Many people who are beginning on the Jedi path are attracted by the more showy uses of the Force, such as the Jedi Mind Trick and telekinesis. Certainly, those can be useful abilities, but the student of the Force would do well to remember that those are much more advanced abilities, and should neither strive to immediately master them nor be frustrated by inability to perform them. For the student of the Force, it is best not to expect too much at first.

My advice to new students who wish to learn to use the Force is to begin with meditation, daily if possible. For those new to meditation, I suggest starting with even such a short time as 5 or 10 minutes a session, and, as comfort with meditation increases, adding 5 minutes at a time to the session. How long you want to work up to is up to you and your schedule. 20-30 minutes a day is perfectly reasonable for some, while others may go up to an hour or even more. 10 minutes of meditation a day is better than none at all! And meditation once or twice a week is better than none as well. It is like exercising your body- while the "ideal" frequency and length of a session is debated, everyone agrees that some is better than none. You should also feel free to experiment with different styles of meditation- clearing your mind, meditating on a word/phrase/sentence or object, meditating on a problem, etc. Calming Breath is a good daily exercise.

I mention meditation in an essay about learning to use the Force because using the Force requires concentration. It is not easy to use the Force when your mind is chaotic. Daily meditation will teach you to calm your mind and achieve better focus and concentration, essential for using the Force.

Start small. Begin with some of the everyday excercises such as Book Pages and Memory Lock, to gain more of a connection between yourself and your interactions with the world, then progress to Sensing Life Force and then on to the Sphere of Responsibility. Try Heating and Cooling and Healing Breath, to strengthen the connection with your own body. For energy work with the Force, begin with Force Ball and Sensing Your Personal Energy, then continue on in Ahweh's Lessons and Jul-Qui's Lessons. The other sections of the Jedi Training Archive also have other exercises that can be done at various levels of Force ability.

The preceeding list is merely a suggestion of some exercises that are good for beginners and intermediates. The basic exercises form a foundation to later expand on, and even for more advanced Force users, it is always good to practice the basics, to keep the base skill set strong.