September 16, 2026

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A message from Kelly

Two years ago, Sarah and I were lying awake at four in the morning on a queen mattress shoved into the tiny bedroom of her Temple. Her house was under construction, which meant Sarah, Jonathan and their three kids were literally living in the Temple at the time, and whenever we held an in-person program, they packed every single thing they owned into this one little bedroom, sent Jonathan and the kids to an Airbnb, and Sarah and I slept on a mattress in the middle of all their stuff. It was November 2024, days after the election, and we were in the middle of leading The Initiation for fifty women.

For three days, we had been asking these women the biggest questions we knew how to ask. Who are you, really? What are you here to do? What do you know that you are not yet living? If money didn’t matter and no one would be mad, what would you build? And somewhere in the middle of holding them through those questions, Sarah and I had the deeply inconvenient realization that we needed to answer them too.

At the time, Sarah’s membership had already been through several evolutions, and we could feel that the work we wanted to do now was bigger than the container we were trying to fit it into. We were becoming much more overt about the Sacred Feminine, much more interested in the relationship between individual transformation and what was happening in the world, and Sarah and I were becoming true creative partners. So at four in the morning, lying on this mattress, we asked ourselves the question we had been asking everyone else: If money didn’t matter, and no one would be mad, what would we build?

And what came was a Temple.

We wanted a real place for ordinary women to practice the Sacred Feminine without having to become priestesses or leave their normal lives. We wanted ceremony at the earth holidays, rites of passage, elders and teachers and community. We wanted the lawyer and the doctor and the teacher and the mother and the CEO and the artist to be able to come sit in ceremony together, have a direct experience of the Divine, remember something about who they were, and then go back into their actual lives.

We also knew we did not want to build another closed loop of personal development where everyone has an incredible breakthrough and then goes home and continues participating in the world exactly as she did before. So we built the Living Temple around three pillars: ceremony, community and collective action. And inside of that, we imagined two connected spaces. The Temple would be where we gathered in ceremony and remembered. The Agora would be the bridge between ceremony and the world, where remembering became collective care, organizing, justice, advocacy and action.

I cannot overstate how much we believed in this idea. We put almost everything else down for six months and built it. We had thousands of conversations about how ceremony should be structured, where lineage ended and our own medicine began, how political a Temple could be without altering the ceremonial field, what collective action belonged inside a spiritual community, and what it meant for Sarah and me to share leadership inside something sacred. We built programming and systems and an app and Local Temples and the Agora and eight ceremonies and all the thousand tiny things required to take something that exists between two women talking until two in the morning and make it real enough for other people to walk into.

And on November 1, 2025, we opened the doors.

A thousand women came to our first ceremony. Over the course of the year, women joined us from more than thirty countries. They found each other, sat in ceremony together, gathered in living rooms, learned from elders, and experienced the Temple in ways that were genuinely beautiful. We also built access into the model from the beginning, with a significant portion of members participating either at no cost or through our Mutual Commitment rate, and in 2026 we committed to recirculating 5% of Temple dues to aligned organizations doing direct work in the world.

And as we lived inside the thing we had built, we started getting information.

The Agora did not become the collective-action arm we had imagined. People were excited by the idea, but participation and member-led projects never really developed in the way we had hoped, and I eventually had to admit something important: after a decade in advocacy and communications, I thought community organizing might be a major part of how my own work was evolving. It turns out it isn’t. Collective responsibility still matters enormously to me, but trying to hold action across a hundred different issues without a clear organizing focus felt diffuse rather than effective.

Local Temples taught us something different. Women loved gathering in real life, and we loved helping them find one another, but formally sending members into strangers’ homes for spiritual and emotional work created a level of liability, training and infrastructure that we were not equipped or called to hold.

And then there was the broader realization that Sarah and I deeply believe Sacred Feminine temples and communities should exist in the world, but that does not necessarily mean our unique work is to manage every part of one. We were getting clearer about the difference between something we believe in and something that is actually ours to build.

That distinction became incredibly important.

This was particularly inconvenient because we had built the thing.

There was no giant institution to blame this time. There was no boss. There was no inherited organizational structure or founder whose vision I was responsible for executing. Sarah and I had listened to our souls, followed the thread, taken the risk, built the thing, put our names on it and invited everyone in. And now we had to be willing to ask whether the thing we had built was still the clearest expression of our soul’s work.

I think this is one of the places where the way we talk about purpose can really mess people up, because we tend to talk about purpose like an answer. You spend enough time journaling or take the assessment or read your birth chart or go to the ceremony and eventually you figure out the thing you are supposed to do. Then you do it, and presumably you have arrived.

Except that is not remotely how my life has worked.

What I am beginning to understand is that soul’s work is alive. You can hear something correctly and still be asked to listen again. You can build something from a place of enormous integrity and eventually discover that its expression needs to change. A chapter can be completely right without needing to be permanent. The soul does not require us to make our past wrong in order to tell the truth about what is alive now.

And I actually think this version of discernment might be harder than the discernment that happens before a leap, because once you’ve built the thing, your identity is involved. Your money is involved. Other people are involved. You’ve announced it. You’ve branded it. There are members and employees and contracts and programming and expectations. There is now an entire external structure reinforcing the idea that this is what you do. You have to get quiet enough inside all of that to ask what is actually true now.

So this summer, Sarah and I started asking again. We looked at what was working and what wasn’t. We listened to our members. We looked at what people actually used rather than what we thought they should want. We looked at the business. We looked at ourselves. And we started asking a very simple question: What is the thing we do that absolutely lights us on fire?

The answer was almost embarrassingly obvious.

Initiation.

Give us a woman standing at the edge of what she knows. A woman who knows there is something she is here to do and cannot quite name it yet, or can name it and is scared shitless to actually do it. A founder whose company has outgrown the version of her who built it. An executive who knows she is leading from an identity she no longer believes in. A mother who can feel some part of herself coming back online and has no idea what to do with her. A woman who has spent twenty years becoming extraordinary at something and is starting to realize she may be complete. Give us the moment when knowing becomes consequential, and Sarah and I are completely alive.

We know how to take a woman seriously when she tells us what she knows. We know how to help her look at all the places where conditioning and fear and fantasy and responsibility and actual practical reality have gotten tangled together. We know how to help her discern without telling her what her answer should be. We know how to see the capacity the next chapter is going to require and hold her accountable for developing it. And we know how to help her begin reorganizing a real life around what she says she knows.

Once we saw that, something else about the original Living Temple vision started to click into place. We had thought our role in collective change was to create a place where women could come and collectively take action together. What if our role is actually to initiate and resource the women who will carry their own work into the collective?

There are extraordinary organizations whose work is organizing, advocacy, mutual aid, policy and direct service, and they are much better at that work than we are. We can give them money. We can support them. Meanwhile, we can help the woman working inside a hospital understand what she is uniquely positioned to change there. We can help the woman building the company learn how to lead it. We can help the woman with capital become responsible for where she puts it, the artist make the thing, the scientist follow the question, the mother change the family pattern, the executive have the conversation, the entrepreneur build the business, and the woman with an idea stop waiting for somebody else to tell her it counts.

Our work is not to decide what everyone should do together. Our work is to help more women become capable of knowing what is theirs and actually doing the fucking thing.

That realization has changed almost everything about how we understand our work, and it is the reason we have been developing a methodology around Soul’s Work. We have become obsessed with the gap between knowing and living, because we have watched over and over again that the knowing itself is rarely the whole problem. A woman can know the marriage needs to change and have no idea how to have the conversation. She can know the business wants to become enormous and not yet know how to lead a team. She can know she wants to make a lot more money and immediately run into every piece of conditioning she carries about women and wealth. She can know she has something to say and discover that her nervous system cannot yet tolerate being misunderstood. She can know the work is complete and still have employees and children and a mortgage and health insurance.

You can receive something in ceremony and still need to run the numbers.

This is why Sacred Skills have become so central to how we understand all of this. Insight can arrive much faster than capacity. The work is not simply knowing. It is becoming capable of living what you know.

And somewhere in the middle of developing this methodology, I had one of those moments where I realized that we had basically just gone backward through our own lives and named the process we had already been living. We called it the Soul’s Work Spiral: Attune, Discover, Discern, Initiate, Build.

I could see it in leaving my old career. I could see it in my first year working with Sarah, in becoming the Weaver, in claiming authorship, in becoming a founder, and in building the Living Temple. Over and over again, there had been something to hear, something to discover, something to discern, some threshold that required me to become different, and then the very practical work of building a life capable of holding it.

But the part that feels most important to me now is that Build is not the end.

Eventually, Build returns you to Attune.

You build the thing and then you live inside what you built. You get information you could never have gotten when it was still an idea. You change. The people you serve teach you things. Your gifts develop. Your desires become clearer. Some things work and some don’t. And if you are actually committed to walking your soul’s path rather than proving that you found the correct answer, eventually you have to listen again.

This is also where my birth chart has become interesting to me again, because one of the developmental tensions in my chart is basically the movement from being incredibly good at holding intense transformational spaces and becoming indispensable at the center of something toward building more sustainable, distributed forms of leadership and community. When someone reflected this whole Temple evolution back to me through that lens, I laughed because, yes, apparently we are still doing this.

I can see now that there is a difference between Sarah and me holding the center for everyone and Sarah and me creating conditions where women become capable of holding their own center. And I think I needed to live the first version in order to understand the second.

I needed to help build the Temple before I could understand what I actually believe a Living Temple can be.

I think it is an ecosystem of women becoming increasingly trustworthy with their own knowing. Women who can hear themselves and discern what they hear. Women who can make sovereign choices while remaining in relationship with reality and the people they love. Women who can develop the actual skills their visions require, understand money and power and leadership, build structures around what they believe, and recognize when those structures need to change. Women who take responsibility for their particular place on the web and the things they are uniquely positioned to affect.

And I want to be really clear that none of this makes me think we got the Living Temple wrong. I think we had to build it to find out what it was.

We had to walk the first year with hundreds of women. We had to try the Agora. We had to create all the programming and probably over-function a little and get tired. We had to listen to what women actually used and what they didn’t. We had to feel the difference in our own bodies between the work that felt heavy and the work that made us come alive. We needed the evidence.

Movement creates information that thinking cannot.

Sometimes discernment happens before the leap, and sometimes you have to build the thing and let the path answer back. The Sacred Skill is remaining sovereign enough to hear the answer, especially when the answer is inconvenient.

Skill 11 of 12: Becoming the Thermostat

Holding and transmitting your frequency in relationship and in rooms that would normally pull you out of it, so the field begins to organize around it.

When I left my old career, I think I understood following my soul mostly as having the courage to move when I finally knew something was true. I still think that matters. I just understand the path differently now. There are going to be many moments of knowing, and many thresholds, and many versions of the life we build around them. The thing that matters is developing the capacity to keep meeting them.

So that is where I am right now.

We built the Temple. We love the Temple. And we’re listening again.

More soon,

Kelly

P.S. If you have already built the thing — the business, the marriage, the role, the identity — and some quiet part of you is beginning to hear that its expression needs to change, Sacred Skills Training is where you develop the capacity to stay sovereign enough to hear the answer, especially when the answer is inconvenient. Enrollment opens to the waitlist next Tuesday, September 22, at the Equinox Enrollment rate. Hop onto the waitlist here.