Baba Yaga’s Call

We are at the threshold of the Snow Moon today and it’s Imbolc as well. It feels as if the Bone Mother calls on those ready to dive into fierce introspection. She is a prominent Slavic figure depicted in folklore as a sort of wicked grandmother. She is a powerful, wise, forest-dweller who may help you or devour you depending on the way wild nature moves through her when you cross paths. She represents the space between the living and the unknown, owning fears, and standing face to face with the untamed parts of yourself while opening to initiate radical transformation. She’s not too unlike the Hindu Goddess Kali in some respects, but Baba Yaga claims the power of the Crone; the old woman that many seek to overlook through repression as useless and no longer desirable. That’s a trick, of course, to keep you from knowing her as an archetypal ascended master.

If she doesn’t scare you off, consider calling on her for support in your shadow work under the last Full Moon of this Wood Snake Lunar Year. Ways to support yourself with the final shed through shadow integration:

Confront Fears: Make a Trigger Board. You may have heard of Vision Boards and you may or may not have had good luck with those. They can be an excellent tool for creating new experiences if your fears aren’t holding you back in some way. To Make a Trigger Board, you may only need tools for visuals of words and some paper with honest reflection about your triggers. List the things that you know hold you back. If words are effective enough for you, let that be but if visuals are more helpful, bring in printed images or magazine cut outs of the images that are going to be most helpful to your true processing of what holds you back. Write and/or cut and paste with intention on the paper or poster board of your choosing.
Devour Fears: Hold the words and images in your view. Consider ways you may respond differently. You may have to devour your ego to do this successfully. Invite an image of Baba Yaga into your mind and ask her how to devour your ego. Ask her how to gobble up your fears. Give some quiet space to see what surfaces as an answer or answers. Be gentle with yourself as you do this. Don’t rush through the quiet space, in fact, let there be more quiet space than you think you need.
Reclaim Your Power: Aim to be open to the different responses you gather. Let yourself imagine moving past any triggers and fears with as much loving grace as possible. Spend time seeing yourself reclaim your power in any scenario where you may have gone quiet before, questioned yourself, or reworked back into a known pattern instead of progressing in a way that would help you to make the gains you seek. Comfort sometimes becomes more appealing than change and we stay in ruts we know aren’t helping us. This is a time to be honest about that. Create visuals in your mind or externally of how you feel after you’ve moved past your fear and revisit these as often as you need to convince yourself it’s better on the other side of comfort and fear.
Forest as Reset: Get into the woods if you can after your trigger work. Let Nature hold you and help you to self-heal. Be with the earth in reverence and witness yourself moving with a lighter heart. Earth will hold you every chance you give her.

Sending so many good wishes to the brave souls approaching shadow work. If you find yourself in too deep, remember to call on a therapist to assist you. Some caverns are deeper than others and asking for support to help you out of there may be what’s needed! Love yourself enough to do what’s right for you.

Everything I Wanted

“In the Divine Plan, every righteous desire of the heart is satisfied”. – Florence Scovel Shinn

When I was 17 I had the inspiration to write a list of what I wanted in life. I included details about my ideal partner, my children, how it would feel to be together, and how I would feel with all those things secured. I sealed up the list in an envelope and I tucked it into my favorite book at the time.

Twelve years later, I was packing up to move to another state with that ideal partner and those two kids just in the gender order I had specified, and the forgotten list fell out of the book. I paused for a long while looking over what 17 year old me had very directly listed I wanted to have and I felt everything freeze around me seeing it all received. I HAD EVERYTHING I WANTED. That may look like a lovely blessing and I definitely felt it as such at the time. I was a bit wowed at how I had simply listed it all and easily received it all without toiling over it. I didn’t repeatedly look at the list and wonder about how it would happen. I just clearly stated what I wanted and let it go. So this realization of how life *can work shifted into my conscious awareness and I say it like this because I have no doubt that some unconscious part of me understood already. It also helps that I wasn’t asking for anything outside of the realm of what we consider to be common occurrence. Those things take more trust and imagination to bring about.

As the move continued on, I didn’t think about the list much more but in the year to come, I found myself begin questioning everything I thought I understood about reality. HOW did that happen exactly? I began to feel curious about astrology and venture down pathways to understand different lenses of life as well as to write poetry and some short stories regularly which caused me to seek inspiration points in others. I found observing the qualities in others as well the way people relate to one another to be an excellent past time; it was super informative for how reality appears to be different depending on the participants.

As more time passed, I began to have symptoms of what many refer to as spiritual awakening. I felt different in my reality, with contrast coming up between me and those around me. I saw others differently than I had seen them before because I was changing. I learned to respond differently to the reality to heal the unhealthy patterns that were playing. I devoted myself to creating a healthier physical form after childbirths and within that began a practice of Kundalini yoga which I attribute now to the pattern awareness that occurred. When I first practiced this yoga I felt like I would vomit after every session for many weeks, and yet for some reason I kept doing it with adjustments here and there to help myself through that reaction. More recently, in a training to teach Kundalini, I understood that was a release of toxins in my body. The breath work and the lymphatic cleanse cleared so much energetic density from my body and it was absolutely worth it to do that work and to ultimately feel better. This also meant becoming more sensitive to my body and what my body needed as well as what it did not need.

I became more sensitive to everything around me as well. I could always read people with ease, but their motivations began to become apparent to me and I could feel their feelings too so that a person’s energy would speak to me before they ever said a word. I found this to be overwhelming for a time, wishing I could just process myself and not so much other information at once too. As I learned to anchor into this way of experiencing life, my external reality took on some challenges that didn’t match that original list at all. Everything I wanted was shifting into an external expression that wasn’t at all what I wanted, but now that I’m a decade deep into venturing away from the list, I’ll say I’ve come to view the growth that has occurred as it’s own blessing. Loss is a great teacher. I’ve learned to have gratitude in each day, to let forgiveness be an ever-present practice, to be mindful of what I speak, that saying less and sometimes nothing is more effective than anything I could have uttered, how to give without a thought for what may come back, how to expect the best from others knowing that allows them to show up as such, and how to love others as well as myself unconditionally. I’ve also learned to trust the universe to know best what’s in alignment with my highest good and to welcome what shows up in my reality now under that frequency.

Sometimes our ego and our soul want or need different things. Making sure they’re aligned is imperative. Otherwise, it could be that everything you want is only in service to a particular aspect of you, but not in service to the whole. That moment of thinking “I have everything I wanted” for me was a gateway to one of many spiritual awakenings. Sometimes Spirit creates a little precursor moment to releasing the ego because the soul has other plans.

Granted

“Watch nature, because it is your greatest teacher. It moves and flows and moves on again. There is an incredible beauty out there in the mountains, in the forests, to teach you it’s silence, it’s beauty, it’s humility. Stay aligned to that.”

— Stuart Wilde

More than a decade ago, I wished to not operate from the various components associated with the personality but to function from spirit within the body; I believed this would allow room for pure spiritual growth. Moving in the world without a pesky personality would allow a free flow of connection to every living thing — so I thought — and I was so wrong. The personality is far too complex for such a wish! However, that wish was then and I am writing this years and years down the road.

What did I learn? When you wish for something from the heart, my experience has repeatedly shown me that heaven and earth will move for you to experience that thing as long as you’re willing to receive it without dictating the how, what, when, where, and who of the wish. Having lived through what followed (which was repeated experiences in various shapes sizes and scenes to release “Valerie”) I would wish you never ask for such a thing and that instead you spend each day embracing yourself as much as possible. You need your ego to function in the world with a grounded view of reality. It may be important that aspects of your personality change, but change is not elimination.

In conversing with one of my daughter’s art teachers in the last few years, I learned she had ventured down a similar rabbit hole at one point. She wanted spirit flow to art without restraint. With the chance you’ve ever gone down or are tempted to a similar path, I’d say to not wish aspects of yourself away. If you must make change – wish for peaceful change that highlights your strengths. We grow with and through our humanness. Spirit works through the expression of personality as an intended stroke on the large canvas of life. So show up with your quirks and your humor, loving every aspect unconditionally for your best possible outcomes.

The current expression of you in this moment is your incredible beauty. You showing up every day as you is a mountain and it is a forest of sorts. You hold a wealth of wisdom within and there’s nothing external that can teach you what’s inside or allow it to flow into the world better than it will naturally. The external can only reflect, reveal, and maybe polish. Your healthy ego directing that glorious personality is the key to your ideal life experience. With pure intention, stay aligned to that.