Land rooms of the our home quarantines and those of our smart-working lives. The rooms with the windows open (and we at the table, spaced apart, in a restaurant). The classrooms of the schools (and they, the students, spaced out in the desks). If we tried to disassemble our somewhat forced and somewhat stacked lives like Chinese boxes, we would be aware of it: it is the matryoshka era, ours.
The rooms of the heart
Not one of the best, of course. But for another reason: the only rooms that have always existed (beyond any pandemic) are the most neglected: they are those of the heart. They could reserve a lot for us, yet little is said about it. The excuse to do it now exists (it’s Valentine’s Day) but the hoped-for effects would like to overcome the contingency. The heart starts beating in the fetus before the brain is formed, it has its own intrinsic nervous system and an electromagnetic field thousands of times higher than that of the brain but despite everything, we mistreat him.
Westerners don’t believe in its power, because they barely proceed trusting the mental one. This is stated by researchers Glen Rein and Rollin McCraty, of the Institute of HeartMath, in the USA, who add: all ancient civilizations spoke of the heart as the seat of emotions. The Torah speaks of the “secret chamber” of the heart. Hildegard of Bingen, a 12th-century Christian mystic, placed the soul right in the center of the heart as if it were in her house.
The strongest power of the mind
In the dresser of feelings Imagining it as a condominium could make sense in short. Lots of studios where you can put your feelings away: yes, the heart has a memory. Science is also providing evidence for the power of the will radiated from the sacred space of the heart, which is even stronger than the mental space. Which means, the researchers say, that with the conscious use of emotions we will be able to modify the human DNAand the heart will do miracles.
We will be able to increase our learning faculties, optimize decision-making processes, improve social behavior. In doing so, we will appeal to every single room of it. To the one where we have locked up the story with the most unforgotten ex of our lifeto the one where the kisses (never) given between our parents rest, to the one where we have kept those received only by them (the first ones), to the one where the film awarded with our tears for the best script in terms of love is always available in streaming.
The film of life, between myths and flashbacks
In the meantime, we proceed quickly without knowing how much all these rooms influence the choices made with a partner or the sentimental education reserved for our children. How many? “Very very much. We experience the affective resonances received from our ancestors but we are not aware of it “, he specifies Chiara Tozzi, Jungian psychoanalyst.
«If we leave more room for reason than for feelings, it is because we have set up the search for success, the ultimate goal of the day, and because the use of technology requires it. The price, however, is high: the heart shows up in psychosomatic terms, it asks us to live in harmony with it too but we understand it late “adds Tozzi, author of The necessary spark (Mondadori, out on March 29), a love story that leverages the importance of time in building relationships.
«Our life as a couple is actually an open space! We are constantly present in the lives of others through social networks and phones. Other than rooms, we have the problem of redefining the boundaries: you need to close the doors, have a personal space to have a perception of oneselfonly in this way can we have a real communication »specifies Tozzi who, regarding the memory of bad loves (including the divorces of our parents), does not see any form of predestination.
Aerial view of a tangled heart shape made with Christmas lights
Read good books, see good movies if anything
“Jung used to say that an oak tree can be born from an acorn. Or we are what we are to become and not what we are conditioned to be. The ideal of love that we have identified in a film will certainly orient our sentimental destinies. I work a lot on the connection between film language and psychoanalytic treatment. They have the same basis. That is the narration that takes place in the analyst’s room it is what we find in films and books, or rather in myths.
That’s why I invite parents to tell fairy tales to children. In Ettore Scola’s family, the grandson understands the meaning of his life by retracing that of his parents and grandparents. Of course it’s been 35 years since that movie. The millennials and Generation Z today have other problems: they are forced to assume the emotional responsibility of their parents.
The boomers broke the rules, as a couple they separate without much thought. And it’s up to the children to find new ones. Sometimes they dictate them, see Greta Thunberg. Most of the time, however, they confide in me that they feel burdened and in search of lightheartedness. Restructuring the rooms even of their hearts is the new task of the boysHe concludes.
Do you know who you love?
Of course, during this work it will be useful to remind them that, in feelings, only the risk to which we are all exposed is democratic: love someone we think we know. By changing room (at home, in the office, in the family, in the gym) we no longer find him. It disappears. The reprint of Jacob’s room (Feltrinelli) by Virginia Woolf, one hundred years after its first publication. The writer tells us about Jacob through the voices of the women in his life.
And he confirms it The nine rooms of the heart (Bompiani), the novel in which nine unnamed voices tell a woman through various stages of her life. Each of them loved her or was loved by her. “Nine because in Hinduism it is a special number, or that of the natural elements, and nine like the planets surrounding the sun” he specifies Janice Pariat, the author of the book which is already a bestseller in India.
Here the rooms are external to the heart, almost an extension, but they too interact with our sentimental bets. “Knowing that others are also something else dwhat we think we love shouldn’t scare us. Indeed, I believe it is a reserve. If we want to fall in love with the same person, we can stay in the same “room” chosen on the altar, instead of changing. There is no room for boredom in love. You just need to accept the idea of decluttering in the rooms to accommodate the complexity of others. After that, nothing is sealed airtight when dealing with feelings.
The first love, the one experienced with the parents, and the last one, are part of a flow. Facing the past confined to one room means accepting that the inherited traumas, preserved in the next one, show up when we think we have found the love of life. But I don’t think it’s easier for the Orientals. There is a historical tendency in the West to focus more on the cerebral and less on the body and other senses. It is a false distinction for me, I believe that mind and body are always interconnected “she concludes.
Unexpected metamorphosis
It seems a story of sliding doors this of the rooms. In any case, know that we have two good news in hand: the twentieth century has gone down in history as the century of the great victory against the scourge of cardiovascular diseases, assures us the doctor Sandeep Jauhar in The heart (Bollati Boringhieri) who also adopted the happy metaphor of the rooms. Finally, the point of view of the rooms is of great use today, if it is true that many use it to tell their stories.
The good education (and / or) of Alice Bignardi it is a debut that starts from a question. How much can a person change from one room to another in the house? Here a daughter asks when she tells about her mother, a person who was a different mother with her sister, yet another with her brother and definitely a very different wife with her father.
Finally, of what happens between people there is always and only the unique story that everyone keeps in a small room: the book is in fact the story of the mother’s illness not as it really happened, but as the daughter remembers it. That said: if claustrophobia is lurking by dint of talking about rooms, go outside. All houses are haunted, wrote Shirley Jackson, who in We’ve always lived in the castle (Adelphi) also offers small forms of redemption: small moments of madness against anxiety, the only one that concerns us.
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