Is anyone else getting excited about the next Star Wars movie coming out on December 20th?! (Trailer here: Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker)
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker will be the final episode of the nine-part “Skywalker saga” and it is the third installment of the Star Wars sequel trilogy, following The Force Awakens (2015) and The Last Jedi (2017), both of which I totally loved! Did you see them? Did you also love them?!
Are you surprised to hear that I love Star Wars?
Perhaps it goes back to that very first movie in the Summer of 1977, when I was a little seven-year-old and my parents took us to the drive-in theatre to see Star Wars on a big screen under the stars…
I can’t say that I have seen every single Star Wars movie… Nor can I say that I remember much from the early episodes… But what I can tell you is that these last two movies made me feel so “woke” as the young folks say today… After seeing The Force Awakens, I felt sure that all of humanity could be enlightened by watching that movie! The power of the Light winning over the darkness felt so tangible to me, as if I could hold that power in my hands!
One scene from The Last Jedi particularly touches me. I have watched this scene countless times. (You can view it here: The Last Jedi Yoda’s Force Ghost Scene.) Yoda, who had died at 900 years old in The Return of the Jedi, appears as a ghost right as Luke Skywalker is about to burn down the tree and the Jedi texts. Luke holds up the torch of fire, but then he cannot go through with it, so Yoda closes his eyes and summons the power of lightening to strike the tree and burn it all down. He laughs (oh, that laugh!), while Luke is horrified that the sacred texts are burning…
Yoda says calmly, “Wisdom they held, but that library contained nothing that the girl Rey does not already possess. Skywalker, still looking to the horizon. Never here, now, hmm?” Luke replies, “I was weak. Unwise.” Yoda says, “Lost Ben Solo you did. Lose Rey we must not.” To that, Luke crumbles in his despair: “I can’t be what she needs me to be.”
Yoda’s answer is profound: “Pass on what you have learned. Strength. Mastery. But weakness, folly, failure also. Yes, failure most of all. The greatest teacher, failure is.”
And the punchline… “Luke, we are what they grow beyond. That is the true burden of all masters.”
So, I am super excited to see how Luke is going to rise above his feelings of failure. I can really relate to him hanging out alone on an island and giving up on life… It will be very interesting to watch how he interacts with Rey in this final episode… And will the Light finally conquer the darkness?!
Dear reader, if you’ve been following my blog for a while then you know that this Summer I began studying the mindfulness teachings of Zen Buddhist Master Thich Nhat Hanh… Well, in the trailer for the movie about him (you can watch the trailer here: Walk With Me), one of his young monks says, “You know Yoda in Star Wars? He’s a little bit like that.”
Indeed, in his teachings, Thich Nhat Hanh does not focus merely on cultivating the positive, but rather, he also stresses the importance of working with our negative feelings… Yoda advised Luke to embrace his failures… And in his book Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm, Thich Nhat Hanh writes:
“We embrace our feelings with tenderness, with nonviolence, and we soothe those feelings…. After some minutes of being recognized and embraced, that painful feeling’s zone of energy will recede, and you will feel a welcome relief from the grip of fear or pain. A seed from the depths of consciousness manifests, it stays for a while as a zone of energy, and then it goes back down to its original place as a seed. But after being recognized and embraced with mindfulness, it loses some of its strength. The seed is a bit weaker than before it manifested…. Every time the pain manifests, we have to let it manifest; we should not push it down. We shouldn’t try to suppress it. We have to let it come and take good care of it.”
In this book Thich Nhat Hanh also teaches about generating joy and happiness, as well as “gladdening the mind” in which he says there is “an added element of reinvigorating and energizing the mind”… (What I like to call “Happy-ing Up”!)… And in the last section of the book, he advises, “Do whatever you can to bring happiness to the air, the water, the rocks, the trees, the birds, and the humans.”
Winnie-the-Pooh, that lovable bear from the stories by A.A. Milne, brings a simpleminded sort of happiness wherever he goes… Recently I re-read a book from my shelf called The Tao of Pooh, by Benjamin Hoff, in which he explains Taoism through the characters in the Winnie-the-Pooh stories. I highly recommend this fun little book!
Hoff also stresses the importance of working with difficult emotions: “Instead of struggling to erase what are referred to as negative emotions, we can learn to use them in positive ways…. So rather than work against ourselves, all we need to do in many cases is to point our weaknesses or unpleasant tendencies in a different direction than we have been.”
Throughout the book, Hoff explains how Pooh Bear’s natural positivity makes him the ideal Taoist, who lives in harmony with “Things As They Are” in the present moment. He says, “The Wise are Who They Are. They work with what they’ve got and do what they can do.”
Very similar to Yoda’s advice to Luke, eh?!
And here’s another paragraph by Hoff that reminded me of Yoda’s talk with Luke: “A way of life that keeps saying, “Around the next corner, above the next step,” works against the natural order of things and makes it so difficult to be happy and good that only a few get to where they would naturally have been in the first place — Happy and Good — and the rest give up and fall by the side of the road, cursing the world, which is not to blame but which is there to help show the way.”
I am really ready to see Luke come into his power in the here and now, as advised by Yoda, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Winnie-the-Pooh!
As Hoff puts it, “In order to take control of our lives and accomplish something of lasting value, sooner or later we need to learn to Believe. We don’t need to shift our responsibilities onto the shoulders of some deified Spiritual Superman, or sit around and wait for Fate to come knocking at the door. We simply need to believe in the power that’s within us, and use it.” (bold lettering added)
Dear readers, I really hope you have enjoyed reading this post as much as I have enjoyed writing it for you!
May the Force of Happiness and Goodness Be With You!
With much love,
StarFire Teja
Image of Yoda from Star Wars: The Last Jedi… Image credit unknown, this image is on many websites… Background SunStar image Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech. (If you are reading this post in an email, please click on the title of this article and you will be taken to the StarFire Teja Blog where you can see Yoda. He is such a love!)
