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<\/a>\nLast week, I took my stepkids to see the new Pixar movie,\u00a0Inside Out<\/i>, a story about the personified emotions that live inside the mind of an 11-year-old girl named Riley. Spoiler alert: not only was it fun for the whole family \u2014 with lots of laughs (pretty much every time Lewis Black had a line) and tears (damn you, Pixar, and your ruthless tugging of my heartstrings) \u2014 but it was also a fascinating exploration of what a Pagan might call the \u201cinner landscape,\u201d the wilderness of the soul. From the fey bizarreness of Imagination Land and Dream Production to the perilous realm of Abstract Thinking, the shadowy caverns of the Subconscious, and the vast labyrinthine halls of Long Term Memory (maybe they even lead into the Akashic records?)\u2026<\/p>\n
It was particularly interesting to see how each of my stepkids responded to the movie. The youngest (who is ten years old) demanded to know why love wasn\u2019t included as one of the emotions. \u201cIs love just an emotion,\u201d I asked her, \u201cor is it an action, something we\u00a0choose to do<\/i>?\u201d After a somewhat skeptical pause, she replied, \u201cNo, it\u2019s an emotion!\u201d<\/p>\n
Kids. They say the darnedest things. You never know what they\u2019re picking up by osmosis from the rest of society, even without you realizing it.<\/p>\n
When I asked them what they thought the movie was trying to say, the littlest piped up again, \u201cThat you can\u2019t really appreciate good things like joy, without the bad things, like sadness. You have to have bad things so that the good things stand out more.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cReally? Where did you learn that?\u201d I asked her. I like to torture my kids with the Socratic method, which has led to some awesome conversations but can also sometimes backfire. This time, I was just too surprised to sound dispassionately curious. The kids could tell that I Had Opinions, and it put them on the defensive.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t learn it anywhere, nobody told it to me. It\u2019s just true!\u201d the youngest objected.<\/p>\n
There are lots of adults who believe this, too. In fact, there are a lot of Pagans who will use exactly this explanation for why we embrace both darkness and light, both life and death, as essential and sacred aspects of the spiraling cycle of existence. And that\u2019s a fine explanation, as far as it goes\u2026<\/p>\n
We are used to thinking of certain emotions like anger, fear and sadness, as \u201cnegative\u201d\u2026 and yet, in the wilds of the inner world, each serves a purpose.\u00a0Inside Out<\/i>\u00a0introduces us to Fear as a desire for safety and stability that allows us to assess risks and plan for the future. The emotion of Anger, the movie suggests, is rooted in our desire for fairness and equality, our need to see that the world is both just and beautiful (and doesn\u2019t contain an abomination like broccoli pizza). Even Disgust (who also has something to say about broccoli pizza) has a role to play: helping us to establish and maintain healthy boundaries, to keep out the literal and metaphorical poisons that might harm us.<\/p>\n And what about Sadness? Does it have a purpose? Is it just a \u201cnegative\u201d emotion that we should only acknowledge when we need it to help Joy shine more brightly? That\u2019s the question that\u00a0Inside Out<\/i>challenges us to ask ourselves, and it\u2019s what the story of 11-year-old Riley and her emotional upheaval attempts to explore. The belief that \u201cwe need negative things so that we can appreciate positive things\u201d is where the story begins, but it\u2019s definitely not where we end up by the closing credits.<\/p>\n My oldest stepdaughter, by now a well-trained diplomat and peacemaker in family\u00a0arguments<\/span>\u00a0conversations, asked me what\u00a0I<\/i>thought the movie was trying to say. \u201cI think the movie is saying that Sadness helps us to connect with others, and it invites others to connect with us.\u201d I told her. \u201cSadness allowed Riley to be vulnerable and open, and she was also able to be gentle and compassionate with others, to offer them a safe space when they were feeling vulnerable. Joy is fun and uplifting, but she can be kind of relentless, even selfish, when she\u2019s not tempered by this awareness of how fragile we all can be sometimes\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n Meaningful, complex relationships require us to nurture complex inner lives, in which a diversity of desires and values can thrive. Another thing I\u2019ve heard a lot of adults (who really should know better) claim is that \u201cyou can\u2019t control your emotions.\u201d This is one of those half-truths that can easily become an excuse to get a little lazy in our journey towards self-knowledge. And it\u2019s one that\u00a0Inside Out<\/i>grapples with in a surprisingly nuanced way, considering it\u2019s a kids movie featuring a talking pink elephant-cat-hybrid.<\/p>\n Can you control your emotions?\u00a0Should<\/i>\u00a0you? I winced when, at the beginning of the movie, Riley\u2019s mom asks her to keep smiling because her joyful presence is such a big help as their family struggles with their move to a new city. Warning bells were going off in the parenting part of my brain:\u00a0You don\u2019t ask a child to be happy for your sake!<\/i>Riley\u2019s Joy, who acts a lot like a loving inner-parent at times, also tries to circumscribe the role of Sadness in Riley\u2019s inner life. Like many of us, Riley has both internal and external forces at work, and her own emotions play a role in keeping each other in check. Later, after Joy and Sadness get sucked away and lost in the wilds of Riley\u2019s inner landscape \u2014 leaving only Anger, Fear and Disgust to man the control board at Headquarters \u2014 these three remaining emotions frantically try to keep things running until Joy gets back. They try to \u201cdo what Joy would do\u201d\u2026 and of course, this only leads to one mess after another.<\/p>\n Is this simply Riley trying to \u201ccontrol her emotions\u201d and failing? Is the problem that she isn\u2019t letting her emotions direct her actions, or do they have too much control? What\u2019s really going on here?<\/p>\n Pagans might call this problem \u201csoul fragmentation.\u201d There are numerous practices and traditions that center on the process of retrieving those bits and pieces of ourselves that have gotten lost or forgotten as the result of trauma in our lives.\u00a0Inside Out<\/i>\u00a0is a modern-day story of the shamanic journey into the Otherworld, a journey of both self-recovery and self-discovery.<\/p>\n In this Other-\/inner world, we encounter guides and companions that help us along the way and provide us with magical gifts, as well as monsters lurking in the dark\u2026 and even mischievous sprites who delight in niggling us with annoying TV ad jingles. A product of our modern mostly-materialist society,\u00a0Inside Out<\/i>\u00a0portrays this world as entirely within a person\u2019s individual mind, but many cultures from around the world have understood that there are no hard-and-fast boundaries between what is \u201cinside\u201d and what is \u201cout.\u201d The inner world and the Otherworld mix and mingle, with only a thin, ever-shifting veil between them. Either way, the journey into the wilds of this inside-out realm serves the same purpose: it is a time when we are tried and tested, when we discover wildly diverse aspects of ourselves and learn what their strengths and limitations really are.<\/p>\n Inside Out<\/i>\u00a0even offers us a peek of what might happen if we fail in this endeavor. If you\u2019re one of those folks who likes to sit through a movie\u2019s end credits, you\u2019ll be treated to glimpses \u201cinside\u201d a number of other characters \u2014 including the pizzeria hipster chick, the \u201ccool girl\u201d at school, and the angry bus driver. These glimpses are not only funny but shockingly poignant, as they show individuals whose emotions have been reduced to poor copies of each other. The hipster chick\u2019s emotions all roll their eyes along with her Disgust; the bus driver has five versions of Anger at the wheel, all fuming over the traffic. When Joy and Sadness are lost, we see Riley begin to slip down this path as well \u2014 her other emotions try to imitate Joy, to make up for that absence. When we lose touch with a part of ourselves, other aspects of the self may step in to try to \u201cplay the part.\u201d Perhaps there was a time when that angry bus driver lost touch with his sense of fairness and justice, and so eventually his own joy, disgust and fear were enlisted to compensate. How many of us have done the same, mistaking our self-righteousness or rage for a sense of joy?<\/p>\n Ultimately, the shamanic journey of soul retrieval is about restoring our integrity, the wholeness of the self. Through this journey into the Otherworld, we find that dynamic balance in which our own complexity and inner diversity can shine. When we lose our sense of joy \u2014 or our ability to grieve, or our desire for justice, or our strength to maintain healthy boundaries \u2014 then we need to \u201cpractice happiness,\u201d as the singer Ani DiFranco puts it, tending to our joy, or our sorrow, or our anger. This isn\u2019t merely trying to exert control over our emotions. It\u2019s about cultivating inner flexibility and creativity. The result of such a journey is a wild and complex inner landscape, in which the many aspects of ourselves continually challenge and temper one another, engaged in an on-going sacred conversation of discovery. May we find ourselves centered and grounded in the harmonies of those many voices.<\/p>\n Photo Credits:<\/b><\/a>\u00a0The trouble is, it doesn\u2019t actually get us very far. This kind of dualism doesn\u2019t even get us to the heart of what\u00a0Inside Out<\/i>\u00a0is challenging us to question: whether our classifications of the world \u2014 as well as our own inner landscape and its denizens \u2014 as good or bad, positive or negative, useful or useless, is maybe missing the point.<\/p>\n<\/a>Inside Out<\/i>\u00a0is not only about discovering the meaningfulness of Sadness, but coming to appreciate the limitations of Joy \u2014 why a life (and a society) built around the pursuit of happiness can sometimes lead us astray. Throughout the movie, Joy struggles to lug around an armful of glowing, bowling-ball-sized memories of happy childhood moments, to hold onto them no matter what and protect them from any touch of Sadness (who can\u2019t seem to help wanting to reach out and touch everything). When we become hoarders of happiness \u2014 whether these are experiences of earthly joys, or moments of spiritual ecstasy and divine blessing \u2014 those experiences can become a burden that keeps us from living a full and adventurous life. Without such experiences, it\u2019s true that we can begin to shut down. But when we obsess over our own happiness as if it were an emotional commodity, something we can acquire, possess or consume, we risk losing our way and cutting ourselves off from the fullness of life in complex relationship with the world around us.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
All pictures are screenshots from\u00a0<\/span>Inside Out<\/a><\/i>, \u00a92015 Disney\u2022Pixar. All Rights Reserved.<\/span><\/p>\n