Jedi Living

When I first created what would become Jedi Living I did so for one simple purpose - To Help Me Live as a Jedi Knight. To learn, live, and grow as a Jedi in everyday life. We are nine years in on my little project and only a year on Tumblr. But I have created some content over that time which you may find useful. So to sort that out, here is a Jedi Living Collection Post. Hope you find it helpful.

Introduction Posts:

Are Jedi Real?

Keep the Basics at Heart

Five (random) Jedi Misconceptions

How Jedi Living Does yo!

The Way is Not Mysterious

Jedi Life Posts:

Five Ways to Start Living as a Jedi

Five Ways to Cultivate a Jedi Mind

Developing a Jedi Attitude 

Developing a Good Jedi Relationship

Five Ways to Help like a Jedi

Five Habits that are Harshing your Jedi Zen

Solving Problems like a Jedi Knight

Creating a Jedi Mood

Dark Side:

Five Tips for Facing a Dark Side Day

Battling the Dark Side

Emotions and the Dark Side

When You Fall

Remembering Your Jedi-Self

Jedi Training Posts:

Real Jedi Training

Ten Things You Should Not Sacrifice for Jedi Training

Four Tips to Improve Your Training

Five Tips Before Searching for Your Jedi Master

How to get Jedi-Level Concentration

Tips for Running

Ten Things to Help You Survive Training

Jedi and Fitness

Jedi Community Posts:

The Jedi Community

Beware the False Master

Be the Master

Jediism = Real Jedi?

Exercises:

Jedi Breathing Exercise

Jedi Relaxation

Improving Jedi Diplomacy

Jedi Meditation 1 (Jedi Codes Reflection)

“Trust your instincts.” - Qui-Gon Jinn

Too often we ignore our guts instincts. And while our logic, reasoning, and forethought are valuable tools they shouldn’t automatically ignore our intuition. Learn to listen and factor in that extra information.

“I have a bad feeling about this.” - Luke Skywalker (or your favorite SW character who says this)

Learn to walk away. Trust your instincts and when you get a bad feeling, understand that at times it is okay to say no. To walk away. To decline. Even if last minute. Sometimes things just don’t add up.

“Always with you what cannot be done.” - Yoda

Drop the negative self-talk. Acknowledge problems, obstacles, and failures, but don’t make them excuses. Don’t focus on them. Instead look for the solution, learn from the challenge, and seek a way forward.

“Learn to let go of what you fear to lose.” - Yoda

While often used in context of people and things, perhaps the most feared loss is that of control. Or the illusion of control. Anakin couldn’t control people’s death. You cannot control a great many things. Learn to let go of that and instead focus more on what you can control. Your choices, your actions, your outlook.

“I shall do what I must, Obi-Wan.” - Qui-Gon Jinn

But the thing about the ‘they’re not fighting slavery!’ argument always gets me because, like, there are roughly ten thousand Jedi. That’s the firmest number we have on the Jedi Order around the time before the clone wars. Some of those Jedi are simply not going to be suited to going up against slavers. Some of them are kids, some of them are elderly, some of them aren’t very good at fighting. So that’s probably a maximum of, what, six thousand field-ready Jedi?

Take a moment to look at that number. Six thousand. That is a low, LOW number of people, if you’re asking them to go out into the Outer Rim (which is where a lot of slavery is happening), to several dozen or perhaps even several HUNDRED planets, to go…what? Kill slavers? Free slaves? And then what?

Now you have thousands or tens of thousands of traumatized people that you are responsible for. The Jedi don’t have the kind of money available to set up tens of thousands of people with trauma care, food, education, housing - because here’s the thing, some of those slaves are going to be second or third generation slaves. You can’t just free people and go ‘you’re free!’ and then walk away. If you care about those people, you need to help them learn how to live as free people. So do the Jedi do it themselves and tie up all their resources that way? Do they ask a planetary ruler they know personally to take all these people? Do they try to house them in the temple? How would the Senate feel about the Jedi cozying up to one particular planetary ruler and taking favours from them?

But what about the Hutts? Won’t the Hutt clans just pay more people to become slavers? So should the Jedi kill all the Hutts? Well then the other crime cartels will fill that void - the Black Sun and such. Should the Jedi kill all of them?

What exactly do people mean when they say the Jedi should be freeing slaves? What process do they envision? Jedi shock-troops marching into Jabba’s Palace, and the headquarters of all the other Hutts and crime syndicates?

Should they leave a trail of corpses in their wake? Should they kill all the children of the people running the cartels? Should they kill Rotta as well as Jabba? Where is the cutoff? Everyone over 21? anyone over 17? Anyone involved in the slavery aspect of the cartels in any way? What about spouses - they knew what their spouse was doing, should the Jedi kill them as well? Or should the Jedi leave them alive, so that their resentment and hatred of the Jedi murderers can grow into open opposition?

And if you think the Jedi could take down the Hutt cartels without a bodycount, then I have a bridge to sell you. There would absolutely be a bodycount. And why would the Hutts not use their slaves to protect themselves? Use the slaves to fight the Jedi - maybe promise them that if they can kill a Jedi, they’ll be freed, or be given a lot of money, or maybe they’d threaten people’s families to make them fight. Or just, y’know, pay them. Should the Jedi cut down all the slaves and mercenaries and cannon fodder the syndicates would send against them?

Should the Jedi become bloody warlords? No?

Then how exactly do people propose they end slavery? Here’s a radical notion - maybe by spreading peace and prosperity by arbitrating disputes between planets so that those planets can get back to co-operating and have less chaos that might allow slavers and pirates to take advantage of intra- or inter-system conflict to pull slave runs. And systems that are more prosperous have more attention and money to spend fighting slavers themselves. Parents who can afford to put food on the table are less likely to sell their children into slavery.

And here’s the thing. Some Jedi ARE out there tracking down slavery rings. Siri Tachi anyone? Tholme and Aayla? and that’s only the ones we know about. And in TCW we are explicitly told that the Jedi being busy with the war means that the crime syndicates are flourishing because the Jedi’s attention is elsewhere. The Zygerrians are getting up to their old tricks BECAUSE THE JEDI ARE BUSY WITH THE WAR. I  just. HOW? HOW DO PEOPLE NOT SEE THE COROLLARY?

Before the war, the Jedi WERE keeping the crime cartels in check. They WERE keeping things from getting worse, and trying to make things better, but they only have TEN THOUSAND PEOPLE, MAX (counting children, elderly, etc), for THE ENTIRE REPUBLIC NOT TO MENTION THE OUTER RIM AREAS OUTSIDE IT.

But Pop Culture Detective put all this far more articulately than I can. Fuck the Jedi, fuck the toxic masculinity that equates the expression of emotion with weakness or evil, and fuck all systems that suggest “good” and “evil” are binary forces.

The Jedi don’t really do any of those things though? While many Jedi are reserved in their emotional expression, and I can agree with Pop Culture Detective about how that can play into real world patterns, he also heavily misunderstands core things about the Jedi and the Force. 

To start with, the Jedi do not ban emotions. We see even very quintessential Jedi show emotions all over the place. What they speak of is controlling them, because things can go really bad when trained force-sensitives loose control. Controlling your emotions is not the same as not feeling them. That Jedi Code people talk about at times is from a 1980′s roleplaying book and not a central part of the worldbuilding. To the extent that it has been picked up in higher levels of canon it’s as a meditation mantra.  Anakin wasn’t prevented from expressing his feelings as a Jedi, he was told to control them. The problem was that Palpatine was dripping poison in his ear.

The “dark side” and “light side” isn’t really Good and Evil as much as they are Selfishness and Selflessness. I’m gonna use a Lucas quote, where he talks about how the force works, to show what I mean:

“The core of the Force–I mean, you got the dark side, the light side, one is selfless, one is selfish, and you wanna keep them in balance. What happens when you go to the dark side is it goes out of balance and you get really selfish and you forget about everybody … because when you get selfish you get stuff, or you want stuff, and when you want stuff and you get stuff then you are afraid somebody is going to take it away from you, whether it’s a person or a thing or a particular pleasure or experience. “Once you become afraid that somebody’s going to take it away from you or you’re gonna lose it, then you start to become angry, especially if you’re losing it, and that anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering. Mostly on the part of the person who’s selfish, because you spend all your time being afraid of losing everything you’ve got instead of actually living. “Where joy, by giving to other people you can’t think about yourself, and therefore there’s no pain. But the pleasure factor of greed and of selfishness is a short-lived experience, therefore you’re constantly trying to replenish it, but of course the more you replenish it, the harder it is to, so you have to keep upping the ante. You’re actually afraid of the pain of not having the joy.”  –George Lucas, The Clone Wars writers meeting

The Dark side is selfishness, and that fear->anger->hate->suffering path Yoda speaks of is literally how Lucas describes the force working. It’s a core of the Star Wars world-building. 

This also plays into how attachment as the Jedi define it is not the same things as love. It’s not the same attachment that we use colloquially or the attachment of attachment theory. It is brought up in connection to possessive relationships, obsession, greed and an inability to let go when time comes. I’m gonna bring in some Lucas quotes to explain further:

“No human can let go,” Lucas would say of [the Yoda-Anakin scene]. “It’s very hard. Ultimately, we do let go because it’s inevitable; you do die and you do lose your loved ones. But while you’re alive, you can’t be obsessed with holding on. As Yoda says in this one, ‘You must learn to let go of everything you’re afraid to let go of.’ Because holding on is in the same category and the precursor to greed. And that’s what a Sith is. A Sith is somebody that is absolutely obsessed with gaining more and more power - but for what? Nothing, except that it becomes an obsession to get more.” 

“The Jedi are trained to let go. They’re trained from birth,” he continues, “They’re not supposed to form attachments. They can love people- in fact, they should love everybody. They should love their enemies; they should love the Sith. But they can’t form attachments. So what all these movies are about is: greed. Greed is a source of pain and suffering for everybody. And the ultimate state of greed is the desire to cheat death.”- The Making of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, page 213

“Jedi Knights aren’t celibate - the thing that is forbidden is attachments - and possessive relationships.”  –George Lucas, BBC News 2002 interview

“He turns into Darth Vader because he gets attached to things. He can’t let go of his mother; he can’t let go of his girlfriend. He can’t let go of things. It makes you greedy. And when you’re greedy, you are on the path to the dark side, because you fear you’re going to lose things, that you’re not going to have the power you need.” –George Lucas, Time Magazine 2002 interview

We also see this expressed in-universe. In “Rise of Clovis” when Obi-Wan goes to see Anakin to try and talk to him, he brings up his feelings for Satine and says “It’s not that we are not allowed to have these feeling. It’s natural.” We have also seen Obi-Wan say that Jedi are forbidden attachments. So, once again, these two concepts being the same thing wouldn’t really make sense. Loving someone is not the same as being attached to them in Jedi jargon. To what extent attachment and love overlaps it’s with attachment as selfish love. What the Jedi instead value, and hold as central to their life style is compassion, selfless love that’s about the other person rather than your own feelings for them. Them not getting married might be just as much about commitment to the order and a need for neutrality as anything else. 

Attachment, the driving force behind Anakin’s fall, is very much presented as being a bad thing, both by Lucas in commentaries and the narrative of the movies. Anakin is attached to his mother, unable to let her go, so the loss of her drives him to a horrible massacre, where he kills not only those responsible for her death but also innocent children. Attachment is what makes him join Sidious. He couldn’t bear the pain of losing Padmé, but it wasn’t about what Padmé wanted but rather his own emotions. I cannot see Padmé agreeing to a genocide just so she can stay alive. Anakin’s love for her turned selfish. Sidious didn’t trick Anakin with promises of letting him feel, Anakin wanted a way to stop death!

Star Wars: Attack of the Clones commentary track, George Lucas:  “The key part of this scene ultimately is Anakin saying “I’m not going to let this happen again.” We’re cementing his determination to become the most powerful Jedi. The only way you can really do that is to go to the Dark Side because the Dark Side is more powerful. If you want the ultimate power you really have to go to the stronger side which is the Dark Side, but ultimately it would be your undoing. But it’s that need for power and the need for power in order to satisfy your greed to keep things and to not let go of things and to allow the natural course of life to go on, which is that things come and go, and to be able to accept the changes that happen around you and not want to keep moments forever frozen in time.“ 

Honestly, I am so surprised when people try to connect the Jedi to Christianity and the West’s philosophy when Lucas and other people have talked about how he was inspired by Japanese movies. Why does this fact flies over people’s head?

There are fundumental things in the East and the West that are just different. It doesn’t make sense when you try and relate it.

East religions and philosophies emphasies more on how a person can better themselves so they can be in harmony in nature and other people. Striving to be better in their day to day lives. Sounds familiar?

They also don’t have “one ruler” of your fate. You make your own fate. Of course there are “spirits” who can help you but you make your own choices. No one is going to send you to “good"or the “bad” place. You can reach a Nirvana, be rebirthed, be rewarded in some sort of way or punished by Karma, which basically “emphasizes the responsibility of a person to decide his happiness through his actions, which have the power to change his destiny.”

“Man, the subject, should gain mastery over man, the object”, (Ho 1995) gaining control over the “Self”, releasing the individual of pain and suffering and thus tending to eternal happiness. ”

This all relates to the Jedi and how they see and use the Force in their daily lives. If you can’t see it - what have you been all watching?

You can find talks about emotional intelligence in Hinduism and a story about two cousins who fight each other. And one of them has mastered how to deal with emotions , the other not so much. So from this story come out some words that are quite familiar to the Jedi’s own teachings.

“Thinking of objects, attachment to them is formed in a man. From attachment longing, and from longing anger grows.

“From anger comes delusion, and from delusion loss of memory. From loss of memory comes the ruin of discrimination, and from the ruin of discrimination, he perishes.”

“He whose mind is not shaken by adversity, who does not hanker after happiness, who has become free from affection, fear, and wrath, is indeed the Muni of steady wisdom.

“He who is everywhere unattached, not pleased at receiving good, nor vexed at evil, his wisdom is fixed.

“When also, like the tortoise drawing its limbs, he can completely withdraw the senses from their objects, then his wisdom becomes steady.”

“Bhagavad-Gita(Hindu script) is considered an authority not only to identify the nature of emotions, but also to show a way out of the darkness of emotional instability, in the form of a dialogue between emotional disturbance (Aijuna) and the universal master (Krishna), and remains an irrefutable answer to many dilemmas or confusions of modern man.”

The Eastern people often think of the spirit of the community rather than the individualistic approach which I personally find harder to relate to and probably a lot of other people too. People in the West are often praised of their accomplishment as individuals and also praise people that stand out from the crowd, when it’s in a positive light. We often see people who follow the crowd as mindless sheeps and like to critisize them for not being “authentic” enough or thinking for themselves. While it may be true in some cases relying on collectivism can be very helpful. Collectivism is what helps us when we are trying to fight for our rights, it helps us when a group of people try and achieve a goal that could help humanity, Earth or etc. In times like these if a person wants just to show off as individual what good does that do.

“According to Bhagavad Gita, selfless service for a good cause and for others, with the right feeling and attitude, is a form of worship and spirituality.”

“According to James Lochtefeld, Karma yoga is the spiritual practice of “selfless action performed for the benefit of others.”

Again you can easily connect that with the Jedi. Because they try and strive for collectivism of some sort they are able to help people without bringing up the “I” in everything. Like “what about me? What about my emotions? What about my dreams and aspirations?”. It’s very easy, you just walk away. No one is holding you back to do whatever you want with your life. This is a way of life, not a cult.

You can read so much stuff ,easily on the internet, about Jedi’s inspiration and stop listening to “sources” that just put their own emotional and philosohical views. There is NOTHING bad if you don’t like that way of thinking. But just because you don’t find it appealing doesn’t mean other people don’t so don’t label them “cult appologist” or some other shit like that.

Hero: “I realize that.”

Villain: “Doesn’t that trouble you?”

Hero: “Sure there is. I’m stopping me.”

Villain: “But in your heart you crave—”

Hero: “Sometimes when I’m in a crowded building I get the sudden urge to just boop a stranger right on the nose. But I don’t do it, because that would be super rude and weird. Does having that compulsion in the first place make me just as much of a weirdo as if I had acted on it? Maybe it does in your eyes, but to the would-be boopee, it makes all the difference in the world.”

Villain: “We’re not talking about booping noses, we’re talking about killing peop—”

THERE’S A REALLY INTERESTING, SURPRISINGLY CONSISTENT STORY TREND WITH JEDI (OR ONCE-JEDI) ALL THROUGHOUT STAR WARS: They seem to have massive cases of survivor’s guilt, that they walk away from fighting and being Jedi, until they do a lot of soul-searching and eventually come to realize that they need to pick their weapon back up, they need to fight to protect people again, to become Jedi again. Kanan Jarrus and Ahsoka Tano and Cal Kestis all have this arc–and, I would argue, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Cere Junda have it as well.  About the only PT Jedi we see who doesn’t pick up his weapon to fight again is Yoda and that’s probably just due to age, he’s basically holding himself back from dying on Dagobah probably since we first see him in ESB. But otherwise every single one of them has an arc they must go through to find themselves again. Kanan deals with the trauma and guilt of surviving (not just Order 66, but that Depa Billaba died to save him, then the clones and the Empire were hunting him down when he was 13), and he hides away for years, trying to forget that he was raised as a Jedi, trying to forget his own people and culture.  It’s not until he brings out his lightsaber and tells Ezra, “Kid, I’m about to let everyone in on the secret.” that he steps back onto the path of being a Jedi.  The entirety of Rebels is about Kanan finding himself again, finding himself as a Jedi.  Ultimately, he’s Knighted by Yoda (using the Grand Inquisitor’s visage) in the Lothal Temple, completing not just his ascension to the rank of Knight, not just solidifying himself as Ezra’s Jedi Master, but Kanan himself as a Jedi in his very heart. Cal Kestis deals with the same trauma and guilt of surviving Order 66 and that Jaro Tapal died to save him.  He hides on Bracca for five years, trying to suppress his very sense of self, his culture and identity, until the Empire finds out about him and he has to act.  His entire story is about healing from the trauma of Order 66 and his damaged connection to the Force, it’s when he goes to Ilum and picks up his lightsaber, when he faces the vision of Master Tapal, that’s when Cal has found himself again.  He is a Jedi again, through and through. Ahsoka deals with the same guilt of surviving Order 66 and the men she couldn’t save on that Jedi Cruiser.  She drops her lightsaber and goes for years without one, hiding away and never really helping anyone, so damaged by everything she’s been through.  It’s not until the Force guides her to a new set of lightsabers and the realization that she’s meant to pick them up again and fight back that she finds herself.  She may not do so as a Jedi–though, with TCW’s final season, we know she wanted to be a Jedi again, some part of her wanted and was open to coming back–but she found herself again when she picked up her lightsabers and fought back. Obi-Wan spends nearly two decades hiding away on Tatooine, not being a Jedi, dealing with not only the trauma of Order 66, his entire people and culture genocided almost entirely out of existence, but he can’t even be who he is.  He can’t talk about being a Jedi, he can’t talk about his loss, he can’t talk about how hard it is not to have his community and loved ones, he can’t talk about this fundamental part of himself.  While he is a Jedi in his patience, the difficult path he walked is one that he rose above precisely because he was raised as a Jedi, he also feels that there’s something deeply missing from his sense of self.  He doesn’t feel like a Jedi on Tatooine, he tells Qui-Gon he’s looking forward to being a Jedi again, shortly before he’s ready to leave with Luke.  And it’s when he picks up his lightsaber again, when he faces Darth Vader on the Death Star, when he protects Luke and Leia and Han, when he lets Vader have the choice of whether to kill him or not, that Obi-Wan is himself again, as a Jedi.

(From a Certain Point of View, “Master and Apprentice”, Claudia Gray) Cere cuts herself off from the Force, she’ll advise Cal, but she can’t be a Jedi herself, she has too much she can’t untangle to do it.  It’s not until she opens herself up to the Force, picking up Trilla’s lightsaber, and Knighting Cal with it, that she really takes the first steps to finding her path and herself again. Even Luke Skywalker does the same–he survives the slaughter of his Jedi School and he feels so guilty for it that he hides himself away for six years, throwing away his saber, then throwing away his father’s saber as well.  It’s not until he reconnects to the Force, projecting himself with his lightsaber in hand to defend against Kylo Ren, to protect the Resistance members, that he finds himself again, as a Jedi.  And that’s why I loved the line in TROS, it wasn’t about tearing down TLJ, but about reconfirming what TLJ already laid out–Luke realized he was wrong and found himself again, he had respect for the weapon of a Jedi again. And all of them have the theme of dropping or hiding their lightsaber, this thing that so uniquely identified them as Jedi (even with Inquisitors and Sith running around, it was still the weapon of a Jedi) that they felt so much guilt and trauma over that they had to leave it behind or hide it.  They survived when others died, often died specifically for them. That’s such a heavy burden for any of them to bear, to know that they survived when others didn’t.  Trilla taunts Cal, “What Jedi gave their life so that you might live?”

Kanan’s voice breaks when he talks about how they gunned down Depa and then came for him.