Sometimes a woman does not become harder. She simply grows into the threshold where beautiful explanations end and real adulthood begins. This is the point where elegant theories about complex processes lose their grip. Where it is no longer possible to hide behind the right words, even the well-timed pauses, or the familiar refrain of, “Wait! I’m still in the experiment.” Suddenly, you find yourself in a different terrain altogether… one where life stops measuring depth of understanding and begins measuring clarity of choice. And here, the facts become difficult to ignore: the body’s signals, the strong frustration, the flicker of FOMO, the waves of doubt, the fog of confusion, the subtle pull toward self-punishment with all these stories…  This is exactly the moment in the fairy tale when Baba Yaga appears. I can now see very clearly how my system reacts when the field is not aligned with my wisdom. The good news is that I am no longer living inside the old conditioning that once ran me and ran over me. I see it when it rises. I see the amplification in my body, especially in moments of doubt and confusion. But I no longer make decisions based on emotional weather that arrives merely to test my center again.

Yaga does not live in the village and not in the palace. She lives at the boundary between worlds, where the forest thickens, where darkness becomes a test, where the threshold begins. No one comes there for comfort. They come when the old forms no longer hold, when a person can no longer live the old way but has not yet proven they are ready to live the new one.

It is important to understand something that is often romanticized. Yaga does not chase the hero, does not persuade, and certainly does not bother herself with those who are not ready for the crossing. How do you know if you are ready for the crossover? Here is how! In the tales, Ivan the Fool almost always must first compel the hut to turn toward him. The formula, “Little hut, turn your back to the forest and your face to me,” is not a childish rhyme, it is an exact model of access to the threshold. First comes persistence. Then the absence of fear. Then the willingness to undergo trials. And this last step is the one that matters most.

Very often Yaga refuses at first. And not just once. Many times. She is not cruel. She refuses because the threshold does not open to everyone who knocks politely. It does not open to those who simply declare that they want wisdom, power, or clarity for their lives. The threshold responds to something far more expensive than intention. Typically, the hero arrives at Yaga’s boundary only when truth can no longer be avoided, when he already knows the choices in front of him and understands that none of them come with guarantees of a happy ending. There is no fantasy left to hide inside. Ivan the Fool reaches this point when returning to his old, immature life is no longer possible. Something very essential has already been lost, and the pain of that loss lives so deep in him it feels almost cellular, as if it sits in the bones. And here is the real turning point: he finally understands the cost. Even if Vasilisa is gone for good. Even if nothing is promised. Even if the path forward is uncertain. He cannot unknow the truth anymore. So he moves. He moves without promises that the victory is guaranteed. He move, because at last… he is willing to act…

Baba Yaga’s attention cannot be purchased with words, it is earned through inner readiness. And only when the hero does not turn away, does not become afraid of consequences, does not begin to maneuver or manipulate…. only then does Yaga slowly turn her face toward him. Not before... Within this archetype there is a strong current of selectivity: Yaga does not come out into the world herself. She remains in her domain, alone, hidden in the deep woods, it is hard to find her, she is in her autonomy, in her silence… Line 2 in Human Design! But when someone truly mature arrives at the threshold, she feels it immediately and she begins to test for the readiness… for the true connection to that goal, that mission…

Then her second function activates… not the witch, but the guide! In the tales this is encoded through the image of milk rivers and jelly banks. On the surface it sounds almost childishly sweet, but symbolically it has nothing to do with sweetness. It speaks of your ancestors, of lineage, of that primordial nourishment of life, of the force that flows deeper than personal history… that force lives with you and she helps you to access that force. But yeah… it won’t be easy!

The milk rivers are the stream of origin. The jelly banks are the holding substance of the ancestral field. And Baba Yaga in this system is not a destroyer, she is a gatekeeper to the place where a person either reconnects with the strength of their lineage… or turns back into a safe but already lifeless form of living… There is always a choice and this choice becomes your life… And each choice assumes the loss… and each choice assumes a gain… Each choice assumes the old… each choice assumes the new…  This is why no one comes to Yaga for comfort. They come when something inside has already matured enough to say: I am ready to see the truth, even if it changes my life.

Yaga senses this long before a single word is spoken. She does not read intentions, she reads capacity. The capacity to carry consequences. Because wisdom given to someone who still hides behind concepts, behind elegant stories of wounds and losses and the intricate geometry of their psyche… is wasted breath… is wasted life… If the structure of the person has not matured enough to LIVE what they CLAIM to understand, the threshold remains closed. And it is not a punishment. It is a precision… It is the balance… It is the Great Judgement of who gets to the new level and who must remain the previous one. Living life and talking about living life are two different things. You are living the life you are living…  Yaga does not invest where embodiment is absent and if she sees that the current life is pretty well suited for Ivan the Fool, then so be it. Choice has been made! And neither do the ancestors intervein, no matter how willing they are to work with you.

And it is precisely here that many things have become unmistakably clear to me. The threshold never opens because of beautiful explanations. It opens only through inner shift… the kind that eventually begins to change reality.  

And the deeper I look into my own life, the clearer I understand: I am living exactly in this point now. I am not waiting. I am at the threshold, because I am a threshold myself. And the body becomes especially honest in this place. You can talk endlessly about mechanics, profiles, lines, complexities of inner dynamics and misunderstandings. The mind is very capable of building elegant explanatory structures, especially when it is afraid to make a choice that will change the shape of life. But the body does not read concepts... The body reads only one thing: is reality actually moving… or is it being carefully held in suspension…

At some point the familiar whisper surfaced again: what if I rushed… what if I should have waited… what if they are almost ready. There was a time I would have romanticized that voice and called it intuition. I don’t anymore. I know its structure too well. This is not intuition — it is old attachment wiring reacting to the discomfort of an unfinished story. It is the part of the psyche that would rather sit in prolonged ambiguity than face clean reality. Once, that program could amplify doubt in me to an almost convincing scale. Now I can see the mechanics while they are running.

My body, however, remains very precise. When the energy around me is genuinely alive for me, my system expands. There is a quiet internal lift, a grounded calm in the nervous system. When I step into carefully managed uncertainty, the opposite happens: contraction, flat energy, no internal peace, frustration. And no amount of elegant psychological geometry overrides that signal. The body is not confused, even when the mind is busy trying to be sophisticated about what it is seeing. If I am honest with myself, uncertainty rarely arrives out of nowhere. It enters through vagueness,  through half-statements, half-truths like “I am working on it! Wait!” (which are lies 100%), indirect references, carefully non-committal positioning... Something is said almost toward me, but never fully to me. And the mind, if undisciplined, begins its old work: did they mean me? Is this a signal? Is there something implied here? What is it? What is the meaning of their hint? Am I supposed to wait? AGAIN? For how long? Um…. Nope, I no longer participate in that loop.

For me now the line is simple. I do not respond to hints. I do not decode emotional subtext in place of direct reality. I am not available for relationships that require interpretation instead of presence and clear intent about their path. If someone has something to say to me, it needs to be said clearly and cleanly. Adult to adult. Without fog, without staging, without strategic ambiguity or clever justifications of the weakness. The question is no longer theoretical for me: what, exactly, do you want from me? and what, exactly, are you prepared to stand behind in the real world?

I am seeing more and more clearly the simple adult equation I once tried to overcomplicate: there is a choice, there is an action, and there are consequences. This applies to everyone. Even to a Manifestor, and, in many ways, especially to a Manifestor. Yes, the Manifestor impulse can be intense. It can move in deep internal cycles. It can require timing to mature. But when the impulse is real, it does not remain theoretical. Sooner or later, a real impulse reorganizes external reality. Not in beautifully written reflections. In observable facts. Why? Because Manifestors create direction. Their energy is designed to move life forward, to initiate shifts that do not remain theoretical for long. As a Manifesting Generator, I know this terrain from the inside, but my mechanics are different. My body does not initiate blindly the way a pure Manifestor can. I am built to respond first, to feel the offers, to hear the internal yes or no, and only then to move into manifestation. That sequencing is not optional in my system, it is very structural.

Manifestors do not move through response the way I do. Their movement is impulse-led. They align with the pull when it is clean enough, not when an external invitation looks safe or well-timed. They are not here to wait for offers the way my body is built to do.

If you have ever watched surfers, the analogy is almost painfully precise. They can sit on the board for a long time, scanning the horizon, feeling the ocean. But the wave is not negotiating with them. When the right one rises, they either commit to it… or someone else does. They may wipe out. They may ride it clean. But without the attempt, nothing reorganizes… But the more the surfer attempts to ride the wave, the better he becomes at riding them…

Manifestors feel these waves in their own way. And if someone knows, truly knows, that their wave came years ago, yet they remain seated in analysis paralysis, still waiting for a more comfortable surge that will somehow remove the risk… clarity does not suddenly improve with time… why? Because there is no experience on riding ANY wave! More often, life simply moves on… and another wave forms and another timeline unfolds. That new wave will bring different people though, different terrains... And the quiet knowledge of the wave that was not taken does not always disappear… because the regret sets in deep inside – why didn’t I ride this wave? Where would I be now?

In Russian there is a word — малодушие. In English the closest translation is cowardice. But the Russian carries a sharper edge. Literally, it means “a small soul.” Not evil. Not incapable. Just a contraction at the moment when life required expansion.

Where distortion often enters for Manifestors is not in the impulse itself, but in fixation on outcomes: if I initiate, will I lose this? If I initiate, will I gain that? If I move, what will they do in response? The moment the focus collapses into consequences and guarantees management, the field tightens. Because for a correctly aligned Manifestor, consequences are never fully known in advance. Outcomes can be estimated, yes. But true initiation is not a personal risk-management strategy. Real Manifestor with accepted nature of theirs, their movement serves a larger field. The impact extends beyond the individual. Even the mental processing around the impulse like the meanings, the narratives, the frameworks, are rarely just for the Manifestor’s private benefit. They move through the system and affect others. When the pull is genuine, the question is not how to secure the safest result. The question is whether the direction itself is true enough to be lived. How do you know? well... if you KNOW you can't let it go and keep coming back, maybe this is the truth... And those who are built for change and crisis should be aware of these features… yes, yes, we are all wounded and traumatized… the past is not who you are now though. Show how it is done to us?

I can feel that pull in my own field right now. The wave is present. The movement is building. Especially these days when I feel the cycle of new has started or about to! What I am not seeing yet are fully formed, grounded offers, and that, too, is information. What is arriving are early signals, directional openings, hints of what is organizing itself in the background. And interestingly, these emerging signals feel very different in my body from the old invitations back into confusion and doubts and vagueness. My system recognizes the difference immediately. One expands the field forward – you smell the future and cooperation and that building together. The other tries to loop me back into ambiguity and doubt about myself, about my life, about my wisdom and about my truth. You can be doubtful about my business strategy for example, but not about who I am in your life...  I know now which one I am available for.

I understand very well the particular pain some Human Design profiles can experience when something collapses before meaning has been fully extracted. I do not dismiss that. I do not minimize how deeply that can register in the nervous system. But not at my expense, please! There is a point where honesty stops being a beautiful concept and becomes a lived practice. If a person feels an internal fracture for years and still preserves the outer structure without meaningful change or not even trying to gain the wisdom from that experience and keeps stuck in that dead form.. well then... that too is a choice. It may be wrapped in refined language, concepts and justifications and explanations... It may be supported by very elegant self-analysis. It remains a choice! And my reality has become very concrete in the last 6 months or even more. If someone is not present in my life as a living presence (even though they are present in someone else's life perfectly well traveling, going out, enjoying day after day etc., but they claim they suck at relationships? really? Bullshit if you ask me)... if they are not present even in the smallest human way, a simple “hey, happy New Year!”, then I take the data seriously. Life is fragile. It can shift in a second. Each day is an actual opening to live what once was clearly felt. Did you like it? Do you want it? Definitely not! When that living thread is absent, I listen. I did feel the old pull again the other day. And it reminded me exactly why I stepped out. An indirect invitation to wait... To hope... As if I was missing something big! Really? What did I miss? More doubts and more confusion and more explanation on why this is not a perfect wave? To hold the space without any real presence, while everything externally stays untouched, as if time paused and reality is preserved, as if nothing changed, as if life never happened, that is too high a price... That arrangement does not match who I am and what I want. My wisdom has become very simple now. Someone is either in my life in a real, observable way… or they are not.

Truth does not come in versions. When another adult does not know the truth about who you are or what you want, they are deprived of their own agency. They cannot make clean decisions. They cannot metabolize reality for themselves. They remain suspended inside projections and false timelines. And that suspension quietly interferes with their will, their basic human capacity to choose their own path. You might pay a high price for that!

For me, truth has become disarmingly simple. It could sound like: this is who I am, and this is what I want. Even if what I want contains tension. Even if it means admitting I want two incompatible things and am not willing to release one of them. That level of clarity may be uncomfortable, but it is clean. It gives everyone involved the dignity of informed choice and most important - consent.  In my case, that clarity was a gift. It returned me to my own ground. I can see much more precisely where I stand now, and I am no longer building connections inside ambiguity. Whatever I build going forward will be built in full transparency: about roles, about responsibilities, and about the real cost of the choices being made.

I don’t believe in refined explanations, even if there is truly a lot of fear inside, even if the mind finds very beautiful mechanics for it. Sometimes we preserve not what nourishes our life, but what maintains a coherent image of ourselves: the role, the reputation, the familiar story. And the body always knows this before the words do. My maturity now is not in accelerating anyone or waiting for the right moment. My maturity is in not betraying my own bodily knowing. If there is no clarity near me, I immediately see it. If actions do not match words, I feel it in my body. If old guilt rises in me that I “left too early”, I know how to pause and look deeper. And most often what I find there is not intuition, but simply an old recording that once kept me inside someone else’s process longer than was alive for my body. I no longer live from that recording. I live from the threshold. From Baba Yaga’s hut…

And at the threshold, the rules are always simple. Yaga does not persuade. Yaga does not wait for the perfect moment. Yaga does not sustain forms that have already lost their fire. She simply watches, and through actions it becomes clear who is truly ready for the crossing. And if somewhere my silence has begun to be perceived as “too early”, then it was exactly on time. I no longer measure truth by the depth of explanations. I look at the geometry of actions. Because real truth does not arrive in small doses. It either begins to change reality… or it continues to explain, very intelligently, why changing it is still impossible.

And Yaga sees the difference immediately.