SOUL A FILM WITH TWO SOULS
We have two lives: the second begins when we realize we have only one (Confucius)
Soul is a film that also whispers to the soul of our inner child.
Il nuovo film di animazione Pixar dal titolo “soul” parla poeticamente di come la morte possa aiutarci a vivere più consapevolmente.
It's a kind of invitation to life that requires us to disidentify from our fears, obsessions, passions, and ideals. This allows us to reconnect with ourselves and reality.
Joe Gardner, the protagonist, is the embodiment of a man who continually loses himself in a desperate search for the true meaning of life. In doing so, he ends up losing life itself. In fact, Joe's life happens while he's busy chasing his purpose. This purpose was what he believed would make his life worth living.
It is only through his encounter with Soul 22 in the Underworld, to avoid the Underworld, that Joe will discover what the spark is, the one invisible and essential ingredient that makes life qualitatively better. The entire film tries to answer the question: "What is the spark?"
And to answer this question, the director appeals to the so-called acorn theory, inspired by Plato's myth of Er. According to this theory, we all come into the world with an image before we are born, which defines us: "Each of us perceives that our own life – writes Hillman in his best-known book, The Soul's Code – contains much more than the thousand theories formulated up to now will ever be able to define.
Who hasn't had, at least once in their life, a kind of enlightenment that led us to where we are today? This something struck us like a bolt of lightning. After the "lightning bolt," we had a clear idea of what we had to do, and we did it. Suddenly, we had a greater awareness of ourselves.”.
The lightning bolt that Hillman talks about can lead us to mistakenly confuse the spark with the talent, passion, or purpose for which we were born.
In reality, we discover that the spark is the "pass" that all new souls, including 22, need to be born, and that will be used by Joe to be reborn, thanks to the second life he is offered. However, the spark is not the goal, but the ability to be curious and amazed by life itself. And it is the same "spark" that is offered to the viewer to remind us that death, if used as a horizon, can help us live fully, savoring it moment by moment. Soul is as if it reminds us that only to the extent that we feel we have truly lived can we allow ourselves to die and cross the bridge that leads to the otherworld without regrets.
Soul offers us the chance to experience the same journey of rebirth as the protagonist while we're still on earth. Otherwise, we risk feeling like Joe, unready to leave a life unlived, or like 22, never ready to live because he's convinced he's inadequate, identified with his negative beliefs (I can't). Both Joe and 22 are the representation of real issues that enter psychotherapy studies and who courageously ask for help to learn to transform "blocks" into new starting points, modifying their negative cognitions into positive cognitions, learning to listen and reconnect with their body, their sensations and their emotions to learn to look at the true meaning of life with different eyes and find the courage to let go of their own way of "jazzing".
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- Anxiety and Panic
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- Creative Synthesis in Psychotherapy
- The phenomenological here and now
- Living and Separating, by Barrie Simmons
Soul is available for streaming on Disney+.
Le domande sul senso della propria vita si possono esplorare anche in un percorso di psychotherapy in Florence.
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