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Star Wars meets Personal Development
The second episode of 2025 is now LIVE!!! Path of the Jedi is officially on a streak! 😉
In planning for this episode, I reflected back on how the circumstances revolving around my childhood influenced who I am today –– or maybe more accurately, influenced and were the cause of the things I’ve spent my adult life working to “fix”.
In the conversation of nature vs nurture, I have a lifetime’s worth of personal experience to show the overwhelming impact that circumstances of upbringing and childhood environments have on the people we become as adult and the baggage we may end up carrying as a result.
And there are endless examples in Star Wars that show the same.
So many of the focal characters in the Star Wars canon have histories and pasts that we can point to as having directly affected the person they became. And many of those histories are fraught with conflict and turmoil, pain and trauma.
That’s what we talk about in this episode. Give it a listen and let us know what you think
[Preview Clip: “However, that was all kind of burned to the ground by the Jedi, right?
So no wonder, no wonder, Osha and Mae have a lot of unresolved trauma that they have to deal with.”]
[Show intro: “You’re listening to Path of the Jedi with your host, Ronnie Cruz.”]
All right, welcome to Path of the Jedi, the podcast where Star Wars meets Personal Development. My name is Ronnie Cruz, your host for this reinvigorated adventure.
That’s right, reinvigorated.
It’s so good to be back here. Well, yeah, I mean, the second episode of 2025, second episode after having been gone for so long. So it’s really nice. It’s really nice.
I feel very reinvigorated. I feel a renewed sense of, well, excitement, enthusiasm, passion, dedication to deliver to you guys, right?
I talked about this in the last episode, where one of the things that really helps me, you know, helps kind of relieve the feelings of loneliness and isolation and feeling separated, feeling depressed and down, is shifting my focus away from all of those kind of negative states of mind and how I’m feeling, and moving that focus to helping others and serving others.
And so, you know, this one tool has been really one of the biggest things that I’ve used over the years, as I’ve, you know, kind of navigated in and out of depression, is service.
It really is service.
And getting back to this show, it just reminds me of the service that I think I… well, the service that I feel like I’m providing with the information and, you know, the ideas and the principles that we share in this show.
And not only that, I mean, it allows me to just kind of reconnect with Star Wars again on this level, because I haven’t done it for so long.
Now, of course, I’ve been watching Star Wars this entire time. Repeatedly, as a matter of fact, especially a lot of the stuff that I have loved over the last two years. And so it’s going to be fun to kind of revisit those things, getting back into this show. It’s going to be fun to do episode by episode examination of some of the stuff that has happened since we put the show on pause.
So I’m really just reinvigorated to be diving into all of that again and exploring all of those little kind of lessons and things that we can learn from the Star Wars universe.
For today’s episode, I want to talk about family.
And really, from a perspective of the environments and the circumstances that we grow up in and how that affects who we become, right? How that influences the people we become.
Really the nurture side of the conversation, right? Nurture, nature versus nurture. This is really the nature… sorry, the nurture side of the conversation.
I had an observation during the long hiatus. It was around the time when my dad passed away.
I really noticed more than any other time before in the past, I really noticed how similar my sisters were to my parents. And not both of them, mind you, one or the other, exclusively one or the other, right?
My older sister, very much like my dad, my younger sister, very much like my mom. Personality traits, mindsets, even insecurities, right? Like, my parents really passed down a lot to my sisters.
Whereas me, I don’t feel like I’m like either of them, right? I don’t feel like I’m similar at all to either of my parents. And that’s because, I think, and not to get too deep into my own traumatic childhood, but I was adopted at a very young age.
And I grew up, I was raised in a different situation. I was not raised with my biological family. And so I don’t feel like I’m at all similar to either of my parents.
Somebody observing from the outside might say otherwise. But at least from my own personal observation, I don’t think I’m at all like my parents. Where again, my sisters are very much like my parents.
And so, you know, that got me to think in terms of Star Wars. Well, there’s a lot of this dynamic happening. Or at least, you know, we can look at how some of our characters have maybe grown up or their past, look into their past and see how their pasts have influenced and informed who they are as the characters that we see.
In preparing for this episode today, however, I couldn’t think of a single character, or at least main character, in Star Wars that had a quote unquote normal and stable upbringing, right?
Now, okay, so let me backtrack.
I haven’t seen Skeleton Crew yet, so I can’t speak to that. I know there are a lot of children characters in that show, and so I don’t know that it, I don’t know whether or not there are any kind of stable family units in that show.
However, in everything else that I can think of, there aren’t really, yeah, like all our characters, all our main characters grew up with some sort of volatility and trauma in their formative years, and that has informed who they have become in their adulthood, right?
Of course, if you look at the OG, Anakin, didn’t know, no, I was going to say didn’t know his dad, but no, he had no father, right? He had no father, grew up with a single mom, enslaved, and then was displaced from that at a young age by Qui-Gon Jinn, right, when they took him to the Jedi Temple.
And, you know, arguably, the Jedi situation was, you know, it’s a pretty nice way to grow up, but obviously with Anakin, he had a lot of internal things going on already, and he was already too old to be taken into the Jedi Temple, into the Jedi Order.
So he had a lot of baggage going in, and growing up, through those years, subsequent years, I mean, you had the Clone Wars, I mean, there was a lot of political strife, and then there was the strife of the internal challenge of being told that he was the chosen one.
There’s a lot of things going on with Anakin.
So, we see how the conditions of his upbringing really kind of informed who he became, ultimately Darth Vader, right?
All right, so moving on from there, you have Luke and Leia, who were orphaned from birth, mind you, from birth, orphaned.
Arguably, Leia grew up in kind of a cushy situation, but, you know, and what’s cool about the Leia character is we see her from a very young age, all the way through her entire life, right?
In Obi-Wan, the show, we see her as a child. And again, even though it’s kind of a cushy upbringing, it was very volatile in the sense that they were very involved with the rebellion, even covertly. And in Kenobi, in the TV show, she was already being hunted down.
So she knew all this volatility from a very young age. And it’s really cool to see that, because we kind of understand then why Leia is the way she is in the original trilogy, and of course, in the sequel trilogy.
So it’s cool having that really broad swath of time with that particular character. We see how those formative years really affect who the character becomes.
And the same thing with us, right?
And I know this is kind of like, again, that nature vs. nurture, but I think for today’s conversation, nurture is… I guess I want to get down to the importance of the nurture side of that equation and how it can affect all of us, really, all of us.
From Luke and Leia, we go to Rey in the sequel trilogy, again, another character that was displaced, pretty much abandoned and had to fend for herself.
Finn, same way, he was likely kidnapped by the first order so that he could be indoctrinated into being a stormtrooper, and then was on his own after he left the order.
Jyn Erso is another one, like parents killed at a very young age, left to fend for herself.
Cassian Andor, very similar situation, was displaced as a very young kid as a result of all that adversity and conflict.
Omega, Omega is one, I mean, Omega is being raised by mercenaries, and they’re always on these really dangerous missions. Very very volatile.
Ezra lost his family at a young age.
Who else, who else?
Osha and Mei from Acolyte, one of the more recent examples.
They had a pretty decent situation in their coven, in that family unit that they had. However, that was all kind of burned to the ground by the Jedi, right? So no wonder, no wonder Osha and Mei have a lot of unresolved trauma that they have to deal with.
And you know, when you look at all these characters, it’s really interesting to see how, as adults, these traumas that they experienced in the past, in their formative years, how those traumas are expressing themselves.
You look at Reva, she’s a great example.
She grew up in the Jedi Order, but then all of a sudden, Order 66 and it’s all being burned to the ground. She’s seeing her friends, really her family, for all intents and purposes, in the Jedi Order, murdered right in front of her.
That’s a major trauma.
And so that trauma, as we see in Kenobi, expresses itself as anger and rage, right? That unprocessed, unaddressed trauma.
You know, when you look at all these different things, and you can look at each character, and you can see how all of this affects who they are and how they behave, and the choices they make as adults.
We start to really get the sense of how important it is, how important it is to, number one, work through our traumas, and work through kind of trying to process those traumas so that they don’t express themselves, the traumas don’t express themselves in unproductive, at the very least, unproductive ways, or even destructive ways, right?
So if you’ve experienced, if you had a volatile childhood, and you’ve experienced a lot of traumas, especially like major traumas, then that’s something that hopefully you have or are addressing. And if you’re not, I encourage you to do so, because again, that can seriously, seriously affect how you interact and the decisions that you make when those traumas are triggered. When you are triggered, then those traumas start to express themselves.
And then the second thing is, in doing that work, realizing then the influence that we have on the younglings, on the youth.
Now I don’t have children myself, but over the years, as I’ve worked on myself and gone through this personal development journey, I’ve really become cognizant of the influence that I leave with children and on children, right? Because again, I know that that influence, no matter how brief that interaction might be, it can really inform who, or at least a piece of who they become as adults, right?
It’s very, very important.
I mean, you know, when you think about the Jedi Order — or even the First Order at that, but let’s just talk about the Jedi Order first — I don’t think this isn’t written down anywhere canonically, but I think they took children at a very young age so that they had a blank slate, so that the children had no baggage.
Again, the exception was Anakin… the major exception was Anakin, and he already had a ton of baggage.
And part of that informed who he became, right? He had all this stuff that he had to work through that he was already carrying that didn’t necessarily get resolved.
So I think the reason why the Order takes or took children at a very young age was for that reason. So they had a blank slate, and that they can positively kind of nurture these individuals to becoming well-adjusted and stable Jedi.
Of course, again, that’s arguable. Jedi are not without their foibles. They are still very human. And the Order itself, as it got towards the end, got pulled more and more into politics, and the hubris, as everybody says, that developed within the Order.
But for the most part, it was well-intentioned, right? It was to raise children in the light side of the force, and to teach them how to be well-adjusted, good humans to serve the galaxy.
Of course, the First Order, I think, took that from the Jedi playbook, and would — again, I don’t know that this is written anywhere in canon — but I assume that they kidnapped kids from a very young age, so that they can easily indoctrinate them into the Jedi, I mean, into the First Order, to do whatever the First Order wants to do. To indoctrinate them into being storm troopers, and et cetera, et cetera, working their way up the ranks.
So, yeah, yeah, I mean, like, Star Wars, there’s a lot of great examples of the importance of upbringing and of nurture and how that affects who we become.
Again, super, super important to address those things, if there is a case that you experience traumas. And even if I think there are kind of things that we all experience growing up, that we should address anyways, because all of that stuff, and I think I’ve talked about this in past episodes, but all of that stuff that we experience gets passed on generation to generation.
Good and bad, right?
And so a lot of that trauma that we may have not even been aware of, or a lot of the situations or volatility that we may have experienced, and no matter how brief in our childhood, was being passed on generation to generation.
And so to address those things I think is very important, so that we don’t continue, we don’t perpetuate the cycle.
There’s that saying, I think in Eastern philosophy, that when you work on your own traumas, when you work on yourself, you’re working on the traumas from seven generations back, because again, all of that stuff has been passed down. If you even look at epigenetics, it’s encoded in our genes, the trauma gets encoded in our genes.
So it’s really, really important to work on that.
And when you do, you’re working on traumas that were from seven generations back, but in doing so, you also work on helping heal seven generations forward, because you’re not passing these things on, because you’ve worked on them.
You’ve processed those.
And so again, it’s really, I think, really, really important to kind of look at things from this point of view.
Star Wars for me always talks about trauma.
I know, it’s great storytelling.
I know that, like, you know, a lot of it is plot devices and drives the story forward.
But I think the human aspect of how well the characters are written, really, again, it reflects back on the human experiences and the experiences that we have in our universe.
And in this existence here on Earth.
It reminds me of the song from Into the Woods. I don’t know if you guys are into Broadway musicals or musicals at all in general, but I love musicals. I’m a theater kid.
And so one of my favorite songs in the show Into the Woods is Children Will Listen.
It really speaks to — whether or not you mean it or not, whether or not you’re doing it on purpose –the things that you say, the things that you do, children are listening, children are watching, children are observing, and they are absorbing that.
And that is influencing them and that is informing how they process the world around them, how they process life, and ultimately who they become.
And again, we see this happening all over the place in Star Wars.
I don’t know if they’re purposely like, okay, let’s make this character have this volatile childhood, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But I think more than that, I think it’s just an unconscious reflection of the human experience that the writers convey in this storytelling.
And that’s why Star Wars is so great, right?
That’s why Star Wars is amazing.
So I’ll leave you with that.
I’ll leave you with that.
Again, if you’ve experienced any kind of trauma, major or minor, if you grew up in a volatile household, if you were displaced as a child, if you didn’t have a lot of attention or you didn’t get a lot of love growing up, whatever it is, whatever it is, if there’s a chip on your shoulder that you’ve been carrying since you were a kid, I encourage you, I urge you to address it.
I urge you to work through it.
Seek professional help if you need.
It’s really, really important that we do this.
Because again, you will not only lighten your own burden. You will lift all this weight off your shoulders that you’ve been carrying your whole life, so that you have a better and happier life experience.
But then you’re also addressing and healing traumas seven generations back. Traumas that your parents passed on to you, that was passed on to them from generations and generations and generations.
And then you’re also breaking the cycle. You’re healing seven generations forward. You’re preventing those traumas from being passed on to the next generation and the next generation after that.
This is how we heal.
We heal ourselves.
We heal the world.
And that’s the episode.
Hopefully that made sense.
I definitely felt like I was rambling through most of that.
But yeah, hopefully the message got across.
I mean, it’s a message that I will always be passionate about. You know, shining a light on how important it is to, number one, address our own traumas, and then number two, so that we don’t create environments and circumstances for children to develop traumas, or to experience traumas.
I think it’s really important for the healing process personally, but also the healing process, you know, as a community and as a species, right, as a world.
Lots of stuff going on in the world that we can’t necessarily control. A lot of conflict, a lot of turmoil. And so there are children, a whole generation of children that will be growing up having experienced some traumas, some major, major traumas.
And, you know, if we ourselves have addressed our own traumas and we’re better equipped to kind of process and navigate these things, then we can pass that on.
We can pass on the good things, right?
Because we pass on good things as well, right?
I don’t want to make it seem like we only pass on the bad things, but we can pass on the good things as well. And we can only we do better at passing on the good things if we’ve worked through our own traumas.
I don’t know why I didn’t just say that in the episode itself in the meat of the episode.
But anyways, I guess now is time for the shout out.
[BB-8 audio clip]
All right, for this episode, I want to give a shout out to Rise Alliance for Children.
Now, I’ve given a shout out to this organization before. You may not recognize the name, but they used to be called Worldwide Orphans. After they were called Worldwide Orphans, they were called WWO, and they have very recently re-branded and re-named the organization to Rise Alliance for Children… Alliance for Children.
I will always shine a light on this particular organization because they do such good work, right? I was initially attracted to them because they work with orphans and I identify as an orphan. I identify with the orphan condition. And, you know, I was really attracted to that.
But then they started evolving to beyond orphans and displaced children.
They still work with orphans, but really children that are at risk, children that have experienced major traumas in areas of the world that have a lot of conflict, in areas of the world that have experienced natural disasters, really, you know, anything, any place where children have experienced major, major traumas like that.
You know, top to bottom too, you know, things from making sure their health and education is good, you know, basic necessities, but also in helping them deal with trauma, right?
Helping them grow up to become well-adjusted adults.
And they have an entire program based around this, and they’re doing some incredible work. So I want to continue to shine the light on them.
You can go to their website is rise slash, it’s not not slash like backslash, I guess it’s dash.
So rise-dash-children-dot-org. [http://rise-children.org]
If you type wwo dot org, it’ll redirect, but the new website is rise dash children dot org.
I’ll leave it in the show notes of this episode, so you can click on it.
But I encourage you to donate if you are able to, or you know, shed some light, right? Post it somewhere so that people can see, so you spread awareness about the organization.
Donation is definitely the biggest way you can help, and not just a single donation, but a recurring donation. I’ve been a recurring contributor to this organization for years.
Even if it’s just a dollar, that’s one thing that I have encouraged people to do. If you just donate a dollar to this organization every week, that’s $52 a year. That’s not much.
But if we have 1,000 people doing that, that’s $52,000 a year, right?
And of course, the more people that do that, the better.
So I encourage you to go check them out. I mean, check out the information, check out what they do, and if it aligns with you, if you believe in their mission, then contribute and consider a recurring contribution.
Again, it’s rise-children-org.
A dollar a week will go a long, long way to helping children around the world navigate and process and deal with the traumas that they’ve experienced.
So Rise Alliance for Children, formerly WWO, formerly Worldwide Orphans…
This week’s shout-out goes to you.
[Tie-Fight audio clip]
Okay, so that’s going to do it for this episode.
Of course, we’ll catch you next week with a fresh new one.
We’re going to start doing the episode by episode so that you guys will have more… it’ll be more Star Wars involved as opposed to today, which is kind of all over the place.
But we’re going to go episode to episode of Ahsoka. Ahsoka, I’ve been really looking forward to this. I know Ahsoka’s been out for a while, but I love that show. So we’re going to do an episode to episode, see what lessons we can get and learn from each episode.
And yeah, so that kicks off next week.
So make sure you tune in.
If you haven’t yet subscribed or followed the show, go ahead and hit that follow button.
That would really help a lot.
And please share, share this episode.
Again, my mission for this year is really to grow this show, and I can do that only with your help, right? This is all grassroots. I’m not advertising, you know, I’m not taking out sponsored posts or anything like that on any of the socials.
I’m trying to grow this as organically as I can. And so I can only do that with your help. Pass this episode, share this episode with somebody who you think it might help. Share this show with people who you think would like it, especially people who are Star Wars fans, helping them, introduce them to a whole side of Star Wars that includes personal development, right? Stuff that can help them in their daily lives.
I would really, really appreciate it, and it would help us accomplish our mission of getting this content out to the world.
So yeah, yeah, next week, again, we’ll start off with Ahsoka, episode one.
So until then, be well, be safe, and may the force be with you.
[Disclaimer: This podcast is not endorsed by the Walt Disney Company nor Lucasfilm Ltd, and is intended for entertainment, educational, and informational purposes only.
The official Star Wars website can be found at www.starwars.com. Star Wars, all names and sounds and any other Star Wars related items are registered trademarks and or copyrights of Disney and their respective trademark and copyright holders. All original content of this podcast is intellectual property of Path of the Jedi, unless otherwise indicated.]
[Yoda giggle audio clip]
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