In the California Jedi Knighting Standards, the core knowledge is broken down into the five areas of wellness, taken from The Jedi Circle. These are Physical Wellness, Emotional Wellness, Intellectual Wellness, Social Wellness, and Spiritual Wellness.
While many of us will have to isolate during the COVID-19 pandemic, its an excellent time to maintain our training in the five areas of wellness: we can stretch on our beds, meditate, read books, journal about our path and lives. But the fourth area of wellness, social wellness, will be a little more challenging during this time. Between the new shelter-in-place order active in some areas, avoiding large gatherings, keeping a “social distance” of six feet, maintaining social wellness presents a unique challenge to our training at this time.
While California Jedi is primarily an offline organization, emphasizing face-to-face offline training, we need to up our online presence during this unusual time as a way to maintain connection not just to our fellow Jedi but to our social circles. It is through electronic communication and interaction that we can maintain social wellness while having to maintain physical distance. Call a friend every day. Host a google hangout for dinner with your family. Join a Jedi chat server or forum to increase discussion and training for the next month. The internet (if you’ve got it) provides many options.
We recognize that through the Force, we are all connected. Even with physical and social distance, it is paramount that we keep our connections to our fellow human beings. Where we cannot touch with our hands, we must connect with our hearts. Where we cannot embrace with our bodies, we must embrace with our words.
This is a trying time for all of us, and we need to reach out to our support networks both to offer and receive support. I often approach the difficult things in my life as “training opportunities” and we are in this together even if we must be physically distant. Now is a time for connecting to your communities online and continuing our training by putting it into practice. Let’s approach this time of social distance and all the other stressors of the pandemic as a Jedi would. Cultivating peace, knowledge, serenity, harmony and the Force–physically apart but together in the struggle.
California Jedi will be attending to our social wellness during the pandemic with our video hangouts on every First Thursday and Third Wednesday of the month. For information on joining us for the California Jedi Hangout, please find details at our meetup group at https://www.meetup.com/CaliforniaJedi/