Is Baba Yaga calling you?

Have you ever looked around your life and thought “This can’t be it. I know I am meant for more”?

That might be Baba Yaga calling you.

I met Baba Yaga at a time in my life when I was feeling so unsure of my own voice, even though I had decades of a successful career in progressive politics behind me.

On paper – all these achievements.

Inside, a terrible feeling that my soul wanted to sing and was instead making catfood jingles.

Black cat in the grass, green slitty eyes possibly angry about wasting life.

And then I was invited to teach a Witchcamp on the myth of Baba Yaga. I had been practicing witchcraft since I was a child, knee deep in a creek every day, best friends with tadpoles and sycamore trees.

But I was new to teaching. And even though I was new, I volunteered for the high-profile role of telling the end of the story on the last night of camp in front of 120 witches in the middle of the woods.

Eek.

All week, preparing for that moment, I sat at the feet of one of the elders, who was an incredible scholar of Baba Yaga‘s lore. I kept asking, “What about this part of the story? What about that part?”  I could feel that there was a portal in it somewhere, an opening to liberation for the last night’s ritual…but I couldn’t find it.

Until finally, this elder looked at me and said ever so gently “My dear, the storyteller gets to decide on the story.”

I felt that resonate and ripple through my whole body, a permission to not just tell Baba Yaga’s story as a path to liberation, but to be the author of my story. To trust myself and my magic in a way that I never had.

In that moment, I began to heal the witch wound (if you don’t know what that is, click here,) and it changed my life.

I spent the rest of that week standing on a stone bridge and listening to the creek sing, sitting at my ancestor altar asking for guidance, feeling the story move through me and I did write the end of the story… Not the ending where Vasilisa attracts the attention of the prince and gets married, but where she becomes one of the most powerful weavers in the land, and makes a magic loom, and claims her power with a nine-part spell that changes everything.

As I recited that spell, I could feel my soul singing and the perfect hush of every eye, every ear, every witch, casting the spell with me.

That nine-part spell became the basis for the next 12 years of my work and life. It became a map of transformation that I tried out with first one person in my coaching practice. Then a team of leaders. Then a circle of women. Then two teams at once. Then five teams and a circle of witches.

Also, I became an elder – or at least a nerd– in Baba Yaga’s lore, learning all the ways that her story is a guide to an older, wiser kind of power. I found out that Baba Yaga is the great initiator, that the witch wound is a not just a legacy of those who had to suppress their power to survive, but a key to taking back power and feeling alive again and Baba Yaga is the boss of that.

(Plus, that Vasilisa was a shape-changer who could turn into a frog! A frog, that wizard of transformation that is and always has been my animal ally. Chills when I found that out.)

I have now taught this story and this nine-part spell to more than 50 people who wanted to become weavers of their fate and did.

As I have become the weaver of mine.

The program is a journey with Baba Yaga. It is called Reclaim Your Fire and if your soul is calling out for mercy, if you feel that your life is killing your fire, if you can hear the call that it’s time to claim the power that you know is waiting for you, registration is open now.

The circle is small- 12 spots for deep work that will change your life. Find out more here.

Blessed be, E