Valarie Kaur’s beautiful brilliant Revolutionary Love Project compass offers an orientation and practices to find love for others who are experiencing harm, love for our opponents, and love for ourselves.

Absolutely core to this work is understanding this is something we do as community – to know we all have different roles to play in each moment, and to trust our body as a guide to what is right for us.

I’d highly recommend following the content at valariekaur.com, or the brilliant series that is US based but applicable to all at The People’s Inauguration. Here is a taster of what you can find there…

Love others – See no stranger

How do we cultivate our love for others, our willingness to take action to protect what is at risk of harm?

How can we look at any other living being with the mindset ‘you are a part of me I do not yet know’…

Revolutionary love gives 3 practices…

1. Cultivate wonder

Seeing others with wonder, being curious about their story, what breaks their heart, what they want and care for.

“I am defining wonder as letting in a sense of awe and openness, deep curiosity. It is to look upon the face of anyone or anything and say ‘you are a part of me, I do not yet know’. Its an orientation of humility. Wondering about another person, their thoughts and experiences, their pains and joys, their wants and needs, gives us information for how to love them. It’s how we have learned how to love our partners, our children, our friends. Now when we wonder about those who we would otherwise see as strangers, let even them inside of our circle of care, then wonder becomes an act of revolutionary love.”

2. Grieve together

Whose grief have we not let into our hearts? When we come together to grieve, to hear someone else’s story of heartbreak, and let in their pain, we are saying ‘you grieve, and you do not grieve alone’. This is part of how we love others.

3. Fight together

From wonder and grieving together, we can notice and honour the impulse from inside us to fight against injustice, to take action, to prevent harm, to show up in active solidarity, to be there as an accomplice from a place of love.

“To fight is to choose to protect those in harm’s way. To fight with revolutionary love is to fight against injustice alongside those most impacted by harm, in a way that preserves our opponents’ humanity as well as our own. When we fight for those outside our immediate circle, our love becomes revolutionary.”

The fight impulse is natural, ancient and fundamental. It shows us what we love, and gives us the energy and the impulse to protect it. When we come to this fight from a place of love, without denying anyone’s humanity, we can fully move on this path of living nonviolence and loving others.

Up next… Love our opponents >