Brené Brown: Hi, everyone. I’m Brené Brown and this is Unlocking Us. Welcome to our new eight-part series that I am calling On My Heart and Mind. This series starts today with my conversation with Valarie Kaur on the power of revolutionary love and what it means to be a sage warrior. This is a tearful, beautiful conversation. I’m really grateful that you’re here for it. In this series, I’m also going to be talking to folks really about the things I can’t stop thinking about right now. I’m in a conversation with the always, always thought provoking, throw the essay through the window, Roxane Gay, who is going to be talking about black gun ownership. What stand your ground means and what it doesn’t mean. I’m talking with Sarah Lewis on her stunning new book, The Unseen Truth, and I’m talking with Mary Claire Haver on bullshit menopause. I love her approach. She is so straightforward, not having it, and really letting us know what to expect and what’s happening and why. It’s a great conversation. I’m also going to talk with my sisters Ashley and Barrett on grief and love and finding unexpected joy in grief. So I’m glad you’re here for the series. I appreciate it. I think a lot of us have a lot on our hearts and minds right now. I hope you’ll find the convos helpful.

BB: Today in this episode, I am talking with Valarie Kaur, and we are talking about her new book that just released on September 10th. Her book is called Sage Warrior: Wake to Oneness, Practice Pleasure, Choose Courage, and Become Victory. In this book, she draws from Sikh tradition, Sikh ancestral wisdom, and I think some people say Sikh and some people say Sikh, and I’m going with what Valarie uses, which is Sikh, and it’s just this incredible journey into deep mystical wisdom and how we can apply it to what we’re living in today. I found it so healing.

BB: Let me tell you a little bit about Valarie before we get started. She is a civil rights leader, a lawyer, an award-winning filmmaker, an educator, and the founder of the Revolutionary Love Project. Valarie is building a movement to reclaim love as a force for justice, healing, and transformation in America. She believes the love ethic is essential to birthing a multiracial democracy and a sustainable future. She declares revolutionary love is the call of our times, the choice to leave no one outside of our circle of care. She’s got an amazing biography, which you can read on the podcast episode page on brenebrown.com. Right now, let’s jump into the conversation and learn not only from Valarie, but Valarie’s ancestors from the Sikh ancestral wisdom that I have found to be such an incredible invitation, soul shifting for me, and incredibly grounding. Let’s jump in. Welcome. I’m so… I don’t know what I am, I’m just so… love. That’s all I’m feeling. I’m feeling lots of love.

Valarie Kaur: Brené the first time I ever heard your voice, I was graduating from law school. It was the final days, I took a really long walk. I knew that I was making a choice that was against the current. I was moving in the direction my heart wanted me to go. And my best friend in law school, Lauren, sent me a link to your TED Talk, and I remember taking that long walk and listening to you in my ear talking about courage and vulnerability. And it was like my… You were my midwife. Like you were… You consolidated the wisdom that I had always felt inside of me and empowered me to then let the rest of my life unfold. So any energy that you are feeling from the art or offerings I’m making in the world is just energy coming back to you full circle.

BB: It is. That energy has picked up speed and changed me. I mean, I think, See No Stranger changed me and this book, I mean, I think I talked to you afterwards. I was like, “Can I borrow an ancestor?” I’m very attached to a couple of the folks in these stories, and I find myself praying to them sometimes or asking… I mean, let’s just jump into it because I just want everyone to understand the depth and breadth of beauty in this book.

VK: I want to tell you that because we are all kin, all of the ancestors are available to us when summoned with integrity and respect. And so if Bebe Nanaki is speaking to you.

BB: Bebe Nanaki is my… Yes.

VK: Let her speak to you. Let her live inside of you. Let her be your midwife.

BB: Did you ever think, I wonder if Bebe Nanaki ever thought “I’m going to be on a post-it note on someone’s laptop?” I just…

VK: [laughter] Yeah. That’s it. Are we still our ancestors wildest dreams if they could not have dreamed precisely us?

BB: Let’s start, before we get to the book, tell us your story. We love to start here. Tell us your story.

VK: My story begins with my ancestors. My father’s father traveled by steamship from Punjab to California in 1913, so 111 years ago.

BB: Wow.

VK: He landed in California as a farmer and made his way down and I grew up on the land that he farmed. And so I felt like deep, profound connection with the land. I remember talking to the cows across the fence, making friends with the stars at night, riding tractors with my father. I mean, I felt this profound sense of wonderment and connection that I could look upon the face of anyone or anything around me and say, “You are a part of me I do not yet know.” When I would go to bed at night, it was my mother’s father, who I called Papaji, who helped raise me. And he would give me the song, “Prayers of Our Ancestors.” [singing] I would fall asleep in his voice in the vessel of those sacred songs. And Papaji would tell me stories that connect me to this lineage of warriors and sages, mystics and poets that stretched all the way to India. It sort of made like a shimmering arc from Punjab to me.

VK: So it wasn’t until… all of this was really integrated in my body, I felt like I could be deeply Californian American and deeply Sikh. And it wasn’t until I would… Started school and I heard my first racial slur at 6 years old. It was, “Get up, you black dog.” I remember feeling, I wasn’t angry with the little boy who said this, I just felt like a stinging under the skin. And they call it internalized oppression, but what it feels like in the body is a voice that says to you, “You’re not good enough.” I still struggle with that internal voice, and I think that voice probably lives in all of us. I think it’s especially strong in those of us who are in bodies that are denigrated in this culture that are made to hate ourselves. But I would come home from the racial slur and my grandfather would dry my tears and look at me and said, “My dear, do not abandon your post.” Like, I’m a little girl in two long brains who likes to ride tractors and talk to the stars. But my grandfather saw me as a warrior, and what he was inviting me into is that even those who choose to hate you, those who fail to wonder about you, to see your beauty and dignity and magnificence, your job is to hold your post, to stand in love, to refuse to become them.

VK: And so that stayed with me as I grew up. The racial slurs turned into attempts to convert me into Christianity and threats of hell fire from best friends and from teachers. And it was, “My dear, don’t abandon your post.” And then I went off to college, and the horror of September 11th unfolded, and the racial violence that exploded across city streets, all across the country, targeted Sikh Americans, the Sikh community at the forefront, along with our Muslim brothers and sisters, because so many of our men and some women wear their hair in turbans. And the first person killed in the aftermath was a family friend who I called Balbir Uncle, Balbir Singh Sodhi was killed in front of his gas station in Mesa, Arizona while planting flowers. And I remember Brené this collapse in my body. His story was drowned out in this anthem of national unity. This was before social media, before we had any opportunity to tell our own stories and, “My dear don’t abandon your post.” You know, it’s like, What if? What if I could capture my people’s stories? What if that could be the starting point for us to heal as a country?” And as soon as I had that idea, it was like that little critic was really loud. Right? Every time you’re about to do something brave and you are…

BB: Oh my gosh. Yes. Oh, God. It’s loud. Brings friends. Yeah.

VK: Yes. Yes. A whole chorus of like, “You are not good enough, you’re only 20 years old. You’re in between the Sikh community and the mainstream community. Like you’re the last person we would choose for such a thing.” And it was that wise woman warrior that I feel like, my grandfather nurtured in me. He was like, “Oh my love, you are brave enough. Let me take your hand. Let’s cross this gulf of fear.” I grabbed my camera, I got in my car with a list of questions, and I drove across the United States from home to home, from city to city, from gurdwara to mosque to temple, sometimes when the blood was still fresh on the ground. And I would sit with my people and I thought I was this like, you know, I had like a journalist jacket. My dad got me my first cell phone.

VK: I’m going to be… I’m going to capture your stories, but what would I… I would show up and they were like, “Oh, Beti. Oh, little. Oh, my daughter. Come inside, have some chai, have some tea.” And we would just weep. We would just weep. I didn’t realize that’s probably the most important offering I was making at that moment is to grieve with people. I learned at a very young age what it meant to grieve with people, not to have the right words or the perfect words. That there’s no fixing grief. There’s only bearing it and only bearing it together do we survive it. You don’t need to know people in order to grieve with them. You grieve with them in order to know them. And so, as I…

BB: Oh my gosh.

VK: Was grieving with people, I felt myself expand and hold all of it. And because I was so young and took so much in, I didn’t know quite how to alchemize that grief, to push back any despair that might be spreading inside of me like a cancer. And then the despair was finding me. And I had one last interview to do. I took a plane to India, back to Punjab, back to our ancestral land to sit with the widow of Balbir Singh Sodhi. We drove through endless fields and villages, and we found her home. And there she was dressed in white, the color of mourning, and she had dark circles under her eyes, and I would just say her husband’s name, and she would cry. I looked at my list of questions and I just threw them away. I just, I sat and I wept with her. So auntie-ji, you’re not alone. I wept with her. And then I finally, the camera’s rolling. So at this point, I’ve been documenting. This becomes my first documentary film. And I asked her, what would you like to tell the people of America. Brené I was expecting…

BB: Oh yeah.

VK: Resentment.

BB: Yeah, rage.

VK: Rage. Rage. That’s what I was feeling. And perhaps because I could hold that rage, it gave her the spaciousness to get quiet and say, “Tell them thank you, thank you. When I came to America for my husband’s memorial, they came out in the thousands, Christian, Jew, Muslim. They didn’t know me. They didn’t know me, but they showed up for me. They cared for me. They loved me. Tell them thank you for their love.” Brené, I returned to the United States with that. I’m like, “How? How? The country didn’t hear my people’s story. They didn’t hear my people’s suffering.” But the local community in Mesa spread the news about Balbir Uncle’s story, and our stories, right, they break open the stereotypes that trap us. Local folks began to see him not as a terrorist or a foreigner, but as a brother, as a neighbor. And they showed up. They saw that his widow’s heart was now broken, that he would never live to see his grandchildren. They remembered how he would hand out candy to children who would come to the gas station. That if people came, they didn’t have enough money, he would let them go free. Like he was an embodiment.

VK: We remember him not just because of his death, but because of how he lived. You have those sages who live among us, and they heard his story and they wept and they grieved. And that their love saved this widow’s heart. And in turn, she saved mine. I came back and I said, “I’m going to tell these stories.” I feel like if I tell these stories, maybe people will see him the way that I do, the way that she does, the way that those people did when they showed up in Arizona. And that began, “My dear, don’t abandon your post.” That began…

BB: Yes.

VK: The rest of my life. And as I was traveling through the country telling my people’s story, I realized that the Sikh community struggling in the United States is bound up with the struggles of all of our communities who are still fighting for justice and freedom and liberation. And that I couldn’t just fight for my people anymore. And so I built my toolkit. I became a lawyer and organizer and faith leader and speaker and writer. And as I was going, I thought, we are making the nation safer for the next generation. That’s what we’re doing. We’re in the struggle. I went from Guantanamo Bay to inside Supermax prisons to forgotten corners of the United States to places where the mass shooting has just happened. I just… It was breathless. I was always leaning forward. I was always pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing. And then I became a mother at the onset of the 2016 election season.

VK: Just when hate violence is skyrocketing, once again, rivaling, rivaling the numbers that we saw on the aftermath of 911. And I look at my son and I just, I’m raising him in a country more dangerous than it was for me or even for my grandfather who arrived a century ago. What? What was it all for? I had an existential crisis. I couldn’t use any tools in my kit. And that voice, that little critic voice that was there from the beginning, that little critic voice was saying, “Oh, you can’t live in this world. You’re not strong enough.” I think of how many women, how many women of color, how many women of color who are activists, let their life be taken, their lives are taken. And I’m so grateful that I was caught by community. My mother who said, “Oh my love, you’ve been pushing for almost 20 years. You’ve got to be breathing the wisdom of the midwife, right?” She doesn’t say, push all the way. She says, “Breathe my love, then push, then breathe again.” There’s a kind of cadence, a kind of rhythm to sustain one’s energy in any long labor.

BB: Oh, yeah.

VK: And I didn’t know how to breathe. I just was pushing so much. I was grounding my bones into the earth. I was always comparing my suffering to the people I was serving.

VK: And so, of course, I was never worthy enough. And so it was my mother who said, “Come, come to the rainforest,” which you know, is like the womb of the earth. It’s warm and wet and safe and generative. And it was like I was taking my first deep breath and all the guilt, all the guilt of leaving the country just when it was on fire and my community saying, “Go. Like, breathe, like process. See us from the outside.” Sometimes you have to leave the country to see it from the outside. And I realized that what my people have suffered and what our generation is suffering is not an aberration. It’s the starting point of this country. This country was born in colonization and genocide and slavery. And I think about all the indigenous mothers and the black mothers who had to ask themselves the same question, looking at their children, “What of their future?” And I’m like, how did they survive? I’d always told my story of like the American dream. My grandfather arrives in 1913, but if I just move the timeline back just a few decades, there is blood in that farmland that I called my own.

VK: We’re all participants in a story that began in atrocity. And the stunning thing is that on this soil, a dream arose. A dream arose that didn’t have to, a dream arose of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And the people for whom those words were never meant seized on those words and labored for those words, and tried to make them true, increase… Expanded the circle of we to mean more and more and more of us. And I thought, “Okay. The story… What if? What if? What if this is not the darkness of the tomb. What if this is the darkness of the womb? What if our America is not dead, but a country still waiting to be born?”

BB: Be born. Yeah.

VK: What if all of our ancestors with all of what they survived are behind us now whispering in our ear, “You are brave. You are brave.” What if the story of America is one long labor, a series of expansions and contractions? And here’s the thing Brené, I don’t know if you and I are going to live to see the results of our labor. I don’t know if we will live to see a healthy multiracial democracy. I want to. I want to live to see a sustainable planet where human beings learn how to live with each other and with the earth. And even if I do not, I know that my ancestors did not live to see me and the freedoms I have and the freedoms my daughter have, and yet they labored. And so it’s all our… Our sacred task is to simply show up because this is our turn in the cycle. And just like labor, every time we show up, we’re creating more space. We have to believe we’re creating more space than there was before.

VK: Every crisis feels like the last contraction and yet every cycle, there’s more. I think there are more of us than ever before, Brené. More of us awake to our oneness, more of us longing for a world of belonging, more of us who know that justice and liberation and peace run together. More of us than the warmongers and the terrorists and the demagogues who profit from our despair, who want us to believe that only those who have weapons or wealth hold the power in this world. But there are millions of us. And I see us showing up in ways that I have never seen before. Whenever people who have no obvious reason to love one another come together to grieve with each other, to care for each other, to organize with each other, then I see glimpses of the nation that is waiting to be born. And I remember the wisdom of the midwife. “Breathe,” she says, “and then push.”

VK: The final stage in birthing labor is the most dangerous and the most painful. It feels like dying, right? It’s so breathless. The crisis keep coming. The contractions keep coming. You can’t even take a breath. It feels like dying. And yet that final stage is the stage that precedes the birth of new life. It is called transition. I believe we are in transition now, as a nation and as a species, that our lives are unfolding in this era of great transition. And no one goes to battle alone. No one gives birth alone. No one should give birth alone, right? We need our people. We need our people. We need our midwives by our side. We need our ancestors at our backs. And this brings me full circle back to you and why I have loved you from afar for so long is that you have created a community of people who know how to gather courage from each other. With the wisdom you give them, the words you give them, the tools you give them, knowing that they’re not alone, that we can be vulnerable together and courageous together to play whatever our role is. Each of us has a separate role, a different role in the labor.

VK: And we can ask ourselves in the deepest wisdom inside of us, “What is my role? What role do I want to play in this moment in history, in this era of great transition?” But to see other people stand up courageously gives us the power to do it too. And we can only do that in community. And that is what you have set into motion in the world. So I am deeply honored to be in your community and deeply grateful for you to be the midwife in my ear. Saying, “Breathe my love and push.”

BB: Thank you. I’ve learned so much from you. I think learning about your ancestors, it’s like every page I read in Sage Warrior, I saw your heart. Like it made you make sense to me. Do you know what I mean?

VK: That’s so beautiful.

BB: The midwifery, I think that piece is so… When I talk to friends of mine who are, you know, I’m at the age now where a lot of my friends are having grandkids. But, when I used to talk to people, they were pregnant for the first time and they said, “What’s it going to be like?” And I said, “It’s going to be everything you’ve ever known and nothing you’ve ever experienced.”

VK: Yes.

BB: And there’s going to be a lot of holding on tight and letting go at the same time. And it’s going to be messier than you think. No one tells you how messy it is. And they’re like, “Oh my God, bad messy?” And I said, “No life messy.” It’s not a sterile act to come into a sterile world. It’s a messy act to come into a messy world. One of the things that strikes me about your story, I don’t know, do you think you can hold the post without ever returning to the womb to inhale? I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anyone actually hold a post over time.

VK: Yes.

BB: Without returning to a womb to inhale.

VK: The womb is the post.

BB: The womb is the post. Yeah.

VK: Yeah. The post is not a fixed position or a fixed role. It is the point at which your deepest wisdom aligns with your words and actions.

BB: Golly, say it again. Come on. Say it again.

VK: The post is where your deepest wisdom aligns with your words and your actions. This was the wisdom of my ancestors when they called us to become Sant Sipahi or sage warriors. The sage is one who makes space to cultivate that inner wisdom, that goes into the womb, that breathes and feels love surging inside of them, the connection between themselves and everybody else, all the way up to the stars. You need spaces to cultivate the sage inside of you and rest in that deep wisdom. And then the warrior, the Sipahi, is one who takes all of that information into courageous action out in the world. Deepest wisdom aligned with your words and your actions. I think so many of us, especially for activists, were only taught to warrior, to do the push, to do the push, to warrior, to be loud. And I finally learned, how do you hold yourself over time? How do you find resilience to be able to breathe and then push?

VK: Sage and warrior, love and revolution. That the two must go together for us to last and meet the call that we are, you know, in an era of such great transition.

BB: Okay. I have two thoughts about Sage Warrior and 7,000 post-it notes again. [laughter] I was like, more of my book is highlighted than not highlighted. No, really it’s true. It’s… two things came to me when I was reading it. One, as someone who studies neuroscience and the neurobiology of psychology and emotion and social relationships, it’s taken a long time for the scientist to catch up with your ancestors. [laughter] Y’all got there first. I’m just saying. I’m just saying that everything… I wish y’all could see her. She’s laughing so hard, she’s holding her stomach. Y’all were like the OG neuroscientists.

VK: Oh, I love that. I love that.

BB: But it’s true. You know that, right?

VK: Yes. Yeah. Well, now that you’ve said it, I feel like I can say it now too.

BB: I actually called a friend of mine who is… Studies neurolinguistics and said, “There’s a whole group of people who got here way before us.” And so we should actually credit them every time we have a hypothesis because…

VK: I just need to say I’m having an out of body experience. Okay. Because…

BB: Why?

VK: I’ve spent my whole life moving through this world illegible, like unable to be read. Like, “What are you? You’re a Sikh. Is it Sikh or Sikh?” I’m like, “It’s Sikh.” But if you say Sikh, we’re just happy you even know who we are. Like most people around me for most of my life have no idea who Sikhs are, what we believe, that we’re a people in the first place. And most of my life, because of the racial violence we’ve survived, I’ve been focused on telling my community stories of pain and suffering. And those stories need to be acknowledged. It was only when I felt the crises coming and the world feeling apocalyptic that I realized I have to go back to my ancestors’ wisdom, my grandfather’s stories at night and find medicine for myself. And in the course of writing this book, I began to see maybe this medicine is exactly what the whole world needs right now.

BB: Yes.

VK: And so for you, someone who I’ve loved and respected for so long to not just know my people, but like love my people and love this wisdom and not just love this wisdom, but say, “Oh, this is what we all need now,” is a… I really didn’t know I would have this experience in my lifetime.

BB: I will tell you that we just ordered a copy of your book for everyone in our office as an organizational read because I think it’s so foundational to not only the OG neuroscientist about oneness, but also, I have been doing a lot of research and work and I write about it in all my books, but I’m deep dive on it right now about Carl Jung said that paradox is the greatest spiritual gift of humanity. And it’s the only thing that comes close to capturing what it means to be human. And it just seems like the entire foundation of wisdom from your ancestors is built on a rejection of false dichotomies.

VK: Yes.

BB: Is that true?

VK: Deeply true. Like radically true, like that can’t be true kind of true. It’s not just…

BB: [chuckle] A paradox inside of a paradox to answer a paradox. I have died and gone to sage warrior heaven. Keep going.

VK: So Guru Nanak, our first teacher, the founder of the faith, when he disappeared in the river in the year 1499 in Punjab, he disappeared for three days. On the third day, he emerged with a vision of oneness [foreign word]. Oneness ever unfolding. But you know what his first utterance was? [foreign words] There is no Hindu. There is no Muslim. This was more than we are connected or even we belong to each other. This was, there is no you against me at all. That we are so part of each other that we can look upon the face of anyone and say, “You are a part of me, I do not yet know.” And that oneness went so deep that it cannot be expressed inside of language because what is language? It’s subject and noun. I am over here and you are over there. And we have to live inside of a world of dichotomy to function.

VK: We have a stream of consciousness that says this, but there are moments, Guru Nanak taught, there are moments, and you know these moments, when everything starts to get quiet. When the music swells, when you are looking into the eyes of your child, when you are at the mountaintop and the vista just, those moments of awe, those moments of wonder where they’re ineffable, there are no words at all, and the line between you and me starts to blur.

BB: It wobbles, yeah.

VK: Right? Guru Nanak… Our ancestors were teaching that those moments are not just throwaway moments. They’re not just incidental. They are sacred insights. They are portals into the true nature of things. That there is no essential separation between you and me, between you and other species, between you and the trees, that we are all cooked in the belly of long-distance stars, that we are… and now science is catching up, like you said, right? We’re breathing in atoms that circulated in the lungs of our descendants. We’re breathing out atoms that will circulate in the lungs of our future generations.

BB: Made of stars.

VK: Right? Right? Like we’re biologically, cosmologically, physiologically, you are a part of me, I do not yet know, is a spiritual truth that holds. But Guru Nanak taught that, you know, when you have these moments of transcendence that, and you taste oneness, you taste the truth, that you actually can’t stay there. And there are many mystical traditions. I mean, the thing is, this is the mystical heart of all the wisdom traditions, Christian, Jewish, Islam, like, this is a truth that’s echoed through time. But Guru Nanak taught you can’t just stay there. You have to come down back from the mountain, till your fields, raise your children, sweat, serve, be of the earth, be of the people, but don’t forget the taste that you got.

VK: Because if you see, if we know that we’re one, that any face that you see, sister, brother, sibling, beloved, my love, if love… My grandfather would say, “Love is dangerous business. Love is dangerous business.” Because if I see you as a part of me, then I have to serve you when you need me, I have to stand up and fight for you when you are in harm’s way. And so those first ancestors, this was, you know, they said we can’t just, and this is why I love Bebe Nanaki, which is…

BB: Yeah. My God.

VK: Right.

BB: My Fav. Yeah. I just… Yeah.

VK: Guru Nanak’s sister. What did Guru Nanak do? He had this revelation, and then he left on these Udasis, these legendary travels. And in all four cardinal directions across South Asia, he wasn’t doing commandments, issuing commandments, or telling stories, he was singing.

VK: He was singing with his Muslim bard, Bhai Mardana, to give people an experience in the body that he had in the river. And so as he was singing for those decades, who was back home raising his children? Who was holding down the home? Who was making the rotis and bringing the cha to a boil? It was his sister, it was Bebe Nanaki. And I thought, she is the first Sikh. She is the first person who sang those songs of love and oneness, and then practiced what she sang in her labors. And this is where so much of my work right now, I can’t believe we haven’t even talked about it. I’m, you know, I’ve spent 20 years of my life organizing around hate. When I had that crisis with my son, and went to the rainforest, and came back to the country, I said, “Oh, I want to spend the rest of my life organizing around love.” What we need is a shift in culture and consciousness, a way of being, a way of seeing, that leaves no one outside of our circle of care. What we need is what Guru Nanak and Bebe Nanaki knew, a revolution of the heart. Revolutionary love is the call of our times. And how do we define love in this culture? I mean, this is where your work around emotional literacy is so powerful and essential. We tend to think of love as a feeling that comes and goes, ebbs and flows.

BB: Yes.

VK: But we know, right? We know. I remember when my son landed on my chest, I was like, feeling that rush of oxytocin of my body, like, “This is love. I’m falling in love.” And I was like, there’s a place for the falling. In the meantime, my mother was opening up her bag and taking out her dal and chholle and feeding me, like feeding her baby while I was feeding mine. And I looked at my mother and I thought, “Oh, she knew what I was just beginning to learn.” Love is more than a rush of emotion. Love is sweet labor. Fierce.

BB: Love is sweet labor.

VK: Bloody.

BB: That’s why. That’s my Bebe. That’s, yeah… That’s…

VK: Right.

BB: That’s, yeah.

VK: And then because love is labor, you know, fierce, bloody, demanding, a choice we make, love engages all of our emotions. Joy is the gift of love. Grief is the price of love. Rage is what we harness to protect that which we love. And when we feel like we’ve reached our limit, I believe wonder is what returns us to the labor of love. So when I go back to my ancestors and I say, “How did they practice revolutionary love?” It was Nanaki who practiced it. She was the first Sikh. And all of those who followed Nanak and Nanaki began to gather in community. And what kind of community was it? It was like what you said, dismantling all dichotomies.

VK: And at that time in South Asia, the caste system was oppressive. Patriarchy was oppressive. They built an anti-caste liberation movement where they were. Because Guru Nanak would say, “If you wish to play the game of love with me, step forth with your head on your hand.” And he would say, “Higher than truth is the living of truth.” And so here was this community of mystics and poets, farmers and householders, who are practicing an alternative way of being. Like any such liberation experiment through history, such a community directly challenges those who want to rule by doctrinal and state authority. So it was only a matter of time, this was 17th century India at this point, where the Mughal Empire came for our people with armies. Our ancestors might’ve been annihilated, might’ve been wiped off the face of our planet, just like the Gnostics or the Cathars or any other mystical community.

VK: But something very unusual happened in the course of human history. This community of mystics resisted. They became warriors.

BB: Warriors. Okay. Goosebumps. I’m telling you, I have goosebumps. No I do have goosebumps because I knew they were going to come for Bebe Nanaki. I knew it. It’s interesting that you call her the first Sikh because I think I fell in love with her… For those of y’all like I called Valarie and I was like, “I’m in love.” I’m in love with one of your ancestors and I think because in this season of my life to see revolutionary love expressed in every day packing lunches, walking the goats, getting the kids to where they need to be, we’ve so diminished that as the most powerful form of both love and being a warrior that I thought, “She’s what I want to be.” At first I was mad because I was like, “Oh my God the guy coming out of the river is going to get all the attention and this story is going to end up where he’s the hero and she’s the sidekick.” And that was so my modern overlay of fear. But then I saw wow mysticism takes many forms, revolutionary love happens in the smallest of moments. Do you know what I mean?

VK: Yes, I’m pretty…

BB: Why are you… You’re making a funny face?

VK: Yes, because I learned this the hard way. I used to think that there was a hierarchy when it came to social change. That the loudest voices on the stage were the most powerful. And then in mothering my babies, they’re now 5 and 9, I started to be transformed in paying attention to what was happening in the classroom and in the neighborhood park and around our kitchen table, and it was humbling. I realized that we’re co-creating culture every second with every breath we take, every word we say, every choice we make and that it’s possible to practice the world that we want in the spaces between us.

BB: That’s it.

VK: And in fact that’s the only way…

BB: I was going to say yeah.

VK: We will presage the world to come is if we live into it now. And so now when I talk to folks I’m like “You have a role. What is your role?” The tender touch after the vigil is just as important as a speech that everyone hears. The way that we explain the news to our child is just as… More important than our social media post about it. The heart to heart brave conversation behind closed doors that no one will ever see about the policy is just as important as the big march to change the policy. Each of our labors are sacred, worthy, necessary.

BB: Tell me about what happens when the warrior is ignited when they come for your ancestors?

VK: Yes this is where I see Mata Ganga. Do you remember her?

BB: Oh yes.

VK: Drowning in a river of grief, her hair just falling in waves around her.

BB: That was hard to read. I’m going to tell you.

VK: The first ancestor who was executed by the empire was our fifth Sikh teacher Guru Arjan. And he left behind what we believe was a 14-year-old son, we believe he was so young and they had a choice at that point. His wife Mata Ganga and his son Hargobind. The empire wanted to come after them too, wanted to lock them up, wanted to confiscate their property. And I imagine the elders around them deciding what to do. Do we escape to the hills? Do we retreat? Do we hide? And Mata Ganga, drowning in her grief, must have found a way to alchemize that pain into courage and how? How? I kept asking myself how, and then the image came of her young son braiding her long hair and her kind of being tugged back up to the surface and looking at her son and realizing that she could summon the depths of her courage for herself for him. And the next scene is a succession ceremony where the guru the young guru is anointed as the next leader and he points to a sword and this is shocking because no one had been appointed by a sword and then he points to a second sword and he called them Miri and Piri. What do those mean Miri and Piri? Inner sovereignty and outer sovereignty.

BB: This is so huge.

VK: Inner power and outer power, and that inaugurated a new era in our history where our ancestors became warriors who resisted and who survived. And I do want to say this because when I was a little girl when you go to a gurdwara, a Sikh house of worship, you see the swords. And I used to tremble because I would always imagine blood on the edge of the sword, and I used to think, “Oh maybe I’m not courageous enough to walk this path if that makes me tremble.” But being an activist looking into the open coffins of people who look like my aunties and uncles, witnessing so much bloodshed, talking to people who have committed that bloodshed, I believe that we can reclaim that warrior energy for creative nonviolent powerful action today. That we have many, many more tools than our ancestors did. And so for folks who are like, “I can’t take battlefield sword imagery,” just release it. That’s why I use a lot of midwife metaphors too. Like it could be like the birthing labor requires a certain kind of courage and so does warrioring. But if you are someone who wants to get serious about how much integrity and discipline it takes to be able to fight for justice to be courageous in our labors.

VK: Even if it means tucking our children to bed when the mass shooting has just happened, and we can’t breathe but we’re still going to tell them the bedtime story. That’s warrior courage too. And so to be able to honor those energies in us, the sage energies and the warrior energies, is where I think our ancestors wisdom is most potent today.

BB: I want to bring this to a moment in recent culture where I thought about you in the weirdest way. It was during the democratic national convention and there were two images that I think I saw on my feed, and they were two different people posting, but I saw one of Vice President Harris and there were signs around her that said, “When we fight we win.” And the second image was Gus Walz crying and hugging his dad, and I thought about you and I thought about this book and I actually posted something to stories that just said, “Fighting to win and loving out loud with our whole hearts are not mutually exclusive. They’re both acts of courage. They’re both acts of vulnerability. They’re rare.” And I thought about the sage warrior. I thought about things that lived in a reconciled way in my body and my heart but I’ve never been able to externally talk about them until this book maybe which is a lot of times people who share my beliefs and I’m a really deep faith person. A lot of people that share my beliefs, I guess I would identify if it’s important is probably a very… a progressive Christian, say things to me like, “Why the fight language? Why the winning language? Why the arena metaphor?”

BB: And then at the same time, “But you are such a believer in love.” When I read this book what I realized is I just came up through a very mystic form of kind of Jungian Catholicism, and I never saw those things as mutually exclusive. I thought, “Wow. I don’t know that anyone would exist across any culture if women had not been fighting from the very beginning.” And then at the same time I do believe in love and God and oneness. And I’ve never been able to make out for myself why those never felt mutually exclusive.

VK: Let me just take a moment to sink into it because it’s so powerful. So just one moment. It’s what you said about paradox earlier that the deepest truths are bound up in paradox. And I have felt the integration of these two energies from the start because of my ancestors’ song, prayers, and wisdom. It’s almost… It’s requiring me to do extra labor to figure out how to explain how the two go together. Like how…

BB: I see you really working. No, I know. I’ve got baited breath. I’m like, “Okay. She’s working over there. This is good because when she puts her mind to something, she’s going to come out with something that’s going to be on a post-it note on my laptop.”

VK: To pursue a life of revolutionary love is to face the hot winds of the world with the eyes of a sage and the heart of a warrior. You need both Brené. You need both to live a fully awakened life and a fully meaningful life, you need both energies. And what I love about walking the path is that so much of this… So Sikh ethics is not like… There’s no rules, there’s no 10 prescriptions, or check off these boxes. Sikh ethics invites a spontaneous way of being in the world. It’s a way of being a way of seeing in the world. And what is aligning with your deepest wisdom in one moment may look entirely different in a different season of your life right?

BB: Yeah.

VK: That last election season I had to leave the country in order to breathe. This election season I’m getting on a bus to 45 cities around the country before the election to ignite people in love and courage on this Revolutionary Love Bus Tour. There is no prescription. It’s about getting quiet enough to ask yourself what is my role in this moment? And in any given moment there might be like, “This is my time to fight, to wield the sword. This is my time to charge, to make the push.” And in the next moment it’s like, “This is my moment to breathe, to expand my heart, to open myself in care, to fall into tears as I let myself love more than I ever have.”

VK: The warrior fights, the sage loves, it’s a path of revolutionary love. And it doesn’t have to be so sequential. Like we know on the birthing table there is a breathe moment and then there’s a push moment. But I know that I have to take some of that courage while I’m breathing. And I know that I need to take some of that serenity while I’m pushing.

BB: Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

VK: So then it becomes an integrated way of being in the world. And my hope, my invitation with this book because our ancestors believe that wisdom landed in the body experientially through music, through sound, through meditation. And so the book is not just a book. It has meditations at the end of every story and it comes with a musical album so you can hear and listen to the truth reverberate inside of your body through the sacred music and it comes with a study guide if you want to activate your mind to figure out how to walk the path that end. And I have to say all of this is a doorway to Sikh wisdom but it’s really just leading us back to the mystical heart of all our wisdom traditions which is why I love what you said about Jungian Catholicism integrating these energies in you from the start.

VK: I feel like these are our wisest ancestors across time and place and culture. Can we draw from them for the medicine we need now? I often think of Noah’s Ark about how Noah, in order to build the civilization to come, he didn’t bring all of the animals. He had to be selective. It’s like, “We don’t need all of the stories. We don’t need all of our history to be able to build that civilization that we need to birth the world we can. But we do need the select stories, the select songs, the select wisdom that is most potent for us now.” And so this was the treasure chest I think we need going forward. And the invitation is for all of us to mine our ancestors and decide what do we need to take forward. What goes on my Ark?

BB: It’s interesting because I think one of the things in addition to falling in love with your ancestral wisdom, I really climbed as fast as I could back into the wisdom from my own faith tradition, and something interesting happened on that journey, which I know, I kept to saying myself, “Oh this is Valarie’s plan all along.” Like this is what she thought was going to happen. And one of the things that’s interesting is I’m an Episcopalian but in that tradition we have this prayer called the Mysteries of Faith. And one of the things that I kept digging into is I don’t think we need everybody and every story on that Ark. But I bet if we got the Ark where we needed it and we did an inventory I would bet what we’d find on that Ark are a lot of mystics and very few faith rule makers.

VK: Yes.

BB: And I think we would find Jewish mystics and Muslim mystics and Sikh mystics and Buddhist mystics and Catholic mystics. I mean I think we would have a… It would be a mystic palooza. And I think there would be mystics from Black tradition, African mystics. It would be global. But I think the rule makers of contemporary faith would be with noodles in the water.

VK: [laughter] That was very compassionate.

BB: Thank you. I’m not going to just put them in deep water, and I’m going to give them a noodle, but I think that… Yeah. I want to say the other thing that’s really… Where I thought about your book a lot with the music is of course neuroscientist Oliver Sacks has a quote about music that says music needs no mediation, it pierces the heart directly. And again I thought from the very first songs coming out of the river in chapter one I thought, “Wow, this guy’s the first Oliver Sacks neuroscientist.” And then it goes from this sacred sharing of the song to Bebe Nanaki humming them as you’re making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches before school. It’s like this is not out of reach elitist. This is the call, in my faith, this would be the liturgical call and response of everyday song that you can never do alone because that doesn’t exist alone.

VK: Yeah. On the way to school my children are singing. [singing in foreign language] This album because we’ve been able to get tracks as it’s been developed over the year. To see my children light up and just hum as she’s playing with her dolls, as they’re going to school, as they’re brushing their teeth. I’m like, “Brush your teeth.”

BB: Yes.

VK: But how amazing that you’re singing the songs. And in our tradition, there’s a concept called Chardi Kala, ever rising joy, even in darkness, ever rising spirits. The thing about joy is that you can’t force it. You can only create the conditions to invite it to come.

BB: Oh God.

VK: And so the singing it’s like we’re just inviting the conditions, lifting your… Even if you don’t feel it, you listen to the music, you lift your voice in song and then the glance might come. The moment might sweep you off your feet, you might get a taste of that oneness, and then you come down and are able to see with those eyes of a sage, heart of a warrior. But the key is, keep singing. Brené I’ve come to… I wanted to hear what you thought about this because I’ve come to think about hope as a feeling that waxes and wanes for me. Sometimes it’s really bright and luminous, and I feel so hopeful. And then other nights I mean I can taste the ash in my mouth from what we have just seen in the world. I feel hopeless. Maybe it’s just a crescent. Maybe I don’t see it at all. And in the dark, I realize what matters is the work that my hands do. And if I can sing a song in that darkness, and if my children can sing along with me, then I know that I have the courage to show up and do my thing, play my role until the moon comes back and I can feel it on my face again.

BB: If we’re playing good poet, bad poet, I’m like the sad academic that comes after the poet that says interestingly in the research…

VK: Well, I want to know. [laughter]

BB: But it’s so funny because like… Yeah so what’s interesting about hope is basically the research we have on hope largely comes from a scholar named C. R. Snyder, who was at University of Kansas at Lawrence, and what’s interesting is he argued… he’s no longer with us, but he argued that hope was not an emotion at all. That hope is a cognitive behavioral process that is made up of three pieces goal, pathway, and agency. And so we experience hope when we can get clear about what it is we want to achieve. We understand the path that may lead us there and we have the tenacity, the sage warrior tenacity, to plan B, C, D, E, and F if plan A doesn’t work. And the last piece of hope is agency, I believe in my ability to do this. And so when you say that the taste of ash diminishes the feeling of hope, and it’s not until you have work in your hands, that’s exactly, in a far less poetic way, what C. R. Snyder would say is that hope is not an emotion that comes and goes it’s directly related to what we are doing and our behavior and our thinking. And so it’s almost like what you said about joy, that we invite joy by actively creating the circumstances, by unlocking the door and calling for the visit. And so with hope we unlock that feeling by connecting with what it is that we want, our belief in ourself to get it, and putting work in our hands toward it.

VK: It is.

BB: Yeah and so it’s interesting when we talk about our kids because we really see high levels of hopelessness for the first time because there’s a disconnect I think in these younger generations between wanting to feel that sense of possibility and their own agency and putting the work in their hands. And let me tell you one thing about this book, there’s not a chapter in this book, there’s not a story in this book, where these mystics and prophets and ancestors do not have work in their hands, is one thing I noticed.

VK: Yes. Yes. Yes.

BB: It’s love work. It’s sage work. It’s fight work, it’s warrior work, but they’re never lying about waiting for things to happen. Would you agree?

VK: Absolutely. And I want to know what does the research say about holding that position of hope if you know that you may not live to see the results of your labor?

BB: I wish I could think of the person who said this quote, because it’s one of my favorites, but I don’t think in both mystical or activist traditions anyone plans to enjoy the shade of the tree they plant. I don’t think it’s why we do it. I think… I don’t know that my kids will enjoy that shade, but that’s not the point for me. The point for me is for my kids to see me walking toward digging the hole for the tree and that bringing meaning to my life and I don’t want to teach my kids that we only do the labor of planting trees if we’re going to enjoy the shade. Because I don’t know how long it will take to get from this great regression to the great progression.

VK: Yeah and so what helps you plant joyfully?

BB: Avoiding the expectation that all planting is joyful.

VK: [laughter] That’s good.

BB: [laughter] I think my relationship with joy and my relationship with the sword and the ability to have both…

VK: Yeah.

BB: I’m not really afraid of either. I think this is maybe related to my sobriety because I’ve been sober for 28 years and this is a big part of that program and that work for me, is I will keep my activism inventory and you keep your activism inventory. And my hope for you is that when you die you’re as at peace with your inventory as I already am with mine.

VK: I feel moved to tell you about how my grandfather died, my sage warrior. He was surrounded by his family and his children and they dabbed the Amrit, the sacred waters, from the Golden Temple on his lips. And he looked at each person and he smiled. And he waited until my grandmother did the same. And then he took the cloth into his mouth. He sighed and he died.

BB: Oh gosh.

VK: It was a chosen death. It was a masterful death. It was a sage death and…

BB: Poetic.

VK: Brené I was so angry for so long that he left without teaching me the secret to his fearlessness. And then I realized that his last lesson to me was the way that he died. And I thought if I am going to die like that I better practice. And so every night for 16 years I have this meditation that I do the moment my head hits the pillow I say to myself think of this day as an entire lifetime with a beginning, a middle, and an end. What was the most joyful part of this lifetime? And I noticed what the joy feels like in my body because even the most miserable days have that moment where the birds sang right?

BB: Oh yeah. Yes.

VK: The second question what was the hardest part of this lifetime? Every day has a moment that was hard and you had to overcome it to get to the pillow. And so notice what that feels like in your body. And then what are you most grateful for in this lifetime? Every lifetime, something new, something beautiful to be grateful for. Notice what gratitude feels like in your body. And then here comes the daring part. Are you ready to let go of this lifetime? Are you ready to behold everything that you’ve done, all the work, all the planting and know that it was enough. Are you ready to behold everyone you’ve loved and kiss them and let them go? Are you ready to die a kind of death? And every night, sometimes I had to think two more thoughts but every night I’m like, “Are you ready? Now, are you ready?” I sigh and I die. And so far this morning I wake up to the gift of a new lifetime and my children… I mean, they still sleep with me which is a whole other conversation. But my children and I look at each other and we say “I get to be alive. I get to be alive today. I get to be alive today with you.” I don’t say “It’s going to be okay today, you’re going to be safe today, the planting is going to be joyful today.”

VK: I say “You get to be alive today. You get to choose who you will be today.” And that too is enough. 16 years of this practice, practicing courage in the face death, has enabled me to practice courage in the face of life, to show up to my labors to the sacred task and to know the quiet the little critic, that feeling of enoughness but is it enough? Are you enough? Are you enough? Oh my love. You are brave enough in this day, in this moment. Can you show up with your whole heart, with your whole love knowing that it’s enough and it’s enough, that you are enough. It’s enough, you are enough.

BB: This is the most profound and beautiful place to end this conversation. Sage Warrior: Wake to Oneness, Practice Pleasure, Choose Courage, Become Victory. An amazing, amazing gift to us. I mean just a very generous offering so thank you for that.

VK: Brené I love you so much.

BB: Oh, I love you right back. So yeah.

VK: And I’m so grateful I get to journey through this lifetime with you. Thank you.

BB: I feel the same way and I’m just holding your book right now thinking about your grandfather. And sometimes we don’t know if we’re on the right path but for this fifth generation Texan to have a quote from Bebe Nanaki on her laptop I would say you’re holding the post. Thank you.

BB: Well I hope you all found this conversation as incredible as I did. I’m just not the same after reading this book. Sage Warrior is to me a sacred invitation. I could listen to Valarie talk about her traditions and her history and her stories for a really long time. I hope you enjoyed it. You can learn more about this episode along with all of the show notes on brenebrown.com. We’ll link to Valarie’s new book. And we’ll also let you know about the Revolutionary Love Bus Tour in the thick of the election season. They are going to 40 plus cities across the country to ignite courageous action rooted in love. At every stop the tour is going to offer storytelling, music, ancestral wisdom, tools, community building. The tour is all based on this new book Sage Warrior. Don’t miss it. Look it up. I’ll link to it on the episode page. It’s RevolutionaryLove.org/tour. Just remember we usually have the transcripts within 3–5 days of the episode going live. You can also sign up for our newsletter on the same episode page. Stay awkward, brave, and kind and here’s to the call for revolutionary love.

BB: Unlocking Us is produced by Brené Brown Education and Research Group. The music is by Carrie Rodriguez and Gina Chavez. Get new episodes as soon as they’re published by following Unlocking Us on your favorite podcast app. We are part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more award-winning shows at podcast.voxmedia.com.

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