommy. Just breathe and push. I thought my son has become my midwife. Beautiful.

Love it. Breathe and cool. We got to be breathing, right, the wisdom of, and the wisdom that our children, that the very people we are seeking to protect are the ones like who can remind us that we don't need to have all the answers. We just got to be breathing with each other in the dark. And so breathing with each other even when I'm holding my fear, breathing even when I'm holding my rage.

breathing even when I'm holding my pain, my shame, all these parts of ourselves that can become barriers that can choke us off from each other. In order to open ourselves to each other, we have to open ourselves to all parts of ourselves first. And to ask, what information does my fear carry? What information does my rage carry? What is it telling me about what's important to me? How do I wish to harness that energy for what I do in the world? When it comes to anger, I call that harnessed energy, divine rage, like divine rage, the aim of divine rage is not vengeance. It is to reorder the world. So how it's these other parts of ourselves, when they hijack the rest of us, that's when they

create damage and devastation. That's when it cuts us off from being able to wonder about others. But when we work with these energies, when we become intimate with them, when we breathe with them, then we can decide how we push in the next moment in a way that gives life instead of takes it. Every time, you know, I sense anything from you in terms of working with emotions, I really love that you honor their intelligence because it is so, it's so pervasive to say, oh, it's bad to be fearful, it's bad to be angry, it's bad to be hateful.

And yet, if we truly simply breathe and feel, what's there, there is a message. I mean, fear's trying to protect us in some way. If I sometimes just say to my fear, okay, I get you're trying to protect me, that it's life-loving life. It's a form of life that's loving life. There's space. And I become inhabiting that larger space. There's a shift. But one of the things that really occurs to me, because you said sometimes we can't really connect with others unless we connect inwardly is sometimes being with others gives us enough of a safe container to connect inwardly. And I heard this beautiful story of one second grader inner city who's dealing with a lot of the things we're talking about, a lot of the violence

and just the ongoing danger. And her way of dealing with her emotions was she would put her hand on her dog's heart and just feel her dog's, so she just was feeling that connection with another living being. We're just too isolated. It's very hard to find our way through difficult emotions because they come out of a sense of separation and we need each other. We need each other to grieve with and also to sense what we're hopeful about. We really need each other. We need each other. We need each other. I actually really have a strong stand against those who say we have to love ourselves in order to love others. I was like, well, then we'll never get there. It's not so sequential. It's a dance. It's like it's we are, it's the inner and the outer, the spiritual, the political, the the, the, the me and you, we are dancing. And one thing I learned so much from sitting at the feet of my ancestors is that is that, the way that they survived cataclysmic times is that they gathered together in person.

They gathered. Shatsunggat. How did they gather? They took out their musical instruments. Song prayers. They cooked food and they shared food and they ate food and the children were on their laps in the center of the circles and in the dark they sang.

And then they started to laugh because there is joy always. When we gather together, even in the worst of grief, we bring out the wonder and the joy of being alive together. And from there, they made a plan for what to do. That was the first thing we did after the election. We were so tired. I had been on a bus for two months and we're like, we need to gather. So we did exactly that. My mother made a huge, huge caldrons of Punjabi food.

And we brought all of our beloveds, invited them to gather in our living room, the children in the center, really. And everyone shared a piece of poetry, a piece of art, a song, a bit of music. And I was thinking for most of my life, I thought these kinds of circles were secondary or nice to have. I'm like, oh, no, this is essential. Like, this is actually how we are going to survive the next four years with our moral compass intact. We hold on my best friend when I was a kid, Bryn Saito, she wrote a poem called Hold Fast to the ones who set you free. So if that is placing your hand on your dog's heart, or holding on to your four-year-old baby

as you're breathing together or gathering in a circle over food or calling your best friend when you just feel like I can't take a breath, oh, my love, will you be my midwife in this moment? Will you breathe with me? That is how we cultivate the conditions for courage. And Tara, you are one of the ones I hold fast too. So much of what I have learned about emotional intelligence and about spiritual groundedness and about how to breathe is through you.

And so this is why I call you my big sister. It's like more than ever I'm holding fast to the ones who bring out the best in me. May we all do that for each other. Yeah. One of the prayers that's most helping me right now, Valerie, is especially right now like this week and last week is I will bring to mind those who care and it's really all of us but those who's caring just shines through so brightly and you are just like a beacon of light your passion is just wildly visible

so I think of you and I think of just so many of us who even at this time where there's a lot of discouragement and not sure a lot of uncertainty and let's pause, what are we going to do? I just let myself bring to mind all of us and all of those in the past. You know, you described that we've been here before. Things have crashed before. There have been plagues, there have been world wars, there have been horrific situations of oppression, people who have cared.

And then I'll think of our great-grandchildren and the great-grandchildren of those we consider the opponents, you know, just that name, their grandchildren and sense them all caring and holding hands. And it really helps me to sense beyond time and space that there is a field of caring that we all belong to. Otherwise, it does feel like too much. It does. And maybe just to add, because a lot of people have said, you know, okay, I know I'm just to open to my suffering, but it just feels like so much how to bear the suffering of the world.

In fact, I'm thinking right now of one friend who's just given her heart and soul to really trying to serve into these times, you know, how to hold the enormity of the suffering. And I said, I invited her to ask her inner Bodhisattva, you know, the wise one and she said, well, I'm just feeling tears, I just feel an urge to cry. And then I said, okay, let that happen. And as she was grieving, she said, you know, when I grieve my heart breaks open and I'm just not alone in this. It's like I'm holding it with you and with everyone else and there's room.

And I think the big stuck place for so many is thinking that we're supposed to change things and we're doing something and it's me that's responsible. It has to be we. It just has to be we. We have to remember a larger belonging. I feel moved to share like a dream vision I had the day after the election. I was thinking a lot about how our bravest ancestors labored for a future they did not live to see. And what does it mean to take up that task, that sacred task now?

Like I want so badly to live long enough to see this country birthed into a multi- racial democracy where I see your child is mine, you see mine is yours. I want so badly to see this human species become one who knows how to live sustainably with the earth and with one another. And with this latest outcome here in the U.S., I have been really reckoning with the fact that I might not live. And the vision that I had the day after the election was I was listening to a piece of ancestral music, the instrument called the Rabab, which my ancestors used to be able to oneness. And I was... And what I saw was reaching the end of my life, singing these songs of love, and

letting that song and that light and that energy go into the next generation. But the next generation appeared like an earth hovering next to me. And then that light went into the next generation. And then the next and the next. And it was almost like those paper, like, cut out dolls. It was like the earths all appeared before me until it got to the seventh earth. And I thought, are we going to make it the same generation? Are there even human beings on that planet? And I looked very closely and it was all green and blue and it was beautiful and it was abundant. And I was like, oh, we didn't. But then I saw a child's face. And I thought, this is who I'm designing for. This is the generation we are designing for.

We are leaving behind blueprints for how to be human for this generation to implement until human beings become beings who know how to how to love as a way of being. Like that's, it might take that long. Our deepest task is to find meaning and joy with our particular role in the labor while we are alive in this moment. to surrender ourselves to that larger arc and know that it's enough. So I want to go slow because I really appreciate you sharing that dream and it really speaks to something that's so deep in us like, what can we hope for?

And if we have the kind of hope that's more like expectation that something's going to change in a certain time and look a certain way, we're in trouble. but my sense is like you that if humans can evolve to love more fully, you know, if we can evolve that inner sage to really see truly that we're one, that all are a part of our heart, if humans can change, there's hope. Yes. That's it. And hope's a muscle.

I mean, it's like it really takes practice to because there's so much that plays into our feeling of something's wrong. I mean, we have such conditioning, it's a negativity bias. So to keep on looking towards where love is possible and how we cultivate love, that feels like our only work and not to have to have it feel like it's manifesting in a certain way by a certain time. So I love that you did that. I mean, I love that you're describing to me because I was going to ask you about hope. And it feels to me like, see no stranger. That child in the green world,

that child's face is a face of a being who can see other beings and see the sacredness that's living through them, that it's all one divine energy. That's it. I make you try to hear you name it. I feel like we can only live to what we can first imagine and to hold that vision with you feels very powerful.

And we have to imagine. I like that you use that word because I think it's an underused part of our consciousness that we can envision the what's possible, that I can sense the who I am when my heart is disarmed and not always live from it. but really sense and trust, that's an imagining. And it calls me to that truth. It calls me to it. It calls us to it.

So I want to, we're coming down the home stretch here. You mentioned the importance of joy. And I always think about Ticknad Han who says, you know, it's not enough to suffer. We have to touch peace and we have to touch joy. It's part of who we are. It's our human capacity when this heart's open and awake. So it needs cultivation. And I'm just wondering, you shared a bit about how Sikhs traditionally have done it,

anything else on how we can give ourselves permission to really savor our moments, to really celebrate. I find that we need hope. And we need joy even more. Like I, for me, hope has become like this, like the light of a moon. It waxes and wanes, to be honest. Sometimes I feel like it's full and luminous and I feel so hopeful, especially when I'm in the light of others.

Like, I feel like we can do this. I can imagine it. I can see it. We're going to show up. And then there are moments where hope is just a sliver. or I can't see it at all and it is all dark all around me. And what I know in those dark moments is that what matters is the work my hands do. Can I stay here on this earth with others and keep moving and keep breathing?

And what gives me the energy to keep moving and keep breathing and keep laboring is joy. And in the Sikh tradition, it is called Chardhikaela. Yeah. Jardhikaela, ever-rising joy, even in darkness. Even in dark times, ever-rising spirits. And in our tradition, you cannot force joy. You can only create the conditions to let it come and take you. And so part of my sacred task is to ask myself, what are the conditions?

that invite joy into my body when it just floods my veins and my heart and my eyes and my voice, like, you know, to feel it all the way. And I've been able to tap into like music and dance, like the darkest way to come back to the original or the horrific news and that we still have our little living room space where we turn on the song and I dance with my children. And in the beginning, I'm like, I don't feel joyful at all. I'm just like a zombie. I'm like, you know, swaying back and forth, but then my child is like, throw me up in the air, mommy, and I throw her up in the air, and she's laughing and I'm laughing and I'm feeling joy. That spark, it's like that spark, it has to be embodied, right? That sparkling energy that goes from the ground up,

and then I can take the breath. And then I can say, all right, I can show up. Let's get them to bed. And then I'll write the thing that needs to be written or organize the thing that needs to happen in the morning, but weaving that breath in means that we are weaving the possibilities for joy in and laboring for a more just and beautiful world, even if it's seven generations from now, but laboring with love and with joy, I have found to be the greatest meaning of life. Thank you for that. And thank you for the inquiry of what are the conditions that make me available to joy. That's a very powerful one. So maybe as, a way of closing. I just give us a sense of you just did this amazing tour. You told me before

we started that you're taking some time, which I'm really, I'm so glad, sweetie, you're going to take some time and really inward, winter, quiet, nourish that inner sage. What's next in terms of engagement, in terms of, you know, how revolution or love is coming forward. What is next that we can know about that you're up to? We are going to keep building this movement. Revolutionary love is the call of our times now more than ever before. I think when we, oftentimes we are standing in love and humanity, but we think we are alone. And what we're doing with this movement is to show people that you are like nodes on a constellation. We've just lit you up.

You are lit up now. We're connecting you. We're sustaining you. We're resourcing you. And so folks want to continue to feel like, and I'm just one note in a symphony of so many voices who are calling for love and humanity. So you've got to find your community, find your spheres, find your people, your leaders, your healers, even locally that are living this. And walk with them, be with them, move together, gather together, rise together. And if you want to do it with the Revolutionary Love Project, go to Revolutionary Love.org, and you'll see that in the new year, the educational tools and the convenings and the meditations and the gatherings and it will all keep happening, all keep building, or just putting revolutionary love into zeitgeist in this moment.

And I want to take seriously the breathe and push cycle. And many of us will be called to like some braver forms of action that we've, you know, perhaps have never stepped into. before come January. And if you're listening to this in December of 2024, these are my words to you that came to me in a dream the other night. Can I read them to you? Please. This is winter.

Transform yourself to transform the world. Activists, sharpen your swords, soak sore muscles, draw a battle plan, and make them your pillow. Artists wash your paint brushes, cut new canvases, crush old stone to color your dreams. Writers, break your quills, lay down your head, let ancestors pour visions in your eyes.

Speakers, forego the stage, drink hot tea, rest your throat to make new vowels. Music makers, recall your first melodies, honor your your teachers, mimic the sound of birdsong to hear finer music. Lovers, as all of us, gather your beloveds, eat, laugh, dance, plant joy in each other. Grow love so big, once ripened, the world will have nowhere to go except its shape. All the parts of me are speaking to all the parts of you. winter as a verb this is not a time to produce it is a time to drop the veil between reality and dream

in hibernation rebirth yourself there will be no spring without you that's just phenomenal you you spoke to all of us so beautifully and i hope you'll send it to me so we can post it with with this, I want to thank you, dear, for the way you bring that amazing, bright, shining heart into the world. Truly, thank you. And I want to invite everyone to visit the website and also just the books are really powerful good for children. For children, it's in the holiday season, world of wonder, and then sage warrior, amazing,

and see no stranger. So these are all readings that will nourish your spirit. Thank you dear. I love you so much. Mutual blessings.