meet Adriana
ABOUTAdriana Marie Rizzolo is a somatic ritualist and educator, performer, writer, and creator of Body Temple - where grief becomes prayer, rage becomes power, and the body becomes the altar. With 17 years of devotional training in India working with Kundalini Shakti through the Tantric and Bhakti traditions, Italian Shamanism, somatic sex education, trauma release work and study and community organizing and care.
Adriana’s work bridges mysticism and nervous system science, sacred theater and relational shadow work. She teaches leaders, facilitators, artists, and cultural change-makers how to work skillfully with the charge of life and death in the body — how to track trauma responses without being possessed by them, how to reclaim erotic intelligence without performance, and how to transform anger, grief, and desire into creative authority.
“I help train people unhook from oppression and come home to their bodies through practices that honor the full spectrum of being human: grief, rage, love, death, and sex as pathways to collective liberation.
My path is rooted in direct relationship to the living sacred feminine as dynamic force: the energy of creation, destruction, devotion, eros, and awakening.”
Trained by Deborah Sundahl in somatic sex education, bringing precise anatomical and pelvic literacy into her work, and has studied Italian shamanism and pre-Christian trance rituals of grief and eros with Alessandra Belloni, weaving ancestral ritual, voice, and embodied devotion into contemporary practice.
Her teaching is not about transcendence. It is about inhabitation.
Owning one’s life fully — in service to collective awakening.
It's not performance—it's prayer in motion. It's the body remembering what the mind has forgotten.
Body Temple Dance is a devotional trance space where grief and rage are alchemized into aliveness through ritual, expressive arts, and prayer-formance.
Here we work with the living patterns of sacred feminine energy that move through all things — contraction and expansion, devotion and desire, life and death. We study how power moves through the nervous system, through the pelvis, through the voice. We learn to relate to intensity rather than suppress it. To track our retentive patterns. To stay present under charge. To own our lives fully — not as domination, but as service to the collective. This is meticulous re-patterning in community, where sensuality, spirituality, and shadow are welcomed into the same room.
Through sacred sexuality education, participants learn orgasm and ejaculation mapping, womb healing practices, and trauma-informed approaches to pleasure as medicine and revolutionary act.
In somatic healing containers, people meet their nervous systems with curiosity instead of judgment, learning to move through fight, flight, and freeze states into embodied presence and choice.
The retreats and pilgrimages take groups to sacred sites—Mary Magdalene's cave in France, goddess temples in India—where ancient lands hold the frequency for modern transformation.
The teacher trainings (UNLEASHED for Body Temple Dance facilitators, Womb Healer certifications for sacred sexuality practitioners, Dark Goddess Doula for business and embodiment) create lineage-holders who can carry this medicine forward with integrity.
This is a place to remember who you are — together.
01
MEDIA & RECOGNITION
Adriana's work has been featured in The New York Times and has reached thousands of people worldwide through her trainings, retreats, and community offerings.
02
GLOBALLY RECOGNIZED
Her teachings have created a global community of practitioners, with students and trained facilitators across six continents bringing this embodied, trauma-informed work into their own communities.
03
TRUSTED TRAINING
Body Temple Church School holds 200-hour CID accreditation for its teacher training programs.
the Origin of Body Temple
Body Temple was not created as a brand. It was born as a survival prayer.
Like many who find their way here, Adriana grew up highly sensitive in a world that did not know how to hold feeling. She learned early how to leave her body — through dissociation, perfection, over-giving, and eventually addiction. Sobriety became her first initiation back into the flesh. Fourteen years ago, she chose to stay. To feel. To listen.
The body became the teacher. Grief became the curriculum. Desire became the compass.
In mythic language, Body Temple began the moment truth replaced goodness as the guiding principle. When rage stopped being something to heal away and became something to ritualize. When grief stopped being private and became communal. When eros stopped being dangerous and became devotional.
This work is about remembering how to walk home through the body — together.
Core Values & Approach
Body Temple is grounded in:
• Trauma-informed, nervous-system-centered practice
• Anti-spiritual bypassing — nothing is rushed, minimized, or made wrong
• Embodied spirituality rather than transcendence-based ideals
• Body-as-temple philosophy — sensation as sacred intelligence
• Ritual, movement, and devotion as tools for transformation
• Social justice integration — healing does not exist outside systems
• Community over commodification
• Accessibility — scholarships, sliding scale, and mutual aid when possible
• All genders welcome
COMING SOON:
THE BOOK
Adriana is currently writing Body Temple, which brings forward the principles of her work: consciously relating to the full spectrum of human experience—grief, rage, love, death, and sex—as a devotional act of embodied awakening.
The book weaves personal story, somatic practices, and goddess wisdom into a roadmap for collective liberation through the body.
FEATURED IN
Meet Adriana Rizzolo
Somatic healer, oracle, artist, adult sex educator, trance dance guide, and founder of Body Temple Church
Adriana Rizzolo has been featured in The New York Times and on numerous respected platforms for her work bridging spirit and matter, art and healing, lineage wisdom and modern somatic practice.
She is a trauma-informed, Tantra-aligned spiritual mentor with over 14 years of sobriety, whose work is deeply shaped by lived experience, devotion, and long-term study. Adriana’s approach is known for its honesty, depth, humor, and refusal to bypass the hard, holy truths of being human.
Her life’s work centers on helping people heal trauma and patterns of helplessness, reclaim pleasure and agency, and feel at home in their bodies so they can live in alignment with their soul’s truth.
Through classes, retreats, trainings, coaching, and ritual spaces, Adriana has supported thousands of people worldwide in awakening to their aliveness.
LINEAGE & TRAININGRooted in Ancient Wisdom
Adriana's work is deeply rooted in the mystical lineages of Kashmir Shaivism and Southern Italian Shamanism, where the body becomes both the altar and the oracle. Some of my teachers and lineages…
• Certified Somatic Sex Educator and female anatomy studies with Deborah Sundahl
• Southern Italian shamanism with Alessandra Belloni
• Mysticism and sacred storytelling with Mirabai Starr
• Embodied astrology and ritual theater with Heidi Rose Robbins
• Therapeutic yoga training - taught yoga full time for 10 years
• Trauma release and somatic education with TRE, SE and others
• Voice and movement trainings
• Intimacy and relational healing work
• Depth Psychology treatment for 11 years straight ( I am also my own case study)
• Devotional practice and study in Tantra, Kashmir Shaivism, and Bhakti Yoga
Equally important is her lived experience — recovery, grief, devotion, service, and the ongoing practice of choosing presence over dissociation. Plus over ten years gathering research from women and queer folks direct experience of God in the body, relationships and soul’s passion and purpose.
Our IMPACT
Thousands of participants served worldwide
Global community spanning multiple countries
Teacher trainings with CID-recognized certification pathways
Retreats, pilgrimages, and rituals across sacred lands
Work With Us
You are welcome here. 01
Join the Monthly Membership
The Body Temple Membership is a living community where you practice embodied spirituality month after month, season after season. Access live classes, movement medicine, sacred sexuality education, and a global community of practitioners who are doing the real work of coming home to their bodies. $44/month.
02
Train as a facilitator through Teacher Trainings
Become a lineage-holder. Body Temple's certification programs — UNLEASHED for somatic dance facilitation, Womb Healer for sacred sexuality practitioners, and Dark Goddess Doula for embodied business — give you the skills, the spiritual grounding, and the community to carry this medicine into the world with integrity.
03
Attend Retreats & Pilgrimages
From Mary Magdalene's cave in Marseille to the high desert of New Mexico, Body Temple retreats take you to the places where the land itself holds the frequency for transformation. These are not vacations. They are initiations — held in sacred community, ritual, and the kind of depth that changes you.
04
Book Private Coaching or Mentorship
For those ready to go deeper with direct support from Adriana. Private sessions weave together somatic healing, nervous system work, sacred sexuality, and intuitive guidance to help you unhook from the patterns keeping you small — and step fully into your purpose, your pleasure, and your power.
