Travel Lightly and Downsize Your Burdens with Valarie Kaur
Nov 24, 2021
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Valarie Kaur, renowned civil rights leader and celebrated prophetic voice, joins the host to discuss downsizing the burdens we carry. They explore embracing our true selves, naming and honoring ancestors, Sikh faith and unity, the power of believing in stories, darkness as both tomb and womb, and standing against prejudice.
Revolutionary love is about practicing love at three levels: self-love, love of our posse, and love of the world to build a better future and birth a long-awaited nation.
Fierce love is an embodiment of revolutionary love that insists on itself, invites us to access the love within us, and carries us forward in the face of crises and challenges.
Deep dives
Practicing Revolutionary Love in Everyday Life
Revolutionary love is the powerful force of healing, change, and transformation. It is the recognition that we belong to one another as siblings and that our movements for justice are rooted in deep solidarity. Solidarity goes beyond shallow exchanges and is instead rooted in love. By coming together, grieving, raging, and reimagining, we can create pockets of beloved community where everyone can feel fully seen and beloved. By practicing the three levels of love—self-love, love of our posse, and love of the world—we can equip ourselves with the tools to build a better future and birth the long-awaited nation.
Love as Sweet Labor
Love is not a rush of good feeling, but a muscular ethic. It is the choice to engage in fierce and imperfect love as a means and an end in itself. Love is a practical and pragmatic practice that can be taught, modeled, and practiced. It involves letting go of burdens, embracing grief and rage, and honoring our own greatness. Love is sweet labor, requiring bravery, vulnerability, and commitment. By practicing love in tiny steps and creating containers for beloved community, we can shift culture, consciousness, and bring about the nation that is longing to be born.
Birthing a New Way of Being
America is in a time of transition and the labor for justice is a cyclical, non-linear process. We are being stretched, torn, and squeezed as a society to create space for what is wanting to be birthed. It is the darkness of both the tomb and the womb, as we grieve what we are losing and eagerly anticipate what is emerging. True progress and change require bravery, surrender, and trust in the transformative power of love. As we come together, shed our limitations, and open ourselves to each other's stories, we become changed and transformed, inching closer to a multi-faith, multi-racial, multicultural democracy.
Fierce Love: A Vibrant Way of Being
Fierce love is about loving in the face of crises, oppressions, and challenges. It is the embodiment of revolutionary love, breathing life into us and carrying us forward. Fierce love insists on itself and invites us to access the love that surrounds us and is within us. It is vibrant, delicious, and the most vibrant way to be alive. By surrendering ourselves to fierce love, we tap into a powerful force that carries us and reminds us that we are never alone. Fierce love is a heartbeat that pulsates through us, inviting us to rebirth our best and most loving selves.
On this episode of Love Period, Valarie Kaur joins Jacqui in conversation to discuss the theme of Chapter Three: "Travel Lightly. Downsize the Burdens You Carry." Valarie Kaur is a renowned civil rights leader and celebrated prophetic voice "at the forefront of progressive change" (Center for American Progress). Valarie burst into American consciousness in the wake of the 2016 election when her Watch Night Service address went viral with 40 million views worldwide. Her question "Is this the darkness of the tomb – or the darkness of the womb?" reframed the political moment and became a mantra for people fighting for change. Valarie now leads the Revolutionary Love Project to reclaim love as a force for justice in America.
In the last twenty years, as a lawyer, innovator, and award-winning filmmaker, Valarie has helped win policy change on multiple fronts – hate crimes, racial profiling, immigration detention, solitary confinement, Internet freedom, and more. She founded Groundswell Movement, Faithful Internet, and the Yale Visual Law Project to equip new generations of advocates. Valarie has been a regular TV commentator on MSNBC and contributor to CNN, NPR, PBS, the Hill, Huffington Post, and the Washington Post. A daughter of Sikh farmers in California's heartland, Valarie earned degrees at Stanford University, Harvard Divinity School, and Yale Law School. Valarie's debut book, See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love, expands on her "blockbuster" TED Talk and is available wherever books are sold.
New to Season 2, after the interview, Jacqui concludes with a reflection on making this practical in everyday life.