Research: healing & my transpersonal journey

BOUND TO BE FREE

by Skye Avalon

I discovered the ultimate answer was that god(ess) is love as I sought answers to questions about who I am, what my life is about, who the goddess is, and where is she? I had to learn to love myself through childhood injuries, and personal and material losses. My challenging transformational experiences are manifest in imagery of me as a healer, goddess, lover, and mystic. Rope bondage as a metaphor for my creative process is healing, empowering, intimate, and transformational. 

I utilize the psychological foundations of transpersonal psychology and the historical foundations of the goddess to begin my creative process. It starts with a psychological wound of some kind, and then evolves into something greater that transcends my old self identity. Similarly, in any healing process, the first step is surrendering the ego driven self and sense of control and finally, making a decision to turn our life over to the care of God(dress) as we understood him. [1] The moment of surrendering control is a psychic death that can feel real because of the terror involved in not knowing what will happen when you are not controlling everything. By choosing to surrender the ego to a higher authority in the name of something greater than the self, a symbolic ego death can occur, and the physical death of the body is avoided.

Being embodied and staying with the suffering rather than numbing emotion is essential to experience a shift in awareness and transformation of thinking. This is why bondage performance art for me is a physical reenactment of reaching a transcendent state of awareness after experiencing the dark night of the soul. The emotional, mental, and physical release from emotional pain, to a pleasurable and a peaceful state of relaxation, is equivalent to the ego death needed to move from the dark night of the soul to a new state of awareness. The insights I gain during a photoshoot become part of the imagery within my paintings. My lover-photographer captures my moment-to-moment experience of being bound by my rope rigger. My rope master has taken courses that make him aware of risks including common medical conditions, anatomical body parts, and ways to avoid accidents such as fainting, falling and nerve injuries. Binding my body requires artistic rope tying skills, safety training, concentration, and physical strength to pull my body up in inversion poses. He must affirm clearly that he understands my instructions of what I want to experience in a scene. At the beginning of our photoshoot, I am preparing mentally to be suspended as he begins to tie me with ropes.

The ropes feel tight but comfortable, similar to being wrapped tightly in a blanket. As I am hoisted up in a suspension pose, I feel the ropes digging into my flesh. The physical pain can trigger past memories of emotional and mental pain. The transitional moment from pain to pleasure happens when the ropes go from feeling like they are digging into my flesh to a firm, binding pressure. Finally, I go into an altered “subspace” state of consciousness, where I lose connection with reality. My healing process is meant to move me through emotional discomfort and confusion. 

One of Jung’s most important contributions—the shadow self—helps me reconstruct a feminine archetype that is more powerful and authentic than the one I grew up with as a child. He believed the shadow was one of key elements in a person’s psyche that needed to be identified, confronted and transformed into a positive attribute of self-identity.[2] In Christian religion, the devil and women represent the collective shadow attributes such as being irrational, lustful, and unintelligent.[3] By questioning those negative attributes and transforming them into positive attributes, I reveal the false projections that prevent me from thinking I can be a sexy, intelligent, and creative woman.

Jung also believed the archetypal lover represents an individual who brings together all the different parts of the self into a unified whole moving from an ego-driven sense of self to a more conscious union with others and God.[4] In order to solve the problem of how to illustrate love in my paintings without being cliché, I have attempted to create a powerful feminine sexual identity. I looked to the earlier Greek images of beautiful, nude Aphrodite, since the later Christian imagery is limited to the saint. Aphrodite represents the sensual and sacred feminine in union with all beings. Aphrodite of Knidos was considered to be one of the first nude female statues that was celebrated in the ancient Greek world as a goddess. Sculpted by Praxiteles, her proportions were established as the ideal female nude for centuries to follow.[5] Similarly, my painting Metamorphosis is a nude figure inspired by the Greek artistic proportions of sensual beauty. 

[1] W. Bill, Alcoholics Anonymous: The Big Book (Dover Publications, 1939), 21, 25, 34.

[2] C.G. Jung, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self  (Princeton University Press, 1969) 267.

[3] Anne Barring, The Myth of the Goddess Evolution of an Image (Penguin Books, 1993), 530.

[4] C.G. Jung, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self  (Princeton University Press, 1969) 22. 

[5] Christine Havelock, The Aphrodite of Knidos and Her Successors: A Historical Review of the Female Nude in Greek Art (The University of Michigan, 1995), 1.