About M.E. Baba Yaga

I write under the name M.E. Baba Yaga.

M.E. are my proper initials, and my grandchildren call me Baba Yaga. Over the years, I have learned to embrace the gray hairs, wrinkles, hard-won wisdom, and witchy ways earned through a life fully lived.

I do not use the word Crone as an insult or a costume. To me, it is an honored title—one earned through experience, survival, study, mistakes, growth, and the willingness to share what has been learned beside the fire.

I am a mother of four, a grandmother, a writer, a trauma-recovery healthcare practitioner, a former farmer, a business owner, and a lifelong student of human beings.

I have raised sons and daughters through childhood, adolescence, heartbreak, rebellion, illness, mistakes, milestones, and the complicated work of becoming adults. Parenting taught me that love is not the same as control, that children need both guidance and accountability, and that adults do not lose authority by apologizing when they have caused harm.

My life has included marriage, divorce, legal battles, religious upheaval, career changes, financial uncertainty, rebuilding, and the slow work of learning to trust myself.

I have accompanied people through death, grief, serious illness, accidents, violence, family crises, trauma, and sudden disasters that divided life into a before and an after. I have witnessed emergencies no one could have predicted, and I have stood in moments when action mattered and done what I could with the knowledge and tools available to me.

These experiences taught me important lessons.

Among other things it taught me, that there are burdens we must take responsibility for, and there are outcomes no human being could have prevented. Learning the difference can loosen guilt that was never ours to carry.

I have also learned to leave room for the unseen story.

 I have been seen in my worst moments, scared, or angry, or overfull... And I try to remember in others that this moment does not define them. When someone rushes past me, speaks sharply, or behaves unlike their best self, I try to remember that I may be witnessing only one page of a much longer story.

Compassion does not require abandoning boundaries or excusing harm. It means recognizing that judgment without context is often an incomplete form of truth.

My spiritual path has changed greatly over the years—from deeply devoted Latter-day Saint, to atheist, to the more spiritual and witchy path I walk today.

Leaving an oppressive religious system cost me community, friendships, family relationships, leadership roles, and the certainty I once believed I possessed. I kept some of what I had been taught, particularly hope in an afterlife, reverence for the teachings of Christ, and the simple instruction to love your neighbor.

Not only the neighbor who agrees with you.

Not only the person who uses the same name for God.

I do not believe the Divine is so small that a sincere person will be condemned for doing their best while using the wrong sacred vocabulary—even if they happen to call God Steve.

Escaping a dangerous long-term relationship required another kind of rebuilding.

It taught me that people do not always remain in abusive relationships because they are weak. Sometimes their strengths have been recruited against them.

Loyalty becomes endurance. Compassion becomes self-erasure. Commitment becomes a cage.

Leaving may resemble breaking an addiction built through fear, hope, attachment, conditioning, and the belief that one more effort might finally make everything right.

Religion, folklore, mythology, psychology, trauma, relationships, parenting, and human behavior have been lifelong areas of study for me.

My education has included college coursework and years of independent research in developmental psychology, trauma-informed care, somatic approaches, behavior and marketing, herbalism, chronic pain, nervous-system regulation, and the relationship between physical and emotional stress.

For over seven years, I have worked directly with people as a trauma-recovery healthcare practitioner, completing more than 8,000 hours of hands-on care and serving more than 2,000 individuals.

Thousands of hours beside people in vulnerable moments have taught me that there is no single correct way to grieve, recover, relax, heal, or feel safe.

Every response has a history.

Some people need to speak. Some need silence. Some need to cry. Some need to laugh at the absurdity of life. Some need an hour in which no one asks anything of them. Many simply need someone who will not be shocked by their story or require them to comfort the listener.

Before entering trauma-recovery work, I spent more than fifteen years helping people explore career paths, develop business ideas, clarify their services, understand their customers, and find practical language for work they hoped to bring into the world.

I have changed careers, built businesses, farmed, moved, started over, raised children, cared for others, lost communities, survived relationships, questioned beliefs, made mistakes, repaired what I could, and learned to live with what could not be repaired.

I do not claim to possess perfect wisdom.

I ask questions. I examine sources. I look for the history beneath beliefs and traditions. I consider who is presenting an idea, what evidence supports it, what biases may shape it, and what remains uncertain.

Whenever possible, I seek original texts and primary sources.

I am willing to change my mind.

I believe truth should withstand questioning, accountability should not require self-destruction, and compassion should survive uncertainty.

One message runs beneath nearly everything I believe:

You are still a person of value while you are learning.

You may make mistakes, carry wounds you did not choose, repeat patterns you were taught, or need time to discover a better way forward. None of that makes you irredeemably bad.

Growth does not require shame.

Healing does not require pretending nothing happened.

Wisdom is not perfection. It is what remains after life has stripped away certainty, pride, illusion, and a few unnecessary layers of skin—and we choose to keep learning anyway.