- [Patrick] Tired of the toxic level of polarization in the United States?

Interested in talking with people whose perspective differs from your own in ways that stay constructive?

We invite you to join us for a year focused on creating a culture of conversation rather than division.

(light hopeful music) The Padnos Sarosik Center for Civil Discourse, Kaufman Interfaith Institute, Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies and WGVU Public Media are pleased to partner for "Talking Together," strengthening our communities through conversation, a dialogue initiative aimed at interrupting polarization and investing in the principles of civil discourse and respectful conversation.

The aim is to assist community members engaging in conversation with one another across differences in perspective, identity, and life experiences.

See no stranger.

That is a core principle anchoring the Revolutionary Love Project.

It's a model designed by a civil rights activist and author Valarie Kaur, for reimagining a better community.

Your TED Talk has inspired millions around the world as well as your bestselling book, "See No Stranger," a memoir and manifesto of revolutionary love.

Valarie, great to see you here.

- Thank you, Patrick.

I'm delighted to be here with you.

- Well, I got to see you in action with your TED Talk just the other day.

You've been on campus, you are spreading the word about "See No Stranger" and it's born out of a compass.

- Yes.

- That you created.

Walk us through this and how it is that we can better see each other and understand each other and have better conversations.

- Mm, well, it begins with a core practice.

It begins with wonder.

So I know that as a mama, I have to wonder about my babies every day in order to figure out how to care for them.

I mean, they're changing so fast.

So what do you need?

What do you want?

And I realize that love is more than just a rush of feeling, love is sweet labor.

It's fierce and bloody, imperfect, demanding.

It's a choice we make again and again.

So what might happen if we take a little bit of that way of loving out into the world?

What if we express that kind of love for others for even our opponents and for ourselves that we too often neglect.

And what I discovered in the process of writing this book was at the core of love was wonder.

So the practice is this, and you all can do it with me.

When you're walking down the street and you're looking at faces on the screen, on the street or on the subway, you can say in your mind, sister, brother, sibling, beloved.

And when you are doing that, you are retraining your eye to see all others as kin.

Now it sounds so simple, but we all carry unconscious bias within us within a split second before conscious thought, our minds decide who is one of them and who is one of us.

And in this country, racial hierarchies most determine that line.

So when you are saying sister, brother, sibling, you're retraining your eye to see no stranger.

It is a powerful anti-racist practice because who we see as one of us determines whose pain we let into our heart, who we choose to help, whose grief we share, what policies we support, and what leaders we elect.

Demagogues succeed in dehumanizing entire groups of people when they successfully shut down our collective imagination.

So wondering about one another, opening ourselves to each other's stories, grieving with each other, and ultimately fighting for each other is how we practice seeing no stranger.

- So that's the first principle, right?

- [Valarie] That's right.

- Because you say love is labor.

So love of others, love for opponents and then love for ourselves, which might be very key.

And that's really the last step.

But as we walk through this wonder, grieve, fight, You go back to 9/11.

- Yeah.

- It seems like that is the first impact.

That is your first step into this development, this practice.

- [Valarie] It is.

- It's a touching story.

Walk us through some of that and how you arrived at this and sharing this with America and the world.

- I was a kid in college in the aftermath of the horror of 9/11.

And you know, within moments we got phone calls and emails that our people were being chased and beaten and stabbed.

So Sikh Americans, my community, the men in our community, some women too wear turbans as part of our faith and so we were on the front lines of all of that racial violence.

People were being attacked on city streets all across America and their stories weren't making the evening news.

And then we got the news that Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh American father, was gunned down in front of his gas station in Mesa, Arizona by a man who called himself a patriot.

I called him Uncle.

So it was as if an uncle had been killed and the country didn't care.

And that was the beginning.

I wasn't planning on becoming an activist.

I left college, I grabbed my camera, I went from home to home, from city to city capturing these stories that the world needed to hear.

And as I was hearing story after story sometimes when the blood was still fresh on the ground, I began to feel a kind of despair spread in my heart.

And I had one last interview I had to do.

I flew around the world to India where Balbir Uncle's widow was there mourning.

And she was dressed in the color of white, there're dark circles under her eyes.

I looked at my questions and I just threw them away.

And I said, "Auntie Ji, "what would you like to tell the people of America?"

I was expecting bitterness or despair.

She said, "Thank you.

"Tell them thank you.

"When I went to America for my husband's funeral "they came out in the thousands.

"They didn't know me, but they chose to love me.

"Thank them for their love."

Patrick, that act of love saved this widow's heart.

And in turn it saved mine because you don't need to know people in order to grieve with them.

You grieve with them in order to know them.

And that's what the people were doing with that family, with this community, with this widow.

They were wondering about each other, grieving with each other and fighting for each other.

And so that's what made me, really set me on a path of thinking about love as this revolutionary force.

And that's why I believe fast forward now more than ever when there are fires all around us, that that kind of revolutionary love is the call of our times.

- There's more to that story because you talk about this rage that we're all dealing with or confronting.

- [Valarie] Yeah.

- Today, it gets to the love for opponents.

That tending the wound.

There's more to this story that is so important to understanding this philosophy.

- Well that (laughs) Patrick, I, you know, I hated the man who killed Balbir Uncle.

He was a monster to me.

And year after year, you know, I focused on our own healing.

The grieving and the raging.

My rage was a powerful force.

I needed to honor it.

But it came to the point where 15 years later, we were at Balbir Uncle's memorial at the gas station putting down flowers.

And his brother turned to me and said, "Nothing has changed."

And I said, "Well, who is the one person "we have not yet tried to love?"

We called Balbir Uncle's murderer in prison the next day.

And at first I thought it was a terrible mistake.

He said, "I'm sorry for what happened to your uncle "but I'm also sorry for all the people killed on 9/11."

He was refusing to take responsibility.

And I was feeling angry and perhaps because I was playing that guardian role, Rana, Balbir's brother could keep listening, keep wondering about Frank, and he could hear what I couldn't hear.

Rana said, "Frank, this is the first time "I have heard you say you were sorry."

And Frank softens and says, "Yes, I am sorry "for what I did to your brother.

"And when I go to heaven to be judged by God "I will ask to see your brother "and I will hug him and I will ask for his forgiveness."

And Rana says, "We've already forgiven you."

That's how I came to learn that forgiveness is not forgetting.

Forgiveness is freedom from hate.

For when we free ourselves we can see our opponents not as monsters.

I've come to understand that there are no such thing as monsters in this world.

There are only human beings who are wounded who do what they do out of their insecurity or greed or rage, that doesn't make them any less dangerous, but when we see their wound, we see their humanity and we preserve our own.

And I think that's the first step to learning how to reimagine our relationships with them.

In talking to Frank, I began to understand that so much of white nationalist rage in this country is a symptom of unresolved grief.

They are grieving this illusion that this country belonged just to them in the first place.

It may not be my role to tend to all that grief but it might be yours.

Each of us has a role in the labor of revolutionary love.

And I believe if each of us might ask ourselves, "Who is the opponent I'm ready to tend to?"

And engage in that labor from a loving place, that we might be able to transition the nation as a whole into a multiracial democracy where all of us are safe.

- You touched on those human emotions.

- [Valarie] Yeah.

- Sometimes they're tough to overcome, right?

They're deep seated, sometimes it's hard to admit certain things.

- Yeah.

- How do you get beyond what is more instinctive?

- [Valarie] Yeah.

- And you mentioned some of those emotions, they're very instinctive.

How do you enlighten yours?

How do you get past that to find this place of helping, or not necessarily helping, 'cause some people need to help themselves, right?

- [Valarie] Correct.

- And you, you admit that in the book, but the whole idea of being open to some of these ideas to change the way you think and to change the way you reach out to somebody else.

To tend to the wounds.

- Right well, when you're sitting with someone who you consider an opponent, at first you'll be hearing the sound bites and the slogans and you'll feel fire rise in you (laughing) like the rage.

And you have to ask yourself, am I safe?

Am I emotionally safe?

Am I physically safe to continue this conversation?

It's very important.

It's 'cause it's not all of our roles.

If you have a knee on your neck right now, it is not your role to look up at your opponent and try to wonder about them or listen to them.

No, your role is to take the next breath.

That's your revolutionary act.

But if you are someone who is safe enough to sit with that opponent and keep listening then wonder because becomes a cognitive act.

It's an act of will.

You have to listen and say, "Okay, but why?

"Why do they say that?

"Why do they believe that?"

And if you keep listening and you deeply want to know why, you begin to hear their story.

And when you hear their story, you begin to see the wound.

And when you see the wound you begin to gather information for what might you do next.

And what happens with human beings is that we mirror each other.

If you come out with daggers out, they're gonna have daggers out.

But if you're really wondering, then it might happen that that person starts to wonder about you too.

They might start to want to hear your story.

And then when that happens, true talking together, listening together occurs and it's magical and miraculous and lifesaving.

Deep listening is an act of surrender.

We risk being changed by what we hear.

And I believe, if we can start to do that work we don't see it modeled in our media landscape at all or in our politics, but if we can start doing that work heart to heart, block by block, perhaps we can amass the collective wisdom to transition America as a whole.

- And there's that re-imagining that takes place.

- Yes so then you're not just about resistance.

There's a role for resistance.

We have to keep our people safe.

But if some of us are protecting space to reimagine, then we might hold up a vision of an America that leaves no one outside of our circle of care, not even our opponents.

- This has been a journey for you.

I mean this takes you back to Stanford and taking off with your family to the rainforest.

(Valarie laughs) Just so our audience understands a little bit of this process and how you've arrived at this compass for better living and better understanding of the stranger.

- It's in "See No Stranger," it's in the book.

I have my own wounds, my own, you know, battles with what police brutality, sexual violence, my own, you know, hatred of myself, my inability to care for my own body, my breathlessness.

I mean, you know, by the time 15, 20 years after 9/11, I had accrued so much trauma in my body that I had a breakdown and I was very lucky 'cause it lined up with the moment that this book was sold.

And I was given a golden ticket, enough of an advance to be able to step back from the front lines for the first time in my life.

I moved my family to the rainforest and I asked myself, "Okay, if love is the answer, "if love is the call of our times, "if we've heard this call to love for thousands of years "on the lips of spiritual teachers from Jesus, "to Buddha, to Muhammad, to Abraham, to Guru Nanak, "why haven't we put this ethic of love into practice?

"Like our very future as a human species, "as a nation and as a species depends "on whether we can put this love ethic into practice."

"So how, how, how, how?"

So I poured through everything that I had studied in social movements and wisdom traditions.

And I began to see these patterns which I started to imagine as practices of revolutionary love.

And that's how the compass came to be.

And really, Patrick, I created this compass to save my own life.

You know, I needed to come back to this country and find a way to keep laboring for justice in a way that can make it so that I could last.

You know, I wanna grow old.

(she chuckles) I wanna grow old with you.

Like, I wanna grow old with my people.

And how do I do that if I think about my life as a series of experiments with revolutionary love, you know, then there's enough space to let breath in, to let joy in.

And now to show up to my particular labor from a place of love has become the most meaningful way to live life.

And I have been very fortunate because I've come back with this medicine and people are saying, "Oh, I need this too."

And in just in the last year or so, there are thousands of people all across the country who have been self-organizing around revolutionary love in schools, universities, organizations, companies, even legislative bodies.

They're using it as a moral compass to make individual and collective decisions.

And it makes me think about the meaning of revolution.

You know, revolutions happen not just in the big grand public moments but in spaces where people are coming together to inhabit a new way of being.

Now that's Dr. King's revolution of values.

That it's a quiet revolution.

It's a lasting revolution.

So I'd like to say welcome to the revolution.

- Well you mentioned Dr. King and there are others, Gandhi, right?

There are other great men and women who have led revolutions.

And yet you point out that some of them haven't looked inward to take care of themselves.

And that is part of your compass.

And that is love ourselves, breathe and push.

(Valarie laughs) I know that's kind of a- - Yes.

- A mama term, right?

- Oh, but it's for everybody.

- For giving birth.

(Patrick laughing) - I'm trying to liberate, if we say soldier on and we say this to our sisters, right?

We're making a war metaphor available to everyone.

This is what I'm trying to do with the wisdom of the midwife.

She doesn't say, "Okay, push all the way."

No, she says, "My love, breathe.

"And then push and then breathe again."

There's a kind of rhythm, a kind of cadence to sustain our stamina in any long labor.

You know, the labor of running a show, or a campus, or raising a family, or trying to build a movement.

And I feel like in so many of us who are trying to do good, who are trying to serve, we just think we have to make ourselves suffer in order to serve.

You know, I certainly was grinding my bones to the earth.

I was always comparing my pain to the pain of people I was serving.

And so I was never worthy enough to take care of my, I didn't know how to breathe.

And now I know that before I push and after I push, there has to be breath.

So how are you breathing every day?

I mean, are you breathing with the stars, with the sea, with the lake, with this beautiful grand river, are you breathing with music and meditation and poetry?

How are you inking anchoring your life in rest and dream and imagination and breath?

And then who are you helping breathe?

You know, can we create more spaces for that?

And when we do that, I do.

I found that those are the conditions that allow joy to find us more and more in the labor.

- Because we started with love for others.

- [Valarie] Right.

But it's difficult to love others if you haven't found that tranquility within or to tend to the opponent's wounds or anything else that you need to do.

Does it truly start here?

Because I know we started out with wonder, but does it start out here first?

- [Valarie] We have to wonder about ourselves, don't we?

- Yeah, we do, yeah.

- Right?

It's like, so my practice is being able to look at any face and say, you are a part of me I do not yet know.

We can wonder about our own self, an emotion that rises, the voice of a little critic, the fearful parts of ourselves, the hopeful parts of ourselves.

We can ask ourselves, you know, "You are a part of me I do not yet know.

"Can I wonder about you?

"Can I ask what you need?

"Can I ask what information you carry?"

And there's enough space to do that, if we can teach our kids how to do that, then we're teaching them emotional resilience and we're teaching them that yes, to transform the world we have to do it from the inside out.

So I don't think it's sequential and that like, first ourselves then, you know, 'cause then we'll get stuck.

(Valarie laughs) - Yeah.

- It's a lifelong practice you know, loving ourselves.

But I do believe that the compass, there's any season where we need one more than the other and we can kind of move through our life with it in our hands.

- I know you've joked about loving yourself because it's very narcissistic.

(they laughs) So, right.

But there is that element of finding your center and then working your way out.

- [Valarie] Yeah, yeah.

The bottom line though, through all of this outside of the compass is joy.

- Yes, yeah.

- Right?

- That's really where you want people to be, to find that joy.

- Yeah, and just being alive.

I mean, the miracle, the mystery, the magic that we can just be sitting here speaking and hundreds, thousands, millions of people are watching and engaging in this moment with us.

The fact that, you know, through the pandemic it was such a dark time, the thick of it.

I would wake up in the mornings and my children and I we would say to each other, "I get to be alive.

"I get to be alive today.

"I get to be alive today with you."

Just sinking into that gratitude no matter how dark, difficult, deadly the day was, created the ability for joy to rise in us.

In the Sikh faith, in my faith, it's called Charhdi Kala.

Charhdi Kala, ever rising joy, even in darkness.

Ever rising spirits even in the thick of the labor.

It's almost like hope to me has become a feeling that waxes and wanes, you know?

Sometimes I feel so hopeful and it's a bright, luminous moon.

And other nights, you know, there was a shooting here in Michigan, it was so horrific.

And you just feel hopeless.

There's no hope to be found and you, I wanna say that's okay.

You know, if you feel breathless, if you feel hopeless, it means that you are awake to what the forces that are unleashed in the world right now.

And that's okay, my love.

The task that you have is like, can you keep moving your hands even in the dark?

And I have found that the only way I can keep moving my hands in the dark is if I am letting in joy from the ground up.

And so even on the darkest nights, my children and I dance, and sometimes it's, "We don't talk about Bruno, no, no!"

like for the hundredth time.

But we're still dancing and by the end of it I'm laughing and I'm letting joy in and I can wake up the next morning with that gratitude and begin again.

- You know there are critics, right?

They say this is a mean, ugly world.

- [Valarie] Yeah.

- Right, and love is this touchy feely thing for some people.

How do you open their eyes?

Are there some critics who have come to you and have said, "You know what?

"Thank you," right?

- Yeah.

- So how do you break down those walls for somebody who has maybe had a really rough life and just sees the world in a very dark way?

- Yeah, well I have been a critic.

Let me say that, you know, anytime someone stood on the stage and said, "Love was the answer," for most of my life, I would roll my eyes.

It's like, "Love?

"With what we're up against, "you know the forces that we have, how?"

And I've come to understand that the problem is not with love, but the way we've come to talk about it.

And so with those folks who are suffering who feel alone, who feel isolated, I ask you like, "How have you made it this far?"

And usually they tell a story about someone who chose to love them when they didn't need to.

Love has saved us over and over again.

We couldn't even make it out of a newborn stage without someone's tender touch.

And some of us have not received as much love as we have deserved, but it's never too late to be able to open our hearts to one another to ask for what we need to save each other in our love again and again.

To show up to that labor.

- You mentioned it earlier, and it stuck out to me also when I was watching your TED talk and that is, "Forgiveness is not forgetting, it's freedom from hate."

How important is that?

- Oh, essential.

- Because people carry hatred with them and they refuse to forgive.

- [Valarie] Yeah.

- It's a weight that, that seems to be one of those things that comes up in most religions, right?

This idea of carrying hate and how forgiveness is freeing.

- Yeah well, I wanna first say that yes, we called Balbir Uncle's murderer to forgive him after 15 years.

- It lingered, even you couldn't go of it.

- You know, it took 15 years.

And honestly, I felt like I needed to withhold my forgiveness as my only act of agency.

I needed to hold onto that grievance in order to say, "No this was wrong and I need support."

And luckily me, the community, we were able to have enough people to love on us to be able to process that grief and process that animosity until I realized I was holding this thing that was like burning a hold through my hand.

I'm like, I don't actually need this anymore.

And I can just.

(she blows) Our forgiveness can happen no matter whether our opponent is alive or not.

You know, forgiveness is for you, not for them.

Forgiveness is for you.

But once that happens, that forgiveness opens up the unimaginable possibility of reconciliation which happened to have found us in this lifetime.

A few months ago, Frank Roque died in prison.

And you know what the first thing Rana Sodhi told me, Balbir's brother, "They're together now.

"Frank is giving Balbir a hug right now.

"They're together."

And a few weeks ago, Frank's daughter reached out to continue the reconciliation process that her father began.

This is a multi-generational labor.

It might not all happen in our lifetime, but if we can show up to play our particular role and the great, great labor then it's enough, then we are enough.

- Valarie Kaur, the book is "See No Stranger."

A memoir, a manifesto of Revolutionary Love.

Thank you so much for being here in Grand Rapids being a part of "Talking Together" and sharing this wisdom that many of us could use.

- Thank you, thank you so much.

- [Patrick] Thank you so much.

And folks can go to seenostranger.com if they wanna learn more.

We're building a movement and if any of this is resonating with you, it's just touching a wisdom that's already there.

Love is our birthright.

- Valarie, thank you so much again, we appreciate it.

- Thank you.

And thank you for joining us.

We'll see you again soon.

(light hopeful music) - It was wonderful to see so many people coming out to see so many students out celebrating that day by doing service for their community and for their brothers and sisters.

But then also to cap that day off with conversation about how do we give back, how do we serve, how do we move forward, and what are the values and messages of Dr. King that still apply to today?