Review – Embrace Mindfulness With ‘Inner Jedi: A Guided Journal for Training in the Light Side of the Force’
If the last few years can teach us anything, it’s that sometimes it’s good to slow your mind down. Mindfulness through meditation and self-reflection are tenets of the Jedi Star Wars often hints at. Sometimes it’s difficult to put down your phone or close your laptop, and even the most disciplined practitioners of mindfulness can use some help. For Star Wars fans looking to look inward while documenting those reflections, Insight Editions offers Inner Jedi: A Guided Journal for Training in the Light Side of the Force.
As someone who struggles with anxiety and emotions (Hello, my Twitter followers!), I often seek guidance on how to slow things down. Inner Jedi takes your hand from the very first page, prompting you with questions to ponder and give your journaling intention. It’s so easy to get scattered when the doom-scrolling, chyron-rolling cycle of news swarms around us. Inner Jedi offers you a place to focus your thoughts and think of a singular question, turning down the volume of the world outside. It allows you to be present and find your own truths through reflection.
Inner Jedi is also very dynamic in the exercises designed to keep your focus. Throughout the journal, there are coloring exercises and beautiful art pieces for contemplation and completion. The journal covers all fifty-two weeks of the year. A year doesn’t sound like a long time, but when you’re trying to commit to new habits, it can feel like it. It’s important to keep those practices fresh. Exercises from drawing to guided meditation greet you at the beginning of each week. Expanding creativity is also an extremely satisfying path to inner reflection.
The entires for each week don’t need to be a novel. Again, keeping this practice brief allows for consistency. The prompts also present an opportunity to fill the pages about acts of service and selflessness rather than one’s own rants about the day. Our complaints about life are valid, but taking that energy and using it to help others is a path to feel more useful and less helpless. It warmed my heart to see these prompts, encouraging folks beginning this journey to look outside themselves and help those around them.
Inner Jedi is beautifully bound with pages hearty enough to ensure your pen doesn’t bleed through. As a notebook and journal hoarder, this is one of the lovelier books I’ve seen. It has a good weight and size, but won’t feel like a brick in your backpack. It’s mobil, but will also look great on your desk. If you’re familiar with the work of Insight Editions, the quality here is as good as the standard they set with each new release. I encourage anyone seeking new good habits in the coming year to treat yourself to this.
As 2022 approaches, and it doesn’t seem like the world is slowing down, you can take solace in yourself. Inner Jedi invokes familiar adages of Jedi Masters, helping prompt the writer to look into their deeper meaning. George Lucas never shied away from referencing Jedi spirituality, and it’s very useful here as a mindful prompt. There is nothing self-righteous or puritanical in this book, it’s merely a guide; and for some of us, Star Wars opened the door to bigger thinking and the philosophies which Lucas sprinkled throughout. Instead of looking to George’s teachers, Inner Jedi asks you to look to yourself as a teacher. I’m very excited to start my 2022 using Inner Jedi.
Inner Jedi: A Guided Journal for Training in the Light Side of the Force is currently available for pre-order. It can be found wherever books are sold starting January 18.
Kyle Larson lives in Portland, Oregon. When he's not running trails, he's reading and writing.
