"The Force healing shown in Rise of Skywalker ruins Anakin's motivation to turn to the dark side in Revenge of the Sith because if the Jedi just taught him that he could have saved Padme!"
Well aside from the fact that you're misunderstanding how Force healing is presented in ROS (and mandalorian, where it actually first showed up), this also misses the point of Revenge of the Sith:
Anakin did not need Force healing, he never did
Padme was only dying because ANAKIN FUCKING STRANGLED HER!!
Anakin did not turn to the dark side because Padme died, he turned because he was afraid of her dying because he couldn't let go, being able to keep Padme from dying means nothing when Anakin is the one who murdered her, if Anakin had done nothing Padme would have lived, she wasn't dying, his dream was not a warning of Padme dying, it was a warning about the consequences of his own actions
That is the tragedy that is Revenge of the Sith, it was all entirely avoidable
As for Force healing in Rise of Skywalker (and mandalorian), it operates entirely on an "equivalent exchange" premise, in order to heal someone else, you have to give some of yourself, so no it doesn't ruin Anakin's motivation to turn to the dark side, if anything, it actually EMPHASIZES how stupid and selfish Anakin was, as even if Padme was dying (again, she wasn't), Anakin could have saved her simply by giving his own life energy, but because Anakin is selfish, that possibility doesn't cross his mind
Anakin doesn't want Padme to live because he loves her or because as a Jedi it's his duty to protect and save lives, Anakin wants to save Padme because he's possessive of her, he doesn't want her to die for his own sake
So to save Padme from death (if she was actually dying, which she wasn't), Anakin would have needed to be willing to give up some of himself, maybe even completely, sacrifice his life so that Padme could live, as is what Ben Solo does for Rey (there's a lot about his redemption that is poorly done, but literally giving his life to bring back someone else-a better person than him, someone who can make the galaxy a better place-isn't one of em, it is in fact a very Jedi thing to do)
So really, Force Healing in ROS only "breaks" Anakin's turn in ROTS in the sense that it shows that Anakin had other options, but he just chose the most immoral one because he refused to consider other options or that there was more to his vision than what it seemed
Force Healing is always on my mind (I have a very soft spot for healers and medics), so I’m going to break down how I think it should work!
To start, there’s two branches.
One is Transferrence. An exchange of life force. A Life for a Life kind of thing where a force user literally gives some of their essence to heal. This is frowned upon amongst the Jedi because of the dangers of giving too much, or starting to pull from darker wells of energy, but it’s not forbidden.
There are ways to adjust this so you’re not giving up literal life energy, but understanding this is a very long and complicated process (think a level above a PHD), and requires connecting deeply to the Living Force. Only true Master Healers or powerful Natural Healers can do this.
In the case of Natural Healers, Tranferrence is their standard method of healing and they don’t need to go through all the processes before they’re allowed to do it. Because they don’t transfer their own life, they transfer life from the Force itself. However this connection means it’s common for Natural Healers to struggle with other aspects of the Force - eg. Obviously weaker telekinesis - and leaves them vulnerable in situations of mass death or decay.
Standard Force healing is essentially a sped up version of actual body repair + advanced in universe medicine.
Healers go through full medical training: you have to know the many internal processes of the body and how they respond to various inputs before you can heal it.
In most cases, it’s just using the Living Force to encourage rapid regeneration of cells to replace and restore the damage.
With severe physical injuries, it’s common to gather a small number of the patient’s stem cells, use the force so they rapidly multiply, then direct them to regrow into the needed tissue.
(I like to think GAR medbays have a freezer full of clone stem cells lying around. You don’t need to be a Jedi to give someone Stem Cell treatment, and I’m sure advanced medicine means it’s pretty easy for your average medic.)
For infections, you’d figure out what antibodies are needed and similarly help them out. The advantage with the Force is you don’t need to know the full specifics. As long as something is fighting back, you can reach out, feel for what it is and give it a boost. That said, if no natural defences are working, you have to find a treatment the traditional way.
This is your standard treatment. It’s not creating or even transferring life. It’s taking what’s naturally there and speeding the process.
Ofc there’s other stuff like using the Force to quickly filter toxins and pull out infection and poisons. But that’s less healing, more General Force Stuff TM. Most Jedi learn how to do this as part of their training.
Now things get interesting when it comes to something like sepsis or necrosis. This is where you get a combination of Standard Healing and Transference.
As I said, transferring life force isn’t forbidden, but it has to be done under very strict conditions. There’s a separate qualification healers earn before they’re allowed to do something like that without supervision.
Palpatine raised his hands, lightning sparking in them, and blasted at Mace Windu with a fan of electrical energy.
Mace raised his lightsaber, blocking the assault, and pressed the attack. He forced Palpatine back, against the windowsill, and the Chancellor’s gaze flicked for a moment to Anakin.
“He is a traitor, Anakin!” he appealed, desperate.
“He’s the traitor!” Mace said, his voice strained by the effort of sustaining the Seventh Form and maintaining control of the battle. “Stop him!”
“Come to your senses, boy!” Palpatine implored. “The Jedi are in revolt! They will betray you, just as they betrayed me!”
His bolts of lightning pressed in on Mace’s defences, and Mace shouted in exertion.
Anakin’s hand twitched, torn at a moment of decision. The Force pressed in on him, on this moment, and he took a step forwards.
There was a faint squish sound as he stepped in Master Tiin, and Anakin glanced down to see the half-bisected corpse on the ground.
“You are not one of them, Anakin!” Palpatine pleaded. “Don’t let him kill me!”
Anakin’s gaze lifted again, to the battle, and he hesitated.
“I am your pathway to power!” Palpatine insisted. “I have the power to save the one you love-”
“Anakin!” Mace interrupted, his voice a shout. “If we stop him now I think we can save Master Fisto!”
Anakin blinked, looking down at the Nautolan.
He appeared to be missing at least two lungs, possibly all three of them.
“We can?” he asked. “He looks… dead.”
“Force healing, mother-” Mace shouted, his irritation spiking and leading him dangerously close to falling off the blade’s edge of the Seventh Form, then wrenched himself back into balance with a monumental effort.
Then Anakin stabbed Palpatine in the side, and the sudden cutoff in Palpatine’s spray of Force Lightning meant that the Chancellor went flying out the window.
Then a speeder crashed into him, and he exploded.
“Ow,” Mace muttered, blinking a few times. “Now that was a shatterpoint.”
“...why did he explode?” Anakin asked, confused, then shook his head. “Master – Master Fisto!”
“Right,” Mace said, deactivating his lightsaber and taking two striding steps over to the fallen Masters – stepping over Master Kolar before kneeling on the battered floor of the office.
“What do I do?” Anakin asked. “How can I help?”
“Hold his head up and watch,” Mace replied, focusing, and put both hands on the chest of his friend. “Nautolans can last for longer without air than humans can, but he needs his lungs…”
Anakin watched, fascinated, as Mace summoned the Force to him.
It was… surprisingly simple, all things considered. It wasn’t some kind of complex, intricate trick where Mace had to factor in all the medical details of exactly what he was doing.
It was just… he was willing to give up some of his own strength, some of his own life. And as he did, Master Fisto coughed, a wet sound but one that showed he was still alive.
Then so did Mace.
“Ow,” the human Master muttered. “I’d… appreciate it if you could call a medic…”
“Master?” Anakin asked, worried. “Are you all right?”
“One of my lungs doesn’t work any more, what do you think?” Mace asked, shaking his head. “There’s a reason we don’t teach that technique to just anyone…”
He turned, slumping into a sitting position on the floor, and sighed. “I think I could have handled this whole thing better…”
“I wondered why you didn’t try to arrest him,” Anakin admitted.
“We did,” Mace replied. “For trial before the Senate – he said he was the Senate. Then he killed three Jedi Masters in five seconds, and you saw yourself… disarming him wouldn’t do anything to stop him killing anyone he wanted dead.”
He shot a glare at Anakin. “Medic?”
“Oh – right,” Anakin realized, fumbling for his commlink.
Miraculous Telekinesis is a Jedi Force Healing (JFH) technique. It involves the telekinetic manipulation of objects by reversal of motion, with greater precision than is ordinarily possible, and often allows feats of movement which are impossible by other means.
Miraculous telekinesis (MT) was invented by a healer, but also has applications outside of medicine.
Understanding the Technique
In some cases, it is unclear which techniques Healer Cheworralyka invented and which he only compiled, but for MT he details the story for us. Early in his practice as a Knight Healer, he encountered a near-mortally wounded wookie child who, after being struck by both shrapnel and a multitude of wooden shards in the Second Bombings of Kashyyyk. It is likely Healer Cheworralyka had been working on techniques for dealing with similar injuries since the First Bombings. The complexity of the numerous injuries and the difficulty of locating small entry wounds under wookie fur motivated his first trial of MT on a patient.
Unlike Vision Healing, which looks to the patient’s future for possibilities of healing, MT looks to the past, and reverses motion which brought harm to the patient.
To understand what is meant by “reverses motion” here, consider the way water flows down a drain. When there is only little left, it begins to swirl downward in a complex, unexpected spiral; this is the motion. Reversing it first appears impossible: neither turning the drain upside-down nor pushing the water up from below will induce the water to spiral up backwards. Indeed, even putting the same water back atop the drain is unlikely to recreate the same spiral. Yet there is no taboo in the universe against each quanta of water finding itself in the same location and with opposite velocity, only a great difficulty. And with the Force as our ally, we may overcome such difficulties.
In Healer Cheworralyka’s first patient, performing this reversal of motion meant searching the Force for knowledge of how both shrapnel and splinters had entered the child’s body, and reversing the process perfectly. The function of the technique is such that where ordinarily jagged shrapnel would catch on flesh and cause further harm as it was removed, instead the movement of the flesh is also reversed, moving around the shrapnel just as it did when the wound was inflicted. In this way, no further damage was done in its removal, and vision healing could be used to heal the existing wounds.
Learning the Technique
Learning MT requires deep understanding of knowledge. The student of MT should spend significant time meditating on knowledge, where it comes from, how it is stored, and to what extent it can be preserved. The instructor should not allow any student to insist they have sufficient experience in this matter unless they demonstrate competence with MT itself.
Prior to attempting the technique on a patient, the student should be able to complete several exercises, which may be revised and replaced according to the materials available:
The reassemblement of shattered pottery or glass. This exercise is assessed by how well particulates return to their positions in the whole alongside larger pieces, and reveals whether the student is using MT, or simply making a particularly skilled use of ordinary telekinesis. Since MT cannot not reattach the pieces to once another, the student will also demonstrate their ability with ordinary telekinesis by holding the pieces together long enough for assessment to occur.
Mixing dye or particulates into water or another fluid, and then reversing the mixing process using MT. This exercise may be done repeatedly with the same materials, mixing and un-mixing, and should also be used to practice control, with the student reversing the mixing by different amounts each time. [1]
The reversal of a spiral of water down a drain, as discussed earlier. Turning what was previously a thought experiment into reality affirms the student’s faith in the Force and their teacher, both essential to performing the technique consistently.
The removal of (harmless or mildly intoxicating) substances from their own blood. This exercise requires the student to trust their own ability and demonstrate their ability to transfer their knowledge to a physiological setting. As a precursor, the student may wish to try purifying water.
When the technique is mastered, it may be applied with great versatility, removing shrapnel from flesh or swallowed credit chits from a child’s stomach, breaking up clots, the reassemblement of pulverized bones or chitin, and indeed any mechanical feat requiring great precision.
Constraints on Miraculous Telekinesis
Miraculous telekinesis is limited in several ways:
While MT allows incredible feats in healing, it does not induce the body to change or increase its function directly.
Like all JFH techniques, the healer’s desire to help and the patient’s desire to be healed determine whether MT can be used on them. Unlike techniques that more directly affect the body however, MT requires a more adamant objection to healing to be prevented from working entirely.
Most uniquely, MT only allows the reversal of mechanical processes, not the execution of new ones.
As usual, Healer Cheworralyka gives us a metaphor by which to understand this third constraint; in some places, a river’s current will run into its bank in such a way that the water swirls backwards on itself before carrying on forward. By means of MT, we create this scenario, where motion travels backward the same course if followed forward.
This backwards travel cannot occur in a place where the river has never traveled; there will be no water there to move, and certainly no course worn into the ground for it to travel. The original motion is what creates for a healer the opportunity to reverse it.
For the majority of users, MT requires them to be close witnesses of the motion they are attempting to reverse. The better a user’s understanding, the less direct an observation of the original motion is required.
When to use Miraculous vs. Ordinary Telekinesis
Ordinary telekinesis is the much more casual ability of Jedi to move objects without touching them, and is shared by many Force traditions to varying degrees. While it does not have the same limitations as MT, it offers no greater precision or utility than a being might have using hands or implements. Something MT and ordinary telekinesis share, however, is the benefit of not requiring the invaisveness created by the extra space for an implement to maneuver or the potential for contamination which direct contact brings (as an aside, consider the relative invasiveness of using MT to break up or move a clot against that of a surgical thrombosis [2]).
It may be possible to use ordinary telekinesis in cases where healing is performed against a patient’s will, or when the required motion is new, rather than a reversal. There may also be cases where the concentration required to perform MT is inconvenient but healing is urgent.
Extraordinary Uses of Miraculous Telekinesis
While some accounts are shrouded by time and legend, there do exist confirmed incidents wherein particularly wise healers have been able to achieve greater versatility with MT by inducing movement based on the reversal of similar motions observed and understood in another scenario.
During the agriculture crisis on Kinyen [3] Master Nuien Di removed heavy metals from staple tubers [4] grown in contaminated soil, through the stems and leaves of the living plants before harvest rather than directly from the tubers themselves (as would be the standard application of MT). She did so to avoid re-contamination of the soil—from which she was unable to remove the contaminants directly—while leaving the foodstuff intact. From her accounts, we know that the motion she reversed was one she understood while healing hairless skeer-cats—which are particularly vulnerable to absorbing similar toxins through the skin and into the blood—earlier in the same crisis. Only a few Master Di’s fellow healers, even those working in the same crisis, were able to replicate her feat.
In another example, albeit a particularly gruesome one, Master Jyr-di—notably also a master of Shein—defended their infirmary against attack using MT. With limited weaponry, Master Jyr-di detonated only a few shrapnel bearing explosives, and then used MT to remove those pieces of shrapnel which hit attackers. Only they did so using the original motions which other pieces had followed, creating even worse injuries. Doing so without killing any of the attackers, and admitting those incapacitated to the very same infirmary earned them the epithet Jyr-di the Merciful on Minfar [5]. It is also no doubt part of what made the feat possible in the first place: quick incapacitation ended the fight for all involved, and in Master Jyr-di’s view, helped all involved.
For other aspects of JFH or other Force traditions, Return to Force Healing Masterlist.
References
[1] @tai-feng suggested this exersise. He pre-read this post and helped me develop ideas & metaphors around MT in conversation
[2] Thrombectomy, surgery to remove a blood clot from an artery or vein
[3] Planet Kinyen, known for "many peaceful farming communities"
[4] Growing Gardens in Urban Soils, pg. 9
[5] Planet Minfar
Healer Cheworralyka, Master Nuien Di, and Master Jyr-di are OCs, and the events surrounding their lives are mostly headcanon, including the First and Second Bombings of Kashyyyk (during the Sith Wars ~1100 BBY), the Agriculture Crisis on Kinyen (after 900 BBY), and the infirmary on Minfar (after 300 BBY).
Bariss Offee had learned to read absence. In the temple corridors silence had contours and cadence; in the hush of a bivouac the gaps between breaths told you when a sentinel had crept close. She practiced listening as other people practiced swordplay: the muscles internalized it until interpretation came without thinking. That skill had always been more than craft; it was a small magic.
The crater wanted to be understood.
It sat at the city's edge like a removed eye, an indented geometry of stone and shadow. Locals inched their carts wide of it, and shipwrights crossed to the far side of the quay so that the crater’s unease could not lick at their ankles. Merchants told stories of a thing that gulped memories like fish, of a sound like the scraping of coins inside a chest. Bariss went because the Force shaped the notion into a question she could not ignore. She did not like unanswered questions.
The rim was warm when she touched it, as if heat pooled beneath like blood. When she crouched and peered down, the darkness inside did not so much absorb light as negotiate with it. Something in the bowl shifted as she leaned forward — a patient, hollow pulse that translated across skin into meaning. It felt like a slow throat clearing.
"You ask to be heard," she said aloud. Speech was a tool to map a strange place; saying a thing made it more legible. "Tell me what you are."
A pressure at the base of her skull answered, like a hand laid over a sleeping heart. "We remember," the crater said. The word was many voices at once — wind in a stairwell, the rustling of paper, a child's whisper. "We gather what slips. We taste.
"We are hungry."
The seduction arrived not as a lash but as curiosity. The crater did not roar; it offered. It drew images from her mind with such particularity that Bariss felt seen: the exact pitch of a laugh she had once given a friend in the rain, the name of a village whose sign had been erased in the maps, the melody of a lullaby hummed by a woman who was not her mother. Each revelation was presented with the intimacy of a suitor who knows the small shapes of your hands.
"Why?" she asked. Curiosity had a moral edge; it could be a weapon.
"Because forgetting is a hunger," it said. "The world discards. We keep what is dropped."
The crater's voice threaded temptingly around her, shaping images into warm offers. It promised maps to secret archives, the location of a ledger that recorded deliberate oblivion, the truth of which officials had decreed certain names to vanish. Knowledge hummed like nectar in the air. The Force whispered in counterpoint — caution and wanting braided together.
She could have left. Many would have. But Bariss had always felt that there were layers to compassion: one might be generous to others yet careless with oneself. She moved into the shadow and felt the ground pulse against her boots, a heartbeat that felt less alive than intent. The crater asked for a trade: remembrance for direction. It wanted what was easiest to take — small memories, private notes. Bariss could have denied it, but the ledger it promised might repair a community's loss.
"You will not be appeased by mere names," she said to the dark, bargaining in the tongue of her training. "Show me the ledger and I will tell of you in return."
"We prefer truth," the crater intoned, but its voice was interested by nuance. "We take what drops. We accept gifts."
Marek came down the slope at the chosen moment, as if summoned by the rust of occasion. He was a practical man with a face like a cautionary tale; his rope and lamp announced himself as a flavor of help that was half rescue, half salvage. "Bariss," he said, winded, "you look like you've been listening to saints and lost your mind."
"I listen to what speaks," she answered without smiling. "It says it will provide a ledger."
He peered into the blackness and did not joke further. "Ledgers are good. Ledgers have fingers you can hold."
They spoke to each other to keep the geometry of the place from swallowing them. The crater, patient and persuasive, filled the bowl with images that moved like fish in a lantern-glass. It offered the exact coordinates of a sunken chest beneath the old bell tower; a key in a quay-stone; the handwriting of the committee that had decided what and who to erase. The seduction worked by being useful. Marek's mouth went dry at the tho
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