Baba Yaga

I’d like to begin with sharing that I love fairytales. I find fairytales fascinating. And being someone who indulges in fairytales, I’ve come across Baba Yaga in various stories. Also, during my Russian language, literature, and culture studies at Syracuse University, I had the pleasure of attending a class on Russian fairytales. Naturally, this prominent character in Slavic folklore was present. So, who is Baba Yaga? She is known as a witch who lives in the deep, dark forest. Her hut sits atop chicken legs and her fence is made of human bones. She rides in a motor and pestle through the forest and has three faithful knights: the dawn, the day, and the night (or rebirth, life, and death, perhaps?). She’s also known for her tendency to threaten to eat people and to present (seemingly) impossible tasks. What I find fascinating about her is that she feels very indefinable. She isn’t inherently good, nor is she inherently evil, much like ourselves. It is only our perspective that creates our truth.

I’d like to use this moment to share with you my experience in Baba Yaga’s medicine. I’ve encountered dear Baba Yaga in ceremonies, on plant diets, and in hypnosis. She holds that deep, terrifying witch energy. She creates a charged stillness. Looking deeper into her energy you will notice she is a wise woman, shamanic, a magician. However, it can be tricky to understand her gifts because we tend to be too distracted by her unpredictability. To me, she lives so deeply in her intuition, so deeply in the moment that to her it doesn’t matter if she knows what she will be doing in the next moment because she doesn’t bother to control the perspective, she’s simply moving within the energy. She will only live deeper into her moments.

As humans, especially depending on the society that you were brought up in, it can be terrifying to encounter the unknown, the mystery, to want to figure it all out, to know our next steps. It’s a form of control. And it is this desire to control that creates a predisposition of being terrified of meeting the mystery, of letting go.

And so, to share a couple of stories of Baba Yaga’s indefinable magic in letting go:

Seeing her appear during a plant diet vision, sitting together at the table in her hut, she was picking her teeth with my young daughter’s bones. She had cooked and ate my child. She waited and watched me as she nonchalantly picked her teeth with my daughter’s bones. Inside, of course, many intense emotions surfaced. I was beyond devastated, feeling the deepest sadness, terrified, and very angry. And sitting in those feelings, I bowed to her and thanked her for her medicine. This feeling of reverence felt like it sprung from nowhere. Though perhaps it is akin to what Richard Rudd (author of the Gene Keys) alludes to when he says that when you are in the deepest, darkest depths of emotion you are touching the edge of Holiness. There is a part of my mind that doesn’t understand why I thanked her, there is a part of my mind that says that I don’t have to understand why, there is a part of my mind that seeks to analyze what this means, and then there is that part of my mind that says this is the medicine, that asks “can you let go?”

In ceremony, again meeting Baba Yaga inside her hut, she placed me in a pot of boiling water and boiled me alive. I did not want to be placed in this pot; I did not want to die. I initially felt very terrified, heart-broken, and very sorry for myself. But she imbues her actions with her medicine, her way is imbued with her essence. Therefore, being placed in that pot and feeling the searing pain, witnessing the boiling bubbles, and seeing the colors shifting from a deep, dark blue to a bright, alive red, I began going deeper and then felt my relationship to the fear and the pain shift. It transmuted into something else that I do not have words to articulate. I transmuted into something else that I do not have words to articulate. I felt myself going deeper into the threshold. And that’s what I feel Baba Yaga’s medicine is, it’s not so much wanting to traverse the threshold to come through to the other side, to ultimately return to a feeling of comfort, releasing the intensity. I feel her medicine is about shifting the relationship we have to the intensity as we remain with it. It’s deepening into the threshold. Baba Yaga opens a portal for us to deepen into our thresholds as there is a whole other realm within them. It’s not the idea that the only way out is through, it’s not about eventually escaping certain spaces or feelings. What I sense it is about is imbuing the space with your own essence, causing your relationship to it to change. And if you feel into that perspective, it may feel like you’ve come through to the other side because there is such a shift; however, I invite you to simply see it as deepening into where you already are, where you’ve been this whole time.

Baba Yaga brings us out of ourselves in a way, to bring us deeper within ourselves.

And for you, dear love, I gift a meditation into Baba Yaga’s medicine for you to feel into your own depths, into your own threshold.

Profound blessings. May your journey be deeply felt.

*Note: for your safety, please do not listen to hypnosis or hypnotherapeutic-meditations while driving.