May the Fourth Be With You

Happy Star Wars Day on this May the 4th! On this momentous day for Star Wars fans, I wanted to revisit the concept of the "force" that Star Wars borrowed from ancient medicine.

As Obi-Wan Kenobi explains, “The Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together.”

Pretty heavy stuff! In an old post, I explored the similarity between this force field and the life force that is an essential component of many ancient civilizations: prana in India, qi in Chinese culture, Japanese ki, Egyptian ka, Greek pneuma, and the Latin spiritus. All of these are essentially the same "life force energy" that keeps us alive and binds us. Just as Luke Skywalker trains to harness the power of the force, yoga, reiki, taichi and other ancient practices teach how to control and balance the life force present inside of us. So here's wishing everyone boatloads of the force working in your favor (in the APs, school finals, spring sports, or whatever else you are dealing with right now.) You can check out my old post at https://ancientmedicina.blogspot.com/2020/09/prana-and-force.html

Prana flows within body

Also, to those of you who are always teasing me about my height, I'll leave you with the wisdom of Yoda's words: “Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm. And well you should not. For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is."

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