Explore Our Principles and Promises

The Body Temple Principles

1. Your body belongs to you.

No teacher, facilitator, partner, community, or spiritual tradition owns your body, your sexuality, your choices, or your path.

2. You are the authority on your own experience.

We offer practices, perspectives, and invitations—not absolute truths. You are encouraged to question, discern, disagree, and make your own meaning.

3. No one is your guru.

Adriana is a teacher and facilitator, not a spiritual authority who requires devotion, obedience, loyalty, or belief. You never have to surrender your agency to participate in Body Temple.

4. Consent is foundational.

Consent applies to movement, touch, sexuality, emotional disclosure, spiritual practice, photography, participation, and everything in between. No is a complete sentence. You can change your mind at any time.

5. You never have to disclose your trauma.

Your story belongs to you. There is no requirement to reveal personal history, share intimate experiences, or make yourself vulnerable in order to belong.

6. Participation is always optional.

You can pause, step out, modify a practice, observe, or leave. There is no spiritual penalty for saying no.

7. We do not use fear to create belonging.

We don't threaten people with abandonment, spiritual failure, energetic consequences, or loss of community for questioning a teaching, leaving a program, or choosing another path.

8. Your relationships outside Body Temple matter.

We encourage connection with friends, family, therapists, teachers, communities, and traditions beyond Body Temple. Your world should become bigger through this work—not smaller.

9. We don't isolate. We interdepend.

Community is not about replacing your existing support system with ours. We believe in many sources of wisdom, care, friendship, accountability, and belonging.

10. Money is never a measure of spiritual worth.

Paying for a program does not make someone more evolved, devoted, committed, or worthy. Scholarships, different levels of participation, and stepping away financially are not moral failures.

11. You can leave.

You don't owe Body Temple your loyalty. You don't owe us your future participation, your friendships, your labor, or your belief. You are free to come. You are free to go.

12. Questioning is welcome.

Healthy skepticism is not resistance. You are allowed to ask difficult questions, challenge an idea, give feedback, and name something that doesn't feel right to you.

13. Teachers are accountable too.

Facilitators have power and responsibility. We commit to ongoing self-reflection, clear boundaries, feedback, repair, and accountability when harm occurs.

14. We don't promise enlightenment, healing, or transformation.

Body Temple can offer practices and conditions for exploration. We cannot guarantee an outcome or claim that our work will cure trauma, mental health conditions, or life circumstances.

15. Your worth exists before you enter the Temple.

You don't become more worthy because you dance, heal, awaken, complete a training, become a facilitator, or belong to this community.

Your worth is not dependent on Body Temple.

It belongs to you.

1. Root into an inner worth and love that cannot be given or taken away.

Learn to stop outsourcing your sense of value to people, places, relationships, achievements, appearance, money, or things. Come home to the felt knowing that your worth and love is inherent—not something you have to earn, perform, prove, or receive from someone else.

2. Become more deeply rooted in your body as a place of belonging and find that becoming a lover will replace performing perfection.

Instead of constantly leaving yourself to seek safety, validation, pleasure, or belonging somewhere outside of you, practice inhabiting your body as an inner home—one you can return to again and again.

3. Meet your fear, anxiety, grief, guilt, anger, freeze, fear,  rage, and depression with curiosity instead of shame.

Body Temple Dance doesn't ask you to transcend the messy parts of being human. We work with them. We learn to listen for what these experiences are communicating and develop the capacity to stay present with ourselves through them. 

Understanding how to articulate the trauma vortex and the healing vortex brings in compassion vs the habitual shaming of unwanted experiences, and gives us a way to share what we’ve been conditioned to hide.

4. Reclaim the shadow without making the shadow wrong, but instead a doorway to the soul-that unstoppable current of aliveness aka eros, within you.

The wild parts. The angry parts. The grieving parts. The jealous parts. The desirous parts. The parts that want to scream, run, say no, take up space, or burn the whole fucking thing down. 

The parts that never had the space to seen, felt and understood gets shoved into the shadows. The body is the subconscious and so naturally these parts arise to be loved.

Nothing gets exiled simply because it makes us uncomfortable.

We learn to meet the shadow with enough compassion, discernment, and humility to understand what it is here to teach us.

5. Develop holy boundaries that allow you to stay connected without abandoning yourself.

Learn the difference between a boundary and a wall, protection and punishment, discernment and rejection.

Practice saying no. Practice saying yes. Practice knowing when something is yours and when it isn't.

And learn that your boundaries don't have to make you less loving.

They can make your love more honest.

6. Stay human adn relating to the Great Mystery as you expand.

As you grow spiritually, creatively, sexually, relationally, and professionally, Body Temple Dance asks you to remain in relationship with your humanity. To directly experience both rest and action rooted in your unbound essence.

Because every expansion brings with it an expansion of the shadow, without humility we become disconnected for our deep why.

We practice staying close to the places where we are still learning, still messy, still afraid, still wrong sometimes, still becoming.

The number 1 killer of the erotic is the known, thinking we know. We surrender a little at a time to the reality that staying open while not knowing takes courage, support and a conscious contact with a power wider than ourselves.

Your humanity is not an obstacle to your evolution. It is part of the initiation.

7. Let your nervous system become a source of information rather than something you are constantly trying to overcome.

Freeze. Flight. Fight. Fawn. Blankness. Dissociation. Contraction. Overwhelm.

Rather than immediately making these responses evidence that something is wrong with you, learn to become curious about what your body is communicating.

Your response is information.

8. Build the capacity for intimacy without losing yourself.

Learn to be deeply connected to other people while remaining rooted in your own body, values, desires, boundaries, and truth.

Because the goal isn't independence.

And it isn't self-abandonment in the name of connection.

It's interdependence.

9. Turn your embodiment into a practice of collective liberation.

Your healing isn't meant to end with you.

Body Temple Dance invites you to ask:

What becomes possible for the people around me when I become more resourced, more honest, more embodied, more boundaried, and more free?

We keep collective liberation at the center of the purpose—because our individual freedom is intertwined with the freedom of others.

The work is not “How can I become the most evolved version of myself?”

It's:

“How can I become more fully myself in a way that contributes to the liberation, dignity, and humanity of us all?”

10. Become someone who can hold more—without abandoning what makes you human.

More pleasure.
More grief.
More power.
More love.
More responsibility.
More visibility.
More money.
More intimacy.
More impact.

Body Temple Dance is a practice of developing the capacity to expand without bypassing.

To grow without becoming superior.

To serve without martyring yourself.

To become powerful without losing humility.

To enter the wild without losing your humanity.

To know your worth without needing to be better than anyone else.

And ultimately:

To become so rooted in your own inner worth that you no longer need to make yourself smaller, make someone else smaller, or abandon yourself in order to belong.

If you’re interested in exploring more about what we mean by Shadow Theatre, here is our guidebook that will give you a comprehensive understanding. Please enjoy!