Episode #46 :: Baba Yaga + Jacquelyn Tierney

Today I’m chatting with my friend Jacquelyn Tierney, an artist and women’s healing guide from the United States.

Her history is windy and layered and sewn into it are little pockets of this and that — in the sacred arts, the fine arts, the healing arts — with formal education in printmaking and a Master’s degree in the history of decorative arts to trainings and practices in energy healing, mediumship, rootwork and various forms of divination.

Growing up with divorced parents she split her time between the states of the south and the north, and for the decade before this past year she lived in Colorado, Italy and New York, rotating with the seasons.

For all of these reasons, when people ask her where she’s from or where she lives, she doesn’t have a clear answer for them.

Currently, Jacquelyn is living out of her backback and going wherever the Universe wants to lead her.

What has shaped her is… all of it. The travels, the art, taking big risks, her curiosity, the voices of the strong women around her.

For the past year she’s been on an intense healing journey of one year from a domestic abuse relationship of a decade. She left in one day with nothing but her cat, a backpack, some jewelry and a little bit of cash, having total faith in the world ahead of her. She didn’t know how she was going to make it, but here she is one year later…making it.

Jacquelyn is a superb artist and does the most honest and thoughtful portraiture I’ve seen. She believes that to learn love, show love, define love and receive love, in relation to ourselves and others is a life-long education. She listens for the conversations about love in the whispers spoken in stillness and in the between, and in the stories communicated through the language of touch and body.

Within her portrait work, my intention is to capture the exchange of love: between woman and herself, mother and her child. In workshops and one-to-one conversation I guide women back into loving relationships with their bodies.

Through the healing medicine of portraiture, embodiment workshops and treks across the globe, she guides women on journeys of self-discovery and transformation back home to their voices, confidence and sensuality.”

Enjoy our ramble through the fairytale of Vasalisa and Baba Yaga as well as Jacquelyn’s relationship with her body and creativity.

Reciprocity & Appreciation

This is an ad-free self-produced podcast, and I’d love to hire people to do the editing and transcription, and eventually even be able to pay my guests.

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  • a monthly recording of a fairytale for you to listen to
  • access to my Honouring Your Anger ecourse
  • access to my Honouring Your Grief ecourse
  • At the $50 level, a monthly writing circle, in which we work with a fairytale and write and discuss (this is so rich and fun!)

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Resources from this episode:

Connecting with Jacquelyn:

Connecting with Janelle:

Things we chatted about in this episode:

  • the fairytale Vasalisa and Baba Yaga
  • On being in the flow of faith, being open to connection with others, even on the surface level if it doesn’t seem like we have anything in common
  • how this story makes her think of her coach’s question: “Are you going to have fear or are you going to have faith?”
  • on having self compassion, and the importance of listening to other people’s stories, without leaping to judgments
  • everyone’s afraid of Baba Yaga but no one’s bothered to ask her what her life is like
  •  the importance of being informed and asking questions first
  • on the importance of being mentored and mentorship, and how it can show up in unlikely ways
  • relationship with creativity
  • on having been an artist all her life, but the medium changes
  • most recently into photography
  • how creative cycles have typically blossomed during depressive difficult phases of her life
  • how making art grounds her – the rest of the world melts away, can be very present
  • how living and working in a hunting camp where she was the only woman amongst 300 men, and with time to devote to doing her photography was so important
  • the importance of giving attention to your relationship with creativity
  •  how important it is to cultivate the relationship to creative, but also how important is it to take time off from creativity and go out into the world and have other experiences
  • how creativity has seasons – and it’s important to honour them
  • relationship with body
  • On not appreciating her body for the miracle that it is
  • on body changes, from lots of exercise to less exercise, from harder to softer, and using self-portraiture to love on her body
  • on using her body for inspiration for doing art – almost like a research
  • studying her own body and how it moves and poses, how her hands look in different positions, then using that to help portraiture clients pose and feel comfortable
  • how self-portraiture can help to see ourselves in a kinder more appreciative light than looking in the mirror, for example
  • how self-portraiture allows us to rewrite our visual narrative and take our power back
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