Episode 45: Valarie Kaur – Wisdom & Love in the Sikh Tradition

Jared: You’re listening to Faith for Normal People, the only other God ordained podcast on the internet. 

Pete: I’m Pete Enns. 

Jared: And I’m Jared Byas.

Pete: Hey folks, we’re headed back to Theology Beer Camp this year from October 17 to 19 in the Mile High City. 

Jared: That’s right. We’re going to Denver, Colorado to nerd out over theology with other podcasters and hopefully, you too. Not only will there be amazing speakers to learn from, such as our very own Peter Enns, but also plenty of craft beer, live podcasts, nineties karaoke and fall festivities.

Pete: The folks at Homebrewed Christianity have given us an exclusive discount code just for our listeners to get $50 off. Head to Theologybeer.camp for more info and to reserve your spot and then use Code BIBLE4NORMALPEOPLE, that’s BIBLE4NORMALPEOPLE with no spaces for $50 off your ticket. Hope to see you there!

Jared: Today on Faith for Normal People, we’re talking about wisdom and love in the Sikh tradition with Valarie Kaur. Valarie is a renowned Sikh activist, lawyer, best selling author, and spiritual leader. She’s the founder of the Revolutionary Love Project, which is both a movement and a powerful learning hub Designed to help people learn about loving ourselves, others, and our opponents.

Pete: Today we’re talking about her brand new book, Sage Warrior, which is out now and available wherever you’d like to buy your books. We also want to mention that Valarie is taking the Revolutionary Love project on a bus tour across 30+ cities in the United States from September through October. 

Jared: She mentions this in the episode, but the aim is to energize hearts, build community bonds, and equip thousands of people with practical tools to integrate revolutionary love into daily life. So check out the tour stops to see if she’ll be in your city at revolutionarylove.org/tour.  

Pete: Finally, don’t forget to stay tuned at the end of the episode for Quiet Time, during which we’ll reflect on our own takeaways from the conversation. So with all that in mind, enjoy the episode with Valarie Kaur.

Valarie: “There’s a kind of cadence, a kind of rhythm to sustaining one’s energy over any long labor, raising children, building a movement, rebirthing a nation. Letting in those moments of wonder, letting in pleasure, letting in joy, in order to feel the magic and mystery and beauty of being alive. And from that place, you can respond. You can’t continue to respond from a place of trauma and think you will last.”

Pete: Valarie, welcome to our podcast. It’s great to have you. 

Valarie: I am so glad to be here with you. 

Pete: Listen, we’re going to talk about something that’s going to be not down the middle of the road for many of our listeners. And I’d like to just start, if you can provide a history for us of Sikhism and how, you know, how it connects to other religious traditions, like maybe especially Islam and Hinduism.

Valarie: The Sikh faith is one of the world’s largest faith traditions. It’s one of the youngest. It is 500 some years old. There are 23 million Sikhs worldwide and half a million Sikhs in the United States. You might hear it pronounced Sikh (seek) which is fine. No one will correct you. We’re just happy you know who we are.

In Punjabi language, in our native language, it’s pronounced Sikh, which literally means one who learns and is always learning. The Sikh tradition is a faith of love. It began in what is now India and Pakistan in the region of Punjab, 550 years ago, Punjab was a land of conquest, cruelty, a place where hierarchy reigned.

The dominant religions at the time were the Hindu tradition and the Islamic tradition. And within those traditions, liberation movements grew. People who didn’t like the hierarchies and the patriarchies and the violence. And so mystics from Islam emerged. Sufis from the north who came to Punjab. And Bhaggats or saints or devotional saints from the Hindu tradition came to Punjab from the south.

So Punjab was this fertile meeting place of language and culture and new ideas. And from this place, the Sikh faith was born. It converged, it began with a man named Nanak. Nanak was a singer, a poet, one who meditated by the riverbank every morning for years in the place called Sultan Burlodi. And one morning he did not come back from the river to his family.

Villagers ran through the streets screaming, Bachao! Bachao! Help! Nanak has disappeared! They thought that Nanak had drowned in the river. They sent the villagers to search the riverbanks. And day and night, the sun rose and the sun fell. The sun rose and the sun fell. And finally, on the third day, the sun rose and the sun fell. And they thought he was a dead man. They thought he was a drowned man. They lost their sage. They lost their poet. 

And suddenly, Nanak appeared three kilometers upstream from where he disappeared, sitting in cremation grounds covered in ash. And his older sister, Nanki, is the one who found him and looked into his eyes. And the only thing that Nanak uttered was, Naako Hindu, Naako Muslimaan. There is no Hindu. There is no Muslim. 

Now, this was radical, it didn’t even make sense. It was not “see no stranger” or “there is no stranger.” It was like “there is no you against me at all. We are all one.” He began to preach this concept, to sing this concept of Ik Onkar, and this became the heart of the Sikh faith, Ik Onkar, which means oneness ever unfolding.

You are part of the one. I am part of the one. There is nothing outside of the one. We’re all part of a oneness that’s unfolding in wondrous multiplicity. And that oneness inspires a kind of love, a kind of revolutionary love. For if I see you as a part of me that I do not yet know, then I must stand up for you when you are in harm’s way.

Nanak began to sing this truth and those who followed him were known as Sikhs, one who learns and is always learning. And that is how, that is the origin story of the Sikh faith. This was 15th century India and people began to practice Nanak’s teachings, Nanak’s poetry, his sacred verses, trying to live the love that they sang.

And of course, like any liberation movement, you know, it was anti-caste, it was anti-hierarchy. It challenged the forces that ruled at the time. And at the time it was the Mughal Empire. And so the Mughal Empire dispatched its armies to crush the nascent Sikh community. And our ancestors might’ve disappeared from the face of the earth. I mean, these were mystics, these were poets, these were farmers. And yet they decided to do something that was very rare in human history. This community of mystics picked up the sword. The sages became warriors. They resisted. They fought back. And they survived. And that’s how I am here. That’s how I exist.

The path of the Sikh faith became one of the Sant Sepahi. The sage warrior. The warrior fights, the sage loves. It’s a path of revolutionary love. 

Jared: That’s beautiful. In your book, you tell a lot of stories and even here, as we talked about a brief history, you give us the story of Nanak. And, you know, you tell these stories of the gurus as you talk about wisdom and lessons for life. What, what’s the place of story in the Sikh tradition? How does story relate to wisdom? 

Valarie: You know, I couldn’t help it. I knew you were going to ask me about the Sikh faith. I’m like, okay, I’m going to keep it to the facts. I’m just going to give them, and I couldn’t help it. I was like, and you need to know the story as I grew up with the story. The origin story is so delicious. It lives inside of your body, not just your mind. And I think that’s why stories are so primary in the Sikh tradition. 

I grew up on the farmlands of California. My family has lived and farmed in the United States for 111 years. I mean, I have deep roots in the United States and yet my grandfather’s stories connected me, not just to the US soil, but to this history, this lineage of mystics and sages and warriors in India through story. In the Sikh tradition, it’s called Katha. Katha is to tell stories. Katha is just as important as Kirtan. Kirtan is the sacred music, setting the sacred verses that Nanak sang and the Guru sang into song. So every Sikh Gurdwara, every house of worship that you might walk into on a Sunday morning, has these two pieces.

You go, and you bow your head before the scriptures, which is all a compilation of sacred poetry, and you sit, and you listen to the kirtan, you let the music wash over you, because the wisdom of oneness is not just an idea to hold in your mind, but it’s an experience to reverberate inside of your whole body.

And then there will be someone who comes and tells a story, katha, so that the wisdom of the poetry is embodied in a time and place. You know that you can walk the path of love, too, because you hear stories about how your ancestors can. And that is what led me to write Sage Warrior, to write a treasure chest of these stories that I would want not only to pass on to my children, but to give to all of my sisters and brothers here in the United States as a way for you to be as ignited by the stories as I have been.

Jared: Can you say a little more about, within the Sikh tradition, you know, you talked about wisdom living in your bones. That’s maybe my interpretation of what you said, not just in our heads, but that embodiment. Can you say more about, of what, what is wisdom in the Sikh tradition? What does it, what does it mean to rest in wisdom?

What, you know, it just feels sometimes like it can be a vague term and we can assume that we know what it means, but what does it mean for Sikhism specifically? 

Valarie: The heart of the heart of Sikh wisdom is Ik Onkar, is oneness. Everything flows from there. To acknowledge our connection with the earth, with each other, with ourselves all the way up to the stars. That is the, the root of all wisdom. If you begin with that root and you let that truth nourish you and you speak from that and you act from that and you think from that and you be from that, then that is how you walk the path of love. If you believe and you feel that interconnection, then you trust that anything you do from that place is doing right by that internal wisdom.

And that can look many, many different ways. There are no rules in the Sikh tradition, no commandments. There is no prescription, really. It’s an invitation to walk a path where your deepest wisdom, your understanding and your felt sense of that connection, aligns with your words and actions. And so that wisdom, if it’s about action, if it’s not just about an idea to hold, but a way of moving through the world, the way of being in the world, then what does it mean if I can look up on the face of anyone or anything around me and say, you are a part of me I do not yet know. You are a part of me I do not yet know. 

Pete: So help us understand something because I mean, oneness is obviously very important in the tradition. It sounds like such a utilitarian kind of question to ask, but how does one wake to oneness? 

Valarie: Yes! this is what’s so delicious is that Guru Nanak and all the Sikh ancestors believe that wisdom, that such wisdom landed in the heart through music, [Pete makes a sound of revelation] through poetry, through art. That’s why the sound current, that’s why the music, that’s why poetry that gets you out of language, because even language is in duality, noun and subject, I over here versus you over there. And so we’re using these tools as channels to experience the oneness that always is. 

But the case that I make in the book is that there are actually many ways to wake to oneness. It doesn’t have to be so exotic or so strange. This moment right here, right now, is a moment to open your senses. What do you see? If you look around the room, what is the most beautiful thing you see? And you rest your attention on it. And then you notice the way the light plays on it, the colors. And you notice what it sounds like, what it feels like.

You open the aperture of beauty, you let yourself feel, ah, a sense of wonder. Perhaps you feel that when you look into the face of your child, or when the music swells, or when the sun sets, or when you’re on the mountain peak, or you’re inside of a moment of profound connection when you’re holding the hand of another.

There are so many ways where the endless talking in our head seizes, and we just peel back the surface, and we see the wonder, the mystery that is always there, the connectivity under it all. And those moments, those moments, those ordinary moments of wonder are not throwaway moments. They are not incidental. They are sacred portals into the true nature of things. 

Pete: You know, in the, in the Christian contemplative tradition, they talk about spontaneous contemplative experiences. And that sounds a lot like what you’re saying. You just pay attention. You just be aware and don’t take any of these moments for granted. They’re gifts. 

Valarie: That’s right. What I love about what you said is that my discovery going deep into my own tradition and the mysticism that inspired revolutionary social change in my tradition, was actually a way for me to understand the mystical heart of all the world’s religious traditions. The mystical stream that runs through Christianity and Judaism and Islam.

It’s like all of the people who were able to be inspired by the structures and the stories and the prophets and all of the infrastructure of religion. But then to have a moment where they’re like, “Oh, but we can just sing. We can just whirl. We can just, we can just find these channels of connection that actually transcend them all.” And what they all agree on is at the heart of it all, the root of it all is love.

Jared: You said earlier that the idea of oneness, this, this ever unfolding oneness, inspires love. What, what’s the connection between oneness and, and love? And I, I ask that because I think for a lot of people, the idea of oneness is that—I’ve been a part of conversations with Sikhs but also I think other traditions and, and even, even when we talk about quantum mechanics and all, even within the sciences, I think in the West, there’s more and more talk about this univocal being, the, the undulating oneness of it all.

And I think it starts to get, feels real abstract, and I think it’s hard for people in the West especially to just wrap their heads around it, but you anchor it in love, and I find that intriguing. So, can you connect those two a little bit more? 

Valarie: I think actually the problem is with the definition of love in our culture, that love is often seen as a feeling, a rush of emotion that comes and goes, ebbs and flows. I think that so much of the movement that I am building and steering and inspiring is about reclaiming love as a force for justice and healing and transformation. And that begins with definition. So love is more than a feeling that comes and goes. Love is sweet labor, fierce, imperfect, demanding a choice that we make every day for one another.

When you think about your deepest relationships, your children, your parents, your friends, your family, you have the feeling of being in love, but to live that love is what you do for each other, how you care for each other, how you show up for each other, you pour into one another. 

And so if we’re reclaiming love as sweet labor, then how is that connected to oneness? So when you walk into a Sikh Gurdwara, there’s always two chambers, there’s always two rooms. Any house of worship in the Sikh tradition all around the world, there’s two rooms. One is the prayer hall or the Von Hall where you sit and you listen to the music and you taste the experience of oneness, right? The poetry, the music, the song you feel, your heart swell. You feel the lines between you blur a little bit. There might be a moment of that. 

But tasting oneness is not enough. You can’t stay on the mountaintop. You can’t stay disappeared in the clouds. You have to return to the earth to see with new eyes. And can you see everyone around you as a part of you that you do not yet know? Can you see sisters and brothers and kin in every face that you see? Can you see other people’s children as your own? And so when you go into the next room, that is the Langar Hall. And in the Langar Hall, everyone is asked to sit together side by side in an unbroken line as equals. And everyone eats together. You serve each other food. You are being served. You are practicing seeing through the eyes of love. You’re practicing loving and serving others, laboring for others, caring for others from that place of recognition inside of you. This is why the Sumpth and the Sapahi go together, right?

To face the hot winds of the world with the eyes of a sage and the heart of a warrior is how you walk the path of a revolutionary kind of love. 

Jared: This is a curious question, and I kind of hesitate to ask because I don’t exactly know the right way to ask it, but when you talk about music and poetry and in that first room, these experiences, I guess I’m trying to understand the cultural piece of that.

So, is the Sikh tradition have a particular, like, are there certain Songs, and I guess, is it a certain set of songs and a certain set of stories? Is there a liturgy? I guess is what our listeners would maybe call it? Is there a liturgy, a rhythm, a calendar, uh, a certain set of these songs and things that you would go through in houses of worship?

Valarie: What a beautiful question. So I should begin with, you know, some things that you just don’t even think to explain [chuckles] because you’ve grown up with them. It’s like, right, I need to tell you what the Guru Granth Sahib is. So after Guru Nanak, after that first teacher emerged, he passed on his leadership to the next and the next and the next. And there were 10 Sikh Gurus over the course of 250 years. 

And all along the way, each of these gurus created verses, poetry, and collected verses, collected poetry. So it wasn’t just—over time a compilation of sacred wisdom grew. So these were poems that were crafted by the Sikh gurus but also collected from Hindu poets, from Muslim poets, from those who were preceded the Sikh gurus, they basically said, why don’t we collect all of the wisdom that’s around us in our multicultural world and compile it into a text that all speaks the same message, that is all about living into this truth of oneness.

And that compilation became known as the Guru Granth Sahib. Guru, because the 10th Sikh Guru said, from now on, no more human gurus. The 11th and lasting teacher will be the Guru Granth Sahib. It’s 1,430 pages of sacred poetry. And when you walk into the Sith Gurdwara, it’s placed at the very top, very front of the room, covered in beautiful silks and a canopy over above.

And you go and you bow and respect and you sit. And there is someone who is sitting behind the book, fanning the pages, perhaps reciting from the pages. And then next to the book, next to the Guru, there are musicians. And sometimes you will have musicians who are using the original instruments that the gurus used: the Rabab, the Dilraba, the Jodi. And with those instruments, they’re taking the different sacred poems and setting them into song. 

There is no set schedule for which poems get performed as Girdan in any Sunday morning. In fact, oftentimes, It will be in response to something that the community is experiencing or something that’s happening in the world. The greatest massacre on Sikh Americans in the United States was in Oak Creek, Wisconsin in 2012. There was a white nationalist who walked into that Gurdwara and opened fire and seven beloved community members were killed.

And the FBI wanted to clean up the scene, but the, the, our aunties and uncles were said, no, we will restore the Gurdwara ourselves. And they rolled up their sleeves and they played their ancestors’ song prayers. They played the Shabbats as they pulled the blood soaked carpets out of the ground, as they repaired the broken glass. And that first Sunday, exactly one week after the shooting, when they gathered everyone together, I remember being there and the Shabbats that they chose, the poetry that they chose to sing was about death as a return, as a return to oneness in whatever circumstances. It was so bittersweet to hear, I had tears streaming down my face and there was a moment when we stopped. And they named each of the community members who were killed in honor of them. And then they paused and they named the gunman, that he too was returning to the oneness that always is. That he too, we were sending off with love and respect.

It was so profound. It was so transcendent. It like, stretched our hearts. And so the trust is that the Guru, the volume of wisdom contains enough poetry for us to be nourished and fed no matter what new crisis we face in our lives. 

Pete: Hmm. So to be awakened to oneness is to be, what I’m hearing you say, is to have a taste perhaps of that to which we are returning?

Valarie: Yes, beautiful!

Pete: Is to experience now a later reality. Am I saying that the right way or would you put it differently? 

Valarie: I have never thought of it that way, but it is actually profound to think of it that way. It’s right, right? You know, when, when you have those moments of awe, you don’t, the, this, the line between you and everything else blurs, doesn’t it? And it is a preview, a kind of [gasps], a kind of taste of what will one day be our, our return to the earth and the sea and the stars and the trees that we become part of everything around us. And that is not a reason for despair. There is no afterlife in the Sikh tradition. It’s actually a reason for profound awe. 

I remember being with my grandfather on his deathbed in those last days, and he was so content. He was so serene. I said, how you’re not afraid at all, Papa [name]? No, you’re not afraid. He’s like, no, I, I returned. I returned to my beloved. I returned to my master. I emerge into the one I have loved and longed for my whole life. And he waited until each of his children placed the sacred waters on his lips. And he waited until my grandmother did so and then he sighed and he died, and it was a perfect death. 

And do you know I was so angry after he died? I said, he died without teaching me the secret to his fearlessness. And so that was oh my goodness it was 16 years ago, and I decided if I wanted to die like that, I had to practice. And so every night when my head hits the pillow I ask myself, think of today as an entire lifetime with a beginning, a middle, and end. What was the hardest part of this lifetime? What was the most joyful? What are you grateful for? And then here comes the: Are you ready to let go of this lifetime? Are you ready to die a kind of death? And I sigh, and I practice dying, and it’s that—that’s it, right? Practice merging with everything that ever is, ever was, ever will be. And so far, I get to wake to the gift of a new lifetime, and I look at my children and we say, “I get to be alive. I get to be alive today. I get to be alive today with you.” 

I have found that practicing that kind of courage in the face of death gives me courage in the face of life. And that is too how the Santh and the Sapahi inspire each other, how the sage right, that inner peace that inner serenity that inner wisdom, inspires one to be courageous with the life that we have the time that we have the voice we have, this moment. 

Jared: That’s a powerful and practical example of this embodiment in this wisdom, I appreciate you saying that you know as a lot of our listeners come from a Christian tradition That maybe is not great at embracing death, in fact, it’s been kind of enfolded in as, which I think is a misappropriation of the tradition that sort of the afterlife allows us to ignore death.

And so I just appreciate that beautiful picture of a practice that can incorporate death as a part of life and it can be a beautiful part of life and actually this returning to the oneness can be a fulfillment of things rather than something to run away from or be afraid of. So I really appreciate that picture.

So whenever we, just thinking of our tradition, a lot of our listeners grew up in a tradition that said that our bodies are bad and that we’re born sinful. So if you don’t mind, I wouldn’t mind going to this idea that you have of befriending the body. It was refreshing to read that. So if I, if you don’t mind, I’m going to quote you here. It says, “Oneness means that all parts of the world are beloved and so are all parts of ourselves. If there are no bad parts of the world, then there are no bad parts of ourselves.” 

And so I wanted to kind of root this into this idea of practice. So what are practices that people can undertake to better internalize this message? Because I think a lot of our listeners have internalized maybe an opposite message from that. 

Valarie: It’s so easy to internalize an opposite message. I mean, I, growing up in this culture as a small brown Sikh girl, my skin was ugly, my rage was something I needed to suffocate and be ashamed of, my thoughts were something that were sometimes not always welcome. My pleasure, my desire was something that wasn’t allowed. There were all these parts of myself that I wanted to exile, that I thought I needed to exile in order to live in this culture. And I find that if you are taught to punish and exile and push away parts of yourselves, it’s so easy to then to do that with people around you. You know, to call other people bad, to call other people sinful, to push other people away, to want to hate other people. So the more we hate parts of ourselves, the easier it is to hate other people who embody things that we don’t like. 

So what might it mean to love all parts of ourselves like a mother might love all parts of her children? I, this is my feminist intervention in the mornings. I, part of my meditation is to like, like right now I deal with a lot of chronic pain in my neck. I had a police brutality injury as an activist 20 years ago, and it never went away. And. And for a long time, I was ashamed of it. Why am I not, why am I not strong enough?

Certainly other people suffer far more than I have. Then why does that one injury tear me down? Why, why? And I had to be, when I got deep, went deeper into my own tradition, and I really embraced oneness, that means I had to embrace it inside of me, all parts of me. And so now my practice, I did it this morning. I walked to the ocean and I checked in with the parts of me that were hurting. And that neck part of me, I said, “Oh, my love, what do you need me to know?” Oh, you’re on fire. I’m on fire. I’m hurting. I’m tense and I’m tight. Okay. “What role would you play, if you didn’t have to play this role of keeping me together?” It’s like, Oh, I would want to be confetti, golden confetti flowing through the rest of your body.

Okay. “Can you trust me that I’m going to do an extra stretch this morning? I’m going to take care of you. I’m going to accompany you. It’s okay that you feel this way. I’m going to be with you.” I do that with my pain. I do that with my grief. Oh my goodness, the pain of our grief. You know, how many of us are taught that our grief, the pain of it is a sign of our weakness, but no, it’s a sign of how deeply we love one another, how deep our capacity is to love.

So to accompany our grief, instead of trying to rush it along or make it go away, I do that with my rage. You know how often I was taught to suppress rage? No, your rage is loaded with information and energy. What do you want me to know? What does it tell me about what matters to me? And then how do you want to move that energy in the world?

And then once you move it through your body, you can ask, “What do I want to do with this energy? How do I harness it for what I do in the world? Creatively, courageously, non violently.” The more we can befriend parts of ourselves and work and dance with parts of ourselves, accompany parts of ourselves lovingly, I find the more that I’m able to do that with other people in my life, other people who are in grief or other people who are in rage or other people who are being hateful. I can say if it is my role to accompany them, I can respond with love and wait to see what happens in the next moment. And what I found again and again is that loving response is the portal to transformation.

Pete: So you’ve mentioned Sage Warrior, your book, but also just the concept, what is the relationship between practicing pleasure and being a warrior? And we ask this because, you know, for a lot of people being an activist makes it hard to enjoy things, right? Because there’s always more justice that has to be done.

Valarie: Yes! [Laughing] This was, this was probably the greatest and hardest thing I learned. I became an activist so young. One thing I should have mentioned at the very beginning, introducing the Sikh faith, is that the Sikh people wear articles of faith to show outwardly their commitment to love and serve others, to fight for justice when needed.

And one of the most prominent articles is keeping one’s hair long and uncut. And men in the United States, men around the world who practice the Sikh faith, will wrap their long hair in a turban. Some women do as well. Anyone you see wearing a turban on a daily basis in the United States, most likely they are a Sikh. And so you can imagine in the last 20 some years since 9/11 and Osama bin Laden and the war on terror, how much this turban has marked our people for enormous violence, continues to. I wasn’t going to become an activist. I wanted to become a professor of religion. I wanted to study and teach about religion.

And I was 20 years old in the aftermath of 9/11, when all of that racial violence that exploded across the country took the life of Babir Singh Sodhi, who is a family friend. He was a Sikh American father who was killed in front of his gas station while planting flowers just a few days after September 11th, and his murder was drowned under an anthem of national unity. It wasn’t even acknowledged. And my people were hurting, more people were dying, it was like we were under attack as the United States and our community was under attack at the same time. And so I grabbed my camera and I got in my car with a list of questions and a camera and I began to make, I went to sites of violence from home to home, from city to city, sometimes when the blood was still fresh on the ground and I began to capture the stories of my people.

So you imagine at 20 years old, taking in all of that grief, all of that horror, all of that violence and all of that responsibility to try to tell my people’s stories. The violence never ended. So I was back on the road, back on the road, again and again, all through my 20s, I lived out of my suitcase, trying to uplift our people’s stories and change policy. And I thought that I had to ground my bones into the earth in order to do that work, I thought I was always comparing my pain to the pain of the people I was serving. And so, of course, I was never worthy of being cared for. I, I measured my success over how fast I worked, how hard I worked, how little sleep I got, how little pleasure I allowed myself.

That went on for so many years. I became a mother and it was the 2016 election and all of the violence that we were then freshly responding to. And I was raising my children and I realized that I was raising them in a country that was less safe for them than it was for me. And I thought, what is it, what was it all for? And I, I broke down cause I had no reserves. I had an existential crisis. I just, I couldn’t function, I had to step back from the front lines for the first time. And that is when I had freshly received the wisdom of the midwife, right on that birthing table. She says, breathe my love and then, and then push and then breathe again.

There’s a kind of cadence, a kind of rhythm to sustaining one’s energy over any long labor, right? The labor of raising children or building a movement or living an activist life or rebirthing a nation. You have to be breathing enough into your body, letting in those moments of wonder, letting in pleasure, letting in joy in order to feel the magic and mystery and beauty of being alive.

And from that place, you can push. From that place, you can respond. You can’t continue to respond from a place of trauma and think you will last. I learned that the hard way. And I’m so grateful that I had a community to catch me. I was, I spent a year in the rainforest. I breathed more deeply than I ever had before.

And that is when I came back with a message that it wasn’t just justice we needed to fight for, it was a new way of being, a new way of seeing. Revolutionary love was the call of our times. And the only way we can labor in love is if we are breathing and pushing and then breathing again. And so now I’ve come back saying joy, joy, and pleasure is our birthright.

Every night, no matter how dark the world gets, I dance with my children. We dance on days I don’t want to dance. And I can feel the spark and the energy of my daughter when I’m throwing her up into the air and the audacity of that, to claim life and to claim the joy of being alive. And knowing that now, now, because I’m breathing enough, letting in enough pleasure and joy, now the labor for justice, the labor for healing, the labor for change is the most meaningful and beautiful and pleasurable way for me to be alive.

Jared: Can you just say a little more of how you, how you got there? So I love the midwife story and imagery of that, of the labor, which is a combination of breathing and pushing. Can you maybe slow us down to what were the steps that you took to, again, kind of taking a page from your book, I want to emphasize not just a head understanding or “aha” moment, but the practices of actually embodying that sense so that you’re starting to change those neural pathways to not have clenched fists and clenched jaws all the time, but to actually relax into pleasure in a way that doesn’t feel like you’re betraying the people you’re trying to serve or the activism and the causes that are worth fighting for.

Valarie: You know, when I was in labor with my daughter, the breathe moments are moments without any pain. And you can spend those moments anticipating the push, anticipating the contraction, fearing it, crying. And at the beginning I was, I was like, I don’t want it to come again. Or you can spend that breathe moment, closing your eyes and feeling the crinkle of the tissue against your face on the birthing table.

When I did that, I closed my eyes and I had an image of being in a meadow with a baby, with my baby, with my daughter. The contraction came and I was pulled down out of the meadow, but then the next breathe moment, I was back in the meadow, and I was playing with her, and she was a toddler now with curly black hair, and she was pointing at the clouds, and then the next push came and I was out, but the next breathe came, and now she was a little older, and we were picking flowers together, on and on, it went until it was time for transition, and I knew that I had to go through the fire of transition, in order—all I wanted to do was be back in the meadow, but I had to push through the fire until she landed on my chest and we were together again.

I share that because in those breathe moments, I was presaging the world to come. I was envisioning it. I was feeling it. I was delighting in it. The flowers and the sky and her next to me, and then I could push for that. And then until I found her, right? And I’m, this is a way of saying in our daily life, when we’re gathering our family around the kitchen table and enjoying a meal together and just slowing down and looking at the laughter of our children as we eat, or when we decide to go on a walk into the forest and we’re just closing our eyes and listening to the birds song and the serenity all around us and the forest is at peace.

Those breathe moments, give us a taste of what the whole world can feel like. Those moments are moments where we can practice the world to come. And when we’re practicing the world to come, we’re presaging the world to come. And we can’t live into what we haven’t already imagined. So I feel like my home, my home is now a container of beloved community. My home is a place where I want to practice that world. I want to practice the meadow. [Chuckles] So then when I, you know, the way that we gather people, the way that we love on people, the way that we have hard conversations, the way that we take care of each other when we’re hurting, the way that we’re grieving, the way that we’re raging, the way that we’re practicing joy, like this is a practice space.

And that allows me when I go out into the streets and there’s an army of police officers or when I go out to the vigil and there’s so much pain and rage, when I go out there, I know what it feels like in my body for the world to be at one with itself, the world to be in harmony. And then I, when I’m out there, I’m not just focused on what I’m fighting against, I am, I am manifesting, I’m calling forth what I know is possible in that space. And I speak from that love, right? I act from that love and I invite other people from that love. 

That is what each of us can do no matter what sphere of influence, right? As a teacher or as a parent or as an engineer, or as an artist, like we all have these spheres of influence, these containers that we move through in our lives, where we can practice the world we want, and we can’t practice it unless we are taking enough time to feel it, taste it, imagine it inside of us. That’s the sage practice, right? That’s like, the wisdom. That’s the mystical practice that I’m inviting all of us to be able to enter in order to live it in our lives. The book Sage Warrior has a practice at the end of each chapter, very practical tools to invite people to do that.

Pete: Thank you for those words, Valarie. Um, maybe just one last question. If someone wants to learn more about the Sikh tradition, I mean, we have your book Sage Warrior, where, where might you point them to get a good basic introduction to this tradition? 

Valarie: I have to say, I’m going to call you to sagewarrior.us, which is the website for the book. Because it’s not just a book, we have a study guide to accompany the book. And in that study guide, you will find the core information that you need about Sikh history, about Sikh wisdom, and other books, other books that can help you along the way. There’s so little that translates our wisdom to general audiences, and this book is not just a book in itself, but as a way to invite people into the resources that we do have.

Pete: Right. There’s no self help Sikh book right, out there? It’s just, you don’t get this in an airport or something that it takes a lot more effort, a lot more discipline to, to get attached to this tradition, I imagine. 

Valarie: Yes. Perhaps it’s because the invitation in the Sikh tradition is into a way of being that is nourished by stories and song as opposed to like, here are the five things you need to know about what it is. And then this is why the book actually will be released along with a musical album so that you can hear the sacred poetry in the book set to music along with artwork inside the book that depicts our ancestors. So you can imagine them too. 

And the book tour has evolved into a full fledged Revolutionary Love bus tour that launches in September, goes to 40 cities all around the country, big cities, small towns, offers an experience of storytelling and music and community building. So that these concepts you’ve heard me talk about, you can actually experience it in your body when I’m on stage, telling you the story, when you’re hearing the musicians, and when you’re engaging in community with the people in your town. We’re so excited that every single event is free and open to the public. And I think it will be very accessible and very universal. The biggest door that we are offering for people to take some of this wisdom into their own lives and apply it exactly where you are. And for that people can get their free tickets at Revolutionarylove.org/tour. 

Jared: Well, thank you so much. It sounds fantastic. And I really appreciate that the thing surrounding the book is working through it in the way that you’ve presented it here, because I really appreciate the embodiedness of it and how it connects to these other pieces of life that’s not just in our head. So, thank you so much, Valarie, for taking some time and introducing our audience to the Sikh tradition and this idea of a, you know, revolutionary love. I think it’s, it’s a powerful message. So thank you so much for coming on and sharing with us. 

Valarie: It was an absolute joy. Thank you so much!

Jared: And now for quiet time…

Pete: …with Pete and Jared. 

Jared: All right, Pete, what did you learn about Sikhism here? 

Pete: Um, well, everything that I know about Sikhism—

Jared: [Laughing] Everything I know, I learned in the last 40 minutes.

Pete: I know, seriously. And, and, you know, I’m not making light of it, but that’s the truth. First of all, I learned how to pronounce it. 

Jared: Yeah, right. 

Pete: Yeah. I, I had, I would have said Sikh a thousand times over. So, um, here’s, hearing Valarie talk about Sikhism, what I kept coming back to in terms of what I’m learning is that there is a um, a philosophy, a way of living, a way of being that’s out there, that’s older than I am, and that has tried to do good things and done it without the help of Christianity or any other religion that we might be familiar with. And there are people there who are trying to live their lives in unity with creation. And, and I, I found that to be helpfully reorienting, you know, like there’s, yeah, I have to keep remembering. It’s not just the micro arguments that I might have on Tiktok with people who read Genesis 2 differently than I do.

You know, it’s just like there are people out there who are making sense of reality. And, and, and that’s what I took from that. And I, and I think I learned things from her about something that I simply didn’t understand, but it’s, it’s like any experience, you know, you leave home and you see things, you say, “Oh, well, there’s a whole world out there” and, and, and, you know, that, that changes, you know?

Jared: Right. Yeah. 

Pete: How about you? 

Jared: Yeah, I was thinking about that. Um, you know, I have family members and, and others who’ve participated in, uh, Sikhism and learned about it. So I knew the basics. So I appreciated getting a little bit more in depth around this idea of the sage warrior or even this poet warrior. So I appreciated understanding that music is a part of the tradition in a, yeah, in a deeper way. This, this—if you—

Pete: Which is very biblical, I mean, not to make it, but just the prophets are poetic. You know, there’s a lot of poetry in the Bible, Psalms. 

Jared: Yeah. And I think it was a good conversation to further my curiosity around this topic. I feel like if you’ve paid attention to the podcast the last couple of seasons, I keep coming back to, when I can, which is holding this tension between the art, the contentment, the happiness, the joy and the warrior, the, there are things that are not set right in this world. What responsibility is it of mine to set it right? This activism and contemplation. And how do we find a wise path to navigate that with balance and wisdom and discernment. So I appreciated being able to dive into that and recognize that other traditions also wrestle with the same thing. 

Pete: Yeah. Yeah. I do like the concept of sage warrior. I think that’s really fascinating. So, okay. Um, one thing that came up a lot is oneness, you know, oneness in our lives and this concept of Ik Onkar. I hope I’m pronouncing that right. But so what does that, I mean, what does it mean to you, oneness in your life, and how does this influence your interactions with others or how you see the world or whatever?

Jared: I think for some people, this is a very earth-shattering revelation. And I think that’s, that’s good. And that’s important. I, so I guess in my life, as I’ve walked with people alongside this idea of, of oneness, for some, it really is like a, a revelation and it changes how they see the world, their, their place in the world, other people, other creatures that are not human, how it all connects.

And I think for others, it’s less impactful. But I do think for me, it was helpful to come at this idea—cause I, I think when we were younger, we heard about this idea and it felt very mystical. It was usually in the context of a kind of a new-ageism or something, uh, around we’re all one. I mean, I think there was a lot of parodies in my world around this idea of—

Pete: When it’s simplistic, it’s something, ick.

Jared: Yeah, we’re all one. Yeah. And it almost had this superciliousness to it. But to come at it from a more western angle around, you know, quantum mechanics, coming up with this idea that at root we are all made of the same stuff, and we are all, we are all extensions of the same material, so to speak, for temporary times, or we are the universe being conscious of itself for a momentary time period, that kind of idea. That really resonates with me, but I want to turn it to you because I want to hear what you think about this, but I think the last thing I would say is if it doesn’t make sense to our listeners, you’re not alone.

Pete: Oh yeah, of course. 

Jared: Because I think it took me, I mean, I’m not, I don’t think I’m a dummy, but it took me a while, because it’s not how people in the West are taught to think about reality and individuals in reality. So I would say it probably took me a good couple of years of thinking about it and reading about it before it clicked.

Pete: Yeah, and that’s the beginning. The clicking is just the beginning. “Oh, I’m there now.” Thank you, enlightened Jared.

Jared: It’s like in the old days when you had those TV channels that like, if you hit the top of the TV, you would get it for a couple of seconds and it would get fuzzy. That’s how it was for a couple of years where I’d be like, I got it. I got it. And then three minutes later I was like, ah, now I lost it. I don’t, I don’t got it anymore. I don’t even know what I’m thinking about. 

Pete: Well, I mean, James Kugel describes wisdom as that path of like, you catch glimpses of what it’s like, but then you lose it right away and you have to keep searching for those glimpses, like a gem, you know, or something.

Jared: That’s a good mental picture. But what about for you, what’s your history of this oneness concept? 

Pete: Well, I mean, it’s something that, you know, I came across, uh, maybe for the first time, really about 15 years ago. And I was like, what the heck is this? But, uh, reading, uh, James Fowler’s book stages of faith, which, you know, he has seven stages.

And the last one is, is something I forgot the language he uses, but it is unitive consciousness. Richard Rohr talks about that. And you know, for, for some people that’s great that Richard Rohr says that, some people say, well, he’s a wacko, but he didn’t make this stuff up. This, this is stuff that people have been talking about for a very long time. The medieval mystics talked like this, right? 

And so I’m attracted to the idea where the, the more you, and I hate to use the word progress, but the more you just sit with things and let go of your ego, the more you realize you really are tied in a deep way that you can’t explain to everything around you.

And that’s on, you know, the subatomic level. It’s on the, you know, the, the celestial level, it’s, it’s everything in between. And I find that idea perplexing, difficult to define. I could never teach it. I don’t understand it, but I have sometimes sensed the, you know, what if that’s where all this is going? So what if that’s really the point? Is we are—our consciousness, we’re just individuals, but we’re, we see ourselves as being part of everything and it affects how you live. I mean, simple things like how you treat animals, right? Right? And where you get your food from and whether you throw trash in the ocean, that kind of stuff.

You, we’re all together in this, you know, we all share the same DNA. It’s something that I get sort of excited thinking about, but I have to be honest, there’s also that little, evangelical Pete noise in the back of my head saying, I told you, I told you, you’d go crazy. I told you, you’d go off the deep end. But I don’t think this is going off the deep end. This is a very humbling thing. And it makes me want to be a better person, right? And not just argue with people over theology. 

Jared: Which is interesting because I think for me growing up, this idea would have been the opposite. It would have been, this is the way to lose meaning. This is the way to not want to be a better person.

Like this is how you give up on wanting to be a better person. Because if we’re all tied, and it’s all part of the same material stuff, and if we’re all connected in this way, sort of what’s the motivation to be a better person? And so to even hear you talk about that, even this idea, and I think the, the changes you’ve gone through in your faith, really just changed the whole framework of how you think about life.

Pete: Yeah. And how I think about Christianity, you know, and, and the role of the Bible, you know, all this stuff comes together and it’s like, they’re all tools to something that is beyond the systems themselves. They point to something beyond it, right? Which I know is difficult for some people and for others. You’re there. You sort of, you get that. And I’m not bashing any, I’m certainly not bashing Christianity, but it’s, it’s maybe what if the point of this is for us to achieve that understanding of the oneness of God, the oneness of the Creator, the oneness of the cosmos, the oneness of everything, and the divine spirit Is through and in all that stuff, as Richard Rohr would say, the universal Christ, right?

So, I mean, and do I understand that? No, not at all. But I like thinking about it. To me, it’s worth putting some energy in thinking about these sorts of things. 

Jared: Yeah, and I think what I would sort of end with is, not being afraid to let someone of a different religious tradition be a teacher in some of these things.

Pete: Holy envy as Barbara Brown Taylor would put it. 

Jared: Yeah, I think some traditions who grew up in different cultures maybe understand some of this better than we do. And it’s not a threat to our Christian faith, but it’s something to incorporate. 

Pete: Well, it’s been so westernized, our Christian faith, that’s the thing.

Jared: Yeah, and there are parts of our tradition, if we go back, that we can get a little behind that veil of that Western influence and see the beginnings of some of this as well. So it’s within our tradition, but other traditions can teach us how to interpret reality. It’s not a binary that only the Christian tradition can teach us truth.

Pete: Only the Western Christian can teach us truth. 

Jared: Only the Western contemporary Christian tradition can teach us truth. [Both laughing]/

Jared: Well, thanks to everyone who supports the show! If you want to support what we do, there are three ways you can do it. One, if you just want to give a little money, go to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/give. 

Pete: And if you want to support us and want a community, classes, and other great resources, go to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/join. 

Jared: And lastly, it always goes a long way if you just wanted to rate the podcast, leave a review, and tell others about our show. In addition, you can let us know what you thought about the episode by emailing us at info@thebiblefornormalpeople.com. 

Outro: You’ve just made it through another episode of Faith for Normal People. Don’t forget you can catch our other show, The Bible for Normal People, in the same feed wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was brought to you by the Bible for Normal People team: Brittany Hodge, Stephen Henning, Wesley Duckworth, Savannah Locke, Tessa Stultz, Danny Wong, Natalie Weyand, Lauren O’Connell, Jessica Shao, and Naiomi Gonzalez.

Jared: Good, yeah, so we’ll take a couple seconds of silence and we’ll welcome you to the podcast and then Pat, Pete, Pat will—Pete will ask the first question. 

Pete: My name’s Pete, Jared. 

Jared: Yeah. Thanks. Good. Appreciate it.