Image
Instagram Facebook Youtube
Image

“Sage Warrior is far more than a book – it’s a sacred invitation… I’m not the same after reading it, and, for that, I am deeply grateful.”

— Brené Brown, Ph.D., Author of the #1 NYT Bestseller Atlas of the Heart

Order now:

Bookshop
Amazon
Powells
B & N

Sign up to our newsletter!

Image
WISDOM
Image
ARTWORK
Image
MUSIC

“Kaur pulls courage from the flames of reality, and calls us all toward sovereignty, sacredness, and love. This is the book we need, and Kaur is a sacred wayfinder.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love

Image

Wisdom from Valarie Kaur, author of See No Stranger and founder of the Revolutionary Love Project.

How do we find the wisdom to envision a new world and the courage to fight for it?
How do we survive seemingly apocalyptic times?
In a world on fire, how do we embrace love and joy?

We are not the first to ask these questions—in fact, seeking the answers forged one of the world’s great wisdom traditions. In a time riven by caste, conquest, and cruelty, Sikhs blazed the path of the sant sipahi, the sage warrior. The sage radiates love and Oneness; the warrior activates that ethical power to fight for humanity. These energies empowered the first Sikhs to survive near-annihilation in South Asia nearly half a millennium ago. The sage warrior is the essential archetype for our time of turmoil—one we can all embody to cultivate our souls and transform the world.

Valarie Kaur combines the epic, immersive story of her Sikh ancestors—centering the stories of the women who worked to map the path of the sage warrior—with the chronicle of a personal journey: her pilgrimage with her young children across Panjab, India where the stories unfolded, an occasionally comic adventure woven with sublime moments of connection and insight. Each chapter offers a sparkling lesson that emerges from the stories—from practicing pleasure to metabolizing grief to choosing courage.

Sage Warrior shimmers with wisdom: Every story is accompanied by original artwork, music, and meditations, illuminating new ways of seeing and being. This journey is for anyone—from any faith tradition or spiritual practice or none at all—who hungers for a better world and is ready to discover the depth of their own power. Welcome to a journey where mystical love meets revolutionary social change.

Valarie Kaur is a visionary civil rights leader, lawyer, award-winning filmmaker, educator, and author of the #1 Los Angeles Times bestseller See No Stranger. Her work has ignited national movement to reclaim love as a force for justice.
Image

The Sage Warrior Study Guide

The Sage Warrior study guide is a tool to reflect upon the ancestral stories and wisdom shared in the text. Use it to guide your own inquiry or facilitate community conversations in a book group, classroom, or house of worship. Ideal for adults of all ages. Each part of the guide corresponds with one of the thirteen parts of the book and offers:

  • Key Learnings: The take-aways from each part of the book.
  • Sikh History: A summary of the events and figures from this era in history.
  • Key Sikh Concept: A deeper dive into the core wisdom that is centered in the story.
  • Reflection Questions: To facilitate a book group, class discussion, or personal reflection.
  • Story Circle: Explore these prompts to tell your story, as part of a group or on your own.
  • A Revolutionary Love Practice: How the themes in the story connect to the Revolutionary Love Compass.
  • Resources to Learn More: For further exploration on your own, in a group, or classroom setting.
Image

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
Name*
 

The Sage Warrior Guide was written by Nirinjan Kaur Khalsa-Baker, Ph.D., scholar, musician, mother, and Senior Instructor Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles. It is based on the work of Valarie Kaur and her book Sage Warrior and produced with the support of the Revolutionary Love Project.

The Revolutionary Love Project is happy to provide this guide to support revolutionary love in homes, communities, and classrooms. We are offering the guide on a sliding scale (pay what you can), beginning at $0. We recommend a donation of $45 and welcome anything you are able to offer to support our mission.

Would you like to make a donation?*
Image

Experience SAGE WARRIOR with Valarie Kaur and Qais Essar!

Image
Image
Find an event near you!

“A wondrous pilgrimage to the Sikh world! This rich literary, visual, aural magnet pulls us: we travel with the author and her family to her sacred sites and meet historic figures — with their mothers, wives, sisters, daughters, nieces, and comrades who have been neglected in history. We actively participate in momentous Sikh events; we see, we hear, we smell, we taste, we feel. All along, the activist Valarie trains us to be sensuously alive, morally awake – the goal of Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh religion himself. Through a stunning, imaginative interweaving of the past with the present, history with imagination, Punjab with California, we are led to the all-inclusive divine One within. This is a transformative text, a must for our dangerously divided and polarized times.”

— Dr. Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh, scholar and author of The First Sikh: The Life and Legacy of Guru Nanak

Music

Image
Credit: Keerat Kaur and Amplifier Art

The album Sage Warrior  is a genre-crossing, twelve-song odyssey into ancestral wisdom from the critically acclaimed singer, trumpeter, and songwriter Sonny Singh. The album explores the Sikh spirit of the sant sipahi, the sage warrior: the sage leads with love; the warrior answers the call to courage. Introspective and urgent, spiritual and rebellious, the album offers bold new renditions of Sikh devotional poems from South Asia, channeling ancestral wisdom for our time. Singh created the album as a companion to the new book Sage Warrior by visionary civil rights leader and bestselling author Valarie Kaur. Each track on the album accompanies a chapter in the book. Together, the Sage Warrior book and album offer an electrifying multi-sensory experience of Sikh wisdom—a clarion call to love, devotion, and courage in dark times.

Discover more about the Sage Warrior album
Order vinyl
Listen now

Brooklyn-based Sonny Singh is celebrated for bold and joyous musical innovation. For the last two decades, Singh gained renown as an original member of the band Red Baraat, performing on stages globally with his fiery trumpet and voice. He embarked on a solo career to explore bold new renderings of Sikh devotional music. In 2022, he released his solo debut Chardi Kala to critical acclaim: “Singh has done that rarest of rare things as a musician—he has actually charted new ground…” (Bhanuj Kappal, Live Mint). His album broke new ground in musical-spiritual terrain: “This is Indian devotional music as Western pop with a trumpet as a driving force. To hear it is to realize there’s not much else like it anywhere” (Bruce Miller, PopMatters).

Now with his second album, Singh ushers us into altogether new experiences of the sacred, channeling ancient wisdom through music, poetry, and song. The album was produced by Grammy-nominated Kaveh Rastegar, who has worked with Sting, John Legend, Ringo Starr, and De La Soul. Sage Warrior features a virtuosic roster of Sikh and non-Sikh talent on guitars, Punjabi and western drums, horns, harmonium, and synths. The result: a rich sonic journey into the world of Sikh music and beyond. At moments, traditional Punjabi rhythms transport us to the riverbanks of Punjab, where Sikh ancestors sang the sacred poems. In the next moment, we are ushered into bold new experiments in global music through soaring trumpets and epic electric guitar-driven melodies. In every track, Sonny’s powerful voice is our guide, as in the words of Annie Mok of Bandcamp Daily: “Singh’s voice arrives, like the breaking of morning sunlight, a bursting open of joy.”

Study Guide

Image
Credit: Artwork by Keerat Kaur

To accompany the book, Professor Nirinjan Kaur Khalsa-Baker, Ph.D. has written a comprehensive SAGE WARRIOR study guide backed by research, animated through stories, and infused with wisdom.

Discover more about the Sage Warrior guide

Nirinjan Kaur Khalsa-Baker, Ph.D. is scholar, musician, mother, and Senior Instructor Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles. She is the first female exponent of the 500 year-old Sikh drumming tradition on the jori (mridang/pakhawaj). Her Fulbright research and continuing scholarship use a decolonial lens to explore loss and resilience of living memory and differing approaches to revival and reform. Her teaching and publications use a decolonial and applied studies approach to Sikh, Jain, and Yoga studies, philosophy, mysticism, and ethics. Nirinjan serves global Sikh and interfaith initiatives through various academic, artistic, and advisory roles. She has contributed to Valarie Kaur’s most recent work Sage Warrior as co-translator, Study Guide creator, and musician on the Revolutionary Love Tour.

https://lmu.academia.edu/NirinjanKaurKhalsaBaker

https://bellarmine.lmu.edu/theologicalstudies/faculty/?expert=nirinjan.khalsa

Instagram @DrNinjaKaur

Facebook @NirinjanKaurKhalsaBaker

Artwork

Image
Credit: Dalbir Chahal

Illustrations by Keerat Kaur bring the rich history and wisdom of SAGE WARRIOR to life.

Drawing inspiration from Sikh philosophies, Keerat Kaur employs the art of metaphor and symbolism to revolutionize our relationship to nature and spirituality. 

Keerat Kaur is a Canadian-born Artist & Architect (lic. OAA) with Sikh-Panjabi roots. Her work takes shape through the disciplines of painting, sculpture, writing, music, and architecture. Drawing inspiration from Sikh philosophies, she employs the art of metaphor and symbolism to revolutionize our relationship to nature and spirituality. Her aesthetic sensibility lies within a realm where the ordinary merges with the dreamlike. More recently, her work has contributed to the advancement of language-learning and preservation.

11-1
10_-1
2_-1
6_-1
8_In_Colour-1
7-1
1_-1
4_-1
4_(for_Album_Cover)-1
9_-1
BEGUMPURA-1
5_-1
3_-1
See the artwork that accompanies the book

“Valarie Kaur is a revolutionary for justice who shows us how to labor for the world we dream. In my darkest moments, I remember my Sikh sister’s call to ‘breathe and push!’ Her wisdom inspires us to build movements and seek the change that love demands.”

— Bishop William J. Barber, II, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign and author of White Poverty

“Valarie Kaur is a profound voice in the current wildness, urging us onward out of the darkness, towards love and peace, goodness and thus, freedom.”

— Anne Lamott, New York Times bestselling author of Bird by Bird and Help Thanks Wow

“In reclaiming the stories of women in Sikh history, Valarie Kaur breathes new life into us all, restoring the true birthright of the human family: to live as wisdom keepers and champions of justice, to honor the gift of spirit rooted in our own bodies, intimate relationships, and communities, and to take our place in the circle of interbeing to which we belong. This book is a homecoming.”

— Mirabai Starr, author of Wild Mercy and Caravan of No Despair

“Valarie Kaur is a balm-maker. She churns potions to heal and inspire. Hers is a voice of Revolutionary Love — a voice of resistance and resilience, a sovereign voice. She commands that voice to ensure goodness and equality for all.

In Sage Warrior, Kaur revives the women ancestors in Gur-Sikh history. She continues the nearly-forgotten line of storytelling, kathā, from ancient India. Her kathā is of stories told and untold, of service, sacrifice, and humility ornate. The Sikh Gurus’ gifts to the world — their extraordinary music, words of wisdom, and sacrifices —would not be possible without the wondrous and protective leadership of mothers, sisters, spouses, daughters, and saintly women warriors. To remember these near-silenced voices is to honor them — and ultimately, to be transformed by them.

Sage Warrior is a gift born of hard-earned, agenda-less, holistic activism.”

— Bhai Baldeep Singh, acclaimed educator, musician, and revivalist of Sikh wisdom and music traditions

“Waking to oneness has become the new focus of my life’s work and, as usual, Valarie is right there with the language and the stories to help me to better understand and articulate my mission. Thank you, Valarie, for holding my hand and accompanying me on my journey to becoming a sage warrior, and thank you for whispering the wisdom of your ancestors in my ear.”

— Ani DiFranco, singer-songwriter and author of No Walls and the Recurring Dream

“Valarie Kaur’s Sage Warrior brings the contribution of Sikh women to the forefront of Sikh history, a history dominated by malestream scholarship. Combining ethnographic work with Sikh narratives in lucid conversational style, it will inspire new generations. This book belongs to every Sikh household. A brilliant achievement!”

— Dr. Pashaura Singh, Sikh historian, scholar, and author of The Oxford Handbook of Sikh Studies

“Valarie Kaur doesn’t just preach Revolutionary Love, she practices it — and her latest act is in the gift of her new book, Sage Warrior. At turns parable, meditation, and personal journal, Kaur invites us to introspection, using the teachings of the luminaries of her beloved Sikh faith to inspire us to change the world with ‘deep, muscular, holistic love.’ In our polarized times, love is the only rational path forward — and with her lyrical words, Kaur lights our way.”

— Karen Walrond, author of The Lightmaker’s Manifestoand Radiant Rebellion

“Valarie Kaur is an intergenerational fire carrier. Sage Warrior offers the embers of ancient wisdom that bring alive her deep Sikh tradition in ways that shape character and courage for the living of our most daunting days. Open any page. You will find insight and light for whatever challenge you face today. In these toxic times, Valarie has truly given us a living library.”

— John Paul Ledearch, peacebuilder and author of The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace

“Valarie Kaur is a woman of vision, warmth and determination. Her insight into revolutionary love is just what we need in turbulent times. This is life giving in community.”

— Sister Simone Campbell, faith leader, recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and
author of A Nun on the Bus

“Sage Warrior is your beautiful guide to the wise stories and heartfelt teachings of the Sikh tradition.”

— Jack Kornfield, author of A Path With Heart

“With Sage Warrior, Valarie Kaur offers the world a profound gift—a way back to itself—a way back to wholeness. Drawing from the wisdom of her ancestors and the warrior sages of her Sikh faith, Kaur pushes typically hidden truths to the center. Ancient stories comfort, challenge and empower, even as they reveal our common human struggle. Sage Warrior is good medicine for our decolonizing world.”

— Lisa Sharon Harper, author of The Very Good Gospel and Fortune

“Valarie Kaur is a leading light of love and compassion at a time when the world needs it most. Her voice is essential.”

— Isabel Wilkerson, New York Times bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“Sage Warrior is far more than a book – it’s a sacred invitation. I learned about love and revolution, and their sameness. I learned about the world and my life, and their oneness. Valarie’s courageous exploration of ancestral wisdom combined with her insights are exactly what the world is craving right now. I’m not the same after reading it, and, for that, I am deeply grateful.”

— Brené Brown, Ph.D., Author of the #1 NYT Bestseller Atlas of the Heart

“When prophets speak the village should listen, and when the village is in need, prophets shall arise. Valarie Kaur is our prophetic voice calling us to reimagine what faith, compassion, and joy must be for our civic village to thrive.”

— Rev. Otis Moss III, faith leader and author of Dancing in the Darkness

“Whatever wisdom tradition informs your life and work, Kaur shows us how to join hands with the ancestors of legend and history for the strength we need to keep walking into the fierce urgency of now.”

— Parker J. Palmer, author of Let Your Life Speak, Healing the Heart of Democracy, and On the Brink of Everything

“Sage Warrior is radical, mystical nutritional juice for transforming a world on fire. Drink up!”

— V (formerly Eve Ensler), author of The Vagina Monologues

“A beautiful, hopeful, heartfelt treasure of a book. Sage Warrior will enrich your soul, grow your knowledge-base and inspire your activism. If you want to achieve progressive ideals while bridging divides, this is the book for you.”

— Eboo Patel, founder of Interfaith America and author of We Need to Build: Field Notes for a Diverse Democracy

“Drawing deep and beautiful resources from her Sikh tradition, Valarie Kaur offers just what we need to grow and thrive and make a difference in our unravelling world. Imagine there was a college major in being a good human being. And then imagine you could wrap up that education between two covers … that’s what you get in Sage Warrior.“

— Brian D. McLaren, author of Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart 

“Sage Warrior is a treasure chest of hope and inspiration. Valarie Kaur digs deep into her beautiful, sacred Sikh faith tradition to bring us tools of wisdom and oneness when we need it most.”

— Rainn Wilson, best-selling author of SOUL BOOM: Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution

“In Sage Warrior, Valarie Kaur has done a remarkable thing: weaving history, memoir, philosophy, and sociology. She didn’t just write this book, she lived it, and so has bridged then and now, bringing ancient tools to our individual lives in the present day. The book tells the story of the first Sikh ancestors, men and women, and the wisdom they can offer us now. She retells their stories and weaves in her own raw and deep reflections as a mother and activist. All the journeys revealed here burnish the Sikh archetype known as the sage warrior, which offers us a strong and loving way to meet the vast difficulties of our time. Enter here and wear what fits your soul until, as Valarie says, “You [may] build sovereign space where you can find refuge and rest in wisdom within you. Until you “find the wisdom you need to be brave with your life.”

— Mark Nepo, author of The Book of Awakening and You Don’t Have to Do It Alone: The Power of Friendship

“Drawing on illuminating stories from the Sikh tradition and her own brilliant imagination, Valarie Kaur takes us on a mystical journey that calls forth our own natural courage, wisdom and love-based activism. Sage Warrioris powerful and much-needed medicine for our times; it inspires us to join hands and create the world we long for.”

— Tara Brach, author of Radical Compassion

“Sage Warrior is a brilliant gem. It’s a truly inspiring, healing odyssey and practical guide to unlock our courage drawing from the deep wisdom and faith of women in the Sikh tradition.”

— –Michelle Alexander, author of the New York Times Bestseller The New Jim Crow

“Valarie Kaur’s beautiful work restores our idea of love to its rightful ,powerful, wise, sustaining place. It truly is a revolutionary force. Using the ground of the Sikh tradition, the book, as Valarie says in the introduction, ‘is for anyone who feels breathless by the world, and is seeking sources of wisdom.’ In our time, we can each benefit from this inspiring offering.”

— Sharon Salzberg, author of Lovingkindness and Real Life

“Valarie’s writing is sensual and evocative as she takes us into worlds of the Sikh Guru and women ancestors, and the insights she has gleaned from these ancient stories for the revolution we need today. If the particular is universal, then this book has gifts for all of us who yearn for what it means to see no stranger.”

— Rev. Jacqui Lewis, Senior Minister
at Middle Church and author of Fierce Love





More videos

Image

Sign up to our newsletter!