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Later on this week I will be hosting a Zoom Event called “The Labyrinth of Release” that I hope will become an annual October Meditation. In thinking on it, I realized that it would probably be a good idea to explain the history, evolution, purpose, and Jedi philosophy behind the Labyrinth of Release so that people know what they are getting into.
Somewhere around 2008 I found a web board on a website that was completely unmonitored called Jedi Church. It was actually the precursor website to the now well known Facebook page “Jedi Church (the Original)”, both the site and group were founded by the same person. Anyways, the web board had A LOT of people asking about Jedi Funerals. They would come in and express how they had recently lost someone close to them who loved Star Wars but weren’t quite religious and were looking for a way to honor them in death. Perhaps Jediism had an answer.
No one ever got back to them and they were left without an answer. Yet people kept coming in with the same question. At the time, the only two orders I knew took anytime to talk about the path as a religion were Jedi Sanctuary and Temple of the Jedi Order. I thought that maybe they had an answer to this question and I could find something that I could give all these people asking these questions something they could use to help them as they laid to rest a loved one.
Jedi Sanctuary didn’t have anything, and Temple of the Jedi Order only provided a book with a handful of 1-2 paragraph long options one could read at a eulogy. But what I saw these people looking for was something more than merely a reading. Something that would make it feel like they were engaging with Star Wars itself. The more I looked into this, I found one tradition in the fiction that stood out: A Funeral Pyre. The problem was, there was like one place in the Southwest of America that had the legal ability to perform Pyre-based cremations. Turns out it’s too much of a fire hazard to make such a thing a wide-spread reality. I’m not sure if there are more these days than in the past- I imagine there probably are, but they aren’t in high demand. So there goes the pyre answer.
So I looked at a different value system within the Jedi Community. We are an eccletic bunch, with varying beliefs about what happens after we die. So I thought, I’ll try this, I’ll create a modular funeral model. People could pick and choose based on their own personal beliefs regarding what happens in the afterlife. It included explanations of why one would use this function over that, etc, etc. The only thing that really related to the Jedi Path itself was this discussion about how burying someone in a Tree Burial Pod manifested a synchronicity with the last line of the Code, that there is no death, there is the Force. Guys, it was AWFUL. REALLY AWFUL. And after about a week of completing it and contemplating what I had worked on, and maybe sharing it with one or two people around me, I threw it to the curb. It was just that bad. No different than having some Jedi Code inspired paragraphs to add to a eulogy.
So I tabled it for a couple of years. Figured I could return later and see what I could come up with. The inspiration for the Labyrinth of Release began on Imbolc 2009, though I wouldn’t come to hammer out any of the details of until 2013. On Imbolc 2009 I was invited by a friend to attend his ceremony. His ceremony included walking a labyrinth, which I found to be a very profound experience. I started looking into the history of labyrinths to learn more about it’s cultural use, because prior to this point I had only known about the Cretian story many of us are exposed to in grade school studying classical mythology. You know the one, Thesus gets thrown into a Labyrinth with a Minotaur and takes him out returning home a hero.
Much like the word “Meditation” that has expanded from meaning one thing- to think deeply, to include a variety of Eastern, Native American and more more traditions that deal with focusing of the mind, the term Labyrinth has expanded beyond the traditional concept of a structure that is easy to get lost in. It can be as simple as a spiral to a center point, or a complex as a maze. Labyrinths got out to a variety of points around the world and took on their own meaning depending on how a culture wanted to use it.
This made the Labyrinth a symbol that wasn’t inherently tied to any one culture, but rather one that was connective. And that’s something the Jedi Path aimed to cultivate on a number of levels. Our philosophy isn’t just rooted in the idea that every life is to be respected, but also in a rich understanding that we are all connected by the Force. Much like how the Force connects us, the Labyrinth- in it’s own way- represents how humanity sought to connect with each other while maintaining our own unique identities.
The Labyrinth model also worked well with another aspect of the Jedi Path that has been interwoven into the community from it’s earliest days: Meditation focused on Self-Awareness. It gives you a road map to explore thoughts and feelings. You can trace a labyrinth in meditation- I use to have one made of aluminum and a stylist that I could use to trace it from a Celtic festival I attended in 2007; you can walk it, and you follow along one through visualization. Each one has different senses they can engage, and you can gain very different results from each method you engage a labyrinth. It gets you to explore yourself, which is at the heart of a Jedi’s meditation practice.
It is for these reasons that you will Labyrinths are the basis of every Jedi ceremony I’ve worked to develop. And that’s really the key to what opened the door to using it as the platform for the Funeral Tradition I wanted to build, called “The Labyrinth of Release”.
Jedi Master Angelus of International Jedi Federation collaborated on some generalized philosophy that should be reflected in the ceremony. One of the things we concluded was that a Jedi Funeral should be focused on helping the living let go of those who were no longer with them. This distinction that a funeral is for the living ties directly into the Jedi Philosophy of letting go of attachments. In the prequels, we find that it was attachment to Padme that caused Anakin to fall for the lie of the darkside- that all things can be resolved by letting the darkness overtake you. And in the more recent Disney adaption of his story in Kenobi, we see the second lie of the dark side in Vader’s story- that in letting go of the light within yourself and allowing your darkness to take over, you do not have to deal with it.
Letting go of an attachment doesn’t mean that you simply throw it away. That’s not healthy, it has to be something you process through, and it can be incredibly hard work. Funeral Rites throughout the various cultures of the world were aimed at helping both the living and in some instances the deceased in letting go of the past so they can move on in their journeys. Similarly, we see that overcoming addiction is tied directly to working through the emotional situations that cause a person to fall right back into their addiction.
One of the reasons that eulogies are helpful for people to process their loved one, is because a eulogy gives an opportunity to hear what made a person so wonderful. The drawback, however, is that the eulogy is written by only one or two people that knew the person in life. You don’t get to experience your own eulogy of that person. This is what the Labyrinth of Release seeks to remedy. As you walk the labyrinth towards the center, you are meant to contemplate the life you shared with the person, or even pet, you lost. You are also afforded an opportunity to share that with someone as they walk with you- to support you as you process through all of those memories. When you reach the center, if you are alone, you can further reflect upon what you’ve seen. And if you are with others who were also friends with the deceased, you can share stories around the fire about their life and see what others saw in the deceased. On the journey back to the entrance of the Labyrinth, you are told to contemplate the lessons you gained from the deceased and how you wish to incorporate them into your life more fully. And before you step out, you have one last chance to say something to either the deceased directly, or the divine who gave you chance to know this person before blowing out your candle with the words “I now release you into the Force, and step back onto my journey.”
It was only this year, in 2022 that I decided to work on putting the Labyrinth of Release into a guided meditation form since the Jedi are so spread out, and oftentimes this can only be facilitated on Zoom. I was put into a situation where I needed to work on it a bit faster than I had initially intended, but I had fortunately already set down the template on New Years Day just a few months prior.
With the meditation, an optional feature was added to the Labyrinth of Release- an opportunity to seek forgiveness from the deceased. Since August of last year, I’ve been working with the concept of forgiveness and more specifically studying the Hawaiian tradition of Ho’oponopono. From this Polynesian starting point, I looked at a variety of other cultures to find out just how important forgiveness was to their survival. It’s something that becomes an almost natural thing as we continue to grow in our social networks. So it shouldn’t be too surprising to find that some kind of practice of forgiveness is seen throughout the different cultures around the world.
But what I found so intriguing about the Hawaiian tradition around this practice, is that it is important to healing physical ailments. According to Hawaiian Tradition, if you were persistently sick, it was because you had wronged someone or a divine being. In order to be able to heal from this, you had to seek forgiveness through a forgiveness ceremony that has become known as Ho’oponopono in the modern age. Know that when I speak of this, I’m not talking about the meditation that was inspired by this tradition, but rather the communal and religious version of it that required you to express yourself and demonstrate that you sincerely were remorseful. After the ceremony, the gods would heal the person who was sick.
Today, I can go onto John Hopkins Medicine and read to you a an article that states, and I quote: “Studies have found that the act of forgiveness can reap huge rewards for your health, lowering the risk of heart attack; improving cholesterol levels and sleep; and reducing pain, blood pressure, and levels of anxiety, depression and stress. And research points to an increase in the forgiveness-health connection as you age.” This shows that it’s not just something religion supports, it’s a scientific reality.
So as I contemplated the next evolution of the Labyrinth of Release I thought “how many times have I heard someone say they left on bad terms?”. This might be the only chance they feel they have an opportunity to ask for that kind of forgiveness. So at the center of the Labyrinth, for this meditation, before you begin your journey out you have an opportunity to say in a private message that you need an opportunity to ask for forgiveness. Why it’s so invaluable to have this as not only optional, but also done anonymously, is that no one in the zoom room has to know who asked for the rite. No one has to know what is said between the person who needs to ask forgiveness and the person they are asking it of.
So there are two versions of the Guided Meditation- one is for a specific person. And one is what I will be hosting this year around Halloween- that holiday that Western Culture has associated so closely with the death - and hopefully future Halloween seasons to come.
The one I’ll be hosting in the near future invites everyone to attend. It has a bit of inspiration from the Kyber Healing Sessions that Temple of the Jedi Order’s Master Rosalyn Johnson and I host at Jedi Community Action Network, Jedi-CAN for short. In that even those who do not know someone who has past can join us and support someone either in attendance processing a death or a soul which the Force calls you to in need of healing from their own loss.
For those seeking to process the death of their loved ones, we believe that the Force can connect you to them regardless of when they passed. So if you’re still holding onto someone who passed away over 10 years ago like I was this past summer, it’s not too late for you to take the opportunity to give them a proper good-bye.
I hope to see you there. Thank you for taking the time to listen, and May the Force be with you.