- Love is the stuff of poetry, and heartache, and hope.

But today's guest says love could be revolutionary.

It is needed as a public ethic to confront hate and nationalism, and the violence board from ignorance.

She's Valerie Kaur this week on Story of The Public Square.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) Hello and welcome to The Story of The Public Square where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

Joining me from his home in Rhode Island is my friend and co-host G. Wayne Miller of The Providence Journal.

Each week, we talk about big issues with great guests, authors, journalists, artists and more to make sense of the stories that shape public life in the United States today.

This week we're joined by civil rights, lawyer, filmmaker, author and founder of The Revolutionary Love Project, Valerie Kaur.

Valerie, thank you so much for being with us.

- [Valarie] Gentlemen, wait, I'm so delighted to be here with you today.

- [Jim] So there is a ton that we want to get into with you but we really want to start with just sort of a 30,000 over... A 30,000 foot overview of what The Revolutionary Love Project actually is?

- [Valarie] We believe that revolutionary love is the call of our times.

We inspire and equip people with the tools to build beloved community right here and now.

Can I tell you why I believe it's the color of our times gentlemen?

- [Jim] Please.

- [Wayne] please.

- With everything that we have seen in the last few years.

With the rise of white supremacy and tyranny and we know that sound government is necessary but it's not sufficient to transition this country into a multiracial democracy.

We need a shift in culture and consciousness.

We need a revolution of the heart.

A new way of seeing and being that leaves no one behind.

A kind of love without limit.

what I call revolutionary love.

And the call of love is ancient.

You know, it comes down to us on the lips of spiritual teachers and social reformers through the millennia.

And so it is up to those of us now who hear that call to pick up the tools to practice it, to reclaim love as a force for justice here and now and that's what our project equips folks to do.

- [Jim] It's you really sounds like you're talking about love as a civic virtue?

- [Valarie] Yes.

It's inspired by ancestral wisdom and wisdom traditions.

I mean, certainly we think of Jesus calling us to love our neighbors, or Abraham to open our tent to (indistinct) Muhammad to take in the orphan, or Buddha unending compassionate.

Guru Nanak right?

The founder of the Sikh faith called, calling us to oneness to see no stranger.

So this call to love has often been on the lips of the spiritual teachers and wisdom traditions.

But what we know is that any great social movement, any great non-violent social movement has anchored it's call for justice in the ethic of love available to all, no matter what background.

And so we are really saying no matter where you're coming from love is a wellspring from which all of us can drink.

And if we're redefining love, you know love is not just a rush of feeling or flood of emotion.

Love is not thoughts and prayers and... Love is not civility.

When we think about our closest relationships in life Love is... Love is practical ongoing care.

Love is labor.

It's fierce.

It's bloody, it's imperfect.

It's life-giving, it's a choice we make again and again.

And when we labor for others, when we choose to love others beyond what evolution requires when we love others, opponents and ourselves that's what I call revolutionary love.

And if love is labor, love can be taught.

Love can be modeled.

Love can be practiced.

Yes, as a civic virtue and as a collective practice by all here and now.

- [Wayne] So you talk about the three kinds of love.

Love of self.

Love of others.

And others are people who are unlike you.

Be that a different gender, be that a different race or a different nationality.

And also love of opponents which I think some people will find surprising.

Can you break down those three different groups for us?

- [Valarie] Yeah.

So love for others.

I call that practice inspired by Guru Nanak.

See no stranger.

We can look at anyone and say, "You are a part of me I do not yet know."

Love begins with the act of wonder.

It's an orientation of humility.

What if we could see anyone around us as sister, brother, sibling, grandfather.

Imagine how powerful that might be.

George Floyd, brother.

Brianna, sister.

Migrant child at the border as my own child.

Love without limits.

Seeing no stranger has always been what drives what I call deep solidarity.

So loving others by wondering about them, grieving with them and fighting with, and for them is what I call the practice.

The full practice of seeing no stranger.

Now what happens when the other in front of you becomes an opponent(chuckles) And here notice I don't use the word enemy.

(indistinct) enemy is a permanent fixed identity.

And in all my life, you know I write about this in my books "See No Stranger", when I've sat down with white supremacists, or prison guards, or soldiers, or my own abusers.

I, as much as I want to hate them.

And I have hated them.

When I hear their story, I come to understand this truth.

There are no such thing as monsters in this world.

There are only human beings who are wounded.

Who act out of their own insecurity, or blindness, or greed.

That doesn't make them any less dangerous.

But when we choose to see that the wound in them, then we become smarter advocates.

We turn from pure resistance to re-imagining the cultures that radicalize them.

The institutions that authorize them.

So this practice of approaching opponents I call tend the wound.

It begins with tending our own wounds before we can even tend theirs.

And then using that information to let that guide our action.

Now, this is really important.

If you are someone who has a knee on your neck right now.

It is not necessarily your role to look up at an opponent and try to wonder about them or love them.

No your job is to take the next breath to stay alive.

That's your revolutionary act.

You see revolutionary love is a practice that's done in community.

We all have different roles at any given time.

So I say, if you are someone who is safe enough or brave enough to tend to those kinds of opponents, we need you now(chuckles) Because if we're gonna transition this country we need to be able to leave no one behind.

That's long work and that's hard work.

which brings me to the third practice.

So from Gandhi to king to Mandela, our social reformers through history have taught us a lot about how to love others, how to love our opponents.

They didn't teach us at length about how to love ourselves.

This is the feminist intervention(chuckles) These are the black women leaders from Bell Hooks to Audrey Lorde, you say, "We can't let our movements for justice just fall on our backs or over our dead bodies.

We gotta be finding ways to love ourselves.

Love on ourselves along the way."

So this practice I call "breathe and push".

See the midwife she has wisdom, I think for all of us.

For how to sustain resilience in any long creative labor.

She doesn't say breed once and push the rest of the way(chuckles) No, she says breathe my love (chuckles) and then push and then breathe again.

So I often ask folks, you know, right now especially all black indigenous people of color in this era right now, you know, to invite them to ask themselves, how are you breathing every day?

How are you letting wellness into your body?

And then only when you're ready how are you making that push?

And then how are you summoning the wisdom inside you your ancestors, to be able to transition yourself as we're transitioning the world?

So in this way, revolutionary love is love for others, opponents, ourselves.

It's less of a a prescription, it's more a sort of an orientation to life.

And what I find is that when I am showing up to my labors for justice, with love then my labors become porous enough to let joy in.

And that's the final practice here.

That joy(chuckles)returns us to everything that is good and beautiful and worth fighting for.

Joy gives us energy for that long struggle.

I have come to believe Jim and Wayne that laboring for a more just and beautiful world with joy, with love and joy is the meaning of life.

- [Wayne] Wow.

I mean that's just an incredible message and philosophy.

Which is why we were drawn to you and having you on here.

Let's talk about how you got to this point.

Start with where you were born.

You were born in California (chuckles) and to a farming family which had been there for I guess a century or more, and it's a Sikh family.

And this might be a good time to get into the different pronunciations of Sikh.

Can you just talk about that cause I think some people are used to hearing sick and in fact it's Sikh.

So give us that event, tell us your story from your early days in California.

- [Valarie] Of course.

Yeah.

I was born in the Sikh tradition, and it's okay if you've said sick for a long time, because for a long time we were saying it that way to make it easier for everyone else, but then we thought, I think we're ready.

(laughs) we didn't wanna people to say it the way that we say.

So Sikh is an aspirated "h" at the end is Sikh It's S I K H and it means student, or a student of truth.

A disciple of the truth.

And to be as Sikh is to walk a path of love what would I call revolutionary love.

As a way of being in the world that we find liberation here and now not anywhere else, if we are showing up with that kind of bravery, seeing through the eyes of a saint and with the heart of a warrior.

So the (indistinct) The Warrior of Sage or The Sage Warrior is the ideal in our faith.

I grew up on the farmlands of central valley in California with all of these stories.

The stories of gurus, and saints, and ancestors, and poets, and pioneers, and warriors.

I mean, this was my childhood.

My grandfather had sailed by steamship from India to America in 1913.

So I grew up on that land that he farmed and to be Sikh and to be American was just infused and how I showed up to the world.

I, the story that I love the most that made everything real for me is the story of what happened when my grandfather first got here.

He was immediately incarcerated when his ship landed in the Port of San Francisco.

He was incarcerated in Angel Island for months, and he would have been deported.

I wouldn't be here talking to you both.

If it weren't for the intervention of a white man, a lawyer, Henry Marshall.

He looked at my grandfather and he knew that the people who caged him were white nationalists who wanted no one who looked like us to be part of this country.

But he chose to see him not as a foreigner or as a suspect.

He chose to see him as a brother.

And you filed a writ of habeas Corpus that freed my grandfather that Christmas Eve.

Decades later my grandfather saw his Japanese American neighbors rounded up and taken to incarceration camps in the deserts of the Midwest and, my grandfather looked after their farm so that they would have a life to return to.

He went to visit them and it was dangerous and, so I grew up with these stories of what I've come to think of as ancestral solidarity.

And when it was my people, my family the Sikh community who was seen as our nation's new enemy in the Wake of 9/11.

It was the granddaughter of one of those Japanese American elders who became my best friend (indistinct) And she showed up for me and my people in my time of need and fast forward 20 years.

And now it's her people in her community that are seen as targets of hate during this pandemic.

And now we are showing up for her.

And I share this because I feel like these are flesh and blood examples of revolutionary love.

Of seeing no stranger.

And they'd not only model what it takes to survive in this country to find longevity to last, but they also model what beloved community can look like, can feel like, you know what if they're not that these like one-off examples.

So what if we could equip enough people in this country.

A critical mass in this country with the tools to show up with that kind of way of seeing and being where they are.

To build beloved community where they are.

Might that shift the consciousness of the country as a whole.

So my work today really truly is infused with these stories of my ancestors and with my upbringing in Clovis, California, where, you know, I had to hold onto these stories in order to make my way.

It wasn't an easy place to grow up but it was how I finally come to you.

It's the stories.

- [Jim] It wasn't easy because of discrimination of racism, of white supremacy?

What, I just wanna pack that a little bit more?

- [Valarie] Yeah, it's so subtle, right, Jim.

You know like the thing about these explosions of hate, these hate crimes that we see they're just the most visible tips of the iceberg.

Like whatever, it's white supremacy is the air that we breathe.

So to be a brown girl, to be a Sikh girl in a primarily white Christian farming town was to be a problem I could not solve(chuckles) No one could solve.

I felt like I was out of my skin.

I mean, my first experience of the world was on the farmland, and the stars, and the trees, and the cows, and the horses, like an orientation to wonder.

Like you are a part of me I do not yet know.

I could feel my oneness.

And it's that, you know, I was at home in my body and at home in the world.

And it was that first racial slur, you know, get up you black dog.

When I was six years old- - [Jim] Aah, six!

- (indistinct)it expelled me from my body(chuckles) You know, and I feel like healing is that long journey of returning to one's own body.

And here's the thing about when that happens, when people are young is that it becomes a voice that becomes internal to you.

They call it "internalized depression".

So I've had to reckon with this voice in my own mind all these years, all these decades that has said (indistinct) seen myself through the eyes of others who say, "You're not good enough.

You're not smart enough.

You're not strong enough.

You're not brave enough.

You're not American enough.

You're not pretty enough.

You're not Sikh enough.

You're not enough."

And that, I feel like my whole life has been this power struggle between the little critic in me put into me by white supremacy(chuckles) And these wise women of my ancestors who say, "No my love, you are brave enough.

You are daughter warriors.

You can show up as a Sage Warrior for, to love even in the face of this much hate."

And I just don't want it to take other people as long as it took me to be able to trust that voice of wisdom.

My son his, had his first racial slur when he was four you know, directed at my father, go back to your country.

And so if I can give him in his generation this new generation, the tools to know how to love themselves in a world that wants to make them strange to themselves to know how to love others even when they want to destroy us, to learn how to stand in solidarity with others who need them.

If I can teach them, if we can equip them to practice revolutionary love it won't take them as long as it took us.

And maybe we can advance this together.

- [Wayne] So during your Ted Talk, which has had over 3 million views and which I highly highly recommend to our audience.

It's 22 minutes long, and it will just, it will change your worldview or certainly influence it.

But during that, you mentioned that hearing that slur as a child, and also being told by a white supremacist or by somebody white, that because you weren't a Christian, you're going to go to hell.

You went to your grandfather and your grandfather.

What did he say?

This seems to me to be in incredibly important almost transcendent moment in his response to you.

- [Valarie] "You must wonder about people, even if they refuse to about you.

You must choose to love them when they are in harm's way."

But you know Wayne(indistinct) he taught me that not through just those platitudes.

He taught me that through story.

You know, he proceeded to tell me the stories of my ancestors.

He told me the story of Mai Bhago the first Sikh woman warrior who you know when 40 soldiers abandoned their post during a great battle.

She said, "No, you will not abandon your post.

You will go back to the fight and I will lead you."

And so my grandfather said, "My dear, don't abandon your post."

And I'm a little girl with these two long braids(chuckles) She likes to ride on tractors.

And my grandfather is seeing me as a warrior, right?

And I nod and I realized my entire life has been this effort to keep the promise I made to my grandfather because the truth is like, I'm the (indistinct) I'm the one who wants to give up.

I'm the one who wants to believe that little critic voice who says, "You're not enough.

You can't keep showing up when the world is this overwhelming, this violent and this endless."

And it's the wise woman in me who takes my hand and say, "Okay, my love, one more breath.

And now we go back in."

- [Jim] Valerie, where...

So people who were practicing revolutionary love what does that really mean in a practical sense?

- [Valarie] well, I can tell you, it's very exciting.

We've created this learning hub that has drawn from research from multiple disciplines, from ethics to neuroscience.

And it contains educational curriculum, teaching videos, guided inquiries, music, meditations.

We're just about to release it.

In fact, by the time you all are hearing this you can go to valeriekaur.com and click on learning hub.

You'll see everything is there available for free.

And the reason we created that is that once I started to speak about revolutionary love as a conscious practice.

we realize that there are very few places that give people the tools to actually build the beloved community where they are educators who are saying, "We want to make revolutionary love the ethic of our school culture."

We talk about love, but like what does it really mean to share a vocabulary but how to practice it?

We've talked to organizations who want to do the same for their activists.

We've talked to parents who want to do this inside their homes with their children.

And what's beautiful about the framework.

You know, I talk about love for others, opponents and ourselves.

We imagine them as points on a compass, and there are 10 practices we identified that actually track the 10 chapters of my books, "See No Stranger".

And they're about how to wonder, how to practice wondering, how to practice grieving, how to cut it on your rage, how to create safe containers to express your rage and the harness the energy of that range for what you do in the world.

How to reimagine, not just to resist, but re-imagine.

how to breathe, how to push, how to let joy in.

The framework is versatile enough, that one can practice this in their own life with their own people.

And in the context of movements and larger communities.

And we are just getting started.

So my hope is that in the coming years, we give people more and more specific tools to help them do what hopefully they're already doing - [Wayne] During that Ted Talk.

You mentioned that you watched the twin towers fall (indistinct) so many of us did on September 11th, 20 years ago hard to believe.

That watching and what happened within a few days of that.

The first person who was killed as a hate crime was a Sikh person a person you called uncle, a family friend.

Talk about that whole period cause that seems to be another great inflection point in your life that headed you to where you are today.

- [Valarie] Wayne I can't believe it was 20 years ago.

- I know, isn't it crazy?

It's just crazy.

- I was a kid in college, you know, I was watching the towers fall.

And then there was an image of our nation's new enemy.

The turban, beard and...

I realized our nation's new enemy looked like my family.

You know, we, how ironic right?

That Sikhs wear this long hair these turbans to represent our commitment to love and justice so that we will never hide(chuckles) So that if you need shelter, we will clothe you.

If you need food, we will feed you.

And yet it's precisely these markers that marked us as terrorists in this country for the last 20 years.

Hate violence broke out on city streets all across America in the Wake of 9/11.

And in fact 20 years later we are still five times more likely to be targets of hate than we were before 9/11.

So the backlash, the aftermath never has never ended for us.

The first person killed was a family friend.

His name was Balbir Singh Sodhi Balbir uncle, he was murdered in front of his gas station in Mesa, Arizona by a man who called himself a Patriot Balbir uncle's murder...

I was gonna be an academic.

I wanted to study religion(chuckles) And his murder turned me into what I now see.

Turn me into an activist.

I grabbed my camera and began to this was before social media, before YouTube and Twitter.

So there was no, we had no channels to tell our own story.

So I began to capture these stories of the Sodhi family and the Sikh families and Muslim families all across the country.

And that became my first documentary film "Divided We Fall".

And all the years after, you know, with every...

I became a lawyer, I studied at divinity school.

I kind of amass these tools and with every film, with every campaign, with every lawsuit I thought we were making the nation safer for the next generation.

That's when I became a new mother at precisely the time when hate violence was skyrocketing once again toward our people.

And I thought, what was it all for?

(chuckles) If not to work, make the nation safer for him.

Like how was he growing up in a nation, more dangerous for him as a little Sikh boy with long hair than it was for me.

And I had an existential crisis.

Like I was a fellow at Stanford law at the time, working on Internet Freedom.

I left my job (chuckles) I got a gift that very few women ever get.

I got time off (indistinct) of my own.

And I went...

I moved my family to the rainforest for a year in Central America.

Almost like looking for the answers.

You know I had shared this.

The only thing that was keeping me alive was this question.

The future is dark, but what of this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb.

What if our America is not dead but a country is still waiting to be born?

What if all of our ancestors standing behind us now whispering in our ear, you are brave.

And the midwife says to breathe and to push.

When I deliver those words, Watch Night of 2016 the video went viral around the world.

It was 40 million people.

And reaching out to me saying, I'm ready to breathe.

I'm ready to push, but how do we labor when the labor is endless?

And so I went to the rainforest to save my own life and hopefully come back with something for others.

And that's where I was pouring through all the science and all the wisdom traditions on my own journals and began to see these patterns and practices which I've come to call revolutionary love.

I'm back in the country with this offering.

And it's born of the last 20 years of grieving and raging in the face of white supremacist violence.

But I can tell you both now that I have found a way to have longevity, like I want to grow to be an old woman(chuckles) I want to last, I want to grow old with you.

And revolutionary love I feel like it's not just how we transition the world as a whole.

It's how we can find meaning and longevity here and now.

If I think of my entire life as a series of experiments with revolutionary love, then the labor becomes an end in itself.

You know, I'm embodying, we are embodying, beloved community here and now, and the way that you are wondering about me listening to me right now.

You know, we birth the beloved community by becoming it here and now.

And if we can invite more and more people into that way of seeing and being in these tools.

Then that's now my life's work - [Jim] Valarie we've got about 15 seconds left here for someone who wants to know more.

You mentioned the website but what's the first step they can take in their own lives to practice revolutionary love?

- [Valarie] When you're walking down the street even behind those masks, you say to your mind, when you look at the face of anyone around you view, you are a part of me, I do not yet know.

Let that recognition of our oneness, our interconnectedness, guide all of your actions.

- [Jim] This is a bit of a remarkable conversation.

- [Wayne] Oh my God, no kidding.

(laughs) - [Jim] Valerie Kaur, The Revolutionary Love Project.

Thank you so much for being with us.

That is all the time we have this week.

But if you want to know more about Story in The Public Square, you can find us on Facebook and Twitter or visit pellcenter.org.

We can always catch up on previous episodes.

- For Wayne, I'm Jim, asking you to join us again next time for more Story in The Public Square.

(upbeat music) (upbeat instrumental music)