Body Temple Church
Primordial Mother
Fierce Faces of the Feminine: Embodying Shakti & Giving From the Ground
A 3-Week Live Immersion with Adriana Rizzolo& Varsha Choudhari
The embodied wisdom of Kali, Lajja Gauri & Durga, through traditional Tantra, somatic practice, ritual and devotion.
Open to all genders.
Enroll NowThree Tuesdays · August 4, 11 & 18 · 8am PT · $188 · Lifetime access to recordings.
You are carrying a paradox. You care deeply. You feel deeply.
You want to create beauty, justice, intimacy, and healing in the world... and yet your nervous system stays caught between two ancient survival strategies.
You freeze. You disappear. You procrastinate on the things your soul most longs to create. You know you're capable of more, but your body says not safe.
Or you become fire. You overwork. You over function. You become everyone's caretaker. You can't stop moving, because slowing down feels terrifying.
You oscillate between collapse and intensity. Softness and control. Devotion and resentment. You long for rest but don't know how to trust it. You long for power but fear becoming harmful. You long to surrender, but your body has learned that surrender isn't safe.
This is not about fixing you. It's about remembering the intelligence beneath the survival strategy.
Before there was shame, there was Shakti
Before the Goddess was reduced to a symbol, she was the earth
She was birth. She was destruction. She was erotic intelligence. She was fierce protection. She was the mystery that creates worlds and dissolves them.
The earliest images of the feminine weren't asking us to be nicer, quieter, more productive, or more spiritual. They invited us into relationship with life itself.
- Not goddess spirituality as aesthetic. Not mythology as self help, and not ancient traditions flattened into empowerment slogans.
- Traditional philosophy, met by the body. Adriana and Varsha weave Indian philosophy and traditional Tantra with contemporary somatic practice.
- Built for modern nervous systems. Freeze and burnout aren't failures of motivation. They're adaptations, and they respond to practice, not pressure.
- An inheritance, not a gender role. Woman, man, nonbinary, trans, queer, anywhere along the spectrum... these are expressions of consciousness, courage, protection, and life force that live in every body.
Meet Your Guides
Together they hold reverence for these traditions while making them accessible in a trauma informed, relational, and deeply human way.
Varsha Choudhari
Psychologist, meditation teacher, lifelong sadhaka · Pune, India
Varsha offers a deeply rooted understanding of Indian philosophy, traditional Tantra, and goddess traditions, bridging contemplative practice with psychological insight and lived devotion.
Adriana Rizzolo
Founder of Body Temple Church, creator of Body Temple Dance
Somatic educator, ritual theatre facilitator, and teacher of embodied spirituality. Adriana brings together nervous system science, ritual, movement, grief work, and devotional practice to help people reclaim the body as a sacred site of transformation.
The problem we are actually addressing
Neither freeze nor burnout is a failure of motivation
Most personal development asks us to think differently. Most spirituality asks us to transcend. Most productivity asks us to push harder.
But these are adaptations. When your nervous system has learned that life is unsafe, creativity becomes difficult. Love becomes exhausting. Boundaries become confusing. Leadership becomes performance. Pleasure becomes something you earn.
Many of us end up giving from adrenaline instead of abundance. Serving from obligation instead of devotion. Creating from urgency instead of inspiration.
You build a life that looks meaningful from the outside while feeling disconnected from your deepest source on the inside. This immersion is about reconnecting to that source.
A different kind of goddess work
This is not goddess spirituality as aesthetic
Not mythology as self help, and not ancient traditions flattened into empowerment slogans. Adriana and Varsha weave traditional Indian philosophy with contemporary somatic practice, honoring both the depth of these lineages and the realities of modern nervous systems.
We will explore these archetypes through
- Traditional Tantra and Bhakti
- Indian mythology and philosophy
- Nervous system regulation
- Somatic embodiment
- Meditation
- Ritual
- Journaling
- Creative inquiry
- Relational practice
An invitation to experience these goddesses not simply as stories, but as living forces that reshape the way you inhabit your body, your relationships, your work, and your creativity.
Three weeks, three faces
What we move through together
Week One
Kali
The fire that liberates
For those trapped in perfectionism, over-responsibility, chronic activation, or fear of change.
Kali doesn't destroy your life. She destroys the identities that keep you from living it.
Together we will explore
- Healthy aggression versus reactivity
- Sacred anger as life force
- Ego death and transformation
- Burning away what no longer serves
- The courage to let endings become beginnings
Week Two
Lajja Gauri
The unashamed mother
Long before the feminine became hidden, she was depicted as radically open.
Headless.Rooted.Birthing.Abundant.
Creativity emerges not from striving, but from relationship with the earth, the pelvis, and the mystery.
Together we will explore
- Creativity as devotion
- The pelvis as a center of intelligence
- Embodied fertility beyond reproduction
- Releasing inherited shame
- Receiving from the ground instead of performing for love
Week Three
Durga
Fierce compassion
Compassion without boundaries becomes martyrdom. Strength without love becomes domination.
She embodies the mature feminine... the capacity to protect life without abandoning tenderness.
Together we will explore
- Boundaries rooted in love
- Courage without violence
- Discernment in relationships
- Sacred leadership
- Becoming someone your own nervous system can trust
Three Tuesdays, 8am PT · 90 minutes each
Why this is potent
A one time transmission. Maiden to mother, and the crone honored in you.
You don't need more crystals. You need clarity on who you really belong to.
Three weeks is not a long time. That is the point. This is not a container you maintain, or another practice to keep up with. It is one turn of the wheel, taken on purpose, with two women who have spent their lives inside this material.
For those who have been walking a spiritual path for years and want to be met in depth, in humor, and in the kind of wild love you cannot ignore. This is nervous system work that reaches the places therapy cannot, learned from the lands these traditions come from.
The Mother who will never leave you.
A letter from Adriana
Durga and the primal power of creation is what gave me access to the dragon and the one who sheds within me. She takes us to the place inside before all mantras and written texts.
We are taught to fear her. Deny her. Find safety in the senses alone.
But if you want real intimacy, a life that satisfies the soul, you cannot just seek safety. You must find others in the night who know how to see.
The serpent and the dragon are the lands for those who have the heart to listen. Who can hold both worlds because their hearts are already broken open. We need lineage. We need to learn from women who were raised on the lands where Kali speaks.
People these days swirl lost in their suffering in denial of the sacred... or turn toward all that is free within us but cannot hold the intensity of grief, rage and aliveness that inner child integration asks of us spiritually. This affects our relationships, and how we hold the natural contractions we will all experience in life.
Across these three seasons we are sending back the energies of abuse and oppression, and unlocking the shameless power of the voice and the womb.
We are here to hold both, and to let the energy of that work leak out into our lives.
Adriana Rizzolo
What you'll receive
Three weeks of live teaching, practice, and integration
$188 for three weeks of live teaching. Everything is recorded, so if you can't make a session live, the material is yours to keep and return to.
Enroll NowThree live online classes
Ninety minutes each, Tuesdays at 8am PT, with teachings on Kali, Lajja Gauri, and Durga drawn from traditional Tantra, Bhakti, Indian mythology, and philosophy.
Somatic and devotional practice
Guided embodiment practices, meditation, mantra, and nervous system regulation. Ritual you can carry home, so this lives in your body and not just your notes.
Integration material
Journaling prompts, creative inquiry, relational practice, and integration exercises to metabolize what moves through you between sessions.
A bonus session with Moni Mena
An additional gathering on the Goddess through the phases of our cycle, and how she moves in us as we move through ours... learning our cycles in the company of other women.
Lifetime access to recordings
Every class, held for you. Return to Kali in a season that calls for her, and to Durga in one that doesn't.
Lajja Gauri
Why giving from the ground?
Many of us learned to give from survival. We perform. We hustle. We rescue. We over-function. We abandon ourselves in the name of service. But the primordial traditions teach something radically different.
The earth gives because she is connected to source. Not because she is trying to prove her worth.
When we become rooted in the body, generosity ceases to be depletion. It becomes an overflow.
This is what we mean by giving from the ground.
There is another ground beneath this word, too. Maybe you have circled these traditions for years without letting yourself all the way in... drawn to the mystical roots of India, and wary of watching those roots get stripped, rebranded, and sold back as ungrounded Tantra with no connection to lineage and no connection to the ground.
Both things can be true. Neither one has to stop you. This is real teaching, from the land it comes from, held by a lineage holder raised in it... with the majority of proceeds going back to the women and girls of that land. Reciprocity that is structural, not decorative.
This is for you if...
- You oscillate between freeze and burnout
- You feel deeply but struggle to act on what matters most
- You want to stop creating from survival and begin creating from devotion
- You long for a grounded relationship with the Goddess that honors both tradition and embodiment
- You want to deepen your understanding of Shakti through philosophy, practice, and lived experience
- You're ready to discover that your sensitivity isn't your weakness... it may be the very place your power is waiting
$188 · Three-week live immersion
What comes through this work
I had a vision last year where I returned to a previous powerful encounter with Kali and asked what to do with this moment. She replied... meet all my faces.
I am reunited with my Indian roots and loved connecting with the deities, chanting mantras and diving into the mystical traditions. I felt unlocked, one chakra at a time.
Before we began I was in deep freeze... I went for a walk shortly after the call finished and I felt like I had my body back. I could feel energy in between my bones again and I felt taller. This somatic work is what will change the world as we know it.
It is so rare to be invited to connect fully to your body, your shadow, your creativity, AND your joy all at once, and to do so in a space that is not only trauma aware but trauma healing. Adriana's voice makes you feel held and rooted.
The Primordial Mother does not ask you to become someone else. She asks you to remember.
To remember the intelligence beneath your trauma. The creativity beneath your fear. The courage beneath your collapse. The tenderness beneath your armor. The life force that has never left you.
She is older than shame. Older than perfectionism. Older than performance. Older than the stories that taught you your body was something to overcome.
She is waiting beneath your feet, within your breath, and in the ancient wisdom of your own being.
Come sit with the Fierce Faces of the Feminine. Come remember how to give from the ground.
Take your place in the circle
Three live classes, lifetime access to the recordings, and a body that remembers how to give from the ground.
60%
of net proceeds go to Awakened Living, Varsha's counseling center in Pune, India, where women and girls receive therapy and spiritual counseling. Your enrollment funds three hour long sessions for a woman or girl in Pune.
$188
Registration
Three Tuesdays · August 4, 11 & 18 · 8am PT · Open to all genders · Lifetime access to recordings.