Death to Hyper-Individualism
birth to feminine aliveness
Babe, we need more space to create…
On the last days of our India pilgrimage — after more blessings than I could ever properly name (we have to be together so you could feel the depth of my humility and love) — something extraordinary happened right in the middle of the ordinary.
We were staying with dear ones — old family, chosen family — my sister Varsha, her husband, and their two daughters. One morning, Mausi — which means “auntie” — the woman who comes each day to cook breakfast and help care for the home while Varsha works as a therapist and they care for the girls, invited us to her home for chai.
We walked the short distance — maybe three minutes — down the busy Pune street where the traffic feels like a living organism: a river of motorbikes, horns, voices, color, dust. Past the Ganesha shrine on the right, past the painted orange stone on the left that had clearly become recognized as the Goddess through devotion alone. Turn the corner. Five steps more…
And suddenly it felt — truly — like I had taken a hero’s dose of psychedelics.
Not in a dissociated way — in a hyper-alive way. The veil thinned. Everything was shimmering with presence. Like my nervous system had been turned toward God-volume.
There were as many buffalo and cows as people lined along the sides. My senses enliven immediately even against the pollution Pune is also known for. Metal bowls stacked high. Fires being fed with bundles of sticks. People bathing outside under the morning sky. Women and men washing clothes. Children weaving through it all getting ready to go to school in their uniforms. Alleys where the cooking happened over open fire. There may as well have been a woman giving birth in the middle of the alley and someone else dying in the next room across–there was that much real-ness imbued in the environment.
Smoke, cow dung, spice, dust, heat, color — every texture speaking at once. No separation between living and surviving and praying and feeding and tending. Life happening completely out in the open. Nothing hidden. Nothing staged. Creative force everywhere. Shakti not as concept — as atmosphere.
The kind of aliveness you feel in your body before you can explain it in your mind.
Mausi greeted us with her wide, unguarded smile adn uncontrollable laughter and welcomed us inside. We sat together and drank chai her daughter in law spoke while her son sat next to us with his stuffy — a simple, warm, life changing, unpretentious, unplanned ceremony of hearts gathering. The only common language the body, the heart, love.I wandered over to her altar — her puja space — and it stopped me. Small goddesses and deities arranged with care. Flowers fresh. Offerings recently given. You could feel it — it had just been tended. It was alive. Not curated, not aestheticized, not something you could purchase pre-made and place for display. It was human devotion. Used. Juicy. Loved. In relationship.
Outside, the community kept breathing — cooking, washing, tending, calling out to one another. It was a completely different world that the one that was there 20 feet away in the bustling streets of Pune. But a shared one at that. Community not as an idea, but as a shared nervous system. Out loud. Out doors. Interwoven. Alive and in love with living itself. I felt elated, touched and lifted by the soul in the Spirit of the place and the people.
It is hands down our hyper-individualism that is widening the gap between us — we are learning language for everything online without the lived space to practice being human in the heat and friction and tenderness of real relationship. We can name our wounds, our patterns, our attachment styles — but naming is not the same as being in the room with another nervous system and staying.
A recent national survey found that about 72% of Americans rarely or never spend time with the people they care about, and most do not participate in community groups, volunteering, or neighborhood action — which means isolation is no longer just emotional, it’s structural (source: American Survey Center / reported by WITF, “New national survey finds widespread social isolation across the U.S.”).
We are over-articulated and under-practiced in belonging — fluent in insight, starving for contact.
Our fragility needs to be transformed into fearlessness if we are to make it through this fraught time — but not the brittle fearlessness of armor, denial, or domination. Not the kind that leaves the body behind. I’m talking about the fearlessness that is born when the nervous system learns it can feel and not disappear. When the heart learns it can break and still belong to itself.
Join our school to practice this in:
Sensitivity is not the enemy — unconscious fragility is because its entitlement trains us to feel like we can take wherever we are . The kind that collapses, lashes out, numbs, or performs strength while secretly starving for safety.
Sacred and ritual theater, grief and pleasure work, somatic dance and meditation, fire ceremony, creative and shamanic writing and embodied performance become training grounds for this transformation. They give us repeated, consensual exposure to intensity — rage, grief, devotion, eros, protest — inside a held frame. The witness learns to stay. The performer learns they will not die from being seen. The room learns how to metabolize truth together.
Fearlessness, then, is not hardness — it is capacity. Capacity to witness what patriarchy, misogyny, systemic oppression, and inherited silence trained us to avoid. Capacity to feel heat without always calling it danger. Capacity to let truth move through the body without shutting the gates.
This is how art becomes medicine and ritual becomes rehearsal for a more courageous culture. we practice staying present to what once overwhelmed us, until presence itself becomes our power.
This is the work we do inside Body Temple.
What’s inside the membership:
Monthly Body Temple Dance class
Fire Ceremony
Monthly Flow Writing class
Yoni Temple — this month we’re unraveling beauty standards and patriarchal perception, taking darshan (to see and be seen) with our own vulvas, plus consent-based mapping to build juiciness and energy in the womb
Sacred Song Circle — where the voice becomes liberator
We move through the landscape of Money, Mother, Father, Rose, Receive, and Sword — each theme a doorway into what your body already knows but hasn’t been allowed to speak.
$44/month. 6-month commitment.
Doors are open now. They close on Wednesday, Feb 11th and don’t reopen until summer solstice.
This is your invitation to build capacity. To practice staying. To let presence become your power.
Doors close Wednesday, February 11th.
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Adriana
PS. Our Magdalene and Black Madonna France writing and womb pilgrimage is offering an early rate until Feb 15th so check it out and apply before then if you’re interested.